Dastgerd Fumée

Fifty silvers for the stew. Hundred at the better houses. I read the board pinned outside a tavern and my stomach asked my brain to verify. Fish. Broth. Herb. Bone. Fire. Fifty silvers. The numbers swelled on a plank of oiled cedar and the plank wheezed from iron hooks at the height where your neck has to work for it.

A fisherman puts fish in water, adds garlic, adds whatever grew in the rocks near his house. Waits. A hundred years of fishermen do the same. The recipe becomes heritage. Heritage acquires a price. The price acquires a building with candles and chairs aimed at the coastline.

Fish blood in the gutters, harbor at noon. Crab shell ground to powder under cart wheels. Brine and rope with the rot of hulls baking in the heat. Women hauled baskets from the boats with their sleeves rolled up past the elbow and cats followed the women and kavvers followed cats. Raw goods lay on the dock in crates silver-bellied or fly-blown, stinking of the fortune that would be charged for them by nightfall. Three coppers a crate at the waterline. Fifty silvers a bowl at the tavern. The landlord adds the view.

I will make the stew.

Fourteen miles through a city older than most religions. Nothing eaten since a bread roll at noon. The bread roll munched like cardboard, for Dastgerd on a holy evening shuts its markets like a fist, alas, shutters come down, chains go on. Provisioners kill their lamps and you stand in the new dark with your feet throbbing and your blood full of the off kind of sugar and the only thought left alive is, well, you know.

First surviving provisioner found. Woman behind the brass till, her face said livestock had wandered into a courthouse. Sure sure I came off the hill road, I had the complexion of objects recovered from a minor excavation. Her eyes tracked me through the glass jars and the flour sacks. She was counting the silverware.

So. The commodity named Milk, a mammal stands in a field, a person takes what the animal provides, vessel filled. A child understands this transaction.

Dastgerd sells its milk in vessels designed to confuse trained soldiers. White bottles shaped for pouring tar. Green bottles shaped for medicating horses. A squat jug with a cap suggesting industrial cement. Hugged three, sniffed the first. Cream. Sniffed the next, disgraceful alliance between yogurt and tile grout. Third had a thickness and a color I would call suspicious under oath. I unscrewed the cap and jabbed my nose into it. Milk! The woman at the till gave me the stare witnessing a customs violation in progress. I would have explained. Explained what, an adult male in a foreign city sniffing bottles is a portrait best left unframed.

The spice wall.

Floor to ceiling. Forty jars. Sixty. More. Little glass soldiers ranked in rows with labels printed neat for the benefit of men with younger eyes. I came for saffron. Saffron costs more than a field hand’s weekly bread because someone crouches at dawn to pull threads from a flower and dry them in shade and weigh them on a jeweler’s scale then package them in wax paper and assign them a number that assumes the buyer has property and sentiments about flavor.

I strutted before the saffron. Been walking since morning though. Harbor salt in my pores. Municipal exhaust on my tongue. Twelve hours of streets laid out by enemies of geometry. A person in this state studying saffron prices. The jar relaxed between two others and the price tag curled in the heat and the ink had gone faint. My reflection in the glass showed a face fit for employment in a quarry. I put the saffron down.

Cumin under it. South of the cumin, turmeric. Below turmeric a row of blended powders in bags with handwritten labels. One nasty jar and this stew crosses a border. Becomes a southern curry. Becomes nomad paste. Becomes something my hands would ruin. The distance between a port fisherman’s recipe and a desert braise is two pinches of the erroneous powder. Picked up a blend and read the label. Fourteen ingredients. Coriander, fennel seed, dried orange peel, five mysteries, and a warning about pregnant people. Put it down. Picked up another. This one promised Moorish lamb. Set that down. The next said fish seasoning and the ingredients listed sugar and cornstarch and I felt a small cold anger build in the back of my molars. The shelf grew endless. Blends for game. Blends for couscous. Blends for tagine, for chermoula, for grilling, for braising, for purposes remained opaque and whose labels implied traditions more dubious than my bloodline. A woman with two children reached past me for a jar without hesitation. Her hand knew where it was going. Mine had been guessing since I entered this aisle.

