In our flight south, the Lady Indili and I traveled alone save for one horse and one camel. The horse was a fine animal of Kharal stock that, though small, bore heavy loads without complaint and was ever vigilant against the presence of wolves. Our camel was an aging, mean, and easily irritated creature who regularly ignored commands. Thankfully he remained perpetually willing to proceed south and was strong as an ox. Though he complained bitterly every morning when we loaded up our baggage, he readily carried our extensive collection of artifacts, fossils, notes, and sketches that represented the expedition’s true gains to this point. We did not ride these pack beasts, but led them on leads and staked them down at night. This did little to announce our presence upon arrival in the marshlands. Lone riders on horses, though not especially common, are unremarkable occurrences on the steppe as Kharal messengers and hunters crisscross the grass with some regularity. Camels are less common, but their strength allows them to carry the goods of a whole family in desperate times, and in the chaos of that autumn we were not the only desperate souls abroad and seeking succor.

The Rutar, of course, were vigilant as to the possibility of outsiders seeking shelter in their lands. Conflict in Snushgud left merchants scattered about the southeast, fleeing bandits and weather alike. Many caravaneers, seeing no possibility of survival through trade, turned bandit, and many mercenaries joined them. The merchants themselves, and such loyal guards as they retained, sought any possible means to gather up easy mobilized wealth and reach refuge. Though most fled across the steppe westward, others traveled the same route we did, hoping to shelter in the swamps for the winter and find passage over the water come spring. The Rutar, having received word from the north through various whispers, were ready.

We were confronted by sentries dispatched from the nearest villages not two days into the marsh. They emerged unseen from the cloaking reeds, surrounding us with ease before we became properly aware of their presence. All were bowmen, the most common form of Rutar combatant, a tradition honed by their hunting and trapping ways. Their slender but powerful weapons and light garb allow them easy movement through the marshes in considerable stealth.

As Sairns we were neither unexpected nor welcome among them. Merchants with at least some measure of Sairn heritage are common in southern Shdustu, though rarely this far to the east, and there is no history of hostility between the peoples. These hunters spoke Kharal in addition to their own language, though not well. My own mastery of that language was, by this time, significant superior to theirs, something I believe impressed these men for few foreigners learn any Shdustu language in detail. I would, in time, make great efforts to learn their language, despite its lack of similarity to others of the region and a strange, almost warbling, speech pattern. Throughout my time with them I was forced to speak simply and struggled to express even the least nuance. This was extremely frustrating, though thankfully most Rutar seemed to find this endearing. Foreigners rarely learn more than a few words of their language, and though most speak at least some Kharal they regard that tongue as one of foreign conquerors and consider speaking it degrading.

The hunters apparently expected fleeing merchants or Nikkad nobles, not a scholar from a distant empire and a master sorcerer. While they had no experience dealing with scholars, as might well be expected from a people with neither writing nor paper, their lack of experience with sorcery surpassed my expectations. Lady Indili found it shocking as well. The chapter house proclaims itself the universal source of sorcerers for all humanity and has long attempted to recruit members from all peoples of the world in support of this claim. While a lack of literacy and scholarly tradition does represent a barrier, and sorcerers drawn from peoples such as the Bahab or Kharal rarely surpass the rank of apprentice, promising children are nevertheless for study and even those with a modest level of control over divine essence can be of great service to their homelands. The Rutar, in violation of this compact, have no sorcerers among them. The nearest outpost of the chapter house is in Snushgud, but the marsh-dwellings people gave up sending children many generations ago as they were invariably killed prior to arrival. Only such scraps of mysticism as their shamans are able to reason out themselves is retained as their knowledge of the art.

