Fathari

Origin

The splice is Irugaine, elephant and owl, and the genome is locked. Their purpose was haulage: "muscular endurance, allowing them to haul and work for long hours with little to no rest," and their tusks were engineered as lifting tools, "being of a genetically refined material, it is extremely strong and near unbreakable." The owl went in for the mind. "Their owl DNA gives them an intelligence that allows a retaining of complex designs and the ability to think quick and near never have an accident."

The devotion was real and it was to the Alverians directly. A Fathari did not worship a god of stone or a god of labour; it worshipped the twenty-foot translucent things that had made it and told it what to lift, and it believed that the lifting was worship and that the finished structure was the prayer. Whole generations were born, worked and died inside that arrangement without ever being given a reason, and did not want one.

Then the stars went out, the atmosphere turned, and the makers went into the ground. The Fathari were left standing in the yard with the plans in their heads and nobody to hand them to. What they did next is the whole of their modern history: they finished the job. They worked the last Alverian commissions to completion over the following two centuries, on ruins, for nobody, and when those were done they hired themselves out.

They serve only themselves now and they are honest about it. The devotion did not transfer to the empires that pay them, and no Fathari has ever taken an oath to a crown. What replaced it was the hoard.

Body

"Their extremely muscular bodies are covered in fine fur-feathers, shielding them from the sun and allowing them to retain more water for longer hours of work." The coat is thick and "dark blown-beige," halfway between down and pelt, and at any distance it reads as dust-coloured hide. The head carries the tools: "their 4-6 tusks are practically unbreakable, acting as lifting tools," and "two large horns come out from their skulls for additional towing power." A Fathari with a load slung across tusks and horns is not carrying it in its hands, and its hands are free.

The tusks come in two or three pairs, set one behind the other along the jaw and angled so that their tips describe a shallow cradle in front of the face. A block dropped into that cradle sits on ivory and cannot roll, and the horns coming back over the skull take the strap. The neck that carries this is a short column of enormous vertebrae strung under a nuchal ligament as thick as a man's waist, which holds the head up without effort and cannot move it quickly. A Fathari does not turn its head. It turns its body, slowly, and looks at what it wants to look at with its whole self, and the peoples of the world read this as gravity and courtesy and are not entirely wrong.

The coat is the invention the Alverians were proudest of. The fur-feather is a true feather at the shaft and splits into hair at the tip, and the mat of it holds a skin of humid air against the body, so that a working Fathari sweats into its own coat and takes most of it back. It can labour a full day in open sun on a fraction of the water a body that size should need. In rain the same coat is a catastrophe: it waterlogs, adds the better part of a ton, and will not dry for two days. Every Fathari contract on every continent carries a rain clause, and no Fathari has ever been persuaded to lift in a downpour by any amount of money.

The eyes are owl eyes in an elephant's face, and they are the detail that stops people treating a Fathari as livestock. They face forward, they are enormous, and they gather light so well that the night shift is the same as the day shift; a monument crew of two runs a site around the clock and sleeps in the afternoon. The depth of field is exact to a hair at twenty yards, which is the whole of the boast about never having an accident. A Fathari setting a lintel does not measure. It looks.

The mind behind them holds a design entire, as one object, with every course and every joint in it, and holds it for decades. There is no drawing, no model and no written plan on a Fathari site, and there never has been. This is why the Librar watch them, and it is why the great taboo of the craft is the alteration of a design after the first stone: the plan is a single thing in a single head and it cannot be partly changed any more than a word can be partly said.

They are heavy. Six to nine tons for a grown adult, which is the number that governs every bridge, ferry, gate, floor and ship a Fathari is asked to cross, and which is why the great roads of three empires have Fathari fords cut beside them. They cannot be carried by any mount. They walk everywhere, at a steady four miles an hour, for two hundred years. The legs are columns and the knee does not fold under load, and a Fathari cannot lie down and get up again without a wall or a slope to work against; they sleep standing, leaning into something they built, and every site has a sleeping-stone set for the purpose before the foundation is laid. Fifteen to twenty feet standing on two legs. Two hundred to two hundred and fifty years.

