The Erka Fjords are the last land going north. Fourteen islands stand in an arc beyond Feldia’s north coast, across the water sailors call the World’s Throat, and nothing past them has been charted by anyone who came home to say so. There is no capital and no king. Each fjord answers to itself.
The land
Glaciers cut these islands and left them steep. The water runs deep to the cliff foot, so a ship can lie at anchor a stone’s throw from bare rock — convenient in summer, lethal in a winter gale. Flat ground is scarce, and villages string along the shoreline in single rows because there is nowhere else to put them.
The year is short. For six weeks around midwinter the sun never clears the ridge, the outer harbors ice over, and nothing moves but sledges. For six weeks around midsummer it never properly sets, and the Erkish do a year’s work in it. Timber does not grow here; houses are stone, turf, driftwood and bone, and every sawn plank in the fjords came north in somebody’s hold.
The crossing has its own reputation. The tide race at the mouth of the World’s Throat, which Feldian crews call the Kettle, can hold a laden ship in place under full sail. Erkish pilots time it to the hour and charge for the knowledge.
Dragons
The Dragon Line runs along Feldia’s north coast. South of it dragons do not survive — the reason is weather, not anything stranger — and north of it they are as ordinary a hazard as wolves. Every other people in the world answered this by living south of the line. The Erkish stayed, and after enough generations of staying have arrived at something that looks from outside like domestication.
Erkish handlers do not use that word. What they describe is closer to keeping: eyries particular families have worked for two hundred years, animals that tolerate specific people and nobody else, and a great deal of caution. Scholars at Kirchberg argue about what the relationship signifies, and none of them have been north. The handlers’ position is that a dragon is an animal — not clever, not prophetic, not interested — and that anyone waiting for it to mean something will be eaten while he waits.
The trade is in the dead ones. Rendered dragon oil burns brighter and longer than tallow or whale and fetches a serious price in Seehaven; bone is light, strong, and worked into rafters, bows, combs and tool handles. Nobody sells a live one, and buyers have stopped asking why.
People and custom
The Erkskol tongue is spoken nowhere else and learned by almost no one. Each fjord governs itself at a midsummer moot held at a marked stone — Hrafnvik’s stands above the anchorage and is called Haldrstein — where households settle debts, feuds and marriages in front of everyone. Killings are paid for in goods, by lists everyone present has memorised. Winter hospitality is an obligation rather than a courtesy, and refusing it is the one offense the lists carry no price for.
Erkish crews leave oil at cairns on the fjord mouths and speak to the weather by name before a crossing. The Feldian Church has recorded this as paganism and has never done much about it, on the grounds that the fjords are far away and the oil is worth having. The Erkish do not argue the point.
Trade
South go oil, bone, walrus ivory, eiderdown, dried cod and sealskin. North come grain, sawn timber, iron, salt and wool cloth. Feldian coin circulates here but is weighed rather than counted, and most bargains are struck in goods.
The other export is passage. A southern hull that wants to go north of the Line buys an Erkish pilot first, and the ones that skip that step tend to lose men. Kronstadt money has been financing dragon-hunting ventures for the last few seasons, and more southern ships come through Skarnfjord and Ostrgard every summer than the summer before. Two of those ventures killed animals within sight of Erkish settlements. The fjords have not retaliated, but the price of a pilot has doubled.