Market Street, Day 3: the Animals

There are probably more animals for sale on Market Street than there are people to buy them. Their snorts and clucks and shrieks occasionally drown out even the songs of the vendors. Horses, mules, oxen, emus, and a variety of cart-lizards pull wagons between the crowded stalls. Klepts lurk silently in the shadows. Fish circle in barrels and tightly woven baskets. Messenger monkeys scuttle over the rooftops, screeching to each other in raucous code. Below them, people stop to listen to the songs of the Kelleries, birds as drab as kiwis and as musical as nightingales. Their voices have outgrown their wings. Some of them sing counterpoint with the calliope cicadas.

The spotted hens this one boy seemed so fond of are only one of the hundreds of kinds of poultry in the market. There are ducks and geese, chickens and kaklbirds, paihens and pahareets, bred for meat or eggs or feathers. One breed of tiny bantams produces eggs the size of grapes, with all the iridescent colors of an opal in the shells. There are jewelers who use them in jewelry; they spend hours hollowing out the eggs, filling the shells with something more durable, and coating them in substances that make the colors last. The recipes for these are jealously guarded by each jeweler. Only their apprentices learn the secret.

The russet crabs are raised to turn food scraps into useful meat, like pigs. They get to be about the same size. The ones at the market are usually sold small - palm-size at most - but they never seem to stop growing. A man once kept one for twelve years to see how big it would get. At the end of the twelve years, it ripped its way out of his basement and cut a thundering path of destruction through the city before plunging into the depths of Lake Twiliat. The hole it left revealed that the man had quadrupled the size of his basement to make room for it. It was taller than his house. As far as anyone knows, it's still somewhere in the depths of the lake, growing bigger every year.

Since then, everyone makes sure to eat russet crabs before they get much larger than a pig. Almost every family has one if they can afford it. You can see them all along the canals, scurrying around in wicker pens under the water. There's never more than one crab to a pen; they have an unfortunate habit of eating each other. I can't say I blame them. I've tasted them once or twice myself, and they're delicious.

There are pets in the market too, of course. This girl seemed to have fallen in love with one of the house-spiders, as so often happens with small, fuzzy animals. It had pink feet. Her brother didn't seem quite so sure about them.

House-spiders are a fairly common sight in SuyMaTmakk. They're descended from the wild tarantulas of the plains, in much the same way that lap-dogs are descended from wolves. The poison was bred out of them a long time ago. They can still bite, but it's only painful, not deadly, and they've long since lost the aggression of wild spiders. You're more likely to be bitten by a hamster. They're kept for the same reason as cats; they're soft, they're affectionate, and they catch mice. Many people prefer house-spiders to cats. They're more easily housebroken, and they get rid of ants as well.

There are dozens of kinds of fish in the market - this is a lake city, after all - but these are some of the strangest. In the wild, jar-fish live in the abandoned tunnels of muskrats and water-snakes. Only the most vertical holes will do. They sit in the holes all day, dangling their long fins down through the entrances, and only come out when they can sense that nothing's moving nearby. No one's sure what sense they use. It could be hearing, or a form of echolocation, or the strange electric awareness used by sharks.

Jar-fish are always kept in tall jars like this, hence the name. If they're kept in larger containers, they develop acute agoraphobia and stop eating. The TiLeKraNas knew a scientist once who kept one in a beaker and used it as a seismograph. He said it was the only reason his workshop survived the eruption of Mount SanCheLi; the tremors were still too gentle for him to feel when the fish panicked and tried to hide in its own mouth.

This is one of my favorite parts of Market Street, second only to the scavenger docks and the booksellers' alley. The animals of the market come from all over the plains. There are birds from the forests, beasts from the open spaces, strange and wondrous fish dredged up from the lake. Parts of the city have become whole ecosystems of their own, narrow wicker forests between the lake and the plains. Many of the creatures here were bred in SuyMaTmakk and exist nowhere but in the city.

Every day, it gets harder to leave the market without bringing some of them with me.

The Scalps

Well. After far too long an absence, here I am, writing to you again. One month of letters. It's far too short, but it's all I can promise for now. At least it's easy to find postbirds here.

After most of a year spent in Mollogou (much easier to find your way into than out of), the Cheeserock Plateaus (much easier to see than to reach), and the Death Marsh (much more pleasant than it sounds, actually), I currently find myself on the Pinstuck Plains - or, as most of the inhabitants call them, the Scalps.

There is very little here besides grass.

Grass is everywhere.

