The Painted Ones

It was lucky that we found the caravan when we did. By that point, after a month or two of traveling through the wild, trackless wastes of the Golden Desert, I had almost forgotten what Tirakhai had hired me to do when we'd started.

I had been unable to get much information about the "Painted Ones," those mysterious beings that apparently required caravans to travel with artists as a precaution of some sort. The people I asked were as ignorant as myself, responding with shrugs and vague rumors they'd heard; or they were strangely reluctant to discuss the topic, giving small shudders and quickly changing the subject. Eventually, I stopped asking. I assumed I would find out if, or when, we actually encountered the Painted Ones. I was slightly less sure by then that I actually wanted to do so.

Less than a week after we rejoined the caravan, the Painted Ones showed up in person and answered all my questions - and as I'd suspected, I almost immediately wished they hadn't.

We never saw or heard them coming. Even Garnet, whose ears and nose were several degrees sharper than average, had no warning. We came around a high dune and they were simply there.

Judging by their appearance, I would guess that the Painted Ones' ancestors included Deinonychus, or one of the other great hunting lizards. They were tall and muscular, with scaly brown hides and sharp, bony faces. They had wide, flat feet - perfect for running on sand - tipped with dagger-like claws as large as my hand. My head barely came up to their breastbones. Even Garnet, I think, would have had difficulty facing one of these. Against a whole pack, the caravan would not have stood a chance.

We had plenty of time to look. The entire caravan froze at the sight of them. The gafl immediately burped out their alarm stink, a reeking cloud that caused several passengers and even one of the gafl handlers to pass out. No one else moved. The Painted Ones didn't seem to mind the smell at all; they just stood there and waited.

There was an aura of casual and utterly terrifying confidence about them. Somehow, standing there with all their sharp edges glinting in the sun, they managed to convey that they would not hesitate to kill and eat every last one of us. It probably wouldn't even take them very long. They looked at the people in the caravan the way you look at fruit in a market stall, considering which ones are the plumpest and ripest and how many pieces you would slice them into before eating them. We would have had about as much chance of fighting back as a fruit would. The only reason the Painted Ones weren't getting started, right now, was that we - I - had something they wanted more than meat.

Then again, maybe they just weren't hungry at the moment. I prefer not to think too hard about that possibility.

Tirakhai had made his way over to me at some point, moving surprisingly quietly for such a large man. I had been somewhat distracted, and I jumped when he whispered to me.

"Well, artist. They have come to meet you." He gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "Good luck."

I would rather have pulled the tails of a thousand flying hyenas than walk out to meet that pack of fangs and claws. Tirakhai had to give me a rather firm shove before I could make my feet start moving. Still, they hadn't eaten us yet - and nothing focuses the mind quite like the awareness that a creature who would like to eat you might be willing to bargain for something else instead.

I have met plenty of saurian people in my life; most of them are not all that different from any other person, aside from a somewhat higher quota of claws and scales and a habit to tread very carefully on thin floors. The Painted Ones were not like any of them. I am glad to say, in fact, that I have never met anyone like the Painted Ones - with the possible exception of the Cathomar I once riddled for my life. Still, there was only one of him. There were at least a dozen of these tall saurians. (Somehow, I never took the time to count.) Their teeth and claws were wickedly sharp, except where they'd been broken off in jagged stumps. They seemed to have plenty to spare. The bases were crusted here and there with dark substances I didn't attempt to identify. Slit-pupiled eyes, in all shades of gold and copper and blood-red, inspected me with a hungry intelligence that made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. I have heard people speak of "undressing someone with their eyes," but I believe most people would stop at the skin.

Their breath had the faint, metallic tang of old blood.

In my mind, I gave my nose the rest of the day off, to calm its nerves, and gave my full desperate attention to my eyes. The Painted Ones apparently wanted an artist. I swallowed and tried to think like one.

Many of the Painted Ones were marked with what turned out, on closer inspection, to be elaborate tattoos. The pigment had been expertly worked in between the scales to form complex patterns - bold stripes and rings and spots that turned into lacy designs when seen up close. Others of the pack were unmarked. I wondered what the difference was, until I caught a glimpse of what seemed to be a shred of cloth at the base of one hunter's horns. I was still less than comfortable around these tall and exceedingly pointy people, so I was slow and careful in working my way closer. Close up, the shred turned out to be a piece of old, half-detached skin - still marked with the traces of a tattoo.

That was the difference, then. The Painted Ones, like many scaly people, shed their skins periodically - and far more thoroughly than most; tattoos, permanent on most skin, were hardly more lasting than paint for them. They had come to us because they wanted them replaced.

Several of them had pouches hung on strings around their necks, hanging next to brightly colored stones and the occasional clinking bone. (None of them bothered to carry knives.) From these pouches, several of the unmarked took yellowed and much-folded scraps of paper and presented them to me. They were sketches. Done in a wide variety of different pigments and styles, each showed one of the Painted Ones decorated with a unique pattern. The owners of the sketches gestured to the faded designs, then to themselves. These ones, apparently, had their own personal designs and wanted them re-inked.

Others, rather than giving me a sketch, pointed to my sketchbook and made empty-handed gestures. I assumed that these had not yet found a pattern that they liked and wanted me to design one for them to try.

I'd never done tattoos before, but I knew at least the basic theory. Karlishek silently loaned me a few sewing needles - not ideal, but the best tools anyone had on hand - and I got started.

It was almost more than I could manage to drive the needle into the skin of the first hunter's arm. The impatient tapping of its left-hand dagger-claw on the sand was what finally got me moving. The needle didn't even make it flinch.

