Yveline offered to see us the rest of the way to Vil Kayman, which I thought was particularly classy of her. As we traveled, I got the impression she was, perhaps, just grateful for the company and the distraction. Under her guidance we made remarkable time, taking only five more days before arriving at the foot of the Highback Mountains. Yveline kept mostly to herself, though she shared our fire, and I kept the nightly music only to the local songs I’d learned since arriving in Barbavia to avoid exposing my secrets more than was necessary. Thankfully, she asked few questions. Very little of note occurred on the remainder of the trip, though I did notice reluctance from the rest of the group to let me go off too far on my own. I was permitted my own bathroom breaks, thankfully, but even then I often spotted Grajo not far from my private location, off in the trees and near enough to keep his singular eye open for trouble. The indignant, childish part of my brain wanted to rage against that and demand I be treated like the fully capable, independent person I knew myself to be, but I wasn’t in a hurry to feel the pain of jagged claws through my back again anytime soon, so the reasonable, adult part of my brain won.
The other thing that kept me occupied on the road was referring to the grimoire and pondering over the choices I could make with the forty-one experience points at my disposal. Don’t Die on Me was an immediate purchase, though a part of me was nervous it might not work on the espers the same way it was purported to work on Red and Tanis. Still, some protection from my allies was better than none at all. There was a desire for some kind of personal defense beyond throwing knives, just in case I did find myself alone again, but after everything I still hadn’t witnessed any offensive magic myself. The thought had crossed my mind to ask Yveline, since she seemed to manage in a swamp teeming with life, but she was already doing so much for us by acting as a guide, and her magic overall seemed slower and less bombastic than something suited for self-defense in a pinch. For that, I imagined, she had claws, teeth, and the muscular body of an ambush predator. My last two purchases were finally grabbing the Purge Condition spell and the Weapon Master Trait, which promised to improve my talent with throwing knives. It wasn’t much, but it was something. That still kept ten back for emergencies, and one to grow on.
Parting the Veil had changed, to my astonishment; the spell now detailed the way I’d used it to return the big balayang to the Esperwild. My actions brought me more options within the usage of the spell, which said some interesting things about the nature of magic itself and what I might be able to do with it. I didn’t quite have concrete thoughts on what that could mean for the future of my spellcraft, but it was a cinder of inspiration I would keep warm for now. The grimoire also offered me insight into the balayang, which were a fireproof species of esper whose young grew incredibly fast, encouraged by a healthy diet. Fortunately, balayang were fairly omnivorous, and Wysteria and Grajo both were happy to do a little extra hunting to keep him fed. So long as we weren’t starving, he should reach full-size in a few months, which sounded incredibly uncomfortable. I remembered the shin splints and side stitches of my own growing pains and hoped the little guy wouldn’t be put through similar suffering. Obviously, there was no way he could fight until he was a little bigger. Wanting to bond with him and be a more active part in training saw me following Red in the mornings when he ran the others through their drills, bleary-eyed with the balayang nestled in my hands when he wasn’t imitating the drills himself. I couldn’t quite bring myself to name him, yet. It made him feel like a pet, and I wanted a stronger relationship with him. Of course, parents named their children, and I would be partly responsible for his upbringing… but that brought up a different set of uncomfortable feelings.
That discomfort was easy enough to bury in the literal light of Vil Kayman as we approached Quatjur afternoon. Glass jars full of literal fireflies hung on strings between buildings across the main drag. The streets were scattered with bright and colorful flower petals, and music filled the air. I expected to see more mawon’nwa in the city, but instead the predominant people were huge, girthy alligator-folk, all dressed in their Barbavian equivalent of Sunday best, blowing horns, throwing fistfuls of petals in the air, laughing, dancing, and reveling in the celebration. Yveline padded forward with a smirk on her face.
“Ahhh,” she purred, “Lobster Quatjur. If I do not see you again, it was a pleasure making your acquaintance.”
“Thank you,” I said a bit rushed, trying to be polite but also squeeze my follow-up question in before she disappeared into the crowd. Unfortunately, I failed in the face of her eagerness to join the festivities, shouting a bit in hopes she might turn around. “Wait, what’s Lobster Quatjur?”