Lady Indili found this state of affairs horrifying and took steps to rectify it, a matter I will discuss in detail at the appropriate time. In the immediate circumstance of our discovery by the Rutar, and our request for access to their village, it meant that we were treated with respect and no small amount of awe. The chance to earn the gratitude of a master sorcerer, a personage who had not visited their people in such a length of time as to become a legendary existence, meant that we were readily accommodated and honored by the Rutar. They escorted us to the nearest village with considerable haste. Though this did not unfold without some misconceptions. Lacking proper knowledge of the rules governing mystics, they initially assumed Lady Indili and I were married, which is of course impossible, and it took considerable time and effort to clarify the nature of our partnership to them.

The hunters took us to the village of Tavu-Onal, which translates out to something like ‘Bending Reeds.’ This occupied a section of wide and open marshland on the edge of a shallow lake at the western edge of the river delta. It was a small place, only a few dozen homes and barely one hundred residents. Despite this, it already hosted a pair of fleeing merchants. These were a gemstone trader and his concubine, both people of the distant lands of Jingli to the distant east. The merchant’s name was Laindquin. By a curious coincidence, I had previously met this man in Shnudidishgu, though we had barely spoken at the time. Like most persons of Jingli origin, he identified by another name among the barely known peoples of that distant region and spoke no more than a few words of broken Nikkad. The language of his homeland is almost impossible for outsiders to pronounce, requiring strange tongue motions to make the proper sounds that, if not learned as a child, are extremely challenging to produce. Laindquin was able to write tolerably well using the Nikkad script, and in this way exchanged several brief letters with me. He explained his troubles in the gemstone trade, thrown into chaos by infighting in Snushgud, and his treatment by the Rutar. He considered the latter abominably crude but was otherwise good-natured about the whole business.

I extended an offer to this merchant to join us on the return to Crisremon. I believed the emperor would welcome a learned visitor from the distant east to court, for those lands were almost wholly unknown to Sanid scholarship. He, and several others of Jingli origin I encountered during that winter, refused this offer, claiming that it was a violation of the laws of his people to visit lands where ‘agents of men rather than the Divines, rule.’ Exactly what this prohibition meant, or how it failed to apply to Shdustu, ruled by khagans who did not even claim to be agents of the Divines, was never something I could get properly explained. Much of the distant east remains very poorly known, something that a properly outfitted mission to those lands will be needed to resolve.

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Due to the presence of other visitors, we did not stay long in Tavu-Onal, remaining a mere two nights until a party of hunters was available to escort us further south to a larger village not already hosting travelers. This, apparently, was the way of the Rutar. Once extended, they considered hospitality a sacred trust, but they spread it out among all their people in order to avoid extreme strain on local resources. Additionally, their unwillingness to extend their shelter to either Kharal or Nikkad makes sense in such context, for any such effort would quickly overwhelm their ability to provide.

Rutar hospitality is, consequently, highly ceremonial and carefully orchestrated. Visitors are housed separately, given a home that is vacated by its proper occupants. Their needs are supplied by an elderly widow, who will conduct all household cooking, cleaning, and mending. Visitors are not under any obligation to aid the villagers in any tasks, though a ‘gift of the stay’ is customary in recompense. The gem merchant Laindquin had offered, in return for accommodation lasting the entire winter, nothing more than a pouch of semiprecious stones, perhaps the most blatant act of mercantile gouging I have witnessed in my entire life. The Rutar value gems, which they struggle to obtain in a land with little stone, very highly, and they are vulnerable to this form of exploitation. Though our time on Tavu-Onal was very short, I attempted to offer compensation by drawing a map of the Shdulus River’s course all the way to the glaciers, as it was known to me. Lady Indili easily surpassed this by sending a shark shade to trawl the bottom of the neighboring lake. The essence construct successfully located two iron knives, a bronze axe head, and a long string of glass beads buried deep in the mud, which divers soon retrieved. As metal tools are of inestimable value among a people unable to manufacture their own, this action started a rumor that the visiting sorceress was a blessing sent by the Divines. This statement, which was at the least bordering on blasphemy, was one I confess we did not work very hard to discourage, and from this point it spread far and wide through the swamps.

