Songs from a Photograph

It's interesting to see the direction that one's thoughts take while indulging in a bit of light convalescence.

After our encounter with the Painted Ones, I spent several days comfortably ensconced in the shade of Chak's wagon, staring at the blank silk canvas of its roof while I waited for my stressed and overheated brain to cool down. What I found it doing, in the meantime, was attempting to recite the entirety of Away from April from memory.

The original play - a rare departure in genre by the great Trachia Ghastie, better known for her murder mysteries - is famous in the realm of theatre for containing no actual events of any kind. The cast is an extended family gathered to sit for an old-fashioned long-exposure family photograph. All of the dialogue in the play is, in fact, the internal monologues of the various family members; their inner selves are free to move about the stage and speak, while the physical bodies of everyone not currently in the spotlight remain silent and stone-faced in their seats. Over the course of the play, the members of the family come to various realizations (singly or in tandem) about each other, themselves, and the nature of reality, all without actually moving a muscle or speaking a single word out loud to each other.

It is, like most of Ms. Ghastie's best-known work, a brilliant piece of psychological drama. That, and the solos-and-duets method in which it is performed, made it perhaps inevitable that it would eventually be adapted into a musical - in this case, by the equally brilliant Temesh Pondshine. The songs of the musical adaptation, in which the characters find their own thoughts taking them to unexpected places and providing unknowing counterpoint to the thoughts of their relatives, are among Pondshine's best.

My own knowledge of the show (aside from those few songs that one hears frequently from music halls and street performers, such as On the Other Hand and Where Have All the Nothings Gone) is thanks entirely to an amateur theatre production in Leopard's Weskit, a small town in the Mountainous Plains.

The quality of the production was nowhere near a professional level; the stage was the back half of a local ice cream shop,* not a single costume was the correct size, and the orchestra was a single elderly pianist who somehow contrived to play three keyboards at the same time. (I believe she had remarkably prehensile toes.) Still, it was clear that the cast and crew loved the show dearly, and they gave it their entire hearts, untrained as they might have been. It remains in my memory as one of the better stage performances I've seen.

I was lucky enough to be commissioned to paint the show's one solitary backdrop, a sepia-toned drawing room with a frame around it. (The director had the clever idea to stage the show as the photograph itself; through the use of colored lights, all of the seated actors were made to look sepia-toned as well, only coming into living color when they left the photograph and came downstage to sing.) As space was limited, I was also lucky enough to find myself painting the backdrop in the shop during rehearsals, with the happy result that I had the show entirely memorized before opening night. This did not, of course, prevent me from applauding from a front-row seat during the performance, though the director flatly refused to allow me to pay for a ticket.

I'd forgotten many of the songs since then, but I was glad, during my recovery in Chak's wagon, to find - with a little of that peculiar not-quite-looking-at-it approach that one uses to gently reel in half-forgotten dreams and memories - that most of them came back to me more or less complete.

I'm glad to have them back in the repertoire of music that I sing to myself while traveling alone (or, on occasion, with a musically inclined companion or two). A good song makes any road shorter.

---

* Named the Tasty Snowman and run by a former manatee trainer and his husband, the shop was well-loved for their charmingly twisted sense of humor (their sign proclaimed that their ice cream was "Served from the Heart!" and featured a snowman cheerfully taking a scoop of ice cream out of his own sternum) and their accidental success, on precisely one occasion, in creating nostalgia-flavored ice cream. Any residents in town fortunate enough to have gotten a taste were eager to reminisce about it to me at length - although none of them were able to describe how, exactly, nostalgia tasted, except that it was "a little too sweet, but in a good way." The shop was the most-visited business in town for six days, after which the single batch of nostalgia ice cream ran out. Subsequent attempts to recreate the flavor were uniformly unsuccessful. Most residents agreed, in retrospect, that this was entirely fitting.

A Different Kind of Voice

During our time in the face-speakers' village, we never did manage to even begin speaking the village's language, nor they ours. We lacked color-shifting abilities of any kind; they appeared to be completely mute. The only sound we ever heard them make was a soft pop of the lips - which was not so much a word as a signal for attention, asking those nearby to turn and read the speaker's face.

Nevertheless, my three companions and I managed to communicate well enough, by gesture and expression, to make do for a few days. We were all grateful for the chance to rest. To be honest, we also might have been somewhat reluctant to venture back into the wild after the circumstances under which we had left it. A brush with death, however brief, tends to make one more appreciative of safe places for a while.

At one point, we even got to help with the harvest. I'm not sure what the season was in the Golden Desert at that time, or even if that particular part of it has any seasons that I would recognize. For all I know, the rainbow-faced villagers might harvest constantly all year.

