The Iron Three deserve to be described together, although they would not say so. Together, Montgard, Barre, and Sabine take up the north western quadrant before Arden and are responsible for the primary supplies of iron to Arden and Amber. Historically, they have also been the source of generations of conflict, intercinine politics, intermarriage and the consequences of long, long memories and a little too much incest for good taste. Represented by three separate symbols - iron, salt and blood - the Iron Kings (today, the Iron Three, or the Dukes of Iron) are deeply related by three distinct bloodlines that cross and overlap and originate together over a thousand years ago.
Generations ago, they were in fact one single kingdom known as Gallian which commanded (through the laws of supply and demand) a vast amount of influence over their neighbors and further acquaintances. Ruled through primogeniture, they were one of the first realms to come up with the concept of inherited rule (rather than the wield sword terrify all possible opponents sort of rule). In part, this was because they could afford to: they were nothing if not luxuriously well off, and the leisure afforded two results: an urge to conquer anything that moves and an earlier venture into culture than others realms in the area. At one point, they commanded large chunks of Arden and Upper Andros (although not nearly the scope that Oberon now holds). The man who achieved this breadth of control was a fierce fellow who went by the name of Carlos Magnos. He encouraged learning, development, wealth and civilization during his lifetime with such success that he was well beloved and held it all in his old age - without challenge - by force of personality and loyalty. He had no desire to see it fall apart after his death. Therefore, he introduced the idea that only the single son of his body had the intrinsic qualities necessary to rule (not to mention the natural right).
Grateful to Carlos Magnos and somewhat accustomed to the concept of overwhelming rule, the idea of primogeniture stuck with surprisingly little fuss. The single son inherited and ruled tolerably well; he married a princess from a kingdom of Lower Andros and they, together, had one son and two daughters. The son inherited; the daughters were married for alliances to the north. Sadly, by the time Carlos Magnos's great grandson was ascending the throne, Gallian's internal friendships and support structure was suffering the pressure of decadence and time. It had held this long because practical, alternate iron deposits had yet to be found to provide competition; in the end, it was human nature that did it in.
The great grandson, Jon of Lackbone, had many, many, many children. 8 sons and 4 daughters lived to adulthood, raised as royalty to have arrogance of arms, resources, and expectations of their station and entitlement. Jon was prepared to split the realm to appease his hungry children and nephews - his aunts, it may be recalled, were married and their sons perceived an entitlement to Gallian. Prior to Jon's death, the young men - all 11 of them - worked out their aggression in largely honorable ways with one exception (the second eldest) who kept his tendencies to seed the realm with armed reserves as privy from his family as possible. Jon felt confident of their good behaviour and wished to deal fairly with all of them. Thus, while Jon's eldest son inherited, he did not inherit Gallian; he inherited a chunk of land that lines up to perhaps half of the modern Duchy of Sabine. The other sons all received smaller parcels of land; Jon was even careful to be kind to the nephews. The daughters and nieces received dowries as part of their brother's lands, and thus a puzzle was made of Gallian.
Jon's eldest son retained his parcel for about three weeks; within that time, his next-younger sibling, Martinian, ambushed his party on progress from a position that must have been established before their father's death. The legends surrounding this oldest of crimes survive to this day (Martinian is not a name given easily to children) and suggest dark sorceries and bargains with devils; instead, it was simply forethought, planning and a singular lack of morals. The eldest son of Jon did not survive the afternoon. His last sight was his wife's head being tossed onto the fire next to the bodies of his infant children.
Their siblings saw the matter darkly once it came to light. Martinian did not announce it; he waited for his elder brother to be perceived as 'missing' and simply offered to step into his place to provide stability for the interim. His siblings allowed him to do so with little suspicion but the eldest of the daughters, Callio, had been involved with Martinian's schemes in the past. She had knowledge of certain of the reserve forces' location and put the pieces together. She confronted him privately with her suspicions, taking as her only caution her own daughter, Sabina. Sabina was hidden in a secret passage with a peephole onto the room when Callio brought her accusations to her brother. Martinian panicked. Thus it was that Sabina witnessed Callio's murder at the hands of her brother and his subsequent flight south. Martinian fled to a country (which no longer exists by its old name, Artre) that lay to the south Of Gallian, never conquered by Carlos Magnos. It was held nonetheless by Martinian's uncle by marriage, Henri (one of the men to whom a sister of Jon had been married), and Martinian felt that he would be sheltered there.
