Character type: Glorious Gypsy King
Rank: Candidate
Age: 22 / 21
Gender: Male
Sexual Preference:
Appearance
Feral. There is something about this youth from Nerat that just screams feral.
It’s seared into his skin, into rangy way he moves, the wary way he watches. His bearing is at once languid yet taut, his posture ever that of movement stilled. Tan though he is, he has a definite foreign flavor, lacking much of the warmer red and gold undertones typical to natives. His is a dusky tan with a dusty tint, darker along hooded lids, around pale, pale eyes. They’re some blend of hazel streaked green, but even more striking for their concentrated intensity than their raw hue. Deep set over the high, sharp cut of his cheekbones, they lend a markedly tigrine cast to his features.
Going by his coloring, he is evidently some mutt of continental breeding— hair dark, but shading up into a brasher mix; shading up into an ashen, ambered brown, a honeyed bronzed brown where the sun crisps his coarse crown. With neither the time nor the care for a regular trim, he leaves it a short tousled mane. Truly, he looks more a creature of the mountains, of the deserts and plains, than the beaches and jungles.
While Ghauvry dresses in layers as much as any islander, the melange of fabric and and blend of colors is again a touch off-beat. The dyes range from vibrant to bleached, the cloth from fresh to ragged. Articles obtained from the weyrstores just seem to add to the patchwork effect. One might guess he just doesn’t care, but from the way new embroidery and embellishments seem to creep and grow over his clothes day after day… he cares rather a lot. To it all he adds a blend of ornaments — of jewelry — ranging from the typical leather and shell pieces common on the coasts to the rarer bits of metal, like the ornate bronze ring in his ear. The ring was once part of a set, but he lost its mate — along with a deal of his lower right lobe — in a brawl.
All in all, he looks like he’s wandered in from the wrong side of the tracks. Only his voice has any whisper of refinement. It’s a gritty voice, already roughened by life and wear, yet the ridges and cracks run so together that they knit to velvet over his tongue.
Personality
Far to the west, across the sea, the men in blue sit in their college and ask the age old question: Nature or Nurture; which is the force that most truly shapes a man?
For Ghauvry, it was Nurture.
Fired in the crucible of need, beat against the anvil of necessity, he has been forged to what he is by the stressors of his station. The remote factors of his birth a mere sidenote to his psyche, Ghauvry has been made to run his life at the pace of need. He was not raise in the communal comfort of a weyr, not fed and clothed by tithes from laborers unseen. He’s had to fight for anything worth having and had to learn that everything has a worth. There is nothing noble in the latter revelation. Down in the gutter, one quickly learns what can be salvaged, what can be sold… Waste not, want not. All things have a price, whether measured in marks or in blood.
Jaded, jaded from head to toe, his experiences have already hardened him. He doesn’t just look wary, he is wary. Bound to vigilance, to a cat’s caution. It is an armor of cynicism that daily saved his life in so many small incalculable ways— never mind the thing called his heart. He doesn’t lack empathy, just sympathy, because Knowing isn’t Caring and, looking out past the bulwark of his own experiences, he sees nothing to wake his dormant pity.
Yet, there is something that is so very free and care-less about him. He has long since accepted the nature of the Nurture and embraced the harsh realities of his existence. No hold, no family, not even a dog to call his own— the liberty of poverty, of a life without commitments— he glories in the gloom of it all.
History
Birthdate: Midsummer-ish — 8.431.11.7
Birthplace: Up north, Nerat — Halicarn Highhold, Halicarn Holding, Fort Territory
Ghauvry is remarkably open handed with the details of his life. He was raised on the great-roads, he’ll say, crisscrossing the continent in the train of a trading caravan. It was only a modest cara, but it had room enough for his small family— just him, his ma, his pa and their wagon. Sure, they weren't your badged, certified Traders, but not everyone had the fortune to be born into those ancient bloodlines and traditional freight agreements. Some had different luck. The folks of his cara, well, they were born to the roads and made their home there and their marks where they could. After all, what home is there, save the road, for Pern’s Holdless?
Holdless. He confesses with relish, with a hardbright grin.
It was hard work, a hard life. They eked out a simple living, bartering from town to town. Goods or labor, the odd import or export here and there— earning their share of marks and scorn. With their sturdy draybeasts and broad wheelhouses they drifted across the continent, from hold to hold, always moving. Together with the badged men of the old Trader families, they were one of the many Holdless caravans making up the life-blood of the continent, running between the far flung holdings and remote cotters.
