I walked for four days after leaving camp, making good time each day but ensuring that I stopped and ate something and rested well each night as well. Deer were becoming less plentiful, but there were still a number of fruit trees to be found off of the main road that produced edible products. I also caught some squirrel-looking creatures and, after making sure they didn't also carry a bacterial contagion like their scavenging cousins, cooked and ate them. The meat wasn't tasty and there wasn't much of it, but it filled up certain bars on my heads-up display that were not being filled by the fruits alone. At least I didn't have to figure out how to cook the tubers the hard way, I thought with a smirk as I trudged down the road.
In the late morning of the fifth day I saw my first sign of civilization in days, literally. A signpost was sitting beside the road with two vaguely arrow-shaped boards attached to it. I had no idea what either one said, but I assumed the one pointing south said “Suwlahtk” and the other said “Frahmtehn”. The path did turn a bit, I thought, I guess it’s more “eastward” than strictly “east”. Trees had been thinning out for days, and they only dotted the rolling hills infrequently in the area I was in, with perhaps one tree per twenty square meters or less being the average density. Looking into the distance along the road I could detect a vague texture to the land ahead of me.
At noon I passed by the farms. The texture I had noticed was actually lines of crops being grown in the soil. Some of the crops were the same as the ones that had been grown in Sultak, but there were many that were different. I didn't recognize any of them though a few were similar to ones I had seen in the past. That one looks almost exactly like corn, I thought, just red and with a spherical cob. Seeing the sheer sprawl of the farms was surprising to me, as I was used to farms scaling into vertical layouts which were used in warbreed villages. As the people here clearly lacked the technical ability to produce such farms they instead spread their crops over dozens, maybe even hundreds of square kilometers.
Unlike in Suwlahtk, the farmhouses were very far from the road and most of the people I could see were well outside the distance where individual features could be picked out. Even still, the people who happened to get close enough to me to see my face didn't stare or gawk like the ones in Suwlahtk did. Instead, they just gave me a glance and moved on. One of them, a woman, even had a hair color that bordered more on brown than the bright blonde which I was now very used to seeing. More phenotypical variation here, I noted, the village might have been a monoculture.
The road widened out and became more trodden as I approached the buildings in the distance. Once I got close I could tell immediately that they were built very differently from the ones in Suwlahtk. They were all stone, every single one, made of hewn pieces held together with concrete mortar. The roofs had no straw, and instead were tightly-fitted wooden boards at forty-five degree angles designed to allow water to run off of them. Window stylings were the same but the shutters looked better built, and the doors had more metal lining their outsides and reinforcing them. This certainly makes them look more technologically apt than I had thought, I grunted.
The buildings were practically abuzz with activity when I approached them. Signs were attached to some, and outside of others humans with carts called out to passerby trying to sell or buy things. The wide street was made to accommodate the “beasts” that the humans used, I realized as I saw one walk by while pulling a cart filled with harvested fruit. There's just so many of them, I thought while looking around. It wouldn't have been an overestimate to say that there were more people talking around the streets in front of me than I had seen in my entire stay in Suwlahtk.
“Excuse me,” I said, approaching a man who was selling fruit. He eyed me up suspiciously, giving a half frown as his judgment. Let's try to be diplomatic, I thought, I am an infiltrator, I should be able to do that much.
“What'ya want?” the man drawled back. For the first time since I learned Uwrish I registered the presence of a distinct accent. “It's one ngeyt to buy a fruit, so pay up or stop botherin' me.”
“Is this Frahmtehn?” I asked, just to be sure. The man squinted at me.
“Where're you from boy?” he asked in response. “Can't even understand you.”
“Am I in the town of Frahmtehn?” I asked again more specifically, trying to make sure my speech was perfect.
“You're in the south tradin' post, so yeah,” he replied. “Now, buy somethin' or piss off.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my pouch of coins, then reconsidered. I'm not that hungry, I thought, I should avoid antagonizing him and find someone else to ask. I put the pouch away and turned to leave, hearing the man mutter an insult as I left.
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“Is a map available to purchase?” I asked a woman who was selling miscellaneous wares on the side of the road sometime later. The woman laughed, then looked at me as though I had just asked something totally crazy.
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“Do I look like I'd have something like that?” she replied flippantly, gesturing to the various functionless artifacts she had laid out in front of her. Do people really buy these things? I wondered.
“You appear to be selling a mixture of goods,” I replied, “the possibility of you having a map is decent in my opinion. Perhaps you have one for personal use, I would be willing to buy it if that is the case.” Again the woman looked at me with her jaw half-slack, then barked out laughter.
