Editing Raksir (section)

== '''A Strange Place to Fish''' ==

I went wandering and came to a place called Racsir Isle.  Since Bleys with an E is setting the tone for these missives I think I'll tell you about the place.

I had come here a few times over the centuries.  Once with Obirin himself. I remember a wonderful time here when Random and I decided to walk in shadow together to find a good place to fish that was far enough from Amber to give us some time and not so far away that the fish would be unrecognizable.  That I decided to shadow-walk with Random of all people tells you how strange things were getting at home.  Obirin was still around then but his pitting of Eric and Corwin and I against each other in his endless search for squabbles had gotten on everyone's nerves, mine most of all.  Racsir has a reputation as having some of the best fighting fish around and for that reputation to span shadow and effect Amberites is saying something.  Whatever other flaws Amber may have as a kingdom, it has spectacular fishing in the oceans, rivers, and harbors of the central realm.  

Racsir's fishing is better but then we know of it because that's what we looked for to find it; a strange place to fish.

To start off with this place is wet.  Its mostly islands and the soggyist people you ever saw air side of Rebma.  It rains a lot. The seas are mostly calm with strange tides and generally low surf and the people have learned to live with it.  The people here have made forgetfulness a virtue.  I'm not sure they can help it really.  There is something incomplete about them.  

That happens sometimes when one has a narrow desire in mind when one shadow-walks.  Some of the places you find just don't entirely make sense or they are lacking in details leaving them incomplete.  A full set of Infinite Shadows will include a heap of incomplete places and incomplete people and this is a place you can find both.  The missing parts can be frustrating to adapt to for outsiders like us.
 
Physically the world is separated into four sections; the North Polar Sea, the Isles, the Big Island, and the Driesia or the Dead Water.  The sun is almost completely in the northern hemisphere so the southern hemisphere is dusky to dark year round.  There are two moons, both small.  One is white, called Moon.  One is red, called Iron.  They circle the world nearly perfectly balanced off angle from each other.  Moon flies above the equator.  Iron flies north to south crossing both poles. Freaky. 
 
The Northern Polar Sea is hot.  It has a water temperature 100º to 150º all the time.  The air temperature can get as high 180º.  There are some very hardy people who live in the upper parts of the world and they have adapted to those conditions.  Mostly they remain in the water.  One thing about the Northern Racir peoples is that they are not scalded when boiling water is thrown on them. Try oil. 

The Isles are where nearly all the people live. Think of an archipelago of your choice and what do you usually have?  A collection of islands clustered together reasonably far from anything else.  The islands are usually close enough to see each other and be a short boat ride to visit.  If you figure you need to be about 5 miles or so away at sea level to not see an island with a smallish hill over the horizon and you can see how fast these archipelagos can lose each other.  There are a thousand archipelagos just over the horizon to each other.  

One thing about these islands is that some are very close to each other.  As you probably already know an island is a mountain with the top above water. The northern hemisphere of this world, if the water was removed, would look like a spiked mace with thousands and thousands of thin spikes.  This means that the mountain are sometimes surrounded by deep waters with little or no sand around them.  The archipelagos that are made from spiked mountains are often close enough to be connected by bridges.  It is not unusual to find an island chain with forty islands, reasonably close to each other, connected by collections of bridges; some narrow and precarious built of rope and driftwood, some wide and strong with dwellings of their own on them.  These bridges will often be filled with people fishing.  Fishing after all is why we are talking about this strange world. 

In general the people here do not go in for mighty sea voyages.  Circumnavigating the globe, while straightforward from an outsider's point of view, never really occurs to them and if they do it, its done rarely, or by accident.  They know which other island chains are in which direction, and they know the Big Island is so far in the south that it is impossible to find.  The Big Island is something of a myth to them, even to those who have been there.  That the Big Island is a myth to people who have been there and know how to get there tells you something about them.

The Big Island is a huge continental chunk of dark frigid rock covering the south pole but it isn't really much of a place with the exception of a few oddities I'll mention later.  It is a bitterly cold, dry, desert covered in dirt devoid of nearly all plant life. It is dark except for the rim which manages a twilight sky that varies in duration depending on the season.  A verdant ring surrounds the interior of the place like belt. This belt near the water's edge is a reasonably habitable land in the 50º to 70º range with a resilient population that seems only a tiny bit different from the northerners, or what they call, the Fish People.  They call themselves the Land People.  So maybe they are not too different after all. Natives with a few generations on the Big Island can see in the dark as if it was daylight and do poorly if they sail north till they are beneath the real sun.  Freaky.

