We were traveling now through the Blood Drenched Hills, and coming to the market town of Spleen. Naturally, I wanted to get moving as quickly as possible, but my entourage had already decided we would spend a day or two here, peddling and enjoying their Mid Spring Festival. It did not feel like mid spring, the wind was still bitingly cold, the roads wet and muddy from snow melt, but the early planting had concluded so it was time for a party.
The town was nestled between a few hills, so the first sign of it was two plumes of smoke from the signal fires outside. As we rounded a curve in the road, the palisades of the town became visible. A token force of guards were posted outside, clearly Kralorelan, and clearly disappointed with their post. Merchants coming to the festival were being charged an entry fee, or were required to prove customary right of entrance to a small, tired looking administrator. He was sitting at one of the collapsible desks that mantrins deployed to the countryside bring with them. His assistant, a much younger scholar, was running errands for him, and interviewed the merchant parties approaching the town. Two guards flanked him, and I could see a patrol around the walls of perhaps ten guards heading around to the north.
It was, all in all, a very typical scene for a little regional market town, that is close enough to an army camp to have taxes drawn from it.
At my guide's request, I did not speak to the mantrin at the gate, or his assistant. "You are very clearly not of Chen Durel, and these games are delicate at the best of times," he had once told me. "It's better to leave these little taxes to us, who are experienced at not paying them." As we drew close to the gates, he tapped his front teeth twice, and inhaled deeply through his nostrils, and his entire carriage changed in that instance. His face set to a practiced smile, and he addressed the administrator with honeyed tones, citing ancient privileges of the Argan Argar cult, and the poverty of their mission, and any excuse he could think of. Through all of it, the administrator was stone-faced, with either boredom or despair, until finally he relented and let us in to the market.
"He's softer than most," my guide commented once we were inside the walls. "Managed to shave four cash off the door fee. Twice the haul I usually manage."
My guide took some time to set up a stall, while I walked off to see what was nearby.
The town was built along a stretch of the road, with a crossroad at the center, making four avenues roughly in the cardinal directions. It was longest along the east-west axis, and bulged out somewhat like an oval to the north and south. The main walk was set up with merchants of various sorts. The largest single sections were assigned to the outlying villages that came to Spleen by custom as their marketplace. They even had permanent trading houses on the main road. Second most were the resident artisans of Spleen, who set up stalls to show their product and invited traveling merchants back to their workshops and warehouses for larger sales. Finally, there were peddlers who brought wares from afar to the city.
Men in black, carrying great leaden staves of office came to meet my guide. They identified themselves as the Market Kings, whose pleasure and obligation is to greet merchants and judge over crimes committed in the town. They reviewed the goods we had brought, and called artisans of the town over to examine the goods, and to give their permission that it may be sold. All in all, the typical rituals of a marketplace, that I had the luxury of not enduring. Rather than wait, I decided to get food and drink from a nearby stall set in front of a local kitchen, and watch the town at its business.
I must digress, momentarily, and discuss my profound disappointment with the state of alcohol in Chen Durel. Years ago, I had cause for business in Chang Tsai, the greatest city of Hanjan. I spent longer there than I should have, seeking partners and opportunities on behalf of my family, and enjoying that most delightful jewel of a city. Once, I met with a merchant who I now understand to be a member of the Benevolent Co-Prosperity Association, or at least the contact of the local Benevolent Societies to the northern trading league. This fine woman served me the most invigorating liqueur, bitterly herbal, smoothly honeyed, and with a cleansing dryness afterwards. At great pressure, I drew from him that this was a specialty of Chen Durel, that ghost haunted land in the north.
Now, I find myself haunted by those same ghosts, my flesh frostbit by the Bandit Winds that still stalk this late spring, on a solitary and bitter task for my ungrateful family. But even this burden could be endured for another taste of that blazing drink, and the hope of the other luxuries we have never heard of in the south.
Here, I find they have none.
