Ossurn

Origin

Nine to twelve feet of feather-furred giant standing in weather that kills everything else, at the exact point where the maps of the old empire stop. The Ossurn were made to go first into the lethal country, hold ground long enough for the whitestone to take, and hand a living frontier back to their makers, and they did that for eight hundred years across ice, ash and salt desert. Then the empire ended and nobody came to collect them, and they are still at the stakes.

Their name comes from the work. Ossur is the frontier stake, the marker driven at the furthest point a survey reached, and the plural ossurn came to mean the people who were left standing at the stakes, which is precisely what happened to them, and it is what they call themselves.

The splice is Nu'uman, Irugaine and a cold-country stock, one to each kin: feather-furred giants for frontier expansion in lethal climates. They were built for the places where a whitestone seed will not germinate until the ground has been held and warmed and worked for a decade, which means somebody has to live there for a decade first, in a country that will kill anyone who tries.

The feather-fur is the signature of the programme and the one genuine piece of design in them. Their guard hair is not hair. Each shaft branches, and the branches branch, so that the coat is structurally a pelt of down, and it traps a layer of still air three inches deep against the skin. It sheds meltwater. It does not mat. It can be shed entire and regrown, and the shed coat is a textile better than anything woven from anything else on Nu. The Alverians made it for insulation. What it became is a currency, a scripture and the centre of an entire religion, which was not in the brief.

They were placed at the stakes in threes and fours with a season's supplies and an instruction to hold, and they held, and the whitestone came, and the frontier moved forward, and they were picked up and placed at the next stakes. Eight hundred years of that. Then the stars went out, the Alverians lost their power, Vaeyar's storm took the element out of the air, and the empire that had placed them stopped existing over the course of about two years.

Nothing came for them. The Ossurn at the stakes waited out the first winter, and the second, and at some point in the third the ones who were going to accept it accepted it, and they have been at the edge of the world ever since, in country nobody else wants, which is one of two reasons a people this large and this useful has never been enslaved.

Body

Nine to twelve feet standing, eight hundred to sixteen hundred pounds, built heavy through the shoulder and hip with a low centre and a short thick neck. The head is broad and blunt with a wide flat nose, small deep eyes under a heavy brow, and a mouth built for grinding. Two of the three kin carry horn: a boss across the brow in the vuln line and short curved tusks in the 'al line. The hands are enormous, five-fingered, with a thick pad and short black claws that are used and not worn as ornament. The feet are broad and splayed and spread the weight on snow like a raft.

The coat is the thing anyone notices. Deep, standing, and visibly branched at the tip if you get close enough, which nobody does, so it reads at distance as a strange soft haze at the edge of the silhouette. Colours run white through iron grey to a dark umber in the ash country. In an Ossurn's own light it looks like something between wool and plumage, and the word the peoples of the frontier use for it means both.

Underneath, the whole body is built to keep heat and has almost no way to lose it. The skin beneath a white coat is black, to take what little light the winter gives. The blood going out to a hand runs alongside the blood coming back, so the heat is handed over before it reaches the fingers, and an Ossurn can work bare-handed at a temperature that opens a Nu'uman's skin, with hands only a little above freezing and no damage done. The nose is a long warming passage that gives the breath's heat back before it leaves. The surface of the coat sits at the temperature of the air around it, which is why an Ossurn lying down does not melt into the snow and does not show at all from a distance.

The cost is absolute and it decides their history. They cannot shed heat. There is no sweat worth the name, the coat cannot be opened, and panting moves almost nothing in a body that size. An Ossurn in a heated hall is in distress within an hour and ill within three, and one carried south into a warm country dies of it inside a week in a way that looks like nothing and is simply the inside of the body becoming too hot to run. They can never go where the wanting is. The two courts that have modelled taking them have both come up against the same line in the same place: a people worth a fortune who cannot be moved to where the fortune is, and who would arrive dead.

Lifespan is two hundred and forty to three hundred years. They are slow to warm, physically and otherwise, and the slowness is metabolic: the whole body runs at a low idle, banks fat, and turns over food across days rather than hours, so they can go a long time on very little and then eat an extraordinary amount at once. They walk at a pace that looks unhurried and covers forty miles in a day.

