The origins of Risbit are shrouded in history’s thickest fog. It’s unknown if they were from the Rockilees or the Hollow; if they served Immish or Talgo; or even if they were male or female. Nonetheless, the legend has a straightforward shape.
One day, Risbit was hunting prongnose on the middle heights, far above what passed for the highest villages of the time. The Peak was thinly settled, but the prey had already learned what to expect from the bipeds with pointy bits in their hands and glints in their eyes, and was predisposed to nervous flight.
It went down from blood lose somewhere up the Trundledowns. Uneven terrain, but clearly above their houses. From there they could see every twinkle of light, every flicker of movement, almost close enough to touch.
It made the knowledge of the five-mile downhill stomp with whatever bits of a five-hundred-pound piece of meat they could rip off even more depressing.
And then Risbit spoke The Words. And, as The Words were so very wise and important, they are known with a precision that no other detail of this story can be sure of. Much else fades, but they remain, seared from brain into the stone of the Peak itself.
Risbit spoke The Words, and The Words were: “Why don’t we just roll it down there?”
Ten minutes later the slightly battered corpse of the prongnose slid off a last slope and pinwheeled into Risbit’s house, denting the wall. It is for this reason that the Peakward face of all houses constructed to this day contains a slight indentation.
There were consequences beyond the dreams of any.
First, there was now incentive for hunters to walk the higher slopes. Now that they knew of The Words, there was no true problem with killing a fat beast far from home. As long as the distance was vertical, it was, for all intents and purposes, insignificant.
Second, there was an innovative explosion in packaging, along with an exploration of material properties. The right kind of padding in the right place could keep a prongnose or bulkhead from exploding – or losing limbs – for an extra half-mile. Once the foragers got interested, baskets were designed that could safely deliver first sturdy tubers, then delicate berries – and weighted just so, so that their momentum was sustained until they reached home.
Third, Risbit was titled ‘the Poly’ by the general acclaim and agreement of their peers.
Some centuries later, after Risbit the Poly was safely buried, their home village became embroiled in a dispute. It seemed that another, younger clan had built their own village directly Peakward of the pre-existing settlement, and the manner in which this blocked off the necessary access to rolling resources was deeply resented. The accused maintained they had done nothing wrong, and in fact that the deeply Flatward positioning of the prosecution gave them unfair title to an unnecessarily large strip of the Peak. This was disputed with sharp objects, and a bloody battle ensued until the smaller, Peakward village, on the verge of defeat, heaved a large boulder down on a shale scree and triggered a very sharp and sudden avalanche.
To this day, the exact location of Risbit the Poly’s tomb and village is unknown.
So, another factor came into settlement. The lower the village, the more Peakward slope it could lay claim to for transport. But the higher the village, the less likely it would be that some upstart rival would claim its Peakward land and threaten its Flatward neighbour with burial by rock. War went from vanishing scarce to a constant threat; every person kept an eye on higher ground and slept with their shoes on. In vocabulary, ‘Peakward gaze’ went from referring to clear-headed planning to creeping paranoia.
At length, the fate of the Peak in general came to rest in the uppermost of its denizens: a council of four headsfolk whose settlements were placed so highly as to be unassailable by rolling, yet deathly impoverished – all of their foraging had to be done downslope, and hand-toted back. Above them was only a little cap of summer frost. As none of them could hurt the other, they talked as equals without fear for the first time in several generations, largely to complain about their problems.
It must’ve been then that some had the idea of extortion, which wafted around like a bad smell until – as many bad smells do –everyone grew accustomed to it and decided it wasn’t so bad. If the Four on the Peak couldn’t roll their own resources, they could profit handsomely from the rollings of their Flatward tributaries. Larger, more prosperous villages were forced to yoke their bounty and drag it upslope by rope (later chain) and by hand. It is believed this wearying vassalage led directly to the domestication of the stupid-but-tractable bulkhead, which spent a lot of its time wandering up and down the Peak anyways and didn’t mind carrying an extra quarter-ton or so of food and supplies as it did so.
For some time the Four on the Peak prospered. Unassailable from below, unrivaled above, at last the most obvious problem reared its head: what to do about those beside you. It was such an obvious thought that all four of them had and executed it at about the same time, leading to a mathematically unlikely quadruple ring ambush. So great and obvious was the hubbub and confusion at the summit that several of the larger, bolder Flatward vassals armed themselves and stole up to the heights. Hardened and embittered, they overpowered the weakened and reduced forces of the Four, although several emergency avalanches were deployed before defeat was obvious. The villages of the Four on the Peak were razed and their supplies of deadly boulders and shales depleted by the expedient measure of dropping them down empty slopes.
