Pakals

Practically every area of the world has come up with its own method of putting food inside bread. There is the sandwich. The pasty. The pie. The calzone. From Froongia, we have smooshi and sashaymi, layered stacks and intricate little slices like edible millefiori wrapped in rice and seaweed; from the Great Shwamp, the gleaming boiled spheres called gulashlub; from Banterkrat, a hundred varieties of intricately folded flatbreads, like origami with food baked inside. If one prefers desserts, there is the cream bun, the eclair, the jambritch, the crepe, the scone, the krifle, the cannoli, the tanchee, the rangoon, the pillidesh. I have yet to find a place without its own variety of food-in-a-crust.

Wherever you go, the purpose is much the same. Everyone wants food they can carry around, food that won't dry out or get squashed or make their fingers sticky. The best way is usually to wrap it in some sort of crust and turn it into its own little self-contained object.

The Golden Desert's version is the pakal.

Pakals are collections of food wrapped in dough and baked, or fried, or occasionally boiled. They are the shape of rounded river pebbles. The crusts are hard on the outside, making a beautiful bready thump when you tap them. They can contain virtually any food that exists in the Desert. Meat, cheese, cabbage, chocolate, fish, fruit, an endless variety of vegetables and spices - if it's edible, you will find it in a pakal sooner or later. They come in practically every imaginable size as well, from tiny ones the size of marbles (popular among children and the Desert's rodent populations) to the steaming, house-sized pastries baked for certain festivals.*

Of course, it's impossible to tell from the outside what is inside a pakal. As a result, it's traditional to punch patterns into the outer crust before baking, like the holes in a pie. The holes let out steam and keep the pakal from exploding when baked. The pattern they form tells you what's inside. Market-goers in the Desert learn to read the crusts as they go. Little fish symbols mean fish of some sort, usually some species from the river Lahra. Triangles mean cabbage. Diamonds mean chocolate. Meat pakals usually have a simple picture of the animal on the top, unless the baker wasn't quite sure what it was, in which case they just have a star instead.

Some pakals are left unmarked, for the adventurous eater.

I have been largely living on these little pastries, in addition to my usual diet of meat and vegetables and chocolate and whatever else happens to be available. (The Golden Desert is sadly lacking in slug meat, but it makes up for it with its wide variety of tasty hoofed animals and edible cacti.) Pakals are common, varied, and cheap, and they travel well. It's what they were made for, after all. Though many modern pakals are essentially pies, juicy pastries of meat or sand-apple, they were originally a way to make dried meat and vegetables last longer and require less packaging on long Desert voyages. In less civilized centuries, some of the more warlike Desert tribes would skewer pakals on their spears, so that they could snack on horseback while fighting each other.

There has been no war in the Golden Desert since the Locust Marauders died out, but it's still easy to find tough, salted pakals baked for long trips. In the dry Desert air, they last nearly forever.

I have always had a kind of magpie attraction to small, beautifully made things.** Pakals are no exception. It is nearly as much fun to collect the little patterned loaves as it is to eat them. I love nearly all food, but there is something special about these compact little gems of the baker's craft.

If they weren't so tasty, it would almost seem a shame to eat them.



* Some of these giant pastries have gone on to become permanent homes. I met a woman in Hemrikath who lived inside one of the empty crusts. It had been emptied of its filling long ago, and larger holes had been cut for windows and a wooden door. I asked her if she ever got the urge to gnaw on the walls. She said no; the old bread had gone stale years ago and was roughly the consistency of granite. The smell of its contents still lingered, though, however faint, and she occasionally woke up from blissful dreams of figs and cinnamon.

** As a traveler with no permanent home, I have to be wary of this tendency, lest I end up as ridiculously overburdened as Elva Ursunorn's fabled Packrat. Though the world is full of beautiful things, I have trained myself to keep only the miniature and the edible ones. People often ask why I have so many random small objects hanging around my neck.

Tunnelers

I took a detour from the path back in May, when I was still in the mangrove swamp. There was a gathering of alarmingly large coconut crabs on the boardwalk, and I didn't feel like trying to go through them. Several were snipping branches off of the trees with their claws and waving them over their heads like flags. I kept my distance and climbed off into the mangrove roots.

It turned out to be surprisingly easy once I got used to it. They were old mangroves, their roots firm and gnarled, with plenty of footholds. Crabs of the ordinary size scuttled away into crevices when they saw me. I tried to stay out of the water; I'm not sure where the estuary becomes fresh enough for leeches. Twilight arrived as I traveled, turning the humid air beneath the trees a dusky blue-green. In the half-dark, I smelled the smoke before I saw it; I'm not sure I would have seen it at all otherwise. This is not what one expects to smell in so humid a place, so I stopped and looked around to see where it was coming from. A thin plume of smoke was rising from the corner of one of the roots. When I bent down to look at it, I found what looked like a tiny incense burner, a smoking brazier in miniature. There were no grasshoppers nearby. The roots were untouched and free of even the oldest bite marks.

That was when someone began throwing small twigs, with perfect accuracy, at my head. I moved away immediately. This sort of greeting is often followed by showers of small but extremely sharp arrows. Once I was out of range, I looked out into the trees and saw that over half of them were inhabited, full of tiny lit windows like stationary fireflies.

They were full of Tunnelers.

The twigs stopped when I had moved a few feet away from the incense burner, which I assumed to be some sort of grasshopper repellent. The last things miniature people want are giant insects eating their houses. I looked around before moving again, making sure I wasn't about to step on anything and provoke more twig-throwing (or worse). This sort of violent reaction from Tunnelers is completely understandable, as people my size are quite capable of accidentally crushing their fields and buildings before we even notice they're there. Our attention has to be gained quickly and emphatically.

Tunnelers are, to the best of my knowledge, the smallest people that anyone my size knows about. They tunnel in things, hence the name. Many live underground in holes dug by domesticated moles. Others live in walls or the unused spaces of machinery. The Arboreal Tunnelers are one of the most widespread tribes; most of Hamjamser's forests have at least a few trees full of them. They're harder to see in the daytime unless you know to look for the tiny shutters in the bark. Arboreal Tunnelers generally confine their excavations to the dead wood of trees, taking care not to harm the living parts except to punch through a window here and there. Entirely dead trees don't make the best homes; they have a tendency to rot and fall over. Tunnelers rarely go outdoors, as nearly everything outside wants to eat them, so it was unsurprising that I couldn't see any of them. I've never seen a tunneler; I don't even know what they look like. Even the twig-throwers never showed themselves. Every so often, one of the windows would flicker as someone moved in front of it, but that was the only sign of life that I saw.

I'm sure I was making them nervous, standing there, so I left after another look at the candlelit trees. I took a different route back and found the usual latticework warning markers set up along the edges of the boardwalk. Apparently, not many travelers leave the path in that part of the Great Shwamp.

The coconut crabs were gone by then. They'd set up the branches in a cone, like the frame of a teepee, and had set a large conch shell on top. I left it alone. I don't know what it was meant for, but it certainly wasn't for me.

Sporetower

I've been uncertain whether or not I should write to you about this. It happened back in May, before I started corresponding again, and it is undoubtedly one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. If you have a sensitive stomach, you may prefer to wait until tomorrow's letter.

I was traveling on the boardwalk at the time. It was one of the above-water sections - fortunately, as it turned out. I had been walking for most of the morning without seeing anything particularly unusual. There had been a dead fish or two, but that's not all that strange; fish die all the time in the Great Shwamp. Something always eats them sooner or later.

As I kept walking, I came across more of them. Most were fairly small. When I passed the seventh one, a four-foot marsh pike floating on its side, I started to be uneasy.

The surface of the water gradually became covered with dead fish. The current was moving them along - at least, I hope it was the current. They kept pace with me as I walked. The bodies of water-rats and small alligators joined them, green and brown in the expanse of tan and silver. I'd rather not discuss the smell. Through gaps between the fish, I could see the bleached shells of crustaceans drifting across the silt. I almost didn't notice when the trees began to be covered with mushrooms.

I certainly noticed when I reached the source of the mushrooms. The boardwalk disappeared into a wall of cloud. Whatever force was moving the bodies in the water seemed to be keeping it contained; the edge undulated slowly, but it didn't seem to be spreading. I thought it was fog until I walked - hesitantly - into it.

I got out much more quickly. After a brief and violent fit of sneezing, during which I nearly stumbled off the boardwalk, I turned around and looked at the cloud through watering eyes. It had, I noticed now, a slightly greenish shade.

An avian woman with black feathers and the face of a vulture was standing in front of it. She wore a necklace of teeth and rodents' skulls.

"My apologies," she whistled. "Normally I catch strangers before they walk in. You're new here, aren't you?"

There seemed little point in denying it.

She didn't speak English. It's difficult without teeth or lips. Many avians are capable of pronouncing the full range of necessary consonants with their throats, parrot-style; this one either didn't have the required vocal anatomy or simply hadn't learned. Fortunately, I'd been practicing the whistling language she spoke, the one that non-avians call Whoopish. It's easy enough to pick up if one has any musical ability at all (though it apparently sounds rather comical when whistled with lips).

Her name, she said, was Lady Carnelia Sarcoramph, and the cloud I had walked into was the boundary of the town of Sporetower. Visitors often react that way to it. Due to some quirk of the currents, or perhaps a geographical sense of tidiness, everything that dies in the Great Shwamp (and isn't immediately eaten) ends up there. The water is thick with bones and floating carrion. Fungi cover the entire town, sprouting on every surface, from the damp houses to the contents of the water below them. The cloud that surrounds the town is made of their spores. It's no wonder I couldn't breathe it. The townspeople are used to it; they breathe in spores like incense. Travelers, not being similarly adapted, have to cover their mouths to keep from choking to death.

I was ready to turn around and take another branch of the boardwalk, but Lady Sarcoramph said that wouldn't be necessary. I was a guest of Sporetower and would be allowed to enter the town. Her tone was friendly enough, but I got the impression that the choice was not mine to make. She gave me a tightly-woven silk scarf (to cover my mouth) and a pair of goggles and led me into the cloud.

The sky of Sporetower was perpetually overcast, the sun visible as a blurred and slightly greenish light through the fog. Flies and brightly colored carrion beetles buzzed through the murk. Mushrooms and shelf fungi covered every tree, every post of the boardwalk, many of them taller than the largest pligma or elephant's-cap. There were small toadstools even on the little rafts of mold in the water. The surface was still covered with fish, but they were obviously older than the ones outside the cloud, and continued to get older. I was able to see the entire process of decomposition as we walked. (The scarf and goggles kept out the spores, but did nothing against the smell; I tried not to breathe through my nose.) The fish around the boardwalk were little more than bones held together by floating mushrooms when Lady Sarcoramph stopped.

