A child came to the water-seller with her jaw set tight in grief and anger. Storm clouds swirled in her eyes. “Tell me a story.” The water-seller dipped her hand in her jar, and as drops fell from her fingers and splashed back into its depths, she said,

Once there was an angel, Al-Nilam, from whose wrists dangled a string of pearls. She stood on a rock in the centre of a salty lake, with her shoulders bowed and her head bent, waiting for time to pass. She was buffeted by winds, soaked by rains, shat on by crows and mocked by magpies, but still she stood, silent and unspeaking, in the centre of that salty lake, clutching that string of pearls.

One day a prince rode by on a black horse and he saw her. He and the horse stopped to drink and they watched the milky light of her pearls dance across the water. They saw it coil in the air like smoke and make her a halo, bathing her face in subtle radiance.

He walked into the salty waters and asked the angel, “What are you waiting for?”

Al-Nilam looked at him with eyes like broken eggshells. “Something has taken my heart. I am waiting to hear it sing so that I can find it and be whole.” She folded her arms around herself more tightly and her pearls flickered grey and blue.

“I have a princess already,” said he, and he tied his red scarf about his brow and rode east on his black horse to return to the palace of his fathers. “But where there is a missing heart there is a prince to find it.”

Once home he told his brothers what he had seen and said, and his second brother, who rode a horse with white dapples like rose-petals on its flanks, and carried a scarf silver as the moon, rode to the west to speak to the angel. “Where did you see your heart last?” he asked.

They went looking for the angel’s heart. She sat beside him on his horse, and they told each other stories of heaven and earth, until the angel’s throat was tired. She began to play with her pearls. One by one, she dropped them, one each in one hundred kingdoms, and they never found them again. Once in a while they see a flag of mist or a spear of white light, but it is always a trick of the clouds or another angel’s radiance dancing in the distance. He told her stories until he had no more to tell, and then they began to sing together, but without her pearls Al-Nilam had nothing to hold her together, and tears began to rush from her eyes. Soon their horse’s back hooves were always cold and wet from the salty river that trailed behind them.

Still they rode in search of the wo poker spielentexas holdem poker trickspartie poker netgratis poker spielepoker superstars 2 spielenpoker flash gameonline poker kostenfreipoker rulespoker game set 300carte giocotavoli da gioco pokeromaha h lwww poker gratispoker tour ps27 card stud in lineacasino poker gratispoker texana onlinepoker game gratisholdem poker on lineasian poker tourgiocare a poker on lineplay omaha poker onlineplay poker,play wize poker,poker play moneystrip poker online demogioco a pokerplay omaha poker freesiti poker on linetornei poker texas holdemstrip poker gratistexas holdem gamepoker americanotexas holdem downloadpoker texana on lineplay omaha pokeromaha poker onlinedownload gioco poker gratispoker gratis multiplayerplay poker on linetornei pokerpoker texas holdem gratispoker sala giochigiochi poker,giochi carte poker gratis,giochi poker per pcgioco di poker gratispoker tournament 2007poker gioco completosale poker onlinetexas holdem freewarestrategia texas holdemcalifornia pokerdownload giochi poker angel’s heart, and sometimes they met messengers from home asking where the young prince had gone and when he would be back, but they would always turn them away, saying, “We have not yet returned from our quest.”

By this time Al-Nilam’s sorrow was so complete that when she cried, teeth would fall out instead of tears. The prince made her magic teeth of rosewood and diamond so that she might chew and speak. They ranged farther and wider, but they could not find her heart. By this time the prince had run out of songs, and so he told the angel secrets. He told her about the crimes of his father and the treacheries of his brothers and the terrible things he had done himself to keep his place in the line of inheritance. He told her about the disaster at the City of Ivory and the betrayal of the djinn.

By this time her bones and organs had begun to fall out, but they said, “It is not important,” and tied them back on with sashes and ribbons and strings. “Maybe later we can put them back in their places.”

