In the far north, there is a two-kilometer high ice cliff. A river of melt water flows from the cliff through the tundra past Bodin Miyatovitch's hunting lodge. Further south, the Lyubisha River, also melt water, flows through taiga and has cut through the northern wall of the Kazan into the Dubina Dolyine province where Kossara's father is both voivode and nachalnik.
The Lyubisha flows into Lake Stoyan where the planetary capital, Zorkagrad, is located at the center of the Kazan. The Elena river flows east out of Lake Stoyan and enters the Black Ocean on the Obala, the east coast of the Rodna continent, where most of the zmayi live.
There may be a few more details to round up.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the seat of the Miyatovich Gospodars (I don't recall what the title means, prince or governor?) is the Zamok, altho by then it was far more than a simple military installation. And there's a parliament building where the three houses of the legislative assembly meets. And a church named after St. Clement. And much else is to be found in Zorkagrad!
Ad astra! Sean
It's an ingenious exercise in worldbuilding, which gets around a problem: planets are -big-.
There's a hilarious scene in one episode of the "Stargate" TV series, where the characters come through the stargate into a chamber in a glacier, an climb out through a crevasse onto a plain of ice with a blizzard howling around them.
One of them exclaims: "It's an ice-world!"
They turn out to be 20 miles from McMurdo Station in Antarctica...
Tho' in fairness I should also point out that the Earth has frozen from pole to equator at least once, and that for most of the history of life on the planet Earth was much warmer than it is now, with snow and ice only present on polar mountains in the winter.
Sean,
We are not given a translation of "Gospodar."
Mr Stirling,
Dennitza, Hermes, Avalon and Merseia seem real.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
One reason I wondered is because we see Yasmini addressing another character in THE PESHAWAR LANCERS as "Gospodin." Russian and Serbo/Croat are different but related languages. "Gospodar" and "gospodin" are obviously related words.
I would include Aeneas, Nike, and the tragic Gywdion to your list of planets that seems very real.
Ad astra! Sean
In Russian, "Gospodin" means the equivalent of "Mr." or "Herr", and like them is derived from a word which originally mean "master".
In Serbian and Croation, "Gospodar" retains the earlier Proto-Slavic meaning, and means "master, lord", although it can also mean "master of the household" in come contexts.
I'm assuming the Dennitzans are basically descended from Serbs, which internal clues (eg., their religious self-designation) indicate. Basically Serbs and Croats are by origin the same group, with one becoming Catholic and aligned to the north and west, and the Serbs being Orothodox and aligned south and east.
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