“What’s Lobster Quatjur?” A thunderous, rich voice echoed my question in disbelief. A well-to-do-looking gator-man in a dapper red-and-white striped vest stepped through the swinging doors of a nearby establishment, gaudy rings on his fingers and a black bow-tie about his considerable throat. “Boy, you must be new around here.”
“I am, in fact.” I wasn’t trembling at the sheer enormity of this man. I wasn’t. He was a genial reptile of leisure by the looks of him, and we’ll ignore that he could probably devour most of my body with one clap of his toothy jaws.
“Ça c'est bon, son! Allow me to offer my services as a purveyor of our local custom! An education on the resplendence of our tradition, if you will, and a delicious one at that!” He tipped his black bowler with its red ribbon and offered a low bow that put him roughly at eye level with me. “My name is Sweet Henri, and I am honored to both make your acquaintance and introduce you to the festivities at hand.”
“I’m Glenn Anura,” I dipped my body in something resembling his bow and tried to swallow the lump of tension in my throat as I did, though I was still too nervous by the sheer enormity of him to take my eyes away. “This is Wysteria, Grajo, Red, and Tanis Vex.” Even if he had a name, the balayang was sleeping soundly in the blankets at the top of my pack, and I had no desire to rouse him unnecessarily.
“Enchanté,” he grinned with a waggling eyebrow toward Wysteria and Tanis. That word I recognized unequivocally as French, whose equivalent here was the High Tongue that Tanis said was basically a dead language.
“Forgive me for asking, but you speak High Tongue?”
“Un petit peu,” he smirked. “L’garto like to keep as much of it in circulation as possible, though the fiddlier bits are unfortunately lost to the ages. Don’t anybody know most of it anymore, but it was the language of old Grampere, an’ we like to keep his soul alive in words, stories, songs, and gatherin’s just like this one.” Despite the complexity of his words, he spoke slowly and clearly enough that I didn’t have a hard time understanding him around his somewhat flat, nasal accent.
“And Grampere is… ?”
“Mais sha! You really are new here!"
“I’m from about as far away and up the river as you can get,” I admitted with a chuckle. The nerves were finally starting to leave and reduce the tension in my spine, so of course it was time for him to clap a massive claw on my shoulder and laugh.
“Ah, but you sure do know a good turn of phrase, yeah? All right. Sweet Henri gon’ tell you all ‘bout Grampere, Lobster Quatjur, Vil Kayman, an’ the l’garto people, each a one. We gon’ learn you a thing or two today, sha.”
“Learn away,” I gestured with enthusiasm. His fingers tightened around me before slapping me jovially on the back in the general direction of the crowd.
“Merci, Glenn Anura. I do take particular joy in tellin’ tales. So let’s start with the biggest an’ most presently pertinent, the origin of Lobster Quatjur. Y’all know what lobster is, yeah? Them mudbugs, the bigger ones with the claws? Long like a sausage, not fat like a duck breast, if you will. That’s crabs.”
“I am familiar with lobsters, yes.”
“Good good! So, it’s a long long time to tell, before any us l’garto were even swimmin’ in the swamp, see. Just old Grampere an’ the bebettes that’ve been here since before time was tickin’. Defan Grampere was the first of us; we come from him just the same as we came from our mamas an’ papas, but further back down the line. You think I’m a big fella, shoooo-weee! Grampere stood ten feet tall if he was an inch. White scales like Northern snow, big teeth of course, an’ eyes all milky white like you’d think he was bereft of sight!” Sweet Henri impressively painted a picture with his words and broad gesticulations, almost skillful as the way he steered us toward a particular food cart as opposed to the many others we passed along the way. I’m sure Red picked up on it much sooner than I did, but it was still pretty obvious getting business for his friends was part of the whole tour guide schtick. It didn’t bother me; nothing was free and we were absolutely going to make a few purchases for fresh, hot food after so much time in the wild anyhow. “Y’all hungry? My cousin Martine make the best boudin an’ shrimp an’ grits gold can buy, I guarantee.”
