Boalden

Origin

The splice is Nu'uman, Irugaine and brown bear. The posting was warden of "the Irugaine forested border in elder times," and the reason the border needed wardens is the part the people do not tell: the Alverians ran trapping encampments in that country, taking live specimens out of the Irugaine forests for the work that produced everything else in the record, and something had to stand around the pens.

A Boalden guarded the cages that the Irugaine were carried to. The hatred on both sides makes sense read that way and does not make much sense read any other. "Being keepers and guards of their race and its territories, they detest the wild intelligent life, as there is no joy in taming creatures they view to be pathetic," which is a sentence about a guard who has decided that the prisoner deserved it.

The Alverians never spoke to them, "as the boalaven were quiet and reserved, and if threatened by an enemy of alveria, they would tear them to shreds." The neglect became a virtue of the people: "thus their nature is truly one of quiet, saving words for when they matter."

When the prisons and pens fell they took to the wild and stayed there, "becoming strong and building their fortifications among nature, trapping and keeping stern watch over the creatures they were genetically born to hate." In the settled kingdoms they went into service: House Vervos of Layavon in Brenmor is Boalden, "being among a wilder Boalden Bear clans that remained scattered or enslaved during the great rise and fall of the god kings," and the people are listed as merchants. They came out of the collapse "noble hardened warriors, turning to strategy and defense, over blind conquering blood lust."

Most Boalden alive today believe the species began in the Wilderlands as free trappers and that the Alverian posting is a slander put about by the Irugaine. The clans that do remember keep it in the oath-house and do not say it in front of the young.

Body

Slightly hump-backed with rigid shoulders. The large fat-muscular body is buried under thick matted hair and the ears are round. Around the Nu'umanoid snout the hair grows longer and shaggier. The claws are hooked at the tip. Brute muscular strength, "forested agility rush," and the roar that clears a wood. Six to eight feet, four hundred to seven hundred pounds, and about a hundred and thirty years. A Boalpa elder in the tropics runs lighter, while a Boalar on all fours in winter coat is the heaviest thing on two legs in this class outside the Fathari.

The hump is not fat. It is the muscle bank that drives the forelimb, mounted on tall spines of the upper vertebrae that stand up out of the back like the frame of a tent, and it is the reason a Boalden can pull a set stake out of frozen ground with one arm and can hold a thrashing beast down without bracing. The shoulders are rigid because that same frame has no give in it, and the cost is that a Boalden cannot reach across its own body, cannot look behind itself without turning at the hips, and throws very badly. No Boalden people has ever developed a missile weapon. They have developed the trap instead, and that is not a coincidence.

The distinctive feature is the natural back fur cloak hanging from the neck down to the collarbone, which reads at distance as a garment and is not one, and is also called "an natural heavier mane." It grows from the crest at the back of the skull and falls forward and out over both shoulders, and the guard hairs of it are coarse, hollow and oiled at the root from a gland along the nape. Rain runs off the ends of it and drops clear of the chest. A Boalden can stand in open weather for a full day and a full night and stay dry down the front and warm through the core, and everything the species is comes out of that. It was bred to stand outside a pen in the rain and not move. It now stands beside a trapline in the rain and does not move. The patience the world admires is a raincoat.

The people are vain about it and make no secret of that. It is groomed, oiled, sometimes braided, and its length and gloss are the first thing another Boalden looks at, and the polite greeting between strangers of the people is to turn slightly so that it can be seen.

The nose runs everything. The muzzle is a long chamber of scrolled bone and the sheet inside it is enormous, and a Boalden works the world by smell first and sight second. It can read a trapline before it reaches it, tell a sprung set from a full one at two hundred yards, follow a four-day track over wet rock, and walk into a smokehouse and name every animal hanging in it and the week each was taken. Sight is the weaker sense and colour is the weakest part of it; the world comes to them in muted browns and greens with very little separation, which is why they dye nothing, why their cloth is undyed, why their carving is deep and textural, and why a Boalden appreciates a fur by running a hand through it and never by looking at it.