I took the jar that had made its decision for me. Garlic and mixed herb. A blend for the ignorant and the willing. Confession in a glass container. Fastest route between stupidity and a meal.

Oil. Fish in portions, white and damp and wrapped in waxed paper. A clay pot of lobster paste the color of siege mud. Pepper-garlic paste for spreading. Ham from the eastern ranges, smelling of salt and woodsmoke, ham confirmed. Two packages of dried noodle in broth as strategic reserve. If the stew fails, the noodles receive the wounded.

The lamps dropped dead. Closing. I paid and gathered and found the street and the street had gotten colder and the last provisioner on the block had pulled its chain across the door.

Bread.

The stew requires bread as a sermon requires a congregation. You tear a piece and drag it through the broth and what you lift to your mouth carries the whole argument. Without bread the stew is a bowl of hot liquid and your hands go idle and the meal loses its infantry.

I assumed bread in this city would grow from the cobblestones. The place was built on bread. Its name belonged in part to bread. Men carried loaves under their arms in the daytime as officers carry swagger sticks, proof of belonging. Seen dock workers break a loaf for lunch with their boots hanging over the harbor wall. Seen women carry triple loaves like fracture loaves from market, brown bag, crooked arm. Bread in Dastgerd at noon is atmosphere.

Holy evening. Seven bells. No bread.

I found a bakery with its shutters drawn. Walked four hundred steps north and found a second with its door locked and its window dark and the shape of empty racks behind the glass. Third bakery. A sign with hours proposing the baker woke before the Wheel and retired before the first lamp was lit. Fourth sold pastry and cake and sugar work and frosted things behind glass, all of it built for mouths softer than mine. The pastry woman looked at me. I looked at the pastry. Cake. All of it cake. Why anyone needs that.

The campaign had taken shape. Retrieval of an asset from hostile territory after hours.

Six hundred gaits south. Over the bridge. Down through a street where the cobbles abandoned each other and the gutters ran with grayish water. A provisioner with bright lights and a glass front and a guard.

The guard pointed at my bags. Leave them.

I discarded the fish. The oil. The lobster paste. The noodles. The ham. All of it piled at the entrance under the supervision of a man prepared to die on the hill of petty theft prevention. He peeped at the bags. He gawked at me. That posture said the criminal underclass of this city operated through grocery concealment and he stood between them and civilization. I wanted to ask him who steals fish portions. Brother, friend, whatever, has the black market for lobster paste sustained a workforce. Wanted to describe the intelligence failures that led to this security posture. I held my lingo. Between me and the bread was a doorway. Between the bread and my stew was a morning of survival. Yours truly would die on other hills.

Inside the place a sound was dying. A song fed into the air through some device in the ceiling bearing the texture of a poor metal bird being crushed inside a drum at regular intervals. The melody had been beaten flat. The voice had been drawn through a machine that added a tremor to the pitch, supposing it’s a man singing through a rainpipe at the bottom of a well. Bass shook the floor tiles. The lyrics concerned love or vehicles or both, since shoppers drifted between the racks in comfort. Comfort. Two women held conversation over a shelf of bottled liquid and the music hammered behind them and they talked through it as fish swim through current. I passed a rack of tinned goods vibrating in sympathy with the bass. A jar of olives walked itself to the edge of its shelf and I caught it. The jar owed me one.

Empires fall when their citizens accept this sound as music and buy groceries to it without flinching.

To bread aisle! Plain loaf on the left, long and pale, crust cracked in the good direction. Darker loaf on the right, rough-surfaced, peasant style, a crust that would test the jaw. I chose the plain one for the teeth. My teeth had been chewing road salt and cold wind for three days and a crust with initiatives of masonry would finish them. I picked it up. Bastard’s dense and much heavy as a short club. The shape of a weapon in a city that sells its weapons alongside its bread and its bread alongside its wine and its wine alongside its cleaning products. Could provision a siege or a wedding from the same counter.

