The Culture Column
The gairriru do not engage in monogamy, but instead in group marriage, and because new spouses can be added to the marriage at any time, even the youngest of these unions have lasted for centuries. Called motremeneu'denosteu, or marriage clans, they are the basic building block of gairriru society. Within the confines of the ëdenoste, sexual relations are quite unrestricted, with members being able to choose partners from any or all of their spouses, and change their decisions at they please (there is no formal decision-making in this matter, after all). While any child will of course have a birth mother, this position is considered to be of little importance in itself and all members of the ëdenoste act as mothers and fathers to all of the children born to it.
Asonzo'sicaist
Asonzo'sicaist, or ritual kidnapping, is one of the most important milestone's in a gairrir's life. When a child reaches the age of thirteen, the marriage clan of his (or her- both genders participate in this rite of passage) birth will contact another motremene'denoste, which will kidnap the child. After a week passes, the first marriage clan is free to send a force to liberate their charge. Both sides are limited only to methods which will not cause permanent harm (this practice would stand a fair chance of dying out if it resulted in cripples and fatalities on a regular basis), and the tradition thus allows for the two ëdenosteu to display and prove their skills. As the child will also most likely be married into the motremene'denoste once the time comes in two years, the practice also lets both ëdenosteu prove to each other that the first is worthy of having the child, and the second is likely to have produced someone worth marrying.
The center of this rite, meanwhile, has spent at least a week being tortured, both so that the kidnapping clan can display its talents at lobror, or "carving," and the child can display his ability to resist pain. Both are considered high art forms, and lobror, which actually consists of all methods of inflicting pain, and not just cutting, is restricted solely to the place of women, who are able to achieve just as much prestige, if not more, in this art as men can in art form (and unlike the men, they are able to practice the specialty of the other gender if lobror is unsatisfactory for them, even if this is frowned upon). Pirsuno'virdag, the word for "woman," literally translates to "torturer person." While a virdag who focuses on healing will not achieve as much prestige as if she becomes a master in lobror, the art of carving requires knowledge which carries over to more medical applications, and medicine and surgery are similarly restricted to women.
Gairriru display their lobror scars with pride.
Because clans will typically choose for their children to be kidnapped by ëdenosteu they are close to, this results in the peculiar frequency of lobror being performed on children by people who, perhaps as recently as a few weeks ago, were laughing and playing with them. Of course, there is not as much dissonance here for the gairrir as an outsider would think. To the warriors, lobror is no more different than tattooing, or any number of hideously painful rites of passages performed by actual cultures elsewhere in the world, and that it is being performed by people who are currently family friends, and will likely be one's wives in only a year or two, can actually lend some comfort. The virdagu, for their part, take great care in their jobs, and it is never forgotten that they are both giving and receiving an honor by performing lobror, whether it be on a child undergoing asonzo'sicaist, or even a prisoner. A third of the point of taking prisoners, after all, is to perform lobror on them and so give them the opportunity to practice the art of resisting pain.
The second third, of course, is being able to demonstrate one's skills in lobror, and the final third is riscoti, or the ransom payment which the prisoner's marriage clan will pay in exchange for those who were taken. Unless an exceptionally valuable person has been taken, the riscoti is first paid on a one-for-one basis, and if one ëdenoste has seven prisoners while the other has five, then they will trade prisoners until there is only the matter of the ëdenoste with two prisoners taken from the other. If the riscoti is left unpaid for long enough, and the hosting ëdenoste is sufficiently impressed by their prisoner's ability to suffer lobror, they have the right to open up a place for him.
The Comp di Bottolo
Prisoners are acquired through asonzou'bottoloru, ritual battles typically held not between individual marriage clans, but alliances of several on each side. Often there is another matter at stake with the ëbottolor, such as territorial disputes or the avenging of grave insults, but these matters are to be resolved with the paying of the riscoti. If the matter at hand was a dispute over a particularly fertile area of land, then both sides will aim to force the other to pay the riscoti in the form of accepting the right of that tribe to take the land. So it is the taking of prisoners which ëbottoloru center around. War is declared after the end of negotiations in which the location of the ritual battle and other things are determined. The various alliances then assemble at the chosen comp di bottolo, and the battle begins. It starts with a series of single combats, and eventually works its way up to battles with as many as ten people on each side. In each case, the losers are taken prisoner. Both sides gain points in each battle, based on the difficulty of the maneuvers which they make, how successful they are, and the flair and elegance with which they act.
It is for their role in the asonzou'bottoloru that a male gairrir is called a pirsuno'compiunot, or "champion person," with another possible translation would being "dueler person."
Alliances are generally formed along lines of common interest in the outcome of this particular ëbottolor (in the aforementioned example of a territorial dispute, the winning alliance would then divide up the land in a manner previously agreed-upon), or because the ëdenosteu traditionally ally together, perhaps having married each other's children for generations. At the comp di bottolo, alliances bring all the finest luxuries with them; asonzo'bottolor is something to be enjoyed. The one exception is the oturmintodu, or endurance war, where the alliances set out on a forced march for weeks to a far-off location so that the compiunotu will be as worn down as possible before they begin battle.
Beyond the Comp di Bottolo
Soups form a principal part of the gairrir diet, especially sap'poscor, or fish soups, which are soured with vinegar and fermented wheat bran. A mixture of milk, sunflower oil, and salt, called a caonteus, forms the base liquid for nearly all sapu (including sapu'poscoru), and can be taken with the cleaned stomach lining of a pig for a mixture called sap'istumog, which is highly effective for curing hangovers. Cauliflower and pumpkin sapu are also common. The latter is called sap'kais, and is accompanied with a sweet bread called pon'kais, made from the rinds of the pumpkin, along with raisins, butter, milk, and eggs.
