The Floodplains of Sedge

I've decided to follow the River Truckle upstream. This close to the Great Shwamp, it's not far from being a swamp itself. It's comfortable in its bed and doesn't hesitate to stretch out into the surrounding woods. The road on the bank is wide and well-traveled - more so than the boardwalk - so there are fewer washed-out sections. Most of the ones that there are have been filled in with logs or little wooden bridges. The mice here - there are mice everywhere - keep their teeth short by chewing on the railings. They're more artistic about it than some; it's rare to see a bridge without fine traceries of carved scrollwork all over it. You have to look closely to see the tooth marks.

According to the Truckle Stoppers I spoke to,* this country is called Sedge. No one seems sure whether that's short for "Shwamp's edge" or a reference to the plants that grow everywhere. The country is a menagerie of seedpods. There's box sedge, pineapple sedge, pyramid sedge, bottle sedge, giraffe sedge, cabinet sedge, and the elusive invisible sedge. Hollow seedpods are used as much as pottery. Musicians who can't afford instruments just find a ripe rattlesack or whistling sedge, put a coat of varnish on it, and play that instead. Many of the seeds have spines all over, so they attach themselves to your clothing when you brush the plants. There are villages where they wear seeds on their clothes, stuck on in intricate patterns like beads or embroidery. Other plants have different ways of spreading. I was nearly hit twice today by rocket sedge, which can shoot its enormous seed spikes all the way across the river. They have a tendency to spontaneously explode during dry seasons. I'm glad this isn't one.

No one can agree on whether or not Sedge is part of the Great Shwamp. The border, like the land, is less than solid. After traveling through the Shwamp, where land is scarce where it exists at all, it's surprising to see so many houses. I come across three or four every mile. Most of them seem to be farmers or fishers, with nets hanging in the water or fields baking beneath the sun. One house had nets strung across the river, above the water, to catch skipperjacks. The fields are low and full of water; the water is shallow and full of dirt. People toss small stones into it as offerings to the river spirit. They believe that rivers ought to have pebbles to rub smooth, and the Truckle, flowing through a marsh, is deprived of them.

The river fills everything here. Ponds, inlets, and tributaries break up the ground into a thousand islands, which shift and change shape with the flow of the water. The land is so flat that you can see their outlines clearly, speckled across the landscape until they disappear behind trees. At night, the river rises into the air as fog; during the Spring, it climbs out of its banks (only a few inches above water at their highest) and floods the land for miles. The small forests and copses that speckle the fields are striped with the mud left by previous floods. The farmers can read the years on them. Every flood has a name.

"Here's the line from the Shell-Raiser. Highest water in my lifetime. I was only five, but I can still remember my mother taking us all up to the top of the old signal tower. First time I ever imagined what the Ocean might be like."

"There's the Great Perforation, when all the termite eels came up from Sporetower. You can still see the holes in the wood..."

Some trees have the detritus of floods caught in their branches. Children don't bother to build treehouses by the Truckle; they just find a tree with a wagon or a wardrobe in it and hang up a rope ladder. The farmers are thoroughly unconcerned about floods. Most of them are at least partly amphibious. They grow rice and mackerel grass, plants that don't mind spending weeks underwater; they build their houses low and sloping, with streamlined roofs that go all the way to the ground, so currents will go over them instead of carrying them away. Half the furniture is made of metal or ironwood so that it won't float away. The rest is tied to the houses. During floods, the farmers spend the day fishing and scavenging, then find their way home by looking for their furniture bobbing on top of the water. Nearly everyone has a bed or a wardrobe that can be turned into a serviceable houseboat for a week or two. It's not unusual to have the world underwater for five or six weeks out of every year. That's just the way things are.

Fortunately for travelers like me, there are rarely floods at this time of year. The land is as close to dry as it gets. The sun pounds dust from the road. Cicadas drone in the daytime, somewhere in the trees, hidden from view but audible for miles. Locusts make short, rattling flights in the grass. At night, katydids and frogs take over, moving from the lazy insect fugue of the daytime to the invisible polyphony of night.

I've never been fond of heat, but it's days like these that remind me of what I love about Summer.