“Ah, you’re too kind, Sweet Henri.” Martine was a slimmer l’garto (the name for the alligator-people, as I’d gathered) but had a broader frame and more muscular arms. Clothing style varied from what I’d call high fantasy to even somewhat modern Earth fare from what I’d seen on my travels thus far, but seeing the off-white T-shirt, apron, and tiny hat you’d expect to be worn by a line cook in a 50’s diner was somewhat jarring. We bought a few sausages and a single bowl of shrimp and grits to share, cumbersome as it was to carry and eat with the rest of our luggage.
“Now, don’t fill up too far! We still got plenty of story to tell an’ more local flavors to sample, yeah?”
“We’ve been livin’ off hard tack an’ burnt game the last few weeks, Henri,” Red blurted around bites of sausage. “There’s a long way to go before our bellies are full.”
“Mais sha! Now, that’s what I like to hear!” His belly-laugh seemed to light a candle of mirth within each of us with the kind of infectious joy I rarely experienced firsthand. “So as I was sayin’, long time ago Grampere was sittin’ in his rockin’ chair on the porch of his stilt house out in Marekaj, an’ he gets envie for some lobster.”
“Ahn-vee?” I asked, managing to swallow a heavenly lump of buttery grits before I opened my mouth.
“Envie, yeah, like when you get a powerful hunger that rumbles your guts, you know. You can also say it like for other things, like you got envie to see the ocean, but mostly ‘round here we say it to mean we wanna eat!”
“I think I already have envie for another bowl of shrimp and grits,” Tanis smirked, scraping the bottom of the paper receptacle with a flat, wooden spoon.
“There’s more where that came from, boo, an’ the fais do-do goes on all night, so you got plenty of time to eat, dance, an’ party to your heart’s content!”
“I like this guy,” she said just under her breath, grinning at me.
“So as I was sayin’, Grampere got the envie somethin’ fierce for fresh lobster. Big man like Grampere, you got a big big appetite, too, sha, so he have a couple home-made lobster traps sittin’ in the pond down by his shack. Now, a shack to him, that was a verifiable mansion to folk like us, ‘cuz what you can make do with Grampere’s magic is more than what common l’garto can scratch up, hear? High walls painted fine, sturdy posts to keep her up out the water, roof thatched with the finest reeds an’ kept dry with the finest slick. Beautiful pictorials on the walls, hand-painted by Grampere himself, of course, ‘cuz weren’t much other folk around to paint ‘em back then, an’ Grampere was a talented man with a brush in his own right, see.”
“Sounds impressive,” I agreed.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Impressive! Shoooot. I ain’t even got to the furnishin’s yet! But maybe that’s another story for another day, save for that big ‘ol rockin’ chair Grampere been settin’ a spell in. Hand-crafted, hand-carved out the finest wood in Marekaj, nary a creak nor crack no matter how fat an’ fed he was when he sat down in it. An’ that was exactly the description of his intentions after surveying an’ consuming his accumulated lobster hoard! So Grampere eases up out of his rocker an' goes for a swim, goes for a walk, spends a half-day navigatin’ his way down to the pond where the lobsters come in. An’ every stroke, every step his mouth is waterin’ more an’ more over the bounty of bebettes he’s about to feast upon. Speakin’ of mouth-waterin’…” He slowed his bustle as we arrived at a live grill with jerked poultry sizzling and a variety of tangy sauces on display. “This is Deaf Laurent, cousin of a cousin if you will. He can’t hear none on account of the time he almost drowned as a child, but you hold up one finger for duck, two for duck an’ rice, an’ three for duck, rice, and andouille. Y’all still hungry, right? Did I get that clear?” We offered a round of acknowledgement and negotiated our options before I held up three fingers for the dark-scaled and scarred Deaf Laurent to hear. I was always delighted to find the different naming conventions cultures used, in Barbavia especially. Names like Tanis Vex and Sweet Henri weren’t that different, after all, but the lack of what the culture I hailed from would call a ‘proper’ surname made them more fun somehow, more individually indicative than what was the norm back home. If you were John Smith, it meant you were probably the son of some guy who’s last name was Smith, but hundreds of years ago it would mean you were the town smith, and your son would probably be Smithson. Would Barbavian culture someday reach that commonality? Would population increase eventually mean there’d be a world full of Vexsons or Vexdotters? If things worked that way for Sweet Henri, would his descendants be the Sweets or the Henris? These were the only intelligible thoughts that filled my head as I enjoyed my portion of the meal, most of them simply being exaltations of tender meet, savory spice, and absolutely perfect fluffy, white rice. Sweet Henri mercifully allowed us a moment to revel in the flavors before continuing our tour down the main drag and the rest of his story.