Grass covers the gentle bulges of ground that pass for hills, coating their domes with strands as fine as hair. This is where the Scalps got their name. From a distance, the hills do look surprisingly like scalps, a thousand sleeping giants packed together like eggs in a carton. Their hair is colored in patches - green and gold, blue and gray, russet and a surprising carrot orange. Some even have bald spots of dusty pink clay. It is nearly impossible to build a house on the Pinstuck Plains that does not end up looking like a hat.

Grass hides the myriad small creatures of the plains from the slightly less numerous large creatures that want to eat them. The plains are riddled with the holes of mice and rats, prairie dogs, riddler crabs,* tortoises, rabbits and coneybees, dustbowl eels, and snakes of all sizes and every possible shade of brown. Cerberus hyenas stride over the hills on long, spotted legs, keeping an eye or six out for prey. Coyotes howl at the moons. Gigantulas pad along on bristled, fingery legs as thick as my arm, leaving a trail of thin gray silk tangled in the grass behind them. Dervish lizards spin in dry stream beds. Hawks and falkyries soar overhead, silent except for the occasional sky-splitting scream.

Grass gives the wind a voice, a thousand thousand scratchy whispers from ankle height. Most visitors to the Scalps find themselves talking constantly, a little louder than normal, trying to distract themselves from the sense that someone is constantly whispering in their ear. It's one way, if not a particularly reliable one, to identify the people who were born here. They don't mind the whispering. Some of them simply tune it out. Others, a rare few, learn its language. The people of the Scalps call them Listeners, or Whisperlings, or Giants' Ears - those who listen to the whispers of the hills. They can find water buried six feet below the ground. They can hear tornadoes and locust swarms** coming long before anyone can see them, even across the unbroken miles of the plains. They hear warnings and secrets and long-forgotten stories. The grass, it seems, has a lot to say.

Grass - in more practical terms - also provides most of the plains-dwellers' food, cloth, and building material.

Sheep are rare on the Scalps - domestic ones, anyway. There's something in the wind, or the sky, or the endless miles of unfenced grass, that changes them. It only takes a few generations. Shepherds come to the plains with flocks from the High Fields or the Railway Regions: slow, simple animals that follow anything that moves and devote most of their brains to chewing.

Their children are just a little more intelligent, a little more courageous, a little more… wild.

Their grandchildren unlatch gates and vanish in the night. Some of them pick the shepherds' pockets before they leave.

The people of the Scalps have learned to do without wool.

Wood is equally rare. There are a few forests, but they don't spread easily; feral sheep and thunderbeast tend to eat or trample new saplings before they get even a foot high. The forests are jealously guarded by the timber towns (the plains' largest permanent settlements), by the squirrel clans with their deadly chestnut catapults, or - in one case - by an unusually aggressive grove of warrior dryads. Plains forest wood is taken from dead trees only and sold at exorbitant prices.*** People who attempt to steal it and survive generally wish they hadn't. The largest plant outside the forests is a little dry bush - hair brush, they call it - and it would take acres of those to make enough sticks to build an outhouse.**** Instead, the people make their houses out of grass.

The nomads live in wicker huts like upturned baskets. They're woven in elaborate patterns, diamonds and zigzags and spirals that rival the fanciest knitting. The nomads set them up in rings, like mushrooms, fastened to the ground with stakes and grass rope. They keep them far away from their cooking fires. The nomads travel with crunklewicks - large, hairy, round-backed creatures that look like their ancestors may once have been woolly mammoths, or possibly the hills under their feet. These carry the nomads' belongings and any family members too young or old or ill or pregnant to walk for days on end. The nomads put their houses on the crunklewicks as well; they fit perfectly over the humps, like wicker tea cozies, and make the crunklewicks look less like mammoths and more like giant armadillos.*****

The more permanent settlements on the plains simply dig a bit deeper. Some take whole bricks of root-woven earth, instead of just the stalks on the surface, and make their houses out of sod. Grass grows in the roofs and windowsills. Others hollow out the hills and make their streets out of streambeds. There are towns that are practically invisible from a distance, just a forest of chimney pots sticking out of the ground, until you get close enough to see people looking out at you from doors in the hillsides.

As if all this weren't enough, I've heard that there are even people who make their homes in airborne grass seeds. I've never seen them myself. They must be very small.

