From what the people of the Sisters could understand, these new men (and their great sailing ships) came from forested coasts to the south and east, originally. Fleeing their homeland, whether from famine, invasion, or simple migratory nature, they had come north. They sailed first in trickles, later as a great migratory fleet. Hopping from harbor to harbor northwards, they exchanged metal tools and weapons for ores and raw metals with the locals. They sought, more than any others, two varieties known well to the Némori for their uses in jewelry and tableware: copper and tin. From these, they created a new alloy stronger than any their trade partners (or, indeed, the cradle) had ever seen before. From their southern homeland, they brought bronze.
On the hilly peninsula separating the sea later called Oddukhet from the waters to its south, the mariners found a sort of home. The local population told the waterborne merchants of their rich tin mines a short distance inland, and backed their tales with ore and metalwork. The mariners answered with spears and war, and in short order either exterminated or subjugated the local populations. With one half of their hold on bronze established, the great fleets diffused throughout the new waters to their north.
Although the mariners traveled together and often cooperated, they were by no means a monolithic culture group. The fleet was composed of an assortment of allied, distantly related ethnicities, and with a wide sea full of islands before them they separated. Some stayed in the tin mining colonies established on the southern peninsula, but the majority moved northwards. While there were countless divisions within the migration, the immediate effects on the cradle resulted from three primary movements. In roughly chronological order, they were the
Juzhen, led by the legendary Shoru, the Rizu, and the
Juakeh.
The Shoru found Yanga several millennia after its first human settlers. On the low southern reaches of the island, wheat fields and rice paddies supported a significant population centered around a number of city states such as Diny and, much more importantly, Kassa. It is impossible to tell whether the name of the wonder at the heart of the latter came from the city which held it, or if the city was named for its labyrinth. Either way, the maze of the Kassa was a sacred thing to the Yangites. Pilgrims probed its depths constantly, and some in Yangite society probed the questions at the heart of their faith by climbing the steps of the central ziggurat daily.
Yangite religion itself was nebulous, but stressed obedience and dogma. Understanding was beyond the mortal realm, and most demagogues who attempted to impose rationality were run out of Kassa. Unlike these, he Shoru did not come alone.
Melding the beliefs of the Juzhen, of chaos gods and a large, expanding pantheon with those of Kassa (and defended by the bronze-armed marines of the Juzhen fleet), Kassa quickly fell under sway of the Shoru. This prophet-leader came to dominate all of Yanga in short order, particularly after the city of Diny led a failed effort to oust the newcomers.
The Shoru (and their successors), faced with the task of ruling a very large realm, organized an advisory body known as the Horotoro to manage day to day affairs on the island. However, Yanga was ruled in a highly decentralized manner. Elites, mostly seaborne merchant lords and the agrarian nobility of the interior, held control at the local and municipal levels. However, popular courts and mob democracy thrived in various ways throughout southern Yanga, issuing denunciations and exerting control on public policy through informal referendums and spontaneous assemblies.
The north of the island was a comparatively undeveloped place. Mostly occupied by shepherds, meandering Juzhen merchants soon found a very good reason to change this condition. Among the goods the northmen brought to the ship-markets were shocking amounts of copper, tin, and gold. Many in the southern cities became fascinated with the idea of exploiting this mineral wealth, and some merchant lords arranged expeditions. These were mostly isolated cases, though, and demand wasnt extremely high, so the true sum of whatever mineral wealth lay on Yanga went unknown and undeveloped.
Despite being one of the richest cultures of the cradle, public displays of wealth were frowned upon in Ju. The political undercurrents of mob democracy that thrived in the urban undergrowth often forced asceticism upon those who carelessly flaunted their success. Rich domestic agricultural and fish production was complemented by massively successful trade. Juzhen ships filled the Oddukhet and the Telesejiya, bringing bronzework, timber, and other goods to the eastern coasts.
However, the ships on the Oddukhet were not only Juzhen, and not all were for commerce. All of the third migration cultures were ship peoples, and it was with the strength of a north-blowing wind that the Rizu sailed into the Telesejiya.
Their ships were few at first, exchanging some tools for Némori lacquerware with settlements along the coast. As the south grew yet more crowded, though, and as the Rizu became more desirous of the source of the northern goods which filtered to the Telesejiyas shores, a few ships became dozens. Dozens became permanent trading posts. These posts housed adventurers eager to venture upriver. The adventurers oceangoing vessels, unsuited to the shallower waters of the Sisters, were converted or replaced with large barges. These they packed with wares and men, and rowed and poled their way west to the Némori heartland.
The rice lords who ruled the political and economic life in the city states gave warm reception to the new arrivals. A network of intercity rivalries was an ideal climate for the trade of bronze, and even if a particular lord attempted to stop the movement of the barges, Némori skiffs could match neither the size of the Rizu nor the power of their bronze-armed crews, and landbound Némori armies could not match the mobility of their opponents.
