Market Street, Day 3: the Animals

There are probably more animals for sale on Market Street than there are people to buy them. Their snorts and clucks and shrieks occasionally drown out even the songs of the vendors. Horses, mules, oxen, emus, and a variety of cart-lizards pull wagons between the crowded stalls. Klepts lurk silently in the shadows. Fish circle in barrels and tightly woven baskets. Messenger monkeys scuttle over the rooftops, screeching to each other in raucous code. Below them, people stop to listen to the songs of the Kelleries, birds as drab as kiwis and as musical as nightingales. Their voices have outgrown their wings. Some of them sing counterpoint with the calliope cicadas.

The spotted hens this one boy seemed so fond of are only one of the hundreds of kinds of poultry in the market. There are ducks and geese, chickens and kaklbirds, paihens and pahareets, bred for meat or eggs or feathers. One breed of tiny bantams produces eggs the size of grapes, with all the iridescent colors of an opal in the shells. There are jewelers who use them in jewelry; they spend hours hollowing out the eggs, filling the shells with something more durable, and coating them in substances that make the colors last. The recipes for these are jealously guarded by each jeweler. Only their apprentices learn the secret.

The russet crabs are raised to turn food scraps into useful meat, like pigs. They get to be about the same size. The ones at the market are usually sold small - palm-size at most - but they never seem to stop growing. A man once kept one for twelve years to see how big it would get. At the end of the twelve years, it ripped its way out of his basement and cut a thundering path of destruction through the city before plunging into the depths of Lake Twiliat. The hole it left revealed that the man had quadrupled the size of his basement to make room for it. It was taller than his house. As far as anyone knows, it's still somewhere in the depths of the lake, growing bigger every year.

Since then, everyone makes sure to eat russet crabs before they get much larger than a pig. Almost every family has one if they can afford it. You can see them all along the canals, scurrying around in wicker pens under the water. There's never more than one crab to a pen; they have an unfortunate habit of eating each other. I can't say I blame them. I've tasted them once or twice myself, and they're delicious.

There are pets in the market too, of course. This girl seemed to have fallen in love with one of the house-spiders, as so often happens with small, fuzzy animals. It had pink feet. Her brother didn't seem quite so sure about them.

House-spiders are a fairly common sight in SuyMaTmakk. They're descended from the wild tarantulas of the plains, in much the same way that lap-dogs are descended from wolves. The poison was bred out of them a long time ago. They can still bite, but it's only painful, not deadly, and they've long since lost the aggression of wild spiders. You're more likely to be bitten by a hamster. They're kept for the same reason as cats; they're soft, they're affectionate, and they catch mice. Many people prefer house-spiders to cats. They're more easily housebroken, and they get rid of ants as well.

There are dozens of kinds of fish in the market - this is a lake city, after all - but these are some of the strangest. In the wild, jar-fish live in the abandoned tunnels of muskrats and water-snakes. Only the most vertical holes will do. They sit in the holes all day, dangling their long fins down through the entrances, and only come out when they can sense that nothing's moving nearby. No one's sure what sense they use. It could be hearing, or a form of echolocation, or the strange electric awareness used by sharks.

Jar-fish are always kept in tall jars like this, hence the name. If they're kept in larger containers, they develop acute agoraphobia and stop eating. The TiLeKraNas knew a scientist once who kept one in a beaker and used it as a seismograph. He said it was the only reason his workshop survived the eruption of Mount SanCheLi; the tremors were still too gentle for him to feel when the fish panicked and tried to hide in its own mouth.

This is one of my favorite parts of Market Street, second only to the scavenger docks and the booksellers' alley. The animals of the market come from all over the plains. There are birds from the forests, beasts from the open spaces, strange and wondrous fish dredged up from the lake. Parts of the city have become whole ecosystems of their own, narrow wicker forests between the lake and the plains. Many of the creatures here were bred in SuyMaTmakk and exist nowhere but in the city.

Every day, it gets harder to leave the market without bringing some of them with me.

Market Street, Day 2: the Waitress

Gisella Peliak is a waitress at the Krolem Hmuytebit, a restaurant on Market Street. Its name means "the Affable Troglodyte." In SuyMaTmakk, it's called a yanyanitlekka, which means something like, "sunrise, sunset, all night long." It never closes. In other parts of the world, it would be called a diner.

There was some sort of festival today - just a minor one, I think. Crowds of people lined up along the docks and threw weeds into the lake, which sucked them down into itself (except where people had brought bladderwort or floatweed. I'm not sure whether or not this counts as cheating). The festival is called the Eating of the Weeds, or something of the sort; it has something to do with farming. A few people tried to explain it to me, but I couldn't hear them very well. I'm fairly sure at least half of them were drunk.

The crowds got to be too much for me after a while, so I ducked down a few alleyways to find a more peaceful spot. Alleys in SuyMaTmakk are even more like crooked birds' nests than the rest of the city. No one bothers to weave neatly on the back of a building. I eventually came out on the quieter end of Market Street. There was hardly anyone there; they were all at the festival. A tall person in a striped cloak - male or female, I couldn't tell - was poring over a bookseller's stall, running a slow finger along the spine of each book, as if reading an unfamiliar language one letter at a time. It looked as if this had been going on for a while. The bookseller was snoring. Other than the two of them, and a couple of construction workers napping on a half-woven building, there was no one on the street.

I stopped for lunch at the nearest restaurant, which turned out to be the Affable Troglodyte. It was nearly deserted as well. There were a few people reading at solitary tables, a couple who appeared to be quietly celebrating an anniversary, and an insect mother and child playing some sort of pencil-and-paper game between crumb-scattered plates. That was all.

I stayed there for most of the afternoon, sitting in a back corner and sketching the other customers. Not many came in. The ones who did usually stayed a while, sitting still, which made them easy to sketch.

Ms. Peliak noticed what I was doing when she brought me lunch. (I forget what it was. Something made of locusts.) Her nails were painted bright pink; so were the tips of her tusks.

"Hmm," she said. "Not bad. Have you been here after dark?"

I hadn't.

"You might want to come back then," she said, and moved on to refill someone's coffee without another word.

The sun was hot and the crowds were noisy, so I decided to simply stay there. It wasn't as if I was taking up needed space; not even half the tables were full.

At about midnight, someone turned the lamps down, and the diner became a dim cave. The customers were stranger after that.

It started with the usual mix of troglodytes and nocturnals - people with pale skin and large eyes, snakes and ferrets, the kinds of miners who never leave the house without a pickaxe. Many of them wore dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats. A bat-woman came in wearing a waistcoat fastened with magnets. There were so many rings in her ears that she jingled when she turned her head. A group of werewolves came in soon after midnight, on two legs or four or something in between. They were laughing and talking among themselves as they ordered meat and green tea. The topic of conversation always seemed to be the moons.

A steady procession of fishy people went in and out all night, dripping with lacy fins and clear lake water. Most of them were wearing weeds, the same little stalks and flowers that had been thrown from the docks that afternoon, tucked into their pockets or gills. They ordered soup and ate it with great slurping gusto.

The person in the striped cloak came in carrying a single book. It was small, but obviously carefully selected. The person sat down at a table and unwrapped the cloth from its head to reveal more cloth. This layer was in a dark gray houndstooth pattern. There was a horizontal tear near the bottom of what I'm assuming was the person's head, into which it tucked tiny slices of potato for almost three hours.

At a table in the back, a man with four ears sat and muttered to himself while he made painstaking repairs to what looked like a disembodied hand. I assumed he was either a shapeshifter or an expert on clockwork. He crunched peanuts from a bowl as he worked. After an hour or two, he unfolded a third arm from his coat and attached the hand to its wrist. He grinned in satisfaction as he flexed the fingers. I'm still not sure whether it was real or clockwork, but whichever it was, he seemed to have gotten it to work.

Vague upright shadows flitted across the floor to lurk under tables, as if even the dim lamp light was too much for them. They gave their orders in flickering sign language. What they got was either ink or the blackest coffee I've ever seen.

Two men sat down on opposite sides of a small table. "It is time," said one of them.

The other man nodded. "Have you the Tome?"

The first man pulled an enormous book out of his coat - I have no idea how it fit - and thumped it onto the table. It was bound in green leather, singed at the corners. The two of them stared at it for a while.

Eventually, the other one reached into his own coat and pulled out one of the little booklets of crossword puzzles that you can buy at the market, three for a Packle.

"Ah. The Tome," said the first man.

"What dreadful checkered mysteries it contains." The other nodded solemnly.

"This night shall see their unraveling."

"Indeed. Let us begin."

They spent the rest of the night doing crossword puzzles with the solemnity of a burial. They were still there when I left.

Ms. Peliak served everyone with equal cheer, pink nails shining in the dim lanterns. Apparently, she's used to them all by now, or professional enough not to show it if she isn't. She asked several of them about their families.

"I visited my parents at their home last night. Then I woke up."

"My sister has been dead for ten years now. She said to thank you for the flowers you sent last week."

"My aunt is downstairs, my uncle is upstairs, my grandfather is on the roof. When it rains, he is the first to know."

"Fam'ly? Whazzat?"