"Behold," she said. "The town of Sporetower."

As you've probably noticed by now, many of the towns in the Great Shwamp, lacking solid land, build instead on trees and clumps of marsh grass. Sporetower is built on mushrooms. The town floats in the water, sprouting from a raft of accumulated decay, a translucent heap of fungus taller than the nearby trees. I don't know how deep it goes. I don't even know how large it is. We were close enough by then to make out the closest section of the town, bobbing gently on the cemetarial water, but the farther sections were lost in the fog. Most of the buildings I could only see in silhouette. That was enough to make out their shapes. If there's any wood in Sporetower, it's either well-hidden or rotted nearly to nothing by now; the town appears to be built not only on, but out of enormous fungi. They form the walls and columns of every building. Stalks like pillars hold up mushroom-cap roofs, tubular chimneys, walls of fungoid brick or woven mold. The streets are made of enormous brackets, ringed like slices of trees. The town is built on the slope of the fungal heap; the streets climb at steep angles, often built on top of buildings. Twisted bridges stretch from roof to roof. Instead of dogs, carrion beetles of all sizes wander through the streets.

From the middle of this heap grows the Necrophyte, a monumental tower of fungus, porous and translucent and turreted with spore caps. It looks like a crumbling castle of mushrooms. Most of them have been hollowed out inside to make rooms and hallways; the narrowest stems have been carved into spiral staircases, punctured with spongey windows, connected to the rest of the building by high walkways of living mushroom. No one seems sure whether the building is a single fungus or a collection of many.

Lord Microbius Sarcoramph, the Undecayed Baron of Sporetower* and Lady Sarcoramph's father, lives with his extensive family in the Necrophyte. He apparently likes to invite every visitor to the town to dinner. He says it's for hospitality. Lady Sarcoramph says it's so that he knows whose pockets to go through if they return to the town by other means. "Few people come back to Sporetower voluntarily," she said. "Many say they will die before they set foot in the town again. It is surprising how often they turn out to be right."

I saw a few other foreigners on their way to the castle, wrapped up like travelers in the Shattered Waste. None of them live here. Every visitor wore the same scarf I did, and most wore the goggles as well, to keep their eyes from watering uncontrollably. Springtime pollen is nothing compared to the air of Sporetower. The townspeople delight in telling about careless visitors who sneezed to death.

The town is inhabited mostly by avians with no sense of smell. Like Lady Sarcoramph, many of them rather resemble vultures - bald, wrinkly heads, similarly bald and sinewy arms, austere black feathers. (A few are a startling blood-red. I don't know if it's dye or just a rare color, like redheaded humans.) They breathed quite comfortably in the murky air. After ten minutes or so of watching them through my goggles and scarf, I began to feel as if I was underwater, surrounded by fish. Every few minutes, I'd see someone nearby make a little swallowing motion; it took me a while to realize that it happened every time they inhaled a fly. I think a large part of their diet comes from breathing insects.

Like ordinary vultures, the lack of feathers is perfect for the townspeople's work. Most of them are scavengers. They wade through the water, sorting through dead animals, collecting useful bones and other bits and pieces. There's quite a lot of that. Sporetower is the largest source of alligator skin in the entire Shwamp. It's also the most painless, for both people and alligators; all the reptiles are already dead. The people of Sporetower receive all the material of a hunter or a livestock farmer with very little of the work. It's not for everyone, of course, but those who can stand to live in Sporetower consider themselves uncommonly lucky.

Of course, not everything worth scavenging is actually part of an animal. Alligators eat so many inedible things that the people of Sporetower call an alligator's stomach its "purse." A cutpurse in Sporetower is not a thief,** but something between a butcher and a beachcomber. They often find such indigestibles as bottles, eyeglasses, nails, pocketwatches, jewelry, and the metal eyelets from boots. Alligators apparently have a fondness for shiny things. There's a legend in Sporetower that the disappearance of Baron Bredebrick was only solved when his crown, his scepter, and his cousin's dagger turned up inside the same alligator.

This is the sort of legend one hears in Sporetower. Any other place would consider stories like this morbid. The townspeople here just think they're funny.

They have no sense of smell, but their tongues are quite sensitive, flicking into the spore-clouded air like snakes. They can taste which fungi are blooming at any given moment. Women wear mushrooms instead of flowers, choosing those with the brightest colors or the sweetest spores. I saw at least three sporist shops (florists are for plants) with lush bouquets of spore caps in vases of decayed wood or carrion. Restaurants grow carefully selected mushrooms on their tables; the customers shake spores onto their food instead of pepper. (In this town of galvanized sinuses, pepper is considered a rather bland spice, suitable only for the sensitive of palate.)

Many of the avians I saw had rings pierced through the wrinkles of their faces. Some had little bone-and-feather charms hanging from them, swinging freely from a nostril or neck-wattle. A few had bells that jingled whenever they raised their eyebrows. One of the guards at the palace gates had hardly an inch of his face unpierced. A row of rings spanned both eyebrows, a mix of all different sizes. The farthest right was too small for a finger; the farthest left could have been a bracelet. He was tapping out a tune on them as he waited.

The philosophy in Sporetower seems to be that flesh is a temporary thing, a substance that outlives its owner hardly at all, so there's no reason to be particularly careful of it. This makes sense when you realize that most of their contact with the outside world is through its skeletons. They might as well experiment with their faces; a few years after they're dead, there will be nothing left of them anyway. Their bones, however, they treat with exquisite care. However invisible it is in life, a bonesetter's work can endure for centuries beyond its owner's death. As the saying goes, skin is the present; bone is the future.

If I needed any proof of that, I got it when we passed through the gates (the first wood I'd seen since entering the town). The entrance hall was made of a transparent fungus; it was cloudy, like the air, but the surface was as smooth as wax. There was a skeleton sealed inside the wall like an insect in amber. Its hands were crossed over its ribcage. The bones were perfectly arranged, with the shadowy outlines of clothing around them, as if the transparent fungus had simply replaced the flesh and left the rest in place.

Lady Sarcoramph smiled for the first time. "There's my grandmother," she said fondly, gesturing to the skeleton. "Quite well-preserved, don't you think? My grandfather always said she had the loveliest skull he'd ever seen."

Her grandfather was a few feet farther on, equally well-preserved in the shadow of a broad-shouldered suit. Lady Sarcoramph pointed out the symmetry of his eye sockets and bemoaned the arthritis that had distorted his perfect knuckles. Only in Sporetower is beauty judged by the bones rather than what covers them.

The Baron had obviously inherited those bones. He was a magnificent avian, a good six feet tall, his feathers raven-black with faint crimson highlights. A few of the ones on his neck-ruff had been edged with gold paint. This seemed to take the place of a crown. Like perhaps a third of the townspeople, he had wings, though I don't know whether or not he could actually fly. Perhaps he could in his youth. Judging from his appearance, though, he had since been more interested in putting on weight than in lifting it.

One of his eyes was missing; he'd replaced it with a large glass marble, the kind with a swirl of color in the middle. I have no idea why. I would have asked Lady Sarcoramph, but she left as soon as we entered the great hall and sat with her father throughout the meal. The Baron talked at great length and great volume. I got the impression, though, that his daughter was the one actually paying attention to the room. Her conversation was short but carefully attended. If she's not already running Sporetower, I think she will be before long.

The great hall was sealed from the outside, every window made of the same fine silk as the breathing scarves, the air free of spores. All the visitors could take their scarves off to eat. I'd been wondering how we would do that. It was strange to see faces other than vultures - or, for that matter, to see anything unobscured by the spore-fog. After my introduction to the town, I didn't expect to have much appetite, but the feast Baron Sarcoramph provided was surprisingly appetizing. Contrary to popular belief, carrion-eaters don't eat rotten meat. They just aren't so picky about it being fresh. Everything here was quite fresh, though; the fish were only the most recently dead from the water around the town. Some of them had even been alive when caught. I didn't quite have the stomach to eat any meat, but many of the townspeople survive quite well on a diet of fungus, so that's what I ate. Properly prepared - and these certainly were - mushrooms can be as good as meat anyway. I tried not to think about what the mushrooms had been eating.

I don't really remember much of dinner. I found it difficult to concentrate on the conversation; the Baron's substitute eyeball kept distracting me. It spun in circles whenever he blinked. The other visitors were a rather subdued group anyway, many of them more disturbed than I was by the fungal architecture, by the invitation that seemed unwise to refuse, or simply by the amount of death in the town. I think we were all relieved when dinner ended and we were escorted to similarly filtered bedrooms.

Overall, the Sarcoramphs' hospitality was beyond reproach, but it seemed just a little too mandatory for comfort. I left a small sketch of Lady Sarcoramph and the Baron in my room, as a sign of gratitude, and snuck out of the palace before anyone was awake. I was out of the spore cloud by dawn. I don't usually leave a town so quickly, or without thanking my hosts in person, but I can't honestly say I regretted it. Sporetower is a fascinating place - beautiful, even, in its own strange and morbid way - but I prefer to visit towns where I can breathe unassisted and choose where I stay. One visit was quite enough for now. I may return someday, but not any time soon.

Perhaps after I die.





* It's a lifelong position; the title changes only after death. You can probably guess what it becomes then.

** Of course, this depends on whether you consider it stealing when the owner is already dead.

The Floodplains of Sedge

I've decided to follow the River Truckle upstream. This close to the Great Shwamp, it's not far from being a swamp itself. It's comfortable in its bed and doesn't hesitate to stretch out into the surrounding woods. The road on the bank is wide and well-traveled - more so than the boardwalk - so there are fewer washed-out sections. Most of the ones that there are have been filled in with logs or little wooden bridges. The mice here - there are mice everywhere - keep their teeth short by chewing on the railings. They're more artistic about it than some; it's rare to see a bridge without fine traceries of carved scrollwork all over it. You have to look closely to see the tooth marks.

