Aiekah

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with freshwater tuna, "Bred to be food in large enclosed fish farms." The limbs exist for the farmer: "they were bred with these so the Alverian's could grab them and pull them out of the water." Their history is one sentence and it is the bleakest in the tier: "A life of slavery, turned to misery induced freedom. They were made to walk out of the tank onto the plate of their gods, only to be freed during the fall of Alveria, and then eaten by the escaped slaves, and further enslaved." They have never known a year in which their people were not stock.

Body

Five feet tall, ninety to a hundred and thirty pounds, more of it meat than is decent. "Floppy, frumpy, and feeble tuna bodies. Their arms, legs and webbed three fingered hands are fragile; strong enough to walk from water to plate. Their deep set white eyes are angled down, creating a look of depression. Two large lips, no teeth, and a deep boisterous voice. They are gray-black in color." They swim and breathe underwater. They live forty to fifty years; the Aieko three hundred.

The muscle was designed by cooks. It is laid in broad sheets with fat marbled through it, dark along the spine and pale at the flank, and it is built entirely for flavour and yield, which means it is built for nothing else. An Aiekah is heavy for its height and tires within a hundred yards of walking. It cannot run, cannot climb, cannot carry a load, cannot throw and cannot strike hard enough to matter. The bones are thin, few and set wide apart, and the ribs are hinged in a way that lets the body open cleanly along one line, and every butcher in every province knows where that line is.

Then the arms. The shoulder is a deliberately shallow socket, so the arm lifts easily and dislocates easily, and along the underside of each forearm runs a raised ridge of bone and thickened skin, the width of a grip, in exactly the place a hand closes. It is a handle. It was put there so that the stock could be taken out of the tank one-handed by somebody holding a knife in the other, and it is the single most deliberate piece of work in the whole of the tier. Fisher gaffs on the mill coasts are still forged to seat against it. The free communities bind their forearms with woven weed from childhood, which conceals the ridge and does nothing else, and a bound forearm is the one badge a free Aiekah wears.

They have no teeth and no claws and no venom and no armour and no speed, and they are herbivores. There is no weapon anywhere in the body, and the taboo against eating anything that swam is a people refusing the one thing it was never given the means to do.

The voice is the marvel: "They have beautiful voices, and sing to the moons at night, as their eyes catch the light and create a beautiful haze of white-light." The voice is made in the gas bladder, the same organ that holds them level in the water, and singing empties it. A long song sinks the singer, which is why an Aiekah must come to the surface to sing at length and must stay there while it does, mouth and eyes above the water, unable to submerge until the song is finished and the bladder refilled. The whole of their culture is at the surface at night for a reason that sits in the body, and the whole of the fishing trade is built on it. The gift and the trap are one organ.

The eyes are deep-set and white and gather what light there is; in dim water they see very well and in daylight they are dazzled to near blindness. The mills keep lamps burning over the pens through the dark hours, which stops the singing, stops the escapes, and keeps the stock quiet and stationary, and the mill owners describe the practice as humane.

They hear through the bones of the head. Sound arriving through water reaches them whole, and an Aiekah on one side of a lake hears a song on the other as if it were beside it. Sound arriving through air reaches them barely at all. An Aiekah at the surface, singing, cannot hear a boat, cannot hear a footfall on the bank, cannot hear a voice calling a warning from land, and can hear every note of what its own people are singing back. The trap is closed from the inside. They also read water temperature to a fraction of a degree and feel the pull of the two moons on a lake as a slow tide that no other people can detect, which is how they know the night of the Turning without counting, and how a community that has been carried inland in a barrel knows what has been done to it.

Life

They breed as their fish stock does, since the makers bred them for food and wanted as many as possible. At the first warm moon a female sheds her thousands of eggs in the shallows and the males cloud the water over them, and the eggs are nobody's. In a free community the fry that live are everyone's and are raised in common, sung to from the bank. In a mill they are counted as stock.

A child is nuu, fry, for a year, a vaen, a walker, at three when the legs come in, and grown at ten. The legs are the hardest year of an Aiekah life; the bones are thin and the body is heavy and a walker that is made to walk too early goes crooked and stays so, which is why the mills, who want the legs working early, produce a generation of bent ones and cull them. The name comes with the first song, and a named one is aloo, a singer. At ten the bladder finishes and the voice deepens, and the Deepening is the whole of their coming of age; a community sings all night for it. The long middle is thirty years. Then the Clouding, when the eyes go and the voice goes low and cracks, and an old Aiekah is oma and is sung for rather than singing.

The free sink their dead in the deep of the lake with a song that is not sung at any other time. The mills have no dead, only stock. They are herbivores and eat algae, river weed and the roots of water-lilies, cropped with the hard lips, and they eat very nearly constantly, since a body that is mostly meat on a diet of weed has to.

Frailty

An Aiekah frightened badly enough dies of it. The heart is small for the body mass and a netted one will often be dead before it reaches the bank, from nothing but terror, and the mills have known this for four thousand years and have built their whole practice around it: the lamps, the slow handling, the singing kept going in the next pen. What looks from the causeway like kindness is yield management, and the Aiekah in the pens know that too.

The body fails on land. A free Aiekah that lives ashore for a few years compresses its own spine under its own weight and cannot straighten again; the old of the free communities stay in the water and are visited. Out of water for a day the skin ulcerates at the joints. In bright water the eyes scar. Crowding in the mills brings gill rot and fin rot through a pen in a week, and the answer is always slaughter rather than treatment, since a sick Aiekah is worth less than a quick one.

The mills breed close and the closeness tells. Voiceless ones are born in the pens every year, with a bladder that will not sound, and they are killed first, because a voiceless Aiekah is only meat, and because a pen that cannot sing is a pen that will not settle. The free communities take in the voiceless where they can reach them and have a place for them, which is to sit at the edge of the water during the evening song and count.

