The History of Rombune
The upheaval of the great Cataclysm made vast alterations in the western coast of ancient Minaria.  Formerly, an arm of the continent called Umiak extended out into the Westward Sea.  Into this pleasant subtropical region crowded many of the empire's Lloroi citizens.  It was here that the Emperor held court in the Imperial capital of Niiawee.  To Niiawee came petitioners from every corner of the realm, even faraway Neuth and Vultelina.  To Niiawee came also ambassadors and visiting kings from distant Reiken and Girion.

Alas, by earthquake and inundation Niiawee overnight perished beneath the waters.  When the torn earth quieted, only three fragments of Umiak remained above the waves ?? islands known today as the Golkus, Thores and the Isle of Fright.  The rest of it vanished into a newly created sea, one whose name will forever remind the world of the disaster that befell Umiak ?? the Sea of Drowning Men.

Great homeless mobs of Lloroi survived upon these islands, but the citified refugees adjusted poorly to a scavenger's existence; starvation reigned everywhere and many a wretch sank to cannibalism during those first terrible months.  But as if the gods demanded even more death, a few years after the Cataclysm the Punishing Star struck the desert inland.  The earthquake, the "fiery wind," and the tidal wave that followed swept away all but the high mountains of Golkus and Thores, and purged the Westward Islands clear of life.  As if this was not enough, the following freezing winters under the sunless "Brown Sky" reduced the island population to only a few hundred of the strongest and most resourceful.

Alas, the survivors preserved their lives only; culture and all but the vaguest myths about their Imperial past were lost with the first new generation.  Memory of lost glory held no meaning in the lives of hand-to-mouth scavengers.  Little more can be said of these impoverished people and their descendants.  Contemporary written records ?? mainly those of the city of Khuzdul ?? mention the tribesmen only in the context of an occasional raid on the islands for slaves.

What is now the city of Parros came to be only two centuries after the Cataclysm.  A tribe of vagabonds, driven from the hunting grounds of the north by fiercer interlopers, crossed the desert and found a sweet?flowing spring rushing out of the hills overlooking the a great bay.  The newcomers built a wattle and daub village and at first plied the sea for food, gradually taking to irrigated agriculture.  Soon they found that they were producing more than what local demand required.  As it happened, salt fish came to be a commodity greatly desired by the more prosperous trading cities of the interior, and developing commerce contributed to the rapid growth of Parros, and also of Zefnar, a town under similar circumstances farther north.  Eventually the Parrosians discovered the great meteoric iron deposits left by the impact of the Punishing Star and Parrosian steel became far-famed.

By this time, some 300 years after the Cataclysm, the outlying barbarian population had grown large enough to constitute a threat to Parros.  In reply, the city-dwellers fortified the islands at the head of the bay as refuges for times of war.  These forts formed the nucleus of island communities; shops and residences were constructed beside them.  The Parrosans used the channels between the islands as watery avenues plied by long, graceful canoes called devos.  Tribesmen who visited the city assumed that it had originally been above water and had submerged??from which belief comes Parros' popular name, "The Sunken City."

Like its neighbors, the Trade Cities of the South Plains, Parros began with a simple civil democracy that evolved into a monarchy as internal complexity and outside menace increased.  Concurrently, the life of its people steadily improved, as a large fishing fleet augmented agriculture.  These net?boats were the precursors of the Parrosan merchant marine.  Trade with other peoples of the coast??including Zefnar to the north ??proved more profitable than fishing.  When the seventh century after the Cataclysm had dawned, the classes of Parros were three??the nobles, the peasants and the merchants.  This last class expanded in direct proportion to Parros' economic growth; its escalating demands for a voice in the government caused sharp conflict with the nobility.

The rivalry exploded in the Sigigar's Day Riot, which allied the merchants with the peasants.  King Voric had to recognize the rights of propertied men and broke up the noble estates into many peasant freeholdings.  When the House of Voric died out in the next century, the kingship was abolished as an unnecessary expense on the taxpayers.