He was about to tell her something else, when he realised that they had ridden back to the angel’s salty lake, and his brother with the red scarf was waiting for them on the rock. He swam out to meet him and then they both came back to shore.

“Brother, when you rode out I went to follow you, to give you my map of a hundred kingdoms, but your rose-petal horse is faster than mine, and so when I arrived at the salty lake you had gone. But look, I found this thing.” He held up a grey, dried-out lump of flesh, covered in the salt of the lake.

“Oh,” said Al-Nilam.

“Oh?” said the brothers in unison.

“Yes, that’s right. That is my heart. I had made a cushion out of it to soften the edges of the rock. It was painful to sit on.”

The elder prince bit his tongue and the younger prince set his jaw and would not speak. They exchanged a look, mounted their horses, and rode to the east, leaving the angel there with her heart at her feet.

A Numidian told me this tale one night at a caravanserai. In his village lived a man and a woman who had twins, a boy and a girl. Their names were Bezek and Bered.

They grew up as ordinary children for some time, sitting at their parents’ feet to learn to make clay jars or weave baskets to sell, or helping to carry water or cut reeds, but one day their mother noticed something strange. She said to their father, “Did you know that Bezek and Bered were made of paper?”

Their father hadn’t noticed, but when he stopped to pay attention, he saw that Bezek made a rumpling sound when he walked and he was terribly nervous around bottles of ink, and whenever Bered didn’t want to be found he couldn’t find her, and their beds never looked slept in. After some time he spoke to his wife. “You are right. They much be something other than children, since it is not the custom of children to be made of paper.”

“It is so. We must find out where our real children have gone,” said their mother in a thoughtful manner. “But what will we do with these? Children or not, they are rather excellent assistants, and it would grieve me to turn them away with no place to go.”

Her husband nodded. “We will have to keep them all, I’m sure. With all the extra hands, we’ll be able to make twice as many baskets and jars! In this way will we enjoy great prosperity.”

“But what if they are someone else’s?”

“What about it? They do not seem overly concerned,” her husband replied.

His wife bit her lip and looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, “But you recall that incident with the mountain goat and the string of pearls.”

“O treasure-chest of my happiness, it stings when you forget that some of your anecdotes were acquired in the company of your previous husband. I do not recall it.”

“It is because I have forgotten all other men, beloved. But here is the tale, and the reason that one must be careful with things that aren’t one’s own, even if they are found merely by accident…”

---

“You see, back then my name was Ašiyane and my husband was Qayd. We were egg-sellers; in a hundred wicker houses we had a hundred assistants and each assistant tended a hundred birds, and every night they would lay enough eggs to match every star in the sky. We fed all of Cairo, Alexandria, Heliopolis, Saqqara, and Fayyum with our eggs.One day as we were climbing the lapis cliffs of Persia, which is where mamlûks come from, hunting the blue-cliff hawk that makes its nest only there—we wanted to catch one because it is said that eating its eggs strengthens the fingernails and cures blindness—we happened upon an odd sight. There on a ledge no wider than my hand,” she showed her husband her hand to remind him how delicate it was, “was a white goat with a yellow beard and yellow tufts at its hooves, nibbling on a rosemary bush.”"That does not sound especially strange. It’s the habit of goats to climb mountains, and all living things must eat.”

“I have not described the strange thing yet. You see, around its neck was a string of pearls! Not just any pearls, mind you, but every sort of pearl you could imagine: white pearls from India and nubbly green peacock-pearls from China, tiny seed-pearls and pearls like grains of rice, pearls in yellow and pink and black, shaped like lentil seeds and chickpeas and tiny potatoes, and one pearl at least as big as my eyeball with a watery bubble and the bones of a fish inside. It went around its neck six times and its head was bowed under the weight of all those riches.

So naturally Qayd and I took the goat and abandoned for the moment the mission of the blue-cliff hawk.

