Giafe

Origin

They have massive bodies with a crown of horns atop the head, they carry immense weight, they have infinite knowledge retention, and they are quiet, kind, mysterious, wise and forgiving. They were bred to carry massive objects for the construction of military defences where whitestone seeds could not be used. The world's opinion of them now is on record and it is bleak: "Strange neck folk." "For sport." "Remnants of an ancient time; needing to be expired or re-enslaved."

The splice is Nu'uman, Irugaine and giraffe. The purpose was haulage: the walls, the gate-blocks, the counterweights and the ram-courses of the empire's frontier fortresses, in every place where a whitestone seed would not take. Whitestone grows only where the ground will let it, and where the ground would not, the Alverians used the Giafe, and the great grey defence-works of the old frontier were carried into place a block at a time on the backs of a people bred for it.

The infinite memory was not designed. It was an error in the breeding, and it has become a curse. What the makers wanted was a load-bearer that could learn a road once and never need to be led again, would not baulk, and would not have to be retaught after a winter. What they got was total, unfading, unselective recall of everything: every road and also every beating, every yoke fitting and also every death in the traces, every order and also the exact tone in which it was given. The record in the Giafe's own keeping says that the error was noticed within two generations, that it was judged harmless, and that the programme continued. That sentence is the single most quoted line in Giafe memory, and they will recite it to anyone who asks about their makers, and then say nothing else about them.

Their genetic code was locked at the end of the frontier programme, error and all, and the three builds that existed at that moment are the three builds that exist now: Giafal, Giafvor, Giafe'on.

Since the collapse they have been a wandering people. The fall did not free them so much as end the arrangement. There was nobody left to haul for, the frontier fortresses were held by strangers within a century, and the Giafe walked out of the work into a world with no place in it for a fifty-foot person who is very strong and remembers everything. Some of the ones who walked out are still walking, and were adults on the day the empire ended.

Body

Massive bodies, with a crown of horns atop the head: one centred, four to either side, with two large ones stretching out to the sides. The muscular form carries substantial weight and pressure. The neck is massive and muscular, twice the height of a giraffe's and half again as wide.

The horns number nine, and the count is read one way only: one centred horn at the crown, called the keystone; four to each side in a descending arc, eight in all; and of those eight, the lowest pair on each side are the great ones, which sweep outward and forward past the ears and can run six feet from base to tip on an old bull. Nine horns, one crown, two of them enormous. Every Giafe has nine. A Giafe born with eight or ten does not survive its first year, and no Giafe will explain why.

The horns are working gear and not ornament. The keystone takes the load when a Giafe carries on the poll, spreading it into the crown plate and down the neck, and the great pair are a third pair of hands: a fulcrum for rolling a block, a brace to hold a course while the fingers are repositioned, a lever for a gate leaf. They are bone-cored and layered and they grow all their lives, and an old Giafe files them by rubbing against particular rocks on particular roads, and those rocks are polished to a shine and are landmarks in the walking.

They stand three to five times the height of a giraffe, which is fifty feet at the low end and ninety at the high, measured to the crown, and the neck is the greater part of it. Weight runs twenty-eight to sixty tons. The head is broad and long-jawed with a soft mobile upper lip, the eyes very large and set forward under heavy lashes, the ears wide and low behind the great horns. The legs are pillars, four-toed and pad-footed rather than hoofed, and the tread is nearly silent, which is the single most unnerving thing about them: a people of that size that arrives without sound.

The engineering of the neck is the reason a Giafe can exist and the reason a fallen one dies. The heart is a slab of muscle running the better part of a yard, driving blood at a pressure that would burst any other people's vessels, and the neck veins are valved along their length so that the blood does not fall back when the head comes down. At the base of the skull sits a dense net of fine vessels that takes the surge when the head drops to drink and keeps the brain from being flooded. The skin of the legs is drawn tight as a bandage to stop the blood pooling in the feet. All of this works standing up and none of it works lying down. A Giafe lowers itself to the ground perhaps twice in a century, deliberately, with help, and a Giafe that falls cannot rise: the weight crushes the low lung, the pressure in the head is wrong, and a fallen Giafe dies in about a day and a half in full possession of every one of its faculties. They sleep standing, in stretches of six or seven minutes, and a people with perfect memory is thereby denied even the mercy of a long unconsciousness. No Giafe has ever slept through anything.

They carry a heavy coat of fur: deep, coarse, close, layered in two, with a dense wool against the hide and a long oily guard coat over it that sheds sun, dust and rain. The pattern is the giraffe's pattern at great scale, plates of dark tan and umber over cream channels, and no two patterns are alike, and a Giafe's pattern is how other peoples tell them apart and is not how they tell each other apart. In the hottest months the guard coat is shed in slabs and the shed coat is worth money.

The back carries the ride. There is a natural saddle-hollow forward of the hips, twelve to twenty feet long, where the spine dips and the muscle rises on either side, and the harness a Giafe consents to wear sits there, and a shelter, a cargo frame, or thirty people sit on top of that. The forelimbs end in broad three-fingered hands, not hooves: heavy, clumsy-looking, and capable of setting a two-ton block within an inch, which was the point of the whole programme.

Their senses are built around an eyeline sixty feet up. They see weather two days out, they see the plan of a city the way a bird would, and they see colour across a wider range than a Nu'uman does, particularly in the hot end, so that a Giafe describing a desert is describing something the listener has never looked at. What they hear is low: thunder over the horizon, the tread of a herd, the hum of another Giafe at half a mile felt through the pads of the feet before it is heard at all. High sound is almost nothing to them, and a whistle, a scream and a bell are all thin and far away, which has cost lives on both sides in every place they have worked. They hum while walking, and the hum is a chest-voice below the range of speech, and a road with Giafe on it is audible in the soles of the feet before anything is in sight.

The memory has no organ. It is not in the horns, whatever the powder-sellers claim, and it is not in one lobe that could be cut out or struck. It is the whole brain doing ordinarily what other brains do occasionally, and there is nothing in a Giafe skull that can be removed to stop it, which is precisely why the only way to silence a Giafe is to kill it, and why that crime has a price and a market.

They live several thousand years, the usual span two to four thousand, and the oldest recorded reached six thousand: a Giafe'on called Then-Who-Carried-The-East-Wall, made before the frontier programme ended and dead in the last age, whose recitation of the road from the eastern works to the sea took nine days and is the longest single account any people on Nu has ever set down.

Life

They breed rarely and slowly and by choice. A pairing is a matter of two very old people agreeing to add a witness to the world, and it is preceded by a recitation in which each gives the other the whole of their memory, which takes months and which is the actual ceremony. Gestation runs a little over three years. One calf, standing eleven feet at birth, walking within the hour, horned in soft velvet buds that harden across the first decade in the order the crown will keep.

A calf's memory does not switch on at birth. It comes in over the first four years, and the coming is the most dangerous period of a Giafe's life, because the memory arrives faster than the mind that has to hold it, and a calf will freeze mid-step under the weight of a week it cannot put down. The mother's whole task in those four years is to give it small days: quiet ground, few strangers, nothing worth remembering. Giafe mothers are notoriously rude to visitors and the reason is this and only this.

Adulthood at forty. Then two to four thousand years of remembering, and the ageing that matters is not in the body. The body stays sound to the last century. What wears is the capacity to carry what has accumulated, and the failure of it has a name, the Long Remembering, in which the past stops being ordered and arrives all at once, continuously, with the present as one thread among ten thousand. A Giafe entering the Long Remembering knows it, announces it, settles its Purpose, and walks, generally toward high ground or toward water, and does not come back. This is the ordinary Giafe death and it is not regarded as a tragedy. The tragedy is the ones who do not announce it.

A Giafe that dies among a people it served is buried by that people, which is a considerable civic undertaking. A Giafe that dies alone is left where it falls, and the bones stay up for years, and the horns are gone within a month, taken. They do not tend graves and they do not visit them, and they do not need to, and that is the reason.

The diet is browse: canopy leaf, thorn, bark, hard fruit, whole crowns of trees taken from the top down, sixty to ninety stone of it a day, plus salt, plus clay from particular banks that they will travel three hundred miles for. The clay is not a habit. A gut that runs on leaf and thorn takes in more poison in a week than most peoples meet in a lifetime, and the clay binds it, and a Giafe kept from its bank goes sour, then sick, then blind in one eye, then dies over about two years. This is why the three clauses of a Purpose are browse, salt and clay, and why a city that wants to keep a Giafe must guarantee a bank three hundred miles outside its own jurisdiction. They do not eat meat and cannot. A Giafe travelling with an army is a logistics problem that armies have historically solved by pointing the Giafe at a forest.

Frailty

The feet go first and they go quietly. Sixty tons standing for four thousand years on four pads produces cracks, and a crack takes stones, and a stone takes rot, and a rotten pad on a body that cannot lie down is a death sentence that arrives over a decade. Every Giafe inspects its own feet daily, lifting each in turn and turning it up to the eye at the top of a sixty-foot neck, and the posture is so characteristic that hot-country children imitate it.

A broken leg is death, immediately and without appeal, and so is a fall, and so is deep mud, and so is a bridge that has been mis-remembered. The walking is kept with such ferocious exactness because the alternative to knowing which bridge holds is dying on it.

The coat carries its own colony: ticks in the wool that no arm can reach, and the pale birds of the hot country that ride them and pick the ticks out, which is the one relationship of mutual convenience the species has with anything. A Giafe that loses its birds scratches itself raw on rock within a season.

The memory is the great illness and it takes two forms. The Long Remembering is the ordinary end. The other is the calf-flood, which kills perhaps one calf in five in the second and third years: the memory comes in too fast, the calf stops moving, stops browsing and will not be led, and the mother stands over it and recites small things to it until it comes back or does not. And beneath both of those is the plain fact that nothing in a Giafe fades. Pain stays available at full strength, on demand and sometimes not on demand, for four thousand years. Their gentleness is a discipline rather than a temperament, and every Giafe knows precisely what it is holding down, and so does every other Giafe.

Country

They live in the hotter climates, and they have no civilisation of their own. They join other civilisations and serve a purpose there. There is no Giafe city, no Giafe village, no Giafe territory and no Giafe claim on any ground anywhere. What exists is the walking: a set of routes across the hot lands, in memory and nowhere else, kept perfectly, passed by recitation, and never written or drawn. A Giafe knows every well, every shade-stand, every clay bank and every bridge that will take it on a road it walked eight hundred years ago, and knows which of them have since gone, because it has been told by another Giafe who walked it last year.

Where they stop, they stop inside somebody else's place: a stock yard outside a city wall, a quarry compound, a caravan post, a temple precinct with a roof taken off for them. A city that hosts Giafe builds for them, and the buildings are unmistakable: doorless walls forty feet high, a roofed shade with no sides, a trough at chest height for something with a very long neck. Half the hot-country cities of the world have a Giafe yard, and in most of them it has been empty for a century and is still swept.

A Giafe changes a country by eating it. Ninety stone of canopy a day, taken from the top down, opens a woodland into parkland within a generation and then into grassland, and the great hot savannas along the old frontier roads are Giafe work: the walking made them by being walked. Grazing peoples follow into that open ground and settle it and give it names and believe it was always there. Where the Giafe stop coming, the canopy closes over the road in about eighty years, and the road is gone, and the towns that grew on it become inland places with no reason to be there. Four ruined cities of the hot country are Giafe absences. The Giafe know which four and can describe every one of them as it was on the last day they walked through.

Society

Quiet and kind. Mysterious. Wise. Forgiving. In a record of slavers, cannibals and toll barons they are the gentlest thing in it.

The Purpose is the whole of Giafe society and it is an arrangement between one Giafe and one people. It is entered by the Asking. A people asks; the Giafe listens; the Giafe then waits a year, walking, before answering, and the year is not negotiable and has never once been waived. At the end of the year it returns and says what it will do and for how long, and the terms are spoken aloud in front of witnesses and never written, because a written thing can be altered and a Giafe cannot.

