Rikanta

Having only arrived in Rikanta two nights ago, I wasn't ready to leave just yet, so I spent today wandering around the town. It's a beautiful place. The old stone gives it a solid, peaceful feel that is hard to find outside of old ruins. It's a town that has settled comfortably into its place. I walked through the streets, following the shade, watching carts roll by and children play elaborately drawn jumping games in the dust, admiring the way the creeping hieroglyphs twined their way around the architecture - though I was careful not to lean too long against any inscripted walls. I didn't want them rubbing off.

Rikanta is a small town. Walk three blocks east, and you reach the river; it's too shallow here for boat travel, but there is the occasional tumbledown dock where people sit to fish during the long, drowsy afternoons. Walk three blocks west, and you come out into farmland, shady orchards and drought-wheat fields where trained shrews scour the crops for particularly succulent insects.

Perhaps "blocks" is the wrong word, though. The town's layout has nothing so regular as that. Inside this narrow patch of land is a maze of twisty little streets that seems far too complex to fit within such a small space. I wandered all day, and I'm fairly sure I was never on the same street twice. Fortunately, there's a tall clock tower in the center of the town, so I could never get entirely lost.

The clock tower is made of the same pilfered castle stones as the rest of the town. It has no clock. When I asked the group of elderly men playing board games in the town square,* they said that the town will get a clock someday. Eventually. When they find one they like. One of the men - who seemed to be winning his game of Hens and Comets, if his opponent's expression was any indication - said that his great-grandfather used to say the same thing.

People in the Golden Desert are rarely in a hurry about anything.



* There is always a group of elderly men playing board games in the town square. This is a universal constant. If it's not the town square, then it's the general store, or perhaps one of the more neatly-kept parks. No matter how far you travel, they are always there. The only things that change are the language and the board games.

If I ever settle down in one place, I hope to be one of them someday.

Market Street, Day 5: the Lucky Bungler

Kekehruy Square is one of several small open spaces that are often connected to Market Street. Today, it was the site of a three-tower clockboard tournament.

Clockboard is generally considered the most elaborate board game in Hamjamser. Each board is unique, laid out to serve the personal strategy of its creator, or simply to make the game work the way they think it should.* People often say that a clockboard looks like a chessboard; this is true, in the same way that a city looks like a brick. Clockboard uses chessboard as a building material. There are multiple layers of black-and-white squares - checkered terraces, spiral walkways, bridges, rotundas, and the checkered towers by which the game is ranked.** The more adventurous clockboards look like mad model cities in harlequin dress. Each board contains some amount of clockwork as well. At the very least, there's a clock in the board somewhere; it usually has three or more hands, only one of which has anything to do with time. The functions of the others vary from board to board. Advanced boards also include clockwork that changes the game, shifting and rotating sections or dropping pieces down hidden chutes to bring them closer or farther from wherever they're trying to go. Half of playing clockboard is anticipating your opponent's moves; the other half is anticipating the moves of the board.

I've never quite been able to figure out three-tower clockboard. It's possible that I could if I took the time, but so far, my experience is limited to the single-tower variety.

This tournament was in its fourth day, so most of the players were seasoned experts. The beginners have been out of the running since Friday. I couldn't understand half of what was going on. The tournament seemed to be going well; nothing particularly exciting was happening, but the players and the audience were interested. Then Spud showed up.

No one has ever managed to find out Spud's last name - or, for that matter, anything else about him. His response to every question is usually something like, "yes, I'm Spud. Where are the doughnuts?" He shows up occasionally at tournaments (some say he's drawn to large concentrations of board games) and usually doubles the size of the audience once word gets around.

He had neglected to bring a clockboard of his own. This was a requirement for the tournament. It's customary, especially at a tournament, for a pair of clockboard players to play pairs of games - one on each player's board. It wouldn't be fair otherwise. A well-built clockboard gives its creator a significant advantage. If one player wins both of the first pair of games, he or she is the winner; if the first pair is a tie, the players move on to a second pair of games. This continues until one player or the other wins both games in a pair.

It often takes a while for this to happen; the Duchesses of Shimrick and Marbelsack once continued a single match of clockboard for almost ninety years. They met every day to play it over lunch. The match was said to have consisted of four thousand and thirty-six separate games (two thousand and eighteen on each board), and it only ended when the Duchess of Shimrick died of such extreme old age that everyone had lost count. The Duchess of Marbelsack is said to have been quite irritated at her timing, as she was winning the current round. It was just like Shimrick, she said, to die at such a contrary moment.

Fortunately for Spud, one of the other contestants had to drop out at the last minute to have a baby. As she left with a doctor and her husband (who looked by far the most nervous of the three), she gave Spud permission to borrow her board, with the clear understanding that she would kill him if anything happened to it. He nodded vaguely, thanked her, and waved as she left.

He proceeded to win every game he played. This is what always happens. Spud has been the world champion of clockboard - and several other games - for years, despite his apparent lack of any strategy whatsoever. I certainly couldn't find any when I watched him play. He moved his pieces seemingly at random; occasionally, he had to ask his opponent what one of them was.*** Several of his opponents appeared to be winning at first, taking full advantage of mistakes a novice player could have avoided, but his luck always changed by the end of the game. Player after expert player saw their detailed strategies overcome by what looked like randomness and sheer luck.

Board game enthusiasts have argued about Spud for years. A third of them think he's a genius who's impossibly good at hiding it; another third think he's an idiot who's impossibly lucky. The remaining third just think he's cheating. If he is, no one has ever managed to catch him at it. Experienced players who've matched wits with Spud - if wits have anything to do with it - are usually certain he's not cheating. What exactly he is doing, they don't know. They just wish they knew how to do it themselves.

Someone - no one remembers who - once called him the Lucky Bungler. The name has stuck. Clockboard players speak of Spud the Lucky Bungler in a tone of voice normally reserved for only the most insane emperors.

The tournament had narrowed down to the last eight players, seven of which were looking rather nervous, when Spud simply got up and wandered off for no apparent reason. Everyone waited for a while to see if he'd come back. In a game that can take years to complete, players quickly learn patience.

He never returned. After a few hours, during which most of the players mobbed the surrounding shops for food and news of Spud's disappearance, the tournament continued without him. The winner and runners-up continued to play well, though they all looked a bit shaken when accepting their checkered clockwork trophies at the end.

I heard later that Spud had shown up at a Go tournament that happened to be taking place simultaneously on the other side of the lake. He won, of course. The city's reigning Go champion, an ancient and brilliant woman named Trihakna Start, reportedly asked him to marry her on the spot. Accounts vary as to what he replied. On his last comment, however, everyone agrees. When asked about his miraculous success at the tournament, Spud simply blinked and replied, "tournament? I thought this was a yard sale."

And then he left.

* For many serious players of board games, the object is simply to play as well as possible; if a game goes well, it doesn't matter who actually wins. An elegant strategy is often all the more satisfying if your opponent surprises you with it.

** Three-tower clockboard is the most complex variety commonly played; double- and single-tower clockboard are more common. I've heard that the game goes up to seven towers, but I've never even seen a board with more than four. Beyond three, it gets so complicated that you might as well try to predict next year's weather as your opponent's next move.****

*** Clockboard has seventeen basic pieces per player, nearly three times as many as in chess. Each piece has its own unique abilities, and advanced players of the game often invent their own.

**** Unless, that is, you're a Weather Dragon. In that case, the weather is easy to predict, as you're the one making it.

Stone over Paper

Sure enough, the Train reached Scarloe this afternoon. I'm starting to wonder if Professor Flanderdrack is a Wayfinder. He's uncannily good at finding things.

I have no idea what he's doing here. He continues to explain the occasional theory; this morning, having finished whatever calculations he began last night, he explained the use of three-tower clockboard as a way of predicting the future.

(The complexity of the game, and the fact that no two boards are alike, apparently creates a mathematically unique situation that distorts time. This can be manipulated by expert players of the game, who can interpret their opponent's moves, the outcome of dice rolls, and the order of randomly shuffled cards to correctly predict the future. Experts can even use their own moves to pose questions. Unfortunately, any expert player of three-tower clockboard is, by definition, interested in only one thing: three-tower clockboard. Anyone skilled enough to use oracular strategy will inevitably ask the game a question about the game itself. The resulting paradox distorts time and can have almost any result; it often did two hundred years ago, during the height of clockboard's popularity. The almost daily transformation of overly curious clockboard players - and their opponents - into newts, trees, and small hills was what caused the game to go quickly and severely out of fashion for the next century, and also led to the loss of more or less all the players who really knew what they were doing. The art of oracular clockboard-playing has been lost for nearly two hundred years. This is probably for the best.)

Professor Flanderdrack remains completely silent, though, about what he's doing at the moment. He disappeared into the page mines of Scarloe today without a word of explanation.

No one really knows where the page mines came from.

To be specific, no one knows where the geological layer came from that led to the creation of the mines. (The mines are there because people dug them.) Several hundred feet below the surface of the Dustbowl, a dome-shaped mountain that rainclouds inexplicably avoid like a gardener avoids kudzu, is the Scriptorial Layer, a sedimentary layer made entirely of tightly pressed paper. The Layer was discovered almost a hundred years ago, when one of the many futile attempts to dig a well in the Dustbowl turned up something even better.

Practically every language on Hamjamser appears on the paper dug out of the mines. English, Sikelak, Carvendrone, Common Vreen, ancient Tetravanian, Aggali runes and Rampastulan hieroglyphs, all the variations on Shasta script... To date, the miners have only found eight pages that didn't have writing on them. They've held on to most of these. They're rarer than diamonds, after all; Scarloe is probably the only place on Hamjamser where you can make your fortune by finding a blank piece of paper.

The written pages, though, are what keep the village going. There's not much else on the Dustbowl - no water, no plants, and no animals, except what people have brought with them. All the water in the village comes from a pump that stretches up the side of the mountain from the nearest river. Before the pump and the page mines were built, no one remembers how anyone was able to live in Scarloe at all.

It's strange to visit the village in late Autumn. The weather is normal for November in the Railway Regions - the pump stops at night to avoid freezing - but Scarloe looks like a small piece of the Golden Desert (or would if everything wasn't gray). A place that looks like this ought to be baking under the sun. Instead, the weather is cool and breezy. There's even fog now and then.

In every way but one, the Dustbowl is a perfectly ordinary mountain. It's just that rain never falls on it.

Over the curve of the mountain, the mountains of the Railway Regions stretch away in every direction, looking perfectly normal: green from hemlock and fir and bottle-brush pine, with the occasional stubborn patch of orange. On top of the mountain is nothing but a blank expanse of gray stone. No normal drought ever dried a place out this much. Scarloe's drought has lasted for centuries.

There's not really much to do in Scarloe except mining. There are a few small farms, startling patches of green that wouldn't last a day without the pump; even with the pump, though, there's only enough water for six or seven of them. Most of Scarloe's food comes from outside. Plants spring up around leaks in the pipeline when birds or people drop their seeds in the right place. A strip of greenery and rust stains follows the pipe all the way to the peak, a tilted temperate oasis two feet wide.

The lack of water is generally thought to be why the pages are so well preserved. The mines are as dry as a bank vault. Rot, mildew, and bookworms are completely unheard of in Scarloe; they'd die of thirst before getting within a mile of the mines. Even so, after spending who knows how many centuries under a mountain, the pages are in amazingly good shape. The miners hardly ever find one that's too damaged to read. Most are slightly ripped, or stained, or missing a corner, but it's rare to find a page missing even a quarter of its words. Whatever left them there was surprisingly careful about it.

The miners spend every day digging pages out of the ground, then sell them to the village bookbinders, who stack them neatly and completely at random and sew them into books. The largest building in the village, besides the bindery, is the store that sells books from underground.

Unfortunately, none of the books make any sense. Most of the linguists and literary experts in the Railway Regions have tried to decipher the meaning of one page, even one sentence, but none of them have come up with any likely explanations for the writing. It's nonsense - neatly written, grammatically perfect nonsense, but nonsense all the same. The theories on the origin of the pages are as numerous as they are unlikely. I'm sure Professor Flanderdrack has one. A surprisingly widespread theory is that the pages were left by one or more giant bookworms, despite the complete lack of any tunnel shapes in the layers. Unfortunately, no one has ever actually seen a giant bookworm; the only indication of their existence is the fact that people believe they exist.

Of course, the fact that the mined books are incomprehensible doesn't stop people from trying. A group of authors and linguists called the Refinery has spent the last few decades buying as many mined books as possible. They insist that the books will all make sense if they can just get enough of them together.

If that's true, they've got a long way to go. No one's reached the edge of the Scriptorial Layer yet.