A time of relative peace blossomed. The Peak’s heights were now depopulated, and the strategic benefits of their position were now known and defended against. Walls were sculpted around settlements to both ensnare rolling goods along specific paths and (in wary preparation) to deflect barrages from above. In truth there were now few enemies from within; the shared suffering inflicted by the Four had forged a small bond of commonality. Rather than competing for rollzones, most codified and elaborated upon their own pre-set roll-routes.
This mutual pacifism was well-timed, for it was not longer after this that those strangers, the Flat, came to the Peak. They had interesting and exotic goods and metal weaponry. The first they bargained with, the second they threatened with, and if the Peakers hadn’t been wary from the get-go things might have ended very badly – conquered first from above, then below. As it was many of the most Flatward settlements were razed, but the newcomers didn’t know of The Words, and thus were wiped out in vast numbers when they sought to climb higher Peakward into the waiting stone rain.
The Peak solidified in friendship at this defeat of a common, alien foe, and the proto-Peak Republic was formed in the loosest sense of the term.
What followed was not unimportant, but was devoid of dramatic shifts. The Peak Republic solidified. The roll-routes were formalized into the rollways, which were deep, broad, and required the relocation of much of the Peak’s good stone into their surfaces. Agriculture – practiced initially at the behest of the Four on the Peak for greater tribute – was refined. The prongnose went extinct. Erosion became a concern, and sculpting of the slope beyond its use for rolling became more common.
This was referred to as the Combing.
The Peak Republic fell in the end not to infighting among peers, but friendship between strangers. Numerous kinds of Flat came to trade at the bottom of the Peak, and in time some of the Flatwardmost settlements came to enjoy a nigh-monopoly on exotic goods and luxuries, from which they profited handsomely. Jealousy grew in those consigned to the Peakward heights (who paid the greatest sums for the smallest tastes of these indulgences) and in the end quarrels grew into denunciations grew into embargoes grew into incitement grew into deliberate disruptions of the rollways. Shielded well from stone, the protecting Peakward walls of the Flatward settlements were not proof from stink and sickness – the Peakward settlements beset them with rotting and diseased carcasses and sewage, choking their fields, forage, and rollways with murderous bacteria. In the end every settlement Flatward of the Rockilees was emptied, either driven into the arms of their Flat allies and friends or eradicated by plague.
This was the second great redistribution of the Peak’s population. Now both the extreme heights and the farthest lows were relatively devoid of habitation. The Peak was girdled with life, and by history, inclination, custom and practicality, this range did not change greatly from that point onwards.
At some point, something had to be done about the trees.
Wood wasn’t what you built a house out of in most of the Peak, but it was needed for an awful lot of tools and smaller-scale projects. The Peak had been forested thick to the treeline in the old days, but toward the mid-life of the Peak Republic that coverage had been thinned thoroughly. Now, with the concentration of population in the Peak’s midsection, competition for timber began to grow. Each settlement also now needed more cropland – Peakward, preferably.
Nobody was above them. Nobody could sneak up on them from below.
So, once again, precautions grew into paranoia. War against one of your neighbours risked an ambush from your other, so it was safest to fortify and content yourself with sabotage and mending the effects of the sabotage of your rivals.
There was plenty to mend. But it was a lot harder than the sabotage, so nobody ever put quite as much effort into it.
At length, a problem emerged. The rollways were wearing awfully deep, and some of the oldest and most-used were collapsing inwards. Alternate routes were found, but they were less stable to begin with (being in less preferable terrain).
There were several summits. During the course of these, it was determined that
(1) rollways were necessary for a Peak life. Existence without The Words was, fundamentally, not thinkable.
(2) without noticing, it appeared that a point had been reached by which rollways were no longer sustainable at the scale necessary to sustain Peak society.
(3) the individuated benefits of ceasing to crumble the Peak with rollways were basically non-existent and if any given Peak settlement did so its neighbours would simple take its belongings.
So, having determined that they couldn’t possibly fix anything, the people of the Peak resigned themselves to merely enlarging and refurbishing the rollways as much as possible as fast as possible.
Some time later, Flats came to the Peak again. Not as conquerors, not as traders. There wasn’t much anymore to conqueror or trade with, so they had to settle for being explorers, and complained a good deal about their lack of fortune. Nothing but crumbled, buckled rocks, ruts, bumps, and dirt – very poor dirt at that.
“This is the ugliest hill I’ve ever seen,” decreed Abideel Gutchen, and those words were written in her journal and remain true to this day, centuries later.
Mind you, the years have taken their toll on the Peak since her day.
It was probably a whole sixty foot high when she saw it.