It was during the reign of King Geonmu that the Sindeok set its sights on the Chwanjeou, an impassable land of extremes, inhabited by barbarians and mountainous tribes that barred the landward passage into Alang and subsequently the mysterious and opulent empire of Hindh. For centuries the armies of the Sindeok had been dwarfed by those forbidding mountains, standing like a wall separating the world of Nanwian from the world of Hindh. Beyond, all was legend and fable, appearing like some voluptuous exotic fantasy. It was called Wuchuan before the Sindeok, ‘the land of the five valleys’, ‘the kingdom of satin and ink’; this was a land of darkly beautiful people — fiery and handsome men whose eyes shone like silver, and rosy-cheeked women draped in flowing silk and ribbons, dancing in an undulating manner on braceleted and tattooed feet, stirring the gold-laden dust of distant Hindh. But this was only a veil before a core of bloodshed and fury; for gold, there was steel; for love, there was hatred. 

Fighting was life itself to the people of the Chwanjeou. They lived and died by their blades. Vengeance was their creed, violence their climate. The young Ahn Yujin, named Han Seorin, at an age where she should have been her thumb, instead ran it over the edge of her saber, babbling the name of Gunmo, the celebrated armourer who had made it for her. ‘May thy blade rip and tear’, said the toddler Seorin, reading the inscription on the silver blade; a natural malediction was, ‘May thy blade rust and shatter’. These were not the curved sabers of the north, descended and scarcely evolved from their Datar ancestors, but an almost straight and very weighty sword that had no guard. No Chwanjeou warrior was properly dressed without their saber; non-combatant women also wore a smaller, but no less formidable, dagger on their belts. These gorgeous weapons were used in a slashing manner, for a kill with the point would lack artistry. Weapons were a cult, as dear as honour itself. 

Everywhere, at all times, the people of the Chwanjeou fought. They fought amongst themselves, or against invaders with equal fury. Successive invaders had found them a terrible foe: the Sinae god-kings, the emperors of Hindh, the Great Khan Taibuga, his son Toghon, and his grandson Naghachu. Legends of the impregnable barrier of Taibuga persisted well into the era of the Karranids of Hindh in the form of a saying, “If the emperor is a fool, he will attack across Alang.” Some invaders were not even considered worthy of a pitched battle by the natives. King Yeonbul, having conquered all of Nanwian and put down the fires of ethnic conflict, next decided to subdue the Chwanjeou and stamp out the final remnants of Sinae disobedience. But he was met and defeated by an army of raging women. The men had not thought it worthwhile turning out themselves. 

The women, believed to be descended from the tribe of the Tiger-Mother who had come down to earth from the Tangr-To Mountains, knew how to fight as well as their men. When the inhabitants of Xiaoli were besieged by Son Jeonmon ‘the eunuch general’ during the reign of Geonmu, women fought beside men. At the sight of Jeonmon’s army of ten thousand with artillery, the men quailed and thought of surrender to spare themselves the sack of Xiaoli, as was the customs of war following a resistance. But the women shamed their men for entertaining such weak thoughts, and the old mother of the city’s lord addressed them, “If you are afraid, then give your women your swords, and hide behind our skirts when we fight.” This produced the desired effect: the men flung themselves onto the invaders with unceasing fury, all the more shocking coming from a foe that they thought had capitulated. But the eunuch general was not defeated by the resistance; when the defenders of Xiaoli ran out of ammunition, they flung rocks down their battlements; when there were no more rocks, the men hurled themselves onto the attackers; when there were no more men, the women threw their children down as ammunition, and then jumped off the walls themselves. Such was the climate of unyielding violence in the Chwanjeou. 

For much of the history of the Sindeok the Chwanjeou was the final frontier. The Datars were tamed, the Jiaozhis were driven into the distant south, the Taiheis paid tribute in women and weapons; but the people of the Chwanjeou had always proved to be impossible to subjugate. Individual princes and chieftains could be bought, but scarcely had the length of some river or a little plateau been pacified when another insurrection would flare up in an altogether different place, sometimes led by those leaders whose passivity the Sindeok thought had been purchased. When its turn came to bring the Chwanjeou under its heel, the Sindeok then realised why this land had been left to its own devices by so many others before it, despite the riches in the soil and the overland route to Hindh; trade between Hindh and Nanwian went either by the route through the twilight khanates of the oases, or by sea. Even when the province of Nanchwan had been carved out by Yeo Hwanseong under Mundeok’s reign, the character of the Chwanjeou remained unchanged. 

Such was the nature of the Chwanjeou. Tigers roamed the lowlands of the north; eagles soared in the skies above the gaunt highlands in the south. Gigantic mountains straddled everywhere in this land. All around were arid regions where nothing lived, ridged rocks which no man could climb, where only the wind raged unceasingly. Yet Sindeok soldiers strained to hoist their guns onto these rocks, and the tribes jumped over these rocks and marched through impassable ravines to hunt their prey. The armies of the Sindeok fought desperately to subdue and conquer this cruel land, key to their colonial expansion into Alang. And down in Chagang, the capital of Nanchwan, beyond the shadows of the mountains and the periphery of the battles, there was an atmosphere of seduction, exciting adventures, and political intrigue. Fruit farms, markets piled with fabrics and exotic hides, Alang jewellers weighing enormous emeralds, Chwanjeou armourers working on chilling blades as darkly beautiful as the natives of their homeland. From fretted balconies came the plaintive songs of the land combined with northerner musical instruments. Stretching across the flatter river plains of Nanchwan were a handful of dusty little garrison towns, where easy women, gambling, and bad wine were the only merriments for the Sindeok officials stationed there. 

This province, more a tourist destination (or prison for seditious officers) than an administrative division of the kingdom, was where all that was considered exotically dangerous by the Sindeok court could be found. Handsome, savage natives; eternal snows; romantic ruins. Here they could be distracted from the ennui of courtly life. In these small towns the aristocracy congregated in an atmosphere of scandal and luxury, where a glorious duel to the death for honour could be engineered if they so wished. Milder-minded people sought the soothing, perfumed springs in the rocky heights, chasing after a quiet that had long left the Sindeok. The visiting l