Processional Crabs

A day of relatively uneventful travel was interrupted in the late afternoon when both carts came to an abrupt halt. The gafl were shuffling their feet and making unhappy snuffling noises. When we got out to see what had upset them, we found a line of crabs marching along on the ground ahead.

Each one was carrying a piece of food: a leaf, a root, an apple, a dead mouse or beetle. Several of them were carrying the dead bodies of other members of their species, but these were crabs, after all; the only unusual thing was that they hadn't already eaten them. The overall effect was similar to a line of ants, only considerably larger, and all moving sideways. Though most of their cargo was ordinary enough, one was carrying a sausage; another had somehow acquired an entire cupcake, intact and in pristine condition. A chocolate-covered coffee bean perched on top of the frosting, unmarred by even a grain of sand.

Despite their small size, the crabs evidently frightened the gafl, who resolutely refused to cross the line. We couldn't have moved the wagons forward without crushing the crabs anyway, or at the very least finding some way to halt their progress while we passed, which we found we were reluctant to do. Besides, we were curious as to where they were all going. We turned to follow them instead.

The sun was setting when we reached the top of a ridge and finally discovered the crabs' destination. The line ended at a heap of food spread across a flat area of the valley below.

Sitting behind the heap was a crab the size of a house.

Each of its eyestalks was taller than I am. Its legs were lazily spread around it, like the buttresses of a cathedral, and it was using both claws to pick through the pile of food with all the delicacy of a gourmet. The total silence of its movements was rather unsettling in so large a creature. Bits of roots and leaves were scattered on the ground around it, apparently too bland for its tastes, but every piece of meat the smaller crabs brought was quickly snatched up and stuffed into its scissoring mouthparts. A few of the smaller crabs would have been snatched up themselves if they hadn't scuttled away quickly enough.

Silently, we all backed up a little, crouching down behind the ridge until we were out of sight of the large and apparently carnivorous crab. Mogen quite sensibly attempted to pull us farther away. Curiosity got the better of us, though, and we peeked over the ridge just long enough to see the crab with the cupcake deliver its gift.

When the giant saw the smaller crab holding up the cupcake in front of it, it actually clapped its claws together in apparent delight. The clack they made was deep and unsettlingly meaty, like a collision between two wooden barrels full of steak. With exquisite care, one rowboat-sized claw came down, plucked the cupcake from the tiny claws that held it, and tucked it unharmed into the giant's chitinous maw.

A shiver ran through the giant's body. It sat perfectly still for a moment. Then, with a majestic and terrible grace, it rose to its feet and began to dance.

If it had been performed on two legs, I might perhaps have identified the step as a waltz. Both massive claws waved joyfully in the air above the crab's carapace while its legs spun it in elegant circles. Despite the lazy grace of the movements, each step of the giant's legs sent a tremor through the ground. All around it, the smaller crabs dropped their gifts and ran for their lives. (Several took the opportunity to steal a better gift from one of their fellows; these were crabs, after all.)

We probably should have run as well, but the giant crab's dance was such a bizarre surprise that we watched, enchanted, for several seconds before Mogen grabbed us (all three at once; I'm still not sure how) and dragged us bodily back from the ridgeline. She was quite right, of course, and we offered our thanks and apologies as soon as we were several valleys away and (hopefully) safely out of earshot of the giant.

We speculated about the crab in hushed tones for the rest of the evening. Was it a spirit? A mutant of some sort? Would any of the smaller crabs have eventually grown to that size, if not eaten by predators or each other? We had no way of knowing.

Still, we all agreed that we were glad it had the smaller crabs to fetch food for it. Otherwise, it might have felt the need to go hunt for itself.

Supper with Nemigan

The crocodilian man in the valley was taking a break with his feet in the stream when we returned, his baskets of fruit set aside. Upon seeing our wagons rolling down between the trees, he rose to his feet with a beaming smile full of friendly fangs and spread his arms wide.

"Kirim!" he called to us in a booming voice. "Um shalassa!" (This, I learned later, is a standard greeting in the border valleys, translating more or less to "Welcome! You look hungry.")

His name, he told us, was Nemigan. That was nearly all I could make out of what he said. He spoke Amrat, but with an unfamiliar accent far thicker than my newfound knowledge of the language could penetrate. Fortunately, Chak and Karlishek seemed to have little trouble understanding him. Mogen, having no business or messages to attend to, didn't seem to feel the need to talk.

After so long in the sun and the dry wind of the dunes, the cool, faintly damp air of the orchard valley was like the kiss of October after a long Summer. I'd almost forgotten what humidity felt like. Even Chak stuck his head out of his wagon to look around.

Each tree in the orchard was hung with what looked like a small talisman - a cord knotted around dangling pebbles and small bones, with a little glass bowl at the bottom. In each bowl was a scrap of honeycomb in a glistening pool of honey. (Though they didn't look like much in the evening shade, the sunlight the next morning lit them up in gleaming amber, dappled with the shadows of leaves and of the various bees, flies, and wasps buzzing around the sweet liquid.)

