Saframish

The last place I visited in the Golden Desert was Saframish, a town built around a giant fish temple. The caravan stopped there to exchange passengers with other caravans and refill its supplies of water.

To be more precise, it's one of the Temples of Gilliva, Lady of the Waters, a deity much appreciated in the Golden Desert. The Temple of Gilliva in Saframish is built in the fossil skull of a giant fish. Its jaws rise up from the ground like twin steeples, dwarfing the houses and shops that have sprouted like barnacles around it. The mouth is open; from inside the main sanctuary of the temple, you can look up past the crooked stone teeth into open sky. This is a common feature of all Gillivan buildings. The followers of the Lady of the Waters don't keep rain out of her temples.

Below the open mouth is a long, oval pool, in which swims a single great catfish as large as a bull. Its whiskers have grown long enough to brush its tail as it swims, like the gray mustaches of an old, old man. The townspeople call the fish the Lasra, which means "tongue." They say it speaks for the Lady of the Waters in times of trouble. This century has been good to Saframish, though, and no one I spoke to could recall the fish speaking in their lifetimes.

According to the people of Saframish, there are catacombs beneath the skull, excavated in the spaces between the ribs and vertebrae. I would have liked to go see them, but they don't let just anyone down into the heart of the fish. Some of the passages are flooded, inhabited with shrimp and blind cave fish. The Gillivans consider them sacred, like all fish. (As I've mentioned before, this religion has never really caught on in coastal areas.)

The founders of the town cut the mountain away from the skull a century or two ago. At that time, a giant fish in the Desert was seen as sufficient evidence of a miracle - or at least a place with interesting geology - so they carved the inside into a temple to the Lady. It's the reason that Saframish has grown from a tiny village to the bustling town it is now.

It does bustle, too. Pilgrims journey to the Great Fish from all over the Golden Desert; there are always people grateful for the water with which their homes have been blessed, just as there are always people in desperate need of more. Most of them, being pragmatic as well as devout, bring things from their home towns to trade while they're here. Nearly every kind of nut and fruit in the Desert can be found in the markets of Saframish - even if only in the amounts that can fit in a single backpack. The cries of vendors and crafters and a whole menagerie of Desert animals fill the streets. One herder I saw had a group of lookout giraffes, wearing lightweight viewing platforms like wicker collars around their necks. Another was selling blind hounds, like a hybrid of dog and earthworm. She said they could sniff out water in the Desert.

There was little chance for them to prove their skill in Saframish; water was everywhere. In all my time in the Golden Desert, I have never seen a town with so many fountains. Several of them were full of lily pads, and I'm sure I caught the golden gaze of a bullfrog in one of them. Floater-merchants paraded their way through the streets, pulling billowing globes of water through the air behind them with oil-coated hands. No one but the floater-merchants is sure how they can make such vast quantities of water hang in the air, as weightless as soap bubbles; they have kept the secret carefully guarded for centuries.

This abundance of water was actually why I ended up leaving the caravan. But more on that later.

Reunited

I wish I could say that we found the caravan again by skill, or perseverance, or some sort of poetic symmetry. One of my unfinished paintings could have called to me from the wagon where I left it, for example. Mirenza could have found ancient, long-untraveled paths, half-buried by Desert sand, with mystical abilities to take travelers where they desire to go. A prophetic story written and left behind by Karlishek could have told the caravan where to look for us. Garnet could have revealed some supernatural sense and led us, where before she had been content to follow.

None of these things happened. I wish I could even say that the caravan had been searching for us while we were away. In the Golden Desert, though, one's odds of finding any particular thing are so small as to be nearly nonexistent. There are many sayings about it. (Sadly, few of them translate well into English.) While the people in the caravan may have regretted losing us, they most likely gave up looking for us when they left the canyons, if not sooner. After all, we had done much the same.

No. To the best of my knowledge, it was simply dumb luck. *

After leaving the village of bright faces, our own faces were considerably more cheerful. We were rested, somewhat better fed, and relieved at the reminder that not every being we met in the Desert wanted to eat us. The next day of travel went by much faster than the one before. At sunset, we were climbing a ridge of rocky hills while listening to Karlishek telling the story of the jeweler and the orchard-worker. This is apparently something of a classic among the funny stories of his birthplace. Unfortunately, I suspect that it relies heavily on puns in Amrat, as Garnet and Mirenza laughed often at phrases that seemed perfectly ordinary to me. Asking them to explain the puns, of course, would have defeated the purpose. Perhaps I'll ask Karlishek to tell the story again when I've had more practice with the language.

When we reached the top, we realized that the hills were actually a line of gigantic fossilized vertebrae, stretching off toward the horizon. I can't even begin to imagine the size of the beast that must have left them. That surprise paled, though, in comparison to the sight of the familiar group of wagons and gafl on the other side.