He was incorrect. His Uncle provided him with troops but sent him north to defend his honor. Sabina, meanwhile, fled to her father, weeping furiously with her tale, and the widower of Callio cried foul to the entire family. Carlos Magnos' great-great-grandchildren rose in outrage in the name of justice. They rode in war on their brother - well. Half of them did. The other half rode in his defense, for Sabina was a distraught girl-child who had lost her mother in some strange and brutal fashion (and therefore her word did not have the automatic integrity of a Knight - quite the opposite, in fact) and had only herself as witness to support her accusation. The Knight, however, cried unnatural seduction on the part of Sabina, followed by a fantastic tale concocted when she failed to seduce her own Uncle. Each had just enough circumstance to possibly be believed, but it made no matter. Within a few years, the original wrongs had plenty of competition.
The family lines did not stay tightly drawn. Certain of Callio's immediate relatives rose to Martinian's iron-eagle standard; some of Martinian's immediate supporters defected to Callio's husband's sun standard, permanantly marred by a bloody smear in memory of his wife. Those relatives who had married outside the realm of Gallia into the kingdoms further south stayed as neutral as they could, and it was wise of them to do so. Among them was Henri, who had originally supplied troops to Martinian. The most even he would do, who had taught Martinian as a boy, was agree to succor Martinian's nephew Charles and see to the boy's education.
The realm was bathed in blood of the oldest, most bitter kind for nearly six decades. The sons poured themselves and all of their resources and allies into the mixing bowl of intercinine feud and the original wrong was lost in the years of conflict. Martinian's daughter was captured, misused by her brother's captain and hung not five years into the war, and it did not stand out. When parents died, their children picked their swords up from their limp fingers and carried on the grudge. The sisters and nieces were not immune, bartered out for added influence, money, and men. Initially, matters on the field of battle were handled by the rules of chivalry. As these failed to yield results, the 11 heirs and their allies began to rely on less - or more, depending on one's point of view - traditional means. Women were kidnapped or married off by force, sometimes to their own siblings; children were taken hostage; men were cut down from behind or through treachery and false friendship. Children betrayed their fathers and uncles, wives assassinated husbands, children were sold to the murderers of their brothers for political whim. Entire towns and villages were put to the torch by their own lords to prevent siezure by a rival. Pyrrhic victory took on a whole new dimension. The rivers alone did not run red: the fields were watered with blood and fertilized with ash. The country stank of its own decay.
By the end of a decade, no one was blameless of cruelty or betrayal, and no one was sure what to gain from peace or from conflict. The War was an end in and of itself. Iron production had slowed to a standstill, creating a paucity of armaments and replacement supplies and doing to the internal economy even more damage. The price of iron shot through the roof to the point that countries outside of Old Gallian sought other alternatives - ANY alternatives. Famine became a matter of course; the peasant base which had worked the mines was dying off through attrition caused by battle, sowing fields with salt, burning whole villages in the wake of passing armies, and 'less-cautious' iron smelting. Funds were nonexistant, largely because taxes had become laughably high; banditry became the most prevalent way of life until the bandits had to prey on each other. The population plummeted as their nobles turned their perfectly healthy country into a wasteland that had neither food nor resources. Peasants fled. Gallian collapsed.
They were beyond ripe for invasion. They were falling off the trees and rotting on the ground ripe for invasion. Thus far, interference from outside Gallian had been avoided simply because the surrounding realms (and those who had successfully seceeded from the mess) viewed the conflict as an unholy cancer and treated it as if it were contagious - which it was, after a fashion. The bloodier it got, the more determined the south became to avoid the mess. The alternatives to the mines, however, were limited and lethal; Gallian still maintained the best supply. And so Gallian needed to be corrected, and forceably.
The neighboring realms to the south - never part of Gallian but dependant on their iron trade, related by marriage in two cases - met in council to determine the best means of access to those mines. Conquering Gallian would pose little threat in the military sense; the issues of concern had more to do with handling the rightful claims of the nobles and exactly how to bring in the resources to restore the mines. And, of course, who would control the rights to that iron and to what degree.