When we returned to our ship we slaughtered the goat so that the ship’s cook might make a meal for us and our crew, for we hadn’t eaten fresh meat in months (it is unlucky to keep livestock aboard ship, and smelly too) and at night Qayd’s ribs would jangle hollowly against the knobs of my backbone as we tried to sleep. We ate well that evening, as the cook made a rich stew with the roots of parsley and a salad with pomegranate and a pilaf with chunks of goat and cakes of shredded crab. As we carried its severed head to the sea to wash it and prepare it for burial a drop of blood landed on the pearls and immediately the goat’s head began to emit a piercing squeal.

Usually the severed heads of deceased animals do not have such strident objections to such slight breaches of good housekeeping, so we paid close attention as it proceeded to elaborate upon its feelings. “Robbers!” it shouted. “Thieves! I am the djinn beneath ten thousand leagues, who commands the waves as a huntsmaster commands the hounds of the chase! You have robbed me of my vehicle, and indeed, consumed it! This will render my exploration of Persia difficult at best!” It was at this point that I observed the fish-bone pearl shining with a rippling, watery light.

“O djinn inside the pearl, we are of course at your service, and apologise for having offended you, but may I advise that you select a less delicious vehicle the next time you choose to perambulate the dry countries? Perhaps if you ride a pig or toad or stray dog, you will not find yourself in such a stew again,” said my husband, speaking around a mouthful of meat. I couldn’t decide then and to this day I still cannot, whether he was making light because he was nervous—an infuriating habit of his—or whether he genuinely found the djinn’s plight as comical as that.

Naturally this comment infuriated the djinn further, and the fish-bone pearl began to crack with his anger. “As I am a faithful Muslim, having been converted by King Suleiman (may he live forever) himself, I will not visit a terrible and violent example on you as a warning to other humorists,” said he, “But I will ban you and all your crew from travelling over my waters for so long as I live.”

At this point Qayd had wearied of the djinn’s conversation and tossed the string of pearls overboard. They fell to the ground with that particular muffled clatter that is their distinctive sound.

“My dear husband, it would seem that we have run aground.”

“I have just noticed the same thing.”

“Maybe the djinn was not as full of hot air as you seemed to think only seconds ago.”

“Of course I am not!” shouted the string of pearls, having given up the macabre game of using a goat’s head as ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Well then, I hope you will enjoy exploring the bottom of this well,” said our heretofore silent cook, and tossed the pearls in. He shrugged. “It seems that being so suddenly bereft of employment has made me irritable.”

Qayd and I laughed and laughed, but then, try as we might, we could not relaunch the ship, and so we were forced to walk to a certain place I know in Lebanon where there is a breeder of giant riding swans. In this time Qayd injured his leg and decided not to risk the flight, so the cook and I made the journey back ourselves, only to find that one of the assistants had reported us dead and taken possession of our egg-laying empire, so that we were forced to seek alternative livelihoods. That was when we married and became potters.”

“I suppose I was present when that adventure took place.”

“Of course you were, beloved. You simply forget everything; it is a part of your charm.”

“Well then.” He passed his fingers through the racks of reeds, selecting pieces for a new basket. “I have only one more question.”

“Ask it.”

“Why did you change your name?”

“Ašiyane’s only love was eggs. Now that I have you, I am someone else entirely.”

I’ve been messing with the comment settings to make it easier to do that.

Also, I’m going to slowly move the food and games off this site onto a more accessible Wordpress blog.  Art and fiction will remain here.

Here’s a rethinking of the conflict rituals for the Mist-Robed Gate. There is a knife. When the knife is on the table any player can take it. When it is in a player’s hand, it cannot be taken; it must be given.

At the beginning the knife is on the table. It is in a sheath and covered by a cloth.

When someone reveals a loyalty that generates conflict, she uncovers the knife but leaves it in its sheath.

Once the knife is uncovered, the time for entreaty has begun.

The sheathed knife is a silent plea. Hand the knife to another player and, without words, tell him what you need with your hands and eyes. He will do one of these things:

• Nod and comply. Though he cannot be certain what you desire, he does something to please you. He places the knife back on the table.
• Silently shake his head. He cannot guess what you need or is unwilling to give it. He passes the knife to another player; his unspoken request is, “Assuage this hurt between the two of us.”
• Draw the knife. He passes it back to you and he demands something of you in exchange.