The senses are made for white country. The eyes are small, deep and shaded by the brow with a dark inner lid drawn across in bright weather, so snow-blindness does not touch them. They smell across miles in cold dry air and can tell a holding's fire from twenty. They feel temperature to a fraction of a degree and treat it as information about time rather than comfort, which is why hold-speech has a grammar of temperature and Common has no way to say most of it. And the coat itself is an instrument: the branched hair lies over in a wind and an Ossurn reads direction and strength off the lay of its own shoulder without looking, which is how a walker holds a line in a whiteout with nothing else to steer by.

Life

They pair for life and they breed rarely, one child every twenty or thirty years, and the birth is the great event of a holding. Gestation runs fourteen months. The child is born in the birth-drift, a chamber dug into a snow bank or an ash bank away from the holding, lined with the mother's own shed coat, and it is born coatless and stays in the drift for its first three months, which is the only part of an Ossurn's life spent hidden. A coatless child in that country is three months of continuous terror for everyone concerned, and the whole holding takes the watch in turns, and nothing else is done in those three months that can be put off.

The first molt at two years is when the child becomes a person in the eyes of the holding. The coat comes off in slabs, the holding gathers it, the vuln shaman cards and spins it, and it is made into the child's first blanket, which the child keeps and is eventually buried in. From then on every molt is gathered and nothing is wasted. The molt comes once a year to the young and once in three or four years to the old, and a holding in molt stays in, because a half-shed Ossurn is a cold Ossurn, and the molt weeks are when the stories are told and the roads are not walked.

They eat what the frontier gives: lichen, moss, frozen root, hard grain traded in, fish, seal, whatever the country holds. The vuln line is nearly herbivorous and the 'al line nearly carnivorous, and this is a difference nobody in a holding regards as interesting.

They die outdoors, always, at the edge of the holding facing away from it, wrapped in their first blanket, and they are covered with stones and with the year's gathered wool, and the covering is done by the whole holding standing in whatever weather is happening. There is no marker. The frontier does not keep markers.

Frailty

Heat is the first killer and it does not need a warm country to do it. An Ossurn working hard in still air overheats in its own coat, and every holding has lost somebody to a hard haul on a mild day, which is why the heavy work is done at night and in wind and never in the thaw. The frontier saying that a fair day is a dangerous day is meant literally.

A failed molt is the second. If the shed coat does not lift clean it mats against the skin, the trapped air is lost, the hide beneath rots in the wet, and the whole pelt has to be cut off a person who then has no coat until the next year and must be wrapped and kept indoors like an infant. Cutting a matted coat is the one time an Ossurn's own wool is taken with a blade, and the holding burns it rather than spin it.

The size takes its own toll. Hips and knees go by two hundred and fifty, and an Ossurn who can no longer walk the road becomes a hall-sitter, which is honourable and is also the end. Sixteen hundred pounds goes through sea ice that carried a thousand, and the 'al line loses people that way every few winters. Falls in ash country are worse, since the crust hides a pit.

The ash holdings under the crimson volcano lose people to the fallout every ash winter. The Crimson takes them slowly, through the lungs and through the food, and what it makes of a body this size the frontier does not describe in detail and does not leave alive. A holding that has lost two in a season moves its stake, which is the only circumstance in which a stake is moved, and the old hole is filled and the shaman speaks over it.

The children are the quiet grief. A coatless infant in a drift that floods, or a drift found by something, is the commonest death among them, and a people who breed once in twenty-five years can lose a generation of a holding to one bad spring.

Country

The lethal country, everywhere on Nu: the tundra north of any tree line, the high ash plains under the crimson volcano's fallout, the salt deserts, the coasts where the sea freezes. The Ossurn hold about four hundred holdings, which are not towns. A holding is a long low hall of stone and turf and whale rib, half sunk, roofed in shed wool felted three feet thick, housing twenty to sixty of them, with a stake driven at each of the four corners of its ground.

The stakes are the old survey markers. Every holding is sited on one. They found them, they kept them, they cut a new one when the old one rots, and they place it in the same hole. The empire that drove the original stakes has been gone six thousand years and the frontier of that empire is still visibly marked across three continents in fresh timber, replaced on a rota, by a people who have never once been asked to stop.