Most of the harvesting - like everything else they did - happened at night. Like many nocturnal people, they didn't appear to actually need light to see, other than that of the moon and stars. The fires in their houses were only for heat and cooking. I never saw them eat meat of any kind. Their main sources of food seemed to be drought-wheat, which they grew in vast, dry fields of sand around the village, and a sort of fruit-like green tuber - like a hybrid of potato and zucchini - that grew under the wet sand of the village's oasis. This was what we had eaten in the soup on the night of our arrival. The name of the vegetable was a green oval with a sort of golden twizzle inside, which was actually a fairly accurate representation of the way it tasted. The villagers harvested it with long, spoon-like implements. They would walk around, stamping on the wet sand until they found a spot that felt somehow different. I never was sure exactly how they knew one of the vegetables was below. Once they had found it, they would dig their spoon into the sand and pull back on its long handle, scooping the vegetable out of the sand and high into the air. The children, lacking the necessary weight and upper-body strength for this task, instead ran around with baskets and caught the vegetables as they fell from the sky.

Upon realizing that we wanted to help, the villagers found a few spare spoons somewhere and let us try. We achieved nothing like the same level of skill, but the villagers' silent laughter at our efforts was good-natured enough.

No ordinary settlement in the Golden Desert can exist without a water source. The village's oasis was relatively small - hence their reliance on drought-wheat, a crop which seems to be able to survive on nothing more than vague rumors that there might be water somewhere nearby.

The resident aquifrax was… unusual, to say the least.

The water spirit seemed to spend most of its time making ice sculptures. It was rather prolific, actually. I can't imagine how much energy it must have taken to freeze so much water in the middle of the Golden Desert. Perhaps that's why it had left its oasis so small - or perhaps it simply preferred it that way. The motivations of spirits are rarely easy for mortals to understand, especially the more eccentric ones.

Most of the ice sculptures seemed to be sea creatures - the fantastic variety, like those drawn by illustrators who have never visited the ocean and have to rely on verbal descriptions of beasts they've never seen. One of the sculptures might have been an octopus. Another resembled a dolphin, or perhaps one of the sleeker varieties of beetlebrow fish. It was difficult to tell, anyway; we could only see them clearly during the day, and they always started melting long before sunrise. By noon, nothing was left but sad little lumps of ice bobbing in the lukewarm water. The only exception was a particularly massive sculpture - possibly a whale or a dire manatee - that lasted a full day and a half, though it more closely resembled a horribly ill blowfish by the second day.

We never saw the aquifrax, of course. Most of the life in the Golden Desert could not exist without their work, but the spirits themselves - like most spirits - rarely show themselves in person.

Perhaps my favorite part of our time in the village, though, was the music. Most of what we heard at first was simple and percussive. Workers in the drought-wheat fields, for example, would keep up a steady rhythm by plucking their toenails with their neighboring toes. (I managed to duplicate the technique myself, though with far less volume.) A whole team of workers could achieve a fairly complex rhythm this way. Still, for several days, this appeared to be all the music the village had. There was certainly no kind of singing.

We were somewhat surprised, on the third night, when the villagers brought out a couple of string instruments and something like a stone xylophone and proceeded to play music in a circle around the oasis. There were only three or four instruments - like the hybrid offspring of a banjo and a harp, no two alike - which the villagers passed around between themselves. Nearly everyone seemed able to play them, though their skill varied. I didn't recognize any of the tunes they played. Many of them were accompanied by rhythmic light shows on the musicians' faces; these were songs with words, apparently, even if I couldn't hear them. The instruments made their slow way around the oasis. When Red-Streaks-On-Yellow had finished playing, he or she hesitated before passing the instrument to me, uncertain of whether or not I could play it.

I couldn't, of course. Instead, I stood up and sang.

It was nothing particularly impressive - just a rendition of "Factory Fool" by Rango Tress. It's a song with a strong rhythm, which seemed to be a major part of the villagers' music, and its melody sounds good in my baritone range.

When I started, all the villagers froze and stared at me, motionless. I'm not actually sure if they had ever heard singing before. I began to be a little nervous when they hadn't moved by the end of the first verse.

Halfway through the second verse, they started to join in.

It was just a simple clap at first - one of our hosts' children, I believe, though I confess that I couldn't tell most of the children apart. A few others took it up as well. Someone started embroidering the rhythm a little. By the end of the third verse, I felt as if I was providing the melody for an entire Thiglian drum circle. It was amazing how many different sounds the villagers could achieve with just their palms and fingers (the rest of their bodies being far too fluffy for percussive purposes). I finished to wild applause.

