SuyMaTmakk

According to the TiLeKraNas, SuyMaTmakk is the only real city on the Scalps. There are a few large towns that like to call themselves cities when they think they can get away with it, and a couple of ghost cities where no one lives except night-haunts and the intensely solitary, but SuyMaTmakk is by far the largest concentration of living people. It's built around the only lake.

When I first saw SuyMaTmakk, I thought it was on fire. The setting sun caught the cloud of mist that hangs constantly over the city, raised by its hundred waterfalls, and lit it all up in orange. The buildings, made of sticks and straw and sod bricks, cast scarecrow shadows against the sunset.

Every river on the Scalps eventually empties into Lake Twiliat. There are only four of them, so this is not quite as impressive as it sounds, but that's still a lot of water for the Scalps. The Hley comes from the East. The other three rivers are the KleMit (West), the HatPaLikk (South), and the Flyeek (Northwest, except during full moons, when it moves around to parallel the HatPaLikk from the South).

The entire lake spins slowly, as if someone's opened a drain at the bottom. According to those who live in the lake, that's fairly accurate. There's a giant hole in the floor of the lake. It's called the Hwuyk - literally, the Drain. Most lake-dwellers stay away from it; the current is too strong to resist past a certain point. Many people have gone into the hole, curious or simply unaware of it until it's too late. Only a handful have ever come out again. They've returned over land, all of them, stumbling across the Scalps on dusty feet or carried in barrels of water by traveling merchants. Their stories have made little sense. They've raved of moons, of coal-fish, of strange and secret oceans. As they recover their senses, they lose their memories of their journeys. No one has ever gotten any sense out of them. The world beneath the Drain remains a mystery.

Some call Twiliat the Lake with No Plug.

It's actually surprisingly difficult to reach the lake by water. Its constant spinning has carved a huge bowl in the ground over the centuries, and the banks are much higher than the water. In many places, they actually overhang it slightly. Fish lurk in the shadowy places underneath, waiting for prey that doesn't have a hook in it. Water only leaves the lake through the Drain; everything above ground flows into it, not out. The four rivers reach the lake as waterfalls. Only the stupidly adventurous sail over those. There are a few systems of locks around the banks, series of stepped pools that lift boats with clever arrangements of valves and gates, but few boats use them. Instead, most of the city's shipping trade takes place in a ring of canals around the raised edges of the lake.* Much of the city is built around and over these canals, or clinging to the steep banks below them. Many buildings slouch on piers over the slowly swirling water.

The dry part of SuyMaTmakk forms a ring around the lake; the submerged part of the city forms a somewhat smaller ring inside it. Their populations are about equal. The city is evenly divided between the people of the air, the people of the water, and the amphibians who travel between the two.

The only people who sail on the lake itself are fishers and scavengers. Whole islands of debris build up in the center of the lake.** The current draws them together, but it's not strong enough to pull them down into the Drain, so they simply float on the surface, spinning gently. Everything that falls into the lake and floats eventually ends up there. The islands are made up of broken furniture, lost toys, dead fish, papers blurred to illegibility, leaves and sticks and wood shavings and a hundred kinds of dust. Some of them are old enough to have sprouted grass and small bushes. There are people who make their living by rowing or swimming back and forth, scavenging in the shifting heaps of trash and lost things. They bring back what they find and sell it in the city's markets. Their booths are full of stained books, locked boxes with no keys, dolls with waterweed in their hair, wooden clocks with their gears full of silt. The scavenger's booths are the first places people go if they lose something. Chances are it will turn up in one of them eventually.

The city itself is a chaotic jumble of buildings. Wood is just as scarce here as elsewhere on the Scalps, so the buildings are made of wicker, of crooked sticks lashed into bundles, of piled sod bricks topped with grass, of bones taken from the elephant graveyards outside the city.*** I don't think there's a straight line in all of SuyMaTmakk. The city tangles around the edges of Lake Twiliat like the nest of an enormous bird.

I haven't actually seen all that much of it yet. The sun set shortly after my first glimpse of that crazed silhouette against the sky, and it was dark when we began to reach the outstretched fingers of the city's river docks. The lamps on them are lit by bottled fireflies and exquisitely trained salamanders. In a city made of sticks and straw, actual fires are extremely scarce. The streets are mostly dark after sunset.

The inn the TiLeKraNas usually stay at is on the Hley, so we didn't actually set foot on the streets tonight; we simply tied the raft up at the dock, next to a shack built on a huge floating dome, and went inside. I looked back as the door was closing and saw the dome lift its head out of the water. It was an enormous turtle.

The inn is called the Hmofrem Pekelli (the Eloquent Pig). It's a cozy, slouching building made of sod bricks. From outside, it looks like a grassy hill with windows. The walls are threaded with embroideries of living roots, some of which reach pale flowers out to the lanterns or the dusty windows. The most bored or drunk patrons of the bar pour various drinks on them; some turn the next day's flowers interesting colors, as if the plants themselves are drunk. A few regulars have become experts and can combine drinks to give the flowers multicolored stripes or splotches. The other patrons generally agree that they don't have enough to do.

All of this is still only what I've heard from the TiLeKraNas; they come to SuyMaTmakk often enough to be familiar with the most interesting parts of the city. It was late when we arrived, though, and the children went straight to bed (after some protesting), soon followed by the adults. I've only stayed up late enough to write this letter and hand it to the patiently waiting postbird. My own exploring will have to wait until tomorrow.