Once I'd started, the work itself was enough to keep me going; painting and drawing is usually like that, though this was probably the most unusual canvas I'd ever done it on. The Painted Ones' skin was tough and pebbled with scales, hot from the sun, crisscrossed with a hundred small scars. The powerful muscles and tendons beneath it barely twitched with the jabs of my needle. The smells of hot leather and old blood filled my nose. The skin was various shades of brown, from the pale tan of parchment to a deep, rich chestnut color. It looked as if it had originally been meant for camouflage in the Desert. Their culture had clearly left that idea behind, though, favoring bold designs that could probably be recognized from miles away.

That didn't seem to be the only purpose of the patterns, though. Several of the adolescent hunters, for example, seemed to have deliberately chosen their designs to be as painful as possible - lots of dark, intricate work in the relatively soft skin around their nostrils, under their arms, in the bends of their knees and elbows. I could see them grinning at each other as I inked the patterns in. I can handle this much pain, they seemed to be saying to each other. Can you?

The older ones, having apparently moved on to other methods of competition, seemed to choose their designs more aesthetically. Some seemed to be simply abstract; others emphasized physical features, such as unusually muscular arms or protruding brow-ridges. One particularly precise drawing featured a long, jagged line twisting down the left thigh. When I began to paint it, I found myself tracing the path of an old scar, faded nearly out of existence. Apparently, even scars are impermanent for the Painted Ones. They commemorate the best ones in ink instead.

Knowing that gave me a somewhat different view of some of the other patterns.

Karlishek eventually worked up the courage to stand and watch while I worked. He'd been talking to some of the older caravan passengers - apparently, they were less reluctant to discuss the Painted Ones when the real things were standing in front of them - and had found out a little of the history behind this odd arrangement.

Apparently, the Painted Ones used to attack caravans in this region. Unpainted then, they weren't interested in trade; they only wanted the plump, tasty merchant passengers and draft animals. As a result, many caravans started traveling with armed guards. Those that couldn't afford an escort simply set out and hoped. An occasional survivor would return from one of these, parched and delirious from the heat, raving about traveling companions devoured and precious cargo dumped out like inedible garbage onto the sand.

This inspired groups of adventurers to set out from nearby cities (relatively speaking; this is not a densely inhabited region of the Golden Desert).  Drawn by the irresistible combination of riches and danger, they would arm themselves with steel and arrogance and venture into the dunes in search of these lost treasures. Many of them were also eaten. Others, failing to find the treasures they sought, turned to banditry instead - which only made matters worse.

Trade in the region was just short of drying up altogether when one group of the Painted (then the Unpainted) Ones happened to attack a caravan with a tattoo artist aboard. Like many artists, she was rather stubborn, and she continued to work on the tattoo she was in the middle of even as chaos erupted all around her wagon. (Her client, squeamish about pain, had fortified himself with large quantities of Desert ale and didn't notice a thing.) When one of the attackers slashed open the side of the wagon where she was working, she broke his leg with a nearby sledgehammer and went back to work - in plain sight of the astonished predators outside.

This was the turning point in the Painted Ones' career. They crowded around, fascinated by these marvelous paintings beneath the skin. (Until this point, their encounters with the art of the Golden Desert's other cultures had mostly consisted of taking the jewelry off of their supper.) The fighting stopped. Someone, somehow, managed to figure out enough of their language - or perhaps they had learned enough of their prey's language - to negotiate an agreement: the Painted Ones would leave the caravan alone if the artist tattooed each of them. They had found, like many before them, that they preferred art to food.

Word spread quickly. For the next few years, caravans would hire the most spectacularly tattooed people they could find to walk out in front, as advertisements of a sort, hoping that the predators would stop and see what they had to offer before simply taking what they wanted. In nearly every case, it worked. Soon, the display became unnecessary; word had traveled between the packs, and even those who had never been painted knew what to ask for when they found a caravan. No one wanted to be the last Unpainted Ones left in the Golden Desert.

No one is sure how there can be so many of the Painted Ones. There are not enough animals in the Golden Desert to sustain a population of carnivores this large. The most popular theory is that they have some hidden desert paradise - an oasis, a plateau, a secret river valley - that they return to between their voyages across the sand. If it's true, no one has ever found this hidden paradise and returned to tell about it. The Painted Ones themselves certainly aren't telling anyone.

Their language, on the rare occasion that they spoke, sounded to me like a distant relative of Halsi - one that had been put through a meat grinder. They hissed the vowels and chewed the consonants with great relish.

"Mashrakh," they kept saying to me. "Mashrakh farrakesh. Hechram rrkh." I eventually came to suspect that this meant something like "stab harder, weakling. You're barely scratching me." It was easier to work out the signals they used: a wave for "bigger," a slashing motion for "darker," a twiddling of the claws for "more complex." I tried to oblige them as quickly as possible.

Complexity seemed to be reserved for the oldest among the pack. I was surprised when I first noticed that there were children among them, though I shouldn't have been. The smallest ones had only a stripe or two each and tried to chew on my bag of tools when their parents weren't looking. I didn't try to stop them; it could just as easily have been my leg.

Most of the patterns were in black, with touches of red on some of the larger and more dangerous-looking adults. Luckily, I had a good supply of black and red pigments; these colors are easy enough to come by in nearly any area. When I pulled out the small bottle of blue paint, though - the last remains of the cockleworm dye I picked up on the Gray Coast - one of the Painted Ones laid its elegant handful of daggers on my arm and shook its head. (Her head, as I found out later.) The common colors were all very well for the rest of the band; blue was reserved for the leader. She wanted only a few touches of the color at the tips of her horns and tail, possibly to match the tattered blue feathers tied to her horns.

