Market Street, Day 1: the Scavenger

After a day spent exploring the market district of SuyMaTmakk, I'm afraid I'm too tired to write much tonight. I did come back with some pictures, though; perhaps they'll make up for it. Here's the first.

This is Harzifan Scrath, scavenger and merchant. He spends most of his days climbing over the islands of flotsam in the center of the lake. On Tuesdays, he brings back what he's found over the week and sells it at the market. His stall is set up by the docks. It's full of old clothes, boxes, and assorted bits of furniture; he found a whole butter churn last week, perfectly intact. A heap of tableware in materials that float (wooden spoons, bone-handled forks) sits next to an array of mismatched jewelry.* There are books so waterlogged that they're shaped like fans, their pages splayed and wrinkled and all but illegible. There's a china doll that looks like the survivor of a shipwreck. Perhaps she is. She has one shoe, patent leather with a brass buckle, and lake-weed in her hair.

A row of bottles stands in an uneven line in front of the stall. They're full of the small, smooth gouges left by the vitreous snail, which makes its shell out of glass. Any glass object left in the lake will be full of the same little pockmarks within days. The snails normally eat sand, processing it into glass in some strange pocket of their digestive system, but they've developed a taste for pure glass since people first settled by the lake. The TiLeKraNas have a colony of them at their house; they bring the occasional shell to the market whenever a snail dies of old age. There were none this time, but the shells are apparently quite lovely. Surprisingly, they're also quite practical. Most of the predators in the lake eat snails - if they like snails - by crunching them up, shell and all. Hail-storks and a few kinds of seagulls can crack even the toughest ones by flying them to great heights and dropping them on the docks.** Nothing bothers to do this with the vitreous snails, though; cracking their shells gives you nothing but a lump of meat full of glass shards.

An ornate wooden mantel clock sits on a back corner of the stall, ticking quietly. Harzifan says he's had it for five years now. It's made of some kind of hardwood - rare and valuable on the plains, where most wood comes in the form of small sticks - but no one has bought it. Harzifan says this might be because of the water stains, which have turned the clock charcoal-black in splotches, or possibly because it's run backward ever since he fished it out of the lake. I'm impressed that it runs at all.

Harzifan himself simply sits there all afternoon, grinning that same piratical grin at everyone who passes by. Every Tuesday, he says, he's more grateful than the week before to have the chance to relax. (His voice is deep and rough, like gravel on a lakebed, or the razor grin of a shark.) He's getting too old to be climbing over heaps of flotsam all day, he says. When someone buys the backward clock, or when it finally stops ticking, that's the day he'll retire.

I took a look at the clock as I was leaving, after I'd thanked Harzifan for letting me sketch him.*** The gears inside, where they were visible, gleamed with polish and good repair; the clock's price was higher than everything else in the stall put together, including the stall itself and possibly Harzifan's hat. Somehow, I don't think he's in a hurry.



* It's impossible to find a matched pair of earrings at a single scavenger's stall. It takes visits to at least a dozen to have the slightest hope of a match. There are people who spend hours going from stall to stall, playing the scavenger market like some sort of giant memory game, cataloguing hundreds of salvaged earrings in their heads in the hopes of finding a match. According to Harzifan, it's surprising how often they succeed.

** This, of course, is what hail-storks are named for. A whole flock of them can produce a short but devastatingly well-aimed shower of snails. This is why dock workers around Lake Twiliat wear such thick hats all the time, even during the hottest weather. They can't just drop what they're doing and run, the way everyone else does when the storks appear overhead; they have to have a different method of avoiding concussions.

*** I bought one of his books, as it seems rude to sketch someone's business and not buy something from it. It's called Hni Teli Paka, which could be translated as either "Greetings, O amusing one" or "Hey you, ugly." Some of its pages still look legible. This could be interesting.

Bubble-Wrap

The fog rolled in today. I woke up this morning, in my silk hotel room like a giant's coat pocket, and there it was. The gauzy white buildings of Chelissera blended perfectly into the fog and became invisible. Nothing was left but the signs on them. The letters seemed to float in space, abandoned, like names that had forgotten whose they were.

I nearly fell off the thread bridges several times because I couldn't see them. It was not a good day to explore.

Now that I have money again, I spent this morning in the market, buying things I really should have bought earlier. Food, for one thing. I was down to my last salted cuttlefish. Fortunately, every town has some shop where travelers can buy the kind of food that lasts forever. In Chelissera, the best example of this seems to be a thing called "shell cake." No one seems entirely sure what it's made of. I suspect beetles. It is the color of fossilized sand. The main ingredients are shards of crunchy stuff held together with globs of slightly less crunchy stuff. The consistency is rather like fried eggs, if someone forgot to take the eggshells out and then burnt them.

