In 1268, as the Teutonic Knights burned Curonian villages and forced conversion at sword-point, the Pūkjājēs clan—a distinguished lineage of Curonian traders, navigators, and scholars—made a desperate decision. Rather than submit to the sword or abandon their ancient beliefs, they would flee beyond the known world, carrying with them the accumulated wisdom of centuries.
The Pūkjājēs were not merely refugees; they were the culmination of Curonia's golden age of exploration. For generations, their trading fleets had reached from the British Isles to Byzantium, from the Baltic to Baghdad. Their warehouses held manuscripts from Moorish Spain, astronomical instruments from Samarkand, medical texts from Constantinople, and maps from Chinese merchants who had reached the Black Sea. When the Crusades threatened to destroy this heritage, Veltas the Navigator, patriarch of the Pūkjājēs, ordered the clan's greatest treasure loaded onto their strongest ships: not gold, but knowledge.
The Exodus (1268–1289)
Phase I: The Baltic Escape (1268–1270)
Departing under cover of winter darkness, the Pūkjājēs sailed three longships—Zvaigzne, Vējš, and Zelts—east through the Gulf of Finland, hugging the coast to avoid Teutonic patrols. They carried 300 souls: warriors, shipwrights, astronomers, physicians, and the clan's complete Bibliotheca Pūkjājēs—2,400 manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese, plus navigational instruments, alchemical apparatus, and seed stocks from three continents.
Women and children accompanied the initial flight—wives, daughters, mothers who had served as scribes and scholars alongside the men. But the journey would prove brutal.
Phase II: The Northern Route (1270–1275)
They wintered in Novgorod, trading silks for supplies, then pressed north into the White Sea during the brief Arctic summer of 1271. Using Norse navigational charts obtained decades earlier from Viking traders, they sailed the Arctic coast, portaging across the Kola Peninsula when ice closed the seas.
In 1273, Zelts was crushed by ice off the Yamal Peninsula. Forty died, including Veltas's wife Sibilja and twenty women who had kept the manuscripts dry through storms. The survivors transferred to Zvaigzne and Vējš, burning Zelts for warmth as they watched the wreckage sink.
Phase III: The Siberian Trek (1275–1282)
When ice destroyed Vējš near the Lena River delta in 1275, the Pūkjājēs abandoned the sea. They became land nomads, building sledges to carry the waterlogged but salvageable manuscripts across the Siberian tundra. For seven years, they traveled the ancient Paleo-Siberian migration routes, hunting mammoth ivory to trade with Evenki guides, crossing the Verkhoyansk Range in winter when rivers froze solid.
More women died: of childbirth in tents at -40°F, of scurvy, of exhaustion. By 1282, when they reached the Bering Strait, only 300 men remained—the women and children were gone, buried in unmarked graves across the width of Asia.
Phase IV: The Crossing and Descent (1282–1289)
They crossed the Bering Strait during the winter of 1282–1283, walking across ice they prayed would hold, carrying the clan's knowledge on their backs. The journey south through Alaska and Canada took six years. They followed the Rocky Mountain cordillera, avoiding the plains where indigenous nations might report their passage, living on mountain goats and thermal springs.
In the summer of 1289, the survivors—now reduced to exactly 300 men, mostly under 30, all male, carrying the last surviving manuscripts in waterproof sealskin bundles—descended through the Absaroka Mountains seeking sanctuary.
They found it: four volcanic grabens, collapsed caldera segments at 8,200–9,800 feet elevation, ringed by sheer basalt cliffs, heated by geothermal vents, invisible from surrounding valleys. Here, the Pūkjājēs made the zvērests (the Sacred Vow) on the summer solstice: they would preserve their knowledge, their freedom, and their way of life.
The Bibliotheca Pūkjājēs—water-damaged but largely intact—included:
- The Constantinople Codex: Ptolemy's Almagest with Byzantine corrections
- The Baghdad Collection: Al-Khwarizmi's algebraic treatises, medical texts from Ibn Sina
- The Toledo Translations: Aristotelian logic, preserved by Moorish scholars
- The Samarkand Instruments: Astrolabes and celestial maps from the Maragheh Observatory
- The Chinese Charts: Navigation methods from the Song Dynasty, obtained through Black Sea trade
This inheritance—the scientific knowledge of the ancient world—would form the foundation of the Ryder Trust's 700-year technological advantage.
The Sacred Vow
On the summer solstice of 1289, the survivors made the zvērests (the Sacred Vow): they would preserve their knowledge, their freedom, and their way of life, accepting that they might be the last generation. They carved the first warrens into the tuff, diverted streams for irrigation, and established the proto-Gudrate—a council of the wisest among them.
They did not yet understand why their women had died. They only knew that the gods—or fate—had taken them. They named the valley "Lāsta ieleja" (the Cursed Valley) and prayed to Māra, the Latvian goddess of the earth, to protect them.