A Tale of Two Princes

I. The Terrain

Sartar was a relatively young kingdom that occupied the southeastern quadrant of the location known as Dragon Pass. It lasted as an independent kingdom for about 110 years before it was conquered by the Lunar Empire, being placed under direct Lunar rule for 11 years, then becoming a client kingdom for another 11, then spending a year under direct Lunar rule again before an uprising drove the Lunars out. 

Sartar was Heortling in culture, founded primarily by Heortling traditionalists fleeing the reformations of Belintar in Heortland, with an admixture of Esrolians and some Tarshites coming south. It also incorporated the Duck/durulz people of Dragon Pass. 

Heortling society operates on several levels of kinship, the smallest level of which is the bloodline, a relatively mutable unit that largely amounted to “who do you share a house with?” Above that, there was the clan, a collection of bloodlines centered around a particular set of regalia and a particular bit of sacred territory, a tula. Heortling clans are consanguine and thus obligatorily exogamous. 

Above that, the next political level is the tribe. Tribes offer perhaps the widest range of political associations, from the triaty (an A -> B -> C -> A ring of marital alliances to prevent incest, the smallest formation) to conglomerations of more than a dozen individual clans with more than 15,000 individual members. 

The next-largest unit is the city, which in Heortling terms was not just the actual location of the city itself but meant a confederation of associated tribes who met the city’s basic needs and used it for trading purposes. A city would be formed by anywhere from three to five tribes. Confusingly to the researcher, Heortlings also had cities that were not beholden to tribal confederations, and the city was not necessarily a medial political element between the tribe and the kingdom or confederation. 

The kingdom or tribal confederation was the highest level of political association the Heortlings possessed. Above that, there was only recognition of the broad cultural kinship terms Heortling, Orlanthi, etc.

A kingdom was made up of multiple tribes aligned together under a hereditary bloodline outside of normal clan relationships that served as the royal lineage. A tribal confederation was the same thing but without the hereditary kingship, and normally this is emphasized by using the term “warlord” instead. However, the terms are identical in the Sartarite language. 

Tribes and tribal confederations elect their leaders according to strict eligibility requirements, forming what’s called the “tribal ring”, which has thirteen members, unlike the traditional seven-member leadership of a clan. Kingdoms reserve more power to select the ring to the hereditary king. 

The membership of a tribal ring represents the following gods:

1. Orlanth, the King of the Gods
2-5. Assorted kin of Orlanth, almost always including Humakt the death god, usually including Urox the Storm Bull and two of the Thunder Brothers (assorted children of Orlanth representing minor parts of the storm).

6. Orlanth’s thane Issaries the Talking God.
7. Orlanth’s thane Lhankor Mhy the Knowing God
8. Orlanth’s thane Chalana Arroy the Healing Goddess
9. Orlanth’s thane, one of Heler the raingod or Elmal/Yelmalio the sungod.

10. Orlanth’s wife Ernalda the Queen of the Gods

11. Ernalda’s mother Asrelia, the crone goddess

12. Ernalda’s daughter Voria, the ever-youthful spring goddess.
13. Eurmal, the Trickster (a ceremonial position without power in the majority of tribes). 

Each of these has a formal title associated with it. 

Orlanth is the warlord or king, Ernalda is the queen, Humakt is the champion, Chalana Arroy is the doctor, and for our purposes here, Issaries is the prince. The formal role of the prince is to be, essentially, the chief diplomat of the tribe or of the kingdom. (In addition, they are important in regulating trade as a representative of the trader god.) 

II. The Princes

Sartar is named after its founder, Sartar, a man from Heortland who arrived about a century and a half after large-scale resettlement had begun and formed his kingdom through negotiations, peacemaking, and in general through an almost pacifistic attitude towards the world. (For example, his solution to the problem of a cannibalistic king was to magically bind the ghosts of the king’s victims to Dragon Pass and teach everyone in the kingdom how to invoke them to drive the king, now turned into an undead ghoul, away.) He styled himself as Prince of Sartar, and this appears to have had several aspects.

One aspect is that Sartar took part in a magical contest to become the King of Dragon Pass as a whole, which he won, and as such he may have wished to avoid the conflicting title. Note,  however, that the various Kings of Tarsh had no problem with striving to become King of Dragon Pass. 