This nearly sparked off another war; as it was, four of the five realms - self-labeled the Iron Confederacy - levied an equal number of troops from four members and rode into Gallian to 'mediate'. The fifth realm was Artre, led by Martinian's nephew, whom Martinian had protected and had raised in Artre by Henri. Artre supplied the 'mediators', the engineers and the leadership. They had a natural family tie and would, it was felt, have the best understanding of how to handle vicious Gallian. It was an uneasy balance, but economic desparation makes for strange bedfellows, and they met with almost no opposition.
The approach was brutally simplistic. They rode over weakened lands and abandoned castles, and claimed them for the confederacy. They 'detained' any noble they encountered, their guard, and their women and plunked the entire mess of them into one hall within the space of a season. Sanitation, comfort and sustenance were not concerns; dignity was less so. The invaders had brought their own food and their own supplies, and they would not share with their prisoners until those prisoners cooperated by suing for peace with their neighbors. It was not a happy atmosphere; the Confederacy was not there to be friendly. They were there to be just and legal by the standards of the local nations; the intent was to prevent further outcry from anyone by placing the label of righteousness and consent on the transactions.
The methods applied to cease the conflict were the oldest known to mediation among nobles: a false breath of renewed life whispered across the land in a series of sudden marriages. They were tainted marriages, ignoring existing unions and the natural laws against generational and immediate incest. Brothers were wed to sisters; in a particularly cruel twist, Callio's daughter Sabina and grandson were wed to Martinian's son and granddaughter. Treaties were signed with iron pikes held to the back of necks and forks and knives by empty plates. The marriage agreements that sued for peace were followed by contracts that entreated the Confederacy to assist fallen Gallian for a small fee. The fee, of course, was Gallian itself. The proud empire - or the fractious and fractional remains of it - was taken without a significant fight.
The driving force behind this tactic was not an uninterested party. Martinian's nephew, King of Artre, led the fifth Kingdom of the Confederacy. This King brought not troops to the Confederacy but funds and diplomacy and legalities - and family knowledge. Known as Charles the Bold, already holding a reputation for cold-blooded pragmatism, he had deliberately kept his country out of Gallian's War. It was not until movement began to pull the Confederacy together that he displayed interest in the plight of his relatives. It was felt by realms outside the Confedaracy that he would bring legitimacy to the proceedings and it was his presence in the arrangement that initially prevented outside intervention. He well knew Callio's history and her fate; he did not enact the marriages of her descendants to Martinian's by ignorant accident.
Charles changed his standard when he joined the Confedaracy. He removed Martinian's iron eagle to be replaced by a salt pillar sweeping across a blue sky like a tornado. It was muttered that this harbored ill for Gallian, and well it may have been so.
Gallian's new peace was followed immediately by a new order, suggested and implemented by young Charles. The nobles were not restored to ruling their parched lands; they were shipped, along with most of their peasantry, to the mines. The mines, after all, were what interested the Federacy. Their rank was acknowledged in that the nobility would oversee the production of the mines; the peasants would have to work them. The incentive that developed overtime involved a price for overseers that failed to produce a solid yield from their mine: they joined their peasants under the ground, digging. In those early years, they had one pick for ten men. Nothing says 'motivation' like clawing at rock with your bare hands.
The country itself was untended and left to run wild outside the area immediately used for mines or resources for the mines. The forests that had survived were cut down to reinforce the shafts; the great forges were fired once more. Supply wagons rolled up narrow roads bringing food, rope, timber, fabric, tools. The Federacy discovered that they lacked the manpower for the mines even if all the peasants of Gallian were conscripted, abandoning every farm, and so a new penal system came into play. Criminals in the five countries of the Federacy spent their lives in ruined Gallian. At times, pending the demand for the rest of the world, ordinary peasants from the Confedaracy were harried off to work in the fast darkness. Not hardened by surviving decades of near-apocalyptic conditions, they often sickened and consequently starved. Since Gallian did not produce its own agricultural base, sustenance was shipped in at dear prices and reserved for those who were worth the trouble of sustaining. Rumours spread throughout the region of the cruelty to be had in the iron mines, and it was said that none escaped and lived. Soldiers who were posted there tended to be posted for life, as a consequence, and they lurked in forts and garrissons, skimming what living they could off the flow of ore. Some of these sodiers took base advantage of the local women; others married, through one means or another, into the broken arm of the nobility. Gallian grew dark, bitterly tamed and haunted.
