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The Tribes of Qaidam Nor
Even the most desolate regions of Parthysis have their inhabitants. In the salt basin surrounding the Lake of Bones and the arid foothills south of the Wall of Knives, these include two semi-nomadic tribes: the Himyari and the Aravalli. While they can be broadly grouped as part of the Bahaduir -- the wandering desert tribes who have long provided the Empire with both legendary warriors and enemies -- they have distinct identities within that group.
According to their shared legends, both tribes originate from the warlord Haryan of the Black Sands, who once served the Emperor of Ardashir but was exiled in disgrace for some unremembered slight. He had two sons: Himyar and Araval, from whom the two tribes are descended. The Children of Haryan, as they sometimes call themselves, consider it their penance and duty to live in the salt-bitter land to which their ancestor was condemned.
Both the Himyari and the Aravalli are subsistence herders, raising scrawny, nimble-footed goats and gray-brown desert asses on the thorny acacia and jojoba that survive in the hills. Their permanent homes are built in the shelter of the region's rock walls; when traveling, they live in lightweight, collapsible huts of stretched hide. They wear light clothes of cotton or linen, undyed except on festival occasions, when they wear brilliant colors woven into complicated geometric bands. During such occasions, the women dance with long tasselled shawls and the men compete in a game/dance called qanzi, leaping as high as they can while other men thrust spears under the leapers' feet.
The Himyari, who tend to have a greater gift for magic, also cultivate small, precious gardens using conjured water to supplement the region's scant rainfall. In these gardens they grow beans, varicolored dwarf maize, and -- where the surrounding rock shelters trees from the wind -- date palms. The Aravalli, who tend to be further-roaming, venture up to the shadow of the mountains in search of valuable goods. They also dominate trade with outlying peoples, selling jojoba nuts, dates, and whatever can be scavenged from the Wall of Knives in exchange for food, cloth, and metal implements.
The desert tribes observe a prickly, clannish code of honor that relies on ritual combat as the primary means of solving disputes. Individual fighting skill is, accordingly, prized among both the Himyari and Aravalli. The tribes' traditional weapons are spears and daggers of sharpened bone or the long thorns of the blade-spine bush, as both wood and metal are in scant supply for other weapons. Because a cripple is incapable of defending his honor -- and, in practical terms, unlikely to survive the extreme hardships of the desert tribes' lifestyle -- deformed babies and permanently injured warriors are customarily put to death as soon as the extent of their incapacity becomes known.
Due to the preciousness of water in the desert, it is utterly forbidden to raise a weapon against a water-caller, as their elementalists are named. Anyone who harms a water-caller in self-defense is exiled from the tribe with no clothes, weapons, or water; anyone who harms or kills a water-caller for any other reason is impaled alive on a blade-spine bush and left for the scavengers.
Traditionally, sons are responsible for defending the honor of their elderly parents; men are responsible for defending the honor of their sisters, wives and daughters; and women occupy a subservient role in the tribes' culture. The exception is a raqawi -- a woman who is sworn to celibacy, cuts her hair short, and is treated in all ways like a man, including the right to carry weapons and use them to defend her honor. Although a raqawi may have been married and even have had children before swearing her vow, she is expected to be completely chaste afterward. Breaking this taboo, too, results in exile, generally self-imposed to escape the shame.
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