Another aspect is that Sartar’s peacefulness and open-handed nature appear to have been something he wished to project by styling himself, and his heirs, as princes rather than kings. 

A more mythological aspect is that kingship requires sovereignty which requires an intimate relationship with something which can grant sovereignty, which is, in Orlanthi lands especially, the land itself. This may be a reflection of the relationship of the gods Orlanth and Ernalda, or it may represent a kind of deeper truth of the universe, but nevertheless, Orlanthi kingship requires a deep connection to the land which is two-way. Sartar appears to have rejected that connection and settled for a lesser title of Prince, and all of his descendants followed this- up until Argrath. 

It’s critical to understand that there was only a very limited bureaucracy in Heortling, or indeed in Orlanthi kingdoms generally. Supraclan institutions included, of course, the various regional temples of the major gods who clans cannot support on their lonesome and a handful of more minor specialist ones- your Humakti warrior-bands, your Chalana Arroy White Lady Temples, your Lhankor Mhy Knowledge Temples, your Babeester Gor Axe Shrines- but their primary emphasis is on serving clans and secondarily tribes. 

As such, one of the immediate seductions of the Lunar Way is quite simply the power that was on display from the sheer bureaucracy of it all. The very thought of conducting a census which verified everyone within the bounds of the kingdom, or of promulgating outright taxes across the whole of the land instead of in the immediate royal auspices, was something that tempted many barbarian kings who might otherwise have resisted the Lunar allure. 

So in turn, one of the basic tensions within Lunarized barbarian kingdoms was quite simply between the prerogatives of the clan and the desires of the royal household. Which required an even more delicate balancing act to keep the clans happy while extending royal power. 

But the balancing act is inevitable to Orlanthi politics, because as the king of an Orlanthi kingdom, you have very little independent power, power that is loyal only to you. Your power comes from clans via tribes, from clans directly, from tribes directly, and from whatever few temples are sworn directly to the royal household. 

That is to say, if you are a king and you wish to make war on some rival, you need to raise your forces from among the clans, usually organized via the tribes. 

Orlanthi clans, in turn, have several well-defined levels of mobilization. The quickest level is to muster the weaponthanes and the household guards, who are full-time professional warriors. To become a thane requires proof of the ability to maintain a horse, so thanes move as mounted infantry. Some rare clans specialize in cavalry fighting and are able to fight as cavalry at this level of mobilization. 

Typically, for the back-and-forth raiding and cattle raiding typical of Fire Season, a few thanes together with a somewhat larger force of skirmishers are sent. 

The next level of mobilization is to mobilize the fyrd. The fyrd is the portion of the clan that maintains weapons of their own. Which is to say, about half of the adult free population of the clan- the rule of thumb is that about six of every seven men, one of every seven women, six of every seven vingans, one of every seven nandans, and half of all helerings and genderless people will be part of the fyrd. Some clans specialize in drilling the entire free adult population and so can mobilize the entirety of it as fyrd if necessary. (Typically, this is not done, but they are able to mobilize higher levels than the quarter of the adult population normal fyrd mobilization can engage in.)

Normally, a contingent from the fyrd is sent for larger-scale raiding, and the whole fyrd is sent for larger musters and general warfare. Skirmishers are also mobilized alongside this. 

The next level of mobilization above that is to mobilize the entirety of the clan, which is to say, drawing upon the semi-free population to fight as skirmishers as well. Whereas typically skirmishers at lower levels of mobilization are the younger members of free bloodlines or specialists, at this level, the whole of the tenant and client classes may be drawn upon to sling rocks. 

This level of mobilization is extremely rare, but grew increasingly common in the lead-up to the Hero Wars as communities tried for slim advantages over one another in the increasing conflicts of that time period. 

In communities with large populations of unfree people who are not outright slaves, (eg debt peons), these are counted among the semi-free people for mobilization purposes. 

These clans fight according to familiar, traditional, almost prescribed formations, and more importantly, when fighting as part of a larger force, they fight as a unit. That is, a clan that is known for being strong on defense is placed in the line of battle as a whole where defense is needed, and so on and so forth. 

Breaking clans up to distribute their members is not done (and would be militarily foolish in any case!), and so if you want specialized troops, such as a truly effective cavalry force, you’re reliant on your own resources as a king. Which are limited. So you can perhaps hire some Pralori or Safelstrans from far away to train your household guard as heavy cavalry, or hire a couple files of Sun Dome Templars to have a stalwart phalanx core, but overall, you must go to war with the army you have, not the one you want. 