“Mais sha, where were we? Ah, yes. Grampere was lickin’ his chops an’ hustlin’ on down to the pond where his lobster traps would surely provide him the kind of feast fit for a figure of his stature and import. He walks through the grass, walks through the reeds, plants his feet in the mud of the bank an’ grabs the chain of one of his home-made lobster traps in both claws. Hand over hand, end over end, Grampere fishes his trap out the pond… and wouldn’t you know it? He pulls it up empty!”
“Land sakes!” I couldn’t tell if Tanis was mocking him or just trying to join in the fun of his folksy style of speech, but either way the l’garto didn’t seem offended.
“Sure enough! Now one empty basket didn’t bother Grampere none; he had to have a dozen an’ a half sunk deep in those murky waters. Even a quarter of that amount would be enough for a respectable supper. So he goes to the next trap, he grabs the chain, an’ he puts his back into it. Claw over claw, little by little, he fishes that trap up out the water an’ once again… empty.” Henri paused for effect, but the only response was written on our faces as our mouths were full chewing amazing food of our own. If this was the kind of cooking I could expect from Vil Kayman, I’d regain all the weight I’d lost in the Commonwealth by staying here for just a week. “So he goes to the next one, as you do, on down the line, an’ pulls up each a one, hand over claw, little by little, end over end, an’ finds each a one empty as the day he put ‘em in the mud. Now, at first he thinks maybe his home-made lobster traps is faulty, you understand. Sometimes when you make somethin’ with your own two claws it’s not as sturdy as a professional, even when you’re Grampere. Except more than an amateur Grampere was humble, as each lobster trap was a slick example of the finest craftsmanship you ever did see. At this point, Grampere is fit to be tied! He’s so mad he reaches into the water, grabs a catfish by the tail, and he slaps it right about the face! An’ Grampere is so strong, of course, his slap is so fast that the heat from the friction of his scaly palm cooks that fish right then an’ there, well past done an’ well done into burnt. Bein’ hungry as he is, he eats it, and finds it is the most succulent fish he ever did consume. An’ that’s the story of how we got the recipe for blackened catfish right there, a little bonus tale inside a tile, if you will.” He folded his hands humbly around his belly, giving us a moment to laugh and navigate a particularly thick gathering of folks dancing to strings, horns, concertinas, and throaty vocals. This was only made more difficult by the abundance of our packs, especially for Tanis who was still carrying the lion’s share of our gear.
“If we can stop you for a moment, Sweet Henri?” He quirked a scaled brow at me over a thin-pupiled yellow-green eye. “Sorry to interrupt, but do you know if there’s a good room to rent around here? Somewhere we can set down our pack before seeing the rest of the festival?”
“Of course! Of course, sha, sorry for makin’ you lug all that so far already. If I’d thought of it sooner I’d have directed you toward an inn closer to the town’s gates. But ah, you’re just in luck. Around the corner here is the establishment of a family friend; Magnolia Meadows. Tell the girl at the desk I sent you an’ she’ll set you right, for sure. If y’all could drink I’ll gather up some sweet tea while you get configured?”
“That sounds great, Henri, thank you.”
We moved to the building in question, a very large, fancy inn with a boardwalk full of rocking chairs out front and thick pillars and walls comprising its structure. It made sense l’garto would need bigger, sturdier accommodations for their size, which was a delightful trade-off for us smaller folk. I wondered if this was how Red felt setting foot into any inn or tavern we spent the night at on our travels. Magnolia Meadows had lots of windows adorned by fluttering white cloth curtains bearing large floral patterns, and the shrubs and trees around it made it seem like you stepped off a busy street and into an isolated garden manor. We rented just one room and paid up a few days in advance since I wasn’t sure how different the process might be to register a fight, how long that would take, and how much we’d like to stay after. It was hard to tell if Vil Kayman was just busy from the festival, or if chainer traffic was adding to the density of people in the celebration. There were certainly a fair amount of non-l’garto eating, dancing, and laughing among us as we followed Sweet Henri, but there wasn’t anything easily identifiable as an esper among them.