It had been morning when we'd encountered the Painted Ones. The sun was setting by the time I finished. No one complained about the loss of time; in fact, very few people even came out of their wagons all afternoon. A few of the brave but unassuming passengers - usually Karlishek and Garnet - kept me supplied with water and reassuringly non-predatory company, but that was all.

The Painted Ones took several minutes to admire themselves when I finally finished the last one, turning in circles on the sand and making pleased little churring noises. (I hoped they were pleased, anyway.) One of them even gave me a friendly nudge with its muzzle before leaving, making me feel as if a rack of kitchen knives had suddenly decided to get affectionate. By then, though, I was a little more able to take the gesture as a compliment; I was, if not actually comfortable around the hunters, at least not actively terrified. It is always a pleasure to have one's work appreciated, and even more so when the mark of that appreciation is that one is still alive.

The Painted Ones left nothing behind when they glided off over the dunes, running with such a silent, effortless grace that they barely seemed to touch the sand. It was startling to see after being so close to them for so long. I had felt the tough muscle and bone beneath their thick skin; the adults must have weighed at least twice what I did, yet they appeared to weigh nothing at all. They paused at the top of a high dune, a line of boldly patterned shapes against the burning sky, and then were gone with a whisper of sand.

I spent the following day or two inside the wagons. After that day of relentless heat and terror, I needed the rest. The aquatic passenger (more about him later) actually let me share his water-filled vehicle until the shakes went away.

Painting the Painted Ones might be the most difficult project I have ever undertaken. It is certainly the most difficult one I have done without being paid. It was thoroughly unique, though - and in exchange for doing it, I was allowed to remain alive. I consider that an excellent trade.

Canyon Town, part two

Mirenza's machine was little more than a small lens in a brass frame. Small buttons and levers protruded from it here and there, like a combination of a pocketwatch and a jeweler's compound eyepiece.

My Amrat and her English have improved since I first met her, so - with some help from Karlishek - she was able to explain a little more fully exactly what the device does.

As far as I could understand it, the lens shows the past. Sometimes. Other times it doesn't. The precise working of it is immensely complicated; the one Mirenza had was the simplified portable version, and even then, her explanations of the functions of all its knobs and switches quickly rose to heights of technicality beyond even Karlishek's ability to understand. Mirenza eventually gave up and just demonstrated for us.

The first subject she tried was a heap of green glass beads lying in an empty doorway. Garnet, Karlishek, and I had to crowd closely around the lens, as it was really only designed to fit a single eye. At first, the lens simply showed the heap, as if we were looking through ordinary - if somewhat dark and distorted - glass. Mirenza gave expert flicks to a couple of switches. The lens darkened, then cleared again to show a different image, grainy and flickering, like the pictures in an antique slide projector. When viewed through the lens, the beads were now on a string. A few more flicks of switches, and the view pulled back to show a dark-haired girl - perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with the stubs of an adolescent pair of antlers on her forehead - wearing the beads around her neck. She laughed, soundlessly, and vanished through the doorway where we had found the beads. In the lens, the opening had a wooden door in it, carved with symbols. "Health and protection," Mirenza identified them in a distracted mutter.

The girl closed the door, and the image blurred into darkness. Mirenza's claws flew over the switches. The darkness gave way to a burst of scratches, which cleared to reveal a priest. (Mirenza identified him by his robes and by the Amulet of Humility* around his neck.) Above the amulet, he was wearing the same necklace. His face bore little resemblance to the girl's, but he did have a magnificent set of antlers.

We watched for what seemed like hours as Mirenza flicked through image after image, following a dizzying array of people. Some had a family resemblance to the girl; many did not. All of them wore the beads around their necks. The lens was watching the beads, in their previous form as a necklace, and their wearers simply happened to be in the picture as well. One brief glimpse showed a glassworker actually making the necklace and giving it to her husband, whose eyes were an identical shade of brilliant green. Other images - much blurrier than the rest - showed only blowing sand, or an outcropping of greenish rock, which we assumed to be the sources of the beads' material and pigment. Apparently, anything further back than that no longer resembled the beads closely enough for the lens to observe it.

Most of the people showed up many times. One heartbreaking scene showed the first girl, a few years older, grieving for the death of her young husband. We had seen the two of them courting in many of the previous images. The next one showed the two of them, decades older, eating a quiet dinner with a small boy so similar that he had to have been their grandson. They were listening, clearly fascinated, while he described something to them with many soup-flinging gesticulations of his spoon.

This was when I started to be doubtful of the accuracy of what the lens was showing us. Mirenza switched it off a moment later, returning it to an ordinary glass lens, and explained.

The lens doesn't see the past; it sees all of the pasts. The pictures in it show both what was and what could have been. Mirenza had pointed it at the remains of the necklace, and we had seen where the necklace had been - and where it might have been, had things been different.

It is an archaeologist's dream. It is an archaeologist's nightmare.

Fittingly, Mirenza's group of archaeomechanogeolinguists calls these devices "arkmasith," which translates roughly to "historians' dreams." They've been working on them ever since Hashmax Bensathrack, their biometallovitrialchemist,** found that he could see strange things through a batch of glass he'd accidentally mixed with the powdered shells of oracular crabs. The creation of more lenses has progressed slowly, as oracular crabs are quite difficult to catch. They always seem to know where you're going to look for them.

