8: The Great Sea
Walk East from Lo-Wil for two or three weeks and you come to Black Bay, the stretch of water that separates the mainland from the East Reach.
(There's a land bridge to the North that you can cross, but it means going through a stretch of the Northern wastes, and no-one wants to do that. There was a party from Lo-Wil tried crossing it years back, and they never returned. If anyone's been fool enough to try it again since, they never came back to tell us.)
Black Bay is huge. You can't see the other side from the shore, and the sea lives up to its name. What you don't realise until you get there is that the water isn't just black. It stinks, a pungent, rotting smell like goat shit and carcasses. And not just the water. It hangs in the air of every town and village on the shore.
It's not so bad further South-West down the coast, around Wosh-Tun, but at the top of the Bay you can smell it from miles away, long before you reach the water. Some kind of face cloth is essential (for visitors, that is — ask the locals what smells so bad and they just look at you funny).
I went to Wetblack Point, where a couple of thousand people somehow make a living off Black Bay. The first thing that hits you — after the smell — is how wet everything is. I mean, that place is well-named.
Water seems to just hang in the air. Strolling through the town is like walking through a hot, wet banket with every step. And a lot of the streets are permanently under a couple inches of water. By the end of my first day walking around, my boots were almost ruined. When I asked one of the farmers why that was, he laughed and told me an old proverb: "Be mindful, menfolk, of Black Bay, she'll soon or late take all away."
At dawn the next day, I went down to the shore to watch the boats go out. The land around the Bay is all swamp and marsh, full of treacherous black mud and inedible rushes. Nobody in their right mind would try to walk around in it, let alone farm hemp there. But these guys do.
And it's all guys. No women are allowed to farm, ever. I found that out when I asked to accompany them on their harvest. Turns out these people aren't just hardy and smell-proof, they're also incredibly superstitious. A woman on deck will drown your neck, they said. Either nobody knew why this rule was around, or they just wouldn't tell an outsider like me. My guess is their ancestors lost a boat somehow and needed something to blame. People always do.
So I stood on the shore and watched the men row across the black water, into the rising sun. They wouldn't be back till after noon, so it was just me, the hempwives and their daughters for the rest of the morning. One of them took me by a store, where I haggled for some new boots that the trader swore up and down were sturdier than the ones I'd almost lost to the floodwater.
The hempwife then told me why the water's so dangerous. It's full of salt and acids and all kinds of shit you don't get in riverwater. That's why it's black, and why you can't eat anything that comes out of it. Even the hemp they harvest has to be smoke dried for a month before it's safe to sell on to the weavers and traders.
I asked how they could even grow hemp on the land out there if the water was so bad, but nobody would tell me that, either. Trader's secret, I guess.
The men came back after noon with their harvest, heavy piles of raw hemp grass loaded up in their metal and wooden boats. I swear, I thought those boats were going to sink, they were so low in the water. The men were all soaked through, and after they pulled the boats into shore they all marched straight into a bath house to get rinsed off by a washer-woman.
Meanwhile, the hempwives all took off their boots and walked into the water. Turned out it was their job to unload. Well, I couldn't just stand by while every woman in town from ten to forty broke their backs carrying the stuff, so I waded in to help them.
We formed chain gangs back up to shore, to a waiting queue of goat-pulled carts that took full loads to a curing house. And as they worked, the women sang in time with their movements; long, sad, rambling songs about living off the Great Sea.
Two hours later we were done, and it was our turn for the bath house. By this time the men were at home, drinking sour goatswater and swapping tall tales.
I left Wetblack Point the next day, and never did get chance to go back. But I'll bet me a fat old goat they're still out there at the water's edge every sunrise — risking their necks on the black water to make a living, and singing sad songs about it.
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