* Riddlers are one of the few species of land crabs in Hamjamser, along with the thirsty crab and the juggernaut horseshoe. All three species live on land, returning to water only to lay their eggs; it's fairly common to find riddlers in forests, and thirsty crabs are often mistaken for scorpions by desert travelers. Juggernaut horseshoes have been found burrowing in pack ice in the Arctic. The shells of riddler crabs are marked with wiggly patterns that look somewhat like writing - the "riddles" for which they're named. People occasionally find, or at least claim to find, riddlers they can actually read. There was one in the Sconth Museum for several years that had a perfectly legible copy of the Recursive Sonnet written on it. Visitors to the Museum can still read several of its castoff shells. Experts on literature and crustaceans have argued for decades about whether or not it was a hoax.

** Ordinary locusts bear only the smallest resemblance to the Locust Marauders of old, but they still call up bad memories in veterans of the Raids. Many families on the plains have stories of their beloved grandfather - or, almost as often, grandmother - blowing the dust off the old war chest and charging out into a locust swarm, armed with a cutlass and a bathrobe. Their children don't mind; the younger grandchildren tend to behave very well around their grandparents after seeing something like this. Besides, you can make a good meal out of bisected locusts.

*** A large portion of the wood is bought by dragons, who say it produces the sweetest smoke in Hamjamser. When one's hoard consists of entire national banks, I suppose one has money to burn.

**** Technically, the largest plants may be the tombstone cacti that grow in massive, weathered rings (crowns?) on the peaks of the hills. Mature colonies of the cacti resemble standing stones in shape, size, and consistency. They grow, though; I've seen a few broken in half, and they have rings like the trunk of a tree. Some even have stubby branches. Opinion is currently divided as to whether they're a plant or a type of rock crystal. They're too tough to eat, too brittle to spin, and too much work to build with, so the plains-dwellers mostly just ignore them.

***** I've never seen a glyptodont in person, but I've seen engravings and a few well-traveled photographs. They look surprisingly like an armadillo might if it was six feet at the hump.

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.

Drawing on the Walls

I'm glad I decided to stay in Chelissera. I was sitting on one of the thread bridges over the water,* sketching a tussock with sheep on top, when a spider climbed down beside me. This was fairly unremarkable until he spoke to me.

"Good moorning," he said. "You are an ahrtist, yes?"

His name was KeChorlitrix. He had a magnificent bass voice with a slight Truvidon accent. I have no idea which of his jointed mouthparts it came from. He was the owner of a restaurant, he told me - he pronounced it "rhoostaurant" - and had just moved into a new building. He was looking for an artist to decorate it. "I would like a myooral," he said. "One with insechts on it, fat ones, to make the coostomers hoongry."

I asked why he wanted me to do it, rather than some artist already in the town. Apparently, art by people with only two eyes is considered exotic in Chelissera. There are very few binocular artists in the town. There are plenty of vertebrates living here - perhaps a tenth or so of the population - but all of them have at least a trace of arachnid in their ancestry. Even the least spidery have four or five eyes each.** The only things with two are the sheep.

I've seen some of the multi-eyed artists' work. I can certainly see the difference. Cubist painters with two eyes have to imagine what their subjects would look like from several directions at the same time; ones with more than two eyes actually see them that way. There's a fragmented, fractal beauty to their work that I can't really describe.

I agreed, of course. I try never to turn down a job, especially one this interesting.

I got a book from the town library for reference; I'm not familiar with the insects in this part of the Shwamp, and most of the ones I could do off the top of my head would have been foreign or imaginary. It was the first time I'd been in the library. Nothing in this town seems to be made out of wood if there's a way to weave it instead. Rather than shelves, the library keeps books in tall lattices of silk. They hang from the rope-beams of the ceiling. The vertical strands are close together, the horizontal ones farther apart, so that each book stands in its own narrow pocket in the grid. They have to stretch some of the pockets to fit in the thicker books. Most of the lattices are sixteen books high or more; you have to climb them like rope ladders to reach the books on the higher shelves. No one seems worried about people falling off. Spiders just don't do that. Even if those of us with four limbs and no claws fell off, though, we wouldn't be hurt. The floor is cloth too.

There were several encyclopedias of insects in the naturalist section, but they were short on pictures. I eventually went and found the librarian. She was busy rearranging books on four shelves at the same time. She was wearing the most spectacular spectacles I've ever seen - not so much a pair as a crown, with more lenses than a microscope. Fortunately, we both knew and could pronounce at least a bit of Sikelak, so I was able to tell her that I was looking for pictures of insects.

She nodded, apparently used to vertebrates making the same mistake, and led me instead to the cooking section.

