Torgai

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with giant toad, "Bred to hunt the escaped Bogish through the swamp regions." They were "the disgusting slavers, in charge of collecting the runaway frog species from the Alverian empire." When the empire fell, the hunters stayed in the swamp and took it: "After the fall they have become barons and lords of the swamp regions, keeping all beneath their boots in sheer size and ferocious control." The hunt became an economy. The Amphirien of the wet country are these same people under an older word.

Body

Four to seven feet, by kin, and coloured after the toad or frog of the kin. "Their warty, dry skin hangs in many areas, but remains tight around their Nu'umanoid-toad bony ridged head. Their eyes have swelling around it, and their mouths are more Nu'uman than toad. Their limbs are massive, and bodies typically very rotund." No external ears, no horns, no tails, no hair. The skin is dry, which tells a Torgai from a Bogish at a glance.

The dry skin is the makers' one gift and the Torgai never stop mentioning it. A dry hide does not need to be kept wet and does not dry out in a day, so the Torgai can cross open country, sit in a tavern, hold a road and garrison a causeway where a Bogish would blister. What it costs them is heat. A skin that will not evaporate cannot shed warmth, and there is no other cooling in the body worth the name, so a Torgai in a dry summer overheats and dies of it in a matter of hours, swollen and speechless. Every barony works from dusk, every causeway town is roofed, and the standing labour law of the swamp, which the barons enforce because it protects their own bodies first, is that nothing is carried between the fourth and the ninth hour.

They have no gills and no skin-breathing to speak of. The lungs are filled by the throat: the great sac under the jaw pumps air down in strokes, and that same sac, worked the other way, is the Croak. Their breathing and their speech are one apparatus, which is why a Torgai holds a conversation in a rhythm nobody else can quite match and why a Torgai who has been running cannot talk.

"Expand their bellies in defense." A Torgai swallows air into a great abdominal sac and inflates until it is twice its width and too round and too hard for a jaw to close on. While it is inflated it cannot use the throat pump for anything else, which means it cannot speak. In a bargaining people this has become the whole of their diplomacy. A Torgai who bellies up at a table has ended the conversation and cannot be made to continue it, and there is no counter to it short of violence. "He bellied up" is used from the swamp to the Golden Road for any refusal that cannot be argued with.

Then there is the tongue: enormous, prehensile, anchored at the front of the mouth and thrown by a pulse of blood, long enough for a thrown knife to go "piercing through the Amphirien's tongue" and pin it to a gaming board, and long enough that she can pull free and leave "the knife to slice its tongue in half," and keep playing. The surface of it carries a glue that only Torgai mucus will release. A Torgai can take a coin off a table across a room, and theft by tongue is a named crime in every barony with a market. The gaming boards of the swamp are kept wet for exactly this reason, and a dry board is an accusation before a card is dealt.

The oath follows from the glue. A Torgai swearing lays its tongue flat on a dry board, where it sticks fast, and cannot take it back until the other party wets the board. The swearer is physically held to the oath by the one it swore to, for as long as that one chooses. It is the only oath in the record that the hearer controls, and it is why a people this deceitful can be dealt with at all.

They swallow with their eyes. The great eyes retract down into the skull to press food through the throat, so a Torgai in the act of swallowing is blind for a moment and knows it. Every assassination in the baronies happens at table, every baron employs a taster who is also a watcher, and the swamp's first rule of courtesy is that the host swallows first and the guest watches the room.

Their sight is locked to movement. A Torgai sees a running thing perfectly at a great distance and does not see a still thing at ten paces; a shape that stops stops existing. Four thousand years of hunting the Bogish have run into this, and the Bogish know it, and BogTown children are taught the Stillness before they are taught to swim. This is the answer to the oldest joke in the swamp. The Torgai were bred to catch the clever frogs and were given eyes that cannot see a frog that has decided not to move. It is the reason the baronies hire Eesham bailiffs, who hunt by other senses entirely, and the reason a Torgai hunt is all noise and beaters and dogs, since the whole craft is making the quarry move. In the Croak, the word for prey and the word for moving are the same word.

Hearing is a drum on each side of the head tuned to the Croak's own register, which is low. A Torgai hears its own kind across miles of open marsh and is close to deaf to the higher voices of the smaller peoples, which it calls the whining tongues. A BogTown a mile from a barony can sing all night and the barony hears weather. They "Swim and breathe underwater." A lean Torgais'shu runs a hundred and fifty pounds; a Torgaesh five hundred. They live about seventy years.

An old Torgai is harder to read. Her skin goes scaly, battle-torn and weathered, and her eyes are sharp and cold and reptilian; the warts dry into plates that pass for scale from a pace away.