The team has managed to improve the accuracy of the lenses somewhat, using the elaborate mechanical workings around them, plus an exhausting amount of testing with objects whose pasts are well-documented enough for comparison. The small one Mirenza had was an early model, with few adjustments for accuracy, considered by most of the team to be past its usefulness. She had kept it anyway. "We are look for beginnings," she explained, with a smile at the edges of her beak. "We never should forget beginnings of our own work. Also, is shiny thing."

We wandered through the canyons for the rest of the day, taking turns looking through the lens at whatever remains of the vanished community caught our eyes. We looked back to when that streak of rust was (probably) the wheel rim of a cart pulled by goats and miniature saurians, when this rock was (possibly) at the bottom of a swift-moving canyon river full of fish and freshwater nautilus, when that doorway was (perhaps) carved by a stubborn one-armed sculptor who clenched his chisel in his teeth, when this fossil was (dubiously) a small trilobite who spent its days tracing geometrical proofs into the silt of an ocean floor, when the hollow cave-houses were (most likely) inhabited by families who lived and died and danced and prayed beneath statues that had not yet lost their sandstone faces to centuries of wind and rain and neglect.

Not one view gave us any hint as to why they had left.



* The Amulet of Humility is commonly worn by the priests of Uncertainty, who teach that true knowledge comes only through sufficiently complete observation. "Sufficiently complete" observation, in the strictest division of the faith, is possible only by omnipotent beings. The most exceptionally adventurous and introspective of mortals might, by the end of their lifetimes, come to know all there is to know about themselves. To know everything about another person is usually considered impossible. To know everything about a place, or a society, or a species - much less the rest of the world - is utterly beyond hope. True knowledge is therefore restricted to the central deity or possibly deities of the Uncertain (His/Her/Its/Their followers don't presume to know anything at all about Him/Her/It/Them, including whether or not He/She/It/They actually exist). Mortals must learn to accept that the sum of their knowledge will forever be a microscopic grain of flawed and partial observations in the vast and incomprehensible universe. Followers of Uncertainty consider it a sin to be certain and a virtue to admit to being wrong. This perhaps explains why there have always been so few of them.


** All of the terms I'm using are broad approximations made up based on Mirenza's attempts to explain the scientists' work to me, and are probably laughably inaccurate. Language barrier aside, they simply do not seem to divide the sciences into the same categories with which I'm familiar.

Message in a Monolith

The stone stood in the sand directly ahead of us. We saw it long before we actually reached it; the vague dark shape had been rippling on the horizon for hours, motionless except for the heat that makes everything in the Golden Desert shimmer at a distance.

When we reached it, it turned out to be a rather unremarkable standing stone. It looked like sandstone of some kind. It also looked old, though - I didn't even recognize the characters that were carved into its single flat side - and nothing made of sandstone keeps its details for long in the gritty wind of the Desert. The writing was still legible.

There are far too many things hidden beneath the sands of the Golden Desert for anyone to even dream of counting them. The dunes roll back occasionally and uncover ruins, tombs, monuments from civilizations long forgotten. They might stay visible for a week, a day, or only a few hours before the dunes swallow them up again. Most travelers (especially if they're of the scientific persuasion) will stop to at least look at things like this stone. The common opinion is that if the Desert has unveiled something for you to see, it's probably worth taking a good look. You'll probably never see the thing again, after all - and even if it holds no meaning for you, who knows? There could be an archaeologist in the next town who's been looking for it for years.

This is the Golden Desert, where the history is deeper than the sand. People stop here for interesting rocks.

Predictably, everyone in the caravan took this as an excuse to take a break. The gafl were unhitched from the wagons, free to go snuffling around in the nearby sand; everyone else got out food or books or pillows and sat down to eat or read or snore for a while.

The team of scientists (I'm still not sure whether they're geologists, archaeologists, something more obscure, or perhaps a combination of all three) piled out of their wagon and gathered around the stone. They tested and measured it with various instruments, taking notes and chattering among themselves. One fished a dilapidated box camera out of her luggage and took a careful photograph or two.

Mirenza, the avian woman I spoke to earlier, stood back a bit from the others. She seemed to be focusing on the writing on the stone. I could hear her muttering under her breath. She squinted at the barely legible hieroglyphs for a few minutes, then turned back to the others with a funny half-smile on her face. I could only pick out a few words of what she said next. The other scientists' reactions ranged from chuckles to confused frowns.

Karlishek told me later that the inscription on the stone roughly translates as follows:

"You have seen the stone I carved, and read the words I wrote. That is all I really wanted. May your travels be happy and your path even."

The signature had been worn away by the sand.

Charcoal Chrysalis

Back in the Autumn, I visited the village of Glimrack. It's a tiny village in a barren corner of the Scalps. The whole area looked as if it had been burned recently; there were plants here and there, but the soil they sprouted from was completely black. It seemed to be mostly ash. On the way to the village, I passed through a whole burned forest, a field of blackened sticks poking into the sky. None of the plants sprouting beneath them looked more than a year old.

There was very little soil, even ash, around Glimrack itself. Most of the village is built on bare stone. The villagers make their living by farming mushrooms in caves; most of their food comes from the nearby village of Gramfimly. All the buildings are made of stone with slate roofs. There are wooden beams underneath, but they're well hidden. When I arrived, the only wood in sight was piled up in tall heaps on the plain outside the village - broken chairs, dead branches, and what looked like several years' worth of firewood. Everyone in the village was running back and forth, adding more wood. Wagons rolled into town, one after the other, piled high with dead logs from the surrounding forests.