Starvation takes the fat first and then the meat, and a starving Aiekah's song goes flat before anything else shows. A Voice listening at the bank can hear which family is going short. That is how a free community rations, and it is one of the reasons they sing every night.

Country

Surface Realm fresh water. The Fishing Mills are "The places where most Aiekah are bred and kept for slaughter." The Aiekah Watering Holes are "The places where Fisher People hunt them at night when they come up to sing." Free Aiekah "live among the river folk, and in harsher regions in private and secret communities." Two are named: the Reedfast, a hidden lake community in cold country that has not been found in two hundred years, and the Long Pens, the largest mill anyone speaks of.

A free community is not built. It is a stretch of deep lake with reed cover at the edges and a bank shallow enough to sit a fry in, and everything the people own is sunk and weighted. The Reedfast has survived two centuries by holding to cold water, where the ice gives them a roof for a third of the year and where the fisher boats cannot work.

Their grazing is what keeps a lake alive. A body of water with Aiekah in it is clear, because they crop the weed and the algae constantly and in quantity, and a lake that loses its Aiekah chokes within a decade, loses its fish under the weed, and stops feeding the villages around it. A number of river-folk settlements that once hunted them now protect the lake population under local custom, having worked out the arithmetic, and the protection is worded as a fishing rule and not as a mercy. The Aiekah understand the distinction perfectly. It is the nearest thing to safety they have ever been offered and they have taken it.

Everything eats them. The Fisher People take them at the surface at night. The river folk take them when hungry. The mills breed them. The large things of the deep lakes take the fry in thousands, which is why the spawn is thousands. Nothing anywhere in the world hunts anything else in order to protect an Aiekah, and the Bogish, who take them in and have nothing to fight with either, are the whole of their alliance.

Society

Small, frightened, close. "Terrified and feeble, having never known a time where their species was not enslaved." "Kind and nurturing, they have nothing besides each other, and so they stick together as long as they can before they are killed and eaten." Music is the whole of the culture that survives, and it is what gets them caught.

A free community follows its eldest singer, who is called the Voice and decides when the community sings and when it stays under. That decision is the only governing act they have, and it is a weighing of a need against a risk: a people that hears only through water must sing to know that the others are there, and singing is what brings the boats. Dress is woven weed and little of it, with the forearm binding under it. They eat algae pressed into cakes and drink lake water. The evening song is the custom and the law: a community that has not sung in three nights is one that has been found. The oath is "by the two lights." Taboo: to sing alone, since the lone singer is the one taken; to eat anything that swam.

Their kindness is not a temperament that survived their treatment. It is the only surviving tool. A people with no weapon, no speed and no hiding place has nothing to offer anyone except company, care and the finest singing on the continent, and they have spent four thousand years becoming very good at all three, and it has bought them a great deal of affection and almost no safety.

Faith

Their faith is the two moon goddesses, and they believe in an equal alignment of all things: good and bad, night and day, the phases of the moons. They name the sisters for themselves. Zuella is Lumae, the Kind Light, and Zaona is Nhaal, the Kind Dark, and both are kind, since to the Aiekah neither sister is evil and evil is only the moment one outweighs the other.

The clergy are the Voices, and the rites are the songs: the Bright Song under Zuella full, the Dark Song under Zaona full, and the Turning, sung on the rare night the two stand equal, when every free community in the world sings the same thing at once and the mills fall silent. They believe the dead are held between the sisters, weighed even, and that is peace. The moon sisters hold no realm and no dead. The soul goes to the star gods' auction like all the rest, and a people whose whole hope is balance is entered there against a price.

Tongue

Common Tongue, sung well and spoken in a deep boisterous voice. Among themselves they speak Aiekan, a sung tongue in which pitch carries meaning, so that a community can talk across a lake and the fisher on the bank hears only music. Aiekan carries perfectly through water and poorly through air, which is the language of a people that cannot be overheard by anything standing on land, and it is the reason the mills forbid it and the reason the pens use it anyway.

A name is given at the first song a child sings, never at birth, since fry are nobody's; the name is two rising vowels with something soft between. In the pens there are no names. The names run: Alooe, Vaenu, Oshimel, Tellu, Iriaan, Nuvvo, Haluma, Ombree.

Regard

"Meat on legs." "Mouthy food that needs to know its place." "Walking food to fouler races."

The Fisher People are the enemy: "The slavers who own and operate the fishing mills in which they are bred and held captive till their slaughter." The river folk tolerate them where they are useful and not currently hungry. The Bogish take them in, and more than one BogTown has an Aiekah choir.

Harvest

Aiekah Meat: "Regular Aiekah Tuna Meat; very soft and rich with flavour." Taken along the hinge of the ribs, which opens the body in one cut, since the ribs were set that way on purpose.

Aiekahn Eyes: "One of the core ingredients in the Apothecary arts to construct a night vision potion." The eye that gathers moonlight is the eye that makes the potion, and the trade takes them from the living where it can, because the gathering layer fails within an hour of death.

Aieko Meat: "Rare and more costly blue-white Aieko Tuna Meat, that carries with it 'the flavours of the moon', as it is known that they sing to it. Extremely rich and sweet."

Song-bladder: the gas bladder, dried and stretched over a frame, which makes a drumhead that holds a note longer than any other and is sold in the same provinces that buy the meat, so that the instrument and the singer arrive at the market together. All of it is legal everywhere. No law anywhere names it murder.

Remembered

Iriaan of the Reedfast. The Voice who led her community under the ice for a winter and sang them through it.

Ombree. An Aieko who sang at a duchess's feast as the entertainment and was served as the last course, and whose song the household still hums without knowing where it came from.

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