After we'd made our introductions, Nemigan led us up a path beside the stream that ran through the center of the valley. His house was a cheerfully lopsided sandstone structure with a gaggle of wooden additions hanging off of it, a pale, asymmetrical shape in the bluish dusk. It was built on a rocky outcropping where the stream chuckled its way up out of the ground. Where the water originated, I have no idea; an underground spring, perhaps, or a local aquifrax. The house wore a front porch at a rakish angle, and we shared supper there while watching the sunset over the orchard.

Supper was a masterful display of what one can do with a few types of fruit. Nemigan served us fresh apples, pickled puddens, apple juice, apple jam on pudden bread, and dried pudden slices with apple butter. To provide a little variety, he added a stir-fry of vegetables, mushrooms, and various unidentified crustaceans from the stream. (There were at least a dozen species, but he referred to them all as "kechenin," which means "crunchables.") I got the impression that he didn't get the opportunity to cook for guests as often as he would have liked. The rest of us, finding ourselves in a surprisingly celebratory mood, contributed various small additions of dried meat and bread from our own supplies, including the last of my dried slug meat. I'll have to see about replenishing my supply now that we're in a less arid region of the world.

Garnet took a walk over the dunes while the rest of us were preparing supper and returned with half of a small herbivore, somewhere between a deer and a jackrabbit. Nemigan identified the creature as a "biffery." He was quite impressed - apparently they're not particularly easy to catch - and was polite enough not to inquire where the other half of it had gone. Karlishek and I were already aware of Garnet's lycanthropic metabolism and certainly didn't begrudge her a small extra snack before the meal.

Before eating, Nemigan said what sounded like a brief prayer, which Karlishek said was thanks to the spirit of the valley. (It occasionally appears in the form of a white mouse, formed of the mist that rises from the stream at dawn; it leaves dewy footprints in the grass even on the driest of days.) I couldn't understand the words that Nemigan used, but I paid my respects the best that I could in my own language.

It turned out that Nemigan spoke a mix of Amrat (of which I now have at least a working knowledge) and Jingli, the most common language of Changrakata. His little valley was part of the patchwork region between that much greener country and the Golden Desert. Karlishek, of course, speaks fluent Amrat, and Chak had spent the journey acquiring at least an academic knowledge of Jingli, so all of us were able to converse in one way or another. We traded news of distant places in Changrakata and the Golden Desert all evening. Most of it was at least second-hand, and several months out of date, but this is usually the case with news from other regions of Hamjamser. No one minded.

Sleeping outdoors in the valleys is apparently unwise; the local centipedes have a fondness for shiny objects and are known to frisk sleeping travelers for coins and jewelry. As the centipedes are venomous, roughly the length of my forearm, and liable to bite when startled, we all agreed that it was better to attempt to fit ourselves into Nemigan's house for the night. Space was limited, but we all found a corner to curl up in or a piece of furniture to slide beneath. I spent the night in the root cellar and nearly wept with joy when the subterranean temperature required me, for the first time in what felt like years, to sleep under a blanket again. The fact that I was folded nearly in half between two baskets of puddens felt hardly worth mentioning.

A crooked extension of the building hung slightly over the stream - Nemigan said he disliked having to go outdoors to fetch water on cold nights - so Chak was finally able to spend a night outside of his wagon, submerged to his neck in the cold water. He said the chill helped him sleep.

The best news for Chak, though, came up during supper, when we discovered that we were now on the outskirts of Changrakata. The hardest part of his journey was nearly over.

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.

The Scalps

Well. After far too long an absence, here I am, writing to you again. One month of letters. It's far too short, but it's all I can promise for now. At least it's easy to find postbirds here.

After most of a year spent in Mollogou (much easier to find your way into than out of), the Cheeserock Plateaus (much easier to see than to reach), and the Death Marsh (much more pleasant than it sounds, actually), I currently find myself on the Pinstuck Plains - or, as most of the inhabitants call them, the Scalps.

There is very little here besides grass.

Grass is everywhere.

Grass covers the gentle bulges of ground that pass for hills, coating their domes with strands as fine as hair. This is where the Scalps got their name. From a distance, the hills do look surprisingly like scalps, a thousand sleeping giants packed together like eggs in a carton. Their hair is colored in patches - green and gold, blue and gray, russet and a surprising carrot orange. Some even have bald spots of dusty pink clay. It is nearly impossible to build a house on the Pinstuck Plains that does not end up looking like a hat.

Grass hides the myriad small creatures of the plains from the slightly less numerous large creatures that want to eat them. The plains are riddled with the holes of mice and rats, prairie dogs, riddler crabs,* tortoises, rabbits and coneybees, dustbowl eels, and snakes of all sizes and every possible shade of brown. Cerberus hyenas stride over the hills on long, spotted legs, keeping an eye or six out for prey. Coyotes howl at the moons. Gigantulas pad along on bristled, fingery legs as thick as my arm, leaving a trail of thin gray silk tangled in the grass behind them. Dervish lizards spin in dry stream beds. Hawks and falkyries soar overhead, silent except for the occasional sky-splitting scream.