That Gallian revolted was not surprising; it was inevitable. This was a harsh people capable of passionately destroying everything about them for their own convictions. They had survived their own self-inflicted ruin. Slavery was unlikely to permanently defeat them. What was surprising was that it took so many generations. Perhaps an influencing factor was the introduction of fresh blood, not hardened by their common past: the peasants-turned-slaves from the south were more easily broken and quicker to fail and betray any independant, organized sparks that might ignite beneath the ground. However, due to the impermanence of imported workers, the Confedaracy found itself trying to breed the locals like stock animals. A sense of paranoia led them to regulate the marriages of the nobility - a travesty of its formal glory. Perhaps to retain the echo the past, the nobles were very strict about their bloodlines within the laws laid upon them. It became common to marry within a family or for a father to remarry his own daughter. Consequently, nobles that were cut down to live among the ordinary slaves were rarely accepted. This, too, may have delayed the coming uprising. As well, hope was something that was relatively rare. The slave who escaped did so to a land with no natives to take pity on them and few controlled resources available. The supply of food was not drawn from the land, afterall - it was supplied from without. Worse, the controlling countries were painfully aware that the rulers were vastly outnumbered by the slaves. The few tentative motions to revolt were cut down with inhumane cruelty. Object lessons were carried out at random.
A counter culture of sorts developed among the slaves after several generations: a kind of organized, passive resistance. Unbelievably, they banded together; nobility felt a sense of obligation to the slaves; the majority took on the burdens of the few. They found a means, within the mines, to hide the sick and take over their workload to allow time for recovery, to protect and raise the children. There gradually developed several clever means for smuggling. They managed to form councils of their own in secret. The foundation was laid; it needed only a spark to unite the slaves and the nobles. This was not news to the Confedaracy; to some extent they allowed it so long as the mines, their primary concern, produced. It gave the slaves a common existance *as* slaves and, even more importantly, guaranteed the cost effective raising of children. Population was very much a concern for the Confedaracy. It cemented, in the Confedaracy's eyes, a kind of acceptance of their role in life. Strangely, the original two standards - Martinian's iron eagle and Callio's bloodmark - remained; the councils identified themselves by these marks and the bloodlines of the nobles were counted in terms of those two unhappy ancestors. Charles' saltpillar was the standard of the conquerer; it flew proudly over the mines, hated by those under its subjugation.
The two mistakes that the Confederacy made was to continue to educate the nobility and to ignore the rest of Gallian. Education breeds the concept of thinking; thinking breeds invention. Nobles who were cast down into the slaves tended to be either incompetent or too humane. The variety that were too humane were occassionally also subtle and stubborn. It was one of these that was the spark. They took the council and the counterculture public, and used it as a cover for extensive smuggling, organization of the mines and communication. Gallian was not occupied outside the immediate sphere of the mines; the Confedaracy could not afford to occupy the entirety of the land taken. Indeed, much of it had been parceled off to four of those five nations. Charles and his descendants had bought them off with land and with profit. Over the years, Gallian's mines had fallen largely into the hands of Artre, who was then overtaxed in managing it and concentrated even more exclusively on the mines themselves. The actual countryside, where not stripped for the mines, had begun to recover, unnoticed. Thus, the slaves had somewhere to run after all.
Run they did. In twos, in threes, picked and organized and supplied, they were slipped out at life-risking cost to forage a living off the wilderness that was left of the country; gradually, they created hidden, tiny settlements dotted across the landscape. (Given the assumption that the land could support no one, it never occured anymore to Artre to look for locals living in caves and hidden valleys under their nose.) These tiny, brave, moving settlements formed the backbone of a communication networks. They were watched; they were careful. They were not careful enough. Occasionally, they were caught and slaughtered as runaway slaves. Another two generations of slow plotting passed. The mines organized. Gallian was quietly reclaimed.
The revolt, when it came, was not bloodless. It was cruel and carried the resentment of years of imposed hardship. By poison, by outright murder, by fire, by collapsed shafts and by careful, exact simultaneous organization, officers and soldiers and overseer nobility died. Artre, distanced, had no warning. Their control was decimated in those first several hours; what followed was vicious guerilla warfare. By the time word had gotten back to the south and troops were coming north, the war for Gallian was already lost.