The drawn knife is a spoken outcry. As you hand the knife to another player, you say what you wish of her. She will do one of these things:

• Nod and comply. She does what you ask and places the knife back on the table.
• Shake her head. She is unwilling or unable to give what you ask. She hands the knife to another player and makes a different demand.
• Pass the knife back to you. She says, “If that, then this,” and makes another demand; she promises to do what you ask if you do what she asks.
• Stab you. She drives her knife through your character sheet. This is the end of you.

The stabbing knife leaves death in its wake. As you are stabbed, you become empowered. You may do these things:

• Die. You do not outlive this scene. Place the knife back on the table.
• Stab who has stabbed you. Drive the knife through her character sheet. You do not outlive this scene. You each demand something of the world (but not of any character), and in your deaths your wishes are fulfilled.
• Hold the knife to another’s throat. Make a demand of him. He may either obey or be stabbed. Regardless, you do not outlive this scene. He takes the knife.

The sheathed knife and the drawn knife may only be passed from hand to hand once per scene, which means that if you are given the knife and you wish to pass it to another, you must end the scene and begin another to do so.

The stabbing knife has no such limits on its speed. There may be any number of stabbings and throat-cuttings in a scene, but once the knife returns to the table, in that scene the knife cannot be taken in hand again.

The Mist-Robed Gate is a cinematic game, right, so I’m going to be talking about it in the language of cinema.

So, I think that in this game, there are scenes, and the scenes alternate between several viewpoint characters. Choose about half as many viewpoints as factions. Rotating through the viewpoint characters, frame a scene around the character. The scene is infused with the character’s colour. You can use a different sensory quality if you like, but I like colour for its expressive power and ease of expressing in text.

Scene Types

We don’t have enough budget to have meandering, shapeless scenes in this game. Instead, each one has a specific goal. In a scene you can either adjust your loyalties, adjust your identity, or struggle with an internal conflict.

Adjusting Loyalty

In a scene where you adjust loyalties, the goal of the scene is to show how your priorities have shifted. You add or move a relationship line. You can’t remove them.

When you move a relationship line, you have to justify it in terms of one of your other relationships, like, “I am in love with Xiaomei, so although I am a policeman, I will cease being loyal to my captain and be loyal to the Flying Daggers rebels instead.” Similarly you have to play out the blossoming of a new loyalty.

Generally the goal of this exercise is to relieve conflicts between your loyalties.

Adjusting Identity

In a scene of adjusting identity, reveal something about your character that forces other characters to reevaluate their loyalties to you. The goal of this exercise is usually to induce conflicts in the loyalties of others. You can either adjust your own identity, or with the consent of all the faction members, adjust the identity of a faction. See Shi Mian Mai Fu again: When Leo reveals that he is in fact a Flying Daggers rebel in disguise, it flings both Jin and Xiaomei into conflict.

When you adjust your identity, you can choose a new colour.

Conflicts

When you can’t or aren’t willing to use either of the above strategies to solve your problems, you can pick a fight. Basically what happens here is that you do violence to someone or something until one of the following happens:

• They submit and promise to change themselves the way you specify.
• They say, “You ask too much,” and you kill them. Stab their character sheet to the table with the knife.
• They say, “This isn’t over,” and in their next scene, they fight you. You can do this repeatedly, stacking different changes on top of one another. If one character submits, then all the requested changes happen.

Anyway, I think that’s how it works. Maybe it’s not quite it…

The Mist-Robed Gate is for Scooter.

The basic premise of this game is that, sometimes, your feelings are more important than you. So, you allow yourself to be hurt in pursuit of your emotion, and when you’re caught between conflicting feelings, you end up manufacturing crises in order to make decisions about yourself. It’s one run at the emotionally fraught wuxia thing that Jonathan and I used to talk about all the time, but you can use it to run other things, like maybe Wuthering Heights.

