Gorehorn Clan

An alliance of herds¶

The Gorehorn Clan is not the minotaur people and is not, strictly speaking, a clan. It is the standing agreement between the large herds of the sun-scorched savannah, and the herds are the real thing.

A herd is a few hundred head under a hoofmother, with its own ground, its own dead and its own reckoning of who owes what. Redwater is the largest and the one foreign envoys are usually sent to, which is why the foreign name for the whole arrangement is a herd name. The smaller herds find this funny. There are also minotaurs who belong to no herd at all, walking the plain alone or in twos, and they are neither outcasts nor rebels: leaving is permitted, returning is permitted, and the Clan has no machinery for objecting to either.

What holds the herds together is not a throne. It is the challenge, and everyone's agreement about how it works.

Violence as a civil order¶

The Gorehorn live by violence as others live by law. They hunt, fight and clash for sport, honour and dominance, and rage arrives as naturally as breath and is treated as a resource rather than a failing.

The mistake outsiders make is to stop the description there. Tradition and instinct temper the fury into a code: what each blow is for, when a challenge may be issued, what is owed to the one who loses and what is forbidden to the one who wins. None of it is written. All of it is obeyed. To face a Gorehorn is not to meet brute strength but calculated force, applied at the correct moment for stated reasons, by something enormous that is enjoying itself.

You are worth the effort. That is the compliment. There will be no others.

Challenge formula, spoken before a Gorehorn duel

The god they kept¶

The herds were Hymephian for as long as anyone can reconstruct, and the bone gardens of the savannah are older than any foreign map of it.

Then the Sahid came over the dunes to explain what a weak hand cannot hold, and sent three expeditions to demonstrate it, and the plain kept all three. What the herds took from the fighting was not plunder but a question: who is the god of a people who want the swing itself rather than the meat afterward. They took the battle-priests alive to hear the answer properly, asked questions for a season, and kept Ragundiazal.

The Empire calls this the conversion of the Gorehorn. The herds allow it, in the way you allow a man his story when he bought the drinks, and the ten points of cordiality between a desert empire and the people who buried three of its armies is the strangest line on any diplomatic roll in Valdrin.

The blood, and what the horns are for¶

Very little in Valdrin takes the rot as easily as minotaur flesh, and a herd knows it, and watches for it with an attention that would surprise anyone who thinks the Gorehorn are careless creatures.

A turned minotaur is not a sad story. It is one of the worst things that can happen to a stretch of country, and every neighbour the herds have ever had knows the sound of the horns that go up when a herd is hunting one of its own. They do not ask for help with this and they do not accept it.

Meeting them¶

There is no version of Gorehorn diplomacy that does not begin with them assessing whether you are worth fighting. Being judged not worth it is safer and considerably more insulting.

The Clan stands sixty points below neutral with nearly everyone, and a governor should read that number correctly: it is not a grudge and it is not a plan. It is an assessment, made fresh every season, of what your walls are like this year.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.