When looking for a needle in a haystack, one has a very small chance of success - but still, always, a chance.

We ran, slid, and occasionally rolled our way down the other side of the backbone, waving our arms and shouting all the way instead of watching our feet. (This may have been the cause of some of the rolling.) Somehow, we managed to reach the bottom both intact and in time to catch the caravan.

They were delighted to see us. Mirenza's colleagues, in particular, seemed ready to throw a celebration on the spot, especially when she showed them her notes from the canyon town. The rest of us had no particular friends among the other passengers, but even so, there is a certain camaraderie that develops between fellow travelers in such an isolated place. They had been worried when we disappeared and had held little hope of ever seeing us again. Tirakhai greeted us with bone-grinding hugs and a flood of jubilant words, his voice too thick with emotion for me to understand a single one. Caravan leaders tend to feel responsible for their passengers and hate to lose them. Even a few of the gafl - looking much more slender after weeks in the open Desert - came up to affectionately knock us over with their blunt little snouts.

It was wonderful to see everyone again, and to sleep that night with a familiar ceiling overhead (even if it was made of canvas). Most of all, though, I was glad to be reunited with my familiar luggage, worn and reliable, my hodgepodge of tools and supplies and keepsakes picked up one piece at a time from all over Hamjamser. Becoming attached to objects is perhaps a bad habit for a wanderer, but it's one I've never been able to resist.

Besides, even if they hadn't called me back - and how can I be sure they didn't? - there were several paintings that I'd been dying to finish.



* There is actually a tribe of fisher-folk in the islands of Kennyrubin who claim to worship Luck, or the personification of it.** They consider gambling to be a form of prayer and delight in taking as many chances as they can. The most devout see all luck as a blessing, especially the extremely good - and the extremely bad. The way they see it, if a giant fish falls from the sky, it doesn't matter whether it lands in your stewpot and feeds you for a month or lands on you and breaks both your legs. Either way, it's a sign that Luck is paying attention to you.
I'm not entirely sure why they consider this a good thing.
Those who scoff at their faith are generally those who have not yet challenged them in any of the islands' myriad dice games. They always win. However, in this case, dismissing them as merely unusually lucky only seems to support their claims.



** They reserve judgement on whether Luck be a lady or not. Gender is, after all, just another of life's coin tosses - one with more sides than many people realize.

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.

The Edge

After barely a whole day of traveling, we had to stop this morning; the road had come to an end. For that matter, so had the ground. The road led straight off the edge of a sheer cliff.

This is not what one expects to find on the Scalps. After months of flat plains, it's easy to forget that the world even has vertical surfaces. I certainly wasn't expecting a cliff.

The River KleMit skirted dangerously close to the cliff, but only a small branch of it actually went over. it vanished into the mist that rose up from below. It was impossible to tell how high the cliff was. Looking to either side, it was equally impossible to tell how wide it was. There was just the edge, tufted with grass and small bushes, winding away into the mist.

The Edge, as I found out later, is one of the areas most hotly debated by theoretical geographers. If it truly is the Edge of the world, it would prove the round-world theorists entirely wrong, as a sphere cannot have an edge. They maintain, of course, that the Edge is merely a very large hole. The flat-world theorists insist that it is indeed the Edge, while the mosaic and amalgam theorists don't really care one way or another. According to the mosaic-world theory, the world is neither round nor flat. It's merely a bunch of small pieces of ground that happen to be connected to each other at random (and constantly changing) points. The world doesn't have a shape; it just shares edges. You might as well say that literature has a shape because books share words.

To be honest, this has always sounded like the most reasonable theory to me.

The amalgam theorists maintain that space is an illusion and that every place in the world is simply a different facet of the same single location - similar to the way that, in geometry, an infinite number of circular slices can be taken from the same sphere. Every place is the same one looked at from a different angle.*

The debate between the four theories (and numerous more eccentric ones) has been going on for centuries, and everyone is still unsure whether the Edge is the actual edge of the world or just an unusually large hole. The mist never clears, so it's impossible to see. No climber or flier has ever found a bottom. Explorers have walked along the Edge for months, even years, and never returned to where they started. The cliff doesn't appear to curve in either direction. Of course, the constant mist makes it hard to tell; it just sits there, drifting up and down in plumes, wafting through the cliff's fringe of hanging grass, making it impossible to see any distance below or beyond the Edge. Possibly the Rain Dragon could be persuaded to do something about the mist, but no one ever knows where to find him.

I heard all of this from a team of experimental geographers staying at the Edge. It's a popular place for them, as you might expect. Some of them have been here for years. They have that disheveled-but-enthusiastic look that scientists often get when they've found something interesting; they're too busy to care if their coats are inside-out.