Artre took a while to figure that out, of course. Another generation of occupied, guerilla warfare ensued. This time, however, Gallian had an outsider to bond them together - that, and desparation. They knew for what they fought. The invaders, unfortunately, did not. They were regimented troops; the Gallians knew the land. They had something to lose; the Gallians did not. Attempts to salt fields already ruined had no effect; there was no threat that could be brought to bear once the Gallians were not under thumb by force. Attempts to sieze the mines failed because, ultimately, the south needed them more than the Gallians did - which required local expertise. A posting in fierce Gallian became the equivalent of a death sentence. It was a one sided fight; that it lasted so long is more of a credit to the Confedaracy's stubborness than anything else.
The glory of generations of wealth-glut in the south became a thing of name alone. Eventually, Artre withdrew almost entirely from Gallian. They left behind a puppet government, completely ineffective and almost completely ignored. About once a year, someone would get around to killing the entirety of the government. They were reasonably creative about it and it could be used as an educational tool if one wanted to study arson, murder and terror. Being given the governorship of Gallian took on in Artre the air of being sent to the front to die - badly. The last puppet government evaded this fate through simple understanding of the situation. They immediately converted to Gallian sympathies, sued for peace, and promised their resources and funds in return for their lives. They stubbornly maintained at least one mine which produced ore that was sent south; ironically, perhaps out of habit, they retained the salt pillar standard. Incredibly, they managed to keep it (although it tended suffer strange fates involving fire on random, unannounced occaisions). Distracted by other concerns (war to the east), Artre left well enough alone.
As for the Gallians, they were clever but separated by the cost of surviving in a land that was thrown back hundreds of years behind its fellows. They kept up the mines, largely under the iron eagle; they kept them up because it prevented the country from being siezed and because it brought revenue, barter, resources into their barren land. Literature was beyond them; they kept their history and their sense of identity through fierce insistence on three standards and doggedly maintained oral traditions. The story of Callio, Martinian and Sabina was legend and myth; Charles an unrelated horror story with endless variations. This was not a country that could band together under one king, one government. Instead, it splintered into little villages, foraging bands, settlements around the mines. Smaller mines were opened up to the west and east - anything to bring income and a better chance of survival. The councils that had sustained them under the mountains were the influences above the ground; they formed small, miniature societies run by the nobility that had not been cut down as part of the traitorous conquerers from Artre.
To be of noble blood in wounded, sore Gallian was not to live a luxurious life. It was to be put to work from childhood; it was understood to be a life of serving everyone else. The education and training for leadership were emphasized, but it was a leadership that required being in the trenches and not only willing to do manual labour but being the best at it. (In a sense, this was payment for life as overseers and for the War.) One was there to see to it that the village and band made it through the next season, the next year - one must be responsible for survival. One must marry a noble - and given that all the nobles were related to one, the chances of children being born healthy or suriving were few. Even the children of average peasant stock had slim chances of seeing adulthood: childhood in Gallian was chancy. Thus, it became the natural priority of every community to protect and to ensure their children.
During hunts, during foraging, when Gallian at last managed to farm enough to draw a harvest, children were given the first and best food. As cruel as life was and as willing as this people were to sacrifice themselves, they were unwilling to consider their children expendable. Their own lives were unlikely to see comfortable success and they knew it. They could, nonetheless, fight for the chance that their children might one day lead secure, healthy lives. The struggle in Gallian was not for the present. It was for the future and the emphasis was on those who would live to see it. That Gallian survived at all was something of a miracle and a testament to the sheer tenacity of this people. That Gallian's children survived was proof of their enduring vitality.
The irony is that, eventually, the noble bloodlines had to be diluted or die out. The solution to this varied between the basic bloodlines. The bloodmark insisted on the purity of its legitimate line, choosing instead to seed bastards among the local women. This created, within two generations, a further blurring between the nobles and the people they served. Among the fields and up to their knees in the blood of the hunt, deeply related to their people, they lost the last vestiges of majesty, becoming simply leaders. The iron eagle took peasant women into their line deliberately. This polluted the line itself, but kept them that last notch apart from their followers - and it kept them aloof from their bloodmark kin. The salt pillar, however, could afford to be far more fastidious. Definitely related but having brought its blood up from the south, it was not nearly under the same constraints. Alone of the three lines, the saltpillar retained its autonomy. It was these three essential distinctions, along with legend, that sowed the seeds for the three separate kingdoms of Gallian.