Interestingly, most of the books printed in Chelissera are made in the accordion style. Instead of being bound on one edge, the pages are segments of a single strip of paper folded in a zigzag. The entire thing can be unfolded and seen all at once. For people with eyes on every side of their head, I suppose this makes sense.

I got lost on my way to the restaurant, wandering through webs of ladders and bridges, but I met a few people who spoke Sikelak and could give me directions. The restaurant was made of silk too. There were a few lightweight tables tilted at odd angles on the cloth floor; most of the seats, though, were on the ceiling. When the restaurant opens, the spider customers will hang in comfortable padded hammocks and drink bottles of half-soup hung from the chandeliers. KeChorlitrix wanted the mural painted in dyes straight onto the cloth walls. (Embroidery would be more permanent, but embroidering a building costs a fortune.) I asked if he had a list of insects he particularly wanted. He handed me a menu.

Being somewhat unfamiliar with this medium - plant and insect dye on architectural spider silk - I started work in an unobtrusive corner, where any mistakes I made would be hard to notice. It was a good thing I did. Painting with cloth dye was a bit like painting with watercolors... on water. The strands took the dye and spread it out in every direction. I would touch the wall with the tip of a brush and get a blotch the size of an orange. I quickly gave up on painting the insects anywhere even close to actual size. Most of one wall is taken up by a gigantic dragonfly, blue with green trim. A beetle the colors of eggplant and blueberry fills another. KeChorlitrix would come in occasionally, roundly extoll the magnificence of my work, and then ask me to make changes to it. "Moore colors!" he kept saying. "Make it brighter!" I was happy to oblige.

There is very little red, orange, or yellow; poisonous insects tend to use these colors to warn predators away. They're about as appetizing to spiders as mold is to vertebrates.

The painting took most of the afternoon, but the canvas I was using was smaller than I had estimated - at least in comparison to the brush strokes - and I finished it before dark. At KeChorlitrix's request, I even managed to climb up and paint a few elaborate butterflies on the ceiling. He thanked me profusely. He offered me dinner. He paid me with a handful of beetles preserved in glass marbles - Sixels, he called them. Apparently, they're the main currency in this part of the Great Shwamp. I'll probably spend most of them soon (customers and stores have been rather scarce on the boardwalk, and I'm rather low on food), but I think I'll keep at least one. I always keep one of everything. If I gave up my collection of coins,*** my luggage would probably be six or seven pounds lighter.

Later that night, I went to the restaurant, which is called the Chuckelgrack.**** KeChorlitrix insisted I order as much I could possibly eat. (It was crunchy, delicious and - thanks to his versatile chef - solid.) I realized when I got there why he had wanted the colors so bright. Most of the buildings in Chelissera are the plain white of undyed silk; a few are dyed in one color, maybe two. Many have only their names written on the outside in tangled spider script. They're lit from inside by lamps and candles at night, white and multicolored, as if the stars had come down from the sky and moved into tents.

Among all of them, the Chuckelgrack stands out like a sunflower among daisies. It has more colors than the rest of the town put together. The paintings on the inside walls shine through, flies and beetles and bolster moths, every detail as clear and incandescent as the pattern on a paper lantern. It was breathtaking.

I may have painted the walls, but KeChorlitrix chose the colors and the setting; this is as much his creation as mine. I've rarely seen any of my work used so beautifully. The money and food are much appreciated, but this is the best payment I could have asked for.



*You can't really call them rope bridges when the individual strands are too fine to see. They look like gauze and are slightly stronger than steel wire.

**I had been wondering about this, but couldn't think of a polite way to ask.

***Most of them are coins, anyway. Not everyone has the same idea of what constitutes currency. I also have a scattering of Toli beads, a few of the little colored stones called Lint, an engraved pleach pit, and seven Train tickets.

****This is a pun in Sikelak combining the words "chuckel" - which means something like "sated" or maybe "bloated" - and "tuckelgrack," a popular variety of half-soup made from beetles.

Chelissera

Invertebrate towns tend to be different from the rest to begin with. The differences in anatomy, speech, family structure, and seasonal schedules tend to keep them just slightly out of step with the vertebrate world. I enjoyed my stay in Carvendrone, meeting giant wasps who have a thousand sisters and speak with their wings, but I know there's a great deal I will never understand about them. For the most part, the differences aren't important - but they still exist. Most people prefer to live in places they understand. This is why insect towns tend to stay insect towns.

None I've visited have been half as odd as Chelissera.

