It is a journey of three days from the city of Nlamadt to the town of Shdraudra. Water, streaming down from the high peaks and hidden springs, is abundant if scattered, but there is little fodder and the hills are thoroughly picked over by goats. There are no intervening villages on the road and the traveler is obligated to camp in the open upon the narrow paths. The air is cold, and has begun to thin even at this point. The body adjusts, but the difference can be felt, especially if one runs.
Many paths lead out from the hills of Nla-Shdrast towards the mountains that form the eastern boundary of both the province and the empire. Most lead nowhere, to empty canyons or impassable escarpments or simply endless repeating towering peaks. Those with any chance of proceeding all the way to the distant land of beyond the snow-capped ridges converge in a curious little town called Shdraudra.
It is not a grand place, holding no more than one thousand lives even if all the wandering shepherds are counted among the total. The town lies at the center of a rare high meadow and savanna where trees grow in scattered strands amid a backdrop of grasses. In many superficial ways it resembles the savanna found in the western core provinces, but a closer examination reveals profound differences. The grasses are different, unfamiliar and not found elsewhere in the empire. Junipers and oaks are the predominant trees, as might be expected, but these too are varied compared to those in the west. Measurements of acorns I made establish this quite clearly. There is even a tree similar in form to the pistachio, but it presents a nut that, though quite savory and filling, has a distinctively rounded shape compared to that well-known foodstuff.
The Lady Indili found such variations fascinating. She dug a deep pit beneath the roots of a great tree and recovered fragments of old bones buried centuries or perhaps even millennia in the past. She claimed, though I struggled to see the point of variation with my unpracticed eye, that these were from animals different from the donkeys and gazelles that now haunt the slopes beyond the ranges of the ubiquitous goats. She would later advance the theory that the valley surrounding Shdraudra represented a patch of a landscape preserved from ancient times and now vanished from all the rest of the face of the world. An extraordinary claim, but one that makes as much sense as any other I ever heard proposed. The intuition of a sorceress is accounted better than most others, and few scholars have ever chanced to study the region.
Shdraudra itself is different from any other town in the empire. It is built entirely of stone, painstakingly shattered off the slopes and then layered together by the careful and nearly lost art of stacking without mortar. These seemingly delicate but strangely robust constructions are then sealed with a layer of sod to keep out wind and rain. Grass grows atop the roofs, providing additional food to the goats, which often sleep upon them in the night. These houses are small, and the lives of the people here very simple. An ancient place, the town has an anachronistic feeling similar to that of the land where it occupies, as if a relic from some previous age before empires and scholarship. It seems obvious that in other circumstances its continued survival would be quite suspect. The Redbone explorers, who have walked far among the hills, claim that the high valleys hide many abandoned foundations, crumbling and long abandoned, the last remains of some pre-empire people whose name has been lost to history.
Unlike those places, which now host no humans save for the occasional desperate band of cutthroats, the town has been preserved by the existence of the passes. Three routes extend eastward from the high meadow, cairn-marked trails ascending skyward. Great shelter barns sit on the valley floor surrounding the low stone wall of the town, full to their ceilings with baled hay and dried grain. Campsites and marked cesspits dot the surrounding flats for the use of caravans, with watering troughs laid out for animals. Trade preserves this town. All the people here are touched by it, from the goat herders who turn hides into saddle blankets, sinew into straps, and meat into jerky to the farriers who care directly for the countless pack animals who pass by their shops to the innkeepers who overcharge for cheap wine hauled up from lower valleys. Even the Dragon Expedition, though far larger than any mule or yak train that normally dares cross the mountains, was not beyond the capacity of this carefully organized settlement. The mayor welcomed Erun into his home as an honored guest and settled all others on the fields to the north. Then the locals came out to supply the necessities of the crossing, both those truly essential and those intended to part a traveler from their accumulated wealth.
The residents are hardly subtle in their offerings. Whatever it began as, the town long ago embraced its purpose as a way-station, a place of transition. Even the people were changed by this. Differences could be seen in their features. Slight tightening around the eyes, a vague roundness to many faces, reduced noses, pale skin tones, and more, but such variations were spread erratically across a community that otherwise appeared fully Sairn due to the lengthy legacy of traders who chose to remain here following the failure of some mercantile endeavor or a disaster among the high peaks.