My three companions received much the same response. Karlishek chose a skittering patter-song from Sham-Tarkazia, which gave the villagers all sorts of challenging rhythms to keep up with. Mirenza sang a thousand-year-old drinking song - evidently not at all worn out by age - which had everyone clapping and silently laughing, even though no one understood the words. Garnet surprised us all with a haunting song about coyotes (they're called feyul in the Golden Desert) that sent chills down my spine.

No one clapped through that one; it didn't need it. Instead, we were surprised again by the occasional clear, ringing note from the half-formed ice sculptures in the oasis. The aquifrax had decided to join in.

We left the village the night after that, feeling much more at peace than we had before our arrival. We said our goodbyes at sundown. The villagers - those who were up that early, at least - stopped what they were doing to give us a parting gift of dried tubers and drought-wheat crackers* and kiss us goodbye on our strangely wordless cheeks. We were sad to leave them; they had been the best possible hosts.

As we were walking away from the village, we heard a single stringed instrument taking up the melody of the song I had sung. It made good music for walking. I kept humming it long after the village was too far away to hear.



* The baker has yet to be born who can turn drought-wheat into anything as moist as, say, flatbread.

Word-Plague

It has been an interesting couple of months in the town of Arkit.

The first sign of the word-plague was when the clockwork pipe crawlers began to literally tie the town's plumbing in knots. This happens occasionally, even with healthy pipe crawlers; it is usually a sign that they are bored, or that some set of instructions was not clear enough. As fine as their metal and crystal workings are, clockwork pipe crawlers are essentially simple creatures. They are capable of following simple instructions and very little else. This is why they so often end up assigned to plumbing repair.

The pipe crawlers' trainers inspected their notes, but they found nothing that could have led to this sort of behavior. What was more, further instructions to the pipe crawlers changed nothing.

This was cause for alarm. No one wants a repeat of the construction of Bratakar, where the bricklaying pipe crawlers stopped responding to instructions and built neat foundations across half the town before someone realized that a misinterpreted command had led them all to turn off their eyes. Arkit's pipe crawler trainers immediately went to work, testing the little machines for every error they've been known to encounter. Still, nothing worked.

This, incidentally, was when the town's schoolteacher began to notice an unusually high number of spelling errors in her pupils' writing. No one took much notice of this at the time.

Over the next few weeks, the pipe crawlers' behavior grew steadily more erratic. Some continued to fix pipes, though many of them fixed them in wild and fantastic shapes more suited to a sculpture museum than to plumbing. Others wandered farther from their assigned tasks, obsessively polishing a single length of pipe, or cutting faucets into careful slices with their metal-cutting tools. (This was when the trainers removed all the heavy-duty tools from the crawlers.) Yet other pipe crawlers wandered off into the town's underground, only to show up later rearranging tableware or carving endless hatch marks into stone walls.

The spelling errors continued to proliferate as well. Several of the town's accountants began to quietly wonder if they were going mad.

Then came the fateful day when every piece of writing in the town spontaneously translated itself into an old and obscure dialect of Halsi. That was when it became clear to everyone that this was not a mere mechanical problem, but some kind of linguistic plague. Spoken words remained unaffected, to the great relief of everyone in the town; the written ones were another story - literally, in some cases. My collection of ambiguous novels briefly opened their pages full of gibberish, then went blank, possibly out of self-defense. I was afraid that they had simply lost their voices and would remain blank forever.

The Halsi lasted only another day or two before Arkit's writing made its final descent into raving alphabet soup. It was not just novels anymore. Every letter had become ambiguous.

It was a great relief when the linguist-philosophers arrived.

The town's fastest flier, a bat-winged girl named Hatraskee, had packed a supply of food and water and taken off across the Desert to fetch them the day the words went bad. The linguist-philosophers traveled quickly and arrived before the town, deprived of written language, could descend into complete chaos. Fortunately, Arkit has never been an exceptionally literate place. If this had happened in a library city like Karkafel, the effects could have taken years for them to fix.

They came armed with glyphs and scrolls, thesauri and syllabaries, imperious tomes of grammar and punctuation - all the tools and weapons of an elite linguist-philosopher. They had dictionaries in a dozen languages. They had powerful epigrams and couplets, engraved in steel and fortified with many layers of rhymes. The largest of them carried stone tablets with carefully worded runes carved an inch deep. Nothing was going to change those words.

