Lexicon:Modern/Dorath
| Dorath | |
|---|---|
| Stage | Modern CLT |
| Pronunciation | /ˈdo.ɾaθ/ |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Etymology | from Middle dōrathē |
| Related words | Vaelith, Graesa, Baelk, Eldershore |
Dorath — the great draft animal of the Known World. The beast upon which all overland trade depends.
Notes
Five to six feet at the shoulder and between two and three thousand five hundred Weith in weight. Barrel-chested, heavily muscled through the shoulder and neck, and set low on four short wide-planted legs. The hide is thick and darkly textured, grown in overlapping segments with slightly raised edges — not armor, but near enough to it that a bite which would cripple another animal costs a healthy adult very little. Herds do not scatter when threatened. They consolidate, adults facing outward in a rough ring with the young inside, and hold. This translates so well to caravan work that a team of eight or ten forming that ring around a stopped wagon will turn away most things that come at it. Experienced masters learn to read the ear positions and the low continuous rumble that means the animals have found something the people have not. Calm, steady, and slow to panic. A Dorath that has worked with one handler for years answers to the voice and shows plain attachment; the same animal under a stranger is merely functional. Six to eight miles in an hour, sustained, with endurance no riding animal can match. First domesticated in Eldershore, whose bred stock is still the finest in the world and sold at prices that reflect it. The Dorath was engineered pre-Fall as livestock and hardened during the war years, when engineered predators were being released into farmland; the defensive ring is a designed behavior rather than a grazing one. It went feral in the collapse, and what Eldershore did during the Quiet Recovery was a second domestication. Nobody in Year 917 knows this. A Dorath takes to harness with a readiness no wild animal of that size should show, and Eldershore’s traders have a proud story about the Skaella of their forebears. The Skaella was real. The animal was also meeting harness for the second time.
The segmented hide is not an invention. Native Teraellan animals carry dermal bone as a matter of course, and whoever built the Dorath took the arrangement from what was already surviving out there.