Balls of minced lamb or pork, called pulito, are mixed with spices and onions during initial preparation, and then glazed with egg yolk shortly before serving. Pulitou are typically served as a breakfast food, along with the day's first meal of sap'poscor, and cirvizo'cerailo, or plum beer.
The gairriru do not war, or practice for war, every minute of the day, and most of their time is spent working their crops, collecting fish from the numerous lakes and rivers of their land and caring for the "log-thick pigs" (so-named for their size, which is nearly twice that of a more normal pig) and cattle which, with dogs, comprise the domesticated animals of gairrir society. Wraps and stuffed breads of various kinds, called kaikau, are prepared ahead of time and eaten later on in the day in the fields. Kaikau'fou, the most common kind, are flat things which look almost like swollen pancakes, with fillings such cheese, jam, eel meat, or the liver offal of a pig. A kaika'ror is a roll of meat, heavily seasoned with onions, mustard, salt, and beer, and then coated with bread. Kaikau'kaisu are made from yeast dough, and filled with cottage cheese.
While less common, stuffed bell peppers, called posou, are served containing meat (usually eel) and onion. Bread is nearly always used in combination with some other food, but boiled wheat, sugar, and walnuts can be used together to make ponu, which is traditionally served on its own at the end of the day. Lecuru'cirizou are held with nearly as much regard as warfare, and each marriage clan keeps secret its methods of producing its own variety of the alcohol, which is a sort of liqueur of sour cherries and honey, and is one of the prime exports of the gairriru.
Archery is no longer a widely-practiced art, but most gairriru still have a bow. No longer used in asonzou'bottoloru in most cases, since ranged weapons are somewhat more difficult to use in these combats, the fact that they exist at all points to their origin as predating the modern traditions of the gairriru. Recognized as weapons of war even now, albeit weapons which are used by only a few motremeneu'denosteu, they are carried by nearly every gairrir even now, but as instruments instead. By placing part of the string in one's mouth, a crude resonator is created, and a variety of tones can be produced by plucking the string. The bows are played both alone and in groups of up to thirty, and even one-on-one fights require a third person, for it is hardly a proper battle if not set against the music of the bow.
The gairriru do not have a true religion so much as they have a collection of constantly evolving folk practices held by the various ëdenosteu, always intermingling as the clans' children, who grow up with one set of practices, marry into other ëdenosteu and pass on a synthesis of it to their own children. It is generally accepted that it is bad luck to eat during a storm, for example, but setting fire to a meal can end a run of bad luck, and marriages should not be entered into immediately after the end of a ëbottolor. Many ëdenosteu believe that ravens bring messages from the dead, and even an asonzo'bottolor can come to a sudden halt as all parties present engage in ricentu, or raven-watching in order to divine what messages, if any, are being delivered. The importance of pigs in gairrir culture is in part due to the belief that they can be used to soak up the spirits which cause disease. Not only do these spirits prefer to infest pigs (which are better able to suffer through the resulting sicknesses), but ingesting pork can help by causing the spirits to enter it.
Metal is an almost sacred thing, not given any specifically spiritual attributes but nevertheless treated with care and reverence. It is used only for the production of weapons, and only metal may be used to produce sharp edges- weapons made from bone or stone, or other hard materials, are unknown in gairrir society. Few are those who do not know how to work metal into a usable shape, and both men and women can gain great respect by producing finely-crafted weapons and instruments of torture. In a sense, even utensils are shown care in their crafting, but it should come as no surprise that the gairriru view these more as "small weapons which happen to be useful for eating" than as simple utensils, especially since forks are rarely used, and spoons nonexistent, even for sapu. Rather, knives (or, less often, forks) are used to stab whatever is large enough and then bring the food to one's mouth, and once nothing more can be obtained in this fashion, the bowl itself is brought to the mouth and the rest of the sap is drunk down.
Being small objects with an almost infinite versatility in form, knives, or haivu, hold a special place in gairrir culture, with as many different terms for knives as there are for rituals or soups. The small thin knives generally used for eating are called haivu'turtarou, while a haiv'dolet is a double-sided knife with a three-inch blade on both sides of the handle. Knives are an important part of gairrir fashion and nearly all of them, regardless of their purpose, sport a small hole at the end of the grip. Gairrir clothing is covered with hanging strings which can be looped through these holes and then tied off in order to let the knife simply hang from one's clothes. Gairriru collect knives and gift them away all throughout their lives, and hanging from a fifty-year-old gairrir will be up to seventy knives of various shapes and sizes, attached to his shirt, pants, and cloak. Gairrir culture lacks an official currency, but knives are handed over as everything from simple bartering chips with a generally-recognized value, for the rougher, less beautiful ones, to highly-valued gifts which will be prized from the ëdenoste for untold generations.
That fifty-year-old man will, incidentally, be dead in ten years once he undergoes asonzo'tollesto, a series of ritual combats where his opponents, unlike him, no longer have the restriction against killing blows. The first fight will be against a single opponent, but the number will increase by one with each successive fight. While outsiders often see it as a cruelty second only to that of subjecting thirteen-year-old children to lobror, the gairriru see this as no less glorious, and by engaging in asonzo'tollesto, he (or, again, she) can gain further prestige. He can avoid the indignity, too, of having to deal with the slow dulling of his senses and his wits, the fading of his memory, the weakening of his bones, and the all-too-acute sense of just how much he has lost even when he has forgotten what, exactly, it is that he has lost.
Next Month: Cannibal-scientists who venerate the mummified remains of especially brilliant members of their society, and practice another variant of group-based marriage. Also, charcoal cookies, and generational famines which have made them either Lawful Evil or Lawful Obsessed.