I really have no idea what all of this equipment was for. It was quite impressive, though, and whatever they did with it, it worked. Within three days, they had sorted the town's letters back into their separate alphabets; within six, they had corralled them back into languages. A further two weeks of constant writing and chanting finally forced the words back to their proper places. It was quite something to watch, too - the elaborately equipped linguist-philosophers often stood in the middle of the town square, chanting at the tops of their lungs while they did graceful and dramatic calligraphy, weaving a net of words to catch the town's wayward language. Quite a lot of the townspeople found that they had pressing business in the square on those days. Some of them stayed all afternoon.

If they ever get tired of language repair, I think the linguist-philosophers could have quite the career in theater. Whether the performance was really necessary, or whether they simply had a flair for the dramatic, I don't know - but the success of their work was undeniable. It was a great relief when the words of the town's ledgers and record books (and my own ambiguous novels) finally settled back into their familiar order. If there was a comma out of place here and there, no one complained.

Accompanying the linguist-philosophers was an expert on Hill Builder technology (as much as such a thing exists). Her job was to fix the pipe crawlers. Whatever language it is - if any - that flows through the crystal brain of a pipe crawler, it is quite different from the ones used by speaking creatures. The mechanic's task was to determine if the pipe crawlers' madness and the word-plague were the same thing, and if so, if the linguist-philosophers had cured the source of the problem or only a symptom.

I heard much less about this process. The details of machinery are as opaque to me as those of linguistic epidemiology, and the mechanic's work was much quieter than that of the linguist-philosophers. Most of it took place indoors and underground. I got the impression that she found all the noise somewhat irritating. Whatever the details, though, within another week, the pipe crawlers were back to making straightforward, functional repairs with no trace of the madness they had shown a month earlier.

Several of their more creative work, however, was sent to the museum in Hemrikath. Art is art, after all. Being made by machines or the mad does nothing to change that.

Market Street, Day 4: the Singing Huntresses

These two looked like an interesting pair. I could hear them laughing from across the street (one of them, anyway). I introduced myself, and they agreed to let me draw them if I bought them another round of drinks.

Their names are Emiline and Katal. Emiline was drinking green tea with mint; Katal had something that steamed and turned the table black when it spilled out of her mug. They were in good spirits and talked while I drew. Emiline says she grew up in Ganraminga, a coastal city in Minann, just far enough from Mollogou to stay intact. It's a city of mist and elegant manners. Katal told me a long, detailed story about how she was raised by wolves on the Scalps, and how she left when she realized she was bigger and stronger than any of them. About twenty minutes later, she told me another story about how she was raised by shark-riding bandits on the Mandible Coast. An hour after that, it was sky-monkeys in the floating jungles.

The two of them make their living by traveling across the plains, hunting and singing ballads. There wasn't much hunting to be done in town, but I did get to hear them sing in the inn this evening. They say people are often surprised to find that both of them are equally skilled at hunting and singing. Katal has a lovely alto voice, sweet and clear between her fangs, and as delicate as Emiline looks, she's apparently rather deadly with her bow. It's almost as tall as she is.

There's a lot of space on the Scalps. Of all the creatures that cross them - thunderbeast, rainwalkers, candlegiraffes, wild horses, lightning hyenas - very few ever come within sight of a town. Katal and Emiline say they find some creature no one's ever heard of on almost every trip they take. This month, it was a strange elephantoid beast with multiple tusks; they grow in rows out of its mouth, curling up and over its head in ranks, like a second ribcage. There's a whole herd of them on the plains. The two huntresses caught "the best one" and brought it back to the Museum of Natural Philosophy in SuyMaTmakk, where it will probably spend the next month being cleaned by carrion beetles and then stuffed. It took the huntresses two weeks to drag it back on a wagon. This is what they were celebrating when I met them.

At this time of year, though, they mostly hunt thunderbeast and speckled antelope. Katal seemed to be wearing most of an antelope already; she wore one of the speckled skins as a dress and several particularly interesting bones around her neck. One of the songs the two of them sang this evening comes from the Scalps, and they performed it the traditional way, with drums made of antelope skulls. The clack of bone went perfectly with the clattering Hmakk words.

The songs came from all over Hamjamser. There were sea shanties, hop-fugues from Kennyrubin, lightning-fast breakdowns from the Railway Regions, arzenroyds with chords that made the silverware vibrate. I recognized love songs (frequently estimated to be half of the music ever written) in at least five different languages. They sang a few hymns, a cappella; the harmonies were breathtaking. They even sang the Saga of Neinrak, one of those bleak Northern song-tales of ice and revenge. It takes half an hour and leaves every character dead. They had the entire room spellbound by the third verse; by the eighth, we were joining in for the choruses (there are five different ones, each repeated throughout the saga). By the sixteenth verse, most of us were too choked up by the story to trust our voices anymore. It took several patter-songs and ironic ballads before anyone could smile again.

