Torgaek

Body

Olive green and ridge-backed, cream on the belly, orange at the throat and under the arms, with a jaw heavier than anything else in the people and spurs of bone in it that serve as teeth. They carry the shared apparatus entire: the dry hide, the throat sac that breathes and croaks, the belly that swallows air, the glued tongue, the eyes that retract to swallow, and the sight that cannot hold a thing which has stopped.

In the dry they lie buried by the hundred under the Cracked Pans, breathing through the cocoon of their own shed skin at a rate that would not keep anything else alive, and rise with the first rain. A barony that has planned a war lays its Torgaek two years early and waits.

Life

A clutch laid in a dry-season pan comes up Torgaek, and the pan is the hardest water in the swamp to be laid in. The tadpoles must eat one another to be the ones that walk out, and a pan that dries early takes a whole generation; the Cracked Pans have empty years in the clan counts that everyone can name. Those that come out live about seventy years, like the rest of the people.

Society

Where the baronies hold them they are garrison; where the clans hold them they are war-clans, following the Loudest and challenged by croaking-down like any other clan. They gamble as all Torgai gamble and swear the same oath on the same dry board, but a Torgaek who has bellied up at a table is rarely argued with a second time, since the alternative to the argument is standing in front of the jaw.