All the people I saw were reptiles, which was interesting by itself; even the smallest villages usually have at least a few mammals and avians as well. I asked a few of them what it was all for. "For the moths," they said. "They hatch tonight." None of them would tell me any more. They kept running back and forth, their arms laden with wood. I stayed and watched. Eventually, I started helping; there didn't seem to be much else to do. The piles of wood kept growing until they covered most of the plain. The bare stone was still visible, but more than half of it was buried under the splintered heaps.

After dark, they lit them.

It was the largest collection of bonfires I've ever seen. They turned the plain into a fiery maze, paths of bare stone between walls of flame. The air had been chilly all day, but it quickly grew so hot that I had to back away. The villagers didn't seem to care. They walked out into the maze, shedding their coats and jackets as they went. Slowly, solemnly, they began to dance.

The reason for the burned forest became clear when moths of flame emerged from the bonfires, swirling up and out in cindery clouds, sparks dripping from their burning wings. They swooped in wild curves through the flames, rising on updrafts and whirling around each other. The people danced through the flames, most of them stripped to the waist or further, spinning in graceful circles with the tiny scraps of living fire.

It seemed to be special when a moth landed on someone. Whenever it happened, the person would stand perfectly still as the moth dripped fire on their skin, smoke rising from the singed scales. Everyone else would do wild leaps and turns around them. When the moth finally left, the standing person would press their hands to the burns left behind, then throw themselves back into the dance with renewed vigor. I must have seen it happen more than twenty times during the night.

I learned later that this is actually part of the life cycle of the moths. They return every year to lay their eggs in the ash, the way monarch butterflies lay their eggs on their native patches of milkweed or viperwort. The caterpillars are gray and ordinary-looking. They live ordinary lives all year, eating ash and charred wood, until a fire burns away their solid bodies and releases the adult flame moths inside. A hundred years ago, there was a forest where Glimrack is now; its frequent fires provided the moths' first hatching ground. The trees are long gone, but the people of the village still gather wood all year long for the Autumn bonfire. The moths have been part of the villagers' lives since the days of their forest-dwelling five-times-great-grandparents. They don't want them to find another place to lay their eggs.

I still don't know exactly what the moths mean to the villagers. Whatever happened that night is obviously quite important, to be worth enduring so much pain, but I don't know why. No one I spoke to offered any information, and I didn't ask.

It was almost dawn before the fires finally burned down to embers. The dancing slowed down as the fires died. A few people paused to receive a last fiery kiss; then, all at once, the whole burning cloud of moths lifted into the sky. The villagers watched the moths until they vanished in the glow of the rising sun. Then, silently, they turned and walked back to their houses.

In the morning, they emerged with the shapes of tiny wings burned into their scales.

Fish of the Drought Land

Most signs of the rain are gone by now. The grass is dry again, except for half an hour of dew each morning; the sogginess of the ground has turned to steam and vanished in the sky. The only water left is in the streams.

To most of the rest of the world, the streams of the Scalps would barely be worthy of the name. They only hold water for a few weeks in every year. The rest of the time, they are simply dry channels, wrinkles in the Scalps, empty except for dust and cracked earth.

One of these streams runs beside the road I'm on. The water was low this morning, barely halfway to the grassy edge of the stream bed, but it was still there. The sound of it woke me up in the morning. It's been a while since I last heard running water.

There were little fish in the stream.

I have no idea how they survive in such a temporary place. Three days ago, the silt they were swimming over was a cracked desert. There has been no water here for months. Where did they come from?

It's different for other creatures. Periodic frogs and lungfish, for example, spend most of their lives waiting underground, sealed in the thin layer of moisture under dry stream beds. They emerge only in the floods after rain, released from their dark confinement for a few days, briefly free to swim and mate and eat ravenously. Unlike their cousins in more permanent waters, they don't lay eggs; their children are born fully mobile. They have to be. Before they're three days old, they have to burrow down into the mud with their parents to await the next rain.

These were not lungfish. They moved more like tiny salmon. It was hard to make out their shapes; the surface of the stream was shattered with the ripples of water going somewhere in a hurry, and the fish never stopped moving. They were like flames in the water, quick flashes of bronze and scarlet and electric blue. They were mesmerizing. These were not the kind of fish who burrow and spend months sitting in the mud.

I had no idea what they did plan to do. I sat and watched them while I ate breakfast. By the time I finished, the water was barely half as high as it was when I started. Mist rose around me as the dew on the grass returned to the air.

The water kept sinking over the morning. I watched it as I walked. The fish grew fewer as the stream shrank; every few minutes, there were fewer flashes of color beneath the surface. They must have been following the water downstream to wherever it was going.

There were still far too many when the stream dried up at noon.

I missed the exact moment when it dried up. I had gotten distracted for a few minutes, trying to remember the third verse of a song by Chellery Hewer. (It still hasn't come to me.) When I looked back at the stream, the water was gone. Only a few puddles remained. The bright fish were flopping in them, gasping as the water drained away into the ground.

I don't believe I was really thinking when I picked up the nearest one. When something is dying, the instant, automatic response is to do something - anything - to try to save it. It's a reflex. It keeps working even when there's nothing you can actually do. The fish continued to flop in my hand, just as doomed there as in the puddle I'd taken it from, a puddle that was gone already. The fish's mouth worked uselessly in the dry air. It was one of the red ones. There were tiny freckles of yellow down its side.

Still running mostly on reflex, I dropped my bags and fumbled one open with my free hand. The small glass jars I use for painting were on the top. With my feet sliding in the mud, I half-stepped, half-slithered to the bottom of the stream bed and filled a jar with as much muddy water as I could take from the largest remaining puddle. Two fish came along with it, blue with pale green spots. I dropped the red one in with them.

