06 · The White Roads & the Painted Valleys

The White Roads — what they are

The salt trade is the most important commerce in Cappadocia and the least romantic. Everybody needs salt: salt preserves fish, meat, cheese, hides; the great cities of the empire do not function without it; the long winter larders of every village in Anatolia are salt-cured. The salt itself comes from the shallow lakes south and west of the theme — Tuz Gölü above all, but also the smaller lakes around Mokissos — where in late summer the water dries off and leaves a crust that men in wide hats and oiled boots break and shovel into hundredweight panniers. The panniers go onto mules. The mules go north, in trains of fifty to a hundred animals, along the roads that have carried salt since long before the empire and will carry salt long after.

These are the white roads. They are called white because at the end of a long dry October the dust on them is white with spilt salt, and a barefoot child who walks them comes home with white feet, and the verges where the mule trains rest are white where the animals have been watered and the salt has crystallised on the stones. A villager who tells you to take the white road is not being poetic. He is telling you which road, in literal contrast to the brown road that goes up to the high pasture and the red road that goes down to the iron forge.

When the caravans pass

Every village on a white road knows to within a day when the salt is coming. The first caravans of the season pass in the last week of September; the great press of the trade is the first three weeks of October; the last stragglers go through in the first week of November, hurrying ahead of the snow. A village on a white road in early October is not a quiet place. There are inns that operate only this month, opened by families who shutter them again in November and reopen them the following October; there are smiths who keep a stock of mule-shoes ready for a trade they will see for thirty days a year; there are boys of ten who earn a follis a day holding mules and consider it the great commercial enterprise of their childhood.

The country eats better in the second week of October than in any other week. The muleteers spend coin, the inns lay on extra bread and wine, and the villages remember it. A campaign session set in October on a white road should have, in the background of every scene, the steady rhythm of bells and hooves and the dust rising at the end of the valley.

Who drives the caravans

Not heroes. Teamsters, muleteers, and merchants. A typical caravan is owned by a syndicate of three or four merchants from Caesarea or Tyana — sometimes one of them rides with it, sometimes none — and is driven by a chief muleteer with eight to fifteen men under him. The chief muleteer is usually a man in his forties who has done the road since he was twelve. He knows every inn, every well, every short cut, every patch of road where the bandits sit in a bad year. He is paid badly and tipped well. He is, on the white road, a king of a small and entirely competent kingdom that exists for thirty days a year and dissolves into the villages for the other eleven months.

The drivers under him are a mixed bag. Greeks from the lake country. Armenians from the eastern villages. A few Paulicians (the trade does not care about doctrine). The occasional Arab — yes, in 838 — who came over as a child after some long-forgotten ransom and stayed and married and now drives mules for a Greek syndicate and is, in this small mobile world, one of them. They speak a working pidgin on the road that is mostly Greek with Armenian counting-numbers and Arabic for parts of the mule's tack. The country tolerates them with affection. The bishop, if asked, would have opinions. The bishop is not asked.

The inn at the bend

Every white road has, every fifteen miles or so, an inn at a bend. The inn is a single long low building of dressed tuff, a courtyard with a stone trough, a stable for forty mules under a tile roof, a common room with two long tables, and upstairs a row of small rooms that sleep two to a bed. The inn-keeper is a family — a husband and wife and however many sons and daughters are old enough to carry plates — and they live in the back room year-round but do their year's business in October. The food is bread, lentils, onions, hard cheese, salt fish, the rough red wine of the local valley, and on a good night a stew of mutton. The price is fixed by long custom and posted on a board in Greek and, since the eighth century, in Armenian as well. The rooms are honest. The stable is clean. The wife sees everything and remembers most of it.

An inn at the bend in October is a perfect set-piece location for a campaign session. The party arrives at dusk. The yard is full of mules. The common room is full of muleteers in various stages of supper and song. A merchant from Caesarea is in the corner with his ledger. A boy is asleep under a bench. The wife sets bread in front of the party before they have asked for it. Outside the door, somewhere up the road, a wolf is making its presence known to a flock that is no longer where the wolf remembered it being. The GM should let this scene breathe for half an hour of real time before anything in particular happens.

What the valleys look like

Pale pink rock, fading at sunset to rose and at dawn to grey-violet. Pinnacles — chimneys — left standing where the wind and rain have eaten the softer rock around them. Whole hillsides honeycombed with door-shaped openings, set at every height, some reachable only by a rope, some opening directly onto a path, some opening onto nothing because the path was eaten away two centuries ago and the cell behind the door has been empty since.