Each Rutar village is controlled by an elder, usually the patriarch of the largest extended family that, through blood or marriage, is related to the majority of residents. Their authority is fairly informal, limited to the use of persuasion to organize various large group enterprises such as major hunts or labor details. For the most part each family conducts its own business, using a section of the swamp as their own primary source of food and other resources. However, since families in these small villages are generally very closely related there is a great deal of mutual support. This helps to explain their generous hospitality tradition, since the stranger who arrives in a village is liable to be related to someone living there. In addition to the village dwellers, the Rutar have a long tradition of swamp hermits. These are small families or lone individuals who live semi-migrant existences in the regions of the swamp far from any village and survive primarily through hunting and trapping. These persons generally return to villages only after making large kills they cannot consume, such as adult boars, or to trade valuable medicinal plants. However, they may also come to work in villages for a season, most often during the winter, in hard times. In this fashion the full resources of the marsh are cycled back into Rutar life.

The Rutar shared food with us readily, and this did much to abate the weariness accumulated by long and desperate days on the run south. Though the cuisine of the swamps, with its endless stews, is simple and not very much to my taste, especially closer to the sea where everything was heavily salted, it was plentiful and hot. Unlike the needs of travel, which enforces many cold meals, or even the Nikkad practice of serving many meals without heating to preserve critical fuel stores, the Rutar have abundant swamp shrubbery to burn and in some areas can harvest peat for this purpose as well, cutting this burnable earth from the bogs with sharp spades. This means, when combined with the low clouds common in the swamps, that the villages often linger beneath a pall of grayish smoke during much of the day.

The Rutar preferentially take meals in large groups, seated amid their work platforms, with each resident fed by filling their bowl from a large cauldron capable of feeding a great many people before it is emptied. This method is efficient in terms of labor, since a single cook, usually an elderly woman, can tend one fire and pot rather than nearly a dozen doing the same. Meal variety is lost as a result. The great cauldrons are central to Rutar cooking, and they rarely use any other means, though fish and sometimes boar may be roasted on spits for festivals. They do not bake bread of any kind, and their harvested vegetables, when not cut or stewed, are mashed and made into dumplings used to enclose leftover meat bits. These are added to the pot or cooked on skewers over hot stones. The very large iron pots used in Rutar cooking are extremely valuable, for they are not easily replaced. They are of unusual design and craftsmanship, and I was unable to determine their origin, though it is not from Shdustu, the Sanid Empire, or distant Jingli. It seems some ironworking people known only to the salt sea traders produce these.

As guests, Lady Indili and I were allowed to eat alone, which quickly became our preference. Otherwise, we would spend the entirety of our meals being bombarded by questions in a language we barely understood at all, which was very tiring. I did, however, make a point of allowing the elderly widows who supported us to sit and eat when we did and strove to converse with them, always about simple matters such as weather, food, and relatives, in order to practice the language. I also invited such elders and shamans who wished to discuss more formal intellectual topics to join us as the winter progressed and my confidence in expressing thoughts in the language increased. These conversations most often turned to the changing flow of the great rivers or the migratory patterns of the numerous birds of the swamplands, eventually becoming well versed in these topics over time. I eventually compiled what I believe is a historically accurate list of major floods during the Husun dynasty and a list of names for all birds that fly north and south over the salt sea. I presented copies of this to the shamans, who considered it most valuable in directing their auguries.

The elderly patriarch of Tavu-Onal, who like many older Rutar suffered from severe damage to his vision, was of cunning mind and arranged to deliver Lady Indili, who he considered an august personage, to the heart of the Rutar homeland, the sacred village of Varu-Tavur, which sits upon the shores of Lake Ariondishtun and contains the holy temple of this people where their shamans are ordained. He conspired that, in order to maximize the benefit to his own reputation, we did not make this journey directly, but spent over two weeks moving from one village to the next through a circuitous passage that dramatically increased the fanfare attached to our ultimate arrival.