“Where on kayvjh do you come from where peasant women have the money to afford maps?” she scoffed. “Seriously, tell me, I'll pack up and catch the next ship there.” Maps are expensive? I thought in confusion, I suppose the transcription of them would be difficult, but these people are at least capable of wood block printing for primitive mass production. It felt anachronistic to think about a society that could create paper but did not disseminate cartographic information on a large scale.
“How much does a map cost?” I asked. The woman frowned and gritted her teeth, a sign of stress if I ever saw one. I have to be gentle to not cause a scene, I thought. The woman looked up at me and I made sure my face reflected only genuine confusion and curiosity, relaxing my brow and making my eyes wide.
“Buy something or stop bothering me,” the woman snapped. I took one last look at her wares for anything that might have been of value, then shook my head and walked away. How could one person come to possess so many roughly-cut wooden statues? I wondered as I walked off.
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“Why'd'you wan' a map?” an older-looking human burped at me. It was now sometime in the mid-afternoon, and I was starting to question whether or not remaining in the trade post was a good idea.
“I need to get to Vehrehr,” I replied simply, “I am not local and I think it would be beneficial to my trip if I had a map for directions.” Despite his absurdly-thick accent, the old man was the most talkative of the humans I had encountered. The opposite of Pae'eyl, I thought, perhaps age magnifies their biases towards people?
“Son, I hav'ta tell ya, I can barely understan' ya,” the man chuckled. “If you're tryin'a ge' to Vehrehr, jus' keep goin' north through th'town proper, th'path turns eas' once ya leave th'walls. Ain't no maps 'round this pos' but ya migh' find one in town.” I sincerely hope my accent isn't perceived as being this thick, I sighed. After being told that my speech was accented enough to be noticeable I had periodically worried that I might sound exactly as unintelligible as the old man in front of me did.
“In town?” I asked, “I thought we were in town, are we not?” The man smiled and took a sip from a mug beside him, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Fruit juice, I smelled on his breath.
“This is jus' th'south tradin' pos',” the man explained, “if ya keep goin' north fer, ehh, an hour or so fer yer young legs, yeh'll get t'th'town proper.” I looked to the north, where around one hundred meters from where I was standing all the buildings just stopped and gave way to farms again. Oh, I realized, the whole thing is the south trading post.
“Thank you for the information,” I said politely. The old man smiled and held out a hand, expecting something from me. I looked at him with a confused expression, though I didn't make any motion to leave.
“It's 'xpensive, livin' here,” he slurred, “I could really use'a bi' o' money.” The man beckoned with his fingers, eyes greedily boring a hole into the pouch which was attached to my waist. I guess I could just give him something to avoid a conflict, I thought as I looked around. There were some armed men which I had noticed walking up and down the streets while I was conversing with the locals, probably guards. One was watching my interaction with the old man even though he tried to appear as though he wasn't when my eyes caught him.
“I understand,” I replied, pulling the pouch from my waist. I took out one of each type of coin and placed them into his hand, hoping that at least one of the coins was valuable enough to sate his thirst for money. The old man pulled his hand back and looked at the coins, blinking a few times, then moving his hand closer to his eyes. A complex expression passed over his face and I began to worry. “That is enough, right?” I asked.
“Oh!” he snapped, looking up at me with wide eyes. “O'course i'is, sorry son, my eyes jus' ac' up sometimes. Gettin' old ain' easy ya know.” The man quickly pocketed the coins and a grin passed over his face. I glanced over at the guard who saw me look, then turned and began walking away. I guess that means I didn't do anything wrong, I thought.
“I'll be going now,” I said politely. The man smiled at me, his teeth stained a deep yellow from whatever it was he was drinking or eating.
“You jus' come back if yeh need somethin',” he called out from behind me. I gave a wave of acknowledgment on habit, hoping that it wouldn't be interpreted as anything improper due to a cultural custom I wasn't aware of. I heard the old man mutter something under his breath as I left, though unlike most mutterings his sounded giddy. I might have overpaid, I thought as I looked at the coins in my pouch again, I'll have to learn what the value of these coins is soon, before I get scammed or robbed. That one man said something about a ngeyt, but which one of these is a ngeyt?
I opted not to attempt to purchase any food and instead headed straight north. Once I was out of the trading post the land did in fact turn back to farmland on all sides for a while, but then I saw a new cluster of buildings growing in the distance. Smoke rose out of the top of it, thin and dark, and for a moment I was worried that I might be walking into the site of a battle. As I approached I saw that it was coming from innumerable chimneys sprouting from the tops of the unevenly-sized buildings, and the sheer volume of it was from the number of them. Oh wow, I thought, I didn't expect it to be this big.