Mappo Runt

Mappo, Icarium's companion

GotM, Dramatis Personae

'Mappo, a name ever chained to another's. And enough rumours to fill a tome.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.343

Fiddler: '...Is that your vow Mappo? To keep the Jhag ignorant?
Mappo: 'Ignorant of the past, yes. His past.
Fiddler: '...Without history there's no growth-'
Mappo: 'Aye.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.459

'...eyes the colour of sand, eyes set deep in a robustly boned, pallid face...bristle-backed hand...'

DG, UK MMPB, p.41

'-big even for a Trell - the shoulders broad and maned in black hair, the sinewy muscles of his long arms, and the thousand years that capered like a gleeful goat behind Mappo's eyes.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.43

'Short and wide as a siege engine, his skin a deep, warm brown, his black hair braided and studded with fetishes. If anything, his canines were bigger than his companion's (Icarium), and looking much sharper. A Trell.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.302

'...my homeland, on the other side of the Jhag Odhan.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.173

'two centuries past...He'd known centuries already, wedded to war in what had become an ever-repeating cycle of raids, feuding and bloody sacrifices before the god of honour...He had been young when he walked out of the trader town that was his home. He was caught - like so many of his age back then - in a fevered backlash, rejecting the rotting immobility of the Trell towns and the elder warriors who'd become merchants trading in bhederin, goats and sheep, and now relived their fighting paths in the countless taverns and bars. He embraced the wandering ways of old, willingly suffered initiation into one of the back-land clans that had retained the traditional lifestyle.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.292-3

'The glory I earned when I'd snuck into a raiding party's camp and broken the tips of every warrior's knife, then sneaked back out with no-one awakening.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.295

'The ruins of the trader town where he'd been born...A month had passed since its destruction. The bodies of the fifteen thousand slain - those that had not burned in the raging fires - had long since been picked clean by the plain's scavengers...The ancient shoulder-women of his adopted clan had divined the tale from the flat bones they burned, as the Nameless Ones had predicted months earlier. While the Trell of the towns had become strangers to them all, they were kin. The tas that remained was not, however, one of vengeance. This pronouncement silenced the many companions who, like Mappo, had been born in the destroyed town. No, all notions of vengeance must be purged in the one chosen for the task ahead. Thus were the words of the Nameless Ones, who foresaw this moment...The ritual that would purge him would destroy all that he was. You will be an unpainted hide, Mappo. The future will offer its own script, writing and shaping your history anew. What was done to the town of your kin must never happen again. You will ensure that...without the horrific destruction of the town of his birth Mappo would have defied them all.'

DG, UK MMPB, p.293-4

'...Mappo could see well enough without them (torches)'

DG, UK MMPB, p.458