"My children number in the hundreds. They knit me socks to make me proud. Whatever shall I do with so many socks? I have only three feet."

A drifting, diaphanous thing came up through the floor at three o'clock, wreathed in smoke. I'm fairly sure it came through the cracks between the tiles. It sat slightly above a table and drank the smoke from a bowl of incense as if it was a fine wine.

That was when I left. I was too exhausted to tell if the thing was real or a sleep-deprived hallucination. In fact, I wonder the same thing about most of the people I saw last night. Ms. Peliak is the only one I'm sure was real. She was there all night, solid among shadows and phantoms, serving eggs and pouring coffee. I don't know when she sleeps.

This, as you may have guessed, is the reason my letter was late yesterday; I was up all night at the diner. I think it was worth it - for this picture, if nothing else.

I haven't included any of my other sketches. I'm not sure I believe them.

Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

After a day spent exploring the market district of SuyMaTmakk, I'm afraid I'm too tired to write much tonight. I did come back with some pictures, though; perhaps they'll make up for it. Here's the first.

This is Harzifan Scrath, scavenger and merchant. He spends most of his days climbing over the islands of flotsam in the center of the lake. On Tuesdays, he brings back what he's found over the week and sells it at the market. His stall is set up by the docks. It's full of old clothes, boxes, and assorted bits of furniture; he found a whole butter churn last week, perfectly intact. A heap of tableware in materials that float (wooden spoons, bone-handled forks) sits next to an array of mismatched jewelry.* There are books so waterlogged that they're shaped like fans, their pages splayed and wrinkled and all but illegible. There's a china doll that looks like the survivor of a shipwreck. Perhaps she is. She has one shoe, patent leather with a brass buckle, and lake-weed in her hair.

A row of bottles stands in an uneven line in front of the stall. They're full of the small, smooth gouges left by the vitreous snail, which makes its shell out of glass. Any glass object left in the lake will be full of the same little pockmarks within days. The snails normally eat sand, processing it into glass in some strange pocket of their digestive system, but they've developed a taste for pure glass since people first settled by the lake. The TiLeKraNas have a colony of them at their house; they bring the occasional shell to the market whenever a snail dies of old age. There were none this time, but the shells are apparently quite lovely. Surprisingly, they're also quite practical. Most of the predators in the lake eat snails - if they like snails - by crunching them up, shell and all. Hail-storks and a few kinds of seagulls can crack even the toughest ones by flying them to great heights and dropping them on the docks.** Nothing bothers to do this with the vitreous snails, though; cracking their shells gives you nothing but a lump of meat full of glass shards.

An ornate wooden mantel clock sits on a back corner of the stall, ticking quietly. Harzifan says he's had it for five years now. It's made of some kind of hardwood - rare and valuable on the plains, where most wood comes in the form of small sticks - but no one has bought it. Harzifan says this might be because of the water stains, which have turned the clock charcoal-black in splotches, or possibly because it's run backward ever since he fished it out of the lake. I'm impressed that it runs at all.

Harzifan himself simply sits there all afternoon, grinning that same piratical grin at everyone who passes by. Every Tuesday, he says, he's more grateful than the week before to have the chance to relax. (His voice is deep and rough, like gravel on a lakebed, or the razor grin of a shark.) He's getting too old to be climbing over heaps of flotsam all day, he says. When someone buys the backward clock, or when it finally stops ticking, that's the day he'll retire.

I took a look at the clock as I was leaving, after I'd thanked Harzifan for letting me sketch him.*** The gears inside, where they were visible, gleamed with polish and good repair; the clock's price was higher than everything else in the stall put together, including the stall itself and possibly Harzifan's hat. Somehow, I don't think he's in a hurry.



* It's impossible to find a matched pair of earrings at a single scavenger's stall. It takes visits to at least a dozen to have the slightest hope of a match. There are people who spend hours going from stall to stall, playing the scavenger market like some sort of giant memory game, cataloguing hundreds of salvaged earrings in their heads in the hopes of finding a match. According to Harzifan, it's surprising how often they succeed.

** This, of course, is what hail-storks are named for. A whole flock of them can produce a short but devastatingly well-aimed shower of snails. This is why dock workers around Lake Twiliat wear such thick hats all the time, even during the hottest weather. They can't just drop what they're doing and run, the way everyone else does when the storks appear overhead; they have to have a different method of avoiding concussions.

*** I bought one of his books, as it seems rude to sketch someone's business and not buy something from it. It's called Hni Teli Paka, which could be translated as either "Greetings, O amusing one" or "Hey you, ugly." Some of its pages still look legible. This could be interesting.