Throughout the seventh and eighth centuries, Parros prospered materially and culturally.  Its daring seafarers forged markets a thousand miles up the coasts of Minaria and Girion.  In the log book of Hilo Fudo, captain of the Grey Auk, the islands of the Golkus and Thores are mentioned for the first time in the year 609, but it is hard to believe they were unknown previously.

The Parrosians named the larger of the two islands after inhabitants they called "the Pale Ones" (Gol?kous in their tongue); the lesser took the name of the slave?raider Misha Thores.  So rapacious were Thores and other slavers that in just a few generations their mass kidnapping left the islands almost uninhabited.  The few Golkus survivors retreated into the volcanic hills, shunning the foreigners who continued to put in on their coasts.

The sailors who now visited the Golkus were not merchants, but had a different trade.  The many coves and rugged interior of the island were ideal shelter for pirates.  From lofty lookouts and well hidden strongholds the sea?robbers began forays against Minaria's expanding marine commerce.  As the ninth century came on, pirates brought chaos to every coast of the Sea of Drowning Men.

Interestingly, no maritime power made a move to nip this menace in the bud.  The first piratical bases provided black markets for cheap, stolen merchandise.  While Minarian traders collaborated with the pirates, many individuals flocked to join their companies??escaped slaves, common criminals, unemployed sailors, dispossessed yeomen.

The latter came in swelling numbers throughout the eighth century, as the plutocrats of Zefnar and Parros cajoled or coerced many small freeholders into selling their farms.  Thereafter, land that had supported many hard?working families was turned into vineyards or sheep pastures.  The former yeomen became demoralized, unemployed hangers?on, supported by a government dole.  Unfit for military service, mercenaries filled their places in city armies.

Superficially, Parros prospered??but a tangible menace grew off its coasts.  By the end of the eighth century, the coves of the Golkus sheltered enough ships and hard?bitten sea fighters to form whole fleets, commanded by elected admirals.  Where once pirate captains competed openly and violently, now most belonged to a few large piratical brotherhoods ("rombunes," in Minarian slang).  The rombunes had efficient intelligence systems, whereby pirates would fraternize with merchant crewmen in the coastal towns, discover their destinations and cargos, and relay the information back to the Golkus.  Harbor records of Parros and Zefnar reveal the appalling losses shippers sustained.  It was common for a continental trader to visit the black markets of the Golkus and find himself bidding on looted merchandise bearing his own shipping company's name.

Severe though sea robbery was, it was only a sideline to the pirates' main occupation of slave?running.  As if in retribution for the callous way the sea powers had preyed upon the islands in earlier times, the new islanders scoured the coasts for prisoners.  Many towns paid out tribute to ward them off; some were forced to accept agreements by which pirate vessels could outfit and sell merchandise in their harbors.  By the latter ninth century, the Golkus was the main source of chattel for the slave?hungry Trade Cities of the South Plains.

And still the danger increased.  The shipwrights of Mivior had developed swift, deep?water craft called lamash vessels.  As numbers of these ships fell into the hands of the pirates, the pace of their depredations was stepped up, and near panic descended on the Minarian sea powers.  In the records of his temple the high priest of the Parrosian god Ashikag laments: "Pirates came into our city by night and abducted more than three hundred young maids, women and other innocents, s/ave and free.  Before our garrison could deal them their punishment, they cut loose the boats in our harbor to prevent pursuit and escaped with all their captives and booty.  Neither was the freedom of the prisoners secured until the council of the city handed over to the pillagers a vast ransom of silver."

Even now Parros did not dispatch a fleet against the pirates; troubles on the Barbarian Frontier were even more pressing.  The Wisnyos, horse nomads led by a chieftain called Simir Raviev, were conquering the south, sending defeated tribes fleeing north to Parros' borders.  The city council of Parros, desperate for manpower, hired some of these tribesmen to fend off other, wilder bands.  Alas one large group they employed took bribes from Simir Raviev.  As the Wisnyos approached the city, these treacherous hirelings seized the city's key fortresses and its leaders.  For eight days Parros was given over to debauchery and looting; afterwards, without pausing to organize his conquest, Simir Raviev extended his campaign north.