I collected my bags from the guard. The sentinel watched me leave, very much convinced he had prevented great evil through vigilance. The bread jutted from the bag. The ham swung. Current campaign from first provisioner to bread in hand had consumed two hours of a day I’d wrung scorched. The route had involved four shops, three dead ends, two misidentified bottles and a religious experience at the spice rack. I headed north along the harbor.

Harbor water gone from noon blue to the color of wet iron. Seems blue had been a fib. The blue a city puts on for visitors, the blue they paint on cards at the port stalls and sell for a copper, a blue that assumes the viewer drinks water from crystal and worries the rain. Evening peeled it away. Black water, oil film. Pier lamps reflected in broken lines on the surface. A hull rocked at the mooring and the lamplight on the hull went long and short and long. Sunset had a minute left and spent it. Light pulled off the waterline and the west went dark. Stars came in over the port district through a ceiling of exhaust and cook smoke.

The day crowd sells fish and rope and ceramic tile and dried fruit. The night crowd sells other things. Two men found themselves comfy on a crate marked GLORY CONDENSED outside a shuttered tackle shop sharing a pipe and watching the street on a full stomach. A woman leaned from a second-floor window and shouted down at a boy and the boy ignored her. Laughter from an open doorway, of folks drinking fast tips into a fight inside the hour. A cart horse stood tied to a ring in the wall and the eyes were aged and wet. Smoke from a grill. A cook working lamb over coals at the mouth of an alley, heard fat hissing on the iron and sparks climbing into the night, more than ten turns and ten more to come. A drunk on the curb got his head between his knees and his hat in the gutter. The hat stayed in the gutter anyway. Three sellswords in company jackets came up the harbor road in a tight knot, sober, armed, boots in step, and the crowd opened for them. The jackets had the Fourth Free stitched at the collar in red thread. Mercenary company. Dastgerd runs on companies. Half the port quarter answers to one flag or another and the other half rents itself by the week.

I bore my bread and fish and my lobster paste into it and the bags danced with me while the bread jutted from the top of the bag like a mast. A person walking fast through a port quarter at dusk with a long loaf jutting from his grip presents a figure the city prefers to give room. Civilized mind sees flour and yeast and oven. The street mind sees a thin club and a face that discourages questions. Bodies parted. The crowd gave way as crowds give way to a rumor in a garrison. A woman stepped aside. Two men did the same. A dog evaluated my ankles and chose to wait for a more promising target.

Drum music ran in my skull, toot toot, darbuka or something tasteful looping pitched temperament of twelve-hour walking and the successful acquisition of bread. My stride fell into the rhythm and the rhythm obliged. Valo and I crossed the Windcut to a song he made up about a mule that married an al-kimiya practitioner and the dowry was disputed. Sorry Valo, that was horrendous. This at least kept time. I’m proud of me.

Ammonia from the alley walls. Stone from the construction that goes on forever and delivers rubble and wages and little else. Engine lard from the harbor machines. A sweetness under it from the bakeries that had closed hours ago and left their exhaust to wander the streets looking for nostrils. Cooking fat from the upper windows. Tobacco and rope fiber and fish scale into the clothing. All of it foul and all of it good.

I passed the harbor wall. Two silhouettes, the tips of their cigarettes bright in the dark. One said something quiet and the other laughed and the laugh carried over the water and died in the oily slap of the harbor. A kavver stood on a piling with something pale in its beak. A lantern swung from a moored boat and the light played on the water and showed rope, barnacle, the green line where the tide had been and would be again. Dastgerd at night is a city that has taken off its good fur and put on the stale fur, the one with the stains, the one it wears among packs.

Turned uphill, hill dwindled and greeted me. Laundry hung between them on wires and fluttered and the shadows of shirts and trousers swung over the cobbles. A cat came out of a doorway in front of me and vanished into a gap between buildings too narrow for a body. A filter played from an upper window. A woman sang in a language unfamiliar to me. The song slow and lived in a different century from the device in the provisioner, when music was made by lungs and string and grief. The filter cut to static then the voice came in again through the interference.

Nine silvers and two hours.