According to the Truckle Stoppers I spoke to,* this country is called Sedge. No one seems sure whether that's short for "Shwamp's edge" or a reference to the plants that grow everywhere. The country is a menagerie of seedpods. There's box sedge, pineapple sedge, pyramid sedge, bottle sedge, giraffe sedge, cabinet sedge, and the elusive invisible sedge. Hollow seedpods are used as much as pottery. Musicians who can't afford instruments just find a ripe rattlesack or whistling sedge, put a coat of varnish on it, and play that instead. Many of the seeds have spines all over, so they attach themselves to your clothing when you brush the plants. There are villages where they wear seeds on their clothes, stuck on in intricate patterns like beads or embroidery. Other plants have different ways of spreading. I was nearly hit twice today by rocket sedge, which can shoot its enormous seed spikes all the way across the river. They have a tendency to spontaneously explode during dry seasons. I'm glad this isn't one.

No one can agree on whether or not Sedge is part of the Great Shwamp. The border, like the land, is less than solid. After traveling through the Shwamp, where land is scarce where it exists at all, it's surprising to see so many houses. I come across three or four every mile. Most of them seem to be farmers or fishers, with nets hanging in the water or fields baking beneath the sun. One house had nets strung across the river, above the water, to catch skipperjacks. The fields are low and full of water; the water is shallow and full of dirt. People toss small stones into it as offerings to the river spirit. They believe that rivers ought to have pebbles to rub smooth, and the Truckle, flowing through a marsh, is deprived of them.

The river fills everything here. Ponds, inlets, and tributaries break up the ground into a thousand islands, which shift and change shape with the flow of the water. The land is so flat that you can see their outlines clearly, speckled across the landscape until they disappear behind trees. At night, the river rises into the air as fog; during the Spring, it climbs out of its banks (only a few inches above water at their highest) and floods the land for miles. The small forests and copses that speckle the fields are striped with the mud left by previous floods. The farmers can read the years on them. Every flood has a name.

"Here's the line from the Shell-Raiser. Highest water in my lifetime. I was only five, but I can still remember my mother taking us all up to the top of the old signal tower. First time I ever imagined what the Ocean might be like."

"There's the Great Perforation, when all the termite eels came up from Sporetower. You can still see the holes in the wood..."

Some trees have the detritus of floods caught in their branches. Children don't bother to build treehouses by the Truckle; they just find a tree with a wagon or a wardrobe in it and hang up a rope ladder. The farmers are thoroughly unconcerned about floods. Most of them are at least partly amphibious. They grow rice and mackerel grass, plants that don't mind spending weeks underwater; they build their houses low and sloping, with streamlined roofs that go all the way to the ground, so currents will go over them instead of carrying them away. Half the furniture is made of metal or ironwood so that it won't float away. The rest is tied to the houses. During floods, the farmers spend the day fishing and scavenging, then find their way home by looking for their furniture bobbing on top of the water. Nearly everyone has a bed or a wardrobe that can be turned into a serviceable houseboat for a week or two. It's not unusual to have the world underwater for five or six weeks out of every year. That's just the way things are.

Fortunately for travelers like me, there are rarely floods at this time of year. The land is as close to dry as it gets. The sun pounds dust from the road. Cicadas drone in the daytime, somewhere in the trees, hidden from view but audible for miles. Locusts make short, rattling flights in the grass. At night, katydids and frogs take over, moving from the lazy insect fugue of the daytime to the invisible polyphony of night.

I've never been fond of heat, but it's days like these that remind me of what I love about Summer.



* Most of the people I spoke to in Truckle Stop wanted portraits. There's a pipe crawler in the town that draws them, but it uses a geometric, highly stylized technique. Not everyone wants to come out looking like the carvings on a thousand-year-old tomb.

Benevolent Clockwork

After more than a month of water, I've finally reached one of the more solid parts of the Great Shwamp. Early this morning, I saw the familiar shapes of docks in the distance, shaggy with moss and freshwater barnacles. Something was odd, though; they weren't attached to trees. I had to get closer before I saw that they were actually connected to land. I can't remember the last time I saw land - not tussocks or mudbanks, but real land, the kind you can't see all at once. It seems strange to actually see the roots of trees.

There's a branch of the boardwalk here, somewhat better maintained than the one I left, but I think I'll be continuing on land from here. I miss being able to stay dry for an entire day.

I paddled my suitcase up to the docks, earning a round of stares from everyone nearby, and stepped ashore. I'll have to remember this mode of transportation. It was quite convenient to be able to pick up my boat and take it with me. Having no idea where I was, I asked a man on the docks. He was carrying a basket of cleaner snails bigger than himself.* Several had escaped and were crawling on his head and shoulders. This seemed to be a fairly common occurrence; silvery snail tracks covered his upper body like tattoos. He told me that the town is called Truckle Stop, as it's where the River Truckle reaches the Shwamp and stops being the River Truckle. Sensible enough.

Truckle Stop looks more or less like an ordinary marsh town: trees full of moss, houses on stilts, little plank bridges over the ponds and inlets that break up the land like the spots on a cow. Dogs and tame caimans wandered over the wooden streets. Many of the houses had fishing poles hanging from the windows; every so often, a bell would ring, and someone would come to the window to reel in a fish. Half the people travel by foot or moa cart, half by rowboat and canoe. The land changes position when no one's looking, as land does, so you never know when your house is going to be on the mainland or on an island.

The town is centered around a bridge over the River Truckle. It's built of wood, like everything in the Shwamp; if there was ever stone here, it's sunk far beyond where anyone can find it. There's moss growing on the bridge. Moss grows on everything here. Most of it is beaded or silvermoss, but there's an edible variety called spaghetti moss that the Truckle Stoppers try to encourage in the town. I tasted a bit this evening, boiled and served with marsh tomato sauce, and the name is quite accurate.

I'd never heard of the place before, but Truckle Stop is apparently rather famous in the Great Shwamp as the home of Temery Malerian, a local inventor. She makes pipe crawlers. They're the windup variety, of course, not the crustaceans. Everyone has their own opinion on which kind is better. The clockwork ones are easier to train; the live ones can make more of themselves. (So can the clockwork ones, of course, but they can't work at the same time.) Most of the towns in the Great Shwamp have the live kind if they have any at all. It's the perfect habitat for them. In Truckle Stop, however, there are so many clockwork pipe crawlers that there's no need for any other kind. Tesra Malerian** apparently does nothing but build them, all day and often all night. The nocturnal townspeople can hear her clanking away after dark. The town crawls with her previous creations, works of clockwork art that are as much like ordinary pipe crawlers as a jade statue is like a rock. Fortunately, this is one of the more accepting towns;*** the people treat the clockwork menagerie as something between pets and benevolent local spirits, welcoming them into their houses and winding them whenever they run down. The children of the town have the usual interest in animals, catching frogs and raising caterpillars in well-stocked jars to watch their metamorphoses; one little girl is constantly surrounded by a cloud of pygmy dragons, a few of which she's trained to carry her schoolbooks for her. With the pipe crawlers, though, the children never do anything more than watch.

The crawlers are beautiful creatures, elegant assemblies of polished silver and brass, like glittering beetles of rods and gears. No two are quite the same. Many of them do the usual pipe crawler tasks - fixing plumbing, patching roofs, collecting lost coins, and so on. Others are... different. It's common in Truckle Stop to come across geometrical arrangements of snail shells, elaborate abstract designs scratched into the plank streets, spidery webs made of cast-off bits of string and strung between banisters or fenceposts. One particularly large crawler shows up on the doorstep of any family that leaves a red ribbon around the doorknob, waits politely to be let in, and alphabetizes all their books. Another seems to know when construction of a new building begins; it always shows up to press bright pieces of broken glass into the clay between the boards. It spends the rest of its time collecting and filing the pieces smooth. The townspeople have developed a habit of leaving all their broken dishes in boxes on their front steps so this crawler can collect them. It must have thousands of pieces by now. No one knows where it keeps them.

The doorsteps all over town, in fact, are covered with bits and pieces for the pipe crawlers: glass shards, wood shavings, bits of string, nutshells and eggshells, pits from peaches and hobberel fruit, bent pins and old rags and the hair from combs and fur-brushes. The doors are just as thickly covered with signs for the useful crawlers. People leave red ribbons for the book-sorter, chalk marks for the windowsill-duster, daubs of jelly for the spoon-polisher, knotted string for the boot-scraper, and paper flowers for the one that comes in and paints tiny floral patterns on ceilings. In addition to the known signals, people often put things out at random - rocks and stockings and old keys - in the hopes of attracting a new crawler. It's like the fairy-signs in the villages of Fethily. Truckle Stop's fairies just happen to be the windup variety.

The overall effect is strange to anyone who don't know what it's for; there's an odd assortment of tiny things by almost every door, like the sweepings of someone's attic carefully arranged in little boxes. Newcomers to the town are occasionally somewhat disconcerted by this until someone explains it to them.

Tesra Malerian's family does most of the business, buying supplies and selling the ordinary pipe crawlers. (The special ones stay in town.) Fortunately, Truckle Stop is near a large supply of the crystal brains used in pipe crawlers. They mine them like gemstones. No one in Truckle Stop knows how the crystals work; no one in the world does, to my knowledge.**** They just hope they never run out of them. Without crystal brains, even Tesra Malerian's clockwork pipe crawlers would be little more than mindless windup toys.

Apparently, they're quite prized in several of the floating cities. No one uses more pipe crawlers than the floating cities, those weightless mountains of prehistoric machinery that depend on maintenance for their very existence, so that's high praise indeed. The inventor herself never leaves her workshop except for the occasional meandering, distracted walk around the town. She is not interested in business. As long as she's got mechanical supplies, she's content. By all accounts, there is no logic to her process; she simply builds the pipe crawlers "the way that seems right." Her clockwork is more art than science, and she is never satisfied with her own work. She considers all her creations, beautiful as they are, failed experiments. They're useful - worth making and keeping - but they're not what she's aiming for. No one seems able to explain what that is.

The townspeople all wish her luck getting wherever she's going. Still, though no one I've met has been tactless enough to say it, I have a feeling that they hope she takes her time getting there.



* The basket, that is, not the snails. The snails were only the size of his head - not unusually large for cleaner snails. Unlike most mollusks, cleaner snails are bred not as food, but as working animals. Practically every coastal town has a colony or two of them. They're let loose to eat the barnacles and shipworms that weaken wood. I'm used to seeing the ocean variety crawling around on docks and fishing boats; I wasn't aware there was a freshwater breed.

** Tesra is the title, in many parts of the world, for a master craftswoman. A ruler of places is a Lord or a Lady; a doer of deeds is a Sir or a Dame; a maker of things is a Tesser or Tesra.

*** This would never work in somewhere like Dubulith, for instance, where any machine that moves by itself is considered unnatural, and the harmless passing of a floating city overhead gets much the same reaction as a hurricane.

**** The Hill Builders presumably did, being the ones who made them. Whoever the Hill Builders were, though, they've all been gone for centuries. I asked why the crystals haven't sunk into the Shwamp, like every other stone does. No one is entirely sure. A common theory is that the little tunnels in them, those microscopic grooves that carry electricity like the cells of an organic brain, make them lighter than ordinary stone. Another common theory is that they're lifted by the power of thought. I don't claim to understand the science of the brain - or electricity, for that matter, fierce and mysterious substance that it is - so both explanations make equal sense to me.

The Gray and Motley Coast

I seem to end up in the Great Shwamp twice as often as any other region of Hamjamser (except possibly the Railway Regions). Other travelers I've met have said the same thing. It makes sense, I suppose. The Shwamp draws everything in. Every river, stream, and ditch flows into it, at least occasionally. It's downhill from everywhere but the ocean.

I got in through a mangrove swamp this time. (All swamps are part of the Great Shwamp, just as all forests are part of the Great Wood.*) I'd been traveling along the coast, stopping in each of a line of the most monochromatic fishing villages I've ever seen. There seemed to be no color in any of them but driftwood gray. The rocks were gray; the houses were gray; the plants were gray; the people were gray. They wore gray clothes and lived on gray fish. Holes in the gray sand contained off-white ghost crabs, which seemed almost garish next to everything else. The villagers were delighted to see someone who carried lots of bright colors and could be persuaded to paint them on things.

In the last village, I noticed a few children playing with what were obviously indigo cockleworm shells; it turned out that they had an enormous field of them just offshore. Cockleworm shells make the best blue dye in the world. I brought this to their attention before I left. If they have any success at farming the worms, I wouldn't be surprised if the Gray Coast eventually becomes the Blue Coast.

It was a few days later that the gray dunes began to give way to mangroves. It was a welcome change. The mangroves were gnarled, ancient trees, raised up on tentacular roots like bark-skinned squid afraid to get their faces wet. Lopsided crabs climbed in the roots next to lizards and sea-green estuary frogs. There were flightless grasshoppers the color of painted Sackamock pottery jugs - and about the same size. Some of them were almost as big as badgers. They ignored the leaves of the trees, preferring instead to take neat little slices out of the roots, which were roughly the consistency of cast iron. I tried to keep my fingers away from them.

Between the mangroves and the sea was Snaffle, a decidedly non-gray fishing village that seemed not so much built as accumulated. In Snaffle, there is no apparent distinction between house and boat. I often had to check under the floorboards to tell which I was on. People without a boat cut their house away from its neighbors and float around in it; people without a house tie their boat up to the village and never leave. They gradually acquire more and more permanent gangplanks, which eventually become whole floors and have more cabins built on top of them, until what was a boat and a dock has become a single conglomeration of buildings with new docks sticking out of it. As far as I can tell, only about a quarter of Snaffle is built on actual land - if the word "land" even applies. It's mostly mangrove roots. The rest of the village has grown out from there. Many of the most solid-looking buildings are built on what are still recognizable - just barely - as the rotting hulls of old boats. I suspect that most of the village's foundations are held together by limpets. There are public fishing holes in the streets and, apparently, private ones inside the houses as well. People put baited strings down through a hole in the kitchen floor and pull up dinner without having to leave the house. Every surface of the village seems to sway, just enough to notice; even the walkways built on solid roots seem to rock gently back and forth, if only in comparison to the rest.

The whole village has a sort of patchwork look to it, being made of boats and whatever spare timber was handy at the time. Sails that have been patched until they're more patch than sail are cut up and made into dresses or coats; many of the people are as motley as the village. There are walls made of driftwood, or furniture, or packing crate slats still printed with their contents. Many people name their houses after the words on them. The inn where I stayed was called the Petrified Fragile. Some of the builders line up the labels to form rhymes:

Olives
Olives
Coffee
POTATOES
THIS WAY UP
DO NOT EAT
Extract of Pear
Salmon
(PICKLED)
The Finest Tomatoes
Peppermint
Pufferfish
Handle With Care

In the end, I had to leave the village in rather a hurry. The hurricane crickets had begun singing. I didn't know what that meant, but the innkeeper (an amphibious man named Cacophonous Moonwreck, who cultivates barnacles on his bald head) informed me that they only sing when there's going to be a storm. The impromptu mating season begins when they first sense the storm and ends, rather abruptly, when it arrives. That way, if the females get blown to other islands, they have all the eggs they need to start new colonies of hurricane crickets.

No one in Snaffle seemed especially concerned about the storm. They've reassembled the village so many times by now that it's practically routine. That's one advantage of living in buildings that float; if your house gets uprooted and blown out to sea, you just tie a bedsheet to the mast and sail it back.

Not being quite so accustomed to hurricanes, I thought it would be best if I made my way inland. I'm glad I did. The storm was frightening enough even three days away from the coast. When it caught up with me, I was able to take shelter in a hollow barrel oak, along with what seemed to be half the animals in the Great Shwamp. The trunk was full of them. Squirrels and tree lemmings crouched in holes with owls and snakes. Marsh wolves crowded into the wide base of the tree next to otters, beavers, several dozen assorted rodents, and one cantankerous alligator, who was given all the space he wanted. The dark hollow of the trunk above us was full of the quiet rustling of winged creatures. Feathers drifted down occasionally. Somewhere up there was a black panther; it never came low enough to see, black on black in the dim light, but I caught the glint of its eyes a few times.

It was an odd few days. The storm raged outside and made the wood around us creak. Inside, everyone was silent; even the goolhowlers and yatter monkeys kept quiet, as if they knew the roaring of the storm was out of their league. The carnivores refrained from eating any of the other animals. Either the storm had inspired some sort of truce, or they were smart enough to realize they were outnumbered. I shared some of my dried squid with them. They were very polite about it. When the wind died down two days later, all of them crept out of the tree and vanished quietly into the Shwamp. I'll probably see any of them again. I'm sure they'd prefer I didn't.

I found the boardwalk a day later, and I've been wandering through the Great Shwamp ever since. I'm in no hurry to leave. There hasn't been a dull moment so far. Nothing has been quite as exciting as those first few days, though - and I couldn't possibly be more grateful for that.



* The odd pronunciation of the Great Shwamp is due to the person who first named it. The Great Wood was named by the legendary explorer and dimensimancer, Lady Erica Pelican, the first to realize it was all the same place; The Great Shwamp was named by Shamyorl Heffelish,** the same sabertoothed explorer responsible for the Shilver Forsht and Lake Shoshenloosher.

** His name was originally Samuel, but he changed the spelling to match the pronunciation.

The End of the Boardwalk

The fog cleared today, and I decided to leave Chelissera while I could still see where I was going. The Pelirikas left the day before yesterday. I was in the middle of painting KeChorlitrix's restaurant; they came to say goodbye while I was eating lunch. Ranapleximilian and Tessemira gave me a snail shell they'd found, banana yellow with black stripes. If you look closely, you can see that the stripes are actually dense lines of small black squiggles, like microscopic hieroglyphics. I wonder if they mean anything.

I'm going to miss talking to the family (though I mostly listened, especially in the case of Mr. Pelirika). I don't think I've enjoyed traveling with anyone so much since I left the Train.

Without the Pelirikas and their wagon, there were no vehicles of any kind scheduled to leave the town for several weeks. Spiders are lurkers by nature. They don't travel much. Lacking any other options besides swimming, I returned to the boardwalk.

I'm glad I bought the bubble-wrap in Chelissera; I don't know what I would have done without it. The boardwalk - already sunken and disintegrating - vanished altogether barely a mile from the town. The last few frayed boards simply disappeared into the silt. There was no trace of them any farther on. Some well-meaning worker had put up a sign: "THIS ROUTE UNDER REPAIR." The sign was almost as rotten as the boardwalk. There was moss growing on it. Somehow, I don't think the repairs ever happened.

The bottom of the Shwamp was fairly flat, so I kept walking. The water continued to get deeper all day. By mid-afternoon, I had emptied my pockets and was walking through water up to my shoulders. It was perfectly clear; I was able to watch for sinkholes and snapping turtles and so on. When the water got deeper than my head, though, I gave up trying to wade and stopped for lunch. The trees were mostly gnorls and marsh manoglia, some of the easiest kinds to climb, so it wasn't hard to find a wide branch to sit on.* I needed a dry place to unwrap my luggage and take out food. While I was there, I checked the bubble-wrap for leaks. There were none. The inside was as dry as a biscuit - unlike me. A small flock of green butterflies flew down while I ate to drink the water from my shirt. I sat there on the branch, perched next to my suitcase, chewing and dripping and wondering if I should turn around.

It was an unusually beautiful part of the Great Shwamp. Plants covered every surface. There were bladderworts and waterlilies in the water beneath me, bryophytes wedged into the bark of the trees, and wispweeds floating through the air on their feathery leaves. The pink blossoms of splash-me-nots clustered on low branches, close enough to the water to see their reflections, but not enough to get their feet wet. The trees around me were full of beaded moss. It hung down in damp, tangled strands, like long green beards with no faces. It was full of the little beads that give it its name. They start out the size and color of peas and change color as they grow, moving through every possible shade of brown and purple. The ripe ones are magenta. If you touch them, they burst and release little clouds of pink spores, which float in every direction and stick to everything. Many of the branches were completely covered on top with pink dust. It looked like an odd cross between sunset and snow. Within a few weeks, it will be gone, turning a more businesslike green as it gets ready to become next year's moss.

I decided to keep going. The water has to get shallower sooner or later. Besides, the bubble-wrap had given me an idea. I resealed it with more air inside, found a relatively straight stick to use as a pole, and turned my luggage into a boat. It wobbles rather alarmingly, but it hasn't quite tipped over yet. I poled my way through the swamp on a suitcase gondola. I sang as I went, of course; someone has to sing on a gondola. I usually resist the urge to sing in public - not everyone likes impromptu recitals of clock songs and show tunes - but there was no one to hear me but the birds. Several of them joined in with harmonies. Sky-blue day bats flitted through the trees overhead. Swamp koi swam lazily under my suitcase, white and orange or black and gold, a few of them the size of dogs. Tree toads watched me pass with eyes that filled most of their heads. Sunlight filtered through the trees, broken into narrow slivers by leaves and hanging moss, full of dust and late-season mayflies. It was a good way to spend the afternoon.



* I sat in one of the gnorls, of course. I don't trust manoglia trees. Most of them stay rooted and mind their own business, but you can never be sure.

Bubble-Wrap

The fog rolled in today. I woke up this morning, in my silk hotel room like a giant's coat pocket, and there it was. The gauzy white buildings of Chelissera blended perfectly into the fog and became invisible. Nothing was left but the signs on them. The letters seemed to float in space, abandoned, like names that had forgotten whose they were.

I nearly fell off the thread bridges several times because I couldn't see them. It was not a good day to explore.

Now that I have money again, I spent this morning in the market, buying things I really should have bought earlier. Food, for one thing. I was down to my last salted cuttlefish. Fortunately, every town has some shop where travelers can buy the kind of food that lasts forever. In Chelissera, the best example of this seems to be a thing called "shell cake." No one seems entirely sure what it's made of. I suspect beetles. It is the color of fossilized sand. The main ingredients are shards of crunchy stuff held together with globs of slightly less crunchy stuff. The consistency is rather like fried eggs, if someone forgot to take the eggshells out and then burnt them.

The flavor is actually surprisingly pleasant; it has that spicy, nutty, shrimp-with-a-sunburn flavor that well-cooked insects often have. I suspected it would get monotonous fairly quickly, though, so I bought a few dried crustaceans* and six lumps of the universal travelers' staple, rock bread.

Ah, rock bread. How I love the stuff. It lasts forever and never gets staler.

Having obtained food, I then went to the bookstore and picked up a book, "Sikelak for the Mammalian Mouth."** I've been intending for some time now to improve my Sikelak. Of all the languages I know - not that there are many - it's probably the most often useful. I haven't learned as much as I might because it's so hard to pronounce. It has the flaw of all universal languages. Anyone can speak it; no one can do so comfortably. It strains every voice in the world. Its great advantage is that it strains them all equally.

Like KeChorlitrix, the shopkeeper spoke English. This happens in many invertebrate towns. The most successful shopkeepers are the ones who can speak the languages of lungs and vocal cords - such as Theskerel and English - as well as their native clicks and hisses. The owners who can't speak the languages themselves find someone who can to mind the counter. The spider behind the bookstore counter was every inch an arachnid, behind the compound spectacles and flowered apron, but somewhere in all those jointed mouthparts was something capable of pronouncing English. Clicking, scissory English, but English all the same.

I knew that my third and last stop would take a while. I decided to take a break for lunch. There was a cafe by the weavers' district that sold solid food; I got a pastry with what looked like blueberries, but turned out to be water beetle larvae. It was delicious. While eating, I watched a bristly spider outside weaving a basket, lying on its back and working with all eight limbs at once. The entire thing was done in about twenty seconds. No wonder the Chelisserites can afford to weave everything in the town.

After lunch, I went to the Chelissera tatter-shop. I try to visit the tatter-shop in every town that has one. This is where people bring their broken things - shredded clothes, smashed dishes, mangled machinery - in the hopes that someone else will find a use for it. Someone almost always does. A few people in every town make their living by fixing things from the tatter-shop and selling them. Others just use the pieces.

From the outside, the shop was all bulges and protrusions, like a sack stuffed with too many lumpy things (which I suppose it was). Inside, it was obvious why. The walls and floor and ceiling were hidden behind pure chaos. There were broken typewriters, reams of cloth with rips and stains, mismatched stockings (only five or six of a full set of eight), two-legged furniture (most of it designed for arachnid anatomy and completely incomprehensible to me), dented pots, stopped clocks, broken toys - everything jumbled together without system or reason. Any trace of organization the shop may have once had was more broken than the objects it contained. There were whole barrels full of shattered china. A spider was picking through them, sifting through shards and comparing them like the scrambled pieces of a hundred jigsaw puzzles. From the way everyone ignored him, I got the impression that he spent a lot of time there.

I looked around for quite some time, wondering about the purposes of some things and the state of others. What did that bottle hold before it lost two of its three spouts? What was the purpose of the clockwork beetle with abacus wings? Who in the world has the strength to not only bend typewriter keys, but to crochet them? I wish I knew.

Amazingly, in all the chaos of mystery and malfunction, I found the one thing I have needed for weeks.

Bubble-wrap is a variety of cloth that can only be made by spiders. It's one of the most precious things to come out of Chelissera. Unique among every kind of cloth, it is completely waterproof. All you have to do is wrap something in it; drop it to the bottom of the ocean, and it will remain dry.***

The secret of bubble-wrap is the stickiness of spider silk. Other kinds of cloth are waterproof only to their edges; you can weave them tight as an alligator's grip, oil and wax them until they gleam, and water will still leak through the seams. Bubble-wrap doesn't have seams. A mix of adhesive and static electricity makes it cling so tightly to itself that even air can't escape between the layers. This is why it's so prized by travelers in the Great Shwamp. If you leave enough air inside the wrapping, not only is your luggage waterproof, but it floats as well (hence the name). You can simply tow it along behind you in the water.

The wrap in the tatter-shop was somewhat shredded, which is why it was in the tatter-shop, and why I was able to afford it (it cost only a sixel).**** I spent an hour this afternoon sewing the tears together and sealing them with snail glue. It's not as perfectly waterproof as the bubble-wrap itself, but it will help it stay in one piece.

Inside the wrap was a pocketwatch with six hands and no numbers on its face. I have no idea how one is supposed to read it. Apparently, neither did whoever left it there. The shopkeeper seemed to have given up trying to sell the watch; when I asked about it, she threw it in with the bubble-wrap for free.

I have more useless curiosities than I probably should. I can't help it. There's something irresistably fascinating about devices that do nothing at all.

In a place like the Great Shwamp, though, bubble-wrap is as far from useless as a sheet of cloth can get. I really should have gotten something like this years ago. It's only luck that I haven't been caught in the rain more often than I have, and I can't rely on the Great Shwamp's haphazard assortment of transportation to keep my luggage dry. My encounter with the troll made that quite clear. Sooner or later, I am going to need waterproof luggage.*****



*It's been weeks since I gave up asking people to identify Shwamp crustaceans for me. It's impossible. No two seem to be the same species - if the word "species" even applies - and they blithely ignore all the rules of taxonomy. They combine features of crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and fish. Many seem to have chosen their number of legs by rolling dice.

**Given the variety of people who speak Sikelak, books on the language are sorted not by the native language of the learner, but by their vocal anatomy. The other options were "Sikelak for the Avian Larynx," "Sikelak for the Metatarsi," and "Sikelak for the Bipalate Coccitella." I didn't think those would help me much. I don't even know what a coccitella is.

***Even in Chelissera, city of spinners, bubble-wrap can be only be made by the very best. It takes experience to make fabric so tight it's waterproof. The master spinners hire other spiders with inferior thread to do their hunting for them; it takes a lot of protein to make silk. The masters grow fat and enormous, spending their days eating and spinning and rarely moving from the same spot. Most eventually learn to spin with one pair of limbs; this becomes a mechanical motion that they do with as little thought as I would need to tap my foot. Their remaining limbs are free for whatever occupation they choose to pass the time.

****Sixels, it turns out, are the middle of the Great Shwamp's glass currency system. One sixel equals eight crickles (smaller marbles with ants inside). Four sixels make a terlimick, a larger marble containing a flightless harlequin grasshopper. There's apparently a fourth coin that is large enough to hold an entire crayfish. No one I've met has ever seen one.

*****I borrowed a lovely waterproof chest while I was in Cormilack, the city with more rain than air. Unfortunately, it was too heavy for me to bring along even if I'd owned it.

Drawing on the Walls

I'm glad I decided to stay in Chelissera. I was sitting on one of the thread bridges over the water,* sketching a tussock with sheep on top, when a spider climbed down beside me. This was fairly unremarkable until he spoke to me.

"Good moorning," he said. "You are an ahrtist, yes?"

His name was KeChorlitrix. He had a magnificent bass voice with a slight Truvidon accent. I have no idea which of his jointed mouthparts it came from. He was the owner of a restaurant, he told me - he pronounced it "rhoostaurant" - and had just moved into a new building. He was looking for an artist to decorate it. "I would like a myooral," he said. "One with insechts on it, fat ones, to make the coostomers hoongry."

I asked why he wanted me to do it, rather than some artist already in the town. Apparently, art by people with only two eyes is considered exotic in Chelissera. There are very few binocular artists in the town. There are plenty of vertebrates living here - perhaps a tenth or so of the population - but all of them have at least a trace of arachnid in their ancestry. Even the least spidery have four or five eyes each.** The only things with two are the sheep.

I've seen some of the multi-eyed artists' work. I can certainly see the difference. Cubist painters with two eyes have to imagine what their subjects would look like from several directions at the same time; ones with more than two eyes actually see them that way. There's a fragmented, fractal beauty to their work that I can't really describe.

I agreed, of course. I try never to turn down a job, especially one this interesting.

I got a book from the town library for reference; I'm not familiar with the insects in this part of the Shwamp, and most of the ones I could do off the top of my head would have been foreign or imaginary. It was the first time I'd been in the library. Nothing in this town seems to be made out of wood if there's a way to weave it instead. Rather than shelves, the library keeps books in tall lattices of silk. They hang from the rope-beams of the ceiling. The vertical strands are close together, the horizontal ones farther apart, so that each book stands in its own narrow pocket in the grid. They have to stretch some of the pockets to fit in the thicker books. Most of the lattices are sixteen books high or more; you have to climb them like rope ladders to reach the books on the higher shelves. No one seems worried about people falling off. Spiders just don't do that. Even if those of us with four limbs and no claws fell off, though, we wouldn't be hurt. The floor is cloth too.

There were several encyclopedias of insects in the naturalist section, but they were short on pictures. I eventually went and found the librarian. She was busy rearranging books on four shelves at the same time. She was wearing the most spectacular spectacles I've ever seen - not so much a pair as a crown, with more lenses than a microscope. Fortunately, we both knew and could pronounce at least a bit of Sikelak, so I was able to tell her that I was looking for pictures of insects.

She nodded, apparently used to vertebrates making the same mistake, and led me instead to the cooking section.

Interestingly, most of the books printed in Chelissera are made in the accordion style. Instead of being bound on one edge, the pages are segments of a single strip of paper folded in a zigzag. The entire thing can be unfolded and seen all at once. For people with eyes on every side of their head, I suppose this makes sense.

I got lost on my way to the restaurant, wandering through webs of ladders and bridges, but I met a few people who spoke Sikelak and could give me directions. The restaurant was made of silk too. There were a few lightweight tables tilted at odd angles on the cloth floor; most of the seats, though, were on the ceiling. When the restaurant opens, the spider customers will hang in comfortable padded hammocks and drink bottles of half-soup hung from the chandeliers. KeChorlitrix wanted the mural painted in dyes straight onto the cloth walls. (Embroidery would be more permanent, but embroidering a building costs a fortune.) I asked if he had a list of insects he particularly wanted. He handed me a menu.

Being somewhat unfamiliar with this medium - plant and insect dye on architectural spider silk - I started work in an unobtrusive corner, where any mistakes I made would be hard to notice. It was a good thing I did. Painting with cloth dye was a bit like painting with watercolors... on water. The strands took the dye and spread it out in every direction. I would touch the wall with the tip of a brush and get a blotch the size of an orange. I quickly gave up on painting the insects anywhere even close to actual size. Most of one wall is taken up by a gigantic dragonfly, blue with green trim. A beetle the colors of eggplant and blueberry fills another. KeChorlitrix would come in occasionally, roundly extoll the magnificence of my work, and then ask me to make changes to it. "Moore colors!" he kept saying. "Make it brighter!" I was happy to oblige.

There is very little red, orange, or yellow; poisonous insects tend to use these colors to warn predators away. They're about as appetizing to spiders as mold is to vertebrates.

The painting took most of the afternoon, but the canvas I was using was smaller than I had estimated - at least in comparison to the brush strokes - and I finished it before dark. At KeChorlitrix's request, I even managed to climb up and paint a few elaborate butterflies on the ceiling. He thanked me profusely. He offered me dinner. He paid me with a handful of beetles preserved in glass marbles - Sixels, he called them. Apparently, they're the main currency in this part of the Great Shwamp. I'll probably spend most of them soon (customers and stores have been rather scarce on the boardwalk, and I'm rather low on food), but I think I'll keep at least one. I always keep one of everything. If I gave up my collection of coins,*** my luggage would probably be six or seven pounds lighter.

Later that night, I went to the restaurant, which is called the Chuckelgrack.**** KeChorlitrix insisted I order as much I could possibly eat. (It was crunchy, delicious and - thanks to his versatile chef - solid.) I realized when I got there why he had wanted the colors so bright. Most of the buildings in Chelissera are the plain white of undyed silk; a few are dyed in one color, maybe two. Many have only their names written on the outside in tangled spider script. They're lit from inside by lamps and candles at night, white and multicolored, as if the stars had come down from the sky and moved into tents.

Among all of them, the Chuckelgrack stands out like a sunflower among daisies. It has more colors than the rest of the town put together. The paintings on the inside walls shine through, flies and beetles and bolster moths, every detail as clear and incandescent as the pattern on a paper lantern. It was breathtaking.

I may have painted the walls, but KeChorlitrix chose the colors and the setting; this is as much his creation as mine. I've rarely seen any of my work used so beautifully. The money and food are much appreciated, but this is the best payment I could have asked for.



*You can't really call them rope bridges when the individual strands are too fine to see. They look like gauze and are slightly stronger than steel wire.

**I had been wondering about this, but couldn't think of a polite way to ask.

***Most of them are coins, anyway. Not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes currency. I also have a scattering of Toli beads, a few of the little colored stones called Lint, an engraved pleach pit, and seven Train tickets.

****This is a pun in Sikelak combining the words "chuckel" - which means something like "sated" or maybe "bloated" - and "tuckelgrack," a popular variety of half-soup made from beetles.

Chelissera

Invertebrate towns tend to be different from the rest to begin with. The differences in anatomy, speech, family structure, and seasonal schedules tend to keep them just slightly out of step with the vertebrate world. I enjoyed my stay in Carvendrone, meeting giant wasps who have a thousand sisters and speak with their wings, but I know there's a great deal I will never understand about them. For the most part, the differences aren't important - but they still exist. Most people prefer to live in places they understand. This is why insect towns tend to stay insect towns.

None I've visited have been half as odd as Chelissera.

Chelissera is for textiles what Woodpot is for ceramics. Most of the thread and cloth in the Great Shwamp comes from here. This is because the town is inhabited by giant spiders. From beneath, the town looks like a vast cobweb; there are a few wooden buildings, but most are enormous cat's-cradles of rope and silk strands. Hanging threads connect every tree. Many of the highest ones are woven to catch birds, the way small spiders would catch insects, in a strategy quite different from that of the trick-hunters. The rare ones they carefully untangle and set free; the rest they eat. Other lines go down into the water to catch fish.

Everything billows in the wind. Brightly colored flags and curtains hang everywhere. Many of the master spinners live in huge, gauzy hammock-pagodas hung between branches; the billowing buildings seem to just float in midair, like clouds with faint, busy silhouettes inside. The threads that hold them up are practically invisible unless the sun hits them right. Sparkles glint on the thousands of tiny strands, played by the light like the strings of a violin.

The spiders bought several large jugs from the Pelirikas. Ranapleximilian told me - very quietly - that they use these for what they call "half-soup." This is the food that they've digested with their venom but haven't eaten yet. He obviously thought the idea was quite disgusting and therefore talked about nothing else for almost half an hour. Half-soup is inedible to nearly everyone who isn't a spider; the acids alone would kill most vertebrates. Among spiders, though, it's by far the most popular food. There are half-soup chefs who strive to achieve the perfect combination of meat and venom, dissolving fish and fowl alike and stirring them together. They experiment with different acids, different animals, even different combinations of specific organs (though many consider it barbaric to dismantle prey while it's still solid). Spiders consider no part of an animal inedible except the skin and bones.* The rest all gets mixed together anyway. A few chefs have experimented with fruit and vegetables, but this is considered avant-garde at best and simply ridiculous in most cases.

It all sounds quite fascinating. This is an entire culinary world that's completely separate from any other. I can't decide whether I want to become a spider to try it out or whether I just want to be sick.

Fortunately, half-soup is not the only thing of interest in Chelissera. Most of the town is involved in the spinning and weaving of fabric. There is, after all, no one better suited to it. They dye the thread as much as any ordinary spinners, but the fact that they produce it themselves means that they don't have to add the color afterward. Many of the farms in the town are devoted to edible dyes. A relative of indigo grows down near the water; cochineal beetles are raised in the trees. The spiders eat them to change the color of their silk. This takes much less work than coloring it separately. There are spiders who eat cochineal like candy, specializing for their entire lives in producing red silk and nothing else. Others choose different dyes or mix them together, balancing their diets based as much on color as nutrition, striving for the perfect shade. The dye eventually stains their exoskeletons as well. There are spiders in Chelissera covered in outrageous swirls of bright colors (they don't blend in the chitin as they do in the silk) whose relatives are uniformly black or brown. The rainbow spiders wear their colors with pride. It takes dedication to a job to achieve so spectacular a change.

Spider silk isn't the only material produced here, of course. There are several farms in the town that produce the more ordinary variety made by worms.** Flax and cotton grow in boxes of earth high in the canopy, field plants growing next to silvermoss and other epiphytes. Sheep graze on the huge tussocks of grass that pass for land in this part of the Shwamp. I'm fairly sure I even saw a few angora goats and longhaired needle-mice.

Much of the cloth in the town actually comes from people. The Great Shwamp has fewer longhaired mammals than colder, drier parts of the world; long fur can be a nuisance in the sticky humidity that lasts all Summer here. Many do live here, though, and nearly all of them are in Chelissera. They go in several times a year to be shorn, just like the sheep. The difference is that they get paid for it, and they can take the dirt and brambles out of their own fur.

I was surprised to realize that, despite all the farming, there actually isn't much more land here than in any other part of the Shwamp I've visited. The tussocks are the only solid things in the water. Even they have very little actual soil, growing instead on the decomposed leaves and roots of previous layers of grass. Most are perfectly round. They sit in the water like giant green pom-poms with sheep on top. The spiders stick a post in the top of each tussock and tie the sheep to it; otherwise, they have a tendency to roll off the sides.

It's strange to see land again - real land, oddly shaped as it might be, with plants growing on it. I'd almost forgotten what that looked like. The Pelirikas plan to stay here for a day or two, selling pottery. I may stay longer than that.



*On invertebrates, of course, skin and bones are often the same thing.

**Like many silk farmers, they kill the moths before they chew through the cocoons. Unlike many silk farmers, they eat them afterward. Spiders don't let much go to waste.

Still in the Dark

I did get to meet Mr. Pelirika tonight, as it turned out. Mrs. Pelirika was cooking some sort of improvisational stew over the incubator's oven, adding little bits and pieces that her children found in the dark. Their night vision is obviously much better than mine. They would wander off and return with plants, fish, snails, assorted crustaceans, and numerous other things I couldn't identify. I think one of them may have brought back a snake at one point. It seemed to be a rule that they gave everything to their mother first, so she could check that it wasn't poisonous. She thanked them warmly for everything. A few times, after the children left again, I saw her discreetly drop a few of the unidentified things back into the water.

I donated some salted cucumber squid that I got at the coast. It would have been rude to share dinner without contributing something. The stew seemed to be almost finished, the children beginning to be more interested in eating food than finding it, when there was a disturbance in the water nearby. It was just a splash at first, but it quickly grew into a great rushing sound, as if something huge was emerging from the water. It was practically underneath us. Before anyone could move, a huge dark shape rose out of the Shwamp, blocking out what few stars were visible through the trees, and sloshed up onto the wagon. The whole thing rocked crazily. The children screamed. I was about ready to do the same until Mrs. Pelirika said, quite calmly, "Don't be so theatrical, dear, we have company. Did you bring anything for dinner?"

"Oh," said the dark shape. "Sorry - didn't know we had guests. No one's jumped overboard this time, I hope?"

The screams turned out to be excited ones. By that point, all five children were climbing on the enormous silhouette. I still couldn't make out any details. I introduced myself, and an extension of the shadow came out of the dark to engulf my hand in a massive and rather damp handshake. This, it seemed, was the nocturnal Mr. Pelirika.

It turned out that he had brought something for dinner: a sabertoothed marsh pike, three or four feet long. The fish appeared for the children to admire, then promptly vanished back into the dark. I could hear him chopping it up to add to the stew. I couldn't see whether he used a knife or not.

"It took me half the day to catch this fish," he said as he worked. "I hunted it into the ruins of a sunken village three miles from here. It was clear it had been there before. Every big fish needs a lair, a deep hole to lurk in, and this was one of the biggest. I must have chased it through hundreds of flooded rooms. It knew the place better than I did. It was fast, darting into hidden openings and doubling back on its trail over and over again. I nearly lost it several times. But it could never quite outrun me. Slowly but unstoppably, I kept up with it, gaining a bit more with every failed evasion. Finally, I was close enough that I could almost grab its tail - if I'd been foolish enough to do that to a pike - and it slammed into a rotten timber, breaking it in half. The whole tunnel collapsed in seconds. It was lucky I was so close behind the fish, or I would have been buried alive!"

