On the kindreds

On the kindreds

The world holds many kinds of thinking creatures. We treat them under three headings, and beg the reader’s patience with the categories; they are working categories, no more.

The first are the kindreds of men — the human peoples shaped by their substrates and their centuries.

The wandering kind go where the road goes. They adapt to any country that will have them, and serve as everybody’s neighbour — which is also to say everybody’s first suspicion when something has gone missing.

The frost-marked of the polar latitudes age slowly. Their memory is oral; what they remember is more than what is written.

The stone-folk live in the mountains and the deep ore. They are dense of flesh and slow of speech, generally taken for stubborn by those who have not worked alongside them. Those who have, do not mistake them so.

The sun-tongued fill the equatorial belt. Their orators have made and unmade kingdoms by sheer force of saying.

The tide-folk travel the long coasts, web-handed and reluctant to admit any knowledge of land they cannot put an oar in. They know quite a lot of all of it.

Most kingdoms hold one of these as the right kind, and the others as suspect or strange. The kingdoms next door reverse the judgement. The travelled reader will have noticed.

The second category are the parallel kindreds — peoples not of our shape, but contemporary to us and ordinary in their own ways. The small swift peoples crowd the wild margins: goblin-folk and their organised cousins, the war-tribes who are more than tribe and less than kingdom, the burrowing folk of certain hills, the mantis- hives of the warm reaches. The four-legged peers of the deep forest keep their own counsel; we have spoken with a pack-leader of the wolf-kin in the eastern range and would speak with her again. The serpent-folk of certain cave-shrines bargain in old languages for warmth and for older information; their patience exceeds ours.

There are also the smaller cousins that the wall-and-hedge cultures know best — the mousekin who carry messages between the houses of a city without being noticed, the warren-folk of the long meadows who hold elections their human neighbours would do well to imitate, the hedge-wise, the mask-folk of the city gutters, the russet trickster-kin. The folk-tales call all of these little people and expect the reader to know which kind is meant. We do not always know.

And there are, we report with reluctance, the passing kind — the old cousins who wear our shape and live our lives and are not us. The cult-priests of certain orders claim to recognise them by augury; our own correspondence has not been able to confirm or refute the claim, and we are aware of the political uses to which the accusation has been put. We pass the report along without endorsing it.

They are none of them monsters in any sense the word usefully serves. Some are at war with their human neighbours. Others are diplomatic partners. We have correspondents writing from three valleys where the trade is indistinguishable from any other — with weights and measures honestly kept, which is more than may be said for certain men.

The third are the elder kindreds — those who have been here longer than memory. The dragons and the great wyrms; the fair-folk of the still woods and the wandering roads; the giants of the high places; the silent tree-folk whose bark and lichen advance across the seasons one walks past them, shedding leaves as a man sheds skin and growing back the next year a little altered; the green-and-withered women of certain valleys who pass fair through the spring and ruined through the winter and return again so faithfully one might set the calendar by them; the under-mat in the old woods that has thought, whose mushrooms answer each other across a forest as one mind and whose conversations the foresters do not interrupt; the standing-folk who weather into menhirs and remember everything that has happened where they stood; the watching-beasts who settle at the old fords and judge those who try to cross; the chiming-kind whose bodies are translucent geometry and whose voices carry their meaning before the syllables do. Each is an individual with a name and a history. They are rare; in many kingdoms the folk-tales are the only record. We do not pretend to know what they remember of the older ages, only that they remember and will not say. They do not, as a rule, instruct us. We have learned to ask politely and to expect refusal, and to count it a gift when a refusal is given with courtesy rather than smoke.

And there are mutants — beings of any kindred whose shape has been undone, by working or by exposure or by causes the priests of various registers will assign with no agreement. The named monsters of folk-tale are usually these. The goblin-king of the old hills was, before he was the goblin-king, a goblin; what worked the change none of us can say with certainty, though we have our suspicions and they do not flatter the goblin-king. The troll of the long pass was once, we believe, a man. They are pitiable, and they are dangerous, and they are not their own kind. The priests of most registers do not know what to do with them — which is generally an improvement on the priests’ treatment of beings they do know what to do with.