The City of Highgate

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"Used to be a cow," was the joke, when a young dog refused to learn its way down a flight of stairs. Cows were domesticated plains grazers, they didn't have much bravery in the face of steep inclines; and young dogs were small and wary of the many topples by which they had to learn their legs. A lot of stairs were a lot of potential aches.

"Used to be a cow," an old elven woman joked, blaming her slow departure from the kitchen foyer, stone stairs freshly scrubbed.

Horse glanced up from the kitchen table with interest, but dropped his gaze again. The old woman wasn't wearing the Iberian pelt of the Druid Madha'in, it wasn't likely she had been anything once but a younger elf.

Goose might have conspired that there were other Druids under Vonadian employ, older and less Iberian Druids who had not yet known the uselessness of cows as a martial force. But Goose had once been a goose, small and angry and immediate to his fears; and now Goose was gone, and there was nobody to conspire at Horse's elbow anymore.

The fragility of Goose's life had always been forefront to Horse's thoughts. The farmer gave them names, of a sort, for his drunken moods or fits of nostalgia; and those he did not name were those meant for butchery or sale.

But that Goose had lived long enough and oddly enough to win a place as a Druid's conscript had implied that Goose would live long enough and oddly enough to only see he and Horse separated by Horse's old age, or an enemy spear, or a bolt of lightning.

Horse, like many, didn't take any of the names the farmer had given him. Not Yvigny nor John nor Arrekst, not any of the oaths the farmer spat in bad temper or the praises he had cooed for a field well ploughed.

Horsen Goosebrother was a perfectly acceptable Vonadian name, at the end of things. The title marked Horse as a transformed conscript, communicated his past, set the foundation for a tribal screed -- cooperation between those who had once labored and birthed and died under the farmer's mysterious authority.

Horse smiled down at his porridge, the old elfin woman having made her journey safely down the stairs. She hadn't been a cow; one could tell by her bravery at the cookfires. Her fluency in speech. Her easy command over dogs.

Her ability to laugh her way down a flight of steps.

The manor was large and cold and busy with staff. Horse could spot his fellow transformed conscripts by their metallic gold eyes and Iberian pelts and timidity at stairs, sure, but also by the haunted tension in their mouths and the scars where the armor hadn't been able to cover; missing limbs and wounded limps.

Probably no cows on staff, here nor anywhere. Not when they made such excellent stews, at the end of their usefulness.

Horse swallowed hard, fidgeting the wooden spoon through the simple clay bowl of boiled oats. He'd almost eaten that baby bird, all those years ago in the barn, before the war efforts had reached their village. Horses easily ate the snails and snakes and grubs from the grass they mowed, needing the protein and calcium, and in the spring especially would chew the wren eggs from their reed nests and gnaw the bones of the mice and voles that had not survived the winter cold.

But the gosling had smelled like life, warm and wet and brand new, and its noises were so small and so plaintive that Horse could forego the demands of his appetite to follow the tug of his curiosity, instead. There in the hay had been a small creature that Horse knew, from experience, was destined for the cookpot; and Horse in that moment had not been able to determine why, what the difference was between the foal he'd been shivering between his mother's legs and this baby bird lost in the hay.

Horse had not been able to see what the difference was, between horses and geese, between dogs and cows, if they all started life from the same place, small and wet and plaintive, vulnerable to the appetites of larger beasts.

And sure, Horse had bitten Goose a few times, when Goose got older and larger and louder and more obnoxious. And Horse had still eaten the eggs from their nests (what weren't smart enough to shelter in their coops proper), still dug at the vole hollows in the spring, still tread the snakes and chewed the locusts. Hungry creatures were allowed to eat, and older creatures were allowed to nip at their energetic young.

But he couldn't tell the difference, really, between the soul of a walking beast and the soul of a flying; the soul of a talking beast and the soul of the mute. If Horse could have served the stewpot in a bad enough winter, so too could have served the flesh of the talking, and why was one considered a less horrible ingredient than the next?

And Horse ate meat, if he could get ahold of it. The marching armies ran on traveling gruels of legume and whatever game could be taken from the land, so Horse wasn't new to cooked meats and hardly minded the sights and smells of the kitchen, having come from a window-high line of sight during his beasthood.

He'd rather see meat slain to a purpose, anyway, instead of all those miles of burning soldier flesh left out to rot.

Horse sighed through his curved Iberian nose and scratched at the tightened skin at the edge of his scars, glad at least they let him keep his elf body for his retirement, let him keep the return to youth and capable set of scratching hands.

