Down in Naundeana, Miecan traders had often encountered a strange people in strange robes. Unlike the Naundei and themselves, they did not wear leather and hides, but a strange material they sold to the northerners. Said people claimed they came from beyond the sea, an idea that baffled the horse lords and originated many a story of mermen and marvellous lands of beauty and riches.

Said men, much like the Miecans, kept their hair long, which, in the steppes, was sign of a man’s freedom and power. For that reason, the horse lords came to call them the Consonnacci, the Sea Riders, although they called themselves the Auonniei, or something of the sort.

Despite being acquainted with them, however, none had ever been north of the Gattainniu, and only traders had seen them in person. That is, until the daring Nioui, chief of the river dwellers, brought some back from a raid on the northern Naundei.

Traditionally, all men and women captured in an attack became slaves and concubines to the person who caught them, yet that was not the case for the Consonnacci. Nioui had long been fascinated by the stories about the Sea People, and when he caught them he ordered that their hair be kept intact and that no one touch them, under threat of death.

The Abanye captives, if they could be considered such, were only forbidden from riding horses, an honour reserved to the warriors, but were otherwise free to move around the camp. Every night, Nioui sat with them, struggling to understand with the aid of an interpreter who spoke the Steppe Trade Pidgin, the ways of those southerners and learn more about them. He asked about the origin of the clothes they wore, about what their home was like, about the indomitable sea and their wooden horses. He wanted to know all there was about that mythical land.

He was marvelled to hear stories about dragons, magicians who drew their spells on hides and great cities as big as the Migasu. He loved learning about a Sun King and a river that stretched vast and wide, possessed by the spirit of a large snake. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than abandoning all he knew to see all those wonders with his own eyes, and return with vast amounts of wealth and an army that could force all his foes to bow to him. For he, Niuoi, wanted to defeat the great dragons and wrestle the Calada, the green snake of the south whose strength was said to rival the Tiger King’s.

After a couple days, they reached Niuoi’s camp, a large moving village composed of tents. There they found bald slaves doing menial work, women tending to the tents and mending clothes, and merry kids who followed the foreigners around and stared at them with eyes wide open. All around them, there were cattle feeding off the grass of the steppe.

Then, a few days later, they stopped by one of the towns under Niuoi’s protection. The settlement was surrounded by fields and a wooden palisade that protected the townsfolk. There the Abanye were granted accommodation and further interrogated by a myriad of curious eyes. Come nightfall, the whole village would gather at the town centre to play their lyres and listen to stories of Noraconsina, the Land Beyond the Sea.