B&T Chapter Four: The Glittering World

=Chapter Three: The Glittering World=

 

All across the borders of Cervidas, the threat of Griffon raiders gave life an undertow of anxiety. The Deerfolk dwelled in a state of vigilance, always half-listening, scanning the sagebrush for movement. Everyone knew some family whose child or mother had been carried off by Griffon war-bands. In the foothills, cairns often studded the pastures. Decorated with crosses or flowers, these markers memorialized shepherds who had been cut down defending their flocks. At a very young age, Deerfolk from the border town of Fawntaine learned to hate and fear the word “Griffon”.

 

But it wasn’t always this way. Cervidians had heard rumors of the civilized Griffons calling themselves “Gryff” far, far to the mountains of the north. There was a time period, brief though it was, where the Deerfolk even tried to proselytize the Griffons, certain that sharing their religion with them could “elevate” these wild wanderers to lead a civilized life. But the Griffon would not tolerate the Cervidas missionaries. In an infamous account, in 1642 a group of Griffons hauled a priest out the doors of his church, ripped off his clothes, and then killed him at the base of an outdoor cross by smashing his head in with a bell. By 1650 all efforts to make the Griffon a part of Deerfolk society were abandoned

 

For centuries onward, the Cervidians would mount retaliatory expeditions into Griffon country, sometimes to recover stolen livestock or kidnapped Deerfolk, other times to capture Griffon women and children to use either as slave labor or bargaining chips against the Griffon war-parties. But these military forays did little to stop the continuing Griffon raids. Their lands were so wrinkled, so maze-like, and so huge that the expeditions scarcely seemed worth the effort expended; conquering the Griffon seemed just as hopeless as converting them.

 

The Griffon lived far away, yet paradoxically they seemed to be close at hand, as though the desert distances did not apply to them, as though miles alone could not check their peregrinations. It was the Griffon menace as much as anything else that made Cervidas so downtrodden, so militarily anemic, and so unready to resist the coming Equestrian invasion.

 

It was odd, in a way, that settlers of the 1800s would consider the Buffalo tribes to be a threat at all, for when compared to the Griffon, it was clear that they were not particularly fierce or effective warriors. They seldom fought in large numbers, and they lacked the aerial assault abilities if the Griffon tribes. The Buffalo avoided killing whenever possible, because theirs was a culture that had a deep-seated fear and revulsion of death. They wanted nothing to do with corpses or funerals or anything connected with mortality. When a member of their tribe died inside a home, the body had to be removed as soon as possible, and the living structure almost always had to be destroyed. The taint could never be washed out. Many anthropologists suggest this is a major reason why the nomadic Buffalo lived in simple dwellings that were easy to create, collapse, and carry with them on their travels.

 

They believed that the presence of death was invariably connected to witchcraft, luring resentful ghosts and evil spirits, upsetting the fragile order of things. As such, upon first contact with unicorns, they were deeply distrustful. They had no concept of a single malicious spirit that permeates the world and counterpoised itself against good, as the Equestrians did in the legends of Discord, the incarnation of Chaos. But for them, the ghosts of the dead were devilish enough. They were vexing and malicious and unimaginably frightening—and they were everywhere. They could even invade a person’s dreams.

 

The Buffalo believed in an evil class of witches called the “Skinwalkers” who were said to dig up graves and put on the pelts of fallen Buffalo. The skinwalkers could be seen prowling around at night on all fours—they had pallid white faces and red glowing eyes and chanted holy prayers backward to evoke evil deities. They desecrated graves. They removed the dead person’s flesh and ground it up to make a lethal poison called “corpse powder,” which the skinwalkers blew into people’s faces, giving them the “ghost sickness.” Even a single hoof or lock of mane from a dead person could be used by a skinwalker to perform all sorts of evil enchantments.

 

A people so unnerved by death could never become great warriors, not on the level of the Griffons. Still, settlers had good reason to be wary around the Buffalo Tribes. They would, on occasion, form raiding parties to steal livestock and other supplies, and with their hulking, muscular frames they struck an imposing figure. When they were drawn to extreme anger or fright, they were prone to devastating stampedes. The sound of thundering Buffalo herds stampeding across the plains was one that haunted many settlers’ dreams.