Life

They spawn as toads do, and they are omnivores. The eggs are laid in strings in still water and the water makes the kin. A clutch laid in slow warm water on a market river comes up Torgaen. A clutch laid in a dry-season pan, where the tadpoles must eat one another to be the ones that walk out, comes up Torgaek. A clutch laid in the cold rock pools under a cascade comes up Torgaesh. A clutch laid in the short-lived pools of a desert river comes up Torgais'shu. The baronies lay for Torgaesh on purpose and guard the cold pools like treasuries. The clans let the water decide.

The stages are named for what a Torgai is worth at each of them. The String is the spawn, and a barony's strings are counted and taxed before they hatch. The Swim is the tadpole season, and it is the only part of a Torgai life with no property in it. The Crawl-out is the coming ashore. Then the First Bargain, which is the day a young Torgai strikes a deal of any kind with anyone, and which is held against it for the rest of its life; barons have been refused thrones over a bad First Bargain made at nine. Full growth at fifteen is the Belly, when the defensive sac finishes and the young one can refuse an argument for the first time. Age is the Drop, when the belly loosens and hangs and will no longer hold air, and a dropped Torgai can be talked at and cannot decline, which is why the old of the baronies stop attending court.

A young Torgai belongs to no one until it can strike a bargain. A baron's dead are sunk in the family mere with their weight in coin, and the heirs dive for it within the month. A clan's dead are left on the mudflat for the swamp, since a clan holds that nothing is owed a corpse. They eat everything: eel, reed heart, frog, carrion, the tavern's food and, when the game goes badly, the tavern's Kriksy.

Frailty

The tongue is the ruin. A torn tongue does not heal to its old length and a split one never grips again, and a Torgai that cannot lay its tongue on a board cannot swear, which in this society is a loss of legal personality. A baron with a damaged tongue holds his seat exactly as long as his weight holds it. That is why the Half-Tongue's people tell her story as a boast: she swore afterwards, on half a tongue, and the oath was accepted, and no Torgai alive can say precisely why except that nobody wished to be the one to refuse her.

Heat kills the young and the fat. The baronies lose labourers every dry summer and lose barons every third one, since a five-hundred-pound body sheds even less than a lean one. Rich food does the rest: the heavy lords of the weir-towns seize in the joints by fifty, and gout of the hind legs is so common in the baronial lines that a limp is read as a sign of wealth.

The Torgaesh carry the worst of it. Seven feet and five hundred pounds is more than the frame and the single-circuit heart were built to hold upright, and a Torgaesh that lies down for long enough cannot get up, because the mass settles onto its own lungs. Blackreed Hold is built on three of them who lay down. The baronies call it a throne-mount and an honour and the Torgaesh who has taken one has taken a life sentence with a hall on top of it, and this is understood by both parties, which is why a Torgaesh is owed a great deal and why no barony has ever recorded the terms.

The tadpole stage is where a clan loses most of its people, and the Torgaek pans lose nearly all of one; a pan that dries early takes a whole generation, and the Cracked Pans have empty years in the clan counts that everyone can name. Their skin cracks at the folds in old age and the cracks go septic in the mud.

And the poison of their own kin kills them: an unmilked Torgais'shu touched by accident puts a full-grown Torgai into a trance for a day, and licked, kills, and the oracles' attendants are chosen as much for steadiness of hand as for the bog-vow.

Country

Surface Realm wetlands: "the swamps and bogs; swamp baronies and lordships." Four baronial seats are named. The Rotten Weir is a weir-town on a slow river and the seat of Baron Burgoo. Gallowsmire hangs its debtors from the causeway. Blackreed Hold is built on the backs of three Torgaesh who have not moved in a century. The Drowned Ford is the toll-seat of the last road across a great marsh. Three clan-grounds stand against them: the Cracked Pans, where the Torgaek clans lie buried through the dry; the Roaring Steps, the cascade country of the Torgaesh clans; and the Salt Bends, the desert river of the Torgais'shu.

A barony is a system of water and a set of tolls on it. The baron holds the weir, the ford, the causeway and the cold pools, and every one of those is both a revenue and a breeding programme, since the water decides the kin and the kin decides the garrison. A century of Torgai rule over a marsh produces a very particular landscape: peat cut in blocks, eel ponds where there were reed beds, dams at the cascades, causeways on piles, and the standing water managed to the inch. It is prosperous and it is a diminished place, and the Bogish, who need living mud and moving water, are pushed further out of it every decade, which raises the frog-bounty, which is taxed.

They have half-domesticated the Kriksy, which is kept caged at the gaming boards and in the kitchens, and they farm eel, leech and peat. What eats a Torgai is the Eesha in the water and other Torgai on the land. What competes with them for the same quarry is the Eesham, and the two predators share the swamp in a standing, profitable, murderous arrangement.

Society

Where they are in the world decides how they are ruled: in some regions clan, in others baronial. "Bold and obnoxious." "Greedy, always in the game of bartering." "Leaving a trail of rot, disruption and chaos wherever they and their clan goes." They are a deceitful and selfish people, chaotic in temper and tending from neutral to evil, with the exceptions every people has.