As the brown water cleared, I realized that half of it was mud. The fish swam in tiny circles in the inch or two that was left. There was barely room in the jar for them to turn around.

I stood there, looking down at the tiny, fragile lives in the little jar, and wondered what exactly I thought I was doing. Water is not abundant on the plains; only the very wealthy can afford to keep fish. It could be days before I found more water. I didn't even know what kind of fish these were, or what they ate, or how big they were going to get.

There were still dozens of them flopping desperately in the mud.

The sheer impossible hopelessness of the whole situation overwhelmed me a little at that point. There was really nothing I could do for most of the fish. They had fallen behind, unable to keep up with the water and their faster siblings, and they were doomed for it. Things die in nature all the time. It wouldn't work otherwise. I was probably crazy to try to intervene with something like this, but those three little fish were still swimming in the pathetic amount of water I'd managed to save. I couldn't just let them die.

I was standing there, staring blankly at the confused little circles of the fish and feeling like much the same thing was happening in my head, when I noticed something sparkling at the corner of my eye. I looked up. A sinuous, glittering shape was coming down the drying stream bed. As it got closer, I could make out a long body with a flat-topped head - a great snake, or possibly an eel. It must have been ten times as long as I was.

It was made of water. I could see the ground through it.

The snake meandered back and forth across the stream bed. I couldn't tell what it was doing until it got closer. It glided from fish to fish, sliding over the sad little flopping shapes and gathering them up into itself. I don't think it missed a single one. Its back was covered with the crossed ripples of a stream; on the snake, the pattern looked surprisingly like scales. When it reached the spot where I was, standing in mud halfway down the bank, it turned to look at me.

Its eyes were pools of liquid black, the color of cave pools or the ocean at night. Small fish swam in its face. Its whole body was full of them, a flashing rainbow of rescued colors, but all I could look at were those eyes.

I've only seen two other river spirits in my life. They don't often show themselves. The rest of the world seems to fade when they're around; everything else is simultaneously too solid and yet not real enough, depressingly static and ridiculously transient, too old to care and too new to understand. Nothing changes so constantly as a river. Nothing is so utterly unchanging. Nothing except, perhaps, the ocean.

This was only the spirit of a small stream. If there's a spirit for the ocean, I hope I never see its face. I would drown from looking.

The snake made an impatient gesture with its head, somehow managing to indicate the jar I held, and the spell was broken. My brain started working again. Quickly - there were fish still waiting in the mud - I held out the jar and upended it over the snake's transparent body. The surface absorbed the water with a small plop, sending ripples over the shining back, and the fish darted away to join the rest. I lost them immediately in the bright school of colors. The snake gave me a nod that seemed approving, somehow, then turned and continued down the stream. The wet trail behind it steamed in the sun.

I didn't try to follow it. There was no help I could give to a being like that, not beyond the well-meaning but useless little bit I'd already done, and I'm not sure I could have handled another sight of its face. I'm used to looking at rivers. I'm not used to them looking back at me.

Instead, I just watched until the shimmering tail had vanished in the glare of the sun. The mud in the jar had already dried to a thin, flaky crust when I put it away and picked up my bags. The road stretched into the distance. Cracks were appearing in the empty stream bed beside it.

I wonder where the spirit was going. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.

The End of the Boardwalk

The fog cleared today, and I decided to leave Chelissera while I could still see where I was going. The Pelirikas left the day before yesterday. I was in the middle of painting KeChorlitrix's restaurant; they came to say goodbye while I was eating lunch. Ranapleximilian and Tessemira gave me a snail shell they'd found, banana yellow with black stripes. If you look closely, you can see that the stripes are actually dense lines of small black squiggles, like microscopic hieroglyphics. I wonder if they mean anything.

I'm going to miss talking to the family (though I mostly listened, especially in the case of Mr. Pelirika). I don't think I've enjoyed traveling with anyone so much since I left the Train.

Without the Pelirikas and their wagon, there were no vehicles of any kind scheduled to leave the town for several weeks. Spiders are lurkers by nature. They don't travel much. Lacking any other options besides swimming, I returned to the boardwalk.

I'm glad I bought the bubble-wrap in Chelissera; I don't know what I would have done without it. The boardwalk - already sunken and disintegrating - vanished altogether barely a mile from the town. The last few frayed boards simply disappeared into the silt. There was no trace of them any farther on. Some well-meaning worker had put up a sign: "THIS ROUTE UNDER REPAIR." The sign was almost as rotten as the boardwalk. There was moss growing on it. Somehow, I don't think the repairs ever happened.

The bottom of the Shwamp was fairly flat, so I kept walking. The water continued to get deeper all day. By mid-afternoon, I had emptied my pockets and was walking through water up to my shoulders. It was perfectly clear; I was able to watch for sinkholes and snapping turtles and so on. When the water got deeper than my head, though, I gave up trying to wade and stopped for lunch. The trees were mostly gnorls and marsh manoglia, some of the easiest kinds to climb, so it wasn't hard to find a wide branch to sit on.* I needed a dry place to unwrap my luggage and take out food. While I was there, I checked the bubble-wrap for leaks. There were none. The inside was as dry as a biscuit - unlike me. A small flock of green butterflies flew down while I ate to drink the water from my shirt. I sat there on the branch, perched next to my suitcase, chewing and dripping and wondering if I should turn around.

