The Grass Sea

The Grass Sea is the vast open steppe between the Heartlands and Kaishon, running east from Lake Surmave's outflow to the Long Rampart. It is horse country: rolling feather-grass taller than a horse in a wet year, the gray smell of steppe wormwood, hard winters, and no trees but the Tsanha willows along the river. Steppe raiders sacked Kaishon's Sorogei in 341, the Charnazin of Tontanor rose and fell here between 455 and 502, and the Cherüsh first appear in the chronicles in 779, conquer their neighbors in 971–975, split in the civil war of 1082, and are reunited by Sarsak Tolmar in 1141 into a Horde of some 120,000 people and 80,000 riders. The Horde's tribes (the Cherüsh proper, the Shiygöl, the Shusa, the Angsit, the far-eastern Nintang, the Jilmu and the Blue Riders) graze it with their herds, while the Saiga Followers, a people older than the Cherüsh who have never owned a horse, walk the whole of it on foot behind the saiga migration and know where the water is in every season. Its creatures include the shaggy Cherüsh horse, saiga herds ten thousand strong, steppe wolves, Tsanha foxes, bustards, hunting eagles and plague-carrying marmots, and for two weeks each spring red tulips carpet the ground for the Cherüsh's one festival.

See also: Tolmar-Buyor, Tontanor, Charnazin of Tontanor, River Tsanha, The Tsanha Crossing