The Kregala Live on the High Steppes of a Large Mountain Range. the Difficulty of Ascending

The Kregala

The Kregala live on the high steppes of a large mountain range. The difficulty of ascending the steep sides of the surrounding mountains has left them in relative cultural isolation for a large portion of their history. They believe that thousands of years ago a matriarch led them up the mountains from the lowlands to escape an enormous flood. The ancient matriarch is the mother goddess of their pantheon. Her many sons are the different gods in their polytheistic religion. Because of their reverence for the Great Mother the Kregala trace their descent in a matrilineal fashion, looking back through their mother’s side of the family. Many families claim they can trace their line of descent on their mother’s side all the way to the Great Mother and her progeny. They settled on the steppes, eventually splitting into bands following the different children of the Great Mother which divided them into seven different warring tribes. These tribes are organized asheadman/bigman societies with one woman as their leader. Her status as head mother is an achieved status and is conferred upon her by the previous leader, usually after success in intertribal war and the birth of several children, having many daughters is considered exceptionally lucky and a woman with several daughters is more likely to reach headwoman status. Her husband becomes the tribe’s shaman who is responsible for communicating with the patron god of the tribe. The tribes believe that they split up and went to war because the sons of the Great Mother squabbled too much and led the people into petty behavior. They maintain the old jealousies and grudges that they believe created the initial rift but understand their warring nature is a fallen state and hope to overcome it one day. The shaman’s communicate with their god in order to see if the deity wants them to reconcile with another tribe or maker war upon them. The Kregala hope that eventually the gods will all decide to make up and they can become one tribe and be at peace. This is partially why they place more emphasis on their matriarchal ascent because women are believed to be more peaceful.

The harsh terrain of their homeland means that the Kregala are foragers. The must gather everything they eat from the sparse vegetation and game on the steppes. Since prime hunting territory hard to come by the tribes must keep moving every so often to find more game. They are nomadic and typically move once a month to avoid depleting resources too much. However they do try to make it next to impossible for another tribe to live in the area after them, meaning they often leave territory burned and trampled so animals fear to come back for a while. When they settle in an area the set up a camp and then send out eight runners. These runners travel a predetermined distance in their compass direction and plant a stake with a flag to mark the edge of their tribe’s current territory. Then while the men hunt and gather within that circle the female warriors circle the border to keep watch for war parties or hunters from other tribes encroaching on their land. The shaman will often travel the circle once every few days to put curses on the flags so that enemy tribes won’t try to pull them up to confuse the hunters. When the time comes to move on the shaman reverses the circle, undoing the curses, then the runners pull up their flags and run back to the center.

The shamans all say that the gods are very jealous and until they make peace with their brothers the Kregala must not marry outside their tribe. They practice endogamy because they fear to anger their gods and exacerbate the conflicts between them. Couples often pairoff according to who they work with the most often. For instance a hunter often marries the border patroller who watches over his hunting ground. This practice occasionally leads to trouble because the couple becomes distracted but informal social control in the form of shaming the hunter for not bringing in enough food or encouraging the patroller to change her section is often successful before any major harm could come of it. Ambitious couples try for children right away and have as many as they can knowing that their social prestige will increase as will their potential for reaching clan leadership status. More children means more responsibility. The elders of the community care for the children while the parents are away working; food and supplies brought back are shared communally among the elders and children. Couples with more children are expected to provide more resources and to participate more in tribal affairs. Therefore, if a couple does not want to be burdened with production expectations or social responsibility they avoid having too many children or any at all. This is considered acceptable but such couples were seen as a little bit lazy.

Despite the harsh climate and near constant warring the Kregala were content to live on the steppes. They understood the people lived in the lowlands below but figured they must have been disfigured into fish people by the great flood that the Great Mother led them away from. Their shamans said that they might see the day when they would leave the steppes but only when the gods decided to make peace.

Then a severe drought began. Several years passed and the already sparse resources dwindled all across the steppes. Food became so scarce that it became clear that the tribes would have to leave the steppes. Messengers were sent between tribes and collectively the shamans announced that the gods had decided to make peace in the face of the suffering of their people and it was time for the Kregala to move back down the mountain side.

After the long journey the Kregala found themselves in a fertile valley occupied by not fish people but agriculturalists who has farmed the valley extensively and lived in settled homes for many generations, trading for what they could not produce. The Kregala had no intention of making war on the people, having come to an understanding that their warlike ways were what had led the Great Mother to starve the steppes, but the farmers in the valley saw the descending tribe of mostly tall women armed to the teeth and panicked, retreating to their strongholds and locking the door against the invaders. The valley people had been under attack from a power kingdom further down the mountain and could not hope to out fight an invading army. Thinking the Kregala were a mercenary force from their enemy they tried to wait it out. The Kregala and the valley people spoke vastly different versions of what had once been a common language so communication between the two groups was nearly impossible. The Kregala camped outside the villages and waited, occasionally going onto the farmland to forage for supplies. When the valley people saw this they decided to fight off the Kregala and chase them away from their food. The attack was vicious and sudden but the united Kregala were mighty in battle. They defeated the attacking men and took control of the village. Those who did not fight in the battle were spared because the Kregala needed the villagers to teach them how to survive in the valley. The Kregala were used to women and men being equal in social aspects and had an ethnocentric response to the women of the village who did not fight. It was considered so strange and fundamentally wrong that the Kregala wondered if the women were planning a surprise attack and were suspicious of them for a very long time. The Kregala chose to settle within that village until enough of them spoke the language of the valley that they could send others to different towns. The Kregaladiffused some of their culture into that of the valley people and vice versa. Since agriculture required living in one place the Kregala had to adapt their home building practices to suit their new terrain. The women of the village began to follow Kregalan practices such as cutting their hair short and dressing like men because it was more practical and helped them fit in with their conquerors. The shamans and head women learned the language of the valley people and ushered in the development of a creole. It took some time but after a generation or so everyone in the village and slowly into the outlying villages spoke the combination of mountain and valley speak.

Initially there was enough fighting with the neighboring villages to keep the women warriors of the Kregala entertained. As the years went on the shamans and head women developed the language and diplomacy enough that things began to settle down in the valley. Now that they existed as agriculturists more women were working in the fields and men were encouraged to still hunt in the woodlands for game. The old warriors resented this as they saw farm work as lowly. To remedy the restlessness the village councils (composed of the shamans and head women and the leaders of the vally villages who had not been killed) decided to form a corps of adventurers to explore the mountains and further down into the lowlands, to see if there was more territory to be had or people to meet. This suited the women who did not want to assimilate to farm work and gave the newly conjoined mountain and valley people the opportunity to expand their empire. Since the Kregala came down the mountain there had been a population boom and the need for new land was high. The explorers made it possible for the cultures to achieve balance as well as help their newly formed culture surivive.

While Kregalan culture was permanently changed by their move to the lowlands and their adoption of agriculture they remained a fundamentally distinct culture. The valley people were absorbed by them and outfitted their culture for better survival, now able to feed ad defend themselves. The synthesis of the two cultures helped them both survive for many thousands of years.