Three valleys carry the bulk of the monastic settlement: Göreme (which the Greeks call Korama), Soğanlı (Soandos), and Ihlara (Peristrema). Each has its own character. Korama is the city of the valleys — relatively crowded, relatively organised, with several substantial communal houses and a circuit walk between chapels that takes a full day. Soandos is poorer and quieter, scattered across a wider area, and its chapels tend to be smaller and older. Peristrema is a long gorge along a single river, with chapels strung at intervals like beads, and a culture more eremitic than communal. The white road from Tuz Gölü to Caesarea passes the mouth of Peristrema and the southern edge of Korama, and the muleteers, after fifteen years of the same road, know the bells of half the chapels by ear.

What is on the walls

In 838: not as much as a later visitor will find, and not as little as official iconoclast policy would prefer. The pattern across the valleys is the long quiet quarrel: every metropolitan instruction since 815 has been to whitewash figural images and limit decoration to crosses, vine scrolls, and geometric panels. The instructions have been received with the unfailing courtesy due to a metropolitan, and the work has been done — in places. In other places it has not. In other places again the figural images have been whitewashed and then, on a quiet Tuesday in a wet spring, partially uncovered, on the grounds that the whitewash was flaking and the brother responsible was elsewhere.

The aniconic work itself is often very beautiful. The Cappadocian taste for the geometric is real and ancient: interlaced crosses, vine scrolls full of small clean leaves, four-armed crosses with little discs at the terminals, panels of red and ochre lozenges. A well-decorated aniconic chapel in Soandos in 838 is a quietly thrilling thing to stand inside. The brothers who painted it are proud of it.

They are also, many of them, faintly mournful about it. The standard local complaint, repeated in a dozen variants across the valleys, runs: it is beautiful, yes, beautiful, very beautiful — but you cannot have one of those lovely faces with the big eyes and the sad mouths, like the one your Uncle Photas had on the chapel wall at home, the one that looked just like him the morning the tax man got him that time. The faces are missed. The faces are missed everywhere. The valleys are full of people quietly, patiently, courteously waiting for the faces to come back. (They will, twelve years from now, when iconoclasm ends. But the valleys do not know this. The valleys are waiting.)

In the chapel of St — the name is worn off the lintel, and three brothers have three opinions about what it was — above the village of Çavuşin, there is a fresco of a local saint whose miracle is depicted in a panel to the left of the apse. The miracle involves a fish, or possibly a mule, and a quantity of bread that is either multiplied or rescued from a fire, depending on which brother you ask. The saint himself is shown with a very large halo and a patient expression, as one who has been waiting eight centuries for somebody to get the story right. The villagers kiss the panel every August and none of them can agree on what happened either. This does not diminish their devotion. It is, in the local understanding, the saint's own fault for not having made the miracle more memorable, and he is lucky they remember him at all.

How the chapels are made

A team of four men, working competently, can cut a small single-nave chapel — say, four metres by three, with a low barrel vault and a small apse — out of the tuff in about six weeks. The work is done with iron picks, short-handled, struck two-handed; the spoil is carried out in baskets and used either to level a courtyard outside or to make a low retaining wall along a nearby terrace. Most chapels are cut in winter, when the agricultural work pauses and the tuff is slightly damp and easier to work.

Once cut, the walls are smoothed with a finer iron tool, then given a thin coat of lime plaster mixed with crushed straw. The plaster takes paint well for the first day and badly thereafter; serious decorators schedule their work in narrow morning windows and curse the afternoon. A typical chapel takes perhaps two months to plaster and decorate, working at a sane pace; a determined patron with money can have it done in three weeks, at the cost of work that will start to flake within a generation.

Damage is the constant problem. Tuff is soft. Roof falls happen — small ones constantly, large ones every decade or two. Plaster comes away in damp seasons. Soot from the lamps blackens the upper walls within a year. Every chapel in the valleys is, in some sense, always being repaired. The good chapels have a brother whose job is the repair work, and who knows every patch on every wall by feel.

How the monks live

Communal houses (Korama, parts of Peristrema): perhaps twenty to forty brothers under an abbot, with a refectory cut from a single chamber, a common kitchen, a chapel for the offices, and small individual cells along a corridor. Diet: bread, lentils, olives, cheese in season, wine cut with water, occasional fish brought up from Caesarea. The brothers work — in the chapels, in the kitchen gardens cut into the terraces below the cliffs, in the binding of small books for sale at Caesarean monasteries, and in the painting work that is the valley's only export of significance.

Eremitic settlements (Soandos, parts of Peristrema): a hermit, a single cell, perhaps a small chapel adjacent, perhaps not. He is visited weekly by a brother from a nearby communal house who brings bread, takes away what needs taking away, and stays half an hour to confess him and be confessed. Some hermits speak. Some have not spoken in years. Some have entered the silence the local tradition calls hesychia, which is not the same as the not-speaking, but which is hard to explain to outsiders and which the brothers do not attempt to.