It took them several centuries to recover Gallian's security. The mines were the key to that security, and all three lines knew it. But only those adhering to the saltpillar standard were willing to maintain the mines whole hog. The rest had been slaves in the mines and there was a prestige in avoiding them. More, Gallia needed food, and they were reluctant to constantly trade ore for grain. Farms began to dot the country side. Livestock were slowly brought in. The bands began to settle down, grew in number, stabalized. The villages grew to cities; the standards that had been stubbornly maintained gradually divied up Gallia into three large portions.
They had to maintain the mines to avoid invasion. This was an ingrained fact of life. Cease iron production and the south will come in force to see to their needs. A council was formed from representatives of each standard - each family branch - to ensure the production of the ore, and the general health of the region and to ensure assistance among the families. They began to be accepted by the other kingdoms of the area as three separate kingdoms, deeply related: the Iron Kings. Their form of government was eccentric as best - committees instead of monarchs - but the iron continued to flow and no one was very interested in invasion. Artre had been a lesson to all.
The interesting thing is that Gallia did not think of itself as one kingdom or even three kingdoms. It thought of itself as one region with three major bloodlines, deeply related, with wrongs and grudges held tightly in long memories. This distinction was vital, because they were an informal bunch, and council meetings developed more and more of a tendency to devolve into long arguments about events centuries old and somewhat blurred by oral traditions. As their population began to thrive at last and life became secure, Gallians did what they do best: disagree.
There were mines all over all three regions by now; iron had begun, once more, to be less a burden and more a thriving trade. The catch was that after so much mining, new mines *had* to be opened and so the Gallians expanded their efforts - this resulted in more population migration, more farms and even more division into three major population areas who disagreed about who got to live where and owned what. Where the mines were, there were the rest of the region. The mines each flew the standard of their principal family, who were still responsible for their welfare. The old standards of service had not changed; they had begun, under the saltpillar most of all, to be more administrative. The bloodmark still required years spent on farms and digging ditches; the iron eagle required time spent leading men. It was never an easy life. Only the saltpillar carried the idea of retaining title to other people.
The regions were named in one meeting: Montgard, along the western ridge of hills, flew the iron eagle. Barre in the center, to halt any southern encroachment, flew the salt pillar and Sabine to the east flew the bloodmark banner in memory of that unhappy girl.
The naming of the last was a cry of challenge to the other two regions, and they began to take it up. Fistfights, common enough on any day in any region in Gallia, became more and more frequent. Nationalism, always present but never before having a name, seeped into the general conciousness. Montgard and Barre and Sabine began to see each other as foreigners. Alcohol-brave young men had a tendency to rough up strangers in the streets. At a committee meeting, the Montgard flag was siezed and burned in the town square by a crowd of Sabines. Borders between the regions were patrolled for the first time in living history. Barre placed a tax on all imports from Sabine or Montgard.
They got petty. Skirmishes broke out on the border; raids on livestock and women got a bit more common; at one point, wells were poisoned. Council meetings gave up hope of regulating anything; internal committees argued over how to answer the latest imaginary or real offense. War seemed inevitable, but no one was sure *why*.
Then they got ornery, which for Gallians was a troubling thing to behold. Armed men were marched back and forth along borders. Far too often, they took practice shots. Someone invented the local variant of the molotov cocktail. Tax collectors - astonishingly, not local tax collectors, but the sort they had to sneak into foreign towns to assault - were tarred and feathered. (Their revenue was strangely not missing.) People were run up flagpoles in chairs (having been tied down first: Gallians are a thorough sort of people). Committee members were assassinated or assaulted if they were lucky. Houses and then entire town quarters were burned down.
Then they got personal: shipments of iron were interefered with. Not two days after the last 'incident', a mine shaft mysteriously collapsed, aided by a very badly - or well, depending on the point of view - placed blow. Hundreds died.