Life

They reproduce as eagles do, and the young fly from the nest at birth, and because of that a Fathari spends its life looking for a mate.

The nest is a ledge, high up, in a cave mouth on a cliff or in the ruin of something the species built long ago. A pair that has found one another builds it once, out of quarried stone laid dry, and lines it with shed fur-feather. The clutch is one egg, occasionally two, and it is brooded by both for most of a year, turned with the tusks. What hatches is not a helpless thing. A Fathari hatchling comes out of the shell at the size of a large dog, wet, fully feathered under the down, and within a day it has crawled to the lip of the ledge and gone over it.

It does not fly, exactly. The fur-feather over the forelimbs and flanks catches enough air to turn a fall into a long, shallow, uncontrollable glide, and the hatchling comes down somewhere in the valley below, alive, alone and moving. The parents do not follow it and could not. This is the fact the entire species is built around, and every Fathari knows it happened to them and has no memory of it.

A Fathari child raises itself for the first few years and is generally picked up by whatever people are nearest, because a talking animal the size of a pony that can carry a plough is not something a village turns away. Most are raised among other peoples entirely. They come into their growth at thirty, take up the craft at forty by simply watching a crew and then joining it, and from that point they work. They are carnivores. They eat meat and only meat, and the quantity is a logistical problem: an employer contracting a Fathari for a monument is contracting a herd as well, and the standard clause in the north is a beast a week for the duration.

The mate-search is the life. Because no Fathari is raised by a Fathari, there are no families, no clans and no communities of them anywhere in the world; there is only a scattered population of enormous solitary individuals, each of whom has been alone since the morning it hatched, walking the roads of every continent doing the heaviest work available and asking, at every crossroads and every yard and every port, whether anyone has seen another. Most never find one. The ones who do stop working that day, whatever the contract says, and go and find a ledge.

Ageing takes the legs. A Fathari past two hundred stops travelling and goes to its cave, and sits with the hoard, and is fed by whoever it has paid to feed it. Death is quiet and the body is not moved, because nothing in the world can move it. The tusks are usually gone within a season.

Frailty

Everything that goes wrong with a Fathari goes wrong underneath it. Nine tons on two feet splits a sole, and a split sole on limestone dust festers and takes a year to close, and the foot trade is a profession in every yard town: small, patient people with long knives who pare and pack a Fathari's feet for a fee and are paid absurdly well. Past a hundred and eighty the ankle and the knee begin to go, and a Fathari can hear its own joints from the inside, and does not mention it.

The other injury is the jaw. A tusk that cracks under a lift does not break clean; it splits back into the socket and tears the bone it is rooted in, and the animal cannot eat for a month and cannot lift for a year and frequently never lifts properly again. A Fathari with a shortened tusk moves to the planning side of the work, sets out the lines, keeps the design and does not touch the stone. Yards treat these with a deference that has nothing to do with sympathy, since a planner is the only insurance a crew has against losing the whole design when the largest present dies.

And there is the fall. A Fathari that goes over on a site cannot get up. It cannot roll, it cannot be levered, and no combination of ropes, beasts and men has ever raised one that was down on flat ground without a slope to work with. What kills it is its own weight on its own chest, over about a day, in front of everybody. Every single custom of the yard exists to prevent this. The plan is agreed before the first stone and never altered. The largest present sets the pace and is obeyed. Nobody speaks during a lift. A stranger who calls out to a Fathari on a scaffold in a foreign city will be beaten by the crew before he has finished the sentence, and no magistrate in any kingdom has ever convicted them for it.

Because no Fathari is raised by its own kind, each one carries whatever sicknesses the people who raised it carry, and a crew of four assembled from four continents is a crew of four different constitutions. They are in no danger from any of it, being enormous, and they are magnificent carriers, and the quiet grievance of the port towns is that the giant who unloaded the grain ship has done something to the children that nobody can prove.