The flavor is actually surprisingly pleasant; it has that spicy, nutty, shrimp-with-a-sunburn flavor that well-cooked insects often have. I suspected it would get monotonous fairly quickly, though, so I bought a few dried crustaceans* and six lumps of the universal travelers' staple, rock bread.

Ah, rock bread. How I love the stuff. It lasts forever and never gets staler.

Having obtained food, I then went to the bookstore and picked up a book, "Sikelak for the Mammalian Mouth."** I've been intending for some time now to improve my Sikelak. Of all the languages I know - not that there are many - it's probably the most often useful. I haven't learned as much as I might because it's so hard to pronounce. It has the flaw of all universal languages. Anyone can speak it; no one can do so comfortably. It strains every voice in the world. Its great advantage is that it strains them all equally.

Like KeChorlitrix, the shopkeeper spoke English. This happens in many invertebrate towns. The most successful shopkeepers are the ones who can speak the languages of lungs and vocal cords - such as Theskerel and English - as well as their native clicks and hisses. The owners who can't speak the languages themselves find someone who can to mind the counter. The spider behind the bookstore counter was every inch an arachnid, behind the compound spectacles and flowered apron, but somewhere in all those jointed mouthparts was something capable of pronouncing English. Clicking, scissory English, but English all the same.

I knew that my third and last stop would take a while. I decided to take a break for lunch. There was a cafe by the weavers' district that sold solid food; I got a pastry with what looked like blueberries, but turned out to be water beetle larvae. It was delicious. While eating, I watched a bristly spider outside weaving a basket, lying on its back and working with all eight limbs at once. The entire thing was done in about twenty seconds. No wonder the Chelisserites can afford to weave everything in the town.

After lunch, I went to the Chelissera tatter-shop. I try to visit the tatter-shop in every town that has one. This is where people bring their broken things - shredded clothes, smashed dishes, mangled machinery - in the hopes that someone else will find a use for it. Someone almost always does. A few people in every town make their living by fixing things from the tatter-shop and selling them. Others just use the pieces.

From the outside, the shop was all bulges and protrusions, like a sack stuffed with too many lumpy things (which I suppose it was). Inside, it was obvious why. The walls and floor and ceiling were hidden behind pure chaos. There were broken typewriters, reams of cloth with rips and stains, mismatched stockings (only five or six of a full set of eight), two-legged furniture (most of it designed for arachnid anatomy and completely incomprehensible to me), dented pots, stopped clocks, broken toys - everything jumbled together without system or reason. Any trace of organization the shop may have once had was more broken than the objects it contained. There were whole barrels full of shattered china. A spider was picking through them, sifting through shards and comparing them like the scrambled pieces of a hundred jigsaw puzzles. From the way everyone ignored him, I got the impression that he spent a lot of time there.

I looked around for quite some time, wondering about the purposes of some things and the state of others. What did that bottle hold before it lost two of its three spouts? What was the purpose of the clockwork beetle with abacus wings? Who in the world has the strength to not only bend typewriter keys, but to crochet them? I wish I knew.

Amazingly, in all the chaos of mystery and malfunction, I found the one thing I have needed for weeks.

Bubble-wrap is a variety of cloth that can only be made by spiders. It's one of the most precious things to come out of Chelissera. Unique among every kind of cloth, it is completely waterproof. All you have to do is wrap something in it; drop it to the bottom of the ocean, and it will remain dry.***

The secret of bubble-wrap is the stickiness of spider silk. Other kinds of cloth are waterproof only to their edges; you can weave them tight as an alligator's grip, oil and wax them until they gleam, and water will still leak through the seams. Bubble-wrap doesn't have seams. A mix of adhesive and static electricity makes it cling so tightly to itself that even air can't escape between the layers. This is why it's so prized by travelers in the Great Shwamp. If you leave enough air inside the wrapping, not only is your luggage waterproof, but it floats as well (hence the name). You can simply tow it along behind you in the water.

The wrap in the tatter-shop was somewhat shredded, which is why it was in the tatter-shop, and why I was able to afford it (it cost only a sixel).**** I spent an hour this afternoon sewing the tears together and sealing them with snail glue. It's not as perfectly waterproof as the bubble-wrap itself, but it will help it stay in one piece.

Inside the wrap was a pocketwatch with six hands and no numbers on its face. I have no idea how one is supposed to read it. Apparently, neither did whoever left it there. The shopkeeper seemed to have given up trying to sell the watch; when I asked about it, she threw it in with the bubble-wrap for free.