And as such, to return to the Princes of Sartar, a fair number of their decisions, like incorporating the Pol-Joni into the kingdom, allying with the Night Jumpers, supporting the Dragon Pass Sun Dome, etc. appear at least partially motivated by the need to have these specialist military forces but only being able to develop them by incorporating little subcultures within the greater kingdom. This may well go all the way back to Sartar’s peace treaty with the Telmori Wolfrunner tribe to make them part of his new kingdom, as the Telmori then served as the royal guard of Sartar until the Lunar Occupation. 

III. Kallyr

So when Kallyr Starbrow, queen of the Kheldon in exile, orchestrated the Dragonrise and entered Boldhome, she had a terrible mess on her plate. 

Firstly, the Sartarites had shown that they couldn’t stand against the Lunar Army in war. They could win individual battles against Lunar units, even some of the best Lunar units, but the Lunars had demonstrated the ability to win wars and the Sartarites lacked any means to assure themselves they could win a war against the Lunars in the long run, or even in the medium run. 

Secondly, the method that Kallyr had used to throw the Lunars off, the Dragonrise, was fundamentally disastrous for her political position. Not only did Sartarites fear dragons, but a substantial proportion of Sartar’s political elite had died, snapped up in the Brown Dragon’s jaws. While they were officially quislings and collaborators, they still had kin who were obligated to seek redress or vengeance against their killers. Kallyr did react quickly and perspicaciously by exiling Orlaront Dragonfriend and blaming him and the dead Minaryth Purple for the Dragonrise, but this was obviously a political maneuver and strained her relationship with the tribes. 

Thirdly, Kallyr was a woman (and not a vingan) who insisted on ruling in a masculine fashion as warleader. This was not as unprecedented as one might think given the status of Heortlings as consciously religiously conservative, but the natural constituency for people to support Kallyr’s gender variance were also people who had been drawn to the Lunar Way. Most of them were in a dragon’s gizzard by now, and the remainder were fundamentally politically toxic for Kallyr to have the support of, making her position additionally awkward.

Fourthly, the unconventional position Kallyr was in was compounded by her relative lack of legitimacy as Prince of Sartar. While she had the reforged Iron Ring, the Flame of Sartar remained smoldering and hadn’t leapt to reignite at her touch, she never claimed to know any of the secrets of the Sartar hero-cult, she was only a distant relative of the royal line, and overall the experience of Temertain lead Sartarites as a whole to be wary of a proclaimed Prince until they demonstrated Princely acumen or power. 

Fifthly, Kallyr had no generally recognized lovers or children. She was also an anti-Lunar fanatic who associated with disreputable people of all kinds. As such, she looked like just possibly another Salinarg with another Household of Death, unable to lead Sartar into a future beyond endless war. It has of course been speculated that Kallyr sought to marry Reaches All, the new Feathered Horse Queen (the previous one, With Bitter Heart, being quite unsuitable if you wanted to prove your Fertility) and certainly Kallyr had mortal lovers alongside her immortal one. It must remain a mystery why precisely Kallyr didn’t publicize this further. 

It is thus no surprise that Kallyr attempted a dangerous Stationary Lightbringers’ Quest, and failed due to circumstances quite outside of her control. But this failure was a sixth strike against her, to the point that not even the Kheldon appear to have been present for the Battle of the Queens. Although the period between 1626 and 1631 remains quite confused, what is immediately relevant is that at the end of it, Kallyr was no longer Prince of Sartar. Instead, Prince Argrath sat on the throne. 

Kallyr had, however, instituted one thing in particular- the formation of hero bands like the Eleven Lights, who were personally loyal to her and were able to provide her with some ability to act independently of the clans and tribes. 

IV. Argrath

Prince Argrath remains, of course, an enigma. It was this that was his strength. Whereas Kallyr was, for better or worse, a known quantity, with a history as queen of the Kheldon and a family lineage, Argrath came from nowhere, washing up on the shores of the Holy Country with the Wolf Pirates, sometimes claiming to be one of those who had defended the Giant Cradle as it sailed down the Zola Fel, sometimes claiming to be the Argrath White Bull who had founded the Praxian White Bull society, but when he claimed Sartarite status it was only via extinguished clans, through mutually contradictory lineages, and he did it all with a smile. 