War was never officially declared. It simply happened, escalating rapidly from cattle raids to torching villages. Gallia had learned their lesson, however, and it was a surprisingly brief one. In the two years of fighting, each region settled behind its primary leader. This was an impressively short time for these people. Partly this was due to mediation; half the realms in the south immediately wanted to soothe them down. Marriages were arranged, and hastily, between the three regions' relatively new leaders, who were then crowned Kings at the insistence of their southern neighbors. (The concept behind this had a lot to do with the south, never thrilled with uncertain iron production, wanting one throat to choke.) The oldest trick in the book, it nonetheless worked. Oh, local women were mocked and toasts resulted in fistfights, but the mines - of ultimate importance - were kept open and the regions settled down to a simmering distrust.
There was one principal, and critical, difference: Gallia was no longer Gallia. The Iron Kings were three separate Kingdoms represented by Iron, Salt and Blood, with three separate if unfortunately related bloodlines. Their neighbors struck up individual treaties with all of them, seeking a balance of power and the exchange of iron for troops or troops for protection in time of war. This formed a loose balance of power. It also tended to embroil their neighbors in their periodic conflicts, creating in everyone a vast interest in peace in the Iron Kings.
They had continued in this fashion for two hundred years when Oberon came through. Never getting along well, the Kingdoms periodically flared into brief, vicious wars that settled swiftly. Memories were long, however, and grudges were held, although at least in the last century Barre needed an excuse to invade Montgard and vice versa. (This was a distinct improvement.) The constant skirmishing did tend to keep the population down, however, and all three Kingdoms retained their sense of the importance of children. At formal meals, for example, children are still served first and tolerated through any range of unlikely, natural behaviours.
The three kingdoms were all called upon for not just iron (in nearly every treaty they signed with their neighbors) but for men for the purpose of mutual defense. (If nothing else, the Iron Kings were known for stout, pernicious troops.) It had been a period of surprising peace for two decades. Twenty years before, Duke Tarraign had dealt with the last flareups of 'he shot my nephew/he burnt my palace' by being the first military force in five hundred years to force his way through all three Iron Kingdoms. He tied each King to a chair and ran him up a flagpole and threatened to keep them there until they sued for peace. This humiliated and outraged each King to such a degree that they did actually sue for peace and had kept it for twenty years. Admittedly, they were trying to determine how to deal with Tarraign, but at least they were not at open conflict.
Two of the Kings kept their word and provided troops. Montgard stripped itself with little choice to the point where it could not man the mines; its women took up the flag. Literally. They made armbands of the iron eagle and went to work in the mines, in the cities, in the fields. Montgard, despite the war that sapped its menfolk, survived and well. Barre, as well, honored its treaties and provided men. Sadly, it did not follow Montgard's example as well and, although it was able to retain enough of a minimum workforce for the mines, it suffered an extreme economic collapse despite a war economy.
Sabine, however, did not provide troops. They turned traitor on their neighbors and declared themselves neutral to all conflicts. Oberon respected that neutrality for exactly as long as he had to; came the day, he rode through them on his way to Tarraign. None of their neighbors have forgotten this; Sabine's security, if ever Oberon looks away, will last for seconds. It is privately believed that the numbers they could have provided might have helped hold Oberon off at critical moments.
Oberon looked at the situation carefully; he was familiar with the history of the Iron Kings to some degree and was less than eager to fight with fanatics. He definitely needed to target the iron production. It could not be left to chance. He tried a brief incursion into Barre and was met with the expected fierce, mildly insane response: they collapsed mines rather than allow him to take them. Sabine, however, seemed to feel differently, and so Oberon bought Sabine. After all, if he had even one of the Iron Kings, he could simply tie up the other two.
He did not phrase it that way. He offered Sabine gifts of friendship: land reclamation techniques, new smelting processes and release from existing treaties which forced them to trade iron at fixed rates. Sabine saw this as an opportunity for trade and superiority over Barre and Montgard. Ever having the long memory and seeing the advantage, Sabine signed.
Barre and Montgard were no threat after that; although some iron made it past their borders, it was largely coming out of Montgard. Barre had destroyed their two best mines and lacked manpower; they were coming out of an economic depression and the war simply sent them tumbling into another one. Montgard proved more resilient, willing to put its women to work. Oberon harried their borders and discovered that the women were willing to fight; he settled for blocking off their main trade routes coming out. By the time the war settled, the Iron Kingdoms were the Iron Duchies and in very different conditions.