 

Even so, the Griffons were the true masters of the raid. Small scale warfare suited them, adept as they were in the techniques of the swift attack and the quick disappearance. Usually the raids were carried out by young Gryff thirsty for adventure and ambitious to accumulate new wealth. Often these exuberant young warriors rode off against the wishes of their fathers and other older men of the tribe, who had already won their status and had lived long enough to understand that raids had far-reaching consequences.

 

Once on the warpath, the young Gryff dismissed all talk, and prepared themselves for battle. They sang songs to Monster Slayer, the great War god of Griffon myth, chanting “Our enemies shall die! The coyote and the crow and the desert sands shall strip the flesh from their bones!” They assembled stone clubs, and would often fasten some feathers from a Griffon that was close to them, such as a father or a mate, to their shields. Then they put on their battle-armor, sometimes fashioned from defeated animals (and in some cases, Deerfolk enemies) and headed off for the Cerviadian ranches to the east.

 

For all their bravado, the Griffons were quite superstitious, especially when it came to their raids. They sometimes sought the wisdom of gypsies to divine the outcome of a contemplated attack. Other times they visited stargazers, who would consult the heavens for answers by rubbing under his eyelids a preparation which included filmy water painstakingly collected from the eyes of an eagle, who the Gryff considered to be their animal ancestor.

 

The wives of warriors were under strict instructions not to leave the roost until the men had returned, hopefully successful, from their raids abroad—for if they did stray from the roost, for whatever reason, it was widely believed that their husbands would encounter bad luck. If a coyote crossed their path, they had to turn back. If they were not hunting manticore, and stepped on a manticore track, if they witnessed a cockatrice shed its skin, even if they accidently ate during an eclipse—then the endeavor could be doomed. But if all went well, they reached their target and waited in the early morning stillness. Just before dawn they descended, sending up the bloodcurdling cry. Within a few minutes they would take sheep, cattle, women, children—anything they could drive off on the ground or scoop up in their talons and carry.

 

Sometimes the purpose of the raid was to steal back a Griffon captive who had been taken by the Deerfolk. Liberating a Griffon slave was always a cause for rejoicing—although often the captive, who perhaps had been sold into slavery as a young hatchling and become acclimated to Cervidian culture, might be just as terrified by the attackers, and fearful of returning to a tribal life that existed only as a dim memory.

Mainly though, the Griffon raiders were interested in obtaining sheep and goats. The Buffalo, almost alone among all the tribes of the West, were a primarily agrarian people. But for the Griffon, everything revolved around the sheep. Shepherding, shearing, drinking the milk and spinning the wool. They talked directly to the flocks, gave them plenty to eat, and sang quaint songs to them on cold winter nights to protect them from freezing. “The sheep is your mother,” the Chieftains would instruct their people, “The sheep is life.” Most of their implements and artifacts were made from the hides, bones, and sinews of sheep and goats. They ate every part of the animal—lung and liver, head and heart—even the blood, which they would mix with corn flour to make a thin, dirty gruel.

 

The Griffons of the western plains had ventured down the spines of the Frostbrace Mountains, in what is now part of the Gryff kingdom far to the north, to the lands they now inhabit. It’s tempting to imagine that, in ancient times, they simply held a meeting in some godforsaken snowdrift and decided, once and for all, that they’d had enough with their mountain life, and left their Gryff family then and there. But truth be told, no one knows the reasons why some of the Griffon left the kingdom to the north and decided to head south. What we do know is that the Griffon began flooding into the Southwest sometime around 1300 AD. Their creation story, which they call the Emergence, is thought by some to symbolize their removal from the Gryff tribe, their sense of having been wandering exiles, twisting in fierce wind storms as they fight for their own place in the word, journeying through strange dark lands until they finally lit on the “glittering world”, as they called their present home.

 

Late arrivals to the region, the Griffon split away from the Buffalo, and quickly evolved into their own band of hunter gatherers. Over a few short centuries, the Griffons had improvised a life that borrowed something from every culture they encountered, spinning it into a society that was entirely their own. And borrow from other cultures they did. In their raids on Deerfolk livestock, they never quite completed their work. With an eye on the future, Griffon warriors were careful not to take all the sheep from the settlements they attacked; they invariably left several ewes and rams behind, to insure that a fine new flock would be there to rob next year.