At the communal house above Peristrema there is a brother called David who is convinced that the swallow that nests every spring in the beam above the refectory door is delivering messages from God. The swallow has been doing this for eleven years. Brother David writes the messages down — they are, in his account, mostly about the weather and the quality of the forthcoming lentil harvest, with occasional remarks about the souls of specific brothers that David does not share — and he keeps them in a small box under his cell pallet. The abbot, a patient man, has twice asked David to show him the messages. David has refused, on the grounds that the abbot is not the intended recipient. The other brothers are divided between those who think David is holy and those who think the swallow is ordinary and David is simply a man who needs something to look forward to in March. Both factions leave him bread crusts at the refectory, which is the monastery's real verdict.

The villages that eat their men

There is a thing the country knows about itself that the country cannot explain. In certain villages — never all of them, never even most of them, but the same villages, in the same valleys, generation after generation — the men do not grow old. They marry at twenty, father children at twenty-five, begin to cough at thirty-five, and are buried, by their wives and their grown sons, somewhere between forty and fifty. The women in those villages live as long as women anywhere. The widows outnumber the husbands by the time the harvest is in. The graveyard, if you walk through it, is full of slabs that say *Niketas, son of Theodoros, in the forty-third year of his age; pray for him*; *Bardas, son of Mamas, in the thirty-ninth year; pray for him*; *Photios, son of Petros, in the forty-seventh year; pray for him*. The wives' slabs come later and bear older numbers.

The country has known this for as long as the country has been here. It does not know why. The villagers themselves have a dozen explanations, none satisfactory. The headman at one such village (call it, as the locals call it, Kato Khorion — the lower village — south-west of Soandos) will tell you, if asked at the right moment of the evening, that his grandfather believed the houses had been cut too deep into the rock and that the rock itself was sour; another grandfather, of a different family, swore it was the spring water, though the spring water is fine and the next village over drinks from the same source and lives to seventy. A third tradition blames a curse laid in the time of the iconoclast emperor before this one, which is no help because nobody can name him. The cathedral school at Caesarea has no opinion. The brothers at the nearby monastery (whose monks come from elsewhere and who themselves live as long as monks anywhere) bless the village every August and the men keep coughing and dying.

The grandmothers know which villages are unlucky. They have known for centuries. A grandmother will not, if she can help it, let her grand-daughter marry into Kato Khorion, or into the small cluster of houses called Sariyer above the Peristrema gorge, or into two or three other places whose names the local women keep in their heads and pass on at weddings without ever quite saying out loud why. The custom is: when a match is proposed to one of those villages, the grandmother of the bride makes a long sympathetic face, kisses the matchmaker on both cheeks, and says — *no, child, not there. There are nicer boys at the next village. Let me ask my cousin.* The matchmaker, who also knows, does not argue.

The cause — which we mention here because the modern reader will want to know, and which the GM should not put into any 9th-century character's mouth — is, in fact, in the rock itself. The tuff of certain Cappadocian valleys carries a fibrous mineral (erionite) which, when the rock is cut and lived in, releases fibres that lodge in the lungs and cause, decades later, a wasting cancer of the chest lining. The villages built on the wrong outcrops have been losing their men to it for at least two thousand years. The country, in 838, cannot name the mineral and cannot see the fibre. It can only watch which villages eat their men, and warn its grand-daughters.

**For the GM.** This is not a horror beat and it is not a mystery to solve. It is a quiet, sad, true fact about the country, in the same register as the goat in the fence and the hermit who has begun to speak. Use it lightly. Let the party ride through a village in the second week of October on a perfectly ordinary white-road afternoon, and let them notice, without comment from any NPC, that the men in the square are all old or all very young, and that the women in their forties have the patient unhurried bearing of widows who have been widows long enough to have remarried other widowers from other villages. Let the headman, when pressed, give the rock-is-sour explanation, with a small dignified shrug. Do not solve it. The country has not solved it. The country is still here.

A note to the GM — what the tower is attached to

The Painted Valleys are a trap for clever players, and the trap is exactly this shape. A party of clever foreigners rides into a village, looks up at the rock-cut chapel above the cliff, and asks the headman what the column in the apse *means*. The headman — who is sixty, who was baptised in that chapel and married in that chapel and will be buried out of that chapel — looks at them for a long moment with an expression they will not at first understand. The column holds up the roof. The column has always held up the roof. The column is the column. The roof is the roof.

The country is not a code to be cracked. Most of what is in front of the players is exactly and only what it appears to be. The fresco on the apse is a fresco on the apse. The hermit on the hill is a hermit on the hill. The goat in the fence is a goat in the fence. When a thing in this country *does* in fact mean something more than itself — and sometimes it does; the villages that eat their men are one of those times — the country will let the players know in its own time and in its own way.

