Sounds good. And since the game is providing plenty of excitement by itself, I decided to ... spice it up a little anyway by finally getting around to also adding another story from the Khatunate's ancient past!
Image credits:
The river ran swift and sure below, between the high, bone-dry rocky hills where the Zalitai Ir kept watch and the plains where peaceful citizens of the Khatunate and followers of the Buddha tended to their cattle, sending milk and beef down the short road to the river and thence down to Muqa on rafts, canoes, and barges. Upriver from the rocky hills, wild cattle not yet captured or fenced in grazed among the grasslands, drinking at the riverbank where - miles downstream - the Zalitai Ir gathered their own water, or on the far side of the isthmus at the shore of Western Banana Lake. Yet they didn't approach the Eastern lake from which the river flowed; rainforests grew thick and wild in that region, between the lakes, far thicker and far hotter than the forests on the far bank between the lake and the pasturelands.
![[Image: IMG_1463-Large.jpg]](http://exotichikes.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IMG_1463-Large.jpg)
It was to those rainforests that the sentry directed her chieftain's eyes. Long trails of smoke rose as ever from the forest across the river, but they rose from the campfires - and also the signal fires - of the Chimeegüi Yarij, the Khatunate tribe that had watched over those woods for generations, preparing defenses for themselves along the riverbank and surveying the copper veins among the woodlands where they dwelt. The smoke rising from the rainforest was new, and could not bode well. The chieftain thought of the wild and desperate tribes who were said to have burned an entire city to the ground in the northeast - and of tales from the west of another wild tribe, desperate to take the fruits of civilization for themselves, who had come down from the taiga northwest of Borte itself and conducted a series of deadly raids on the camps of the storied Irves clan - fortunately more deadly for the raiders than for the proud warriors of the Irves, whose ancestors were said to have ridden the Muqa Isthmus of man-eating lions that roamed there in the ancient past. Such raiders as these could hardly threaten the Chimeegüi Yarij with their river fortifications at the edge of the woodlands where they lived, still less the Zalitai Ir themselves, trained as they were in the barracks of Muqa, and bearing metal weapons shaped from Borte bronze, but there is no such thing as battle without danger, and if enemy raiders ever got past the Zalitai Ir, Muqa would be completely unprotected.
![[Image: CopyofMaasaiMau-Clearingofindigenousfore...hfires.JPG]](http://www.plant-talk.org/images/content/CopyofMaasaiMau-Clearingofindigenousforestthroughfires.JPG)
More troubling still was the sheer volume of smoke already rising from around the rainforest below: No simple tribe of raiders like those who were said to have perished in a last suicidal charge against the warriors of the Irves clan would need so many cookfires or so many separate camps. The chieftain feared the worst, and smoke signals from Chimeegüi Yarij watchposts along the lakeshore far below soon confirmed it: Along the western shores of the lake, at the edges of the jungle, many people could be seen - many and growing in number, with more still streaming southward from their homelands: Families, herdsfolk, farmers, and fisherfolk whose fear could practically be felt from all the way across the lake, driven forward by the dread Asegai warriors of the Zulu.
![[Image: 1194740-zulu-warriors.jpeg]](http://gb.fotolibra.com/images/previews/1194740-zulu-warriors.jpeg)
The old chieftain didn't hesitate. He had himself been born in Muqa, decades before, and most of his still-nomadic clan had grown up among maize farmers who worked the fields just up-river from the city. Allowing the Zulu to assault the city would be unthinkable, and he knew that many of Muqa's people were already gathering wagon trains, preparing to depart the city en masse for the very threatened forests in which Clan Chimeegüi Yarij were camped: An enormous proportion of Muqa's silver mining community on the point of heading north, drawn by hopes and promises, but driven by necessity. They would not be able to survive in the shadow of Asegai spears, and without the northern prospects that had drawn them, it wasn't clear to the old chieftain how the miners could properly survive as a community at all. Worse, a Zulu outpost amid those jungles would be a constant threat to Muqa - and constantly threatened by it even more severly still - which meant that conflict would be inevitable on that front, and the city of Muqa forced to become a permanent military outpost, forever facing down the Zulu threat until either the threat itself or the ancient Khatunate city was destroyed permanently.
