The Boardwalk

I left Meligma this morning, bringing with me a sack of climbing potatoes (the farmers say they keep longer in the humid Shwamp than any other food) and a few bottles of the fruit dye that the Meligmans use on their pod-houses. Trilliko was quite pleased with the sketch I made of him. In return, he gave me a small charm carved from cypress wood. It's shaped like a spectacled owl and is supposed to protect the wearer from falling from great heights. His mother carved it for him; he's never worn it.

"Not something I need, eh?" he laughed, flapping his wings and knocking one of the other trick-hunters into the water. "Don't tell her I gave it to you," he added. "She thinks I lost it years ago."

I will miss talking to Trilliko.

The Great Shwamp, it turns out, has an extensive system of boardwalks in the wetter areas. This is the only way to travel if you can't fly and don't want to swim. It was mostly built by beavers. Most things in the Shwamp were built by beavers. They have shown little interest in maintaining the boardwalks, though, and age and Shwamp damp have taken their toll. The boardwalk is a ruin of patches and detours now, twisted and sagging, parts of it completely submerged. Half of it seems to be held together by the weeds and fungi growing from the rotten boards. It creaks when stepped on. Whole sections of it have collapsed altogether. Soon after leaving Meligma, I came to a fork in the path - or what had been a fork, long ago. It was not much of a choice anymore. One branch was still intact, though it leaned at a drunken angle and was patched with a mad zigzag of boards, sticks, and broken furniture. The other branch was nothing but a line of disintegrating posts sticking out of the water like rotten teeth. Mushrooms and marsh flowers grew from the stumps.

I didn't go that way.

Large parts of the boardwalk are actually quite beautiful. The trees are enormous here, cypresses and redwoods and inundation willows, feet in the water and heads in the clouds. The branches are dripping with silvermoss and other epiphytes. Brackets the size of cart wheels grow from the trunks. Walking under a redwood at one point, I briefly became the center of a small shower of cones. I don't know what dislodged them - a squirrel, perhaps, or a gust of wind too high to notice from the ground. Fortunately, the cones were the size of grapes and mostly empty space. I might have been injured otherwise. Some trees grow larger and larger seeds the taller they get; redwoods grow taller than any other trees, but continue to produce the same elegant little cones. They just make more of them. Judging from the size of this tree, there were probably tens of thousands still waiting to drop.

Later in the evening, I got my first glimpse of marsh-wisps. Technically, I suppose I didn't actually see them; no one ever does. What I saw was a sudden blooming of blue lights in the water around the boardwalk. Marsh-wisps are gaseous creatures. They eat by finding pockets of swamp gas, those little clusters of bubbles that break the surface every now and then, and igniting them. The small blue flames provide most of the light for night travelers in the Great Shwamp. The ones I saw looked like wildflowers, small blue blossoms among the dark trees, or fireflies that had taken their name more literally than usual. The soft whoosh of flame was quite audible from the closer ones. I was glad that the boardwalk was too rotten to burn.

Even the crumbling path itself has a sort of decrepit charm, like an old ship encrusted with barnacles. You never quite know what you're going to find in it. I ate lunch in the afternoon with a family of mice who live in a chest of drawers, one of many old pieces of furniture that have been used to prop up the boardwalk. I don't know where it all comes from. Several of the mice are actually experts on antique furniture; the abundance of it in the boardwalk is the reason the family moved here in the first place. It's been many generations since then, and they've intermarried with the local water-rats and taken to moss-farming and fishing, but a few in every generation still take an interest in antiques. The chest of drawers they live in was apparently built during the reign of the Dowager Duchess of Glog, who was half marsh serpent and needed monumental wardrobes to contain her outfits. One of her most famous tube-gowns contained a full mile of lace. It quickly became the fashion in Glog to own enormous furniture, which is why so many of the largest houses in the region are now partially submerged. There's only so much weight a Shwamp house can take before it begins to sink. When this became obvious - and several basements became underground lakes - most of the enormous furniture was disposed of, which is how so much of it ended up underneath the boardwalk. This is also the origin of the narrow quarter-dressers that are unique to the Great Shwamp. Much of the furniture was quite beautiful, if oversized; sawn neatly into quarters, it was still perfectly functional and a much more sensible size.

I learned all of this from the matron of the family, a stately mouse who has broken several records by living to the ripe old age of six. In addition to being the thirty-six-times-great-grandmother of most of the little mice who ran around climbing and splashing and squeaking the entire time, she is also the family's current authority on antiques. I think she was glad to have an audience who wasn't tired of hearing about them. She gave me marshweed tea (which was surprisingly good) in a doll's teacup, part of a set they keep for visitors, and I gave her a saltwater scone I'd been saving since I left the coast last month. She thanked me, saying that it should provide the family a whole week of desserts.

The entire time we were talking, her thirty-six-times-great-grandchildren kept sneaking up and running off with pieces of the scone. I'm not sure it will last that long.

Trick-Hunters

Meligma has its share of ordinary hunters, the ones who catch fish and muskrats and duffel pigs and small alligators. They are quiet, serious, and businesslike. These are the people who keep the village fed.

The trick-hunters are different. They hunt birds in the canopies of the Shwamp trees. There's certainly no shortage of birds to hunt up there. There are white egrets, flowerbirds with honey-colored plumage, long-tail screeps and quetzals, toucans and thricans, hairy wolfbirds, featherbats and shrieking trebulons. A flock of kaklbirds have a grove all to themselves, as no other birds can stand to be near them. Silver eagles nest in the treetops and bring back alligators for their eaglets. The trick-hunters hunt all of them. They consider it cheating to actually kill a bird unless they're planning to eat it; this is why they're called trick-hunters. Any child with a bow and arrow can kill a bird. To get close enough to pluck a quetzal's tailfeathers, though, or to steal a silver eagle's egg without losing one's head in exchange, a hunter has to be tricky.* They're hard to miss most of the time, leaping through the treetops and whooping at the top of their lungs, but they can be practically invisible when they want to be.

Of all the trick-hunters, Trilliko seems the most interested in travelers from beyond the village.** He sits with me for hours (or leaps from branch to branch while I sit, actually; none of the trick-hunters seem capable of staying still), asking me endless questions about the Train, the floating cities, the Blue Desert. He's more than returned the favor, though; nearly everything I know about trick-hunting I've heard from Trilliko.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure how much of it is accurate. When I first remarked on the age of the trick-hunters - Trilliko is one of the oldest, at twenty-five - he told me that that was because they all break their necks or get eaten by the silver eagles before they reach thirty. My expression kept him laughing for several minutes, after which he took pity on me and explained that every trick-hunter gets too slow, too bored, or too married to keep trick-hunting by age thirty. (The saying is that if the birds don't clip a trick-hunter's wings, his wife will.)*** They don't get eaten.

"Well, not often," he added.

Many of the Meligmans seem to have some bat in their ancestry. Unusually for an amphibian, Trilliko has wings. They're a mottled green with dark speckles - perfect for camouflage in the Shwamp. He steers with his enormous webbed feet and can do dizzying acrobatics in the air. Of course, this means that several of his favorite adventures to retell are the ones in which his wings were broken or deliberately tied up - triumphing without his biggest advantage - and the ones that took place in midair. There's no excitement in doing something anyone could have done.

As I've mentioned before, Trilliko has a piece of jewelry for every death-defying feat he's accomplished. All the trick-hunters do, actually, but Trilliko has the most of any I've met. There are numerous rings in his webbed hands and toes (not in his wings - they would ruin the aerodynamics). He wears a necklace full of the feathers of particularly deadly birds. Almost as impressive as Trilliko's collection of jewelry is his collection of scars. The two collections cover him more or less all over, and they match. A ring and several toe scars are from his riding of the chekaraul when he first became a trick-hunter. Another ring and most of the scars on his arms are from his taming of the scissorbats. The largest feather on his necklace, and the scars across his nose, are from his defeat of the Dire Pelican four years ago.

This is Trilliko's favorite midair adventure. It was a ferocious battle, against a foe six times his size, and he only barely survived it. He won by blinding the Dire Pelican with mud. Unfortunately, the other head got him while he was doing that, and he only barely managed to withstand the pain long enough to trick it into biting off its own flight feathers. He was in a coma for three weeks until the venom wore off.

That's the way he tells it, at least. Every trick-hunter in Meligma claims to be the one who defeated the Dire Pelican. Each has a different version of the fight, winning by strength or agility or cleverness or sheer suicidal bravery. It's the best story in recent history; who wouldn't want to be the hero of it? I'm not sure which hunter actually defeated the beast.

Maybe it doesn't matter. There is no shortage of genuine feats of bravery among the trick-hunters, but the adventures are only the beginning. Everyone has to stop having them eventually. The stories, however, can be told and retold for the rest of a trick-hunter's life.



*According to Trilliko, the trick-hunters actually rarely bother the silver eagles. They get most of their eggs from the truckle-hens, who always lay more than their nests can hold anyway. Everyone has to face the eagles at some point, but there's no point in risking death every time you want an omelette.

**He's named after the Eternal Chuckler of Shwamp folklore. The name suits him.

***Half the time, the villagers replace "his wife" with "her husband." About two thirds of the trick-hunters are male, but several of the most terrifying are women. The title is open to anyone who can ride the chekaraul. Regardless of gender, though, few people want their spouses fighting eagles up in the treetops when they could be safely hunting duffel pigs on the ground.

Chekaraul

I looked down yesterday and saw what looked like a new island below the village. It was vaguely crescent-shaped, covered with moss and marsh flowers.

I was surprised, as the water below Meligma has remained deep and unbroken all the time I've been here. Nothing rises out of it but the trunks of the giant trees, encrusted with lichen and multicolored fungi, and the strangely carved knees of the cypresses. A floating tussock drifts by now and then. The water's surface is incredibly still, like a smooth black mirror. Looking into it, one appears to be looking at an upended double of the village, the bridges and pod-houses and hanging baskets floating upwards on their ropes like a collection of balloons. Swamp koi swim through the inverted windows. The addition of an island in the empty water was startling, breaking the illusion.

I started down one of the village's many rope ladders to take a closer look. Trilliko, one of the village's trick-hunters,* stopped me.

"Wait," he said, grinning and holding up a bird's egg he had found somewhere. "Watch this."

He dropped it. It plopped into the water near one end of the island, which opened a great fang-studded mouth and chomped it down. A single eye opened among the foliage, blinked once, and closed again. A moment later, there was no sign that the island was anything but an island. Only a spreading ring of ripples showed that anything had happened.

Trilliko laughed uproariously at my expression, as he has a habit of doing.

"Chekaraul," he said when he was finished. This roughly translates as "island with teeth." They seem to be some sort of giant reptile, camouflaged like snapping turtles by the plants that grow from their pockmarked shells. Apparently, it's a sort of rite of passage for the young trick-hunters of Meligma to set foot on a chekaraul and live. Trilliko did so several years ago. He has a ring to prove it, which (lacking earlobes) he wears in the webbing between his fingers.**

I believe I will be more careful about wading in the Shwamp from now on.



*These deserve more than a footnote. I will write about them later.

**Every piece of Trilliko's jewelry seems to have some death-defying story attached to it, and he has a frightening number of them. It's a wonder he's still alive.

In a Nutshell

At long last, I'm back to civilization (the part of it that's connected to other parts, at least).* I'm writing from Meligma, a small village in the upper reaches of the Great Shwamp. It's a tangled cobweb of a village, a collection of little tents and pod-houses strung between the branches of giant cypress trees. Most of the villagers say they've never seen the ground. The few who have ventured below the canopy say that, in fact, there is no ground; the trees grow straight out of still black water. The knobbled knees that grow from their roots were carved by the ancient tribes into strange shapes, like totem poles or watchtowers. So much new bark has grown since then that it's impossible to tell what any of them were. Gnarled, lumpy shapes are all that remain. They have grown mysterious with age.

Most of the houses in Meligma are the hollowed shells of calabrash nuts, which grow on three ancient calabrash trees in the village. The largest shells are big enough to comfortably house a family of five or six, and even the smallest can serve as gardening sheds.** The chief's house has windowpanes cut from the clear shells of coracle snails. They distort the trees outside into bulbous shapes that look like they might float away at any moment.

The nut experts of the village are called Calabrashers. They know exactly when to harvest a nut - the point at which it has reached its maximum size, just before it drops from the tree and is lost in the swamp below. Calabrash nuts are sturdy and will float a long way before they rot and drop their seeds. They've washed ashore in nearly every river in Hamjamser. Sailors have even found them in the ocean near Kennyrubin.

When a nut is judged ready, the family in line for it (there's always someone ready to leave their tent) gathers to bore through the shell and empty it out.*** The insides are fibrous and squishy - more like a squash than a nut, really. The nuts have to float, so they're mostly air. The large ones still weigh several hundred pounds each. Once the shell is empty, it's light enough to cut from the tree and hang in a different one. The family cuts windows and a smoke-hole and connects the house to the village's network of rope ladders and bridges. Most people paint their houses with fruit dyes. They hang in the cypress branches, colorful balls with doors and windows, connected by garlands of climbing vines.

Staying in Meligma is a bit like living in a giant Christmas tree.



*My apologies, by the way, for another long silence - where I've been, postbirds have been scarce. I was unable to write at all in November, as I usually do. I will try to do so in June instead.

**There's a surprisingly large amount of hanging agriculture in Meligma. Grapes grow high in the trees, where it's sunny, and the lower branches are covered in squidvine, marsh-bloat, and climbing potatoes. Even the giant cypress cones have edible seeds in them.

***Most of the Calabrashers use saws and axes, but there are a lot of rodents in Meligma who still do it the old-fashioned way and use their teeth.