Until then, the kindest thing a GM can do for a party of clever foreigners is to let one of them, gently, in the second session, ask what some perfectly ordinary feature of the landscape is attached to, and let the headman, gently, in the third, tell them what it is attached to. The answer will be something like *the floor*, or *the cliff*, or *itself*. The lesson lands once, the party stops over-reading the country, and the campaign can begin.

The quiet trade — pigments, plaster, and the brothers who travel

There is a small guild — though no one calls it that — of perhaps a dozen brothers across the three valleys who travel between communal houses with sacks of pigment, rolls of cartoon-paper, and the small iron tools of the trade. They are the painters. They are the plasterers. They are, in the right villages and on the right evenings, the men who uncover figural work that has been politely whitewashed under metropolitan instructions and, in the right villages and on the right evenings, the men who whitewash it back when the inspector is due. The same brothers do both jobs. The same brothers will, in a generation, do the great uncovering when iconoclasm ends. They are quietly proud of having kept the patterns alive in their hands while the walls were blank.

The pigments come up the white road from Tuz Gölü in October, on a single mule led by a brother of the Korama house whose only job, in this life, is the pigment run. He has done the run for twenty-one years. He buys ochre from a Greek family at the lakes, vermilion from an Arab trader at Caesarea who imports it from across the pass, lapis from a Venetian agent who comes through Constantinople once every three or four years and whose price is paid in cathedral silver advanced against the next harvest, and green earth from a quarry above Soandos that the brothers work themselves on the feast-day of St Sergios. The mule's name is Onesimos. The brother's name is forgotten in the records but is, in the valleys, known to every village headman on the route, who steps out to meet him at the bend below the inn and exchanges three sentences about the weather and one about the price of pigment before letting him pass on into the dusk.

A PC who is admitted, by patient courtesy over several weeks, into the company of one of the travelling brothers will see things no inspector from Constantinople will ever see: a small panel of the Forty Martyrs uncovered for one afternoon in a side-chapel above Soandos so that an old shepherd, who has been asking for two years, can pray in front of it once before he dies; a fresh whitewash going up at dawn over a great Pantocrator that was, the previous night, briefly visible by lamplight to a wedding party from three villages; the small wooden box in which a brother keeps a dozen cartoon-tracings of faces he is not, this year, allowed to paint, and which he opens, in the lamplight, with the same care a merchant opens his strong-box. The country is keeping the faces. The country has been keeping them since 815. The country will not stop.

Hooks

**The commission.** A village headman north of Soandos has commissioned the decoration of a new chapel cut from the cliff above his settlement. He has money. The painter he wants is in prison at Tyana. The pigments he wants are not available in the theme. His wife wants their dead son painted on the apse as St Mamas, which is illegal under current canon law and very dangerous to the painter. (This hook is the spine of ch. 10. It is foreshadowed everywhere in this chapter on purpose.)

**The flaking Pantocrator.** A communal chapel in Korama has had its great apse Pantocrator whitewashed under metropolitan instructions for the past nineteen years. The whitewash is failing, badly, this spring. The abbot is, sincerely, an iconoclast. His brothers, less sincerely, are not. Someone has to decide whether to repatch or to let the image come back, and whoever decides will have made an enemy of the other party for life.

**The hermit who has begun to speak.** A hermit of forty years' silence above Peristrema has, this week, begun to speak. He is speaking to anyone who will climb up to his cell. What he is saying is, by general agreement of the visitors so far, important. It is also, by the same agreement, not quite in any known language.

**The pigment mule is late.** Onesimos and his brother have not arrived at the bend below the Korama inn at the expected hour, which is the third evening of the third week of October, and have not arrived by the second evening of the fourth week either. The cathedral silver for this year's lapis went south with them. The brothers at Korama would like, very quietly, to know where the mule is before the metropolitan's auditor arrives in November.

A note to the GM — what to have open on the table

A session set in the painted valleys is the session in which *Appendix B — Stones and Pigments* earns its place in the book. Have Plate B-I (chapel anatomy) open the first time the party walks into a rock-cut chapel — the vocabulary in it will save you inventing words. Have Plate B-II (fresco anatomy) open the first time a PC asks what is on the wall — the answer in 838 is *a cross, not a face*, and the plate shows why and what the village is waiting for. Have Plate B-III (the six pigments) open the first time the party meets the pigment mule or the brother who paints — the prices in folles and walking-days are the village's economy made visible. Have Plate B-IV (the eighteen-month carving sequence) open when a PC asks how the chapels are made, or when a chapel in one of your villages is mid-cut and the party rides through twice a year. Four plates, one per common question. None of them needs to be read aloud in full; a sentence each is enough. The plates are the appendix earning its keep at the table, which is the whole point of including them.