It was a life with all the glamour of dirt. Always outside hold limits by nightfall, always camped in the brush or fallow fields. They were plagued by all the dangers and woes the beset the layman — the illnesses, the injury, the casual calamities and common deaths — but denied any of the aid of hold and hall, just as they were denied the chance at a true Trader’s contracts and custom with those same halls and holds. No craft-trained master would willingly entrust transport of their goods to a holdless band, to renegades. Those that weren’t criminal themselves were born of criminals and Blood Would Tell.
Is it any wonder the holdless turn to other methods to make ends meet?
Cutting cattle from a farmer’s herds, forging crafthall marks on ‘inferior’ goods, raiding a field, raiding a hold— you name it, Ghauv’s caravan did it. They fought and stole and lied and cheated, and fed their elders and their wives and their babes on the breast. Sometimes, often, their targets weren’t even the properly knotted and badged, but fellow outcasts like themselves. A dog-eat-dog world, the holders said, and they were right.
Yet, it was the life Ghauvry knew, living on the fringes, and it was normal to him. His youth was spent like any other caravan kid, minding their livestock, holding the wagon reins, helping his mother with the washing and waiting in the shadows to run and shout and help his father and the men drive away a farmer’s herd.
He learned death and loss young in that rough world, his father killed during a raid on another caravan when Ghauvry was a little man of ten, but already the notion of death had ceased to shock him— life on the road had long since robbed him of that innocence. His mother soon remarried, if it could be called that out there on the roads. Any of the young bucks in the train would have be glad to extend to the widow his aid and protection in exchange for a place in her wagon and in her bed, yet she spurned them all in favor of Osem.
A middle aged, greying father of six, he was no maiden’s dream come true, but he offered more stability and kindness than any of the wild bachelors. He had a wagon of his own, a share in the herd, and if he already had a wife as well— well, they were no holders to be bothered by convention. So life went on…
Yet Ghauv never appreciated the man’s clumsy attempts at parenting, never could quite stomach the defensive scorn and resentment Osem’s first wife reserved for his mother and him. So when his mother died on the birthing bed a turn later, a weedy little half-brother with her, he left the caravan and the red wagon that had been his home.
Too young to make it alone, Ghauvry went to the one place that remained to him: the Caverns.
There is one home, beyond the roads, open to the holdless and their kind: the cavern networks of Pern. From old boltholes established by traders during the Pass, to vast natural caves settled over the turns by the holdless who preferred a more stationary life, their kind seized the little they could hold and made it their own. Ghauvry made his way to one of the latter outposts: the Dendritic Caves in northern Nerat, one of the largest settlements on the seaboard and bane of the region’s Lord. To the Holders it was the Dendritic Caves, but to Them it was Nerashi Caverns— and Home.
He left the wide open roads and descended into the caverns, into the messy hodge-podge of people and activity. It was like any great hold, or so he imagined, with crafting folk and families and merchants, all living side-by-side and on-top of one another, some trading band or another always passing through. Loud and rank and filthy.
His story might have ended there, blotted out in that crush of life and vice, but he took to that wild world and found a new kind of family in one of the orphan gangs. As gangs went they were no better or worse than any other, volatile and malicious in the sense that a feline is— by nature rather than a moral choice. They ran the usual rackets, fiercely protecting the stalls and shelters on their turf while charging for the favor, making and peddling a variety of opiates and moonshine. As Ghauvry grew he came to know their operations, and the caverns, like the back of his hand.
Ghauv didn’t regret leaving the roads where the holdless were so often at the mercy of some Farmer Joam. When he was in the holding of caverns he could believe they needed no one else, that they themselves were lords on Pern. He spent nearly a decade there, tearing his way through the pecking order and… living. Living as only the holdless knew how, as if each day was truly the last. The music brighter, the dances lighter, the wine sweeter, the kisses hotter.
Still he ventured abroad from time to time, when restlessness seized him, joining a band of bucks on a raid or riding out to the holds in harvest season. It was during the latter that he was Searched. A shift in gang politics had made a temporary absence attractive and Ghauvry had gone off with a pack of young folk from Nerashi, hoping to earn the odd mark working in the orchards of the peninsula. No one was more surprised than he when dragonmen arrived on Search and a simple trip south for his health turned into the chance of a lifetime.
Relationships
Family
Father: Ghauvin, deceased — Bannard, ex-Holder of Halicarn
Mother: Erijke, deceased — Elibhe, ex-Lady of Halicarn
Siblings: Halfbrother, (stillborn) and Ashaya, Holder of Halicarn
Friends
His Band of Brothers
Jaga?
Kirje?
Lovers
A few…
Enemies
The Snakebraids
The Nerashi Whers
Jaga?
Kirje?
Numerous others