Chelissera is for textiles what Woodpot is for ceramics. Most of the thread and cloth in the Great Shwamp comes from here. This is because the town is inhabited by giant spiders. From beneath, the town looks like a vast cobweb; there are a few wooden buildings, but most are enormous cat's-cradles of rope and silk strands. Hanging threads connect every tree. Many of the highest ones are woven to catch birds, the way small spiders would catch insects, in a strategy quite different from that of the trick-hunters. The rare ones they carefully untangle and set free; the rest they eat. Other lines go down into the water to catch fish.

Everything billows in the wind. Brightly colored flags and curtains hang everywhere. Many of the master spinners live in huge, gauzy hammock-pagodas hung between branches; the billowing buildings seem to just float in midair, like clouds with faint, busy silhouettes inside. The threads that hold them up are practically invisible unless the sun hits them right. Sparkles glint on the thousands of tiny strands, played by the light like the strings of a violin.

The spiders bought several large jugs from the Pelirikas. Ranapleximilian told me - very quietly - that they use these for what they call "half-soup." This is the food that they've digested with their venom but haven't eaten yet. He obviously thought the idea was quite disgusting and therefore talked about nothing else for almost half an hour. Half-soup is inedible to nearly everyone who isn't a spider; the acids alone would kill most vertebrates. Among spiders, though, it's by far the most popular food. There are half-soup chefs who strive to achieve the perfect combination of meat and venom, dissolving fish and fowl alike and stirring them together. They experiment with different acids, different animals, even different combinations of specific organs (though many consider it barbaric to dismantle prey while it's still solid). Spiders consider no part of an animal inedible except the skin and bones.* The rest all gets mixed together anyway. A few chefs have experimented with fruit and vegetables, but this is considered avant-garde at best and simply ridiculous in most cases.

It all sounds quite fascinating. This is an entire culinary world that's completely separate from any other. I can't decide whether I want to become a spider to try it out or whether I just want to be sick.

Fortunately, half-soup is not the only thing of interest in Chelissera. Most of the town is involved in the spinning and weaving of fabric. There is, after all, no one better suited to it. They dye the thread as much as any ordinary spinners, but the fact that they produce it themselves means that they don't have to add the color afterward. Many of the farms in the town are devoted to edible dyes. A relative of indigo grows down near the water; cochineal beetles are raised in the trees. The spiders eat them to change the color of their silk. This takes much less work than coloring it separately. There are spiders who eat cochineal like candy, specializing for their entire lives in producing red silk and nothing else. Others choose different dyes or mix them together, balancing their diets based as much on color as nutrition, striving for the perfect shade. The dye eventually stains their exoskeletons as well. There are spiders in Chelissera covered in outrageous swirls of bright colors (they don't blend in the chitin as they do in the silk) whose relatives are uniformly black or brown. The rainbow spiders wear their colors with pride. It takes dedication to a job to achieve so spectacular a change.

Spider silk isn't the only material produced here, of course. There are several farms in the town that produce the more ordinary variety made by worms.** Flax and cotton grow in boxes of earth high in the canopy, field plants growing next to silvermoss and other epiphytes. Sheep graze on the huge tussocks of grass that pass for land in this part of the Shwamp. I'm fairly sure I even saw a few angora goats and longhaired needle-mice.

Much of the cloth in the town actually comes from people. The Great Shwamp has fewer longhaired mammals than colder, drier parts of the world; long fur can be a nuisance in the sticky humidity that lasts all Summer here. Many do live here, though, and nearly all of them are in Chelissera. They go in several times a year to be shorn, just like the sheep. The difference is that they get paid for it, and they can take the dirt and brambles out of their own fur.

I was surprised to realize that, despite all the farming, there actually isn't much more land here than in any other part of the Shwamp I've visited. The tussocks are the only solid things in the water. Even they have very little actual soil, growing instead on the decomposed leaves and roots of previous layers of grass. Most are perfectly round. They sit in the water like giant green pom-poms with sheep on top. The spiders stick a post in the top of each tussock and tie the sheep to it; otherwise, they have a tendency to roll off the sides.

It's strange to see land again - real land, oddly shaped as it might be, with plants growing on it. I'd almost forgotten what that looked like. The Pelirikas plan to stay here for a day or two, selling pottery. I may stay longer than that.



*On invertebrates, of course, skin and bones are often the same thing.

**Like many silk farmers, they kill the moths before they chew through the cocoons. Unlike many silk farmers, they eat them afterward. Spiders don't let much go to waste.