Minotaur

The herds of the burned plain¶

Minotaurs cross the sun-scorched savannah in herds, and measure a warrior's worth by what has been taken from those foolish enough to test the herd's ground. Every battle is sought. Every skirmish is welcomed. Rage arrives as naturally as breath and is treated as a resource rather than a failing.

It would be a great deal simpler if that were the whole of it. It is not.

The code under the fury¶

Tradition and instinct temper the fury into a code: complete, consistent, fully understood inside the herd and terrifying from anywhere else. 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.

So to face a minotaur is not to meet brute strength. It is to meet deliberate, calculated force, applied at the correct moment for stated reasons, by something enormous that is enjoying itself.

You want them written down. Write this. I know what I owe the one I put in the dirt this morning, and I owe it whether or not you are watching, and there is no herd on this plain that would take me back if I did not pay it. Your kingdom needs a book because your kingdom cannot trust itself. Do not confuse that with having laws.

Hoofmother Dassa of the Redwater herd, asked by a Lyaud envoy whether her people had laws

The herd is the 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. It is the only unit a minotaur considers permanent.

The Gorehorn Clan is the standing agreement between the large herds, and foreign envoys are usually sent to Redwater, 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 there is no machinery anywhere in minotaur life for objecting to either.

The god they were given, and the god they took¶

Before the Sahid came over the dunes the herds belonged to Verdantism, and it suited them. Hymephie eats the weak and feeds the worthy on the corpses of the fallen, the plain drinks what falls on it, and a people who leave bodies wherever they walk have no trouble at all believing that the grass is hungry. The bone gardens of the savannah are older than any Sahid map of it.

Then the Empire arrived to make a garden of its own, and told the herds what a weak hand cannot hold, and sent three expeditions to demonstrate it. The Empire records this as a conversion. That is one word for it.

What actually happened is that something in the fighting made the minotaurs curious. Not about the Sahid, who were merely the fourth interesting thing to walk onto the plain that decade, but about the god behind them: a power that did not ask for the dead afterward, that wanted the swing itself, that called the wound the teaching and the battle the prayer. The herds took the battle-priests alive to hear the doctrine properly. They asked questions for a season. Then they kept Ragundiazal and let Hymephie go, and no herd has felt the need to explain the decision since.

It was never much of a leap. The Green Maw asks you to feed it. The Thousand Blades asks you to do what you already do and calls it worship, which for a minotaur is less a change of faith than a correction of the record.

The Empire had lost the argument long before that, and not in the way it tells the story. It lost it in the first hour of the first expedition, and it lost it through its own priest.

Tell the Crown the field is lost and send no relief. I have seen them. They are eight feet of intention. They do not learn war, they are shaped for it, horn and hoof and the weight to use both, and no smith of ours has ever come near it. Brothers, I have spent my life teaching men to be what these things are on the day they are born. Ragundiazal did not send us to conquer the plain. He sent us to look at his work.

Battle-priest Amsun al-Marrad, first Sahid expedition, sent within the hour of sighting the herds and some days before they killed him

That dispatch is scripture now. The Sahid war colleges teach it in the second year, and the doctrine it founded is not a compromise: the minotaur is held to be the Thousand Blades' own handiwork, the one people he built rather than merely blessed. A faith whose central claim is that every death proves the strength of the faithful has nowhere else to file three lost armies except as scripture.

The practical results are strange and the Crown has never much liked them. Sahid battle-priests go to the savannah on pilgrimage. They ask to walk with the herds. Some do not come back and their order counts this as a good death rather than a loss. There has been no fourth expedition, and there will not be one, because the war colleges that would have to plan it are staffed by men who believe the target is holy.

What the herds make of being worshipped by the survivors of the people they buried is not recorded, because no Sahid priest has ever thought to ask, and no minotaur has ever thought it was a question.

What Ragundiazal asks¶

Flesh is tested. Courage is tempered. Weakness is crushed beneath the march of steel. Every wound teaches, every victory is a prayer, and every death proves the strength of the faithful, including the deaths on your side of the field, which is the doctrinal detail outsiders find hardest to sit with.

So there is no conversion problem with a minotaur, and there never was. There is no argument to win. Ragundiazal simply agrees with him.

The heat in the blood¶

The same fire that makes a minotaur formidable makes him porous. Very little in Valdrin takes the rot as easily as minotaur flesh does, and a herd knows it, and watches for it with an attention that would surprise anyone who thinks minotaurs 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.

In your settlement¶

Enormously strong, awkward to house, and tolerated by almost nobody. Elves and giants hold them in open contempt and receive it back with interest.

In the field a minotaur is a considerable asset. In the town he is a standing item on the watch's list, and the watch will not thank you.

Governors who recruit them want the wage ready, the food ready, a clear position on what happens when two of them disagree in public, and the discipline to keep an eye on the blood. The strength is the easy part. It was never the part that ended a colony.