Strange Tides

Though Isidoros performed all his duties during the festival to the Lady of the Harvest with the same somber formality he had long ago learned walking the corridors of the palace in lost Orchomenos inside he was unsettled as a man stepping on icy mountain trails in winter. The modest bounty of the feast was drawn from stocks that were worryingly close empty. Would their good fortune hold another season? Would it be enough to see them through the winter? These were the questions the King of Hyphyria struggled with in the stillness of his heart as his people settled to a tempered, tentative celebration.

Lost 2 Supplies

Demeter mildly appeased

The potters had been content enough to be given an assurance of royal attention in the fall while the woodsmen had settled into a low rumble about Semni. Their encounter with the woodsfolk earlier in the year had even left a few of them calling her a witch, figuring that one kind of foreigner was much the same as another, but those waters would doubtless settle once the young woman would fail to show any sign of magic. Only a mother waiting to see the birth of her first child... Had Isidoros the time to worry about such things he would have counseled Argurios to pay more attention to his wife, but alas his time was soon called upon in another matter.

From the south Hyphyria received news that the ships had found a sheltered cove that would make a fine anchorage, perhaps a port of trade in the future, but to the north they had found something far more intriguing.

Southern Coastal Exploration Success: Discovered sheltered anchorage (Potential City Location)


Poseidon has smiled upon us, Ekhinos thought as the galley's prow cut the waves in a shower of foam with nary a single oar having to dip into the sea. The wind seemed to have been made for their purpose, but he knew better than to trust the favor of the Earth Shaker and still less the whims of this unknown sea.

"Smoke! Smoke on the shore!" Orestes called. He was a man grey of hair and rich in years with the long sight upon him, and so he was the ship's lookout and rightly so.

"How many and how large?" the captain asked, pondering if these others might be a danger, or an opportunity.

The answer was slow in coming for wariness as a virtue when sailing unknown seas, but the sight of the locals' three ships, rough craft, like the tin traders were said to use, was enough to drive Ekhinos to sending men ashore. A bull, the Greek captain thought, looking at the prow of the largest of the locals' vessels where such an effigy was carved in wood, save for the horns which had been taken from a true beast. Had the children of Minos passed this way...

Alas that the Hyphyrias did not find themselves quite so fortunate for they shared none of the civilized tongues of the east and neither were their holds filled with tin, but still these mariners proved hospitable enough and it was soon discovered, interested in trade.

From the vague signs and gestures Ekhinos guessed that they came from the west, where a great island lay. Though he could guess but a little of the passage due to knowing not the tongue, the works of these western men were finer than those he had seen brought from the shepherds: cloth of a finer weave and pottery with a more careful glaze. Nothing of course to good Greek work, but still better than he would have expected of men lost among the western sea. Honey they had also and proper mead made from it, not the goat's piss he had heard the mountain men drunk. It sweet it as upon the tongue and sweeter still thinking of all the praise he was sure to get.

These Bull-folk were just as impressed by the craftsmanship Ekhinos could show, and so they parted as friends, even exchanging slaves that each might learn the other's tongue in time and both might profit from it.

Northern Expedition Success: Friendly contact established with the Bull-men of the Sunset lands.

With the addition of another pair of hands the work of rule goes easier. Pick up to one personal action each.
[] Isidoros
[] Argurios
[] Semni

Available actions: