Jakai

Body

"Tall forms, with a shelled exterior to hide droopy pale skin. They have tri-toed angled down feet, and a head that has two shell plates jutting out the side, conjoining around back. Their nose hole has countless feelers/bristles in it and their mouth is a hole with four rows of teeth inside it. Pale blue eyes in jagged deep eye sockets. Scrawny bug-like arms, with root-like hands, that have blue pollen sacks on the end of each finger. A large chest, tiny stomach, and wide hips, supported by lean muscular legs." Nine to ten feet, a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty pounds, four hundred thousand years.

The memory is physical and it is the reason the chest is large and the stomach is tiny: the whole thoracic volume is laid down in fine layers, one for each season the Jakai has lived, the way a trunk lays a ring, and a Jakai remembers by reading its own chest from the inside. Nothing is edited, nothing fades and nothing can be added out of order. They are the memory of the species and its diplomatic corps, and they read minds by pressing a pollen sack against a creature's eyeball, which is a negotiating method nobody has ever enjoyed.

Society

They are ruled by exact age, and by nothing else. The Jakai of the Hall of Remembered Ages sit in a ring in the order in which they fell from the branch, and there is no dispute about the order because every Jakai remembers every other Jakai's first spring. The eldest is the First Remembering and speaks last and decides; below it the ring speaks in order, each adding what it holds and no more; a Jakai does not argue with an older Jakai, because the older one was there and it was not. It is the least contested government in the world and the slowest to change its mind, and it has changed its mind twice. The Jakai do not rule other kin and would consider it a category error. What they do is remember, translate and carry, and the other fifteen kin route everything through them, so that in practice a Jakai stands at the shoulder of every Irugaine leader on Nu holding four hundred thousand years of precedent and saying nothing until asked.

Life

They eat pollen, tree-mast and the soft inner cambium of the Life Tree, taken once a year at its flowering, chewed through the four rows of teeth into a paste that the tiny stomach works on for a season. A Jakai can go a decade without eating and often does, out of absent-mindedness.

Their affliction is the crowding of their own layers: past three hundred thousand years the chest is full, the newest layers lie thin and confused over the old, and a Jakai at the end of its span can recite the Scourging in perfect order and cannot recall who it spoke to yesterday. The ring seats them close to the First Remembering and asks them only about the deep past, which is a kindness and is also exactly what they are for.

Harvest

Taken from them: the pollen sacks, which read a mind through the eye, and which continue to work exactly once after being cut from a corpse, making them the single most illegal object in the Nu'uman courts and the most reliably present one in the pockets of their inquisitors; the shell plates, light, layered and proof against anything but a pick; the nose-bristles, which sort one scent out of ten thousand and are sewn into the masks of Do'urssan tunnel-wardens; and the memory itself, which cannot be cut out, though the Alverians tried it on nine Jakai and the Jakai remember all nine names.