A barony is held by weight and by ledger. The baron taxes passage, peat, reed, eel and the frog-bounty, and sits a Torgaesh as a throne; the heir is whoever can climb the throne-mount and stay on it while the court croaks. Charters from the Nu'uman crowns are bought and kept, since a chartered baron can hang a poacher and an unchartered one has to drown him quietly. A clan follows its Loudest, whoever's croak carries furthest across the pan at dusk, and is challenged by croaking-down, which can take three nights and has killed old Loudests from the strain; the throat sac that leads a clan is the same organ that breathes it, and three nights of it is three nights of not resting.

The game is the custom. Every Torgai gambles, at the hexagon board above all, and the tongue is the oath: a Torgai who lays its tongue on the board has sworn, and one who has been pinned there has been called a liar in the only way that matters. Barons wear stolen finery a size too small; clansfolk wear eel-hide. They drink mire, a bog-rum that other peoples use to strip paint. The music is the dusk chorus, every throat-sac in the barony sounding at once, which the barons call an anthem and their neighbours call the reason they moved.

Taboo: to ask a Torgai its weight; to take a Bogish alive without paying the baron's cut; to touch a Torgais'shu without leave; and, at any table, to swallow before your host.

Faith

The Torgai align toward the Void Princes. The faith is called the Still Water and its mouths are the Torgais'shu. The Prince the Torgai serve they name in their own tongue, and in Common call the Holder of the Marker: the one who keeps the tally of every bargain ever struck and will call it in. Every Torgai bargain is a small offering to him, and a cheat that is not caught is a prayer answered. The oracles croak the old Alverian liturgies into still water and read what the ripples do, and a baron does nothing large without a reading. To touch a Torgais'shu is to enter trance; to lick one is to die; and every word an oracle speaks is carried by attendants who have taken the bog-vow and will never speak again in their own voices. The Torgai believe the dead are called before the Holder to settle their markers, and that a Torgai who died owing is worked for it. This is nearer the truth than most faiths come. The Princes have realms; they buy at the star gods' auction; and a soul with a marker on it fetches very little.

Tongue

Common Tongue. Their own is the Croak, a tongue of throat-sac tones under the words, in which a baron can insult a rival across a hall while praising him aloud. The tones sit below the hearing of most of the smaller peoples, so the insult is genuinely private in a crowded room, and the Bogish, who hear high and not low, are among the few peoples the Croak cannot be used against.

Names are blunt, one or two syllables, with a doubled vowel where the bearer wants weight. A baron adds his seat: Burgoo of the Rotten Weir.

The names run: Burgoo, Gorb, Hobbek, Grull, Mudgar, Tolloch, Skabb, Wurrum.

Regard

"Disgusting, rancid and self serving." "bold, obnoxious, greedy barterers." And in every tavern on the edge of the swamp, sooner or later, somebody calls one a cheating frog and follows it with a word this record will not carry.

The Bogish are the original purpose and the standing feud; the barony stands on the swamp that hides the people it was made to catch. The Eesham hunt the same frogs for the same markets, and the two predators share the water uneasily; a baron who hires an Eesham bailiff has hired the thing that will one day lay eggs in him. The Nu'uman crowns sell the charters and look away. The Torkan raid the baronies and are paid off in Bogish. The Tusiva have been known to sit at a baron's board, and the baron has not always known it.

Harvest

Croak-hide: the dry warty hide, thick and water-shedding, cured for boots, saddle-bags and the hulls of small marsh boats.

Tongue-sinew: the long muscle of the tongue, dried and twisted, the best sling-cord and bowstring in wet country, since it neither rots nor slackens. Every length of it ended a Torgai's standing before it ended its life.

Belly-bladder: the defensive belly, tanned whole, a waterproof sack that will hold a man's weight of grain, or a drumhead.

Torgaen gland-milk: the poison behind a Torgaen's eyes, a purgative in small doses and an arrow-poison in large.

Dream-milk: the skin-milk of the Torgais'shu, the trance-poison of the Still Water, forbidden by every clan and barony to be taken from a living oracle, and sold anyway, in the same taverns, under the board.

The baronies tax all of it and hang for the last.

Remembered

The Half-Tongue, a scarred female Torgai with cold eyes and a caged Kriksy beside her at the hexagon board, whose tongue was pinned to that board with a thrown knife and who cut it free and did not stop playing. Her own people tell the story as a boast.

Baron Burgoo of the Rotten Weir, who holds his charter from a crown that has forgotten it granted one and taxes a road that crosses no one's land but his.

Gorb, a Torgaen road-trader who has sat in every tavern between three rivers and has never once been caught, which every barony finds more useful than a spy.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Torgai code is locked. The four kin are morphs of the one genome, made by the water the clutch is laid in, never by a second splice. Each carries the shape of a particular toad or frog of Nu.