A Purpose runs to the completion of a work, or to the end of a life, or to the end of the people, whichever comes first, and the third clause is in every Purpose ever spoken because Giafe outlive kingdoms and have learned to say so at the outset. What they take in return is browse rights, salt, clay, safe standing, and the right to be told the truth. That last is the only clause a Giafe will end a Purpose over. Lie to a Giafe once and it will finish the day's work, say the sentence, and walk, and the sentence is remembered in the city for two hundred years and the Giafe is remembered in the walking for four thousand, and no Giafe will take an Asking from that people again. There are eleven peoples on Nu currently under that judgement. None of them know the full list. The Giafe do.

Purposes now served include hauling for quarries and shipyards; carrying whole caravans across country where the ground will not hold wheels; standing as a mobile watchtower for frontier towns, since a Giafe's eyeline is sixty feet up; carrying water into famine districts; carrying plague dead out of them; and, most valuably and most quietly, witnessing. A Giafe present at an oath, a treaty, a marriage or a trial is the only unimpeachable record in the world, and cities pay them in salt and clay to stand at the back of the room and say nothing. A Giafe called to recite a witnessing does it flatly, in the original voices, for as long as it takes.

A Giafe between Purposes is unyoked, which is their own word and is not an insult among them and is very close to one. An unyoked Giafe walks and eats and does not speak much, and will refuse an Asking from the wrong people for centuries at a time. There are unyoked Giafe who have not spoken to another people since the fall of Alveria.

They wear little: a chest-strap of woven bark and their own shed wool, hung with the tokens of every Purpose completed, and an old Giafe's strap is a hundred feet of small objects and is the nearest thing the species has to a history that can be looked at. Harness is put on by the Giafe itself or not at all, and to touch a Giafe's harness uninvited is the one act that will make one of them angry, and a Giafe's anger is the reason the horns are that size. The music is the chest-hum. An oath, among themselves, is not sworn. It is recited, by both, and thereafter neither can pretend not to know it.

There is no rank. There is age, and age is deferred to absolutely, and the deferral is practical: the older one has more of the world in it.

Faith

Their faith is their own and they do not share it. They have one. It is not secret in the way a cult is secret, since nothing about it is hidden or denied; it is simply not for anyone else, and a Giafe asked about it will say "that is ours" in a tone that ends the subject, and will still be perfectly friendly, and will not answer if it is asked again in six hundred years.

Three things about it are known to outsiders, because they are done in the open and cannot be hidden.

At dusk a Giafe turns its head away from the setting sun and holds the position until the light has gone. All of them. Everywhere. This has been observed for six thousand years and never explained.

They will not speak the name of a Giafe that has died, in any tongue, ever again, and they will not permit it to be spoken in their hearing. The dead of the recitations are all called what they carried.

They bury nothing and they leave nothing at a death place, and they do not go back.

Every scholar who has tried has concluded that a people with perfect memory has no need of the machinery other faiths are built from: no relic, no monument, no scripture, no anniversary, no shrine, because nothing needs to be reminded. What is left, whatever it is, is a private practice conducted inside the skull of every Giafe alive, simultaneously, forever, and there are theologians who find that idea worse than the Void Princes.

Whatever it promises, the ending is the same as it is for everyone. The worldly gods hold no realms and the afterlives their faiths sell are make-believe; every soul on Nu goes to the auction of the star gods. A Giafe soul arrives there with six thousand years of perfect recollection in it, which is worth something, and what it fetches has never been written down.

Tongue

They speak Common, better than the peoples who speak it natively, in the way of a person who has heard every dialect of it since it was gifted, and an old Giafe can and will answer a Nu'uman in the Nu'uman's grandfather's accent, which is not intended as a threat and is generally received as one. They have no tongue of their own and have never wanted one. Between themselves they use the chest-hum for distance and Common for everything else, and their Common is archaic and enormously formal and they will not modernise it.

A Giafe's name is a sentence worn down. It begins as a full clause describing the first thing the calf did that its mother thought worth keeping, and it shortens over centuries as it is used, and a very old Giafe often has a name of two syllables that nobody now living can unpack. Outsiders are given the long form on introduction and the short form thereafter. Eight names, in the form they are given to other peoples: Ohmvaru (long form, She Who Walked Before She Was Told), Tenneth-Who-Carried-Stone, Gaharu, He Who Waited At The Ford, Amma-Vesh, Nolun-Who-Counted-The-Rain, Sohaan, She Who Set The Keystone Twice.

Regard

"Strange neck folk." "For sport." "Remnants of an ancient time; needing to be expired or re-enslaved." The three phrases are three different peoples' positions and all three are live.

In the hot-country cities that host them the Giafe are a civic treasure and a point of pride, and a city with two Giafe in its yard will tell you so within a minute of your arrival. In the middle countries they are a curiosity, a thing to bring children to see. And there is a hunting culture, well funded and perfectly legal in several jurisdictions, that takes Giafe from horseback with lances over three or four days, and the trophies are the horns, and the practice is old enough to have its own etiquette. The lobby for re-enslavement is smaller, louder and better connected, and its argument is that a people bred to carry is being wasted, and it recruits well among those who own quarries.

The Giafe response to all of it is on record and never varies. They do not fight back, they do not organise, they do not appeal, and they remember, and they say the names of the hunters aloud, once, at the next witnessing they are called to. Four noble lines have been ruined that way. It takes about a century and the Giafe are not in a hurry.

They have no enemy of their own making. Their hunters are Nu'uman and Torkan sporting parties in about equal measure, and the Torkan are honest about it, which the Giafe note. The Boalden trap for them and refuse the work, as a matter of their own standing. The Do'urssan hire them and pay well and treat them as equipment. The Librar seek them out constantly, since a Giafe is the only archive in the world that walks, and the Librar will trade stolen knowledge for a recitation, and this is the closest thing the Giafe have to a friendship with another people. The Eaven, who also remember perfectly and are also thousands of years old and also unbound since the collapse, avoid them entirely, and neither species will discuss why.

Harvest

Giafe horn. Nine to a head, the great pair the size of a man, dense, layered and pale gold at the core. It takes an edge, it takes carving, it does not warp, and it is the trophy of the hunt and the reason for most of the hunts. There is a widespread and entirely false belief that a Giafe's memory is held in its horns and that ground horn confers recollection, and the belief supports a large trade in powder, and nothing sold as Giafe horn powder in any market on Nu has ever done anything to anyone.

Giafe wool. The shed undercoat, gathered from the ground where a Giafe has moulted, given freely and worth a great deal. It is warm, light, and does not take dye, and a coat of it lasts three lifetimes. Gathered wool is legal and honourable everywhere. Shorn wool is theft of the person.

Giafe hide and bone, from the hunts, for shields and for building. The clay-gut, the organ that processes the bank clay, prized by apothecaries for reasons that do not survive scrutiny. The neck valves, cut in strings from a fresh kill and sold to surgeons who have heard they can be sewn into a person, which they cannot.

The recollection. The real trade, and the only one the Giafe conduct themselves. A recitation is bought with salt, clay and safe standing, and it is exact, and it is admissible in the courts of nine peoples. The dark end of that trade is the buying of a witnessing that the Giafe has refused to give, and since there is no way to compel a Giafe to speak and nothing in the body that can be cut out to take the memory, the practice instead is to make certain it never speaks, and the murder of a Giafe on the eve of a hearing is a known crime with a known price.

Remembered

Then-Who-Carried-The-East-Wall, six thousand years and the oldest of any recorded, whose nine-day recitation of the eastern road is the longest account set down by anyone.

She Who Set The Keystone Twice, who raised the same gate-block into the same arch four hundred years apart for two different empires and remarked on it both times.

Ohmvaru, unyoked for three thousand years, who has refused every Asking since the fall, walks the southern circuit alone, and is the last living witness to a treaty that four crowns would prefer forgotten.

Gaharu the Standing, who held a Purpose to a city for eleven hundred years, through nine dynasties, and was buried by that city with the whole population present, and whose yard is still swept.

He Who Waited At The Ford, killed in a sporting hunt eighty years ago, whose name is not spoken by his own people and is carved on the gate of the house that took him.

Kin each has a page of its own

What divides them is the job the programme cut them for, and nothing else: three builds off one locked genome, still doing three different things with the same mind.