Brosdh
| Brosdh | |
|---|---|
| English gloss | donkey / pony (small draft beast) (translation, not identification) |
| Role | Haulage |
| Where found | Every city street, mill, and river |
| Size | About the size of a Vaelith |
| Kept / wild | Kept; native, domesticated after the Fall |
| Used for | Carts, drays, barges, mill wheels, night-soil barrels |
| Lexicon | Brosdh |
Where the Dorath hauls long distances, the Brosdh carries everything else. Stocky, barrel-bodied, and short-legged, about the size of a Vaelith, it has thick hide over plates of dermal bone at shoulder and rump, so it plows through whatever work it is given and shrugs off attacks. A small flexible snout strips plant life nothing else would touch — scrub, field edges, cast-offs — which makes it cheap to keep where a Dorath eats food a family would rather have had. It swims without much prodding and crosses fords a Vaelith refuses.
It pulls the smallholder's cart, the peddler's wagon, the brewer's dray, and the night-soil barrel; it tows barges on Forgegate's rivers and turns the wheels of most mills in the world. A city street has one Dorath team and about thirty Brosdh. It is calm and stubborn beyond argument: a Brosdh that has decided not to do a thing has decided, and every owner has accepted this. Regional lines differ in size and coat rather than kind — Forgegate's small and heavy, Eldershore's lean and good on wet ground. Unlike the Dorath, it is native to Teraell and was domesticated after the Fall by people who needed carts pulled and had no machine to do it.
The Brosdhun
Not a different animal but a line bred to pull mining carts: about half the size, wider in the shoulder, and far calmer in the dark after centuries of breeding. It hauls ore from the face to the shaft and lives below, rarely brought up, often half blind after years in the same galleries and working anyway, because sight is not needed in a gallery it knows. Miners are attached to the Brosdhun of their mine in a way they never are to topside Brosdh — they name them, hand-feed them, and mourn them. What becomes of a Brosdhun when the mine is worked out is a thing miners do not like to discuss.