The children gasped. Mrs. Pelirika seemed unconcerned.

"As it was, I lost my net in the chaos. I was trapped in the last room, the only entrance buried under a ton of rubble, facing the most vicious fish in the Shwamp with only my bare hands-"

"If that was the only entrance, how did you get out?" Mrs. Pelirika asked.

There was a brief pause.

"I'll get to that in a moment," said Mr. Pelirika with great dignity. "Don't rush the story. Now, when the pike attacked, I was quick enough to jam its mouth open with a piece of wood..."

I don't remember all of the rest of the story, but it got steadily more dramatic from there, adding underwater tombs and cave krakens and curses from ancient drowned empires. It was quite clear where the children had gotten their love of talking. This was the way things went on all night. Every conversation inevitably grew into a wilder and wilder tale, with Mr. Pelirika going on at length about his adventures (or those of other people - he was actually only the hero of two or three stories), or the habits of exotic (in some cases mythological) creatures, or creative retellings of history. The children were enthralled and interrupted frequently with questions. Mrs. Pelirika was silent most of the time; it almost seemed as if she wasn't listening at all. Every so often, though, she would speak up to point out some inconsistency in the current story. This would stop her husband for a moment. He always managed to come up with some explanation, though, usually something even more outlandish than before.

Eventually, Mrs. Pelirika took advantage of a rare gap between stories and announced that it was time for bed. The children protested and were silenced with a look. I got the impression that Mr. Pelirika might have done the same, but knew by now that it wouldn't work. He filled all the available space in the wagon when he lay down. I still couldn't make out anything of him but a vague silhouette. The rest of the family went to sleep on top of him, as if he was a mattress, a vast expanse of solid black with bright lumps of feathers curled on top. I set up a hammock in a nearby tree. By the time I woke, the sun was up, and Mr. Pelirika was gone again.

We spent the entire evening listening to his stories, and I still haven't the faintest idea what he looked like.

A Wagon Without Wheels

For breakfast this morning, I had a sort of chocolate pastry called a mud pie. Given where I was, I was somewhat wary of this, but the baker assured me that there was no actual mud in it (or, at least, as little as is possible in Woodpot). I ate it while wandering through the village. I had only been walking for about ten minutes when I realized that I had a small swarm of large dauber wasps following me. They kept a polite distance, but they were quite obviously waiting for something. I looked at them for a moment, then broke off a piece of my pie and tossed it to them.

There was a brief blur of buzzing black chaos. When it cleared, there was no sign of the crumb, but one of the wasps was cleaning its face and looking pleased with itself. The rest were still waiting.

I decided that this was more fun than eating the pie. The wasps got the rest of it. They continued to follow me as I walked around the village, looking at the architecture and the potters at work. It didn't matter which direction I tossed a crumb; there was always a wasp there to catch it. Some of them eventually got tired and sat on my shoulders, trying to snatch bites of the pie while I wasn't looking. They were surprisingly heavy. They hummed constantly, a faint vibration that I could feel but not hear, like the purring of a cat.

It's quite possible that feeding them is encouraging a bad habit, but I couldn't resist. How often does one get to spend a morning playing with giant wasps?

According to the baker, the boardwalk in the other direction is in even worse condition than the one I arrived on. I decided not to risk walking on it. Instead, I got a ride with a pottery merchant and her family. I met them at the bakery.* Like most people who travel frequently in the Great Shwamp, they can't afford to depend on the boardwalk and have come up with something better. I've met travelers who ride on alligators and giant tortoises, others who use rowboats or rafts, and one or two who have long enough legs (and wide enough feet) to wade in even the deepest water. Many people fly. A traveling tinker I met in May had a clockwork vehicle powered by a pair of capybaras running in wheels. He said they were a special variety bred for racing. The vehicle was amphibious; it had wheels, mechanical legs for soft ground, and a paddle-boat attachment in the back. It seemed to work quite well, aside from an unfortunate habit of shedding gears and breaking down every few hours.

The pottery merchant doesn't have anything so exotic. She and her family travel by wagon. Given the scarceness of solid ground in this part of the Shwamp, they've removed the wheels; instead, each axle has a cluster of ceramic floats tied to it. They look a bit like the glass floats used by fishermen to hold up nets, but in clay instead of glass. Each one is held in a many-knotted web of rope. They're glazed in three or four different patterns, like a mismatched set of dishes. Several have been broken and glued back together with metal. Webs of rusty lines outline the patterns of the cracks, weeping streaks of rust over the glaze.

The pottery reminded me of something I hadn't thought of before. Unbaked clay architecture works well in the desert, where there's plenty of sun to harden it and little rain to melt it. The Great Shwamp has just the opposite. How, I asked, do they keep the houses in Woodpot from melting in the rain?

One of the merchant's sons was happy to explain this to me. His name, he told me proudly, is Ranapleximilian, an old Kletheran name that means "slayer of the great night-frog," and he can pronounce the whole thing. (His sisters and brothers, all younger, have not yet succeeded with their own equally impressive names.) Apparently, the houses are waterproofed with gristlebird oil. Gristlebirds have the oiliest feathers of any bird in the Shwamp; according to Ranapleximilian, they repel water so strongly that they create a bubble of air around themselves when they dive. They eat the stunned fish that fall into it.** To waterproof a roof, the villagers simply lay a few fish on top of it; this inevitably attracts five or six gristlebirds, each of which wants all the fish and is prepared to fight for them. The resulting brawl leaves the roof, walls, and surrounding trees evenly coated with oil. (It also leaves them covered with feathers, dandruff, bird droppings, and half-eaten fish, but those wash off in the rain.)

The merchant herself is named Mrs. Pelirika. She doesn't seem to talk much. For most of the day, she was busy navigating the Shwamp and managing the somewhat temperamental marsh-squid that pulled the wagon. Her five children, in contrast, talk enough for ten. The other four's names, from second-oldest to youngest, are Tessemira, Donrondamole, Coralilamander, and Vanesily. No wonder the younger ones can't pronounce them yet. Vanesily, the youngest, is only just getting his down feathers. Ranapleximilian says that he is almost old enough to fly (he does have a few flight feathers, though they're mostly gaps, like some mammal children's teeth) and kept jumping off the wagon all day in attempts to do so. None of these worked, but he didn't seem to mind landing in the water every time. Quite often, he would come back with some sort of snail or outlandish crustacean. His sister, Tessemira, was fascinated with these; I don't think she ever had less than three or four sitting in her hands or on her head. All five children kept up a constant commentary on every unusual tree and fish we passed, as well as the pottery in the wagon and life in the Shwamp in general. They kept coming up with things for me to draw all day long. I was happy to do so. Hardly anyone makes a better audience than children. If you do something wrong, they will tell you immediately; if you do something right, they can be more enthusiastic than almost anyone. They found my attempts to draw some of the fish they described to me quite hilarious.

Much of the conversation during the day was about the current load of pottery. The children seem to take just as much of an interest in it as their mother; they had something to say about nearly every piece, and quite a lot of the talk of styles and glazes and double-firing went well over my head. The wagon seemed to have something from practically every potter in Woodpot. There are quite a lot of them. The clay under Woodpot is the best in the Shwamp, Ranapleximilian said, so all the best potters (and quite a lot of the others) end up in the village eventually. So do all the pottery merchants. No matter where you go in the Shwamp, you'll find someone eager to buy Woodpot work.

My favorite piece in the wagon is a huge pitcher in the shape of an octopus. The base and handle are made of five of its curled tentacles, and the other three twist above it to form the spout. The children said that this was the work of Artemisia Treble, one of their favorite potters, who is rather famous for beautifully detailed pottery in the shape of aquatic animals. Tessemira showed me a tiny bottle shaped like a marsh snail, in which she keeps buttons.

There appears to be a sixth child on the way. On the floor by Mrs. Pelirika's feet was a portable incubator, a metal basket with smoke coming out of the little oven in the bottom. There was a thermometer stuck in the mound of blankets in the basket, which she checked every few minutes. I assume that somewhere in there is an egg.

I have not met Mr. Pelirika yet. Mrs. Pelirika said only that he doesn't like the sunlight and travels underwater by day. I didn't press any further. The children seem to take after their mother, with brightly colored plumage like jungle parrots; they obviously enjoy the Shwamp, but don't seem particularly aquatic.

Perhaps I'll get to meet him tonight.



*Most of the village seemed to be at the bakery when I arrived. The diggers from the previous day were there - most of them, at least - though I didn't recognize them until they started talking to me. Their faces look different without a coating of mud. Some of them had sculpted patterns in the clay on their faces the day before, pinching it into cracked masks of swirls and ridges. I found it much easier to read their expressions this morning.

**He may have been exaggerating here, but I'm no authority on marsh birds, so I wouldn't know.

Woodpot

The boardwalk continues to be flooded. The water is up to my knees now; I'm starting to wonder just how deep it's going to get. As if that wasn't enough, the water got gradually more opaque all morning. By noon, I could no longer see my feet.

It seemed to be silt. The water was a thick, even brown color, occasionally turning reddish or yellowish, as if something was stirring up layer after layer of mud. I can't imagine this is pleasant for the fish. I saw silt eels break the surface several times; I've never seen so many in one day - or ones this large. They're muddy brown creatures that lurk in cloudy water, preying on befuddled fish lost in the murk. There were probably a lot of those today.

The mudbanks to either side of the boardwalk continued to grow in size as I walked. They didn't seem to be the source of the mud; they were the wrong color. It wasn't until almost sunset that I found out where it was coming from.

The trees in this part of the Great Shwamp are mostly gridwillows and gnorls. Their complex, twisted shapes are quite a contrast to the monolithic redwoods and cypresses around Meligma. They limit vision as well; I heard the diggers long before I saw them. Once I did, it was quite clear that they were the reason the water wasn't. They were in the middle of dismantling a mudbank. It looked as if it had been nearly the size of a house once. They had hollowed out the middle, leaving the sides high so that they could dig below water level. Water seeped in anyway; two of them did nothing but toss buckets of it out of the pit. The rest were busy filling more buckets with thick red clay and passing them on down the boardwalk. Those not equipped with webbed feet wore things like snowshoes to keep from sinking. They seemed to be a mix of species, like most people you meet, but it was hard to be sure. Fur looks the same as scales with enough mud on it.

