Angst

Minoc, 51st October 352 Stratics Reckoning
The Fiskdotters have no bards to recount our story. I therefore take it on myself, as Arch-Matriarch, to set down these notes as a record of our trials and achievements.

The Fiskdotters are the saviours of the Norse peoples. It is thanks to the ships of my foremothers that the Flight Families escaped the inferno that engulfed the Norse Isles. Without the Fiskdotters there would have been no survivors to settle in Minoc.

Just a few years ago I obtained a copy of The Book of Leafsta, made, I understand, from a copy of one lodged in the Windenboug Library. There is one bare mention of my family name therein, but no acknowledgement of the critical role we played in saving many worthless skins. One ship only, it is falsely claimed, arrived safely to Minoc, whereas we know that three ships made safe anchorage. The Frettings have shamefully played down the role of the Fiskdotters. The book is a travesty.

Aye, the Fiskdotters saved the Frettings and the other Flight Families and brought them to Minoc. No thanks did we get. Worse, it proved all for nought. At the last Minoc Norsefolk Council ever held, that of 267 SR, - before the Frettings led a host of Flight familes on their lemming trek west – my great-great-grandmother argued vehemently against that foolhardy venture, trying in vain to persuade the Council that we were too small a community to split and predicting the very disaster of extinction that later struck. But Anvel listened not, and so drunk on success were the Frettings with their brief period of petty prominence in – of all things - gravemarker fretwork (!) that they closed their ears to all reason.

So it was that there was a kin-sundering, with some from each of the Flight Families joining the lemming trek. Wife against husband, parent against child, sibling against sibling, no family was unaffected. And because so few were left in Minoc, neither the original colony nor the departing settlers were able to survive. Dolts, Fools! Idiots!

Of this there is no mention in the infamous Book of Leafsta. The lemming trek is implicitly presented as unanimously agreed, all trace of dispute and division is omitted. And it is acclaimed as an act of heroic pioneering, and not the bitterly contested and suicidal kin-sundering that it really was. We, the Fiskdotters, are now the only surviving kin from the Flight Families, fighting for our survival as a community, thanks to our social organisation. But our survival was long in question, weakened as we were by the lemming trek. Here, then, I record a brief description and history of the Fiskdotters, the true survivors of the Leafsta lunacy.

As The Book of Leafsta fails totally to record anything of our kin and its pivotal importance in the history of the Flight Families I here record briefly our journey to safe harbour in Minoc. Our verbal traditions recount that the three ships, dangerously overloaded with refugees, were being driven by northerly gales onto the rocky shores that lie due north of Minoc. This forbidding coast comprises towering cliffs that are unscalable: cliffs that rise to a great height to the permenant snowfields and glaciers of the mountains behind them. Only great seafaring skill and a modicum of luck enabled our foremothers to make the large sheltered bay to its west of those cliffs: a bay that lies between those cliffs and the mountains of Wrong. And so the battered fleet made the shelter of The Bay of Lost Hope, at the head of which lies the shanty-town of Minoc. It anchored off-shore, there being no docks or harbour in that forsaken frontier mining town.

The Fiskdotters were – and still are - differently organised from the patriarchal crafting families of the Norse Isles. Women hold the power among my kin. Mankind are kept to menial tasks that demand brawn but little intelligence and no responsibility. The highest and most respected position that a man can rise to in our society is that of tillerman, taking his orders directly from the ship’s mistress.

Tillermen are also the men from among whom the ship mistresses choose their mates, young and fit men with good breeding potential. Her sons become the next generation of tillermen and once weaned from the breast are reared and trained by their father. Most mistresses keep their tillerman long enough to train up a son or two - and the mistress’ sons never take over as tillerman on a Fiskdotter ship. Instead they are sent out in the world to earn their way on one of the many ships run by other seafarers. This way in-breeding is prevented and always fresh manhood from outside is available to the Mistresses.

Different it is with the daughters, who are reared and trained by the ship’s mistress to become the next generation of ship mistresses. Each daughter works on her mother’s ship for a share of the profits: mending nets, skinning, boning, salting and drying the catch, learning the skills of sailing and maintaining the ship, and selling catch in town until she can afford a ship of her own and has learned enough to run one.

It has been this social organisation that has kept our community intact: mating with obedient men of a particular kind - tillermen who have a connection to the sea but who are rootless to any community or town. A tillerman who fails to produce daughters is often dismissed and a replacement found. Mistresses can ill-afford to go on producing sons when daughters are needed to continue the line.

Each head of family (matriarch) has a seat at the family consultations – the Matriarch Council is chaired by the Arch-Matriarch. This is an hereditary title, though in extreme need an incompetent or otherwise negligent or criminal an Arch-Matriarch can have her title revoked and conferred on another matriarch by a majority vote by the council, a thing that has happened but once. The Arch-Matriarch also used to represented Fiskdotter interests at the Minoc Norsefolk’s Council, though having little influence in its predominantly mining and smithing matters. She also liaises with other interests - with the town rulers, merchants and guildmasters, and the sea-gypsies that are called the Larkin.

Minoc was not the place we would have chosen to settle in, but it has suited us well, being primarily a mining town and so looking inland rather than to sea. Being at the head of a deep-set north-facing bay mitigates its exposure to westerly storms, while the mountains and sea cliffs to the north protect the town from the icy northerly gales. So we settled in Minoc and began to fish the waters of the Bay of Lost Hope, that we call Minoc Bay. We provided fish and other sea foods to the taverns and inns of Minoc and to the ever-hungry mining camps.

With the Frettings’ lemming trek to the Deep Forest, those crafting Flight Families left in Minoc lost coherence as a community, inter-married extensively and in but two generations disappeared as an identifiable immigrant culture, forgetting their origins, culture and language. Only we, the Fiskdotters, with our unique Matriarchal organisation and our fleet that kept us apart from the townsfolk, survived by turning even more decisively to the sea. We have kept intact the traditions of the Flight families, though holding ourselves aloof from the Minoc crafting patriarchies.

We later also began to explore and map the tortuously indented coasts, a huge task that we have so far completed east to Vesper and west to Deepwater. Each summer during the 330s and 340s the whole fleet was away.

One major fleet expedition has also explored north during the summer of 351 in yet another attempt to locate the Norse Isles in the hope of reclaiming them and returning home permanently. But without success: we found but an extensive area of skerries and treacherous shallows. Yet the expedition was not entirely in vain as we also found fishing grounds richer than any we had come across earlier, with huge shoals of herring and abundant stockfish.

Each autumn of these explorations we brought back large catches of salted herring and dried stockfish to sell. It was on returning from one of these in the early 340s that we heard news from our Minoc buyers of a sole survivor from the Deep Forest, an old man, who lay ill in the infirmary and who sought refugees from the Fretting settlement. It seemed it had met with some disaster, as described in The Book of Leafsta. More we did not enquire. None in Minoc lived who remembered our common origins with the Norse colony or the lemming trek of two generations earlier, and we did not remind them.

It was in the autumn of 351 when the fleet returned from the fruitless search for the Norse Isles that we learned of the visit to Minoc that summer of a Fretting, none other than the author of the infamous Book of Leafsta who is herself daughter of a Fiskdotter lemming. It seems that she also sought news from the Deep Forest, before leaving for Vesper to catch up with the sole refugee. It seemed she was only interested in finding either Deep Forest refugees or their Minoc crafting kin, so she enquired not after the Fiskdotters – her own close kin! Good riddance. May those who survived the lemming trek rot!

We have survived and even prospered, the number of matriarch ships has almost recovered to the level at the time of the lemming trek. We have mapped the nearby coasts, found rich new fishing grounds and are soon ready for our next project, to expand our trade. Much remains to be done. The Fiskdotters are at last about to enter a time of prosperity and growth.

Arch-Matriarch Yedda Fiskdotter