The mercantile success of the Rizu on the plains ensured that the adventurers established themselves as a fixture in the political and economic systems of the littoral. Some acted as mercenaries, and were a deadly and key fixture in the arsenal of any city state with the means to hire them. In commerce, they brought goods from the Sisters far into the Oddukhet, and linked the Némori into a new trade network. Within the river system, they went largely unopposed, as the ostensibly republican city lords feared reprisals from Rizu marines.
Only history knows what his original name was, but by the time he was a god-king to the Rizu the Némori knew him only as Rizuké. In the years after his rise and death, king turned to god and was ascribed the characteristics of such, but as far as can be known he was a man.
Most of the cultures of the third migration had a tendency to be ruled by divinely justified autarchs or oligarchs, like the Shoru, or otherwise hold themselves to strict hierarchies at smaller scales of organization. While the Rizu had fragmented once introduced to the winding Sisters, they found a leader in Rizuké. Within a short span of time, most of the boat men pledged themselves to his designs. For a few years, he took nothing more than this allegiance from these followers, but he had grander plans in mind.
The city of Telié, on the banks of the lower Atsenu, awoke itself one morning to find a squadron of barges massed in the lazy waters of the river. As legend tells it, the most powerful of the citys landlords greeted the visitors, welcoming them to his city. Met by bronze spearheads and painted shields, he was asked why exactly he thought it was his.
In rapid succession, the Némori city states fell to Rizu fleets. Resistance, and alliances against the riverine armies invariably failed as the barges could simply retreat to the safety of the water and outpace any marching army. Although the Némori far outnumbered their new invaders, internal rivalries and opportunism meant that a united front was rarely if ever presented to the Rizu. In a matter of years, essentially all of the Sisters had fallen under the control of the boatmen.
The overwhelming force of the Rizu riverfleet could easily suppress any rebellion or disobedience on the part of the Némori rice lords, but it could only be in so many places at once. Rizuké, recognizing this reality, began to establish alliances with organizations of farmers and city-dwelling artisans in order to keep their lords in check. In addition, the fleet played on relations between city states to create ready-made support should any particular city decide to shake the yoke. Backed up by contracts recorded in primitive pictograms, the pacts were meant to last. These precautions rarely needed to be used, though, as the Rizu tended to rule with a light hand. The control they exerted was generally nominal, and their dominance was mostly used to ensure favorable trade deals and food supplies.
In any case, the Rizu could not stay cohesive after the Conquerors death. Even before Rizuké breathed his last, the boatmen had begun to return to their meandering mercantile ways. No successor could keep the decentralized empire together, and all parties were quite happy to return to their uneventful existences from before the crisis. However, a few lasting impacts on the region were the alliances, which continued to be respected in written contract, and partially as a result of this the tentative dominance of the Rizu over the Némori.
On a theological level, the wheel was shaken in its rut by the sudden shock of the conquest. If life was a cycle, and continued largely in its own previous patterns, how could these foreigners establish themselves when before they simply had not been? As the events faded from living memory, and myth rather than experience socialized the people of the Sisters to the age of alliances and the grand river fleet, a twin idea grew to accompany the wheel in the Némori spiritual mind. In addition to the regular turn of the wheel, some whispered of great Defiers, who were strong enough to run counter to fate and make grand marks upon the world. In the years that followed, many claimed to be Defiers but few were recognized as such on levels beyond the local. Regardless, the change to philosophy seemed to be permanent.
While the Némori were experiencing the minor upheaval of foreign subjugation at the hands of a third migration culture, another fragment of the third wave washed up on the shores of the Oddukhet.
The Juakeh were known as Jyaké to the Némori, but names are less important than profits. Every year, the winds carried them north from their permanent homes in the south, laden with tin, bronze, gold, and other products of their peninsula. Their ships were beached on the coast of the Oddukhet, and they stayed for a season until their wares were gone. Once their return voyage began, their holds stuffed with rice and wheat rather than manufactured goods, they would disappear to the south and not return until the next year.
While not particularly active in the political and diplomatic affairs of the cradle, the Juakeh were still vitally important as a major supplier of tin to the growing number of bronze forges in the littoral, not to mention the valuable gold ore they brought to northern markets. Their kings (and most of their polities) grew fabulously wealthy from this mineral trade, but besides this had little concern for littoral affairs beyond what affected their food supplies.
The cradle balances on the precipice. From the shrouded heights of the Elkatar to the fertile littoral plains, from the ore-laden hills of Yanga to the salt flats of the Xẁda, from the marshes of the Hebuttar to the low Fethandal, millennia of war, commerce, migration, and change have rendered unrecognizable the virgin plains the first men found in the ancient days of the past. Even now, the art of bronze working spreads from the artisans of the Sisters to the highlands and the west. Bronze tools and weapons (and the hunt for the resources to make them) will doubtlessly alter the political, economic, and natural landscapes of the region, but their age is just now dawning. In some corners, centralized polities are beginning to develop, but culture and city remain the defining levels of organizations.
Whether they know it or not, the modern inhabitants of the cradle will live in an age of change. The sun has begun its rise, it already brightens the landscape. It will cross the horizon soon, but only time will tell its color.
Culture Map:
Economic/Trade Map: