Gidan

Origin

The splice is Nu'uman, satyr and goat, and the entire purpose of the people depends on the satyr in them. "During the height of the Alverian empire, the Irugaine fled into their forest lands, and the Alverian's to the best of their ability, could not locate them all. The Gidan were bred to look nearly identical to the Satyr's, only to infiltrate their societies, and carnivorously devour them and their children. They have since become Irugaine head hunters and mountain folk."

The design failed in one respect and the failure is the species. The horns kept growing. "Almost identical to satyr folk, but their horns don't stop once they've grown to a half circle curve; they grow out and continue to curl; random unstable DNA mutation." A Gidan is a weapon that announces itself if left alone for a year, and the whole of Gidan culture is downstream of what a people does about that.

After the collapse they went up rather than in. Their present occupation is "guarding, like bridge trolls, passage ways. Admission is payment or death," and to the kingdoms below they are cliff-dwelling toll-takers. They remained Irugaine head hunters throughout and there is no age in which they were not. The epithet is Tall Hold; the "Feathered Giants" that has sometimes been printed over them belongs to the Fathari and has no business here.

Body

A satyr with the wrong horns, and everything else about the silhouette designed to pass at a distance and in firelight, which is what it was for. Five and a half to seven feet, and a Gidanak past seven. Two hundred to three hundred pounds, dense, with the weight low; they are heavier than they look and this surprises people once. The legs are digitigrade and hard-hoofed, the chest is deep for the altitude, and the coat is short and coarse and runs from dirty white through grey and roan to near black. Ninety to a hundred and ten years.

Because the horn is the tell, the horn is managed: "they often cut their horns to look more like Satyrs." A Gidan met on a mountain road has usually filed itself down that season and the cut ends are what to look for. The horns, ungroomed, curl out and back and out again into a double spiral that on an old male can span four feet and weigh as much as a shield.

A horn is not a nail and cutting one is not grooming. Inside the sheath is a core of living bone grown out of the frontal plate, carrying blood, and hollowed by a sinus that opens directly into the skull. Cut a finger's width too low and the cutter opens that sinus, and what follows is a fortnight of the mountain's cold going straight into a Gidan's head, and then a death every hold has watched at least once. The margin is a matter of judgement, it differs on every head, and it changes every year, because the core keeps growing under the cut and each spring's line stands a little nearer the skull than the last.

No Gidan cuts its own horns. Every one of them has a cutter, and the cutter is somebody else, and that relationship is the only permanent tie in a culture that has no clan, no king, no priesthood and an argument running in every room. A cutter is chosen young and is rarely changed, and a Gidan who loses a cutter to age or a rockfall will cross a range to find another and will not go into spring uncut. Nothing else in the people is held so lightly and so absolutely. Two Gidan who have quarrelled for thirty years will still sit down on the step in the first warm week, one behind the other, and one will put a hand on the other's skull.

The file is given at about fourteen, when the outward curl first shows, and the conversation that goes with it is the nearest thing the people have to a coming of age. What a Gidan child is told is that it cannot do this for itself, that it will need somebody for the rest of its life, and that the somebody will have a blade an inch from its brain once a year. The people are famously bad-tempered, famously quarrelsome, and famously conclusive in an argument, and they are also the only people in this class in which nobody is ever entirely alone.

There is an end to it. Past sixty the margin is gone, the cut line has walked up as far as it can go, and the horn has to be left. An old Gidan cannot pass as a satyr and everyone in the hold knows what that means: the infiltration work was always young work, the old sit above the road, and a people built for a single purpose puts down that purpose in its own sixth decade whether it wants to or not.

The sinus does one other thing, which the Gidanvur have made a whole discipline out of. A full-grown uncut spiral is a chamber of bone coupled to the skull, and what it picks up is the low sound of the rock: the settle of a slope before it goes, water working somewhere under a scree, the difference between a face that is sound and a face that is not. A Gidan with cut horns hears the mountain the way anyone does. A Gidan who has never cut hears it well enough to be consulted, and is, and is obeyed.

The eyes are the one thing the makers did not solve. They are the goat's, horizontally slotted, and in firelight they throw back the light in a flat bar, and every satyr community that ever caught one caught it by the eyes and not the horns. The pupil rolls in the socket to stay level with the horizon whatever the head is doing, so a Gidan going down a cliff face keeps a flat, wide, undistorted view of the road below while its body is pitched at every angle, which is what "cliff scaling" means. The same eye gives poor depth at distance and the people are hopeless with a thrown weapon or a bow, which is precisely why a Gidan toll is taken at a gate, at arm's length, and never from above.

Smell and taste are one sense and are run through the lip. A Gidan meeting a stranger leans in and breathes over the face, which every other people on the planet finds appalling and which is the single reason most travellers remember a crossing. Recorded abilities are "consume raw meat/ flesh," "intense muscular strength," "cliff scaling" and "break bones with teeth." The last is an organ-level matter: the jaw hinge is short and the back teeth are low, broad and enamelled to an extraordinary thickness, and a Gidan gets marrow without tools and without ceremony.

Life

They breed as their stock does and they breed often. A kid or two in the spring, born already able to stand, following the mother across broken rock within the week. There is no den, no nursery and no long infancy; a Gidan child is on the pass with the family from its first month, because the pass is where the family is and there is nowhere else to leave it.

Childhood is short and is spent watching the road. The children are the counters: they sit above the toll and count what comes, who is armed, what is in the carts, and how many went the other way last month, and they are questioned about it in the evening. A Gidan of ten has a better head for traffic than most merchants and cannot read. The teeth come in properly at twelve and the first horns show the outward curl at about fourteen, which is when the child is given the file and told what it is for.

They eat what crosses and what they take, and above the tree line that means goat, sheep, mountain fowl, whatever a rockfall leaves and whoever would not pay. The Irugaine hunting is a separate matter from eating and is done for its own reasons, and the head is what is brought back. They keep no herds and grow nothing.

They die on the rock and are not buried in it, because there is no ground. A dead Gidan is put into a crevice with stones packed over, and the horns are left on, always, which is the single point on which the whole people is sentimental.

Frailty

The cut goes wrong and it goes wrong regularly. Sinus-rot kills a Gidan or two in every hold in every generation, and it kills them slowly and in public, and the cutter who did it is not punished and is not forgiven either and usually stops cutting. Below that there is horn-fly, which lays in the crease of the spiral and whose grubs work down toward the core, and mites in the fleece of the throat that no amount of grooming clears. A hold in a warm spring smells of tar, which is what they paint the cut ends with.

The hooves crack. Wet rock, iron-hard frost and ten thousand crossings a year split the wall of the hoof up into the quick, and winter lameness is the commonest thing that ends a Gidan's working life. A lame Gidan sits in the hold and takes the toll at the table, which is a demotion nobody comments on because everyone is coming to it.

The chest that lets them live where they live is what keeps them there. The lungs are outsized, the blood runs thick and dark, and a Gidan taken down to the lowlands for a season goes heavy, sleeps badly, bruises, and begins to labour at nothing. Two seasons of it will kill one. No Gidan army has ever descended out of the mountains, no Gidan has ever held ground below the tree line, and the whole political shape of the species, a people with no king and no ambition beyond the road through the house, is the consequence of a heart that cannot work at sea level. They take tolls because they cannot take anything else.

And the teeth go flat. A lifetime of bone wears the molars to the gum by eighty, and an old Gidan cannot get marrow out of a joint and depends on the younger ones to crack it for him, which they do, at the table, without being asked and without a word about it.

Country

The Surface Realm, in high country, above the tree line and on the wind. A Gidan holding is a Tall Hold: a stone house built across the narrowest point of a pass, with the road running through its ground floor and a gate at each end, so that to cross the mountain is to walk through somebody's kitchen. A Tall Hold is three or four storeys, dry-stone, roofed in slate, with the family living above the road and the byre and the strongroom below it, and it is the only architecture the people have. The oldest of them are two thousand years standing and have been extended upward by every generation, so a great hold is a tower with a road through the bottom and eleven families in it, and the ones at the top are the oldest branch.

Holds are named for the pass and the naming is plain: the High Cut, the Long Throat, Ninebend, the Grey Stair, Cold Gate, the Narrow.

What a Gidan hold does to a mountain over a thousand years is mostly to keep it empty, which is the point. The pass is clean, the road is maintained, the slopes on either side are stripped of anything a bandit could shelter in, and the wild goat and the mountain fowl are held at a level that leaves enough to eat and not enough to draw a predator. What the range loses is its people. Nobody settles within a day of a hold, because there is nowhere to settle that is not somebody's toll ground, and the valleys below fill up instead, which is where the Gidaesh live. A range that loses its holds, and two have, does not become free. It becomes impassable, and the trade goes round by sea, and the valley towns die in about thirty years.

Society

"Brutish; not level headed." "Unforgiving. Unrelenting." And the one that makes them something other than monsters: "Information barterers." A Gidan on a pass sees everyone who crosses it, and sells that.

The hold is the unit and the eldest of the senior branch is the Holder. There is no clan above the hold and no king anywhere in the people; two holds on the same range will cooperate over a road and will not otherwise. Authority inside a hold is by age and by branch and is disputed constantly and loudly, and Gidan argument is famously bad-tempered and famously conclusive, since it ends when one of them leaves the room.

The toll is the institution and it is a formal thing. A traveller is stopped at the lower gate, and the Holder or the Holder's second names the price, and the price has three currencies: coin, goods, or the road. The road means information, and it is the one the Gidan actually want. A party that can say who is behind them, what is in the carts, how many riders were at the last hold and what colours they wore will cross for nothing, and a party that pays coin and says nothing is charged double and is remembered. This is the trade the people live on, since what a Gidan sells downhill is not the fur or the ore that crossed the pass, it is the fact that it crossed. "Admission is payment or death." The second option is exercised and is not a bluff, and the bodies are not left on the road, which is why the passes are clean and the reputation is what it is.

They dress heavily and plainly in wool and hide, with the horns bare in all weather. Their food is roasted and their drink is a clear spirit run off in the byre. Their music is a single reed pipe and a stamped hoof, played in the hold at night with the road gate shut, and travellers sleeping in the ground floor hear it through the ceiling and rarely enjoy it. Their oath is sworn on the horn and is sworn by touching the cut end, and it means that the swearer's word will hold until the horn grows out, which is a year, and no Gidan will swear anything longer than that. Their taboo is the unpaid crossing. A person who has crossed a Gidan pass without paying is not forgiven, ever, and holds trade the name of that person up and down the range for decades.

Faith

They believe in the rock, and in the way of the earth and the soil. The Gidan hold that the mountain is the oldest thing and the only honest one, that it was here before anything walked on it and will be here after, and that it is not a person and has no name and wants nothing. They call it the Weight. Their whole theology is three propositions: the Weight is under everything, the Weight does not care, and the Weight is patient. From this they take a code that other peoples find surprisingly rigid in a people who eat travellers: what is built badly falls, what is placed well stands, and a debt is a stone that has been picked up and must be put down somewhere.

There is no clergy and no temple, and the Gidanvur are the exception and are treated as an oddity by the rest. The rite is the Placing. Every Gidan who crosses a pass not their own picks up a stone at the bottom and puts it down at the top, and the cairns at the head of every pass in the world are Gidan work, some of them the size of houses, and no Gidan has ever explained this to anybody who asked. A hold marks a death by taking one stone out of its own wall and adding it to the cairn, so that a very old hold is measurably thinner than it was built.

There is no afterlife in it at all, and the people are content with that. What the Weight does with a body is press it, over a long enough time, into the rock, and the Gidan consider that a sufficient account and a good one.

The truth is that Aezithis is the god of stone and the crust, that he traded his heart for a void one, and that he is worshipped here by a people who have never spoken his name and would deny it if told. The worldly gods have no afterlife realms; there is nothing at the end of the Placing; and every Gidan soul goes to the soul auction of the star gods with everyone else's.

Tongue

Common Tongue, and the satyr tongue, which is Low Irugaine, spoken natively and without accent, since a species bred to sit down at a satyr's fire had to be able to talk at it. That is the plainest confirmation available that the satyr is in the splice.

Their own speech is Common worn down by altitude: short, flat, heavy on consonants, with the vowels swallowed, and a hold's dialect is close enough to its neighbours' to trade and far enough to tell a stranger. There is no Gidan literature and no writing of any kind, in a people whose entire livelihood is the recording of who went where, and the whole of that record lives in the heads of children who were made to say it out loud in the evening.

A Gidan carries a given name and a hold name, and the hold name is the pass. Given names are single hard syllables or two at most and are reused within a branch, so numbering appears: Dagg, Dagg the Second. Eight examples: Dagg of the High Cut, Orma of Ninebend, Skell of the Long Throat, Bruk of Cold Gate, Vess of the Grey Stair, Tarn of the Narrow, Hodd of Ninebend, Grae of the High Cut.

Regard

"Brutish mountain folk." "None wishing to become one with any given society." And, in full: "Asses."

Merchants who use the passes regularly have a different view and keep it to themselves, which is that a Gidan hold is the most reliable institution in the mountains: the price is the price, the road is safe on the far side, and a hold that has taken your toll for twenty years will send men out after you in a storm. The Irugaine have no such view. To a grove, a Gidan is the thing that came to the fire wearing a friend's shape, and there is no negotiation available.

The satyr and the Irugaine are prey, and the people were built to eat them and are still hunting them. Everyone with a cart is an enemy on the terms above. The Boalden are trade, since their furs cross Gidan ground and they pay in goods and in the road. The Lathse are rivals and occasional neighbours, holding the high country from the other side of the tree line, and they are the only people the Gidan bargain with as equals. The customers are everyone with an interest in who is moving: the information the passes generate is bought by houses, companies and the Librar, and a Gidan Holder will sell the same crossing three times.

Harvest

Wearing Gidan fur or Gidan horn is an insult, and among the wild peoples and the common folk of most civilisations it is understood as one and answered as one. The market exists regardless, because the horn is remarkable material: dense, layered, spiralled, taking a polish like dark glass, and prized for horn-bows, drinking vessels, dagger grips and the inlay of expensive furniture.

Cut horn, the kind a Gidan files off itself each spring, is traded openly by the Gidan themselves and carries no shame at all, since it was given up rather than taken. It is sold by the hold at the gate, by weight, and is the second income of the people, which is to say that a species survives on what it shaves off its own skulls to stay disguised. Whole horn is another thing entirely. A whole spiral means a dead Gidan, because nothing short of death takes a horn off at the root, everybody in the trade knows it, and a hold that sees one on a passing merchant's saddle will take it, and will take the merchant.

The hide is coarse and cheap and nobody wants it except as an insult, which is precisely how it is used; a Gidan-hide cloak is worn by Irugaine bounty men and by nobody else on the planet. There is a bounty, and it is Irugaine money, and it is paid on the head. Cut-ended horn found on a corpse is the standing evidence in the grove courts that the corpse was Gidan and not satyr, and the Gidan know this, and the ones who hunt groves grow their horns out first and take the risk.

Remembered

Dagg of the High Cut. Holder of the oldest standing Tall Hold, whose wall is said to be a third gone into the cairn above it.

Orma of Ninebend. Sold the same crossing to three houses in one season and started a war between two of them.

Skell of the Long Throat. A Gidanvur who came down off the mountain to say something to a grove and was not heard out.

Kin each has a page of its own