The Numberless Wars

“Ask the forest who began the war, and it will name the axe. Ask the axe, and it will name the tree standing in its way.” — old Gholibin saying

The Numberless Wars were a long series of ancient conflicts between the Seylandri of Tar Aerchel and the Gholibin. They occurred during the Long Summer, long before the Rhone became a significant presence in the recorded history of the Sigil Lands.

No reliable chronology of the wars survives. Even their familiar name comes from Seylandri tradition and reflects the seemingly inexhaustible hosts their ancestors remembered facing. Gholibin memory preserves the same age differently.

Modern histories can establish that the conflicts occurred. They can identify some places, battles and consequences. Beyond that, certainty becomes increasingly difficult.

Two Memories of the War

The Seylandri possessed writing, long memories and a civilization capable of preserving knowledge in living things. The Gholibin developed traditions in which memory could be preserved and transmitted through song.

Neither produced an impartial record.

Seylandri accounts describe repeated wars against vast Gholibin hosts pressing against Tar Aerchel. Their chronicles remember settlements threatened, forests invaded and generations called upon to defend lands cultivated by their ancestors.

Gholibin traditions remember lands from which their people were driven, paths closed to them and forests spreading into country through which they had once hunted, travelled and lived. Their songs preserve battles, migrations, defeats and victories that sometimes have no recognizable counterpart in Seylandri histories.

The two traditions occasionally agree upon an event while disagreeing almost completely about what it meant.

Neither is necessarily lying.

The Growing Forest

When the Seylandri first came to Tar Aerchel, they found extensive forests already growing there. Over thousands of years they encouraged those forests outward through Craft, joining woodlands, cultivating new growth and gradually extending the country they inhabited.

To the Seylandri this was not conquest in the later Rhone sense. Forest and settlement were not opposites, and extending Tar Aerchel meant extending the living country of which they considered themselves a part.

Other peoples did not necessarily see it that way.

The Gholibin occupied and travelled through lands beyond the early Seylandri forests. Hunting grounds, migration routes, caves, water sources and places remembered in Gholibin tradition could become part of an expanding Tar Aerchel without a Seylandri army ever marching across them.

Whether this expansion caused the Numberless Wars cannot now be established. It almost certainly contributed to the conditions in which they were fought.

War Without Number

There was no single Numberless War.

The surviving traditions describe periods of violence separated by truces, withdrawals and generations in which open conflict appears to have diminished or disappeared. Later Seylandri historians gathered these struggles beneath one name because they involved the same peoples and because the oldest accounts were already difficult to arrange into a dependable chronology.

Some wars may have begun as local disputes and expanded. Others appear to have involved large movements of Gholibin and coordinated Seylandri resistance. Alliances changed, old grievances accumulated, and events remembered as causes in one tradition appear as retaliation in another.

The scale could be terrible.

Seylandri memory dwells upon the apparent multitude of the enemy. Gholibin tradition remembers the persistence of a foe whose forests and settlements seemed always capable of growing back into contested country. Each people consequently remembered something frighteningly inexhaustible about the other.

The wars helped create the Seylandri image of the Gholibin as the Numberless Horde.

The Gholibin did not forget being given the name.

Songs and Memory

The Numberless Wars occupy an important place in the development of Gholibin memory traditions.

Gholibin music was never solely historical. Instruments, rhythm and song accompanied work, travel, celebration and war. Over generations, however, songs increasingly became a means of carrying information that could survive the death of the individual who possessed it.

Names could be fitted to melody. Routes could be remembered through repeated verses. Warnings, battle instructions and accounts of past mistakes could be carried by people who possessed no written archive.

The wars did not create Gholibin music, but they gave memory-song a terrible practical value.

A written archive can burn. A singer can flee.

Much of what the Gholibin know of the Numberless Wars survived because somebody remembered the song.

The Dragha

The Dragha also appear in traditions concerning the Numberless Wars.

At times they fought beside the Gholibin against the Seylandri. Exactly what those alliances meant is uncertain. Later events make it tempting to read the Numberless Wars merely as an early chapter of the hostility between Dragha and Seylandri that eventually culminated in the Great Wrath, but the surviving evidence does not support so simple a history.

The peoples of the ancient world had their own interests, grievances and alliances. Friendship in one generation did not guarantee friendship in another, and a common enemy did not make two peoples natural allies forever.

What is certain is that the Seylandri and Dragha knew one another as enemies long before the War of Leaf and Scale.

After the Wars

The Numberless Wars eventually ceased without either the Seylandri or Gholibin destroying the other.

Tar Aerchel survived and continued to grow. The Gholibin survived beyond and among its borders, carrying memories of the conflicts into later generations. Trade, encounters and periods of peace followed warfare, but neither people entirely forgot what had happened.

For the Seylandri, the wars became one of the great struggles of the Long Summer.

For the Gholibin, they became part of something deeper.

The philosophy later called Skûr did not arise from a single battle or defeat. It developed through long experience with catastrophe, displacement and survival, of which the Numberless Wars formed an important part. The world could take a homeland, a victory, a friend or an entire generation. Nothing promised that courage would be rewarded or that justice would prevail.

What remained was the necessity of continuing anyway.

What Can Be Known

Rhone scholars have repeatedly attempted to construct a definitive history of the Numberless Wars.

They have not succeeded.

Ancient Seylandri texts preserve material unavailable anywhere else, but they describe the wars from one side. Gholibin memory-songs preserve traditions absent from Seylandri sources, but songs change in transmission and do not arrange themselves conveniently by date. Place-names have vanished. Landscapes have changed. Tar Aerchel itself was later devastated in the Great Wrath, destroying much of the evidence upon which any reconstruction might have depended.

Even the people who fought the wars understood them through inherited grievances older than themselves.

The safest conclusion is therefore also the least satisfying.

The Seylandri believed they were defending their home.

The Gholibin believed they were defending theirs.

Both may have been right.

Sigil:Numberless Wars