To play the Mist-Robed Gate, you need several players—say at least four—and one of the relationship diagrams. You’ll also need copies of the character profile card and several different boardgame pawns, one for each player, a knife that you don’t mind cutting paper with, and a table you don’t mind stabbing. I might mention some other things you could use to simplify life, later on in the text.

Relationship Diagrams

A relationship diagram is used as an easy reference for the mess of conflicting loyalties and identities that the characters must navigate. It shows a number of social groups, and within or outside the groups are spaces to place pawns. Being located inside a group shows that a character is a member of the group. Drawing a line from one character to another shows that the characters are loyal to one another. That’s a technical term that I’ll expand on later. If you have a tube of “pickup sticks,” then you could use these for relationship lines that are easy to rearrange. One pawn space in each group has a double ring around it; loyalty to the character in this space is also loyalty to the group. If you have some rings that fit around your pawns, like if you own a Yinsh set or something, then you can ignore the printed ring and use the movable ring as the nexus of loyalty.

To set up, after settling on a genre and mood (taking into account the unavoidable emotional violence of the system), name and describe the social groups on your diagram. Each group should have a reason, straightforward or not, to come into conflict with each other group. Then each player selects a spot on the diagram and makes a character to fill that spot. See below. During the character creation process, you’ll also construct the network of loyalties that leads to the central conflicts of play.

More on Groups

When you’re making up your groups, what you want to do is situate them so that they naturally turn inwards in conflict—look at the cast of Shi Mian Mai Fu for instance, where the two major groups are policemen in the Imperial service and the prostitutes of the Peony Pavilion, who later turn out to be the Flying Daggers rebels. Clearly policemen don’t always get along with sex workers, and the government and rebels never do.

You can set groups in conflict along lines of agenda as well as identity—for instance a group of Korean soldiers might be trying to sail home from China, and some pirates are trying to take their ship. There might be other ships, but they want this one!

Characters

The characters you make don’t need to be essential to the workings of their groups; this story is really about them, and not about the world outside them.

The thing about the character is that their loyalties (there’s that word again!) cross faction lines. As you create characters, think about how their loyalties are crossed. You don’t have to set up their initial relationships that way, but be ready for them to do so, and maybe have a plan for it.

Each character is necessarily a member of a group. You should also decide what group they are loyal to. It’s possible to be a member of one and loyal to another or both!

Each character has, also, a name, a distinctive colour, and a quirk—they may be a drunk, or they may be blind, or overly legalistic, or whatever.

Loyalty

So, what’s loyalty mean? It means that here is something you care about uncompromisingly. A loyalty has an agenda. If you’re loyal to something, that means there is something that you want for or from it, and pursuing your loyalty means doing things that advance your agenda.

So, that concludes your setup. This post is getting long—the next one will talk about play.

This one isn’t as effortless as Skyflower.

Sometimes there is something you have to do, and you have to carry that burden alone, make a journey of seven steps outside your homeland, and do something that no one knows about, that the fate of the world depends on. That’s not important, though—what matters is what part of yourself you have to change to make that journey, and whether you can come back.

This game has one protagonist, who we’ll call The Seeker. It can have any number of supporting characters.

There are two maps that show where the characters are on their journey. One is a map of the world, and the other is the Seven-Step Stair.

At the beginning of the game, The Seeker is in his home and he has not stepped onto the first Stair. At his home, he learns something of the quest he faces, and he is faced with the people he will leave at home, the ones he is questing on the behalf of. I think if you’re going really Prince of the Godborn with this, you include some scenes where there are problems in the homeland that are a microcosm of problems in the world, but you don’t have to. There is a sense of pilgrimage around home, maybe, a circumambulation?

The Seven-Step Stair

Every time you ascend onto a step, you embark on a journey to a different part of the world, and as you leave you give up something forever—maybe one of your companions dies, or maybe you miss some event that only occurs once in a lifetime, or maybe there is some terrible price to escaping the place where you are. Maybe you had to surrender some part of your self or honour that you held dear. Write what you gave up on the step.

