In order to understand the deals that were struck to make peace in the land, you must have foresight of the three nations’ history. Let me therefore tell you that war accounts the greater part of it.
So the story goes, the Longfoot made war on the Maileut four-hundred and twenty years before the land was confederated. In battle, the Maileut rode the heights on horseback and the Maileut rode the currents in canoes. Naturally this contrast in tactics resulted in most of the fighting happening in the harsh Wetland where water and land meet. It was a zero-sum game, and a long game at that. Generations of hardship were all that this three-hundred-year war created.
The names of many chiefly families were erased in battle and the corpses of sound warriors were swallowed in the mud. Wise chiefs would bleed out and communities would be left without lawful authority. People soon forgot the proper ways to lay brick, to work metals, to raise crops and to rear horses. Then, people stopped trading in silver and gold coins, lost the ability to write Maileutian characters, ceased from obeying the laws.
It was a dark age. And three hundred years after the Longfoot arrival, these nations were on the verge of complete barbarism: leaving ancestral lands to rot away, living and hunting and scavenging in the free country like their most ancient ancestors. All the while, war was the order of the day.
The terror of a new foe shook the land suddenly: the coming of the Atissa from the far north. Lightning-quick, their invasion had entire Maileut families (who I might add, kept to noble ways and shuddered at the barbarousness in the south and east) escaping the northwest in terror. They returned to their desolate ancestral lands and rode out to gather anyone they could find. Even Longfoot holdouts up the Okâminakasi River¹ were being left behind; broken warriors returning downstream in what remained of their infamous war-canoes. The families who had given up their noble lives returned, hearing of the return of their woodland brothers and sisters. The Atissa had made their impression and an alliance to end them seemed the only way to end this foe. Runners were sent up and down the rivers and what leadership remained on either side of the Wetland rode into the muddy battlefield once again. Among the misty ponds and willow trees, two enemy races finally settled their differences. The chiefs² drew up a great map. The shore and the wetland were left to the Longfoot, while the Maileut kept the parkland and the prairie. This was the treaty of alliance that ended the Longfoot-Atissa War.
When this was done, the Maileut chiefs and the Longfoot chiefs sat in a circle around a great fire and smoked from a pipe carved from the wood of a nearby willow that had fallen and made a crossing over a narrow bog. They did this because that was how they showed their approved for the treaty.
The triumph of peace, laws and of the wisdom of man led to an age of human motivation only the eldest among us today can recall. People returned to their honourable old lives. Chiefly families married off and produced generations of strong and sharp young people. Good chiefs ruled and made wise decisions for their communities. Builders put up beautiful houses and temples, smiths learned about iron and how to work it, farmers' harvests became bountiful and horses were bred to be fast. Roads were put down and traders navigated them to do business in new towns. The elders began to teach important lessons to the children and artists wrote poems in Maileutian.
For the Alliance, an army of five-thousand men was raised against the Atissa and each warrior was trained to use a rifle.
Many great inventions at this time had just been introduced from the East. You may have even correctly assumed that wrought iron was one of them. Rifles were another. Maileut traders had bought cargoes of them in exchange for the raw materials they offered up. There were permanent businesses and warehouses set up for all these things now.
No more than twenty years after the Attisa invasion, hundreds of rifles crossed into the spruce forest and peace in the land vanished again for nearly a hundred years, because when rifles were not enough to destroy the Atissa, cannons were sold to the Alliance and rolled in to blast the enemy to bits! And when that was not enough, the Longfoot fastened engines to their war-boats, armoured them in plate and sent them up the river with whole bands of rifles. Even that was not enough to make that nation cower!
As I have mentioned before, the Atissa were skillful fighters because they played tricks on their enemies. You see, they didn't deal in arms like the Longfoot or the Maileut. They were masters of deception. They set fire to boats with crude torches and resin, tainted rivers with simple poisons, baited riflemen into natural pitfalls and ambushed warriors from the treetops.