The Wisnyo conquest had a profound effect on the pirates' slave trade.  With an empire at their feet, the nomads had no need for outside slave dealers.  Further, their ignorance and extortions ruined the merchant marines of Parros and Zefnar, leaving only the depressed but well guarded ships of Mivior to prey upon.  The Miviorans reacted with deadly vengeance, raiding the pirate bases, scuttling their ships and burning their villages.  The pirates they caught in the process were hanged.

The pirates had not recovered from the Mivioran raids before the invasion of "the abominations of the land and the horrors of the air" ruined Mivior and thus the last important shipping on the Sea of Drowning Men.  Deprived of the incentive to go to sea, the former pirates settled down to a life of subsistence farming and fishing.  In the eleventh century, the invasions over, Parros and Zefnar recovered somewhat, but the tyrants who took power were too preoccupied by intrigue and local warfare to develop their sea trade to its pre?Wisnyo levels.  The piratical response of the Golkus was likewise a pale shadow of the past.

But the vital energies of these pirates' sons could not be indefinitely repressed.  Many islanders remembered the golden days of the "rombunes" and longed to see unity among the scattered villages.  The eleventh century logbook of the village of Daiton's Moor says: "Those who wished the Golkus to have one leader looked to the captain Marko Steelknife of Quaytown.  Steelknife believed that unity was within reach of the island, for unlike the continental states, the boundaries of the Golkus were clearly defined and not coveted by neighbors or barbarians.  To advance his plan, he formed a brotherhood which he called 'The Rombune' and built a strong fortress."

This fort, built in 1020, was named Port Leeward, but foreigners called it after the island??"the Golkus." Subsequently, Steelknife extended the power of his Rombune by a series of small wars, power plays and intrigues.  By the time Steelknife's physical powers started to yield to age, the principal leaders of the Golkus had assembled at Port Leeward to draw a charter for united government.

The document showed the pirates' natural distrust of authority.  The islanders' system borrowed many elements from old piratical articles??including a division of the chief executive's office into two parts.  A king managed foreign relations and warfare, while the otzlauf, a kind of tribune, administered law and domestic policy.  These offices corresponded to the captain and the boatswain of a pirate ship??one of Minaria's most democratic institutions.

In 1052, Steelknife assumed the kingship, but died in his residence less than one year later.  The new state which his election brought into being was officially recognized as Rombune.

The nation leapt into vigorous life.  Mivior was not fully recovered from the devastations of a century earlier.  Zefnar and Parros had taken to raiding Mivior's coasts for plunder and slaves; Rombune struck an accord with its neighbors and joined in the raping.  Not until the climactic fleet engagement of Marooner's Island in 1098 did Mivior manage to reassert its naval power and drive the raiders from its coasts.

The end of the Mivioran war coincided with a major shift in Rombunese policy.  The government had for a long time closed its eyes to the nation's traditional trade, piracy, but now that the reavers could not be employed against Mivior, their lawless spirit led to outlawry along Rombune's shores.  Furthermore, nationhood had brought a need for respectability, and the pirates were becoming an embarrassment.  As more and more restrictions were placed upon Rombune's pirate captains, the freebooters gradually changed their bases of operation to Thores and the Westward Islands.  Finally, by edict of King Harus Tarpaulin, piracy was forbidden; raiding was to be permitted only against states at war with Rombune, and then only if the captains carried legal letters of marque.

When the captains of Thores resisted the new law, Harus dispatched his marines to the island, seized it and made it a major naval base.  The pirates who would not live under the new order joined mercenary fleets or moved to the Westward Islands.

The filibusters of the Westward Island thrived; by the middle of the twelfth century their attacks had driven most of Zefnar's and Parros' shipping off the seas.  Finally, the desperate tyrant of Parros, Arin, persuaded the Black Knight to take charge of his squadrons.  Within a few years the mercenary champion had captured and hanged thousands of filibusters, thereby frightening the rest out of the Sea of Drowning Men.

Rombune did not oppose piracy on moral grounds; piracy that served the government's ends was highly desirable.  After conniving at their crimes for years, the Rombunese chose this moment of filibuster weakness to bring a fleet to the Westward Islands and set up a number of forts.  Hereafter, the pirates would be the tool of Rombunese policy.