I have more useless curiosities than I probably should. I can't help it. There's something irresistably fascinating about devices that do nothing at all.

In a place like the Great Shwamp, though, bubble-wrap is as far from useless as a sheet of cloth can get. I really should have gotten something like this years ago. It's only luck that I haven't been caught in the rain more often than I have, and I can't rely on the Great Shwamp's haphazard assortment of transportation to keep my luggage dry. My encounter with the troll made that quite clear. Sooner or later, I am going to need waterproof luggage.*****



*It's been weeks since I gave up asking people to identify Shwamp crustaceans for me. It's impossible. No two seem to be the same species - if the word "species" even applies - and they blithely ignore all the rules of taxonomy. They combine features of crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and fish. Many seem to have chosen their number of legs by rolling dice.

**Given the variety of people who speak Sikelak, books on the language are sorted not by the native language of the learner, but by their vocal anatomy. The other options were "Sikelak for the Avian Larynx," "Sikelak for the Metatarsi," and "Sikelak for the Bipalate Coccitella." I didn't think those would help me much. I don't even know what a coccitella is.

***Even in Chelissera, city of spinners, bubble-wrap can be only be made by the very best. It takes experience to make fabric so tight it's waterproof. The master spinners hire other spiders with inferior thread to do their hunting for them; it takes a lot of protein to make silk. The masters grow fat and enormous, spending their days eating and spinning and rarely moving from the same spot. Most eventually learn to spin with one pair of limbs; this becomes a mechanical motion that they do with as little thought as I would need to tap my foot. Their remaining limbs are free for whatever occupation they choose to pass the time.

****Sixels, it turns out, are the middle of the Great Shwamp's glass currency system. One sixel equals eight crickles (smaller marbles with ants inside). Four sixels make a terlimick, a larger marble containing a flightless harlequin grasshopper. There's apparently a fourth coin that is large enough to hold an entire crayfish. No one I've met has ever seen one.

*****I borrowed a lovely waterproof chest while I was in Cormilack, the city with more rain than air. Unfortunately, it was too heavy for me to bring along even if I'd owned it.

A Wagon Without Wheels

For breakfast this morning, I had a sort of chocolate pastry called a mud pie. Given where I was, I was somewhat wary of this, but the baker assured me that there was no actual mud in it (or, at least, as little as is possible in Woodpot). I ate it while wandering through the village. I had only been walking for about ten minutes when I realized that I had a small swarm of large dauber wasps following me. They kept a polite distance, but they were quite obviously waiting for something. I looked at them for a moment, then broke off a piece of my pie and tossed it to them.

There was a brief blur of buzzing black chaos. When it cleared, there was no sign of the crumb, but one of the wasps was cleaning its face and looking pleased with itself. The rest were still waiting.

I decided that this was more fun than eating the pie. The wasps got the rest of it. They continued to follow me as I walked around the village, looking at the architecture and the potters at work. It didn't matter which direction I tossed a crumb; there was always a wasp there to catch it. Some of them eventually got tired and sat on my shoulders, trying to snatch bites of the pie while I wasn't looking. They were surprisingly heavy. They hummed constantly, a faint vibration that I could feel but not hear, like the purring of a cat.

It's quite possible that feeding them is encouraging a bad habit, but I couldn't resist. How often does one get to spend a morning playing with giant wasps?

According to the baker, the boardwalk in the other direction is in even worse condition than the one I arrived on. I decided not to risk walking on it. Instead, I got a ride with a pottery merchant and her family. I met them at the bakery.* Like most people who travel frequently in the Great Shwamp, they can't afford to depend on the boardwalk and have come up with something better. I've met travelers who ride on alligators and giant tortoises, others who use rowboats or rafts, and one or two who have long enough legs (and wide enough feet) to wade in even the deepest water. Many people fly. A traveling tinker I met in May had a clockwork vehicle powered by a pair of capybaras running in wheels. He said they were a special variety bred for racing. The vehicle was amphibious; it had wheels, mechanical legs for soft ground, and a paddle-boat attachment in the back. It seemed to work quite well, aside from an unfortunate habit of shedding gears and breaking down every few hours.

The pottery merchant doesn't have anything so exotic. She and her family travel by wagon. Given the scarceness of solid ground in this part of the Shwamp, they've removed the wheels; instead, each axle has a cluster of ceramic floats tied to it. They look a bit like the glass floats used by fishermen to hold up nets, but in clay instead of glass. Each one is held in a many-knotted web of rope. They're glazed in three or four different patterns, like a mismatched set of dishes. Several have been broken and glued back together with metal. Webs of rusty lines outline the patterns of the cracks, weeping streaks of rust over the glaze.