Their distilleries are possibly the most skilled in all of Kralorela, and yield the highest quality of alcohol to be tasted, and they drink none of it.
It is purely medicinal. The majority is used as the solvent base for concocting elixirs. That liqueur I was served is an herbal medicine taken to encourage liver health. To just drink it, to guzzle it, they say, would be to risk public drunkenness, to become incontinent, be rendered not a man, as they would repeat in their idiom, an embarrassment worse than death.
An amount is left as raw vodka, as they view it as a useful curative, in small dosages, to those lost in illusions, and as a way to drive off dangerous spirits who despise harsh smells. I was horrified the first time I saw one of the caravan men empty a flask of fine vodka into a small pond before watering the llamas, until I saw the black, half submerged shapes of water spirits bolt along the top of the pond to the opposite end. They hulked like crocodiles, yellow eyes staring unblinking, hungry at the far edges of the water.
When they drink, they prefer a sorghum beer, which is at best watery and at worst vile, and a soupy maize beer, which is consistently vile. There is a third beer as well, also made from maize, but it is less common.
Once, I had the supreme displeasure of encountering a mead they make from fermented sap, honey, and an unknown assortment of herbs. I took a single sniff and began retching. I asked my guide, "how can you drink this stuff?" and his only response, laughing, was "you aren't supposed to *drink* it." What he implicated still fills me with dread.
I nursed my miserable sorghum-water, and watched the crowd deal with each other for a while. Eventually, some motion at our stall caught my eye, and I saw the Market Kings, my guide, the caravan men, all of them laughing and clapping hands. It seems we passed the most important test: they liked us. One of the men sat at the stall and to move our goods, one set up on the other side of the road to watch the scene, a few spread out to see if there were any deals to take. My guide came up to me."It appears that we have arrived here at a good moment. The first show of the day is soon to begin."
A horn sounded from the hill outside town, a drum responded from a watchtower towards the middle of the town.
"Ah, I have made a mistake, the first show of the day is beginning."
Coming along all avenues of the town, now, were the Fools.
Each was dressed in brilliant, gaudy robes, with intricate patterns embroidered into the fabric. They resembled mantrins, and I supposed immediately that was not coincidental.
Each had two bright yellow Truth runes embroidered on their chest, one at each shoulder. In long columns down the length of their front were the woven and embroidered patterns that mark the hometown of the performer.
Each wore a headdress with small lead tokens cast as the Eight Icons of Wealth, sewn next to satirical inclusions such as latrines and graves. Many wore faux peacock feathers made from reeds and dyed llama hair.
Each wore a mask, with a long fake beard.
People would yell simple questions at the Fools, asking "how do you get to Urgzant from here?" or "how do you keep pigs from slipping out of their pen?" and the Fool, diligently, would respond in flowing rhetoric, inventing evasive language to avoid speaking too directly, and citing long and irrelevant passages from classical scripts, typically invented on the spot.
First periodically, then regularly, then frequently, then constantly, one or another would deliver a response that hit the refined sensibilities of the Ignorants' humor.
My guide commented, "you see, they must enter the role, they must let their spirits enter them."
The show reached its second act when they reached the center of the village, and they made a great circle. "Friends," the foremost of them said, "we must debate this matter again! We cannot let this go unanswered! Are birds fish, or are fish birds?"
"Clearly, all fish are birds! We see this because all fish have wings, as birds do, merely suited for flying in water!" cried one Fool.
"Of course you would say that," came the response from a third Fool, "but the application of rigorous Logic will reveal that the bird is a sort of fish, capable of swimming in air from its marriage to the Sky God!"
"We must be careful here, a single wrong step may doom us all," yet another Fool contributed, "to understand something, we must return to its origin. Let us review the cosmogony of fish, in detail-"
At this point, they all started chiming in with increasingly ridiculous and self-defeating arguments. At length they came to blows, and fought with one another in the mud.