It was an unusually beautiful part of the Great Shwamp. Plants covered every surface. There were bladderworts and waterlilies in the water beneath me, bryophytes wedged into the bark of the trees, and wispweeds floating through the air on their feathery leaves. The pink blossoms of splash-me-nots clustered on low branches, close enough to the water to see their reflections, but not enough to get their feet wet. The trees around me were full of beaded moss. It hung down in damp, tangled strands, like long green beards with no faces. It was full of the little beads that give it its name. They start out the size and color of peas and change color as they grow, moving through every possible shade of brown and purple. The ripe ones are magenta. If you touch them, they burst and release little clouds of pink spores, which float in every direction and stick to everything. Many of the branches were completely covered on top with pink dust. It looked like an odd cross between sunset and snow. Within a few weeks, it will be gone, turning a more businesslike green as it gets ready to become next year's moss.

I decided to keep going. The water has to get shallower sooner or later. Besides, the bubble-wrap had given me an idea. I resealed it with more air inside, found a relatively straight stick to use as a pole, and turned my luggage into a boat. It wobbles rather alarmingly, but it hasn't quite tipped over yet. I poled my way through the swamp on a suitcase gondola. I sang as I went, of course; someone has to sing on a gondola. I usually resist the urge to sing in public - not everyone likes impromptu recitals of clock songs and show tunes - but there was no one to hear me but the birds. Several of them joined in with harmonies. Sky-blue day bats flitted through the trees overhead. Swamp koi swam lazily under my suitcase, white and orange or black and gold, a few of them the size of dogs. Tree toads watched me pass with eyes that filled most of their heads. Sunlight filtered through the trees, broken into narrow slivers by leaves and hanging moss, full of dust and late-season mayflies. It was a good way to spend the afternoon.



* I sat in one of the gnorls, of course. I don't trust manoglia trees. Most of them stay rooted and mind their own business, but you can never be sure.

A Piece of Summer

Today, I found someone's afternoon. They had lost it. It was a beautiful one, one of those long August days when you can lie in the shade and watch the sunlight pour down on the world.* There was water in a glass, or possibly lemonade, dripping with cold and drops of condensation. There was a book. I couldn't tell what was in it, but the cover was scuffed, and the pages were yellow and bent at the corners from being turned many times. It was obviously well-read and loved. Overhead, the leaves rustled and leaked tiny spots of sunlight onto the ground. Dragonflies flew past like miniature carnivorous biplanes. Lizards basked on lichen-encrusted fenceposts. The air was filled with the antiphonal chanting of cicadas and the fading rattle of painted locusts.

It's not every day that you find a lost afternoon. I put it safely away in my suitcase, wrapped in a scarf I won't need for a while yet. Some things ought to be kept safe. If I ever find a place with oak trees and fencepost lizards and an old brown book that someone has loved, I'll know where the afternoon came from, and then I can give it back.



* Sunlight and rain are strangely similar in large amounts. A hot day and a pounding rain have almost the same feeling - the world is swamped, pounded with too much weather, flooded and filled to overflowing with shining water or torrents of sunlight. The dry or the dark afterwards is clear and quiet, resting, as if after a thoroughly satisfying meal. The world lives on water and light. When it drinks them, it does so not in sips, but in great booming gulps.

Kingdoms in the Snow

It snowed for most of the day, surrounding the Train in silent curtains of white flakes. A layer of white built up outside the compartment window. I could see the tiny crystals in it against the dark wood of the frame. The engine dripped, hot and iron-black in the middle of all the white, and snowflakes vanished on it in tiny puffs of steam.

We stopped at a few small villages - Tremel, Arn, Tackahoe, and two or three more whose names I've forgotten. Everyone in them was tucked away in their houses, sleeping or sitting quietly, looking out at the snow. It's the first snow of the year. By January, no one will even notice it anymore; the flakes on the ground and in the air will become as unremarkable as leaves in Summer. Today, though, the world stops to watch them. Everything is quiet. The sleeping passenger in our compartment wasn't the only one. Only one passenger got off the Train all day, wrapped in so many scarves that nothing was visible but a pair of gleaming yellow eyes. The bundled figure was walking away down the streets of Tremel, a lone silhouette in the empty whiteness, when the Train pulled out of the station. The smell of frost came in through the open door and lingered for half an hour.

A few miles past Tackahoe, there were snowflies in the snow. They looked a bit like tiny white moths. I couldn't see their faces or their tiny hands; I'd need a microscope even if they ever stayed still. They were barely visible even when they flew right up to the Train's windows, braving the raging heat that leaked through the panes of glass. I doubt they got anywhere near the engine. The salamanders on the roof, letting out curious little puffs of steam, must have seemed like enormous fire-breathing dragons.

No one is sure where snowflies come from. They are never seen before the first snowfall. Some people believe they are born then, that one water drop in a million freezes into a snowfly instead of a snowflake and takes on a tiny life of its own.

Snowflies live fast. A day lasts about a year for them. They live through nights that are whole Winters, when ice blooms and the world flourishes, and bleak daytime Summers when the sun drains the cold from the world. An exceptionally long-lived snowfly might see the passing of an entire week. They collect snowflakes, digging them out of the layers on the ground or catching in them midair. Some of them look for quite a while. No one knows why, but only certain snowflakes will do. They build castles with them. This is probably the first tribe of snowflies to appear this year; they will begin a new era, here at the dawn of time, and be remembered in myth and legend by their descendants.

Their castles are marvels of miniature architecture. Snowflies lock snowflakes together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, building them into walls and minarets and tall spires like icicles made of lace. The very thickest walls are thinner than my little finger, and they can withstand the strongest Winter gale. For their size, the snowflies' ice buildings are stronger than stone. The rooms are smaller than the ones in a doll's house.