What the nose does to their society is the thing outsiders never work out. A Boalden smells fear, smells anger before it shows, and smells the particular sourness of a person who is saying a thing he does not believe. They cannot be bluffed and they have never needed a court. A dispute goes to the oath-house and both parties tell the story until they agree on it, and it can take three days, and it works because neither of them can lie for three days in a small room to somebody who can smell it. It is also why the settled kingdoms trust a Boalden with a strongroom key: whatever else is true of him, he is the only member of the household who will know at once who has been at the silver.

Life

They breed as bears do, in numbers and in season. One to three cubs, rarely four, born in deep winter and born very small, blind and almost naked, which is the fact the den houses exist to solve. The young stay in den houses for several months before they are allowed to begin learning the ways of their people.

A den house is not a family home. It is a low, half-sunk, windowless log building at the centre of a stilted village, warm, dark and shared, and every cub born to the village that winter goes into it together with three or four adults who do not leave it either. Those adults are not merely on duty. A Boalden in deep winter drops into a heavy torpor for days at a stretch, breathing slow, waking dull, and a den-keeper spends the season half under, which is exactly the state in which a very small blind cub can be kept warm against a body that does not roll over. Mothers hand over and take turns. Nobody keeps track of whose is whose for the first hundred days, on purpose. A Boalden therefore has one mother and eleven aunts, calls all of them by the same word, and is genuinely uncertain which of them bore it, and asking is a rudeness on the level of asking a Nu'uman how much he owes.

At about five months the door is opened and the cubs come out into the spring, and the learning begins the same week. It begins with the trap. A Boalden child's first task is to sit beside a set snare for a whole day and not touch it, and the second is to sit beside a sprung one and not touch that either, and the third is to build one badly and be shown why it would have failed. Everything else the people teach is arranged behind that: tracking, the reading of ground, skinning, curing, snowcraft, the roar, and last of all the fighting, which is taught at fifteen and taught defensively.

They are omnivores. Fish, game, roots, berries, mast, honey when it can be got, and a great deal of preserved food, since a trapping people is a preserving people. The tropical Boalpa eat almost no meat. Every Boalden village runs on smoked and dried stock and the smokehouse is the second most important building after the den house, and it is always set downwind of the platform, because a people who navigate by smell cannot live inside a smoke cloud.

They age slowly and stay strong late, and the last twenty years are spent in the den house with the cubs, which the people regard as a return rather than a retirement. The dead are given to the ground under a cairn on a trapline and the line is retired with them, so the map of an old clan's territory is a map of its dead.

Frailty

The year is a cycle of weight and the cycle can fail. A Boalden must put on a third of its body mass between the first mast and the first hard frost, and an autumn of bad fruiting or a line lost to flood means a village goes into the den house light. What follows is not hunger in the ordinary sense. The torpor does not hold in a thin body; the adults surface, restless and irritable, in a dark building full of newborns, and the cubs get cold because nothing in there is warm enough. A famine year in the Wilderlands is counted in cubs and every clan can recite its bad winters by name.

The teeth wear and the claws catch. A hooked claw torn out on a stake is the trapper's commonest injury and it grows back crooked and never grips properly again. The molars go flat by ninety on a diet of bone, mast and dried meat, and an old Boalden lives on soaked stores and fish, which is one reason the elders sit in the den house and one reason the smokehouse matters as much as it does.

The back-cloak has its own diseases and they are the ones the people dread most, because of what they are vain about. A mite that lives in the oil gland at the nape takes the guard hairs out in patches, the coat stops shedding water, and a Boalden with a bald cloak cannot work a line in the wet and will not be looked at in the oath-house. There is no reliable cure. Clans burn the bedding, scrub with lye and ash, and most of them have a story about somebody who went off alone.

Above all there is the Crimson Bloom, "The Red Rot," found in infected Boalden territory. A Boalkar is what a stilted village becomes, and it becomes it all at once, in one winter, in the den house, where everybody is breathing the same dark air for five months. This is why the clans walk their ground so obsessively and why the buying-back fund exists in every village. A clan that finds Crimson Bloom on a line abandons the line, which is the one circumstance in which the great taboo is set aside, and even then it is spoken of afterward as a shame.

