Woodpot

The boardwalk continues to be flooded. The water is up to my knees now; I'm starting to wonder just how deep it's going to get. As if that wasn't enough, the water got gradually more opaque all morning. By noon, I could no longer see my feet.

It seemed to be silt. The water was a thick, even brown color, occasionally turning reddish or yellowish, as if something was stirring up layer after layer of mud. I can't imagine this is pleasant for the fish. I saw silt eels break the surface several times; I've never seen so many in one day - or ones this large. They're muddy brown creatures that lurk in cloudy water, preying on befuddled fish lost in the murk. There were probably a lot of those today.

The mudbanks to either side of the boardwalk continued to grow in size as I walked. They didn't seem to be the source of the mud; they were the wrong color. It wasn't until almost sunset that I found out where it was coming from.

The trees in this part of the Great Shwamp are mostly gridwillows and gnorls. Their complex, twisted shapes are quite a contrast to the monolithic redwoods and cypresses around Meligma. They limit vision as well; I heard the diggers long before I saw them. Once I did, it was quite clear that they were the reason the water wasn't. They were in the middle of dismantling a mudbank. It looked as if it had been nearly the size of a house once. They had hollowed out the middle, leaving the sides high so that they could dig below water level. Water seeped in anyway; two of them did nothing but toss buckets of it out of the pit. The rest were busy filling more buckets with thick red clay and passing them on down the boardwalk. Those not equipped with webbed feet wore things like snowshoes to keep from sinking. They seemed to be a mix of species, like most people you meet, but it was hard to be sure. Fur looks the same as scales with enough mud on it.

They were singing one of those morbidly amusing songs that are so good for repetitive work. Miners and sailors seem especially fond of them. I didn't catch all the words of this one. It seemed to be about mud - I'm digging a hole that fills itself in, I can't remember what color my fur is, throw me in the oven and you'll have a brick wall, and so on. They seemed happy enough, in a businesslike way. Work songs just seem to turn out like that.

"Hey there!" one of them called, catching sight of me. "Welcome to Woodpot, the most beautiful village in the Shwamp!"

There was no village in sight. As far as I could see - which, admittedly, wasn't all that far - there was nothing in sight but trees, the boardwalk, and mud. I looked around, trying to think of something to say.

The digger seemed well aware of my confusion. He grinned at me, his teeth startingly white in his clay-covered face. "What, don't you see it?"

I admitted that I didn't.

"Look up."

I came out from under the gridwillow that shaded the mud pit and looked up. The trees seemed to be full of enormous striped pots. It took me a moment to realize that they were houses.

The only land near Woodpot is mud; the villagers build their houses not on it, but out of it. The buildings perch like fat clay owls at the bases of branches. Some of the larger ones have multiple stories or wrap all the way around the tree. Many are striped, like hornets' nests or sedimentary rock, each layer laid down in a slightly different color. They're more pottery than architecture; with their bulging shapes and round windows, they look as much like jugs as like houses. I almost expected to see corks sticking out of the chimneys.

Several of the diggers were quite happy to take a break from work and show me around the village, pointing out their own houses and talking about their construction. The houses are kept in repair by trained mud rats and dauber wasps. The mud rats seem to be a sort of cross between squirrel and beaver; they build their mud-and-stick lodges in trees, carrying mud up from the ground in their cheek pouches.* The dauber wasps are thin and blue-black, like the dauber wasps found near every muddy riverbank in Hamjamser. In size and intelligence, they're somewhere between the little wild ones and the civilized, dog-sized architects of the Sclesserax. The small daubers live here too, building their little clay egg cases alongside the larger ones. The rows of large and small tubes look like clay organ pipes.

No one bothers to decorate their houses much in Woodpot. There's no point. The baroque nurseries of dauber wasps end up covering every surface. If a building stands for a full year without a dauber wasp building on it, it is judged to be cursed, and the villagers tip it into the Shwamp to dissolve. Most people try to finish new construction during the egg-laying season, just in case.

The basic structure of each house is still built by the villagers. Mud-rats build everything in balls and mounds, while dauber wasps use only tubes. Humans still prefer to have things like floors and windows. Most of the actual clay, however, is laid down by rats and wasps. Each building is full of burrows, mud rat nests and chambers for the wasps' larvae. The grubs are roughly the size of my arm. They spend their entire childhoods in tubes only big enough for themselves and whatever food their parents can hunt or scavenge for them. Barring accidents, no one ever sees the grubs until they complete their metamorphoses and break through the walls as fully mature blue-black wasps. The village children play with them as if they were shiny, flying cats.

Most Woodpotters don't even try to keep their children clean. In a town where the very buildings are made of mud, there's not much point. A few parents do try to keep their children from burrowing in it with the others; they tell them to at least stay in the trees.** Children restricted this way have a remarkable tendency to accidentally fall off of low branches and land in mud pits.

The diggers eventually went back to work and left me at the inn, a collection of honeycombed chambers clustered around a particularly huge and twisted gnorl tree. The sun had set by then. Candles and marsh-lamps were burning in windows all through the village, making it look like a collection of lanterns hung in the trees. I went inside and rented a room.

The room is nearly perfectly spherical; it's tall enough, just barely, that I can stand up in the very center. Most of the walls are hidden behind heaps of old pillows and blankets. It's like being in a mouse's nest. I'm not sure I've ever been anywhere more comfortable. The room is full of the rich, dusty smell of dry clay, and the evening chorus of frogs and insects is just starting outside. I expect to sleep deeply and dream of Summer.



*For a long time, this behavior led people to believe that they ate mud, like earthworms or auger weasels.

**Most of those parents are avians. Cleaning mud out of small down feathers is not a pleasant task.

Rats

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

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

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

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

I hadn't, and said so.

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

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

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

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

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

The Sand Rat's Apprentice

Like kilopedes, postbirds, and the uncommon Wayfinders, the singing sand rats of the Golden Desert have the rare ability to actually find their way from place to place on the surface of Hamjamser. This is especially useful in the Golden Desert. Its cities and villages tend to cluster around oases and rivers, and they stay small and scattered. Very few of them are ever within sight of each other. Finding one is not like looking for a needle in a haystack; it's more like looking for a flea.

The singing sand rats say they find their way by listening. Each city and village, they say, has its own song, and they can hear them and follow them to their source. Nothing else on Hamjamser can hear these songs. Only the sand rats. Their name comes from their tradition of singing the songs they know to their children; almost every sand rat's dream is to become a guide, and practically all of them achieve it. Guides on Hamjamser are rare and precious.

So the sand rats spend the first few years of their lives listening to their parents or teachers, learning the songs of the Golden Desert or the Railway Regions or the Mountainous Plains, until they know by heart the mechanical rhythm of Miggle-Meezel, the sweet trills of Samrath Kazi, the ancient clank of Cormilack, the bubble of Baconeg, the murmur of Vanister, the drone of Sconth... The more talented ones even learn the variations on a theme that are the thousand islands of Kennyrubin, or the song of the lost city of Fasra Koum, passed from rat to rat for generations for its indescribable beauty despite the fact that the city itself has been gone for centuries. Singing sand rats never forget a tune.

When they have learned all the songs they can from the sand rats they know, they go off to live with the people they will guide. Many of them leave for other parts of Hamjamser; most stay with the white-cloaked nomads of the Golden Desert. It is their home, after all, and the people there need them the most.

Besides, Fasra Koum was built in the Golden Desert. There is always the chance - however slight - that some rat, someday, might hear its voice again.