The original note, as written at the time
At a certain time in history complex animate life became indestructible. They can hibernate when without food but cannot die. However they can no longer reproduce and they can no longer provide meat and milk for food. A small amount of them remained and it is these creatures that have shaped history ever since. Whoever finds the best ways to utilise this new phase of life forms masters creation and rules the world.
Ongoing development
They do not move much. That is the first thing the histories get wrong, because histories prefer events.
There are perhaps four hundred of them left, spread across the whole of the country, and each one occupies a territory it has held for longer than any family in it. They cannot die. They cannot breed. They cannot be eaten, and this is the part that changed everything, because a creature that cannot be eaten is not a resource in the way we understand resources.
They hibernate when there is nothing, and they wake when there is, and the waking is not on any schedule we can predict. So the herdsman is not a herdsman any more. He is a steward of something that will be here after him, and whose movements are not his decision.
The great fortunes of the last two centuries were not made by killing them. They were made by finding a use. Somebody worked out how to mill the hide while the animal was standing. Somebody else found that the creature will carry weight — extraordinary weight — without complaint and without ageing, if the load is placed correctly. There is a guild in the north whose whole wealth rests on a pattern of packs designed so that an indestructible beast will tolerate it indefinitely.
The emperor’s interest is different. He has begun to think about what a body that cannot die is worth on a border. Not as a soldier; nobody imagines these things fighting. As a witness. A thing that stands at a crossing for sixty years and sees everything that passes, and cannot be bought out or killed or moved on.
I have been sent to count them, which is a way of saying that I have been sent to claim them, and I have written the number down and I have not sent it. Four hundred is a small figure. It is the sort of figure that invites a decision by a person who has never stood in a field for an afternoon waiting for something that has decided, for its own reasons, not to do anything today.
The animals cannot die and cannot reproduce. Sooner or later there will be fewer. And the man who decides what happens to the last one will be a kind of emperor no crown has ever managed to produce.