![[Image: fire2.jpg?itok=txfbYjlt]](https://cdn1.pri.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_main/public/story/images/fire2.jpg?itok=txfbYjlt)
There was only one way the chieftain knew to protect the city: The Zulu outpost beginning to form in the rainforest between the lakes had to be dislodged before it could establish itself as a power in the region - and the sooner the Zulu people got the message, the safer both they and the Khatunate would be. The chieftain consulted with the bhikkhunī of his tribe - the Buddhist spiritual leader who still performed many of the same functions and indeed the same rituals as udgan intercessors with the spirits in ages past - but not before he gave the order to break camp and prepare for travel. He approached her as a matter of form, but he knew the only way forward, and he knew the bhikkhunī of his clan, as pragmatic as wise, and as steeped in the world of war as of relgious mysteries, and the chieftain knew she would approve. Ere long, the whole of clan Zalitai Ir was marching northward, out of the hills, to the fields where wild cattle grazed, there to block the passage southward from the rainforest, between the lakes. The bhikkhunī put the ram's horn to her lips and sounded the clan's call to battle, and there issued from every throat on either side of the river - Zalitai Ir and Chimeegüi Yarij alike - the Khatunate battle cry.
![[Image: mongol_by_asahisuperdry-d9x35yy.jpg]](https://img00.deviantart.net/6cd8/i/2016/089/1/7/mongol_by_asahisuperdry-d9x35yy.jpg)
"Uukhai!!!" rose from the valley and resounded from the cliffs that bounded the Western lake. "Uukhai!!!" the Khatunate warriors answered, meeting the echoes of their own voices. The Zalitai Ir were not yet in any position to charge, and the Chimeegüi Yarij, neither as well-trained nor as well-equipped, were ill-prepared to venture into the rainforest without their support, but already both were making their position clear: They would not back off, still less back down from a fight. The approaches to Muqa would be defended, and any Zulu outpost built between the lakes would be met with the full, deadly force of their clans.
![[Image: Shaka-Zulu-Henry-Cele-a.jpg]](http://www.writeups.org/wp-content/uploads/Shaka-Zulu-Henry-Cele-a.jpg)
Asegai warriors and Zulu tribal elders, their attention drawn by the shouting, watched musingly over the possible battlefield. They discussed it at length and sent swift messengers north as the Khatunate forces slowly gathered together and arrayed themselves across the gap between the lakes, preparing simultaneously to defend themselves if needed and to march on any new military outpost that might be formed. Behind them, the first of the Horse Lords - a band of warrior-nobles out of Borte who drove their horses before them, riding into battle as charioteers - made their first foray into the north, riding all the way into Muqa to help contribute to the strength and flexibility of Khatunate forces already in the area, to ensure the safe passage of every member of the mining community to the woods already guarded by the Chimeegüi Yarij, and ultimately to help lay claim to all the disputed land in the name of the Khatunate. And slowly, slowly, as word came back from the Palace of Tokugawa, the Zulu began to withdraw. They were no longer seen along the banks of the eastern lake, and the smoke from their fires steadily receded as Clan Zalitai Ir cautiously approached the rainforest. As the great mass of the Zulu camps came into sight beyond the jungle eaves, watering along the far bank of West Banana Lake, Muqa's old community of miners began the journey north at last. They brought with them picks and shovels to mine the silver ore, but there would be no pick-axes crossed upon the walls of Chubei's ancient meeting hall: The axes lifted to that place of honor within the city-to-be would be battle axes of the Zalitai Ir.
It was to those rainforests that the sentry directed her chieftain's eyes. Long trails of smoke rose as ever from the forest across the river, but they rose from the campfires - and also the signal fires - of the Chimeegüi Yarij, the Khatunate tribe that had watched over those woods for generations, preparing defenses for themselves along the riverbank and surveying the copper veins among the woodlands where they dwelt. The smoke rising from the rainforest was new, and could not bode well. The chieftain thought of the wild and desperate tribes who were said to have burned an entire city to the ground in the northeast - and of tales from the west of another wild tribe, desperate to take the fruits of civilization for themselves, who had come down from the taiga northwest of Borte itself and conducted a series of deadly raids on the camps of the storied Irves clan - fortunately more deadly for the raiders than for the proud warriors of the Irves, whose ancestors were said to have ridden the Muqa Isthmus of man-eating lions that roamed there in the ancient past. Such raiders as these could hardly threaten the Chimeegüi Yarij with their river fortifications at the edge of the woodlands where they lived, still less the Zalitai Ir themselves, trained as they were in the barracks of Muqa, and bearing metal weapons shaped from Borte bronze, but there is no such thing as battle without danger, and if enemy raiders ever got past the Zalitai Ir, Muqa would be completely unprotected.
More troubling still was the sheer volume of smoke already rising from around the rainforest below: No simple tribe of raiders like those who were said to have perished in a last suicidal charge against the warriors of the Irves clan would need so many cookfires or so many separate camps. The chieftain feared the worst, and smoke signals from Chimeegüi Yarij watchposts along the lakeshore far below soon confirmed it: Along the western shores of the lake, at the edges of the jungle, many people could be seen - many and growing in number, with more still streaming southward from their homelands: Families, herdsfolk, farmers, and fisherfolk whose fear could practically be felt from all the way across the lake, driven forward by the dread Asegai warriors of the Zulu.