Whenever you ascend a step, you may also gain a new companion. You don’t have to. You can’t gain companions in any other ways—you can have people who attend you on your journey, but they have no connection with you and can’t support you when you need it. Thus every companion costs you something precious.

You can leave a place without ascending a step, except when you’re leaving home. Every time you leave home you must ascend a step.

The last step isn’t a step—it’s a gate. Once you’ve passed through the gate, you’re no longer the person you were, and you can never go home.

The Map of the World

Each place you visit has a song or a story of a prophecy, something the people know that tells the story of that place. When you arrive in a place, know its name. Before you leave it, someone must recite a few lines of its song, or quote its story, or justify his actions based on scripture, or so on.

As you travel around the map, mark your route in red.

The places you visit involve you in the mundane business of everyday life, and you become entangled with it even as you travel on your quest. Maybe each place has a dharma. Sometimes its dharma will send you elsewhere, if it’s a problem and you wish to resolve it. This mundane business is immediately relevant, but it evolves from history even back to the creation of the world, and it’s easy to make reference to events that may have occurred hundreds of years ago. I gotta explain that better.

The songs are there to exist perpendicularly to the quest, to give weight and texture to the story.

Once upon a time there was a woman. She had a name but no one knew it. She knew a song but no one sang it. She was dressed in blue and she carried a jar, and when she sat beside the well the children of Samarkand knew her as the water-seller.

“It is time you found a husband,” said one of the women one day, as she and the water-seller and the others were at their weaving, talking of this and that over the clicking of the looms. The water-seller made a little gesture and finished stitching the mirror-flower into the sleeve of a coat.

She lifted her hair out of her eyes and slid it back behind its clip. “You think so?”

The other woman, whose name was Nour, was the eldest of the weavers and she had a habit of offering advice unasked, but it was generally very good advice. “Yes, indeed. Zouman and I met each other when I was hardly older than you, and by that time my mother had nearly torn out all her hair trying to find a husband for me.”

The water-seller merely raised an eyebrow at this, and Nour understood the unspoken question: But you have always been such a weaver, and of such good family, and you are so beautiful…

“Yes, indeed…I was headstrong, and every suitor they presented me, I threw back at them for one reason or another.”

The water-seller laughed. “Oh yes! They are always too fat, or too thin, or too clever or not clever enough, or their eyes are a funny colour or when they walk their shoes squeak just so… But then, what about Zouman?”

“What about Zouman?” The weaver lowered her voice. “Well, I would always buy silk thread from one Chinese trader in the Headless Tiger market, and this boy would always be there.”

“This boy?”

“His family went to prayer with mine but our fathers were not friends. He would always be buying some trinket—outlandish carvings of animals, or little bricks of tea, or a silk ribbon for his turban, or bits of that milky jade of the East—I would see him almost every week. One day, he bought a great bundle of thread—white and scarlet and thread-of-gold, vermillion, saffron yellow, every shade of pink you could imagine. I left the stand before he did, but somehow he overtook me. I found it on my doorstep—a Chinese box painted with red and white birds (what why are these birds), overflowing with this incredible thread.”

The water-seller, remembering her embroidery, guiltily picked up another mirror and began to stitch. “And then?”

“I took the box and began to look at the thread, thinking what I could make. I hid it in my room. Finally, cataloguing all the colours, I reached the bottom and found a note. It was a poem in the classical style, and it was too difficult for me to read, so I took it to my grandmother. When she saw it her eyes lit up, and she said, ‘Someone is in love with you!’ I almost ran from the room.”

“The next week, I was careful to go to the Chinese trader much earlier than I usually did. I came and spoke to the chief trader, a great round man named Bei, who always wore an enormous robe covered in waves of every colour and twining knots and bolts of lightning. He was very grand and I was afraid, but as it turned out, he was very friendly to a little girl with a romantic errand. I told him about the boy and his laughter shook the tent. ‘I was waiting for you to notice!’ He took the gloves I had made for Zouman—deerskin riding gloves, because I knew his father bred horse, hung with little bells, and embroidered with the same red-and-white birds that were on the box he gave me. Inside the gloves I left him a note. Then I fled and took a different route home so Zouman would not see me.”