While I talked to the geographers, FlunDitChukk sat on the wagon and didn't look at the road. Every few minutes, he'd take a quick glance at it, just in case it had decided to lead somewhere else while he wasn't looking. So far, it hasn't. Maybe the dunderblub has been peeking at it. I doubt anyone could tell.

The geographers have a small forest of instruments set up at the Edge. There are telescopes, mist-lenses, all manner of surveying tools,** and dozens of other things I couldn't identify - devices like giant sextants and exploded clocks on carefully calibrated tripods. One geographer was inspecting the Edge with a sonograph and a trio of specially bred echo-frogs. Salamander lanterns burned everywhere, more for heat than for light. The mist makes it almost chilly near the Edge. A group of large samovals - research assistants, I assume - were gathered around one lantern, scribbling busily in tiny notebooks like a scientific sewing circle. Their thick fur is less help than usual here. The mist condenses in it, making it stick out all over in damp spikes.

The assistants, when they aren't busy, amuse themselves by throwing things over the Edge. If there's anyone down there, they're probably not amused.

* I have probably explained this entirely wrong. I don't pretend to understand the amalgam world theory in the slightest.

** Contrary to common belief, these actually have some practical uses and are not merely amusing mechanical curiosities. Surveying is not as pointless a pursuit as cartography. It can be quite useful in measuring the heights of large objects, such as mountains or termite mounds.

Out of the Wild

Although I've been traveling across the Scalps for over a month now, it wasn't until today that I finally saw a jackalope. They're not easy to find. I only barely caught a glimpse of this one; it was running between two hills, out in the open for as little time as possible. I thought it was an ordinary jackrabbit at first. I had just enough time to see the tiny antlers on its head before it vanished into the grass.

According to legends, some jackalopes will grant wishes if you catch them (or wealth, or luck, or wisdom, depending on who you ask). No one I've met has ever succeeded in catching one - or if they have, they aren't telling anyone. After centuries, jackalopes have gotten good at not being found.

There are a lot of clever animals on the Scalps. The local foxes are a jackalope's match - some of them, at least - and so are the rhyming magpies. Colonies of the long-legged grass ants have shown rather alarming intelligence at times, though whether they count as one animal or many is anyone's guess. This may be the reason for a widespread belief on the Scalps - that every intelligent being was an animal that somehow found a way to be reborn. The methods of doing this vary quite a lot.

This is seen as an improvement, not because people are considered better than animals (after all, according to this theory, they're the same individuals), but because people have more options. An animal's life and personality are largely determined by its species. It is also, of course, somewhat more pleasant to live in a house and eat cooked food instead of sleeping out in the cold and eating raw dead things; this is considered sufficient reason to want a civilized life all by itself. So is the existence of art. Some believe that music alone (or painting, or poetry, or storytelling, depending on your tastes) is all the reason anyone needs to live in civilization.*

Domesticated animals, while not quite human also tend to have more widely varied personalities than their wild counterparts.** They are seen as an intermediate step - creatures that didn't quite manage the leap to intelligence, but are perhaps halfway there. Ones that show an appreciation for art are thought to be farther along than others and are encouraged. No one on the Scalps stops a dog from howling along with a song.

For similar reasons, people tend to treat animals well here. Killing an animal for food is all right; you are, after all, simply sending it one step further on its journey to intelligence. (Besides, carnivores have to eat something.) Causing unnecessary pain, however, is considered barbaric. Twenty years from now, an animal could turn out to be your own grandchild. It's best to treat all of them kindly.

Many of the stories of the plains are, not surprisingly, about animals seeking humanity. Hance DeStrill has written whole books about them. The most common heroes are the clever ones, such as foxes, crows, and jackalopes, but there are also stories are about more unlikely species. Several tell of the surprising successes of termites or tubermoles.***

A major event in anyone's spiritual life is the discovery (or the theorizing, as few people are ever entirely sure) of what animal they were before. This is not as simple as it might appear. Looks would seem an obvious way to judge species - antelopes become people with horns, snakes become people with scales, and so on. This is not the case. In fact, as far as anyone can tell, the opposite is frequently true. Many herbivores are thought to become large, intimidating people, while predators may be misleadingly small and soft - at least on the outside. The instinct for camouflage is not so easily left behind.

If people are themselves reborn as something a step beyond humanity, no one is sure what it is. Weather Dragons, perhaps, or any of the myriad other nature spirits. They do seem to know much more than we do. It doesn't seem all that unlikely.

* Many people believe art is civilization's only excuse for existing in the first place.

** This is only partly due to the eccentricities caused by inbreeding.

*** It's anyone's guess what sort of people these would make. Hardworking, I suppose, and probably good at digging.