The Vulcan Peninsula

To most Britons the Vulcan Peninsula is less a place on any chart than a picture carried in the mind. It lies off beyond the near continent, away to the south-east and east, and it is imagined as a broad dark belt of country between the richer southern waters and the cold northern cities: black fir forest, high passes, ruined monasteries, wolf roads, strongholds on the uplands, villages of charcoal-burners wreathed in smoke, and ravines whose names have outlasted the maps that once set them down.

What reaches the island from that country comes mixed. Merchants know it for copper, timber, iron and the mercenary companies that hire out of it. The clergy know it for disputed bishoprics, for hermit saints whose claims are argued over, and for valleys where old local bargains with the unseen have grown so close around the people's devotions that no stranger can say where one ends and the other begins. Relics, soldiers for hire, contested saints and dark stories all seem to travel westward from it together, and a tale told in a Dover tavern about the peninsula is seldom the worse for its journey.

The learned speak of its frontiers and jurisdictions as they would of any other land, for it has its own lords, its own churches and its own long memory, older than many a British custom. Ordinary speech remembers the roads instead: the forest tracks, the monastery roads and the ways the hired companies march, where a route can turn to rumour inside a day and where, it is said, a map ages quicker than the soldier carrying it. Few Britons have been there. Fewer still could name a town in it, but nearly everyone has a working opinion of what lies under those black trees.