The Obala

The Obala is the east coast of the Rodna continent on the colonized planet, Dennitza. Nanteiwon is a fishing village where ychan families live in long, wide houses of tarred black timber, brightly painted ancestral symbols carved on supporting pillars, built to withstand hurricanes. Behind are cultivated fields and the Kazan ringwall.

Males wear brightly colored tunics with knuckleduster knives at their belts. The house of Ywod, Hand of the Vach Anochrin and steadcaptain of Nanteiwon, contains the frescoed mootroom. When Ywod and two visitors address a meeting from the honor-dais, the narrative point of view is, oddly, collective. The visitors:

"...were human. One they knew well, Kossara Vymezal. She used to come here with Trohdwyr, brother to Kwent, Yffal, drowned Qythwy...How weary she looked. The other was a tall man..."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 540.

Ywod says:

"'Between dawn, when I asked you to keep ashore today, and our meeting here, I was in phonetalk up and down the Obala. Not an ychan leader but swore us aid. We know what Merseian rule would bring.'" (p. 541)

What would it bring to the ychani, who are Merseian by species? It would bring slavery for their fellow Dennitzans and it is good that the ychani oppose that. There will be more on the Obala but right now on the western coast of the Eurasian continent, where I type in bed, breakfast beckons.