“That night I sat by my window listening to the bulbuls singing, and I heard the sound of hooves and bells. Zouman rode up beneath my balcony and whispered, ‘Nour, come riding with me. I know a place where the jasmine blooms at night…’ and the rest you can imagine.”
The water-seller shook her head. “I’m not a beauty like you, nor am I charming or cultured, or even ugly in a distinctive and interesting way. Men forget my name.”

It was Nour’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Once when I was young, a boy I knew—I thought I knew—we had played together in the street since we were able to walk—he called me Jamila, and when I told him that was not my name, he didn’t know what it really was, and we both went home crying. That night as I washed my hair, I recited the names of the stars and promised I would not forget them as he forgot me. We didn’t play together anymore after that.”

The weaver looked at the water-seller. “Give me your hand, child.” So she did. “Do you still remember the names of the stars?” She traced the lines on the water-seller’s palm with one trembling finger.

“I do. Deneb. Altair. Baten Kaitos. ADD STAR NAMES HERE”

“Other hand.” The water-seller offered it up to her, and she traced the lines again. “Look, the Seal of Suleiman.”

I just threw together some diagrams…

This first is a look at the major characters and their nations. Squares are humans; the largest squares are protagonists, and the smaller squares are supporting characters. Hezhi and Perkar both have characters that ground them in the human world—the sharp squares—and characters that link them to the spiritual world—the rounded squares. The circles are gods, again with size indicating their relative importance.

This one labels some relationships. They’re very tight and symmetrical! The similarity/distance relationships between the nations are very interesting; you slowly learn, through lessons about their languages, that the Nholish people are cosely related to the Mang, and similarly, the musical epics, ekar, of the Cattle-Lands echo the musical customs of the Alwat people who live in Balat. There’s a beautiful moment in the book where Eruka, a singer, improvises a few verses of Ekar Perkar…

The interaction between Perkar and Hezhi is really interesting, too…they don’t meet until very late in the book, but the stream carries his seed down the River to Nhol, and she dreams of his passion…

Here I’ve taken the characters and exploded their relationships some more so you can get a better look at them…I added some characters and left the Balat sequence out because it’s a little weird and I don’t remember it well. Also, I left out Ngangata. Sorry, Neha!

The water-seller said, “Whoever can tell me the most remarkable story may sit beside me at the well,” and her dark eyes flashed with mirth. She patted the empty seat at her side. “I get so lonely…”

A man spoke up, “I am Firouz al-Hakam, a scribe of Marrakech. This story was told to me—”

The water-seller put her hand over the mouth of the jar in her lap and suddenly he could not speak. “Dispense with the pleasantries, O scribe.” She moved her hand.

“Once upon a time, there was an orphan girl who lived in the wilds. No one knew where she came from; she lived in the trees, and magpies brought her shiny trinkets to play with, although they were mostly broken or forgotten things, and bits of food to eat, although they were magpies and what is enough for a magpie is not enough for a little girl.

There were other children in the wood. There was a boy raised by hawks and another boy raised by vultures. There was a girl whose mother was a swan.

The hawk-boy never slept. His fingers were red with blood and his eyes twitched with hunger.

The vulture-boy knew where all the things to eat were, but he let them rot and so he stank of offal and rot. He was fat but his hair fell out in patches.

The swan-girl ate grasses and seeds and as the children grew older she became tall and slender and lovely like a reed. She was thinner than her bones. She swayed in the wind and it made odd whistling noises as it passed through her ribs.

The magpie-girl was their queen, her neck and wrists dripping with treasures of knotted silver, her harsh voice crying out in the gloom.

A charcoal-burner came to live in the forest and soon the children learned the art of speech. Then a fruit-picker came there, and a potter and a hunter and all those people that make up a village. Soon the children learned about farming and building and forging and writing and all the other arts of man.

