“What are these?” I asked, having to work hard to look up from the figures.
He smiled and laugh lines crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Why, they’re wooden sculptures, my boy. What do they look like?”
I saw Brill’s eyes flicker from one figure to another. She examined the detail and the textures, certainly, but it almost seemed like she was searching for one item in particular.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I can see they’re wooden sculptures, and they are absolutely exquisite. But…what are they? What kind of wood is this?”
He smiled again. His seamed and weathered skin made him appear carved from wood himself. “The wood is windrift, and ’tis a gift from the sea, which we gather on the beaches. The larger bits we burn for fuel. Some we carve.”
“And the hearts?”
“Ah, the hearts are bits of shell. The sea provides those as well.”
“These are not just souvenirs. They have some meaning. Can you tell us?”
He raised his eyebrows in amusement at this. “You see what you see, young sir. I am but a simple carver of shapes.”
As stall banter, his speech felt unusual. Most craftsmen wanted to prattle on to make their wares more appealing but I had to drag everything out of this guy. Maybe he was smarter than I thought because he was spectacularly effective at securing my attention. I could not get it out of my head that the figures were more than mere carvings. Perhaps I projected my own feelings onto them. I could not shake the feeling. To begin with, the carving was exquisite and the inlay work, flawless. The shapes emerged from the wood like they were always there hidden below the surface, and the carver merely revealed them.
“Good sir, I mean no offense,” I answered him formally, playing along with his script. “But I’m a simple lad and not familiar with your customs. Are they religious icons? Good luck charms? These seem like more than merely shapes.” I glanced at Brill again but she seemed oblivious to our conversation as she intently examined the figures.
The man relented then and admitted, “These are but the shapes in the windrift and shells of the sea. My family has been making them for decades, my father and his father before him. We collect the windrift and shells and carve them as the mood strike us. They bear no significance other than the love we have for the sea.”
His words seemed at once sincere and not completely true. As I was about to press him on the matter, Brill reached out and plucked a figure from the table. It was a heron, about six centimeters tall, with a delicately formed neck and long legs. The carving had a bit of rich purple shell as the heart. “How much?” she asked.
“All the pieces on the table are ten creds,” he said. “That’s the price.”
She placed the heron back on the table. “It’s lovely, but…no, thank you.”
We took our leave then, but as I was walking away, I noted the booth number.
A few meters down the aisle, we turned to each other. “What was that about?” Brill asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure, but we need to remember that booth. Ten creds is a lot for a small wooden artifact, but they might be worth every bit of it. The craftsmanship on them is spectacular, and each one seems to have captured the essence of its subject. That heron looked like it might reach out and strike a fish.”
She nodded. “It was lovely.”
“Why didn’t you get it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it but as soon as he said the price, I didn’t really want it anymore.” She shook her head slightly as if just waking up. “I mean, I wanted it, but I didn’t want to buy it.” She blinked and looked confused. “I don’t know what I mean. How about you? Why didn’t you buy some?”
“I don’t know either. I just want to think about it.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Ten creds is a bit much.” We continued down the aisle. Around the next corner was a booth selling powdered dyes and it reminded me of a conversation I had with Pip on Margary.
I nudged Brill with an elbow and pointed. “You were looking for trade goods?”
“Yeah.”
“Back on Margary, Pip and I were thinking we should buy dyes as private cargo and bring them to St. Cloud. We thought there might be a market because of all the yarn producers here. But when we did a little research, we discovered that St. Cloud dyes are kind of a cottage level export.”
“Makes sense. If you have the yarn, you’ll find ways to dye it.”
We drifted into the dye booth and examined the dye packets. The couple behind the counter, a woman and her husband, were pleasant and business-like. The dye was packaged in paper packages from a few grams up to a quarter kilo. Each packet had a small sample of yarn attached to it showing the color the particular dye would produce.
Brill asked, “Do you have these in larger packages?”
The man laughed, but the woman shook her head and grinned. “The quarter kilo packets will dye ten kilos of wool to full saturation,” she explained. “That’s a lot of wool. For most normal uses, the hundred gram packets are preferred.”
The packets were spread on the table in a color wheel pattern with the purples on one end arching around to red on the other. There were no white dyes, of course, but blacks took up space in the center of the curve. I took out my tablet and snapped a digital of the display and sent it off to Pip.
“We’re crew from the Lois McKendrick,” I explained. “We’re looking for things to take with us out of the system. I’m interested, but I’d like my partner to come see.”
“Please, take a card,” the man said, offering a small item. “We’re happy to offer wholesale prices.”
I took the data-card and thanked them before Brill and I moved on.
“What do you think?” she asked as we turned a corner to head down another aisle.
“I’m not sure. The dyes are a good idea in practice, but I’m thinking of what they’d look like on the co-op table. As a trade good, they lack something.”
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying. It does seem like a specialty kind of item. Either you want it or not.”
It was just about then when we came to a section that was dedicated just to yarn. There were dozens of vendors, and as we worked our way through them, we found Sean Grishan about halfway down the aisle. Sean was a short guy with a pug nose and sandy hair, a spacer apprentice in the deck division. He carried several skeins of a soft-looking yarn in a wide variety of colors. As hard as it was to believe, he spent quite a bit of his downtime on the ship knitting and crocheting. Back on Margary, his handmade lace earned him a pile of creds in the booth. Judging from the skeins in his bag, I suspected he had some new projects in mind. He waved when he saw us and had a kid-in-a-candy-store grin plastered on his face. “Hey, shippies,” he called.
“Hi, Sean,” Brill returned. “You look like you’re gonna be doing some knitting. How much yarn do you have there?”
“About five kilos worth, but I’m not knitting with these.”
“What then?” I asked. “Five kilos is a lot of mass.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, “but I’ve got a lot to spare. I unloaded almost everything I had between Margary and here. I’m going to use this stuff to make afghans!”
Brill laughed delightedly. “Afghans?”
“Yeah, I’ve had a bunch of patterns for crocheted afghans for nearly a stanyer. This is the first time I’ve had enough creds and mass allotment to actually get enough yarn to try them out.”
“So? This is good yarn?” I asked.
“There’s just about anything you want here. It ranges from good to excellent. It really depends on what you want to do with it. You looking for trade goods?”