Country

Everywhere. There is no Fathari homeland, no Fathari region and no Fathari city, and the blank is the truth rather than a gap in it. They are found wherever there is heavy work, which is everywhere, and they are found in caves, which are also everywhere.

The cave is the one thing a Fathari owns. A working Fathari takes a cave early, high and hard to reach, and everything it is paid goes into it. Not invested, not banked, not spent: carried up and put down. Coin, plate, bar, gem, worked metal, contract-fees paid in kind, the gilt off a cathedral's old roof taken in lieu of the last third of a fee, all of it in heaps, none of it counted, and a good deal of it no longer worth anything because the kingdom that minted it is four hundred years gone. Fathari know the hoards are useless. They keep adding to them. Asked why, they say that it is theirs, which is the only sentence in the species' history that is entirely their own.

A hoard is defended absolutely and this is the only circumstance in which a Fathari kills. They do not raid, they do not feud and they have no enemies, and a party that goes up the cliff after the gold meets nine tons of unbreakable tusks in a corridor it cannot turn round in.

Their effect on a country is the opposite of every other people in this class, because they add and do not take. A district that has hosted a Fathari crew for forty years has a bridge, a dam, a wall or a road that will outlast the kingdom, a generation of Nu'uman masons who learned their trade standing next to something that cannot make a mistake, and a hill with a hole in it that nobody goes near. The beasts are the only real cost: a beast a week for forty years empties a valley of cattle and remakes its farming around supplying one creature, and when the work tops out and the Fathari walks away, the drovers, the graziers and the three villages that grew up to feed it are left holding a trade with no customer. There are towns in the north that were built to feed a giant and have been looking for a reason ever since.

Society

"In present time, they have become known as devout masons and constructed by empires to erect monolithic structures, typically spending their entire lives working, where their employer usually dies before they do." The temperament is "calm, intelligent and reserved," "extremely dedicated and hard working towards the completion of a task," and "defensive when assaulted." They are the only WildKin with no enemy at all.

There is no Fathari society. There is a profession, and there are individuals in it. What functions in place of a society is the yard. Two or three Fathari on the same commission will work together for forty years, eat together, share a cave if the site is remote, and part at the topping-out without ceremony and often without arranging to meet again, because both of them are looking for something else. Yard custom is nonetheless strict and is the same on every continent, which is the strongest evidence that it is older than the collapse: the plan is agreed before the first stone and never altered; the largest present sets the pace and is obeyed; nobody speaks during a lift; and the last stone of any structure is laid by whoever laid the first, or by nobody.

The customs are transmitted by nothing but proximity. A young Fathari raised among some other people arrives at its first yard knowing none of them and has them all inside a year, taught by strangers of its own kind who will be gone in a decade. The species is one bad century of contracts away from losing itself entirely, and it has come close twice and does not know it.

They dress in harness and nothing else, leather and chain across the chest and shoulder, hung with the small tools their hands are too large to hold loose. They drink enormously and cheaply and are welcome in any yard-tavern with a door they can get through. Their music is a single sustained note held by several of them at once, felt in the floor rather than heard, used to time a lift and sung for pleasure afterward. Their oath is on the work: a Fathari that has agreed a plan will finish it, and no case is known of one walking off a site except to go to a ledge. Their taboo is the alteration of a design after the first stone, and a client who insists is not argued with; the Fathari simply stops, is paid off, and leaves the site half-built, and no other Fathari will take the contract afterwards.

Faith

They were devout to the Alverians. They are not devout to anything now, and the word describes a religion that has ended rather than one that continues.

What is left of it is a set of habits nobody can explain, kept by every Fathari alive and taught by nobody. A foundation stone is set at first light and touched once with the flat of the tusk before it is bedded. A finished structure is walked around, entire, once, before the crew leaves. No Fathari will work under a roof it did not raise on the anniversary of a day none of them can name, and there are perhaps three such days a year, and the dates do not match between continents, which tells you the calendar went into the ground with the makers. Asked what these are for, a Fathari will say that it is how it is done.

