But the area remained prey to seismic upheaval for years afterward; and there were floods in Merovingen in the summer of 2691, in 2695, in 2696, in 2698, 2699, and 2700, generally just a flooding of the streets, but in 2696 and 2700 the floods came high enough to cause extensive damage. The early floods were attributed to slight subsidence and unseasonal rams, which had indeed been known during and after the sharrh attacks. It was theorized the fires which attended the quake denuded the land and prevented the retention of water upland. Minor diking and sandbagging took care of the problem in most years.

And there was one curious incident, when floodwaters revealed the Angel of Merovingen, which appeared from forgotten (some said miraculous) provenance, washed to light in the clearing of rubble from the original governor's residence. It was seized upon as a sign of hope by the desperate citizens and contributed to the resolve of Merovingians to stay on the site of their city.

But in 2701 the dikes broke and the floodwaters stayed into winter, shallow enough to wade in most districts, Desperate Merovingians filled basements with nibble, built bridges, and in general survived as best they could.

So Merovingen began to be a city of bridges, but the full extent of the calamity was not evident until 2702, when flooding became worse. Merovingians, prevented by fear of Nev Hettek and by inhospitable conditions to either side of their harbor, stayed put,

Conditions grew worse gradually, men seemed to stabilize by 2710, when Nev Hettek intervened in a flooded Merovingen and proved unable to hold it.

Nature, however, was not through with Merovingen, for in 2720, a quake and a subsequent storm combined to alter the contours of the harbor, which had been undergoing silting and which already had numerous difficulties. Many ships in the harbor were swept from moorings and ground together to their destruction, forming a sandbar that finished the harbor in the years that followed. A new, deeper anchorage was established on the other side of Rimmon Isle. The construction of massive dikes and the eventual lessening of the rate of subsidence helped stabilize both city and harbor.

Legends persist that drowned dead rise from the harbor in the worst storms and crew the ships buried in the shallows of the Dead Harbor, which are occasionally said to rise and sail in particularly bad storms. Further superstitions say that the dead recruit sailors to their midst; that all who die at sea are bound to sunken ships, and that at the final departure of the last human from Merovin, the Ghost Fleet will follow.

The Dead Harbor remains the refuge of the lost and the desperate, the outcasts of every city up and down the Det.

Merovan Names

Generally Merovan names reflect the frequency of names in the area of space from which colonists came: that area itself was a frontier and had, like most frontiers, a fairly polyglot and polyethnic population.

Many original place names honored a discoverer, for example the name Merovin itself: or were the whimsy of mapmakers or colonists; or were historical referents to geographical features of other worlds; and finally, some were sharrh names attached only after the initial terse communique identified certain sites in evidence of sharrh claims.

During the Re-establishment two forces operated within the language: first, a breakdown of formal education and the fact that a few groups were bilingual, using the ground-based equivalent of ship-speech: some small, remote areas were actually dominated by these family-languages, derived from Terran origins. Second, there was a realization in the latter part of the Re-establishment that a great deal had been lost, and there was a conscious attempt to restore original forms both in nomenclature and in speech and to adhere to them.

At the ordinary rate of linguistic change in a society without telecommunications, deepteach, or even minimal literacy in a great deal of the population, six hundred years of life on Merovin might have seen Merovin a patchwork of regional dialects so divergent that average citizens from widely separated regions could not understand each other. But to this tendency of language to change rapidly there was a counterbalance: the profound interest of Merovans in regaining contact with humankind, or in preserving their culture against these changes which Merovans of the Re-establishment saw accelerating in their own time.

The influence of religion on this preservation is extreme but varied: Adventists, believing that humankind will come to rescue them, believe that there is a very substantive reason to preserve the original language, so that they can comprehend instruction from their deliverers, who, they trust, will speak something unchanged: they preserve a recollection of deepteach. Revenantists on the other hand do not believe in an intervention, but believe that preserving the ways of the Ancestors gains merit and that a sort of collective karma or sympathy toward the rest of humanity increases the likelihood of rebirth on another world.

In practice, the priests and the wealthy religious speak an educated, conservative language of forms current six hundred years ago; while there exists even among the upper class educated a vernacular which changes much more rapidly, new words which pepper a more conservative speech and which generally disappear as out of vogue.. There is therefore change, but it is slow. The trades, on the other hand, have evolved a vernacular of their own to handle work and business with implements the Ancestors knew only in principle. And the illiterate (or the functionally illiterate, since some learn their letters for religious motives but cannot read with any skill) have a vernacular which is held to the conservative mainstream only by the necessity to communicate with the upper classes. As oper ative within the illiterate community is the tendency of alienated populations to develop jargon or cant specifically designed to shut out unwanted listeners. In some areas this has become impenetrable dialect; and in others, where Terran languages have compounded the problem, there might be said to exist new evolved languages. An example of this is the Falken Isles, where the original neo-Terran language and the creation of an entire new wooden-ship technology have created a language no outsider can understand.

Likewise a canaler from Merovingen or a fanner from the upper Det can lapse deliberately into an accent so extreme that an outsider might hear few intelligible words; and might misunderstand the contextual meanings of those.

Generally personal names and family names have withstood changes far better than place names. This link with persona] Ancestors is a tie which few Merovans will abandon, particularly in the surname. More flexibility appears in the personal name, which is religiously influenced; but even many sharrists are reluctant to abandon the advantages of an Ancestor-name: some names in particular have social or financial advantage, establishing ties to wealthy families or heroes of the Re-establishment, or establishing ties to privileges which have attached to certain names. In Nev Hettek the Schuler name entails the right to the first booth in the main row of the autumn fair, and in Merovingen the Ebers have the right to direct petition of the governor without going through the Justiciary.

Merovin and Money

In general the world runs on the gold standard, each bank or city able to mint its own coin.

Merovingen and other cities of the Det have a basically standard monetary system, although the coinages differ in imprint.

Examples of such, their colloquial names, and their values in ounces arc as follows; and reckoning gold at $425 and silver at $8 an ounce, a comparison in late 20th century coinage is appended.

Merovingian Coinage