Between holdings run the ice roads and the ash roads, walked rather than built, kept open in the worst months by the ae line, and the roads are the reason the frontier peoples of the world can send word at all. A road that has been walked by Ossurn for six thousand years is a packed lane a yard below the surface of the country either side of it, and in summer thaw it shows as a green line across white ground, and the herding peoples follow it without knowing why it is there.

What they do to a country is mostly to hold it open. A holding keeps a lane clear, keeps a fishery worked, keeps a pass passable, and the frontier towns two hundred miles downcountry exist because of that and mostly do not know it. Where a holding has been abandoned the road closes in a decade and the town at the far end of it dies in thirty years, and the frontier has a word for that kind of ruin and uses it about four places.

Society

A holding is governed by its molt-shaman, who is always Ossurnvuln, and the office is religious, textile and civil at once, which is not a contradiction in a place where cloth is survival. Under the shaman are the walkers, who are the ae line and hold the roads and the hunting, and the ice-walkers, the 'al line, who do the heavy work and the fighting. Decisions are taken in the hall by everyone present, slowly, with long silences that outsiders find unbearable, and the shaman speaks last and speaks briefly.

Wool is sacred and wool is never sold. This is the central fact of their culture and the one thing that has to be understood before anything they do makes sense. The coat is gathered, carded, spun and woven by the vuln line in the holding, and the cloth is given: to the holding's own, to travellers who need it, to neighbouring peoples at need, to anyone at the door in a bad winter. Nothing else in the world keeps a person alive at forty below and the Ossurn know it and will not put a price on it. They will trade for iron, grain, salt, timber and Baruush hide, and if you offer coin for wool they will give you the wool and refuse the coin, and it is the most frustrating trading relationship in the world and it has made them beloved in every frontier district they touch.

The rule has a body behind it as well as a doctrine. The coat grows back. A thing a person sheds every year and regrows without effort cannot be understood as property by the people who shed it, and no argument from scarcity has ever made sense to an Ossurn, because scarcity is a fact about the south and not about their skin. There is, inevitably, a black trade in Ossurn wool downcountry, where a given blanket is worth a farm, and every bolt in it was a gift somewhere further up the road. The Ossurn are aware and do not do anything about it, and the reason they give is that the gift was completed at the door.

Custom: a guest is wrapped before being fed. The hall fire is never let out and the person who lets it out leaves. Names are spoken at every meal, all of them, including the dead of the holding, which takes a while and is the reason meals are long. An oath is sworn with a hand in the fire-ash and the words are "at the stake," which means at the furthest point, until relieved, and everyone who hears it understands that no relief is coming and swears it anyway. It is taboo to sell wool, to sleep indoors in good weather, and to complain about cold, that last being simply unlucky.

Their music is throat-singing over a drum of stretched hide, two voices where there is one singer, and it carries a very long way over flat white country and is used to find the holding in a whiteout.

Faith

The Storm That Ended It. They worship the storm, and the storm is Vaeyar's, and they know whose it was and use her name without much reverence. Their reading is theological and entirely self-interested: a god struck at the empire, the empire choked, and the stake-holders were freed by an act of weather. Everything good in their history came out of one storm. The storm is therefore the thing they face.

It follows that they do not pray for good weather. They pray in it: the rite is to go out into the worst of it, stand, and stay out until the shaman calls them in, and a holding will lose someone at this perhaps once a generation and does not regard that as an argument. What they say when they come in is that the storm is still going on somewhere and has not finished the job.

The vuln shamans hold the doctrine and the doctrine is tangible: the coat is the god's answer. A people put out to die in lethal country were given a body that could live in it, and the wool is that answer made into a thing you can wrap a stranger in, and to sell it would be to sell the answer. This is why the wool rule is not economics but scripture, and why an Ossurn cannot be argued out of it by any reasoning about markets that anyone has yet tried.

They keep Tantis of the mountain as a lesser figure, under their own name for him, as the thing that does not move while the storm goes over. They have no interest in the Void Princes, and Princes' cults that have gone into the frontier looking for recruits have come back with nothing and, in two cases, have not come back.

Vaeyar keeps no realm, and neither does Tantis, and the storm promises nothing after death whatever the shamans hold. Every Ossurn soul goes to the auction of the star gods. Their own doctrine, as it happens, promises nothing after death either, which puts them closer to the truth than most faiths on Nu manage, and they got there by accident.