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Echoes of the strange past could be further found in the nature of the town's temple. It was not a proper triple structure but rather three separate buildings positioned in a roughly triangular format that had been later joined together through the addition of arched walkways. Even my eyes, little tuned to masonry, could detect this obvious reconstruction. The resident priest freely admitted to the hybrid origin of the temple, though he claimed that the change predated any record or even retained local legend. It seems that in ancient times the worship of the Three Divines, though well established, was conducted separately, each deity treated as a separate entity rather than part of a united whole as is proper. As deviations from proper observance are measured this is surely a modest one. Compared to beliefs and distortions of the faith found in some foreign lands it is barely worthy of mention.
The stopover in the town is one of absolute necessity. The passes themselves are uninhabited save for mountain bandits and offer no possibility of forage as to stray from the trail risks death for both animal and handler alike. As such, all food and fodder needed to complete the journey must be carried along. The caravan master directed the loading of every animal accordingly. Further, he hired a local merchant to join us, adding twenty-seven yaks to the train for the sole purpose of carting additional supplies as support in case of unforeseen delays. This act added six locals, all member's of the merchant's family, to the expedition, though only temporarily. A considerable expense, but one Erun accounted easily paid as it could be credited to the imperial treasury and this was the last such point to bank an expense of this kind. Further purchases would need to be made using silver and trade goods.
This was my first encounter with yaks, and it is my firm belief that Shdraudra is the only place in the Sanid Empire where any of these unusual animals, which appear vaguely like oversized shaggy goats at first glance but seem in truth to be a strange variation of cattle, are found. According to the local herdsmen, they originated in high mountains far to the east, beyond even Shdustu. They are very much alpine creatures, for they struggle to breathe properly in lowlands and their thick coats are so stout that even brief periods of considerable heat can kill them. Even in the thinned air and shaded vales surrounding Shdraudra they had a tendency to grow hot by midday and would run to streams and immerse themselves deeply in order to cool down. While on the trail, if the snow was high and bright, they would rumble bodily through thick banks of snow to similar purpose.
Though smaller in stature than a working ox of the core provinces, yaks are doughty, stubborn, and bull-headed animals capable of being turned to very similar purpose, and the people of this region use them to haul, plow, and pull accordingly. The key difference is the compacted frame, sturdy but stubby legs, and the thick coat that hangs down nearly to the ground below the belly. Perhaps unexpectedly, their small bodies can be very dense, with the bulls especially being much heavier than lowland cattle of similar size. Despite this, their forage needs appear to be lesser. I suspect they grow slower as a consequence. Curiously, they are not capable of lowing, but will grunt instead. Very surefooted, their performance in this regard equals or perhaps surpasses mules, and they can handle considerably heavier loads. This makes them excellent pack animals overall, though they are given to a rather slow walking pace and it takes great skill to press them to any speed, though they may move rapidly if spooked by predators. Curiously, larger specimens can even be ridden, as the merchant guiding the herd that joined us was wont to do most days.
It is common for merchants who seek to cross the Shdrast Range to load their goods entirely onto the local yaks during the passage with the intention of acquiring new animals upon reaching the other side, a trade that goes both ways. As such, Shdraudra hosts a lively market in pack animals, with the attendant scents attached. In our case this was not done, for two reasons. Our expedition's cargo was primarily persons, not goods, allowing proper attention to the mules and therefore savings in this way. It was also absolutely necessary to bring the cavalry horses, required by the Imperial Guard and unavailable anywhere beyond imperial territories, with us. They would be needed in times to come.
Counting the yak drivers, the Dragon Expedition intended to cross the mountains with one hundred and five lives in train. There had been, to this point, neither death nor serious injury, and all who left Crisremon remained among our company. Inquiries I made among the townspeople suggested that this made ours the largest group to make the crossing in over a century, since the last of the tributary missions dispatched to Shdustu by the previous ruling dynasty. A typical trade mission across the mountains contains no more than thirty persons, and often considerably less.
The local magistrate suggested that Erun might split the expedition into three groups to challenge each of the passes at once. He opposed this, arguing, quite reasonably, that it was necessary to keep the entirety of the expedition together in order to protect against avaricious predators waiting on the far side of the peaks. Though both the local herders and the resident merchants claim that such depredations do not occur, it takes little to deduce that there must be some who collude with the mountain bandits on some level. Otherwise how could those who strike in the high places trade their ill-gotten plunder? That threat was well-known and often warned against. An armed escort and willingness to fight is therefore essential to all who attempt the crossing. Even the yak drivers, though their animals were hauling nothing but fodder of no value to the bandits, were issued spears they carried ready for use.