Vardulli in 218 B.C.

Vardulli — Spring 218 BC · A Free People of the North.

The Varduli — a people of the rain-green country where the northern mountains of Iberia fall to the cold sea, between the Caristii to the west and the great nation of the Vascones to the east. They are kin in tongue and blood to the old peoples of these uplands, neither Celt nor Iberian of the south but a folk apart, speaking a speech all their own. They keep no king and no single capital: the Varduli are a loose weave of clans and valleys, each gathered about its own hillfort, its own headmen and its own herds. Theirs is a rugged land of wooded ridges and narrow river-valleys running down to the ocean, of cattle and sheep on the high pastures and small fields of grain and apple in the bottoms. In 218 BC they are wholly their own masters. The armies of Carthage move far to the south and east, beyond the Ebro and along the warm seaboard; the writ of no great power reaches these northern glens.

While the great war gathers far to the south — Carthaginian armies massing beyond the Ebro, the seaboard cities trembling — the Varduli keep to the rhythm of their own seasons in the green north. Theirs is a country the southern powers have never troubled to take: too poor in silver, too rough in its hills, too far from the warm-water trade. The people live as they always have, scattered among fortified hill-villages above the valleys, driving cattle to the upland pastures in summer and down again before the rains, tending small plots of grain in the river-bottoms. No king binds them; they are a confederacy of clans, each valley a little world. Strangers know them only at second hand, as one more of the wild northern nations beyond the mountains — a free people on the ocean edge of the world, untouched by the quarrels of Carthage and the cities.