At the apex of the Atissa–Alliance War (ten years before the confederation), machine guns bought in Port Wilhelm were now rolling across the parkland and into the spruces. Factories towered over the prairie and mines dotted the upper shore. Some of these were owned by wealthy chiefs born in Kataskenaw, but the better part contractually belonged to foreign businessmen who sought to capitalize on the land’s great wealth of natural resources. Some wise elders used to say "our war is a fire the Man-of-the-East stokes" only to be mocked by those around them. Endowed with the fruits of modern warfare, the Maileut and the Longfoot were likely prepared to carry on forever, despite their total lack of credible victory.
It was just then that the Atissa used their own fruit of modern warfare: spies. These spies set out to force the foreign capitalist to intervene in order to save their investments. This incredible tactic sought to use the Atissa’s greatest strength to win the war without raising a single rifle against their enemies.
This is how it all happened: spies torched the factories they learned about. They demolished profitable mines with dynamite stolen from the easterly trade. Then, they disappeared into hiding. This happened all over the country. Managers struggled to placate their business partners in South Ethia and Scalvia. Many of them refused new contracts, and industry began to slow down.
After five hard years of sabotage (and of misfortune for the workers whose means were won in the factories), the capitalists of Port Wilhelm conspired to pay a private army to recoup their losses. They battled their way into the prairie, surrounded Tâwâyihk³ on all sides and demanded an end to the war. The war chiefs assembled in the Maileut capital⁴ protested the invasion, but were confronted with the threat of losing preferential trade relations with the East. Worse yet, the brokers that came with the soldiers threatened to lobby the Emperor for direct rule. This kind of talk was something the war chiefs could not tolerate. They caved to the demands of the foreign brokers and sent runners to the northwest with terms of peace.
The Atissa had forced a settlement in their favour and the feeling in Kanatasè:ke⁵ was that of a victorious power. They celebrated their triumph for a week and made preparations to cross the parkland in order to face the enemy chiefs for the first time. People had never seen the Atissa's war chiefs before and they made a great spectacle as they arrived in the Maileut capital. On their faces and muscles they wore paint as red as blood and crowns of oak leaves. The warriors and their horses were dressed in thick, needly shrubs and carried wooden effigies of deer and of bears and of other the woodland animals. Then six veiled medicine women hauled in a wooden statue of their god Orenda. The extravagance of all this was not lost on anybody. Even the children watched in disbelief; the woodland race was not ugly and deformed like their parents had told them. The Alliance was humiliated.
At sunup, the effort to confederate the nations of the Alliance and the Atissa was begun. The first treaty was authored by a sitting assembly of Maileut, Longfoot and Atissa war chiefs as well as the foreign brokers from Port Wilhelm. By it, the Atissa would end their attacks on the mines and the factories and the Alliance would recognize the northwest as Atissa territory. At sundown, the sitting chiefs and the brokers shared in the smoking pipe as the words were being put to paper, and the matter was settled.
Over the many days of the peace council, seventeen treaties in all were written.
When they were all finished being drafted, the sitting chiefs' wives wove black and white shell beads together into a long patterned belt. It was wrapped around the great heap of paper and ink and by this symbolic gesture, the peacemaking process was finished. The capitalists disarmed their footsoldiers, the Atissa returned to their home in the forest and the sitting chiefs parted company for the last time. To uphold the work of confederation, a council of the nations would be held in Tâwâyihk each year during the late spring moons for “white chiefs” to discuss business that demanded the attention of all the land, such as foreign matters.
Now the question on every man's mind: for how long would their Confederation hold?
¹ This Maileutian word translates to "Thorny" in Mercanti. Therefore, foreign accounts refer to this location as the Thorny River.
² A "chief" refers to a wise community leader in Three-Nations tradition and tended to be a middle-aged man that managed a settlement's farmland. However, wandering communities also had chiefs whose role was shaped by the person's experience in war and hunting.
³ This Maileutian word translates to "Place at the centre" in Mercanti. It was the historic capital city of the Maileut and is the de facto capital city of Kataskenaw today.
⁴ The Alliance had no central governing authority over the country but as prosecutors of the war, the war chiefs were treated as such. These were deputies to ordinary chiefs who were sent to direct the war effort of the Alliance.
⁵ This Atissan word translates to "Place of the new town" in Mercanti. This was the Atissa capital city.
