The central lake of Rakite, a long, shallow body of water fed by the Ver Pes river and drained toward the eastern coast. "Kro Shiik" means "gathering water" in Rakiten, and the name reflects its primary purpose: this is where the tribes meet.
Character
Kro Shiik is unremarkable by the standards of lakes. It's perhaps five miles long and a mile wide, oriented roughly east-west. The water is brown with sediment most of the year, clearing briefly in late winter before spring runoff muddies it again. The shores are marshy in places, firm in others, and lined with the only significant tree growth for miles: cottonwoods and willows that draw on the shallow water table.
The lake is shallow, rarely more than fifteen feet at its deepest, and warm enough for comfortable swimming in summer. Fish are plentiful but small, mostly carp and perch. Waterfowl nest in the marsh sections, providing eggs and meat for tribes camped nearby.
The basin itself is a practical thing, and the Rakiten treat it as one: a source of water, food, and a fixed point in a landscape that has none. The water is another matter. Kro Shiik is the gathering water — the place where the living river the Rakiten hold sacred from source to sea pools before it departs eastward down the Ver Neles. The mud is mundane. The flow through it is not, and the difference between the two is the whole of the country's quarrel with the colony downstream.
The convocation
Once a year, at the autumn equinox, tribal leaders gather at Kro Shiik for the annual convocation, the only time all Rakiten tribes come together in one place. Camps ring the lake, arranged by tradition: each tribe has its customary location, and disputes over placement have been known to derail entire gatherings.
The convocation lasts five days. The first is for arriving and establishing camps. The second through fourth are for discussion, negotiation, and the resolution of inter-tribal disputes. The fifth is for leave-taking and the ceremonies that mark the end of gathering season.
Decisions at the convocation are made by consensus, in sign and in the open, where every tribe with a line of sight is a witness — the form of worship the Rakiten owe Vaeloten, the daemon of the seen gesture. In practice this means most decisions aren't made. The tribes are too independent, too watchful of one another, too attached to their own ways. The camps' order is itself a record: the sight-bonds of the Ver Pes delta hold the western shore by the freshest inflowing water, a position their ancestors earned and they have never given up. The gathering still does the work consensus does not block — marriages arranged, trade conducted, news carried, feuds settled. The Kro Shiik convocation has its own entry; what the lake holds is the body, the deadlock is the institution's.
The bone shore
The southeastern shore of Kro Shiik is called the Bone Shore, a stretch of marshy ground where buffalo occasionally die during winter crossings. The carcasses accumulate over years, their bones eventually washing into shallow water or sinking into the mud.
The Rakiten consider the Bone Shore sacred. The spirits of the dead buffalo are believed to linger here, and their blessing is sought before major hunts. Offerings are left at the water's edge: tobacco, carved bone, occasionally drops of blood.
Some tribes believe that a white buffalo died here in the mythic past, and its spirit guards the lake. Others say the Bone Shore is simply where death gathers, and the spirits are hungry rather than benevolent. The practical result is the same: no one fishes or hunts near the southeastern shore, and camps avoid the area.
The departing water
The Roule colonial villages lie downstream and east, where the Ver Neles carries the gathered water toward the sea, and on clear days the smoke of their burned grass stands on the eastern horizon. The trouble is not that the colony fouls the river with dirt. It is that the colony dams it. A dam set across the lower Ver Neles backs the channel into warm, stagnant slackwater and, in dry years, strands the reaches into rotting, disconnected pools, so the water gathered at Kro Shiik no longer departs. To a people who hold the river one living body, a river that has been stopped is not slow. It is dead.
Roule has now sent a land-factor, Wendel Corvos, to the convocation with a standing offer: annual water-rent for the diverted flow. The offer is the trap. To take coin is to price a sacred river and concede it can be bought; to refuse is to be written into a foreigner's ledger as the side that turned down a fair bargain. Across twenty autumns the tribes have hardened into three positions — withdraw further, ride east and end the colony, or defer for one more year — and the largest is the one that cannot choose. How near the patience is to ending is what they read in the smoke.
The convocation argues this less cleanly than its anger would suggest, and the reason sits on its own western shore. In the last drought the Ver Pes delta bonds threw an earthwork across the Ver Lakei, a narrow tributary in their winter range, and held its water back to force rival herds to come and ask — a river of their own, stilled, by the very tribes who speak loudest against Roule. No one has named it the gravest crime. The delta tribes are too strong, and the water, they say, was only being held.