The Conquest
The barons found they had little taste for peace and many took their household knights
into the wild lands ruled by the Mersons, Erthalmen and Galts. The disciplined,
well-armoured warriors of Lyonesse proved more than a match for the armies of most
Merson and Galtic warlords. The Mersons were brave and doughty, and fought as they
had been taught by the Dwarfs in resilient formations on foot but they had no answer
to the swiftness of the mounted knights. The Galtic poet-kings and warrior-druids
had a mastery of scythed chariots and many reckless champions of the sword and spear,
but their ill-disciplined charges were halted by the Lyonesse archers and repelled
by the footmen. Many tribes had no choice but to swear fealty to the Lyonesse Barons.
The Mersons were perhaps the most favoured servants; their culture was not dissimilar,
and their serfs merely changed masters, and so were adopted most easily. Within
a few generations the Merson kingdoms were a distant memory, The Galts largely favoured
their own laws and customs, and those who could slipped away into the barren edges
of the kingdom to live with the old gods they adored.
The savage Erthalmen, however, fought to the bitter end. The Erthalmen are dimly
remembered now; they seem to have been a human tribe, but entirely uncivilised and
without language. They neither farmed nor had any crafts recognised by the Lyonesse,
yet the horde that came forth to fight the barons was vast and accompanied by monstrous
beings of several descriptions; many-headed giants, horse-sized hounds, and " a
thing that was like an ox, that had on it armour like a beetle". An Erthalman was
said to stand shorter than a man of Lyonesse, yet their strength was seemingly much
greater and their chief warriors were apparently clad head-to-toe in stony plates.
It appears likely that some of these details were exaggerated. This would be in
character for the chroniclers of Lyonesse. However, there is little doubt that the
Erthalmen presented a serious threat to the barons. The Erthalman chief known to
the Galts as Sorrvhed Keul’tharn destroyed the army of Lord Edren the Huntsman at
the bloody battle of the Weeping Hill. There were no survivors to tell how this
battle was won, but Edren's lieutenant, Sir Aedrew Arrowhand, came across the scene
of devastation two days later; in a letter he wrote to the king he described how
Edren's knights were found sunk to the shoulder in the soil, and how he found Edren's
head on the summit of the hill, impaled upon his own lance. In the following summer,
at the Battle of the Four Horns, Sir Aedrew Arrowhand, now elevated as the king's
constable, met Sorrvhed Keul'tharn in battle and defeated him soundly. The last
recorded reference to the Erthalman comes from the autumn of that year, at the battle
of the Nine Mile Strand, where Arrowhand's bard tells us that "their stone-wheeled
chariots foundered, and the Erthal chiefs were washed out to sea forevermore".
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