The last region is the Driesia or the Dead Water.  Anyone familiar with sea travel knows to be wary of regions like the Doldrums, the Flat Wave, the Long Lakes, or the Calms.  Diega has a Calm that only magic can cross. This world though, has no magic to speak of.  What it has is a region that stretches from 10° north of the equator down to 35° south of the equator that winds flatly avoid.  Ocean currents drastically separate north and south and do not cross the Dead Water.  So if you want to cross it, you have to row.  

The Dead Water is crossed by rowing following the passage of the moon Iron as it crosses north to south. Despite the difficulty of following Iron across the Dead Water there is a lot of trade between the Fish People and the Land People.  The Fish people have fish, fruits, grains, and wood.  The Land People have glass, gems, stone, and metals.  The adventurous sailors who cross the Dead Water have learned to navigate and manage their crafts through extraordinarily difficult conditions.  Considering how bad these people are at trade its a miracle they bother at all.  

For fans of trade here is one more tidbit and it really tells you something about these people.  Islanders trade east and west and much of the trade ends up in the archipelagos on the passage of Iron across the equator because it is there they can trade Isles goods for Big Island goods. There is considerable merchant shipping up and down the archipelagos on the passage of Iron and the Fish People in those islands have a better grip on the nature of the word then most other people in the Isles.  A few hundred miles east or west the people of the Isles start believing less and less in the existence of the Big Island.  Freaky. 

There are a few physical anomalies on this world that are worth noting at this point.  One is that its rich wet atmosphere is only 12,000 feet thick.  A scientist might figure out why the atmosphere clings to the land and water of this world but why bother?  We shadow-walkers understand some places have weird rules that only make sense there.  Freaky.

The narrow atmosphere doesn't matter to the surface dwellers, of course; nothing on this planet is more then 8000' above sea-level except for two freaky surface features.  These are the Handle and the Southern Spire.

The Handle is a single solid rock sticking straight out of the equator about two miles in diameter.  It reaches up 14,000'.  For about a mile around the Handle, is a constructed city made of sea craft and driftwood.  Any ship lost in the Dead Water eventually floats to the Handle though it might take a decade for the negligible currents to bring it there.  These ships are then bridged and tied onto the exiting structure and people move in.  Many of the sailors retire here. Its a port of call to be sure but while its on the equator its 90º off the orbit of Iron, so its about as far as it can be from the north-south shipping lanes and solidly in the Dead Water.  To get to it one rows following Iron to the equator then one waits till Moon rise and follows the moon to the Handle.  Freaky.

The Southern Spire is a single piece of unbreakable crystal rising out of the South Pole like a needle. 6000' in diameter at the base it rises straight and evenly up to the dizzying height of 30,000' with  needle tip.  For a couple weeks each year the sun in the north is at such an angle that it casts light on the tip of the Spire causing the whole thing to glow.  The natives go to the frigid south to view the glow with something like worshipful devotion but they don't have a religion to give it meaning. The Land People believe that once a person has seen the Glowing Spire a person is a Land Person.  That is the full extent of the dogma of their religion and the final say on their immigration policy for people going from being Fish People to Land People.  Freaky.

There are stars in the sky but if one pilots a star ship through shadow to this realm there would be little reason to go anywhere else. I know because I have done so. The stars are glowing chunks of crystal glass thousand of miles from the planet hovering around it while it spins.  Freaky.

'''All you need is a stick, a thread, and a hook.'''
Since the Isles are where most the people are, I'll get back to them.  

They have a saying in Racsir.  "All you need is a stick, a thread, and a hook."  It expresses their belief that life is easy and you only need three things. 
 
The Stick is all material goods.  The Thread is the people.  The Hook is the fish.
First, lets talk about the Stick and the Thread. 

The Stick

When it comes to making fishing poles the stick they mean is usually bamboo.  There are hundreds of varieties and its so common that nearly everyone in the north of this world could make you a rod in a few minutes.  And if you ask, they will, I shit you not. "T'is a pleasure." they say about so many things.

In general the islands are metal poor but they are rich in fast growing woods. Some really fast. They have a variety of quick growing trees similar to palms, bananas, and coconuts. Along with rattans and bamboos these are mostly the kinds of wood used for furniture, decoration, and general construction as well as food and cooking fuel.  Further north are several stringy types of fruit trees that provide similar uses as well as several interesting types of citrus and stone fruits.  

There are a wide range of vine type plants that grow at the base and up into these trees.  Vines provide food, building materials, ropes, and smoking herbs.

