Iziakee
The Iziakee are the island canopy strain, hyper green and faded cyan with "crude white stripes lining their scratchy tiny scales," and they are the one people of the Iziaka whose homes the rest of the world can name. The Iziakee TreeTops are treetop villages, built up in the high crowns of tropical island forest, and everything about the strain follows from living sixty feet off the ground.
They hunt birds and trap ground animals. Out West they wear little, their "bodies not built for the climates of those regions," and they are uncommon anywhere else. Five feet, light-boned, ninety pounds, and the finest bowmen of the species, since a canopy hunter who misses loses the arrow and the day.
Body
Their depth judgement is the best in the class, the eyes set forward far enough to overlap, which is what a life of jumping between branches at sixty feet selects for and what makes the bow easy. The trade is a narrow field of view, so an Iziakee turns its whole head where another strain would move an eye, and reads as shifty in a room.
They hear nothing through a tree. The whole species listens through stone, and an Iziakee above the ground has given that up and relies on sight alone, which is why the only way anyone has ever taken a TreeTops village is at night and from below. Their hide grades firm, and firm hide makes coats and saddlery, so the strain is worth taking and is not worth a war.
Country
Tropical island forest, in the crowns rather than under them. The villages are the only Iziakan settlement form the world has a name for, and they are not a clutch-ground village lifted into the air: there is no warm bed at the centre of an Iziakee village, because the bed hangs.
Out of the islands they are travellers, and badly dressed ones. The strain turns up in the West wearing almost nothing in weather it was not built for, and is uncommon in every country that is not hot and green.
Life
The Iziakee weave egg-baskets of vine and hang them in the high crowns where no ground animal climbs, and the Counting is done sixty feet in the air. The elders count the living, count the dead in the shell and name each hatchling in the order it broke out, and the hatchlings that dig free of a hanging basket climb before they walk.
Everything else runs as it does across the species. The First Shedding falls between the third year and the fifth, an elder reads the new scale with a thumb and a knife point, and a word is spoken that will not be lowered while the child lives.
Faith
Irus in his shepherd face, whom they name Kee'rusk, the Canopy Shepherd, who feeds the high crowns and asks only that nothing be taken from the ground below without a bird given to the air in return. Like every Iziakan faith it is a faith of the Hardening: the god tests the scale, and a life well lived ends harder than it began.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the Iziakee TreeTops stand on the map of Nu, since they are the one Iziakan settlement the world names
- Whether a hanging clutch is read differently from a buried one, and what the Salt Scales think of it
- How many TreeTops villages there are, and whether they answer to each other