Waldheim is the forest duchy of Feldia, and the forest is not one feature of it among others. It is the whole of it, border to border. The trees are old — some of them older than any record the realm keeps — and they stand thickly enough that full sun reaches the ground only in the glades and along the water. Waldheim supplies the realm with timber, fur and charcoal, and supplies it with a good deal of uneasy talk besides.
The land
The Kron makes the duchy’s southern boundary, dividing Waldheim from Kronstadt and running west to the coast; timber rafts go down it to the Kronstadt yards every spring, crewed by men who do that work and no other. To the east the Waldwater divides Waldheim from Kornfeld, and the change is abrupt — grain on one bank, closed canopy on the other. In the interior lies the Waldsee, a long dark lake fed by streams nobody has fully mapped. Where the forest ends in the north, no Feldian map agrees.
The climate is temperate and can turn hard in winter, though snow rarely lies deep under the canopy. The real danger in Waldheim is not weather. It is distance and sameness. A traveler who leaves the marked ways can walk for a day in what he is certain is a straight line and come out where he started, and the locals will not be surprised, and will not be especially sympathetic either.
Settlements
Waldmark, the ducal seat, holds about three thousand people. It was not cleared out of the forest so much as fitted into it: houses built between living trunks, stone walls that a beech has grown around and now supports, streets that bend for a tree rather than the other way about. Visitors find it unsettling for about a week. The people who live there move through it without looking down.
Everything else is smaller. Lumber camps, charcoal burners’ clearings, hunting lodges, fur stations on the streams — permanent enough to have names and roofs, too small and too seasonal to be called towns. The Lost Road, an old trade route that once crossed the duchy, still appears on old maps; the trees have taken back most of it, and finding what is left requires a guide who was born nearby.
People and custom
Waldheim belief is animistic and unembarrassed. The forest is held to be inhabited — presences that are neither kind nor cruel, but owed respect, greeting, and on certain days a share. Small things are left at the treeline: bread, salt, a first cut of meat, a coin from a good sale. Nobody local finds this remarkable. Outsiders find it remarkable for years.
What travelers report is consistent enough to be worth setting down and vague enough to be worth doubting: paths that were not there on the way out, a stand of trees that goes completely silent as you pass it, voices carrying across water at night in a valley with nobody in it. Kirchberg scholars have written a great deal about this and reached no agreement whatever. Waldheimers, asked directly, tend to answer a different question.
Authority here is thin. The Duke’s word carries formal weight, but real influence belongs to councils of wise folk — those held to know the forest best — and their standing comes from being right about things over a long period. There is no law in the sense other duchies mean it.
Hospitality is close to sacred. A stranger who comes to a Waldheim door is fed and housed and asked nothing until he has eaten. The obligation runs both ways, and it ends sharply. Break the local courtesies, or take from the wood in a way that is considered greedy, and the same household that sheltered you will put you back on the road at once.
Trade
Timber is the duchy’s making. Waldheim oak, ash and maple are the best in Feldia, cut for ships, halls and fine furniture, and the felling is deliberately slow — quotas set by custom rather than by any ducal clerk, on the reasoning that the forest has to outlast the family. Fur follows: pine marten, fox, wolf and beaver, traded south and sold well beyond Feldia’s borders. Charcoal goes to the forges of half the realm, burned in clearings by families who have burned in the same clearings for generations.
There is also a steady, quiet trade in herbs and roots. Hedge doctors from every duchy send for Waldheim bark and Waldheim mosses, pay more than the weight suggests, and do not discuss it in front of a bishop.
Faith and history
Waldheim’s people were in the forest before Feldia was a realm. The Church came late — about five hundred years ago — and was received politely and absorbed incompletely. There is a bishop’s seat in the capital and a chapel in most camps of any size. There are also standing stones in clearings across the duchy, weathered past reading, which the local people neither explain nor damage.
Recently the wood has been off. Last autumn the birdsong stopped across an entire valley and the game went with it, for weeks, over a stretch of country a hundred miles wide. The game has come back thinner and warier than it should be, hunting has been poor since, and the people who live there will discuss the weather instead.