Country

The Surface Realm. The Stilted Villages are "the elevated trapping societies of the Boalden that are raised usually fifteen feet off the ground, as to be sure they are safe from wild animals in the Wilderlands." A stilted village is thirty to sixty souls on a platform of pile-driven trunks, reached by a single ladder that comes up at night, with the den house sunk into the earth beneath the platform rather than on it and reached by a covered stair. Around it, at distances of a day, are the traplines, and the traplines are the property. A clan's line can be a century old, and a clan that loses one does not usually recover.

Away from the Wilderlands the Boalden live inside other peoples' towns as furriers, victuallers, guides, gate guards, bailiffs and household staff, and they are good at all of it, and there is a Boalden in the servants' hall of most great houses in Brenmor and Camelot. In the settled kingdoms, House Vervos of Layavon in the Kingdom of Brenmor is the house of record.

A century of Boalden trapping does something to a forest that looks like ruin and is not. The fur-bearers are held down hard and held down evenly, because a walked line is a counted line and a Line-Keeper who overtakes a valley has ended his own clan; what goes is the surplus, year on year, at the same rate. What the country loses instead is its large predators, which compete for the same catch and are killed on sight, and the effect of removing them from a wood for a hundred years is a wood full of deer, which the Boalden also trap, and a wood with no undergrowth left under six feet. An old Boalden range is open and quiet and easy to walk, and the Irugaine can tell you to the year when the wardens arrived. When a clan is broken up and its lines are retired the wood closes again in about forty years, and the wolves come back before the birds do.

Society

Trappers and wardens, "physically assertive and highly strategic." The noble class are "extremely quiet and a brooding bunch, keeping to themselves as they are ever-examining the political terrain. When drunk they are lively and full of merry." In the courts they serve as household staff and are addressed, and address others, with heavy deference: "Yes, M'lady."

The clan is the unit and the clan is run by the Line-Keeper, who is not the strongest and is usually the oldest working trapper, and whose authority rests entirely on knowing where every set on the territory is. Below the Line-Keeper are the walkers, who run the lines; the den-keepers, who hold the young and hold the winter stores and are the only Boalden with an unquestioned right to refuse an order; and the young, who carry. Disputes go to the oath-house, which is a single room on the platform with a plank floor and no furniture, and are settled by both parties telling the story until they agree on it.

They dress in cured hide over the back-cloak, never in fur taken from a creature that could speak, and they are particular about that. They eat twice a day and enormously. They drink a heavy black beer brewed from mast and burnt grain and they drink it in silence until the third round, after which they become lively and full of merry. Their music is a two-note drone hummed in the chest with words fitted over it, and the words are almost always the names of places on a line.

The oath of the people is the Set Oath, sworn with a hand in a sprung trap: a Boalden who swears it has agreed to be held to the thing the way the trap holds, and there is no releasing him and no releasing himself. It is sworn perhaps twice in a life. The great taboo is the unwatched set. To leave a trap in the ground and not walk it is the worst thing a Boalden can do, worse than theft and considerably worse than killing, and a clan that is found to have abandoned a line is broken up and its members taken into other clans as walkers, which is a demotion nobody recovers from.

Faith

They worship Irus of the Wild, and many have been assimilated into other faiths and follow whatever the town they live in follows. They are the clearest case in the world of a people who worship both faces of the same god and see no difficulty in it, because their work requires both. Irus the Shepherd is prayed to over the den house and over the stores and over anything born; Irus the Hunter is prayed to at the setting of a line and at the killing. A Boalden holds that these are one god doing two necessary things and that a people who could only manage one of them would starve or be eaten.

There is no clergy. The Line-Keeper says the words at the setting, the eldest den-keeper says them over a birth, and neither is a priest. The rite is the Two Sayings, spoken at the opening of the den house door in spring, in which the Shepherd is thanked for the winter and the Hunter is asked for the year, said in that order and never the other way. The only object of worship in a Boalden village is the first trap ever set on its oldest line, which is dug up once a generation, oiled, and put back.