But it did not work out that way.  Some captains cooperated for a while, but the others plotted to regain their old independence.  Before long, in the year 1153, a young filibuster captain named Garn the Cutlass seized the Rombunese fort of Seawood.  The escapade touched off a long rebellion in the isles, and though Rombune poured men, ships and treasure into island conflict, the angry pirates kept victory out of its grasp.

But King Harus maintained his aggressive stance on other fronts, too.  Afgaar, to the south, was undergoing distracting difficulties at this time and so Harus chose to push the claims of Rombune flush to its northern border.  Harus ordered a strong fortress be built and this he named Sarda, after his flag ship.  But after the king's death it generally became known as Fort Harus.

Standing like a dagger poised at Afgaar's heart, Moroj, its major port, and its throat ?? Zamesh, its capital ?? Ft.  Harus' existence has been a source of antagonism between the two kingdoms since Harus' day.  Further, Rombune's demand to be the sole carrier of trade goods between Afgaar and Minaria at high custom duties has kept the relations between the two kingdoms tense.  The heavy fortifications and large garrison of Ft.  Harus ties down Rombuni resources better spent elsewhere.

The war with the Westward Islands continued into the reign of Harus son, Nectano Brownstockings.  At last public opinion turned against the war and the king, refusing to make peace, he was forced to abdicate when the peace faction found enough votes to elect one of their own, Janup Goodcargo, to his place.

King Janup ruled for twenty?six years.  During this time Parros and Zefnar were suffering severely from the trade war which followed the resurgence of Mivior.  A series of military reverses all but eliminated these city?states from the sea lanes.  In their decline they looked for support from Rombune, which deigned to grant it ?? at a cost.  The acquiring of client status greatly enhanced the prestige of the Rombunese king.  Under Janup, too, Rombune reasserted itself militarily, keeping the pirates at bay and safeguarding the southern trade from Mivioran encroachment.  At home, the alliance of factional interests that Janup welded together was strong enough to ensure the election of his son upon his death, and of his grandson after that.

The grandson, Modeus Goodcargo, enjoyed a reign so tranquil that little is recorded of it.  The succession of kings of the House of Goodcargo had proven so fortunate for Rombune that after Modeus' death the captains of Rombune took the remarkable step of electing his only child, his daughter Daring, to the throne.

Early in Daring's reign, Zefnar and Parros sent out a call for help against the new kingdom of Shucassam.  Daring dispatched her marines to their aid, and several years of sporadic warfare with Shucassam followed.  In the course of the war, Daring met and fell in love with Galiz Tabir, the tyrant of Parros.  The crafty young man saw that a royal marriage was the best way out of his troubles; he accordingly wooed and won the queen's hand.  Once installed as prince consort, he persuaded the Rombunese to sacrifice Zefnar to Shucassam to buy a long?term peace for Parros ?? which would become at first a formal protectorate of Rombune, and in time a integral part of the kingdom.  The war?weary Shucassamites decided to strike the bargain and gained a permanent port.

Parros accepted its lost of independence without much lamentation as it had been a mere formality for a long while.  It rebuilt its economy and even reopened the meteoric iron mines that had not been worked to their fullest potential since the Wisnyo conquest.  The Parrosan fleet, for a long time in deep decay, sprang to life again with Rombune's support, and shared in that kingdom's far?flung markets.

While protecting Parros from barbarians, Afgaarans, and Shucassamites, Rombune has made great material progress in the last century.  Its shipbuilding yards rival Mivior's in the number of merchant vessels produced, primarily because of the careful replanting of timber which the city relied upon for its industry.  The wise kings of the House of Goodcargo?Tabir are, in a large measure responsible for the kingdom's continuing prosperity.  What they have done for their country has been rewarded by Rombune's electors.  To date, the throne has not left the family of Janup Goodcargo.

If the past is the guidepost to the future, it is possible that the present monarch, Redgrave I, will see the rivalry between Mivior and Rombune come to a head.  If it does, at issue will be a vast trading empire and the command of the coasts and seas of Minaria for the next century.


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