While they sang, I touched up the paint on Emiline's quiver. It had gotten scratched while she was wrestling a cathomar in the foothills of the Railway Regions. Though she's modest about it, Emiline has trained rather extensively in the kinds of martial arts that let you toss around creatures five times your size. She's the only person I've met who's chosen the contest of strength - usually the least popular of a cathomar's traditional three choices - and one of the only ones I've even heard of who's actually won it. The cathomar must have been quite surprised.

Some of my favorite songs were the ones from Mollogou, crooked melodies with strange, metallic chords. Katal's instrument is called a trangaban; it's an enormous stringed thing, like a five-foot banjo made of steel. It looks like she occasionally uses it as a club (presumably when her actual iron hunting club isn't handy). For the Mollogou songs, she played the trangaban with a pair of tin spoons, producing a sound somewhere between a steel drum and a dulcimer. Emiline plays the soolian, a relative of the clarinet. It has a flared opening carved to look like a dragon's head. The two of them showed exactly how good they were with their instruments when they performed a traditional haknit from SuyMaTmakk; soolian and trangaban skittered up and down the scale, forming complex, glittering harmonies with Katal's powerful voice. The angry words of the haknit would have been slightly more convincing if they hadn't been grinning so widely the whole time.

The Burning Man

Today, I was woken at sunrise by horrific screaming. I stumbled to the window, certain that someone was being murdered outside.

The street proved to have a distinct shortage of death. People were walking around and nodding to each other. No one seemed to notice the screaming, though I didn't see them trying to talk either. I doubt anyone could have heard.

The flames I'd glimpsed last night came to mind. Maybe this was just one of those towns where fire and screaming were considered unremarkable. I usually try to avoid those. They're quite rare, fortunately, but it's not always easy to tell when you've found one. I had nearly made up my mind to sneak out quietly, before anyone noticed me, when I happened to see the source of the screaming. It was a little gray bird, about the size and color of a mouse, which sat on a fence post and screamed as if it was being eaten alive. It seemed far too small to have a voice like that. Occasionally, it stopped to sneeze or preen its feathers.

I gave up trying to sleep and went outside instead.

Twokk is a fairly small town, so it was easy to find my way to the center (which was lucky, as I couldn't have heard anyone if I'd asked for directions). There was a man there. He was sitting in the middle of the town square, and he was on fire.

This seemed like the sort of situation that might warrant screaming, but everyone in sight seemed as unconcerned as ever. Several people stood with buckets next to a trough of water. I assumed there were there in case anything else caught fire. They watched the burning man idly, looking almost bored.

"Er… does this happen often?" I asked one of them.

She shrugged. "Usually he only does it once every few months, but there's been a drought lately."

I had been under the impression that droughts were normally a reason not to light fires in the middle of town.

"Normally, yes." The woman took the piece of wood she'd been whittling, eyed it critically, turned it around, and stuck it back in her mouth. I tried not to stare. I can't recall ever meeting someone who could carve wood with her teeth and talk at the same time. "Not in his case. He does this to end droughts, apparently. Something about taking the dry thoughts and burning them away. When he wakes up, he won't even remember there was a drought unless we tell him. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but I've seen it rain after his little bonfires often enough. Whatever he's doing, it works. Besides, the salamanders like it."

I looked closer then, trying to see through the flames. The man was sitting in what looked like meditation - one of those poses that requires minimal use of muscles to maintain. The flames rose from every inch of his body, bright and roaring, as if he was made of dry wood. I could feel the waves of heat blowing from him.* His eyes were closed; his face was peaceful, completely unmarked by the fire.

He was also covered with salamanders. They perched on his head and shoulders, sat around his feet, and clung gecko-style to his bare chest. My own salamander seemed agitated, so I let it join them. It climbed into the flames and settled down on a heap of other salamanders on the man's foot.

Maybe salamanders like the taste of dry thoughts.

One of the other bucket-holders checked a pocket watch. "You showed up just in time. He's been going for almost a whole day now. Can't be much longer."

"Usually, he remembers to take his clothes off first." The whittler pointed to the ground around the man. It was covered with a thin layer of ash and a few half-melted buttons. "Not this time."

"Hmm." The man with the watch put it back in his pocket. "Pity. That was a nice shirt."

We talked for maybe ten minutes or so. The screaming had stopped by then. The bird, I found out, is called a throkelit skeee, which literally means "shriek of death." They're found only in a very small region of the Scalps. Thank goodness. Apparently, the shrieking is a mating call; females are attracted to the males with the most bloodcurdling screams. They occasionally get confused and mob the heroines (sometimes the heros) of particularly melodramatic traveling plays.