Throttling some poor sop whose costume had almost completely fallen apart, the first Fool to speak shouted into their face, "I'm right, and if you were me you'd see that too!"
"Oh! Is that all we have to do? Let's try that then!"
They backed away, acting embarrassed to have let their passions run away, and they swapped their heads with one another.
I had seen this many times by now, and each time it is still unnerving. I know that it is a trick they have here, but it still horrifies me when a body walks headless, when jugglers rip off their own arms as part of their routine.
"Hm, hm, hm, yes, I see, birds are fish, just as you said."
"No, actually, now I see it too, fish are birds, just as you said."
"Well, I need to see that too!" a third Fool got up from a melee and charged at the two.
Now the fight took on a new character, as the Fools in general swapped heads. One headless body staggered on its feet, and as heads passed by, it stole them, and hooked the heads to its waist. Unaware they were bodiless, the gathered heads continued their debate. The headless Fool took one head in its left hand and its right, and held them up.
"Well, should we call this a draw?" one asked.
The crowd laughed uproariously at this miserable creature. From the west came what had to be the oldest man in town, huddled over at the waist, propped up on a leaden spear like a walking stick, helped along by his grandchildren. He wore a fishskin shirt, and a solid black plume on his head. He stumbled into the square, the fools had fallen silent, and stood still for a moment. Then gathering himself, he bolted towards the headless bodies, screaming "pe! pe!" and swinging his spear recklessly. He struck the fools and they fell to pieces, until he had brought the headtaker at the end to pieces as well.
Everyone began to cheer the old man and the great show the Fools had made, as with the help of their audience, the Fools began to pull themselves together and take their bows.
My guide said "I rarely am here to see this festival, I usually do not peddle on this route this time of year, but I see others like it from time to time. They play Fool well here."
"Is that how it always ends?"
"Usually, yes. You have to chase those fool spirits out, before they settle in and become problems. And Basko has always been the best one to do that."
That evening, I saw how the red dusk played on the western horizon, and how the red wildflowers flowed in rivulets down the hillsides, and came to see how the Blood Drenched Hills took their name.
- From My Travels in Chen Durel
The town was nestled between a few hills, so the first sign of it was two plumes of smoke from the signal fires outside. As we rounded a curve in the road, the palisades of the town became visible. A token force of guards were posted outside, clearly Kralorelan, and clearly disappointed with their post. Merchants coming to the festival were being charged an entry fee, or were required to prove customary right of entrance to a small, tired looking administrator. He was sitting at one of the collapsible desks that mantrins deployed to the countryside bring with them. His assistant, a much younger scholar, was running errands for him, and interviewed the merchant parties approaching the town. Two guards flanked him, and I could see a patrol around the walls of perhaps ten guards heading around to the north.
It was, all in all, a very typical scene for a little regional market town, that is close enough to an army camp to have taxes drawn from it.
At my guide's request, I did not speak to the mantrin at the gate, or his assistant. "You are very clearly not of Chen Durel, and these games are delicate at the best of times," he had once told me. "It's better to leave these little taxes to us, who are experienced at not paying them." As we drew close to the gates, he tapped his front teeth twice, and inhaled deeply through his nostrils, and his entire carriage changed in that instance. His face set to a practiced smile, and he addressed the administrator with honeyed tones, citing ancient privileges of the Argan Argar cult, and the poverty of their mission, and any excuse he could think of. Through all of it, the administrator was stone-faced, with either boredom or despair, until finally he relented and let us in to the market.
"He's softer than most," my guide commented once we were inside the walls. "Managed to shave four cash off the door fee. Twice the haul I usually manage."
My guide took some time to set up a stall, while I walked off to see what was nearby.
