Human

The briefest people in the world¶

Sixty five years, and every one of them spent at a run. A human is born, grown, married, ruined and buried while an elf across the water is still waiting for a boundary claim to mature.

They are also the easiest of all peoples to turn. Nothing that walks takes the rot as readily as human flesh, and four different faiths will give you four different reasons why, each of them flattering to the faith.

None of this has slowed them down. The short-lived, corruptible, unremarkable human has put more flags on more coastlines than every ancient people in Valdrin combined, and the ancient peoples cannot explain it without insulting themselves.

Everything they build is a letter to a stranger¶

A human mason laying a foundation knows he will not see the roof. He cuts the stone anyway, for a grandson he has not met and would probably dislike.

That single fact explains the whole people. They write everything down, because they will not be here to remember it. They are ruinous about charters and seals and titles, because a promise has to outlive the mouth that made it. And sixty years after a human sets foot anywhere, everybody else is arguing with a document.

They breed faster than any long-lived people can match. They lose most of what they make. They begin again with an enthusiasm outsiders find either magnificent or obscene, and there is no third opinion available.

Four flags, and the ones who fly none¶

Four of the great powers are human, and no two agree on anything except that the other three are colonising wrongly.

Aethras sells the land, then the title to the land, then the judgment when the two turn out to conflict. Vuskar sails to it and makes a verse of the sailing, so that the voyage outlives the crew. Lyaud bleeds for it out of a poverty grown so old it has hardened into pride. The Sahid Empire arrives convinced it is rescuing the place from its own neglect, and plants a garrison that is also a school.

None of the four speaks for the race and together they do not cover it. The Free Colonies stopped answering any crown generations ago and never quite noticed doing it. The Bloodhound Brotherhood and the Mongrel Company are human to the last man and answer to a ledger and a paymaster respectively. And beyond all of them are the ordinary millions in valleys and ports whose entire political position is that somebody else's banner went past last spring and may go past again.

Against the four stand peoples who have held one valley for a thousand years and regard the entire human performance as weather. Loud, violent, seasonal, survivable behind good walls.

They are brief. It costs us less to wait than to object.

An elven envoy, on being asked why humans are tolerated

What the envoy failed to notice¶

Waiting has not worked. It was sound counsel when there were fewer humans, and there are never fewer humans.

The elf who declines to object to one generation finds himself objecting to four by the time he gets round to it, and by the fifth his objection is a minority view in a town that did not exist when he formed it.

Humans do not win arguments in Valdrin. They outlast the room.

In your settlement¶

Humans are the default labour of the colonial world. No great aptitude anywhere, no crippling weakness anywhere, tolerable to most of their neighbours and tolerated in return, adequate in any posting and brilliant in none.

This is worth more than it sounds. A settlement of specialists breaks the moment the specialty stops being what the season needs. A settlement of humans simply carries on, worse at everything, at all times, forever, and quietly replaces its own dead without being asked to.

Watch the blood, though. What ends human colonies is rarely the harvest and rarely the neighbours. It is that the rot finds somewhere quiet to take hold, and human flesh gives it more to work with than anything else you could have hired.