* Most of the people I spoke to in Truckle Stop wanted portraits. There's a pipe crawler in the town that draws them, but it uses a geometric, highly stylized technique. Not everyone wants to come out looking like the carvings on a thousand-year-old tomb.

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.

Leviathump and Thing

It rained today, all day, and the streets of Vanister became little more than rivers of mud. The children of the town had a marvelous time playing in them. Their parents were not quite so happy.

I spent the day in the Museum again. There has still been no sign of Professor Flanderdrack since he disappeared into the building two days ago; as slim as the chances of finding anything in the Vanister Museum are, I was still hoping I might run into him. I didn't.

What I did find was a small room, probably a former washroom or the bottom of a stairwell, with only one thing in it. On a crate in the middle of the room sat a complex little clockwork thing, a bit like a cross between a typewriter and a crab. Its label said simply, "Thing." That was all. The room was otherwise empty except for a little bowl for the dust-mice, which was filling up with the rain that dripped down the narrow window.

(As huge a building as it is, it would be impossible for the curators to keep the Museum clean. They can't even find all the rooms in it. Instead, it's swept and dusted by omnivorous dust-mice (some of the only wild rodents in Hamjamser that people actually encourage to live in their houses). They come out every night to sweep up dust with their tails - which are so fluffy that they look bigger than the mice themselves - and eat it. They live on nothing else; dust and water are all they need. The downspouts on the Museum's many roofs are linked to small basins in each room to provide water for them.)

The room had the usual little brass nameplate, which proclaimed it the "Leviathump," so it wasn't undiscovered. The curator who discovered it simply hadn't done much with it. I still don't know whether the Thing was called that because no one knew what it was, or because no one had bothered to find out, or because that was actually its name. I probably never will know.

I assume it was my footsteps on the floor that woke it up. When I looked later, mine were the only footprints in the dust on the floor - the dust-mice apparently avoided the room, which made the forlorn little water-basin seem rather sad - so no one else had entered it in quite a while. For whatever reason, when I got within three feet of the Thing, it started moving. There was a click, then a tight little chorus of clinking gears, and it raised itself on eight metal legs (made, I think, of dismantled scissors) and began to dig its way through the crate.

I can't think of another word for it. It simply dug into the wooden slats, using three or four little brass shovel attachments, and scooped out slivers of wood. They clattered on the floorboards on either side. Within a few seconds, it had dug straight through the top of the crate and climbed inside.

Cautiously, in case the Thing climbed back out, I leaned over and looked through the hole in the crate. A few slivers of rain-soaked light leaked through the spaces in the side. I could see small flashes of polished metal pieces moving in the darkness. The sound of wood being scooped away like ice cream filled the little box, then suddenly stopped; the glints of light folded themselves downward and vanished.

I waited for a good two minutes before I moved the crate.

Below it, there was a neat, round hole in the floorboards. For some reason known probably only to Mister Creemer, the space beneath them was filled with layers of embroidered carpet. These had been cut neatly away as well. Below them was empty space. The darkness was filled with the muffled clicking of a multitude of surreptitious clockwork.

I backed away from the hole then, wondering where exactly there was an unlit room full of moving machinery in the Vanister Museum, and went to the window to see if there was another one below it. I was surprised to find that the room was now on the ground floor. It had been on the third when I found it. When I went back to the hole, there was nothing below it but dirt. The room had moved.

I'm still not sure what the Thing was. Perhaps it was some sort of sentry, posted to warn the other Things when someone found the room above theirs. That seems rather pointless, though, as I would never have found the dark room if the Thing hadn't burrowed into it. Perhaps something in it had jammed, and it took just the vibration of my feet on the floor to loosen it and let it make its way home. Perhaps it just wanted to be alone, and I interrupted it, or frightened it, or woke it up. I doubt I'll ever know.

I put the crate back before I left. The label saying "Thing" now appears to refer to a hole in the floor. If future visitors to the Leviathump find that confusing, they won't be the first.

Rats

I was sitting in the Train station in Jiligamant today, having visited the clockwork market that shows up in the town's main square every so often. Jiligamant is inhabited nearly entirely by mice and rats, who make some of the best clockwork in existence. No one else is better at tiny details.