Argrath was an outsider who approached being a Sartarite from the presentation that he could walk away from it at any time. How, then, did he do it? Why did anyone obey his directives, even before he began a campaign of what would, for any other Orlanthi, be called the purest Lokamayadonism, let alone after? 

Argrath had three important power bases. Firstly, he had the backing of the Wolf Pirates. Secondly, he had an army of Pol-Joni stiffened with Praxian bands, his famous “Barbarian Horde”. Thirdly, he had not just one but two professional armies, the materialistic Sartar Free Army and the more mystical Sartar Magical Union. Both of these latter drew upon existing elements- the Free Army emerging from the city militias that had been the core of Prince Kallyr’s forces, the Sartar Magical Union emerging from her hero bands. 

Nevertheless, Argrath could afford to disregard what the clans and tribes wanted to a much greater extent than any Prince could before, as he had his own parallel army that, proven by battle, could not be dismissed or driven off. Argrath thus had a totally independent power base that would have allowed him to crush the clans and tribes and remake Sartar by force. 

He did not do so. The transformations Argrath worked on Sartarite society were somewhat more subtle and less direct. But they were profound nevertheless. In order to defeat the Lunar Empire, Argrath remade Sartar into something a bit more like the Lunar Empire- and also a bit more like those menaces from out of history, the Middle Sea Empire, the EWF, the Bright Empire- and in the process transformed the way that the Sartarites and their neighbors understood the world and each other, the way they spoke to the gods, the way they saw and heard and tasted and smelled and felt. 

It is thus no surprise that latter-day Tarshites, seeing in Argrath a man who had worked over a generation what it had taken king after king and the full force of the Lunar Empire’s demigods to do in their own land, “civilizing” the Sartarite “barbarians”, revered Argrath as a hero and attributed to him dominion over Kethaela, Saird, Prax, and a reach into Ralios. It is very questionable that Argrath ever maintained rule over any of these places, barring perhaps authority over Saird through a marriage to the Queen of Holay (but see also the tradition that this is a separate Argrath, like the Enostar Bad Dream who became “Argrath of Pavis” in folklore), but what was important was that Argrath had done the impossible and deliberately performed a transformation on the people of Sartar that took centuries elsewhere. 

Thus, no wonder Argrath, though almost certainly lacking any kind of congenital connection to those demigods, was accepted so instantly by Pavis and Sartar as their heirs- he was their descendant in his magic of change, the Larnsting way of the Twisting Wind. One wonders if any of the Sartarites, whose own writing appears to have been irretrievably fragmented by the Hero Wars and the Illiteracy Plague, barring perhaps the “Southern Version” of Argrathssaga, appreciated his efforts.

V. Conclusions  

Could it have been different? That is, could Kallyr have succeeded and preempted Argrath? 

On one level, the answer would be no. Against Kallyr lay Jar-eel the Razoress, and the full force of the ever-mutable Lunar Empire. It is tempting to answer that only Argrath, the Other of the Red Moon, could have fought such forces and won. 

But on another level, anyone could have stepped into the position of Jar-eel’s opposite, the Other of the Red Moon, and indeed, even Argrath was unable to fight the Lunar Empire under Phargentes the Younger, and had to rely on Sheng Seleris. 

And on yet a different level, one could argue that Kallyr, having relied on the power of dragons to overthrow the Lunars, could not then credibly threaten to use that power, whereas Argrath could credibly threaten to use Mularik or Harrek or Gunda or Gold-gotti or Jaldon or Elusu or Reaches All or any of the manifold monsters who followed in his train against people. But this also reduces politics to a mere matter of escalating monstrosity, and Argrath himself often used a gentler hand. 

And so we come to what may be the nearest level to the core of the matter, which is that Argrath truly understood the lesson the Red Goddess taught Orlanth at Castle Blue when she defeated Orlanth’s horn with her harp and reversed the existing order- the wind cannot remain stagnant. Argrath embraced the Larnsting Way, and became compelled to do things in a different way, frequently failing. Kallyr remained behold somewhat to old ways of doing things. 