The magpie-girl said to the others, “Let us go and make a village. I will be the magistrate! I will provide for us and we will not want, but be satisfied.” First they built one house and all lived there together. But the hawk-boy said, “The vulture-boy makes me uncomfortable and sometimes he touches me at night,” so he went outside and built a house of his own.

Soon after the other two left as well, and there were four houses in their village, one for each of them.

One day the magpie-girl went out hunting, and came back, her arms heavy with gold and figs. She came upon the swan-girl, bloated, in the village square, surrounded by bones. Her eyes were black and empty as river stones.

“Do you know where the boys are?” asked the swan-girl? “They were teaching me to eat meat.”

The magpie-girl did not speak but went to the home of the charcoal-burner and told him all that happened, and today she is in the service of the sultan, making jewels as beautiful as flowering trees. But she will not go out in the gardens, where the sultana keeps a lake of swans.”

The water-seller put both hands over the mouth of her jar. “Your story does not please me. You may try again tomorrow.” The man found that he could not speak at all.

 

The next person to come to the water-seller was Darzeen, a tailor. He said to the water-seller,

“In the south of Madinah there is a strange country. They have black slaves and two black kings, but all the citizens are white! They all dress in white bandages as if they were already dead, and strew themselves with petals of blue lotus. They tell an odd story of how their country was founded…

In the immortal country of the West there is a hollowed-out marble mountain where the emperor of the world lives surrounded by his husbands and wives. One day he told his spouses and children, “I have grown tired wearing the heavy crown of this kingdom. Tonight I have chosen to die. The one of you who can perform the most AMAZING FEAT will inherit my endless empire.”

The king’s eldest son said, “I have tamed lightning!” He reached into the sky and pulled out a writhing bolt, but the king’s eldest daughter had foreseen this, and she sat in the clouds to pour oil on the lightning. When the prince turned to show his father, the bolt twisted out of his grip and thrashed upon the floor! It impaled one hundred kings and queens.

“Son, you have failed me,” said the emperor of the world. “Take this book,” and he handed the prince the empire’s immutable code of laws, one thousand pages long and each page having one thousand words, “and carve it upon the side of the mountain in letters one hundred cubits tall.”

The prince bowed his head, took the book, and departed.

Then the eldest daughter descended from the sky, saying, “Father, I have tamed the moon!” She reached into the sky to pull it down, but her younger brother had replaced it with the sun, all veiled in gauzy clouds, and as her fist closed upon it the clouds burned away and she singed her hand.

“Daughter, you have failed me as well,” said the emperor of the world. “Take this seal,” and he gave her the ring from his royal finger, “and stamp it upon every leaf of every tree in the country.”

“It is as you have said, father,” replied the princess as she turned to the tree in the corner of the throne room.

So did they continue, making outlandish and impossible claims, and being assigned outlandish and impossible tasks in response, until at last only the youngest prince remained. “I have learned to make a boat, father.”

“Show me!”

The prince took his father to the docks and showed him his boat made of white cedar, its swan-wing sails slack in the still air, its ropes of three kinds, silk and cotton and hemp, coiled against the rails. At its prow were painted seven eyes, and its stern curved up even like a breaking wave.

“It is beautiful, my son. But does it sail?”

“Let us try it.”

They set asail and the wind took them east to this continent. Just as they lost sight of land, the young prince remembered something he had forgotten; the ship had no roof. The two men young and old sat in the sun for a year as the wind carried them across the world. Finally they landed in the country of Allah and they said, “Well, this is not our home but we can be kings here,” and so they built a city out of the boat’s timbers and stitched clothing out of its sails.

That is why the kings of that strange country are black, and why the people of the uttermost west are so exceeding strange.”

The water-seller’s features flickered as if she almost smiled, but she dipped her fingers in her jug of water and sprinkled them on Darzeen. “O tailor, be a tailor-bird for the rest of the day, and tell me a better story tomorrow.”

The tailor tried to protest but the only thing that came from his mouth was the warbling of a bird.