sentient peoples of issadai (pt 2): tousa
The tousa are a species of primate that received aetherial souls around the same time humans did. They aren’t as widespread as humans, who have proven hardier and better able to adapt to new environments, and live primarily in the jungles and coastal mangrove swamps south of the Mysskaean Sea (map). They have good relations with the human peoples closest to them, the Shuwafi, whom they trade with extensively.
Tousa are taller than humans, with the average individual standing about six and a half feet tall, and slighter, with long, thin limbs. Their species started out as gracile tree-dwellers, so at one time they had disproportionately long arms and hand-like feet. Their faces were also longer than humans’, with a snout-like nose, large canine teeth, and long opposable ears. Modern tousa have become bipedal land-dwellers like humans, and thus their body plan has become more human-like. Their faces, too, have become flatter and smaller-jawed, closely resembling the human face, though they have retained large, round eyes and a long nose. Most have pale or pinkish skin which flushes easily, gold or light brown eyes with little sclera showing around the iris, and coarse straight hair that ranges from gold to burnt orange in color. Their faces are heart-shaped, with broad cheekbones, a shallow brow ridge, and a low hairline that often has a pronounced widow’s peak. Their opposable ears are used extensively in body language, and their eyes retain the tapetum lucidum. Tousa generally have heavier body hair than humans, bordering on fur—except on the chest, belly, and face, which are usually hairless. They exhibit minimal sexual dimorphism. Tousa are semi-nocturnal; they are most active around dawn and dusk, and sleep through the hottest point of the day. Like humans, they live about a hundred years, and individuals with strong magic have the potential to live much longer.
The tousa vocal tract differs from a human’s; they have higher voices, usually in the alto or soprano range, and they cannot pronounce some vowels that are essential to the human languages. Because of this, a pidgin speech has evolved between the tousa and the human peoples they deal with, which omits vowel sounds that they cannot pronounce.
Tousa can interbreed with humans, but they’re much more fragile, physiologically speaking, so hybrid offspring are rare. Generally hybrids have a much better chance of surviving to birth if they’re being carried by the human parent. Most tend to take after the human parent in appearance, but it is common for them to exhibit tousa coloring.
Most tousa follow a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, though within the last thousand years or so they have adopted agriculture from the human peoples they are in contact with, and since then have begun to build permanent settlements. They also rely heavily on fishing for food, and in human or mixed-species areas they can often be found working as fishermen.
The only major tousa city is known as Hle’alu. It is located at the broad, shallow mouth of the Eto’a River where it runs into Alo’ikalo’ani Lake, and consists of wooden structures that sit on stilt-supported platforms above the water, or on the hundreds of small islands that dot the river delta. There are no streets, and city-dwellers get around either by boat, navigating the channels between islands, or on narrow wooden bridges. Founded over five hundred years ago, it was built on the site of one of the first great tousa civilizations, the Eto’a River Valley Civilization, which grew up during their agricultural revolution. While the swamps that surround the city offer little in the way of farmland, the islands of the Eto’a River have been built up and expanded with earth over the centuries, creating tiered fields of rich, wet soil that is exceptionally well-suited for growing rice and beans, two main staples of the tousa diet.
Plentiful fishing and the rich farmland they have engineered has allowed the Eto’ans to devote time that had once gone to hunting and gathering towards the pursuit of art, music, and mathematics. They have also developed a writing system, Udu, which is written in ink on banana leaves, and used mainly for recordkeeping—at the time it was invented, Hle’alu had become a bustling center of trade, which it remains to this day. Farmers, craftsmen, and fishermen from villages both human and tousa travel to the city to participate in its floating markets. Hle’alu is ruled by a priest-king, who not only oversees the city government, but also performs the sacred rituals that must be observed on each holy day. The great temple and the priest-king’s palace are located on Gis, the large island at the center of the city.
Tousa are known as fine weavers, and their cotton is famous among the southern peoples for its delicacy and strength. Much of their clothing and other fabric goods are colored with an unusual reddish-purple dye called axim, which is obtained by collecting and boiling the mucus of a snail found in jungle waterways.
The primary Tousa religion, Qe’elateqa, revolves around a demigod hero named Ateqa. Son of the river goddess Yu’a, he is considered to be the father of the tousa, and the first sentient being in Issadai. They call themselves “tousa”, which means “children of the river” in their language, for this reason. According to tousa mythology, during the early ages of the world Yu’a, becoming lonely, created for herself a son out of the clay that lined her riverbank, breathing life into him. She named him Ateqa, which means “earth that walks”—because he had the soul of a god but a mortal body, he would someday return to the earth Yu’a had shaped him from. When Ateqa grew to adulthood, he left Yu’a to wander the world, awakening the sentient species as he went, and doing battle with the evil gods and spirits that threatened their safety. He was eventually killed while fighting Bedu, the leopard god of the hunt and of darkness, but the children he had with a tousa woman lived on to become a great line of wise and powerful mages. The priest-kings of Hle’alu have long claimed descendance from Ateqa.
