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, and what they remember would fill libraries the southern academies have not yet bothered to assemble.

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 that crowd the wild margins: goblin-folk and their kin, ratfolk where the marshes run deep, the burrowing kindreds of certain hills. They breed quickly, live briefly, and build cultures their human neighbours rarely trouble to read. Some are at war with those 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. They are not monsters in any sense the word usefully serves.

The third are the elder kindreds — those who have been here longer than memory. The dragons and the great wyrms; the high folk of certain mountains; the things that walk the deep woods only at certain centuries’ turning. Each is an individual with a name and a history. 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.