Giafal

Body

The smallest, fifty to sixty feet, short-coated, narrow through the barrel and quick over broken ground, with a shorter and thicker neck and a lower crown. The horns are still nine and the count is still read the same way: the keystone centred, four to each side, the lowest pair on each side the great ones. The pads are the same four-toed pillars and the tread is the same near-silence, which at fifty feet and moving fast is worse rather than better.

Everything the species cannot do, a Giafal cannot do. It sleeps standing in stretches of six or seven minutes, it cannot lie down and rise again, a broken leg is death without appeal, and a bridge that has been mis-remembered kills it. That is the whole reason its trade exists.

Country

They walk the routes before anyone else does, and the walking is held in memory and nowhere else, never written and never drawn. A Giafal knows every well, every shade-stand, every clay bank and every bridge that will hold on a road it walked eight hundred years ago, and knows which of those have gone since, because it has been told by another Giafe who walked it last year. What it brings back is the line.

Society

A Giafal serves a Purpose like any other Giafe: asked for, considered for a year of walking, spoken aloud in front of witnesses, paid in browse, salt, clay, safe standing and the truth. The Purposes it takes are the moving ones. It carries messages and light cargo across country nothing else crosses, it goes ahead of caravans, and a frontier town that cannot afford to host a larger build will still take a Giafal for the eyeline.