Of course, having been a center of rodent culture for generations, it's not just the small mice and rats that live in Jiligamant. There are rodents of all kinds - squirrels, capybaras, chinchillas, three-legged gerboas, and probably a lot more that I don't know about. Even the town's humanoid inhabitants look rather rodent-like. There are winged mice the size of bumblebees and a clan of rats the size of hippopotami, who live in what used to be the town's sewers. Jiligamant has six or seven layers of sewers altogether; being a town of rodents, the pipes always have rats living in them, even when they're in use. The rats in the working sewers gradually dry out and brick up parts of them to make houses. This inevitably causes the whole sewer system to back up and stop working, at which point the town builds another one underneath it. Only a sixth of Jiligamant is above ground. The giant rats, who are as close to nobility as you'll find in Jiligamant, have the whole top level - the original sewers - more or less to themselves.

Anyway. I was sitting in the Train station, eating my lunch (some sort of grain thing from a food stall in the market) and waiting for the Train to finish exchanging a boxcar of seeds for a boxcar of clockwork pipe crawlers. A crate of pipe crawlers had, apparently, not been switched off or properly sealed; they were making things rather interesting for the loading crews when a tall gray rat in a blue frock coat came and sat down next to me.

"Morning," he said. It was four in the afternoon. "You ever been to Pickerell's Peak?"

I hadn't, and said so.

"Well, don't." He was quite emphatic. "Nothing there but fir trees and loonies. I was sitting at the Train station there, that little one that looks like an umbrella and never has anyone in it, just sitting there and minding my own business when a lizard in a tuxedo comes along the tracks and says to me, 'have you seen a house around here?' Now, if you'd been to Pickerell you'd know there's not a house within six miles of the station, not even a lean-to, so I gave him the look I give ceiling salesmen and said that if there'd been a house then I'd missed it. So he said fine, he'd wait, and I'll be flanneled if he didn't sit down there and wait! For a house!

"So I sat there with him and ate my lunch, and asked him if he wanted any, but he said he was allergic to cheese, said it made him grow fur, so I said what's wrong with a bit of fur then, and he said that he had nothing against fur but only in the Wintertime. In the Wintertime, he said, he ate cheese until he was so fluffy you could hardly see him.

"Well, I couldn't think of anything to say after that, so I just sat there and ate my lunch. Me waiting for my Train and him waiting for his house. And I'd just said to myself, well, he'll be waiting here a lot longer than I will, when there's a clattering noise off along the tracks, and around the corner comes a house. A house. Perfectly ordinary, the kind you see in Tazramack or anywhere, four stories high and one room wide. It was blue with dormer windows. Had those little fiddly bricks on the chimney. And it was walking, I tell you, just walking along on four great planking feet made all of boards. I could see the nails sticking out of the knees. And it walked right along the tracks, making a racket like you wouldn't believe, and settled down right in front of the station like a big dog, so that its little front porch was level with the platform. And you know what that lizard said? He said, 'my house appears to have arrived at me. Good day to you.' And his house stood there, calm as a horse, while he walked up to the front door and went right in. And then it stood up again on its feet - it had knobs on its toes like on a banister - and it clattered off along the tracks until I couldn't see it anymore. And what I say is, anyone who lives in a house that bounces like that can't have many dishes left by now. I mean, honestly, is it too much to ask for a man to sit and eat his lunch in peace? Why does every loony in the Railway Regions have to come and sit next to me?"

I nodded sympathetically. He gave me a suspicious look at that, stood up, and hurried away without another word.

I could have asked him the same question. Somehow, though, I doubt he'd have taken it well.

Rodent Invasion

The bakery near the hotel had been having trouble with mice in the basement recently. They'd been chewing open crates, taking food, and generally making a mess of everything. The traps the restaurant owner set out had all disappeared. No one had even seen the mice.

Finally, frustrated to the limit of his patience, the owner decided to stay awake in the basement all night. If the mice came, maybe he'd be able to tell why they were so hard to get rid of; if they didn't, well, he'd know he could hire someone to sit in the basement every night as a last resort.

As it turned out, the mice did come... sort of. The owner was kind enough to show me the photograph he had taken before running back upstairs as fast as he possibly could.


He still hasn't managed to catch it yet. It might take a bit longer than he expected.