We were comparing the plot of "Death in a handbag" (the dialogue in the Hmakk translation is apparently a bit more… explicit… than Trachia Ghastie's original script) to that of "The Perils of Pulgreen" (one of the few plays with an ogre as the heroine) when the burning man woke up. His eyes were wide and golden. Steam hissed as the fire vaporized the water on them. He didn't seem to care.

The fire died down gradually as he sat there, as did the conversation. He looked strangely naked without the coat of flames. (Technically, he was, but since he was a reptile, no one cared.) His scales were orange and yellow, speckled here and there with the intense blue of a fire's heart. I could just make out the shape of clothing silhouetted on him in soot. Other than the ash on the ground, that was all that was left. He got up, stretched, and gave everyone a vague smile.

"My, it's hot out here, isn't it?" he said.

No one seemed to have an answer to this.

A cool breeze wafted in as he spoke, carrying the scent of rain. His smile widened. "Oh. Never mind."

With that, he turned and walked away, shedding salamanders as he went. The rain swept in a few minutes later. Everyone ran to gather their own salamanders, or their children who had been watching the show, and disappeared into various houses. The extinguished man disappeared in a cloud of his own steam. The raindrops sizzled and vanished when they touched his skin. It rained until nightfall, and I spent the rest of the day inside, illustrating the inn's menus.

I never did find out his name.

* It was early, after all. The morning air was barely hot enough to melt candles.

Bringing the House Down

Wherever I go, I try to see at least one local performance. I don't particularly care what it is. I love music and the theater, and I never cease to be amazed at how different it is in every town. The musical I saw in Tetravania was Conrad Owle's "Obfuscation." It's about the Doff of Gelfizzy, the ruler of a small country, who is searching for something and fleeing from someone else. What and who depends on which performance you see. The Doff is played by a different actor or actress in every scene; he or she is identified by his or her hat.

Like most Tetravanian theater, the script is debatable. The basic plot and a given actor's favorite lines can generally be relied on, but there are no set entrances or exits. People go on or off stage, start or stop singing, whenever they feel like it. The rest are expected to improvise accordingly.* As a result, the story and music are different at every performance.

The costumes are done in a similar way. The cast members add or subtract bits and pieces whenever they want. On one night, one of the Troglodyte Duchesses in act two came onstage wearing a massive horsetail wig, in a shocking shade of blue, that hung down to her knees. Something about it delighted the live cicadas that were onstage for musical accompaniment in that scene. Fifteen of them ended up on her head by the end of the number.

The only absolute rule, as far as I can tell, is that no one is allowed to steal someone else's lines; if you want to do something outside the script, you have to make it up yourself. Other than that, many productions end up being theatrical free-for-alls. Most playwrights in Tetravania don't even bother to specify a main character. The stars are the ones who can upstage everyone else.

I never got to see the end of the play. "Obfuscation" does have an official main character, but that doesn't keep all the others from trying to steal every scene. Halfway through the last act, the Dowager Waitress came out in a four-foot pompadour wig that she had set on fire. The somewhat panicked improvisations that followed from the rest of the cast were some of the best parts of the entire musical. Unfortunately, the Dowager Waitress's wig then set the curtain on fire, at which the theater was quickly evacuated while the stagehands rushed to douse the flames with snuffer squids.

The musical closed a few days later. It seems to be generally accepted in Tetravania that when the actors start setting the stage on fire, the play has run long enough.



*The success of this method varies depending on the skill and quick thinking of the actors. The less skilled actors in Tetravania, unable to think quite as well on their feet as the rest, generally cultivate an expression of dumbfounded astonishment to give themselves time to think while the audience laughs. Lower-quality Tetravanian theater companies can sometimes double the length of a play with the sheer number of astonished pauses. Naturally, someone has taken advantage of this situation; "The Somnambulist," a play by the multitalented Rhem S. Trupelo, consists entirely of astonished pauses as various cast members enter the stage in increasingly ridiculous outfits. The play has no dialogue whatsoever.

Hollowane

This October, I happened to be in Golgoolian on Hollowane Night. I'm glad I was. The city throws itself into the holiday with more enthusiasm than anywhere else I've ever been.

Hollowane is the night of illusions, when everyone tries to look as strange as possible in the hopes of getting candy. Half the people in the city dress up and go out onto the streets; the other half dress up and stay home to feed the random strangers at their door. There are chocolates and candied fruit and muffins wherever you look, lollipops and peppermints and sugar beetles, berries and bonbons, fruit jewels and candymoss and the little spiral pastries called Shwamp shnails. The bakeries, fruit stalls, and sweet shops of Golgoolian are nearly emptied for Hollowane.