Grass gives the wind a voice, a thousand thousand scratchy whispers from ankle height. Most visitors to the Scalps find themselves talking constantly, a little louder than normal, trying to distract themselves from the sense that someone is constantly whispering in their ear. It's one way, if not a particularly reliable one, to identify the people who were born here. They don't mind the whispering. Some of them simply tune it out. Others, a rare few, learn its language. The people of the Scalps call them Listeners, or Whisperlings, or Giants' Ears - those who listen to the whispers of the hills. They can find water buried six feet below the ground. They can hear tornadoes and locust swarms** coming long before anyone can see them, even across the unbroken miles of the plains. They hear warnings and secrets and long-forgotten stories. The grass, it seems, has a lot to say.

Grass - in more practical terms - also provides most of the plains-dwellers' food, cloth, and building material.

Sheep are rare on the Scalps - domestic ones, anyway. There's something in the wind, or the sky, or the endless miles of unfenced grass, that changes them. It only takes a few generations. Shepherds come to the plains with flocks from the High Fields or the Railway Regions: slow, simple animals that follow anything that moves and devote most of their brains to chewing.

Their children are just a little more intelligent, a little more courageous, a little more… wild.

Their grandchildren unlatch gates and vanish in the night. Some of them pick the shepherds' pockets before they leave.

The people of the Scalps have learned to do without wool.

Wood is equally rare. There are a few forests, but they don't spread easily; feral sheep and thunderbeast tend to eat or trample new saplings before they get even a foot high. The forests are jealously guarded by the timber towns (the plains' largest permanent settlements), by the squirrel clans with their deadly chestnut catapults, or - in one case - by an unusually aggressive grove of warrior dryads. Plains forest wood is taken from dead trees only and sold at exorbitant prices.*** People who attempt to steal it and survive generally wish they hadn't. The largest plant outside the forests is a little dry bush - hair brush, they call it - and it would take acres of those to make enough sticks to build an outhouse.**** Instead, the people make their houses out of grass.

The nomads live in wicker huts like upturned baskets. They're woven in elaborate patterns, diamonds and zigzags and spirals that rival the fanciest knitting. The nomads set them up in rings, like mushrooms, fastened to the ground with stakes and grass rope. They keep them far away from their cooking fires. The nomads travel with crunklewicks - large, hairy, round-backed creatures that look like their ancestors may once have been woolly mammoths, or possibly the hills under their feet. These carry the nomads' belongings and any family members too young or old or ill or pregnant to walk for days on end. The nomads put their houses on the crunklewicks as well; they fit perfectly over the humps, like wicker tea cozies, and make the crunklewicks look less like mammoths and more like giant armadillos.*****

The more permanent settlements on the plains simply dig a bit deeper. Some take whole bricks of root-woven earth, instead of just the stalks on the surface, and make their houses out of sod. Grass grows in the roofs and windowsills. Others hollow out the hills and make their streets out of streambeds. There are towns that are practically invisible from a distance, just a forest of chimney pots sticking out of the ground, until you get close enough to see people looking out at you from doors in the hillsides.

As if all this weren't enough, I've heard that there are even people who make their homes in airborne grass seeds. I've never seen them myself. They must be very small.

* Riddlers are one of the few species of land crabs in Hamjamser, along with the thirsty crab and the juggernaut horseshoe. All three species live on land, returning to water only to lay their eggs; it's fairly common to find riddlers in forests, and thirsty crabs are often mistaken for scorpions by desert travelers. Juggernaut horseshoes have been found burrowing in pack ice in the Arctic. The shells of riddler crabs are marked with wiggly patterns that look somewhat like writing - the "riddles" for which they're named. People occasionally find, or at least claim to find, riddlers they can actually read. There was one in the Sconth Museum for several years that had a perfectly legible copy of the Recursive Sonnet written on it. Visitors to the Museum can still read several of its castoff shells. Experts on literature and crustaceans have argued for decades about whether or not it was a hoax.

** Ordinary locusts bear only the smallest resemblance to the Locust Marauders of old, but they still call up bad memories in veterans of the Raids. Many families on the plains have stories of their beloved grandfather - or, almost as often, grandmother - blowing the dust off the old war chest and charging out into a locust swarm, armed with a cutlass and a bathrobe. Their children don't mind; the younger grandchildren tend to behave very well around their grandparents after seeing something like this. Besides, you can make a good meal out of bisected locusts.

*** A large portion of the wood is bought by dragons, who say it produces the sweetest smoke in Hamjamser. When one's hoard consists of entire national banks, I suppose one has money to burn.

**** Technically, the largest plants may be the tombstone cacti that grow in massive, weathered rings (crowns?) on the peaks of the hills. Mature colonies of the cacti resemble standing stones in shape, size, and consistency. They grow, though; I've seen a few broken in half, and they have rings like the trunk of a tree. Some even have stubby branches. Opinion is currently divided as to whether they're a plant or a type of rock crystal. They're too tough to eat, too brittle to spin, and too much work to build with, so the plains-dwellers mostly just ignore them.

***** I've never seen a glyptodont in person, but I've seen engravings and a few well-traveled photographs. They look surprisingly like an armadillo might if it was six feet at the hump.

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.