‘But in the main the vampires were kept down, and in those days there were no Wamphyri. The people weren’t migratory; they had nothing to fear and so nothing to run from; their systems were mainly barter, less frequently feudal.
‘Anyway, as far as I can make out they were maybe three to four hundred years behind us. There were big differences, of course: they hadn’t discovered gunpowder, for one thing. Also, while they’d developed a complex language, they still hadn’t made much effort to get it down on paper – or on skins. That’s why most of this has had to come down by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. Of course, you can get big distortions that way: some unimportant things get exaggerated while others of real importance are lost entirely. For example, the heroes in the Traveller myths are all giants, who eat vampires for breakfast and don’t even get a stomach ache! But no one remembers who developed the metalworking skills, designed the first caravan, made the first crossbow.
‘So that was the way this world was: like ours maybe three or four hundred years ago, but in many ways less dangerous, less warlike, less noisy. Mainly people lived in peace with each other, and apart from small territorial disputes they were left alone to farm, fish, and trade off anything extra which they managed to produce. There have been plenty of worse places, and worse times, in our own world.
‘Oh, and perhaps I should mention: in that bygone time the world did have proper seasons, shorter days and nights, again pretty similar to our own planet. But then –
Then something happened.
‘According to the Traveller legend, a “white sun” appeared in the night sky. It came through the heavens so fast it looked like a bar of fire; it glanced off the moon, speared down and blazed across the surface of the world! As it fell so it shrank, until finally it skimmed across the land in a huge ball of fire, like a flat stone bouncing on water, and came to rest back there beyond the mountains.
‘But though it was small, this “white sun”, its magic was enormous. It speeded up the moon in its orbit, changed the world’s axis, brought into being geological stresses of awesome magnitude. It created these mountains, the frozen lands to the north, the deserts of the south. And for a thousand years after its coming, the surface of this world was more like hell than the friendly place it had been.
The seasons were gone forever, the moon was now a demon flyer that called to the wolves, an estimated quarter-billion people were reduced to a few thousand. The continents had changed, mountains disappeared from where they’d been, were forced up elsewhere; the survivors went through a nightmare of tidal waves, storms, volcanic upheavals – you name it. But they learned to live with it, and eventually the world settled down. Except that now there was a Starside and a Sunside.
‘Centuries passed. Who knows how many? Far Sunside became a desert, and Starside . . . well, you’ve seen it. Only the mountains and their Sunside foothills could support human life as we know it. People had settled there, started to rebuild, however slowly, crudely. They remembered a few of their skills, used them to start afresh. And meanwhile the swamps, mainly unchanged, had re-stocked with evil vampiric life . . .
‘Explorers went over the mountains, through the passes, saw the frozen wastes beyond. Torrential rains, the howling elements and glacial ice had carved mighty stacks from the mountain flanks, but the land was all but barren. Men couldn’t live there. Men, mind you . . .
Then there came the plague – a plague of vampires!
The swamps overflowed with the damned things. They infested men and animals in unprecedented numbers. Bands of vampirized men roamed on Sunside, murdering by night and crawling into holes during the interminable days. Reduced to near-savagery by Nature’s disaster, now this un-natural disaster reduced people further still. Then the tribes rallied, began hunting vampires, killed them as they had in the old days. They used the stake, the sword, fire; they dragged vampires screaming into the open, pinned them down for the sun to fry.