I wasn't out to get candy (I took what people in the crowd gave me, but that's all I want to carry), and I didn't have anywhere to give it out from, so I mostly just walked around the city. I wandered through Golgoolian all night. There were people and things everywhere, walking and eating and singing at the slightest provocation.

Practically everyone in Golgoolian is in costume on Hollowane. They mismatch their clothes, paint their skin and scales and fur, and hang curtains from their antlers. Groups of courtiers trade masks of their own faces and become each other for the night. Acrobats walk on their hands and put sock puppets on their feet. A few of the people in the crowd actually had two heads; others were two people sharing a costume. A spiny reptile had stuck fruit and vegetables on every spike - onions, turnips, squash, and a small cherry on the tip of his nose. A large samoval had rubbed something into his fur that made him glow pale blue all over. One... something... seemed to have covered itself with most of a hillside. It shed dirt in clumps as it walked. Grass covered its back and shoulders, pebbles dotted it like scales, and a small tree was growing out of its head. Someone else was wearing an outfit of creased leather that, in the dark, looked exactly like the wooden skin of a Drae. There were blue eyes behind the dark knotholes.

Golgoolian has more costume makers than anywhere else in the Railway Regions. They spend all year getting ready for that one night. The makers of wigs and artificial tails (a common sight in any city or medium-sized town) serve a steady stream of the bald and unentailed all year, but they still do more business in October than in all the other months together.

All over the city, the toads were dancing in the sinkhole gardens. It was like...

Well...

I can't explain it. If you've never seen a toad dancing, no amount of description can possibly tell you what it's like.

The moons were full. The moons are always full on Hollowane. It's a tradition. A group from the Lupine Astronomers' Guild had decided to come to Golgoolian for the celebrations, and the streets were full of grinning, hairy shapes. Some looked like ordinary people of canine ancestry; others looked like wolves, or large dogs, or massive hulks of teeth and bristles half-glimpsed in the darkness. The crowds of big furry stargazers added something to the celebration, a sort of intense canine happiness that seems to follow them wherever they go. Everything's more fun with werewolves.

They would stop every now and then, as if on cue, to howl hauntingly at the moons. Several of them had started doing four-part harmony and jazz improvisations by the end of the night.

Hollowane is the one night when shapeshifters all over Hamjamser (full shapeshifters, not their half-malleable descendants, like the werewolves or myself) get to show what they're really capable of doing. They can walk the streets undisguised, in all their frilled, multicolored, glittering glory, each one completely different from the others and many different from one moment to the next. If anyone recognizes them, they can always say that it was just a costume.

The people of Golgoolian also believe that on Hollowane, the things that live under the city come out to join the celebration. No one is sure exactly what the things under the city are, but almost everyone is sure that they're there. All that space has to have something in it. There are tales of mole-people, of albino alligators, of earthworms bigger than the Train and mud that writes poetry. You can find all of those on the streets during Hollowane. They're part of the city's mythology. It's anyone's guess how many of them are people in costumes.

As if that weren't enough, every ghost in Hamjamser gets stronger on Hollowane night. They refuse to be overshadowed by real people. No one is sure why. Some ghosts have even been known to leave their usual routines for the night, doing something new instead of the one thing they've been echoing for years or centuries. Three years ago, the ghostly actors in Tazramack stopped halfway through "Without the Dragon," the show they've been repeating since their deaths, and instead launched into an impromptu performance of "The Importance of Being Hairy," a comedy by the brilliant Worsel Acid. According to the audience (the theater allows a larger one than usual on Hollowane, due to the temporary amplification of the ghosts), they put on a splendid show. Scofferell Flint and Giacomo Cargellini even managed to acquire a plate of ghostly muffins for one scene. It's never happened again.

There are a lot of ghosts in a city as large as Golgoolian. In the dark, it's hard to tell them apart from real people.

For quite a lot of people, including me, that's the most exciting thing about Hollowane: the people out on the streets could be anyone or anything. There are a lot of strange and wonderful things in Hamjamser that stay hidden all year. Some of them are frightening; others, like shapeshifters, are just a little too interesting for their own good. Hollowane is a chance for them all to come out of hiding. By the next day, the shapeshifters have returned to their disguises; the troglodytes have gone back underground; the werewolves have returned to their observatory on Mount Moler. The ghosts fade. The clandestine androids cover themselves once again with artificial skin and rubber muscles. The world goes back to normal, or at least a very convincing imitation of it.

For many people, Hollowane is a chance to dress up as something else. For others, it's a chance to be entirely themselves, if only for a single night.