They were singing one of those morbidly amusing songs that are so good for repetitive work. Miners and sailors seem especially fond of them. I didn't catch all the words of this one. It seemed to be about mud - I'm digging a hole that fills itself in, I can't remember what color my fur is, throw me in the oven and you'll have a brick wall, and so on. They seemed happy enough, in a businesslike way. Work songs just seem to turn out like that.

"Hey there!" one of them called, catching sight of me. "Welcome to Woodpot, the most beautiful village in the Shwamp!"

There was no village in sight. As far as I could see - which, admittedly, wasn't all that far - there was nothing in sight but trees, the boardwalk, and mud. I looked around, trying to think of something to say.

The digger seemed well aware of my confusion. He grinned at me, his teeth startingly white in his clay-covered face. "What, don't you see it?"

I admitted that I didn't.

"Look up."

I came out from under the gridwillow that shaded the mud pit and looked up. The trees seemed to be full of enormous striped pots. It took me a moment to realize that they were houses.

The only land near Woodpot is mud; the villagers build their houses not on it, but out of it. The buildings perch like fat clay owls at the bases of branches. Some of the larger ones have multiple stories or wrap all the way around the tree. Many are striped, like hornets' nests or sedimentary rock, each layer laid down in a slightly different color. They're more pottery than architecture; with their bulging shapes and round windows, they look as much like jugs as like houses. I almost expected to see corks sticking out of the chimneys.

Several of the diggers were quite happy to take a break from work and show me around the village, pointing out their own houses and talking about their construction. The houses are kept in repair by trained mud rats and dauber wasps. The mud rats seem to be a sort of cross between squirrel and beaver; they build their mud-and-stick lodges in trees, carrying mud up from the ground in their cheek pouches.* The dauber wasps are thin and blue-black, like the dauber wasps found near every muddy riverbank in Hamjamser. In size and intelligence, they're somewhere between the little wild ones and the civilized, dog-sized architects of the Sclesserax. The small daubers live here too, building their little clay egg cases alongside the larger ones. The rows of large and small tubes look like clay organ pipes.

No one bothers to decorate their houses much in Woodpot. There's no point. The baroque nurseries of dauber wasps end up covering every surface. If a building stands for a full year without a dauber wasp building on it, it is judged to be cursed, and the villagers tip it into the Shwamp to dissolve. Most people try to finish new construction during the egg-laying season, just in case.

The basic structure of each house is still built by the villagers. Mud-rats build everything in balls and mounds, while dauber wasps use only tubes. Humans still prefer to have things like floors and windows. Most of the actual clay, however, is laid down by rats and wasps. Each building is full of burrows, mud rat nests and chambers for the wasps' larvae. The grubs are roughly the size of my arm. They spend their entire childhoods in tubes only big enough for themselves and whatever food their parents can hunt or scavenge for them. Barring accidents, no one ever sees the grubs until they complete their metamorphoses and break through the walls as fully mature blue-black wasps. The village children play with them as if they were shiny, flying cats.

Most Woodpotters don't even try to keep their children clean. In a town where the very buildings are made of mud, there's not much point. A few parents do try to keep their children from burrowing in it with the others; they tell them to at least stay in the trees.** Children restricted this way have a remarkable tendency to accidentally fall off of low branches and land in mud pits.

The diggers eventually went back to work and left me at the inn, a collection of honeycombed chambers clustered around a particularly huge and twisted gnorl tree. The sun had set by then. Candles and marsh-lamps were burning in windows all through the village, making it look like a collection of lanterns hung in the trees. I went inside and rented a room.

The room is nearly perfectly spherical; it's tall enough, just barely, that I can stand up in the very center. Most of the walls are hidden behind heaps of old pillows and blankets. It's like being in a mouse's nest. I'm not sure I've ever been anywhere more comfortable. The room is full of the rich, dusty smell of dry clay, and the evening chorus of frogs and insects is just starting outside. I expect to sleep deeply and dream of Summer.



*For a long time, this behavior led people to believe that they ate mud, like earthworms or auger weasels.

**Most of those parents are avians. Cleaning mud out of small down feathers is not a pleasant task.

Troll Game

The boardwalk has been deteriorating the farther I go. Nearly all of my traveling today involved wading. The boards are there, under the water, but you have to tread carefully or risk putting your foot through a rotten one. Still, despite its erratic condition, the boardwalk is the only way to travel through much of the Great Shwamp without swimming. It's inevitable that such an important route would eventually attract trolls.

For the most part, I object to trolls. I wouldn't mind paying their tolls if they actually provided something in exchange. Some of them do; there are many roads in the Railway Regions that would be completely impassable by now if not for their curmudgeonly but dedicated troll keepers. Few people in the Regions are particularly interested in roads. It's easier to take the Train. Most trolls, however, do nothing but get in the way.

The troll booth was built on the only unsubmerged piece of boardwalk I'd seen all day. Someone had done some work to keep that section, if nothing else, above water. There were so many posts and tree trunks wedged under and around it that it looked like a funnel shrike's nest. Many of them were held together with string. The house itself was more or less mushroom-shaped; the bottom floor was only as wide as the boardwalk, while the second looked just wide enough to lie down in. It was quite obviously a troll house. They're built to get in the way as much as possible.

As if that wasn't enough, the troll herself was sitting outside, fishing. She was one of the Northern trolls - built like a foothill, with a nose the size of a loaf of bread. She was wearing a coat made of strips of odd, shiny leather. They were quite obviously hagfish skins. Most people at least take the heads off first.

Normally, I would simply have swam around the booth.* I have no objection to getting wet. My books and supplies are not quite so waterproof, though. The only way to get them past intact was through the troll's front door.

She stood up when she saw me, her coat creaking in protest, and leaned her fishing pole against the house. The hook was baited with a slice of cucumber. She grinned at me as if she'd just caught a particularly large fish. Her teeth were a mix of brown, gold, black, blue, and missing. One of her tusks had knot patterns carved into the tip. I could see mice climbing through her hair.

"Gots any moneys?"

"Yes," I said quickly. Trolls often see a lack of money as an excuse to take whatever they want.

"Tha'sh good." Her voice creaked more than her coat, and the tusks made her speech even harder to understand. It sounded something like a rusty doorknob being ground up in a landslide. I began digging for change in my pockets, but she held up a long-nailed hand to stop me.

"NO! Firsht we plays ze Game."

"Game?"

She grinned again, even wider, and pulled a pack of battered cards out of her coat.

"Ze Game o' Pickerel Shproot."

From her explanation, I gathered that, unlike most trolls, she preferred to gamble with her victims before taking their money. If she won, she would take twice as much as usual. (What "usual" was, I have no idea.) She didn't say what would happen if I won. It seemed overly optimistic to hope that I would get by for free; a more likely possibility was that I would be eaten in revenge. Maybe no one had ever won before. I suggested that I could just pay her right then and be on my way, but she was quite firm about that.

"No wan getz by wizhout playsh ze Game. Boring here, eh? Gotza have shomething te do."

I couldn't very well argue with that.

From somewhere in her closet-sized downstairs, she pulled a card table with three legs and set it up on the boardwalk. From her coat, she pulled an enormous porcelain pipe; she wedged a lump of coal in the bowl and lit it. The smoke was black. She breathed in deeply and sat down, dealing the cards with the machinelike speed of a professional.

"Now liszen good," she said, "'coz I'z only gonna tell ye ze roolz wance. Ye gotz ninedy-sevhen cardsh in Pickerel Shproot. Twenny iz Flatz, shirty-six iz Numverz, elevhen iz Shproots, nine is Doublez, ten is Upz, ten is Downz, an' wan iz ze Shpit. Ye gotza make pairsh and Threezies. Firsht ta get three pairsh, or two Threezies, an' ye win..."

The rules were long and complicated, and I won't go into them all. I don't even remember half of them now, though I'll probably try to write down as much as I can recall later. I want to know more about this game. Does it even exist anywhere else?

I was surprised at the cards when I finally got to pick them up. The fronts of the cards were unmistakeably the madly detailed engravings of Reddish Crill. I'd never heard of him illustrating a deck of cards, but it's not particularly surprising. He did practically everything before his dramatic high-altitude demise. In my hand, I had the Nine of Corkscrews, the Three of Speckles, the Two and a Half of Rocks, the Reverse Sponge, Toothache, and a card with nothing on it but pink flowers. I tried to keep the backs of my cards hidden as much as possible. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the troll was able to identify them by the coal stains.

Amazingly, I won the first game, more by beginner's luck than anything else. It's lucky that I pick up game rules fairly quickly; these ones were more confusing than most. The troll was not happy. The coal in her pipe glowed brighter, and smoke started coming out of her nose. She didn't say a word; she just shuffled the cards and laid them out again. I had won, so I got up to go.

"Besht two outta shree," she growled.

It didn't seem wise to argue.

She won the second game, after which she started to look happier. I had enough of a grasp of the rules to play the game, but not enough to be good at it.**

In the third game, I did my best to play badly, preferring to pay twice whatever the usual fee was rather than find out how gracious the troll was about losing. It didn't seem to matter. She was clearly not pleased with her cards. The coal in her pipe glowed hotter and hotter as the game went on, cards clenched in her rootlike fists. It only took a few rounds before it started shooting sparks; after that, it was only seconds before one of the sparks landed on her house. It started smoking immediately.

"FIRE!" roared the troll, erupting to her feet, upsetting the card table, and dropping her pipe in the Shwamp.*** She tore off her coat and began beating the flames with it.

Unfortunately, this was too much for the structure. Many of the strings had already been weakened by fire. At this new assault, they snapped. Knots broke, boards sagged, and as we watched, the entire house slowly tipped over into the Shwamp.

That put out the fire, at least.

Roaring with rage, the troll leapt into the water and sloshed over to her house. It was already starting to sink. It stopped when she dug her hands under it and heaved, lifting the entire structure several inches. I could hear dishes breaking inside.

I decided that that was a good time to leave. She seemed to have the situation in hand. As quietly as I could, I gathered up my luggage and crept over what was left of the boardwalk. I could hear her shouting unintelligible curses at her house long after I was out of sight.

I still wonder who would have won that last game.



*After checking for chekaraul and alligators, of course.

**Besides, the rules of drama require that every contest be decided only in the last round.

***It had obviously spent time in the Shwamp before. There were barnacles on it. From the look of them, some of the cards had been there as well.