Goose had lamented the loss of his flight and feathers and what he'd considered his own personal weaponry, larger and more dangerous in his own point of view than he had actually been. Horse was just glad to be able to comfortably reach his own ass, that the summer's biting flies would not, could not so torment the patches of hide his whisking tail could never reach.

Clothing was a boon, the addition of structured language a rewarding hurdle, and even if the soldiering had been fraught it hadn't been much different from Horse's early horsen years hauling within armies (and part of why he'd ended up on that farm in the first place, shatter-shocked and elderly but still useful in the fields). Maybe the noise of the talking tribes' civilization wasn't so great -- difficult to hear the wind or the birdsong or the rain, listening for the shepard's bell but only hearing fires yawn through flues and hagglers yawp at market stalls and if a dog is barking it's to the credit of its own terrible temper and not to alert the homestead of a passing fox.

But overall, Horse was glad to have lived long enough and strangely enough to end up here at a Barony, eating and sleeping and shitting as if 'elf' had been the natural stage of life to follow after 'foal' and 'horse'. Horse's temperament had always been thus; calm acceptance, idling beside intense curiosity.

The talking tribes' society, however, didn't find it so easy to accept the farmstead veterans en masse, and Horse didn't make much effort to fit in.

Clothing was nice, it kept the flies and the rain off, but shoes made no sense even when they were cuffs of iron to be nailed to the soft bone of his hooves. Horse would walk on soft grasses and eschew the easy passage of the cobbled roads, and even without the loamy dirt of the gardens to labor in did Horse wander around unshod, preferring the tactile honesty and improved balance of bare feet.

Some elves did as much for religious reasons, foregoing shoes to better commune with the earth, but Horse was not a cultist and didn't much agree with the elven supremacy assumed of him on first sight.

Horse also struggled with plain speech, in that he could not speak any way but plainly, and this was often seen as uncouth -- asking for food at inopportune moments and from wildly inappropriate sources (could a lady's valet not risk a carrot in his soft hands? what about the lady, had she no waxen cubes of sugar in that clutch?) not to mention Horse's nearly constant pursuit for an extra pair of scratching hands or some warm body to lean against for companionship.

Goose had been a menace and a malcontent but he was Horse's best friend and brother and if Horse could just get back to the farm he might be able to recover Goose's company -- an appropriate source of affection in all.

The hallkeep had banished Horse from the manor's public facing rooms, but Horse wandered the manor at his own leisure anyway, doors only a different sort of fencing gate and those hardly obeyed if there were sweet grasses to be reached. What retaliation could be levied at Horse did nothing to sway him -- yelling was just a different sort of sound, like a roll of thunder over the barn, or a wizard's copper kettle ripping death through the ranks.

And striking was never as painful as most domestic servants probably assumed -- the pain inherent to the shame of being harrowed, and any horse with little enough shame to put any sting behind the blows. When a porter tried to use a switch to get Horse out of the observatory then Horse had simply taken the thing in his soldiering hands and broke it neatly over his soldiering knee, reminding everyone involved that transformed veterans might have been animals once, but the only difference between the speaking tribes and the unenlightened were a set of thumbs by which to knock arrows or wield filet knives.

"Do they boil elven bones for glue?" Horse had asked the porter, direct in his curiosity, unaware that the question might come off as a threat. "Be careful of that temper, or they'll butcher you for parts." He felt quite proud of warning the man -- the distempered livestock didn't live long enough to pass their anger on to their young, that porter was at real risk of getting culled!

Horse had the Druid's build and the Druid's features, but the mass of his starting body had been large, long in the bones. Where Goose was short and bustling, Horse was tall and meandering, and where Goose wore the disconcerted scowl of the fussy and small, Horse wore the placid tranquility of the gracefully large.

It was difficult, then, for Horse to come off as anything but threatening. The nobility of the speaking tribes expected animals to be timid and easily steered, no matter their size, unaware of the months and even years of gladmaking cooperation that beast handlers of every stripe had to labor at.

Stress and anger made the meat taste bad; not even the butcher stock were abused! But especially not the laboring stock -- whose trust and affection lay cornerstone to their performance at task. That was why farmers built fences to keep Horses out of fields, because there was no other cooperative method yet to be found; and the Astronomer was never going to keep Horsen Goosebrother's muddy footprints out of his observatory so long as Horse had hands with which to turn the door handle.