Ugbarra Marsh

Ugbarra Marsh, which means "the giant-marsh" in the Zengaran Language tongue, is a vast tract of reed-fen and black silt on the northern coast of Gallorea, where the Black River unravels into a thousand channels and drowns at last in the Ygarlsed Sea. It spreads across the low country just north of Baal-Istra, the Zengaran capital, and by the reckoning of that city it is older than the river, older than the throne, and older than men. For the Zengarans hold that the giants named it, in the age when they still waded it dry-shod.

Name

Zengaran is a tongue said to have descended from the speech of giants, and Ugbarra is one of its oldest words: not a name men invented for the marsh, but one they inherited along with the language. In the giant-telling the fen was a shallow thing, a wet place a giant might cross in a few strides with the water no higher than the knee. It is only to the small folk who came after that Ugbarra became a drowning country, its channels bottomless, its reeds a wall, its maze uncrossable. The marsh did not rise; the world that walked it merely shrank. To name the place the giant-marsh is thus to admit, every time it is spoken, that greater things than men once held this coast.

Geography

The marsh is a broad, flat delta of black silt and standing water, laced by countless slow channels that shift their courses from season to season, so that no chart of it stays true for long. Reeds grow there tall as ship's masts, dense enough to swallow a boat's length off, and the water runs sweet at the river's side and bitter toward the sea, where the Ygarlsed tides push salt back up into the fen. It is a rich country and a deadly one: thick with fish, eel, and waterfowl, and just as thick with fever, biting fly, and the quiet danger of losing the way among reeds that all look alike.

The Black River, which the Zengarans call the Khalgann, comes down out of the Black Mountains far to the south, past Velanos, and reaches the coast as a single great silt-black flood before it comes apart, dividing and dividing again until it is less a river than a wide wet labyrinth breathing in and out with the sea. It is the river’s black burden of mountain-silt, laid down here at its mouth over uncounted ages, that gives Ugbarra its bottomless floor. Where exactly the marsh ends and the Ygarlsed Sea begins, no one can say to within a league, and the line moves with every tide.

The Giant's Steps

Running through the heart of Ugbarra is the one sure road across it: a line of colossal stones, each the size of a house, set at intervals through the deepest fen. The Zengarans call them the Giant's Steps and hold that the giants laid them as a causeway in the elder days, stepping-stones spaced for a stride no living thing can match. To the small folk they are not a path but a series of islands, and crossing the marsh by them means punting or wading the long gaps between, from one vast stone to the next, through water that hides its floor.

Many of the Steps have sunk or tilted with the ages, and a few are gone altogether, leaving killing gaps where a crossing that was safe in a grandfather's day now drowns the unwary. The reed-folk keep the count of them as sacred knowledge, and a guide who knows the true order of the Steps is worth more than his weight in silver to any who must cross.

The Reed-folk

Ugbarra is peopled, after a fashion, by the Eshkin, the reed-folk of Zengara: a marsh-dwelling people who raise their villages on floating islands of woven reed and move by narrow punt through channels no outsider could follow. They harvest reed and fish and fowl, render the black silt into fuel, and guide the desperate across the Giant's Steps for a price. Baal-Istra regards them as half-wild and indispensable in equal measure, and leaves them largely to themselves, for the marsh keeps its own better than any law of the city could.

Baal-Istra and the Marsh

The capital stands on the firm ground at the marsh's southern edge, where the last solid earth meets the first of the reeds. Ugbarra is at once the city's larder, its highway to the sea, and its shield: no army can cross the fen without the reed-folk's leave, and more than one invader has been swallowed whole in the attempt, led astray among channels that close behind them like a door. The fever that rises off the marsh in the hot season is the price Baal-Istra pays for that protection, and the city has paid it for as long as it has stood.

Legends

• That on certain still nights the giants can be heard again in the deep marsh: a slow, world-heavy tread, and the sound of great legs parting water, though nothing is ever seen.
• That the largest of the sunken Steps is no stone at all, but a giant who lay down to sleep in the marsh in the elder days and never rose, and that the reeds grow thickest where he dreams.
• That the marsh remembers every stride ever taken across it, and will not let a crossing be forgotten: those who die among the reeds are said to walk the Steps still, counting the stones forever.

This is a thumbnail description and is scheduled for expansion at a later date.

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