The town was built along a stretch of the road, with a crossroad at the center, making four avenues roughly in the cardinal directions. It was longest along the east-west axis, and bulged out somewhat like an oval to the north and south. The main walk was set up with merchants of various sorts. The largest single sections were assigned to the outlying villages that came to Spleen by custom as their marketplace. They even had permanent trading houses on the main road. Second most were the resident artisans of Spleen, who set up stalls to show their product and invited traveling merchants back to their workshops and warehouses for larger sales. Finally, there were peddlers who brought wares from afar to the city.
Men in black, carrying great leaden staves of office came to meet my guide. They identified themselves as the Market Kings, whose pleasure and obligation is to greet merchants and judge over crimes committed in the town. They reviewed the goods we had brought, and called artisans of the town over to examine the goods, and to give their permission that it may be sold. All in all, the typical rituals of a marketplace, that I had the luxury of not enduring. Rather than wait, I decided to get food and drink from a nearby stall set in front of a local kitchen, and watch the town at its business.
I must digress, momentarily, and discuss my profound disappointment with the state of alcohol in Chen Durel. Years ago, I had cause for business in Chang Tsai, the greatest city of Hanjan. I spent longer there than I should have, seeking partners and opportunities on behalf of my family, and enjoying that most delightful jewel of a city. Once, I met with a merchant who I now understand to be a member of the Benevolent Co-Prosperity Association, or at least the contact of the local Benevolent Societies to the northern trading league. This fine woman served me the most invigorating liqueur, bitterly herbal, smoothly honeyed, and with a cleansing dryness afterwards. At great pressure, I drew from him that this was a specialty of Chen Durel, that ghost haunted land in the north.
Now, I find myself haunted by those same ghosts, my flesh frostbit by the Bandit Winds that still stalk this late spring, on a solitary and bitter task for my ungrateful family. But even this burden could be endured for another taste of that blazing drink, and the hope of the other luxuries we have never heard of in the south.
Here, I find they have none.
Their distilleries are possibly the most skilled in all of Kralorela, and yield the highest quality of alcohol to be tasted, and they drink none of it.
It is purely medicinal. The majority is used as the solvent base for concocting elixirs. That liqueur I was served is an herbal medicine taken to encourage liver health. To just drink it, to guzzle it, they say, would be to risk public drunkenness, to become incontinent, be rendered not a man, as they would repeat in their idiom, an embarrassment worse than death.
An amount is left as raw vodka, as they view it as a useful curative, in small dosages, to those lost in illusions, and as a way to drive off dangerous spirits who despise harsh smells. I was horrified the first time I saw one of the caravan men empty a flask of fine vodka into a small pond before watering the llamas, until I saw the black, half submerged shapes of water spirits bolt along the top of the pond to the opposite end. They hulked like crocodiles, yellow eyes staring unblinking, hungry at the far edges of the water.
When they drink, they prefer a sorghum beer, which is at best watery and at worst vile, and a soupy maize beer, which is consistently vile. There is a third beer as well, also made from maize, but it is less common.
Once, I had the supreme displeasure of encountering a mead they make from fermented sap, honey, and an unknown assortment of herbs. I took a single sniff and began retching. I asked my guide, "how can you drink this stuff?" and his only response, laughing, was "you aren't supposed to *drink* it." What he implicated still fills me with dread.
I nursed my miserable sorghum-water, and watched the crowd deal with each other for a while. Eventually, some motion at our stall caught my eye, and I saw the Market Kings, my guide, the caravan men, all of them laughing and clapping hands. It seems we passed the most important test: they liked us. One of the men sat at the stall and to move our goods, one set up on the other side of the road to watch the scene, a few spread out to see if there were any deals to take. My guide came up to me."It appears that we have arrived here at a good moment. The first show of the day is soon to begin."
A horn sounded from the hill outside town, a drum responded from a watchtower towards the middle of the town.
"Ah, I have made a mistake, the first show of the day is beginning."
Coming along all avenues of the town, now, were the Fools.
Each was dressed in brilliant, gaudy robes, with intricate patterns embroidered into the fabric. They resembled mantrins, and I supposed immediately that was not coincidental.