The old chieftain didn't hesitate. He had himself been born in Muqa, decades before, and most of his still-nomadic clan had grown up among maize farmers who worked the fields just up-river from the city. Allowing the Zulu to assault the city would be unthinkable, and he knew that many of Muqa's people were already gathering wagon trains, preparing to depart the city en masse for the very threatened forests in which Clan Chimeegüi Yarij were camped: An enormous proportion of Muqa's silver mining community on the point of heading north, drawn by hopes and promises, but driven by necessity. They would not be able to survive in the shadow of Asegai spears, and without the northern prospects that had drawn them, it wasn't clear to the old chieftain how the miners could properly survive as a community at all. Worse, a Zulu outpost amid those jungles would be a constant threat to Muqa - and constantly threatened by it even more severly still - which meant that conflict would be inevitable on that front, and the city of Muqa forced to become a permanent military outpost, forever facing down the Zulu threat until either the threat itself or the ancient Khatunate city was destroyed permanently.
There was only one way the chieftain knew to protect the city: The Zulu outpost beginning to form in the rainforest between the lakes had to be dislodged before it could establish itself as a power in the region - and the sooner the Zulu people got the message, the safer both they and the Khatunate would be. The chieftain consulted with the bhikkhunī of his tribe - the Buddhist spiritual leader who still performed many of the same functions and indeed the same rituals as udgan intercessors with the spirits in ages past - but not before he gave the order to break camp and prepare for travel. He approached her as a matter of form, but he knew the only way forward, and he knew the bhikkhunī of his clan, as pragmatic as wise, and as steeped in the world of war as of relgious mysteries, and the chieftain knew she would approve. Ere long, the whole of clan Zalitai Ir was marching northward, out of the hills, to the fields where wild cattle grazed, there to block the passage southward from the rainforest, between the lakes. The bhikkhunī put the ram's horn to her lips and sounded the clan's call to battle, and there issued from every throat on either side of the river - Zalitai Ir and Chimeegüi Yarij alike - the Khatunate battle cry.
"Uukhai!!!" rose from the valley and resounded from the cliffs that bounded the Western lake. "Uukhai!!!" the Khatunate warriors answered, meeting the echoes of their own voices. The Zalitai Ir were not yet in any position to charge, and the Chimeegüi Yarij, neither as well-trained nor as well-equipped, were ill-prepared to venture into the rainforest without their support, but already both were making their position clear: They would not back off, still less back down from a fight. The approaches to Muqa would be defended, and any Zulu outpost built between the lakes would be met with the full, deadly force of their clans.
Asegai warriors and Zulu tribal elders, their attention drawn by the shouting, watched musingly over the possible battlefield. They discussed it at length and sent swift messengers north as the Khatunate forces slowly gathered together and arrayed themselves across the gap between the lakes, preparing simultaneously to defend themselves if needed and to march on any new military outpost that might be formed. Behind them, the first of the Horse Lords - a band of warrior-nobles out of Borte who drove their horses before them, riding into battle as charioteers - made their first foray into the north, riding all the way into Muqa to help contribute to the strength and flexibility of Khatunate forces already in the area, to ensure the safe passage of every member of the mining community to the woods already guarded by the Chimeegüi Yarij, and ultimately to help lay claim to all the disputed land in the name of the Khatunate. And slowly, slowly, as word came back from the Palace of Tokugawa, the Zulu began to withdraw. They were no longer seen along the banks of the eastern lake, and the smoke from their fires steadily receded as Clan Zalitai Ir cautiously approached the rainforest. As the great mass of the Zulu camps came into sight beyond the jungle eaves, watering along the far bank of West Banana Lake, Muqa's old community of miners began the journey north at last. They brought with them picks and shovels to mine the silver ore, but there would be no pick-axes crossed upon the walls of Chubei's ancient meeting hall: The axes lifted to that place of honor within the city-to-be would be battle axes of the Zalitai Ir.
Image credits:
River and forest: ExoticHikes.com
Smoke rising from a forest: Christian Lambrechts, UNEP
Asegai warriors: Miles Kelly Publishing
Burning village: News.CN
Mongolian axe warrior: Pierre "Asahi" Raveneau
Shaka Zulu, as portrayed by Henry Cele: Screenshot from the 1986 television series "Shaka Zulu"
Smoke rising from a forest: Christian Lambrechts, UNEP
Asegai warriors: Miles Kelly Publishing
Burning village: News.CN
Mongolian axe warrior: Pierre "Asahi" Raveneau
Shaka Zulu, as portrayed by Henry Cele: Screenshot from the 1986 television series "Shaka Zulu"