But then there is one level below that, which is that if Kallyr had followed the Twisting Wind fully, she would have faced more resistance than Argrath did, for Kallyr, by following the old ways faithfully, showed their inadequacies for what faced Sartar, and so by walking, she allowed Argrath to sprint. 

Appendix: Orlanthi Battle Formations 

When an Orlanthi army assembles, it divides itself into five or six tactical units. An individual clan normally cannot divide itself into these units tactically, but it will replicate this structure in a simpler form. 

These units are:

1. The Sword, the offensive specialists.

2. The Shield, the defensive specialists.

3. The Breastplate, troops without specialization surrounding the tactical commander.

4. The Spear, skirmishers. 

5. The Backplate, the non-combatant support. 

6. The Javelin, uncontrollable berserkers and oathsworn weirdos. 

The canonical formation forms the overall troops into three lines. The first line consists of the Spear. The third line, well behind the other two, is the Backplate. In between, the Sword is placed on the right wing, the Shield on the left wing. The Breastplate remains in the center. 

The battle opens with the Spears of the two sides loosing arrows, slingstones, and eventually javelins as the two armies approach one another, then breaking contact and reforming as a rearguard. The shield-and-spear troops that make up the majority of the formation come together, led by the Sword with the Shield trailing slightly, forming an oblique contact wherein each side’s Sword and Shield are engaged with each other closely and the Breastplates are less directly engaged. Within the mass of the fyrd, specialist weaponthanes with their personal magic and potentially additional godtalker focus aid in the push and prepare to exploit a momentary breakthrough or stiffen a weakening formation. 

If a Javelin is present, it is traditionally placed in lead of the Sword and charges well in advance of the Sword, in an attempt to break the enemy Shield or mangle it. 

Note that for a tribal or multitribal formation, each individual clan will divide into combatants and noncombatants and then take their positions within one of the five combat units as a clan. Thus, if your clan is selected as part of the Spear, the entire clan’s fighting force takes its place with the Spear. 

Note also that the Javelin is thus proportionately much smaller in larger-scale armies than in individual clan struggles, because assigning a clan to the Javelin is calling them disposable. Thus, it is generally better to assign independent hero bands to the Javelin, or specialist troops from large temples. 

As such, it is fairly common, especially in more urbanized Orlanthi societies, for each clan to contribute only a part of its force to an army, based on its specializations- they raise only their skirmishers, or only send their berserks, and thus avoid the problem of having a Spear which is effectively a shieldwall formation not capable of moving with the looseness skirmishing demands. Thus, Orlanthi armies are frequently much smaller than what the sheer numbers of potential combatants may suggest. 

Many variations on the basic three-line formation exist. Note, however, that there are generally two people in an Orlanthi army, at best, who have authority to command the whole of it- the tribal king or warlord, and the tribal or kingdom champion. As such, complicated maneuvers generally fail, and successful tactical art involves maneuvering two separate units at most. 

It is sometimes done to split clans up, especially in emergency situations. This often fails, however, as a clan’s fyrd are unlikely to stand on their own without the thanes, and homogeneous units of individual clan thanes reassembled into a single full-sized Sword or Shield generally fight with less cohesion than simply piling three or four clans into a Sword together. 

Where allies take the field with Orlanthi armies, they are normally deployed in accordance with Orlanthi expectations of where they ought to go. 

Note that cavalry doesn’t really have a firm place in this approach. It is possible to use light cavalry as the basis of a Spear and heavier cavalry as the basis of a Sword or Javelin, but this essentially means only using cavalry in those roles, restricting this to larger armies or urbanized armies that can effectively draft 10 clans’ worth of heavy cavalry into a proper-sized Sword. Clans with a cavalry tradition can of course fight in this way too.

In the traditional Orlanthi way of war, magicians are distributed throughout the battle line in accordance with their particular role and social position. Specialist magicians outside of the normal social structure end up next to the commander or champion. The Sartar Magical Union will change this by providing specialist magician covens that effectively act as their own “clans” in a tribal or kingdom-wide army structure. 

Orlanthi tribal fyrd armies could defeat Lunar professional armies in large part because they had a great deal of cohesion that Lunar armies did not always have, especially with scratch forces. When the Lunars could deploy full armies with their full diverse panoply of units, the tribal fyrd armies were generally at a disadvantage even without the deployment of superweapons like the Crimson Bat or Crater Makers.