They fear Irus, in the exact way the Irugaine fear him and for the same reason: he is real, he holds court, and he has opinions. A Boalden will not hunt in a wood he believes the Hunter is walking, and will not say why he thinks so, and the answer, when it is anything, is that the wood smelled wrong.

There is an afterlife in the teaching and it is modest: the dead go into the ground under the cairn and into the line, and the line goes on being walked, and that is understood as continuance rather than reward. The assimilated Boalden of the towns believe whatever their neighbours believe, and the clans regard this as a sad thing rather than a wicked one. The truth is that the worldly gods have no realms at all and every afterlife their faiths promise is make-believe, Irus included. Every Boalden soul goes to the soul auction of the star gods.

Tongue

Common Tongue, and a heavy trapper's cant of the Wilderlands that is Common with two hundred words of its own in it, most of them about ground, weather and sign, and a good many of them for smells that no other tongue has a word for. The attested names are the Nu'uman-facing house names of the settled kingdoms: Arvan Vervos, "a strong-looking, cunning middle-aged Boalden," and Lord Hadrik Vervos. The pattern is a hard two-syllable given name plus a house name.

A clan-born Boalden carries a given name and a line-name, and the line-name is the trapline the child was first walked on rather than the family's, so siblings often differ. Written in the clan form it is the given name, then the word for line, then the place. In the settled kingdoms the line-name is dropped and a house name is taken, which is how Arvan Vervos got his and how everyone in the Wilderlands knows what he gave up. Eight in the clan form: Arven of Coldrun, Hessa of Ninemile, Dorm of the Black Fen, Ulla of Stonebridge, Brek of Longwater, Sena of the Second Cut, Tobber of Ashline, Marnn of the High Sets.

Regard

"Distant and brooding bunch." "Tamers of the untamable wild." "Guardians over the savage Irugaine forests." In a noble hall a Boalden servant is addressed as "a fine young bear."

They are trusted with property and not with authority, which is the settled kingdoms' summary of the people and is meant as a compliment. Every quartermaster wants one and no duke wants one seated beside him at dinner. Among the Irugaine there is no such ambivalence, and the enmity is mutual, ancient and unresolved. The Gidan are rivals, holding the passes the Boalden's furs have to cross and pricing accordingly. The customers are everyone: the fur, hide and preserved meat trade of three continents runs through Boalden hands. The Torkan are uneasy kin, who also trap and who set for the peoples of the world, a distinction the Boalden consider absolute and the Torkan consider a matter of squeamishness.

Harvest

Boalden Pelts. "Various in texture, depending on which Boalden is skinned for its fur; often used in clothing or decor." Boalden Bones. "All assortments used for various clothing, armour, weapon, decor purposes." Adjacent to both, Crimson Bloom, "The Red Rot," found in infected Boalden territory and the origin of the Boalkar.

The people who supply the world with fur are the people whose fur is on the market, and they know exactly what it is worth, and they will not discuss it. What is sold is almost always the back-cloak, because it is the only part of a Boalden that a furrier wants: coarse, hollow, oiled, waterproof and unlike anything else on the counter, and worth four times the rest of the hide. A Boalden who finds one for sale buys it, at any price, and takes it home to be buried under a cairn, and clans keep a fund for this and call it the buying-back. The bone trade is old and untroubled by contrast; Boalden bone is strong, cheap and everywhere, and nobody minds.

Remembered

Arvan Vervos. Cunning and middle-aged, of House Vervos of Layavon, and the best-known Boalden in the settled kingdoms.

Lord Hadrik Vervos. Head of the house.

Marnn of the High Sets. Line-Keeper of a clan that walks the passes, said to have sworn the Set Oath three times, which is twice more than anyone can name a reason for.

Ulla of Stonebridge. Den-keeper, who refused a lord's order in the Brenmor famine year and kept the winter stores shut, and whose village is the only one on that river that still exists.

Kin each has a page of its own