The castles are more or less the same every year. Either the snowflies build them by instinct, or the basics of snowflake masonry are rediscovered each Winter.

By February, each castle will have become a palace, a monumental construction of a trillion tiny crystals. The snowflies will build an empire. Settlements will grow around the palace, little clusters of ice huts sprouting like mushrooms. A few snowflake empires have grown to cover whole hillsides. The farmers will harvest the frost every morning. Hunts will fly out after gargantuan field mice and the occasional terrifying shrew, waging ferocious battles in the tunnels beneath an inch of snow.

It's almost impossible to observe snowflies, as they're not much larger than snowflakes and move so fast they're practically invisible. Nearly everything we know about them is thanks to Brindle Soffmoggin, a scientist who once spent three weeks in the snow with a camera and a magnifying glass, studying the snowflies. They were curious about him at first (a mute, molten giant, lying motionless on the ground for years at a time), but started treating him like part of the landscape after a few hours. They harvested frost off of the mountain of his coat. Most people these days know Soffmoggin by his nickname, Snowfly Brindley.

In Spring, the world of the snowflies will come to an end. The days will grow longer and harsher. The castles will drip and collapse. The frost will become scarce and die out, the snow will stop falling, and empires that have stood for months will crumble and fall into anarchy. Every snowfly in the Railway Regions will be gone before May.

Next November, when the first snow falls, a new tribe of snowflies will appear and start history all over again.

The world, it is generally agreed, has been around a long time. It will probably be around for quite a while longer. Looking at the snowflies every year, though, I can't help but wonder how many there have been before it.

Valestrina

The Train had to stop for almost an hour today, in the middle of nowhere, because there was a valestrina on the tracks.

Valestrini are widely considered to be one of the seven most beautiful birds in Hamjamser. (No one seems to be able to agree on which is the most beautiful of all, but the top seven are always the same.) They look a bit like a cross between a peacock and an ostrich. Some believe that's exactly what they are. It's rare to see a valestrina anywhere colder than Clam-Porkle, much less in the Railway Regions during Winter, so half the passengers in the Train tried to get out and have a look at it. After five minutes, the Train was blocked as much by its own passengers as by the valestrina. Several people climbed onto the roof. (One of them was me - I like to be up high, out of the crowd. It's surprisingly easy to get onto roofs with a little practice.)

Every type of feather in existence can be found somewhere on a valestrina. They have rather more feathers than can really fit on a single bird, actually, and they lose them constantly. Predators can track the birds by the trail of feathers they leave behind them. (Not many predators bother with valestrini, though, as they kick like mules and are mostly fluff.) The colors vary from bird to bird - black and white, violet, a peacock's blue and green, or just about anything else. This one was mostly coppery orange. It had a peacock's crown on its head, a scarlet crest all the way down its long and elegant neck, and pink wattles so long they looked like a catfish's whiskers. Round-edged feathers like copper pennies covered its neck and breast. Its flight feathers - such as they were - were tipped with sapphire blue. (Valestrini are quite incapable of flight, though not all of them realize it.) Thick golden feathers covered the top half of its legs; past that, its feet were a vivid pink, and as scaly as a velociraptor's. Its tail was a magnificent sheaf of feathers, like a bouquet of the feathers from the tails of a dozen birds. There were woodpecker stripes in black and copper, the speckled rectangles of a mockingbird (blue and gold instead of gray and white), quetzal plumes almost eight feet long, the fluffy curls of an ostrich, and about fifty peacock eyespots in every shade of gold and copper and jeweled blue. It spread it while we were watching - just once - and there was a sigh of awe from everyone on and around the Train. It was like watching every flower in Melligan bloom at once. Nothing in the world has a tail like a valestrina's.

After a while, it became clear that the bird was not planning to move anytime soon, so a few salamander keepers went out to shoo it off the tracks. The valestrina watched them suspiciously. When they got within ten feet of it, it began to leap up and down and scream as if it was being murdered. Valestrini may have beautiful feathers, but their voices are somewhat less melodious than a crow's. Brilliant feathers flew everywhere. The salamander keepers backed off, alarmed; the valestrina let out a few more ghastly squawks, fluffed its feathers indignantly, and settled back down again.

The same thing happened whenever anyone got near it. The best place on the mountain, apparently, was right in the middle of the tracks, and no one else was allowed there. Eventually, people started settling in, as the valestrina showed no interest in moving two feet over and getting out of the Train's way. Picnic blankets sprouted around the Train. I took about twenty sketches and photographs of the valestrina. I may try to draw or paint it someday, but I doubt I could ever really do it justice.

Mostly, everyone just sat and watched the bird. It made little hiccuping noises. It bobbed its head like a chicken and scratched at its feathers, which fell out. It was still the most beautiful thing on the mountain.

After an hour of this, the valestrina seemed to decide that it had been stared at enough for one day, or that it was bored, or that it actually preferred that patch of ground over there, or something. I don't know. For whatever reason, it got up and poked its lovely way into the woods. Everyone watched it go.

There was a moment of perfect silence.

Then half the people on the ground ran to pick up one of the dropped feathers, and the other half started talking all at once, and the Train workers started shouting to each other, and the engine roared as it warmed up again, and there was all the usual noise and chaos that happens every time the Train leaves a place. It was like waking up from a dream. In fifteen minutes, everyone was back on board, and we were rolling along as if nothing unusual had happened. The rest of the day was perfectly ordinary. Still, whenever anyone mentioned the valestrina, all conversations would stop, and we would stare blindly at nothing in particular, remembering sunlight on feathers the color of copper and sapphire and gold.