Locusts

Overview

Locusts are grasshoppers of the far side's dry grassland. In most years they are scattered and harmless. In a swarm year they gather in clouds that darken the sky and eat everything green in their path: the thin grass of the Windscar shelves, the green fringe of the Long Pan, and, when the wind carries them over the Lee Wall, the terraces of the Leeward Folds. A swarm year is one of the years the Folds' long-cycle reserve exists for.

Appearance

A locust is as long as a finger, with a blunt head, large eyes, short horns, a saddle-shaped plate over the shoulders, long folded wings, and great hind legs for jumping. A lone locust in an ordinary year is green or sandy brown, hard to see in the grass. A swarming locust is a different-looking thing: yellow and black, its wings longer, and it moves with others. A swarm on the wing is a roaring, glittering cloud, and the noise of one feeding is like rain falling on a roof. A field after a swarm smells of crushed grass and dung.

Habitat and Range

They live in the dry grassland and scrub of the Rimward Basins and the High Scars, along the Windscar edge of the Glassbelt, and on the dry spurs and saddles round the Folds. Swarms go wherever the wind takes them, mostly from the dry country towards the greener.

Behaviour and Temperament

In ordinary years each locust lives alone, eating grass and leaves. When a run of dry years ends in good rains, the young hatch in vast numbers onto a small area of new green, and crowding changes them: they turn colour, seek one another out, and move together, first as marching bands of wingless young, then as flying swarms. A swarm eats grass, grain, leaves, fruit, bark, and thatch, and moves on when the ground is bare.

Life Cycle

Females lay pods of eggs in damp sand and soil. The young hatch with the rains, wingless, and grow wings after a few moults; a swarming generation breeds again wherever it lands, so a swarm year can last two or three seasons before the dry and the birds bring it down.

Uses and Dangers

A swarm can strip a shelf of grass in a day, leave the herds with nothing to eat, and take a fold's green crops and orchard leaves before harvest. On the Windscar a swarm year starves herds and sends camps to the strongholds early; in the Folds it is a hole in the year that only the reserve can fill. Halfling households drive marching bands into trenches and burn them, beat pans and light smoky fires against a swarm, and cover what they can. The locusts themselves are food: roasted, salted, or dried and ground, and in a swarm year many households eat a great deal of them.

Lore and Belief

Rimward kindreds say a swarm follows the end of a dry cycle as surely as night follows day, and in a sense they are right. Halflings say a swarm comes to a fold that has let its reserve run low, and an unlucky fold with a full reserve is suspected of having miscounted. Some Orc kindreds hold that Rakhal the Storm-Caller sends the swarms on the wind to move camps that have stayed too long.

A swarm year is a raiding year: kindreds whose pasture has been stripped ride against those whose pasture was spared, and the songs of the Rimward Basins date their oldest feuds by the swarms.

Where It Appears

• The Leeward Folds
• Writers' Guide: The Leeward Folds