Tongue

They speak Common, slowly, with very long pauses that are not hesitation and should not be filled. They also keep hold-speech, a small hard tongue of about two thousand words developed at the stakes for use in wind: every word short, every word front-loaded, no word longer than two syllables, and a whole grammar of temperature, distance and time-until-dark that Common has no way to say. A speaker of hold-speech can state, in three syllables, how cold it is, how long that leaves, and how far the nearest roof is, and there is no dialect of it anywhere because the wind is the same everywhere. It is taught to any neighbour who asks, freely, like the wool.

A name is a given name plus the stake. The stake is the holding's marker, numbered in the old survey and still numbered that way, so an Ossurn's full name contains an Alverian survey figure that nobody alive can interpret and everybody uses. Eight names: Hurrun of the Ninth Stake, Ossvei of the Long Drift, Bel-Karruth of the Forty-First, Umma of Ashfell, Terrun Two-Coat, Sohl of the Eleventh, Vaskur of the Salt Stake, Enni of the Last Stake.

Regard

On the frontier they are the reason anyone else is alive, and they are treated accordingly: a frontier town with an Ossurn holding upcountry of it will feed a walker, house a walker and lie to a tax officer for a walker without discussion. Downcountry they are barely known and are assumed to be a story about giants. The wool is famous and the people are not, which is precisely the wrong way round for their own safety and which they have never addressed.

Where they are known to the powerful they are wanted, and the wanting is the danger of the age. A people twelve feet tall that works in lethal cold, does not complain, does not organise beyond the holding, and gives away the most valuable textile on Nu is an obvious target for anyone with the reach to go and get them, and there are two courts that have modelled it, and what has stopped both is the distance, the weather, and the plain fact that an Ossurn taken south arrives as a body.

The Foulsen work the outside of their holdings and are tolerated, which surprises everyone; the Ossurn view is that a thief in that country is a person who has not been given enough yet. The Gidan, who believe in the rock and the way of the earth, respect them enormously and the two peoples trade horn and wool and have never had a dispute. The Baruush sell them hide and find them impossible to deal with.

They acknowledge no parent people. Their enemies are the cold, honestly given as the first answer by any Ossurn asked; the Crimson, since the ash holdings sit under the fallout and lose people every ash winter; the Xacrie of the deep north, who take from the drifts; and the two courts. Their friends are the Gidan, the frontier towns, and the Giafe, who come north rarely and are given wool and give a recitation in return, and the sight of a Giafe in an Ossurn hall doorway is a thing the frontier tells stories about.

Harvest

Ossurn wool. The finest insulating cloth in the world, given and never sold by the makers, worth a small fortune three hundred miles downcountry, and the whole of the black trade in the north. Gathered wool is a gift. Shorn wool is an atrocity, and the shearing of a living Ossurn is the one crime that will bring the holdings off the stakes, and it has happened four times and four expeditions did not come home.

Boss and tusk, from the vuln and 'al lines, worked into tools and traded openly by the Ossurn themselves from their own dead.

Hide, which is thick, and which they will not part with, since the hide comes off a person and the wool does not.

The fat, which burns and which they sell without any feeling about it at all.

Remembered

Enni of the Last Stake. Molt-shaman of the furthest holding on the northern survey, who has never travelled south of her own stake and to whom the other three hundred and ninety-nine holdings send their first-molt wool for the naming.

Hurrun of the Ninth Stake. Who walked eleven days into an ash winter to bring wool to a Nu'uman town that had refused his people entry the previous summer, and left it at the gate, and walked back.

Bel-Karruth of the Forty-First. Who led the holdings off the stakes after the third shearing, and who is the only Ossurn in history to have commanded more than one holding, and who put them all back afterwards.

Terrun Two-Coat. Born with a double molt, revered by the vuln line and deeply tired of it.

Vaskur of the Salt Stake. Who has been offered a title, a fortune and a fleet by a southern court on four occasions and has each time given the envoy a blanket and sent him home.

Kin each has a page of its own

One cold-country stock to each kin, and the division among them is the division of the work at a stake: the one who holds the ice, the one who holds the road, and the one who holds the cloth and the doctrine and the hall. No holding is complete without all three and every holding knows the count of each that it has.