Barre has never fully recovered, although it has begun the process. It had to rebuild mines, rebuild a population and, bitter and furious with its brethren, it has not accepted help. A silent bed of resistance to Oberon, it produces iron and seethes. Its people are a quiet, determined lot, working to stay above subsistence. Their houses are thatched. Their fields are often unworked. Their clothing is of the most brutally practical sort. They fight off the local wilderness much too often. It's a hard life, but they have been here before. They know they will work their way past it. But now they have a new focus for resentment: Sabine, Montgard, and Oberon.
Oberon has tried to win Barre over; he has offered them the same technology and information that he offered Sabine. Barre, unbelievably, would not accept. They said so in language that was rather unmistakable. This did not help their economic health. Oberon is still attempting to bring them round, and military intervention may become necessary. He periodically places economic pressure on them, offers to rescue them, or tries a new tactic. He is periodically told to go to hell in language that has only reluctantly grown more respectful. (It is this last that has convinced their King that they are not entirely suicidal.) They are still dreadfully short of population, having lost the majority of theirs to the war. The traveler in Barre, consequently, does not have a pleasant stay and may find himself, if he is not careful, too strongly encouraged to volunteer to work the mines. Oberon has replaced their Duke from internal families five times in his reign due to disrespect or a tendency to incite rebellion; they are currently without a Duke while Oberon awards the title to someone who has never been to the Iron Kingdoms but who will nonetheless know what to do with a bitter, stubborn people.
Montgard had a different set of problems. Their men fared better than Barre's, at least until they got home. Somewhat delayed - Oberon used them as peacekeepers in several locales - the menfolk returned home to find their wives unwilling to relinquish control of their business, homes, and fields. They could perform the work, if they wished; the wives would, thankyouverymuch, retain administrative control. The response was acrimonious and the result interesting. A war of the sexes, comical and incredulous to everyone outside Montgard, played out, meeting in marriage and in play but no where else. The women controled certain businesses and the adminsitrative and trade aspects of the mines; the men controled the engineering, the business the women don't, and a similar arrangement exists for the farming communities. The women have the money lenders, the transport industry, and they retain command of the committees that deal with economic concerns for Montgard. The men retain the goods, and the actual manufacturing and industry.
This arrangement lasted approximately ten years (and that long because they're a stubborn lot). Marriage, practicality and reality eroded at the artificial arrangements and the result is a far more equal society than might be expected in this region. Women can be found in almost any role within the society. Perversely, the folk of Montgard are proud of this. The Duke Resano, a middle aged man who chose his wife out of affection, rules along with his Duchess Justinia (named after the lady who organized the slave rebellion centuries ago). They make an effective, intelligent and (amazingly) diplomatic pair (if a prolific one: Justinia has produced no less than 14 children). Women still have a distinct presence on the financial committees; Montgard has a distressing tendencies to send them out to other duchies or baronies as representatives. This has not softened Montgard's air of pugnacious challenge by any means; it simply results in the unfortunate fact that a traveler is as likely to get decked by a drunk woman as by a drunk man. Equal opportunity brawls abound. This level playing field is not reflected in the subtext of the duchy: the women, if anything, dress much more provacatively than their counterparts of Barre or Sabine do. It is quite cold in this area; furs are prized, and lined jerkins and pants are favored. This poses no difficulty to either gender when flirting, which is something of a national pasttime.
Sabine is the Iron Duchy that thrives the most, and would do most well to watch its back. Both Barre and Montgard harbour deep resentments, not to mention everyone else. They are, hoewver, a lovely land of charming villages, flourishing farm land - all that reclamation - and considerably more wealth than their brethren. They dominate the market in terms of iron - theirs is stronger, more resilient and less costly to produce. Terribly concious of this fact, Sabine's air is one of disdain, and this does not help them at all. Their Duke Marco is a young bravo, famed for his affection for Oberon's Games, and a bit too haughty for good sense. He grew up with Oberon as King and as such does not fully appreciate the extent of the betrayal that Sabine perpetrated. Oberon therefore finds that he needs to remind Sabine of their likely destiny should he withdraw his hand of protection; Marco seems oblivious. He has not married yet. It is rumoured that his bride will be selected for him and that she will be from Barre. There are bets out on his life expectancy if that's the case, and the odds do not favour him. His is a traditional sort of people; the children are hyperprotected and the women nourish. They dress not precisely flamboyantly, but certainly with self concious style in long robes - both genders - and have a tendency to brightly paint everything from their carriages to their window shutters.