The Greikh are a people of the giant, not a separate bloodline — their civilization of farming, trade, and city-states is a cultural achievement, not a biological divergence from giant stock.
The Greikh are the giants who built cities. Where most of their kind wander or squat in scattered steadings, the Greikh raised walls along the Xcraya River, learned to put seed in the ground, and worked out how to live a dozen city-states deep without eating one another out of field and house. By human measure their cities are crude: heaped stone, timber the size of ship masts, streets laid for legs that cross them in a stride. By giant measure they are a civilization, and the Greikh know the difference. They speak of the savage hill giants of Triuci the way a man speaks of a wolf — kin to the dog, and nothing he would let in the door.
They farm, which sets them apart from the proud herding giants of the northern basins. Greikh fields carry grain bred to giant scale and orchards whose single trees would pass for woodlots elsewhere, and they keep the enormous cattle that anchor every giant's diet. A Greikh city eats from its own valley. That surplus buys them the thing other giants cannot afford, which is politics.
Each city answers to its own chief or council and counts itself sovereign. The confederation that outsiders name Malo Kon Greikh is really the sum of their feuds, marriages, and trade pacts, redrawn season to season. They war on one another often and finish one another rarely; a chief who wipes out a rival has only opened a gap for outsiders to walk through, and they all know it. Against a genuine threat from beyond, the cities can combine, slowly and with bad grace. They have not had to in living memory.
The civilization has a floor, and the floor is the prisoner camps. Greikh raiders take captives across the Gezzeri and hold them in the Prisoner Hills for ransom, for labor, and for the pot, and which of the three a given captive is for is often unsettled when he arrives. A people who keep orchards and ledgers also keep men in pens, and the Greikh see nothing strange in it. Their neighbors across the river, who lose sons to the raids, see little else.
They plant. They trade. They hold court like little kings. Then they put my brother in a pen in those hills, and I do not know to this day whether they ransomed him or ate him. — a Breia riverman, recorded at a Gezzeri crossing
Aspects
- Builder of crude cities
- Civil at home, raider abroad