The Show Must Go On

The Tazramack Theater's production of "Without the Dragon" is thought by most to be the greatest performance of the greatest musical ever written. It was certainly the best one Robwell Dandewyre ever wrote, and the cast was incredible: Lirabel Dan Rega as Florith, Elbert Mythosteling as the Great Eagle, Scofferell Flint as Sir Mumberly, and - of course - the incomparable Giacomo Cargellini as Hadrion (not to mention Ilsa Denderfuge, Ton Tovl, Mysengard Ranchendraffle, Sessian Eyen, and Harkerell Fleen in the supporting cast). The story was enthralling. The music was overpowering. The cast was perfect, the costumes lavish, the sets practically overflowing with detail. The musical brought more people to Tazramack than anything else before or since. Within the first week, every ticket for the next month had been sold.

The show ran for exactly eight and a half days. On the night of the ninth performance, an avalanche swept the entire theater off the mountain with everyone inside. The Railway Regions lost some of the best performers in Hamjamser that night.

Not completely, though. Their ghosts still perform every evening.

Tazramack was a miserable mess after the avalanche. The best musical in the Regions was gone, just like that, and with it had gone the town's only theater and several of the streets around it. The town was even gloomier than usual. The fog moved in again.

It wasn't until it cleared, weeks later, that they found the cast still performing in the same place. High above the streets of the town - or where the streets had been - pale, indistinct figures still came onto the stage that was no longer there, spoke their lines and sang their songs in voices almost too quiet to hear. The actors were dead; the theater was obliterated; the show had gone on anyway.

Being a pragmatic bunch, with a long history of preserving things, the people of Tazramack promptly built another theater around the ghosts. The original one had been a tall building, leaving plenty of room beneath the stage for props and machinery; the stage had been high above the ground, and the avalanche had scraped several feet of stone off of that as well.* The new theater had to be even taller than the old one. Builders built scaffolding and held their yardsticks beneath the feet of ghosts. The stage had to match their footsteps exactly.

The theater that stands there now is a plain, rickety building on stilts, built only to provide a stage beneath the performance and seats from which to watch it. Nothing else is necessary. The actors disappear when they go offstage, and their ghostly props are there with them.

The owners of the theater only let in five people every night. They don't want the performance to fade. Ghosts are the echoes of people, for lack of a better word; they're created when something happens that's so incredible - so LOUD, so to speak - that it leaves echoes in history. It's not always someone's death. Two faded people kiss each other every evening, two stories above an old ruin in the High Fields, but only on days with exceptionally beautiful sunsets. Hester Anantazi occasionally makes her fabled walk across the Jagarmelt Canyon on a tightrope that's been gone for decades. The first flight of the first airship, the Lofty Concertina, is visible somewhere in the forests around Golgoolian. Someone stumbles across it every few years. Once a century, a giant commonly thought to be the legendary Orbadon lifts something invisible, but obviously extremely heavy, in a temple in Karkafel. There are probably many more ghosts in Hamjamser than anyone realizes. They're only the echoes of real people, after all; too many real ones drown them out.

Not only does the theater in Tazramack only let in five people a night, there are only five seats in the audience. Every seat is a front-row seat. It's nearly impossible to get a ticket. When someone gave one to me in the Train station, a mournful man with drooping jowls and whiskers who said only that he needed to leave town unexpectedly, I could hardly believe it. I don't think I really did believe it until the guards at the theater took my ticket, without a word, and I was walking up the narrow staircase and up to the stage.

The performance was everything I had ever heard it was. I'm not even going to try to describe it; practically every theater enthusiast in Hamjamser has done so, most of them better writers than I, and not one of them has done it justice. "Without the Dragon" is unlike anything else ever performed onstage. In some impossible stroke of luck, the show put on by the ghosts is not the last one, the one cut off halfway through by the avalanche; it's the one from the previous night. The actors hold the audience rapt, lit in stark black-and-white by spotlights that are no longer there. On the dark stage, they look like escapees from an old and faded photograph. The walls are visible through the shadows on their faces and clothes. Nothing remains but the highlights. Their lines are only audible thanks to the hearing trumpets used by the audience and something unusual about the curvature of the walls. The play runs all the way to the end; the actors bow no less than nine times, to what must have been thunderous applause. The five of us did the best we could. It didn't matter that the people we were applauding were long dead and could never have heard us. That's not the point.

The people of Tazramack have been preserving things for as long as the town has existed. It's odd that probably the most precious thing in the entire town is the one that was preserved completely by accident.


* Incidentally, this was only a few years before the even larger avalanche that completely obliterated the village of Samrath Kazi. Winter avalanches are frighteningly common in the higher parts of the Railway Regions. For some reason, they never touch the railroad.