Many vines produce fruit similar to melons, strawberries, and grapes as well as other vine growths. They have a thick, tough ground vine called Acsala, that provides stability on sandy turf but also produces long thin tubers that are eaten like potatoes but taste something like boiled socks.  There is a plant like the pea that grows everywhere and plays a major part in their diet.  The produce from it varies in color depending on the local nutrients but the natives don't much care about the differences. 

One vine called Groussa has bulb-like growths that are filled with a sickeningly sweet sap that is rendered down to sugar and used in many ways.  It creates a base alcohol that is infused in many ways.

Grestra is a common vine that has rich and plentiful puffs of grayish green that is harvested and used to make fabric with textures similar to cotton.  A blackish variety is somewhat oily and is used to weave a fabric that once cured can hold or repel water.
The Trabblen vine has wide leaves and grows equally well on land or in kelp-like masses in the water.  Harvested and dried the leaves can be smoked making a very pleasant tasting tobacco and Trabblen Cigars are a common trade good.  The vine makes extremely strong rope so Trabblen Rope is another common trade good.

There are some native grains that grow fast and wild as well as being tended in personal gardens.  Breads are common with unleavened and vegetable breads easily found.  Tortillas or pita style breads are found in every dwelling. A rich sweet fish & vegetable bread is greatly adored by these people but made me gag for the first few years.  Now I love the stuff.

However, and here comes another weirdness, a major source of structural wood around the islands is the Ragdat Tree.  These are massive ocean-bound plants sticking to the ground hundreds of feet below the waterline. Extremely fast growing, they have long tendrils branching off the wide trunk that produce a kelp-like leaf that is a common ingredient in their food.  The leaves sheer themselves off and wash up on the beaches to be readily gathered.  The tree is a single stalk that grows very wide with a shallow root system holding them in place below the water.  This main stalk might be as much as 10' in diameter and grow to 30' with bristling tendrils from an inch to a couple feet in diameter.  It waves like a mass of wet noodles in the ocean tides such as they are.

As they grow they start developing burls up and down the stalk and roots and thick bulbs that cover the stalks.  The bulbs contain a very lightly flavored naturally alcoholic liquid and a lighter then air gas which is highly euphoric and is a mild aphrodisiac.  

Eventually the burls on the root system overtake the subterranean portions of the plant, choking off the roots holding the trees in place.  Around the same time the bulbs containing the lighter then air gas start getting large enough to pull the trees loose from the soil.  

The end result is plants the size of houses popping up to the surface like leaping whales.  Forests of these trees are tended by local divers who have an uncanny skill of judging which trees are ready "to Leap". When these trees leap, they usually do so in groups of 20 or more because once one pops the others get so shaken or agitated they must join in. 

The Ragdat Trees play a big part in a common social event called a "Tapping".  While wood tenders do the work of growing and tending the trees underwater and cutting the trees once dry, they are too few to prepare the wood for drying and to harvest all the burls and bulbs.  So they invite the family down and everyone pitches in. Once the trees start leaping everyone stops whatever they are doing and comes down to watch, eat, drink, and fish. They gather for a large picnic with food and drink and song.  These are a lusty life-loving people to be sure.

"Tapping" consists of dragging the extraordinarily heavy fresh limp trees up onto the beach causing all the limbs to gather like stacks of wet spaghetti surrounding the thick main stalk.  As this is done pockets of the gas and liquid that fills the bulbs is released with expected results of getting everyone a lot drunk and a little bit horny.

Once the trees are beached and stretched out the bulbs are removed.  The bulbs are hung and allowed to dry for  couple hours.  The top of the bulb is "Tapped" to release the interior gas which if left inside will spoil the liquid.  The gas is nearly impossible to store, fading quickly, losing its potency. So these people make use of it while they can.  "Taking the Heat" they call it. 

After the bulbs dry the liquid is poured off and used in many ways.  The most common is to refine it into an extremely strong, pleasant, light tasting alcohol called "Racswater." the empty bulbs dry into watertight bags that are fitted with nozzles for drinking. 

The dry trees are cut into logs, and prepared for use. They range from thin dowels to thick main logs.  Logs are cut into board, and planks.  Sawdust is mixed with wax for fire-starters among other uses.  The thinner strands are sometimes cut and laid out in forms to dry in particular shapes.  Furniture and decorative architecture use a lot of these form shaped dowels. 

The Burls are removed and allowed to dry separately.  The Burls are prized for their many decorative uses.  Wood carving is a everyday activity for many of the people in the Isles.  I carry a Racsir Burlwood pipe on me most of the time.  Lovely thing. Ask someone to make you a burl wood pipe and they will say, "T'is a pleasure".  Freaky.