A small number, mostly very old and mostly in the cave years, have arrived at something else: that the work was the worship and the makers were not the point, and that what they were doing all along was praying to the thing they were building. Nobody preaches this. There is no clergy, no scripture and no gathering. There is no afterlife in any of it, because the Alverians never offered one and it did not occur to the Fathari to want one.

The truth is what it is for everybody: the soul goes to the auction of the star gods. The Alverian lords, whichever of the seventy-two remain, do not have and never had a realm to collect anyone into.

Tongue

Common Tongue. The Fathari have no tongue of their own and never developed one, for the simple reason that a people whose young are scattered at birth cannot pass a language down. They speak Common, slowly, in a very low register, and most of them speak three or four other tongues besides, picked up from the peoples who raised them and the crews they have worked with.

Names are given by whoever picks the hatchling up, which means Fathari given names come from every people on the planet and follow no pattern at all. What is Fathari is the second half. On completing a first major work, a Fathari takes the work as a surname and keeps it, and adds each subsequent one, so a name lengthens with a career and can be read as a record of it by anyone who knows the buildings. In the short form: Ombhal of the Nine Spans, Grothun Deepgate, Vaskarr Tallwall, Umbrekh of the Salt Arch, Dolvane Threehundred, Kharrun of the Broken Aqueduct, Sethrol Highroof, Bhoruun of the Unfinished Tower. The last of those is an insult and is worn on purpose.

Regard

"Monstrous in size, and great for the construction of massive structures." Two words reduce the entire species: "Muscular masons."

They are the most widely liked people in the record and the least thought about. Every city has one somewhere and no city has a Fathari quarter. Masons' guilds resent them and hire them. Children are told the cave stories, in which the gold is real and the giant is not always kind, and the cave stories are the only place in common culture where a Fathari is frightening. The Librar watch them closely, because the citadels are Fathari work and a Fathari remembers the plan of every room it ever laid.

No enemy is recorded for them anywhere. The empires are employers, and every kingdom that wants a monolith hires them, and none of them lives long enough to matter to the one it hired. The Alverians are former masters and the devotion is over; nothing suggests the Fathari would answer a call, and nothing suggests they would refuse one either, because the question has not been put. The Do'urssan are rivals of a sort, who build underground and better and will not hire outside labour. The Giafe are occasional partners, who can carry what even a Fathari cannot and who are likewise alone.

Harvest

Fathari Tusks. "Being of a genetically refined material, it is extremely strong and near unbreakable. They can however be sharpened and made into weapons, armour and decor." It is the hardest organic material among the WildKin, and its structure is the reason: the ivory is laid down in crossed spirals rather than rings, so that a blade ground from it does not split along a grain because it has none.

Fathari Feathers. "Thick, and dark blown-beige feathers." Common, cheap, used for insulation and heavy cloak lining.

The tusk trade is legal, lucrative and almost entirely posthumous, and there is a standing custom in the trade that a tusk is bought from the estate of a dead Fathari and never from a living one. Since no Fathari has an estate, in practice the tusks are taken by whoever reaches the cave first, which is a race that begins the day the great one stops coming down for meat. The hoard is taken at the same time. There is no taboo attached to any of this from the Fathari side, because there is nobody left to be insulted.

Remembered

Ombhal of the Nine Spans. Raised the bridges of a road three kingdoms fought over, and outlived all three kingdoms.

Dolvane Threehundred. Said to have found a mate at a hundred and ninety, and to have left the site the same hour.

Bhoruun of the Unfinished Tower. Asked to change a design at the second course, and has been sitting in a cave for sixty years.

The kin

None. The genome is locked and the Fathari have no variant, no caste and no strain, and this is one of the two or three places in the record where the lock has never been challenged. What a Fathari is in the north is what a Fathari is in the tropics, at the same height, on the same diet, with the same six tusks, and the species has spent eight thousand years in every climate on the planet without producing a single thing that could be called a second kind of itself. The bear and mustelid creature that has sometimes been confused with them is a separate people with its own root and does not belong here.