I turn now to a subject that falls outside the affairs of kingdoms, though not, I think, outside the scope of a work that means to record the world as it is.
In the high passes where the northern plains break against the ranges of the White Mountains, there lives a creature called Barūq by the people of that country. It is large—an adult male may weigh a ton or more—and broad, standing low on four thick legs that end in clawed feet capable of gripping sheer stone. The hide is plated and pale, mottled with darker markings, reptilian in appearance, though coarse fur runs along the spine and shoulders.
The head is heavy and blunt, the face somewhere between bovine and something less tractable, and the horns—curved forward, yellowed, deeply scarred—are what one remembers. I have watched one cross a cliff face that I would not have trusted a goat to attempt, moving with a slowness that seemed less like caution than contempt for the distance.
It is an omnivore, surviving on moss, bark, carrion, and whatever else the mountains provide. In winter, it is not particular.
The Barūq is territorial rather than aggressive, though the distinction is of limited comfort when one is standing in the wrong place. Each animal claims a stretch of mountainside and marks its boundaries by scoring deep furrows into the rock—gouges wide enough that no traveller who has seen them once mistakes them for anything else. Fresh marks mean the path ahead is claimed. Experienced travellers find another route without discussion.
In spring, the females bear a single cub, and a mother Barūq does not trouble herself with the difference between a threat and an ignorant human who failed to read the stones. Most deaths in the region happen this way. Not from malice, but from proximity.
The Aurian settlers of the Chalk Towns do not hunt the Barūq. This is not sentiment. They are a practical people. The meat is poor. The hide will not be worked. The horns, while large, carry a prohibition that functions as law: to wear one not taken in genuine mortal contest is to invite serious misfortune. They mount them above doorways instead, as protection against rock-slide. The creature belongs to the stone, they say. The stone’s virtue travels with its parts. Such superstitions have become more prevalent among the younger generations of the settlers.
There is a proverb I heard repeated in several of the Chalk Towns, always without variation: A Barūq will let you pass if you respect the path. Block it, and you become the path.
To call someone “Barūq-stubborn” in that country is an insult that concedes respect. It describes a person who cannot be moved and will not be reasoned with, and who will almost certainly outlast the thing that is trying. The Chalk Towners recognise the quality. They are, in the main, examples of it.
They trace this affinity to a story from their founding winter, which all accounts agree was savage. The settlers, cornered by wolves and near starvation, were saved—so the story goes—by the intervention of a lone Grey Barūq of unusual size, which killed the wolves and left the humans unharmed. It did not stay. Whether this occurred as told, I am not in a position to say. I note only that I have encountered the bones of this same story in other regions, attached to other creatures, told by other peoples who settled in hard country and found themselves sharing it with something older than their arrival. It is the kind of account that recurs. Whether that makes it more or less credible, I leave to the reader.
The Barūq does not concern itself with the affairs of men. This is, I suspect, the source of the Chalk Towners’ respect for it: a creature that has occupied those ranges since before any kingdom I have studied came into being, and that seems likely to remain there long after the present difficulties have resolved themselves, one way or another.
There are worse things to record.