Each had two bright yellow Truth runes embroidered on their chest, one at each shoulder. In long columns down the length of their front were the woven and embroidered patterns that mark the hometown of the performer.
Each wore a headdress with small lead tokens cast as the Eight Icons of Wealth, sewn next to satirical inclusions such as latrines and graves. Many wore faux peacock feathers made from reeds and dyed llama hair.
Each wore a mask, with a long fake beard.
People would yell simple questions at the Fools, asking "how do you get to Urgzant from here?" or "how do you keep pigs from slipping out of their pen?" and the Fool, diligently, would respond in flowing rhetoric, inventing evasive language to avoid speaking too directly, and citing long and irrelevant passages from classical scripts, typically invented on the spot.
First periodically, then regularly, then frequently, then constantly, one or another would deliver a response that hit the refined sensibilities of the Ignorants' humor.
My guide commented, "you see, they must enter the role, they must let their spirits enter them."
The show reached its second act when they reached the center of the village, and they made a great circle. "Friends," the foremost of them said, "we must debate this matter again! We cannot let this go unanswered! Are birds fish, or are fish birds?"
"Clearly, all fish are birds! We see this because all fish have wings, as birds do, merely suited for flying in water!" cried one Fool.
"Of course you would say that," came the response from a third Fool, "but the application of rigorous Logic will reveal that the bird is a sort of fish, capable of swimming in air from its marriage to the Sky God!"
"We must be careful here, a single wrong step may doom us all," yet another Fool contributed, "to understand something, we must return to its origin. Let us review the cosmogony of fish, in detail-"
At this point, they all started chiming in with increasingly ridiculous and self-defeating arguments. At length they came to blows, and fought with one another in the mud.
Throttling some poor sop whose costume had almost completely fallen apart, the first Fool to speak shouted into their face, "I'm right, and if you were me you'd see that too!"
"Oh! Is that all we have to do? Let's try that then!"
They backed away, acting embarrassed to have let their passions run away, and they swapped their heads with one another.
I had seen this many times by now, and each time it is still unnerving. I know that it is a trick they have here, but it still horrifies me when a body walks headless, when jugglers rip off their own arms as part of their routine.
"Hm, hm, hm, yes, I see, birds are fish, just as you said."
"No, actually, now I see it too, fish are birds, just as you said."
"Well, I need to see that too!" a third Fool got up from a melee and charged at the two.
Now the fight took on a new character, as the Fools in general swapped heads. One headless body staggered on its feet, and as heads passed by, it stole them, and hooked the heads to its waist. Unaware they were bodiless, the gathered heads continued their debate. The headless Fool took one head in its left hand and its right, and held them up.
"Well, should we call this a draw?" one asked.
The crowd laughed uproariously at this miserable creature. From the west came what had to be the oldest man in town, huddled over at the waist, propped up on a leaden spear like a walking stick, helped along by his grandchildren. He wore a fishskin shirt, and a solid black plume on his head. He stumbled into the square, the fools had fallen silent, and stood still for a moment. Then gathering himself, he bolted towards the headless bodies, screaming "pe! pe!" and swinging his spear recklessly. He struck the fools and they fell to pieces, until he had brought the headtaker at the end to pieces as well.
Everyone began to cheer the old man and the great show the Fools had made, as with the help of their audience, the Fools began to pull themselves together and take their bows.
My guide said "I rarely am here to see this festival, I usually do not peddle on this route this time of year, but I see others like it from time to time. They play Fool well here."
"Is that how it always ends?"
"Usually, yes. You have to chase those fool spirits out, before they settle in and become problems. And Basko has always been the best one to do that."
That evening, I saw how the red dusk played on the western horizon, and how the red wildflowers flowed in rivulets down the hillsides, and came to see how the Blood Drenched Hills took their name.
- From My Travels in Chen Durel
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