The pottery reminded me of something I hadn't thought of before. Unbaked clay architecture works well in the desert, where there's plenty of sun to harden it and little rain to melt it. The Great Shwamp has just the opposite. How, I asked, do they keep the houses in Woodpot from melting in the rain?

One of the merchant's sons was happy to explain this to me. His name, he told me proudly, is Ranapleximilian, an old Kletheran name that means "slayer of the great night-frog," and he can pronounce the whole thing. (His sisters and brothers, all younger, have not yet succeeded with their own equally impressive names.) Apparently, the houses are waterproofed with gristlebird oil. Gristlebirds have the oiliest feathers of any bird in the Shwamp; according to Ranapleximilian, they repel water so strongly that they create a bubble of air around themselves when they dive. They eat the stunned fish that fall into it.** To waterproof a roof, the villagers simply lay a few fish on top of it; this inevitably attracts five or six gristlebirds, each of which wants all the fish and is prepared to fight for them. The resulting brawl leaves the roof, walls, and surrounding trees evenly coated with oil. (It also leaves them covered with feathers, dandruff, bird droppings, and half-eaten fish, but those wash off in the rain.)

The merchant herself is named Mrs. Pelirika. She doesn't seem to talk much. For most of the day, she was busy navigating the Shwamp and managing the somewhat temperamental marsh-squid that pulled the wagon. Her five children, in contrast, talk enough for ten. The other four's names, from second-oldest to youngest, are Tessemira, Donrondamole, Coralilamander, and Vanesily. No wonder the younger ones can't pronounce them yet. Vanesily, the youngest, is only just getting his down feathers. Ranapleximilian says that he is almost old enough to fly (he does have a few flight feathers, though they're mostly gaps, like some mammal children's teeth) and kept jumping off the wagon all day in attempts to do so. None of these worked, but he didn't seem to mind landing in the water every time. Quite often, he would come back with some sort of snail or outlandish crustacean. His sister, Tessemira, was fascinated with these; I don't think she ever had less than three or four sitting in her hands or on her head. All five children kept up a constant commentary on every unusual tree and fish we passed, as well as the pottery in the wagon and life in the Shwamp in general. They kept coming up with things for me to draw all day long. I was happy to do so. Hardly anyone makes a better audience than children. If you do something wrong, they will tell you immediately; if you do something right, they can be more enthusiastic than almost anyone. They found my attempts to draw some of the fish they described to me quite hilarious.

Much of the conversation during the day was about the current load of pottery. The children seem to take just as much of an interest in it as their mother; they had something to say about nearly every piece, and quite a lot of the talk of styles and glazes and double-firing went well over my head. The wagon seemed to have something from practically every potter in Woodpot. There are quite a lot of them. The clay under Woodpot is the best in the Shwamp, Ranapleximilian said, so all the best potters (and quite a lot of the others) end up in the village eventually. So do all the pottery merchants. No matter where you go in the Shwamp, you'll find someone eager to buy Woodpot work.

My favorite piece in the wagon is a huge pitcher in the shape of an octopus. The base and handle are made of five of its curled tentacles, and the other three twist above it to form the spout. The children said that this was the work of Artemisia Treble, one of their favorite potters, who is rather famous for beautifully detailed pottery in the shape of aquatic animals. Tessemira showed me a tiny bottle shaped like a marsh snail, in which she keeps buttons.

There appears to be a sixth child on the way. On the floor by Mrs. Pelirika's feet was a portable incubator, a metal basket with smoke coming out of the little oven in the bottom. There was a thermometer stuck in the mound of blankets in the basket, which she checked every few minutes. I assume that somewhere in there is an egg.

I have not met Mr. Pelirika yet. Mrs. Pelirika said only that he doesn't like the sunlight and travels underwater by day. I didn't press any further. The children seem to take after their mother, with brightly colored plumage like jungle parrots; they obviously enjoy the Shwamp, but don't seem particularly aquatic.

Perhaps I'll get to meet him tonight.



*Most of the village seemed to be at the bakery when I arrived. The diggers from the previous day were there - most of them, at least - though I didn't recognize them until they started talking to me. Their faces look different without a coating of mud. Some of them had sculpted patterns in the clay on their faces the day before, pinching it into cracked masks of swirls and ridges. I found it much easier to read their expressions this morning.

**He may have been exaggerating here, but I'm no authority on marsh birds, so I wouldn't know.