After sharing a bit of sausage with the balayang, we left him in the room to sleep it off. Wysteria and Grajo remained behind to stand guard for the little guy, and also to have some rest themselves; smaller stomachs meant smaller appetites, and they’d eaten considerably better given hunted bugs, fish, and game were much more in their traditional meal wheelhouse. I splashed some water on my face and the remaining three of us met Henri downstairs, his arms full of iced tea in jars not unlike the ones full of dancing lightning bugs that swayed in the breeze over our heads. It was more citrussy than I liked my tea, but it still felt a relief to drink from the heat. The weather was tolerable thanks to what amounted to winter in this climate, especially out of the moisture of the swamp proper, but the press of people radiating their own body heat nearby made it feel like a sunny summer day. I wondered if l’garto were endothermic, or ectothermic like their Earth counterparts? I hadn’t noticed Henri or any of his cousins sweating, though that didn’t say much as most non-humans didn’t sweat either. Was the celebration so fun in part because all the heat of all the people partying brought their spirits up? So many questions, so few polite ways to ask without coming across as intrusive or creepy.
“What do we owe you for the tea, Henri?” I did not mean to rhyme those last two words, but it happened, and I rolled with it.
“On the house, sha. Don’t say Sweet Henri never did nothin’ for ya.” Oh, he was good. Much like a free drink at a fast food joint, the sort of good will not forcing someone to pay ten times the price for ten cents of sugar water far eclipsed the loss in the first place. “You want a refill, though, that’s on you. Modeste has an iced tea an’ lemonade stand just up the street a piece. Them’s her glasses an’ she’d see you a discount on the next one if you returned with ‘em.”
“Then let’s stop there and fill up again before we continue.”
Modeste and every other female l’garto I’d seen basically just seemed like slightly smaller versions of the males. In fact, if you’d taken a picture of Modeste and told me she was the ‘before’ to Deaf Laurent’s scarred-up ‘after’, I would believe you. She made one hell of a glass of sweet tea, though, something she insisted was sun-brewed according to a recipe passed down her family line for generations. Red and I had another round, but Tanis opted for a strawberry lemonade with little chunks of fruit and pulp floating around inside the glass. It looked delectable, and I made a mental note to return to Modeste’s stall for a glass before I hit the hay.
“Now where was I?” Henri pondered aloud as we resumed the walk. The sun was starting to set now, the lights of the fireflies more prominent.
“Grampere just invented blackened catfish,” Red intoned.
“Ah, yes! Thank you, Red. So while old Grampere’s hunger was curbed a bit, his mood hadn’t lightened none, and he decided to dive down into the pond an’ root out the culprit who must’ve done made off with his rightfully-trapped abundance of crustaceans. Now, you know how it is down there in the mire; it can be hard to see your own claws in front of your face, nevermind discover someone who don’t wanna be found. But Defan Grampere is a clever sort; instead of stirrin’ up the mud he settles down on the bottom of the pond like a big white log, an’ he holds his breath… an’ he waits. The sun rises, the sun sets, sun rises, sun sets, years or hours pass by and eventually somethin’ else at the bottom of the lake stirs, an’ out swims this beast covered in slimy, olive-green, shaggy plants goin’ straight for the trap. SNAP! Grampere jumps up from his hidin’ spot an tackles him, an’ they’re a-fussin’ an’ a-fightin’, stirrin’ up mud and the whole water! Now a slap from Grampere can flash-fry a catfish, so you best bet whatever beast he’s tanglin’ with can go, an anything else in that lake was writin’ correspondence to their realtor with such a tussle goin’ on in their sittin’ room.
“Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a fight while blind from the muck, nice young drylander such as yourself, but you just keep throwin’ fists an’ elbows an’ knees and such until you can’t throw no more. An’ Grampere has a legendary fortitude among his other enviable qualities, so he an’ his opponent went on well into the night until neither of ‘em could take it anymore an’ they flopped up onto the shore. Well, of course Grampere was curious to see his opponent in this confrontation of epic proportions. But instead of a creature covered in slime an’ kelp, it’s a creature made of slime an’ kelp… the Muckman!”
“The Muckman?” I asked, making sure I’d heard him correctly.
“The Muckman!” He repeated.
“What’s a Muckman?” Tanis asked.
“It’s a man made of muck,” Henri said simply.
“I withdraw my question,” Tanis giggled.
“This wasn’t the first time Grampere an’ the Muckman had crossed paths, now, sha. That Muckman would always be tryin’ to pull one over on Grampere, tryin’ to reach past his grasp an’ all that. So Grampere sits on the bank of the pond an’ asks old Muckman, ‘Muckman! Why did you steal my crop of lobsters from my lobster traps?’ An’ Muckman says ‘Well, I was just down by the pond, an’ I had envie for some o’ them big mudbugs, an’ I saw the chain for your lobster traps and thought I’d help myself.’ Now, mind you, the Muckman is big to be sure, but he’s nowhere near as big as Grampere and can’t eat near as much. So Grampere, knowin’ this, asks him ’Muckman, did you really eat all my lobsters?’ an’ Muckman says ‘no, sir, some of them escaped while I got ‘em out the trap an’ swam away. I suppose I ate about half.’ So Grampere sighs a long long sigh, all the way out through the tip of his snout an’ says ‘Muckman, if you were so hungry, how come you didn’t just ask? You know I woulda shared my lobsters with you.’ Because, see, despite their many quarrels, Grampere is a wise an’ forgiving sort. Well, the Muckman goes quiet for a real long time after that, an’ there ain’t a bit of noise between the mangroves but the rumblin’ of Grampere’s stomach. Muckman hears this of course, an he says ‘Grampere, I am a bit hungry after our fight,’ an’ Grampere says ‘yeah?’ an’ he says ‘yeah,’ an’ Grampere says ‘but we don’t have any lobsters now,’ an’ Muckman says ‘well, no, but there’s plenty of catfish an’ duck, shrimps an’ crawfish. There’s greens an’ rice, an’ the whole bounty of Marekaj before us. I reckon we could make a fine meal on that even without lobster.’ And so Grampere agrees, an the two spend the rest of that Quatjur evenin’ gatherin’ food an’ cookin’ up a feast, an’ that was the first Lobster Quatjur.”
“A whole day named after lobster and they didn’t even eat any?” Tanis queried, sipping her lemonade.
“That’s the moral of the story, boo; sometimes we need to make the best we can outta what little we have. An’ sometimes you need to forgive somebody who done you wrong, because of the beautiful things you can create together. On Lobster Quatjur we call in our friends an’ loved ones, let bygones be bygones if just for one day, an’ we eat, we laugh, an’ we dance. Let the Muckman have the lobsters today; we’ll make do and give him plenty else if he decide to show up.”
“You guys do this every year?” Between the story, the energy of the scene, and the delectable treats on offer, I was already marking my calendar for a return trip.
“Ha! Year? Ain’t a month go by without Lobster Quatjur. There’s no schedule to the festivities, Glenn. Company comin’ over an’ you need a feast? Lobster Quatjur. Vil Kayman gone too long without a fais do-do? Lobster Quatjur. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be Quatjur! Ujur, Trojur, in the middle of another holiday? They’re all liable to become Lobster Quatjur.”
“Jeeze, Henri. Maybe I should move here,” I joked. “L’garto sure now how to live.”
“Ah, you say that now, sha, just imagine how you gonna feel after dessert! Y’all hungry for some pralines? Beignets? Bananas Fabienne?”
“I might be sick in the mornin’, but at this point I’ll eat anything this guy mentions, chief,” Red grinned my way and I looked to Tanis who nodded her head in enthusiastic confirmation.
“Sounds like we’ve all got a sweet tooth. Lead the way, Sweet Henri!”
“Let us gourmandize, then! Allons!”