“Oh, yes.”
Water roared around rocks, plunging down toward a sea lost to distance and mist. The river was wide here. The massive bridge was watersmoothed boulders embedded in smooth, homogenous rock: poured rock, like several structures near the hub of Spiral Town. Tim showed his awe and hid his recognition.
Over the bridge they went, then downstream, spreading out.
After that nobody got much exercise. The men with poles dropped their lines into still pools in the white water. They sat on smooth rocks and talked or dozed. When anyone shouted, Tim or Hal moved briskly to get the net under whatever was flopping on a line. The fish were Earthlife, three or four species. Dannis spread a sheet well back from the stream and cleaned the fish on that.
The mist cleared for an hour in the afternoon. Tim could see all the way to the sea. There was a rectilinear feature along the shore: houses, many.
“The Shire?”
“Right.”
“Why didn't they build along the Road?”
“They don't like us,” Joker said. “They'd die without us, so they keep their manners. They'll cook us dinner if we bring the food. They don't fish or hunt much, so they don't get enough fat. There's another thing about the Shire,” Joker said. “You don't rub up against Shire women.”
He'd already heard that. Tim said, “A yutz wouldn't anyway.”
“Here, a merchant doesn't either.”
The Shire was spread along five or six klicks of shore, four klicks downslope from the Road. Over that distance a dozen men carried forty pounds of fish in a net hammock, following a worn dirt path that in no way resembled cooled lava.
There wasn't any beach. Waves smashed against rock cliffs, and only spray showed above the edge.
From a central building the houses reached two arms out along the bluff. They were squarish, with peaked roofs, like the houses of Twerdahl Town. Differences became clearer as they came near. These were smaller. Some had been shored up. They were all the same color: weathered wood. Roofs weren't as high. Walls leaned.
The hunting party beat them down. They'd killed something as big as a small man. Its head was shot to shreds, and puncture wounds showed along its body too. They were showing it to admiring Shire folk when the fishers arrived.
“Boar pig,” Hal told him.
A score of children swarmed around the carcass and the hunters from the caravan. Adults hung back, except for a dozen elder men. Those elders came to meet the fishing party.
The merchants' bias against haste might have worked against them. Fresher fish would have made a better gift. The Shire elders chose not to notice. They exclaimed over the fish as they had the boar, gave both to the women's care, and took the merchants off to the big central building that Tim had already dubbed City Hall. It was older than the other houses, and better built; and it had once had windows.
The Shire women were setting up to cook dinner. When Tim announced himself as a chef, they just looked at him, then closed a circle with Tim outside.
Tim was starting to feel left out. The children d~dn't want to talk, only to look. He watched the women at work for a bit, ignoring Hal's grin. Did they think, did Hal think, would Rian think that he was interested in them?
The Shire women enveloped themselves in shapeless robes. It was hard to see what they were like. One woman seemed bent and twisted, and too young for it. One or two who might be in their teens and twenties moved like they were in their thirties and forties. The way they moved and stood formed groups, with merchants and yutzes and Shire men outside. They closed themselves off from strangers, men and women alike, and only the Shire elders spoke to the elder merchants.
Joker's warning, Hal's warning, seemed superfluous.
The Shire had agriculture, at any rate. There were mushrooms big as a man's hand, corn and squashes and potatoes and unidentifiable flowery green stalks. It was all set steaming between blankets of Destiny ferns over a bed of coals.
The pig got the same treatment. An hour later, the fish did too.
The Shire men were settled in conversational circles, idle but for their busy hands. They ignored the men of the caravan, and Tim respected their wish. But Hal stood above one old man for a time, then called, “Tim? Bord'n? You've got to see this.”
The old man was seated against the tilted wall of a house. His skin was dark and seamed, his curly hair gone nearly white. His legs were thin and knobby. There was something distorted about him. Maybe something about the line of his jaw? He'd been working on the pale inner surface of an oval of hard gray stuff nearly a meter long, using tiny pointed picks. Now he grinned up, showing good white teeth set nearly at random, basking in Hal's admiration.
“This's Geordy Bruns,” Hal said.
The picks left dark scratches, or else Geordy Bruns had rubbed lampblack into them for shading. He'd carved a seascape: clouds and sea and dark bluffs, the same bluffs Tim could see to the northwest. A man in the middle distance, his back turned, looking up at a tinier human shape on the bluff. Tim turned the picture in his hands. A woman?
“It's amazing,” he said, “how much you've shown with so few lines.” Geordy Bruns nodded happily. Tim handed it back, carefully, and asked, “What is this?”
The Shireman's voice was rough, his accent twisted. “Scrimshaw. This's a lungshark's backplate.”
Tim studied it. The polished surface had a pearly iridescence. Hal said, “They're littler, but elsewise they're not so different from a chug's. You can go to a caravan's campground and pick up a hundred.”
Most of the Shire men were working scrimshaw carvings. Scenes differed; skills did too. Geordy Bruns showed a finished plate, a line of bas-relief skulls, all Destiny life, all clearly derived from some common ancestor. The middle one was certainly a chug. Another man had carved a crude view of Landing Day, as two featureless cylinders descended on inverted candle flames. A man Tim's age was instructing a younger one in technique, practicing on a chipped shell. They stopped uneasily until Tim stopped watching them.
The rest of the caravan arrived near sunset.
The men of the Shire distributed dinner. Some of them ushered the children into their own circle. When Geordy Bruns stood to take his meal, Tim saw that his back was twisted.
These women might know only one way to cook, but it worked. Fish, pig, potatoes and mushrooms and greens, they all tasted wonderful. Tim became certain that they'd used a different Destiny plant to flavor each coal bed. He should have watched more closely.
And finally it came to him to wonder-“Bord'n!”
“Tim?”
“Where on Earth are the chugs?”
“Well, they can't use the bluffs, can they? We turned them loose a couple of klicks up the Road, where they can get to a beach. It's still a good run for them.”
“Sharks?”
“We stayed to shoot a few. That's why some of us are late.”
Quicksilver was gone, and the sun was a last sliver of light on the sea. Against the dying red sky the silhouettes of human shapes showed their origin clearly. Tim saw it, the common thread. In their stance, in their walk, the Shire folk were distorted. Too many were sick, one way and another. Like Jemmy Bloocher's father: crippled, twisted.
He'd been seeing it half the afternoon: how they set wide privacy bubbles around traders and yutzes both. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, did they think outsiders were the twisted ones? And the traders were being meticulously polite- Tim watched Rian and Senka together. Senka's walk was always an invitation, and Rian's too. Not tonight! Senka's walk was clumpy, jarring. Rian tottered alongside, imitating her, two cripples keeping their balance with each other's help, with jaws set in anger against what the universe had done to them. Rian caught him looking, and winked.