* Twiliat literally means "Ear." It is, after all, a hole beneath the Scalps. English-speakers call the city's main waterway the Ear Canal.

** This might explain why rafts on the Hley look the way they do.

*** Most of the bone-houses' inhabitants are immigrants from Trammelghast, where a house is not considered homey until it's haunted by at least one shrieking specter. They see the dead as something like eccentric pets. Their neighborhoods tend to remain politely out of earshot of the rest of the city.

The Hley

The dry stream eventually joined another dry stream, forming a somewhat wider dry stream that still had no water in it. This continued for a day or so before reaching the river.

The river is called the HleyPakkPakkKa. (Yes, that's a triple K, though it's technically a double K followed by a single. Hmakk is not meant to be written in this alphabet.) When someone pronounces the name correctly, it sounds like fireworks are going off inside their mouth. This is how you identify people who grew up in the Scalps. When I try to talk about the river, it sounds more like someone pulling their boot out of a swamp.

Fortunately, many people simply call it the Hley. I can manage that.

The Hley isn't particularly wide or deep; only the middle is over my head, as I found out a few times when the heat got to be too much for me. It's still the largest - possibly the only - body of water I've seen in months. Since the highest hills in the Scalps are about as tall as I am, the river doesn't flow particularly quickly either. You can use its surface as a mirror. It meanders so crookedly over the plains that the banks are made up entirely of peninsulas. Nearly every one of them had someone fishing on it as I walked by. I said hello to a few of them, but they told me - rather irritably - to shut up before I scared away the fish. I stopped after that.

One woman had a pole as thick as my arm, strung with rope and what looked like a grappling hook. She was baiting it with pickles. I don't know what she was fishing for, but the teeth hanging from her hat would have put a smilodon to shame. A few were longer than my fingers.

I didn't ask. From the way she was frowning, I got the impression she would have broken me in half if I'd scared off the fish - though what could scare off something with teeth like that, I have no idea.

I tried to stay out of the deep sections after that.

There are very few boats on the river, but a great many other things. I suppose you could call most of them rafts. Many are made of sticks - the kind you get from the little bushes of the Scalps - tied into bundles and lashed together with string. Others are floating collections of bottles, or barrels, or empty pots. One raft I saw floated on empty snail shells the size of pumpkins. Their openings were sealed with wax. Other people poled by in enormous baskets, either sealed with tar or simply woven well enough to be watertight. A few people were in coracles of oiled cloth stretched umbrella-style over a thin frame. They folded them up at the dock and carried them away on their shoulders.

Then, of course, there are those who don't need boats. There seem to be almost as many people in the water as on it. This is the case in most of the highly populated parts of Hamjamser, but it still surprises me occasionally. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time underwater. Everyone here is quite used to it, of course; it's fairly common to see people stick their heads up out of the water and start conversations with people in boats. Some seemed to be dropping their children off with friends for the day. A group of small mammalian girls - sisters, I'd guess - jumped off a raft at one point to join an otter-like family that looked like they might be cousins. A bit later in the day, a pair of small frogs in straw hats climbed up onto a raft to eat lunch with a family of avians. Everyone seems to know everyone, in and on the river, or to simply not care if they don't.

At around noon, I passed a raft that had stopped on the bank. Everyone on it had gotten off and was doing something in the grass. When I got closer, I found that they were picking strawberries.

Patches of wild strawberries turn up here and there along the banks of the Hley. I'd found a few of them already, but this was by far the largest yet. The people from the raft turned out to be a family - HeMiKa (a reptile), HmoTan (a mammal), and their children (various combinations of the two). Their last name was TiLeKraNa, and they were a family of glassblowers. The raft (which was made of corncobs) was piled high with glass bottles and fishing floats. It clinked every time anyone moved. The family lives somewhere upstream, near a convenient sand pit, but they come down the river every few weeks to sell their wares in the city.

They told me all of this over lunch. After I helped them gather up the last of the strawberries, they invited me to come the rest of the way downstream with them, and I was happy to accept. There's only so much walking I can do in one day when it's this hot. The little awning on the raft was the only shade I'd seen since sunrise.

As is traditional, I contributed the most exotic bits of food I had left. Most of my current supplies are plain food from the plains - bread, dried clackrabbit, and various things made of locusts - but I still had a few of those little sugar things I picked up in Mollogou. The children loved these, though their parents limited them to one each.

While we ate, the family told me all about the city, though the two smallest children kept interrupting to show me various blobs of glass they'd made. Their names are TiLi and HnerKipPeLo. (HnerKipPeLo is at a stubborn age and refuses to let anyone shorten his name.) They've started learning the trade already, apparently, and they seem quite good at it; TiLi had made a bottle large enough to hold a grape, which she showed me several times, and even the blobs were quite beautiful. There were streaks of blue and green in them. (The source of this color is a family secret.) The oldest son, MetTeyy, has started making some of the precision glassware used by the alchemists and apothecaries in the city. He doesn't talk quite as much as his two siblings. I'm not sure anyone does.

Once they found out that I'd never visited SuyMaTmakk, the city became the main topic of conversation. I'd been interested before; now that I've heard a bit more about the place, I can't wait to get there. The raft arrives (probably) tomorrow. I'll write more then, but I want to see this place with my own eyes first.