I reached the room. Candles. Table. Bags down. Oil, paste, fish, herb jar, ham, noodle reserve, lobster paste, the bottle that turned out to be milk. The bread stood propped by the wall and I cut the far end free and threw it away. It had traveled a mile through the harbor district uncovered from municipal breath. The history of that last inch belonged to the city and the city could keep it.

Boots off, the heel blister had opened. I sat on the bed and ate ham with my fingers and tore bread and put the bread in my mouth and the bread was good, the ham was good, lobster paste was red and murky and the spice jar was on the table unopened accompanied by the fish in wax paper. Tomorrow the pot and tomorrow the water and the oil and the garlic and the heat and the broth left to think. Tomorrow the bread torn and laid on the plate and the stew harvested into a bowl in a kitchen that faces a courtyard where a cat lives. Bare walls. Courtyard and the cat and the bowl and me.

The stew was unmade. Me full of bread and ham eaten on the stairs because the body ignores the production schedule of the mind. Lamp down. The harbor drummed and the harbor stank and I owed it nothing but a night’s rent.

Fair terms.

Notice found pinned to the board at the Fourth Free Company canteen, Dastgerd harbor quarter. Undated. Handwritten in lamp-black ink on butcher paper. Three knife holes in the upper margin imply prior use as a throwing target.

REGARDING THE PORT STEW

Members of the Fourth Free and attached personnel are advised.

1. The harbor taverns charge between forty and a hundred silvers for the local fish stew. This sum exceeds the daily combat pay of a lance corporal by a factor of three. Command does not authorize reimbursement. Command does not care about your dinner.

2. Canteen stew is served at six bells for four coppers. Canteen stew is made from what the cooks find. Do not ask what the cooks find. The cooks have asked us not to ask them.

3. Members preparing stew in barracks quarters are reminded of the fire at the South Block last month. The fire originated from an unattended lobster broth left on a spirit burner by Corporal Estarre, who was at the time asleep in the courtyard. Corporal Estarre has been reassigned to latrine detail. The South Block wall has been replastered. The smell has not been replastered.

4. Bread. Bread in Dastgerd after seven bells on a holy evening is a tactical problem. Plan your procurement. A squad without bread is a squad without morale. A squad without morale starts a fight. A fight in a harbor tavern costs the company sixty silvers in damages, fourteen in medical fees, and one formal apology to the city magistrate. Buy the bread before sundown.

5. The spice rack at the Rue Bas provisioner contains forty-seven blends. Thirty-nine of them will turn your fish stew into something foreign. Use the garlic and herb blend, third shelf, green label. This has been tested. Deviation from this recommendation is at the member’s own risk and bowel.

6. DO NOT pursue the saffron. Saffron costs more than your balls. If your stew requires saffron to taste correct you have exceeded the culinary conspiracy appropriate to your rank.

7. Members are forbidden from trading company pepper stores for fresh bread after hours. This has happened. This will be prosecuted.

Signed, Quartermaster Ildras Moh
    Fourth Free Company, Dastgerd Garrison
    Post Scriptum: Whoever carved FIFTY SILVERS FOR FISH WATER into the latrine door is invited to pay for the door.

Fragment of a letter recovered from a decommissioned Fourth Free footlocker, Dastgerd harbor quarter. Addressee unknown. 

The port has this stew they make from the fish they pull out of the harbor in the morning. They charge more for it than you would believe. I made it in the barracks with a pot I borrowed from the canteen and ingredients I bought for less than ten silvers. Burned the garlic and broth got gloomy, fish fell apart and the bread I found was stale, thing tasted like the harbor smells.

It was the best meal I have eaten in Dastgerd. Better than any tavern. Better than canteen. Better than the dried meat and hard biscuit and lukewarm water for rations on the road. I ate on my bunk from the pot, courtyard cat came in through the window and watched so I gave it the fish spine and it took the spine under the bed and ate in the dark. We had supper together for free and the harbor was in the bowl.

I’ve been in this city four months. The money is fair. The work is what work is. Food in the canteen tastes of nothing. Food in the taverns tastes of money. Food in my pot tasted of the fire and the garlic and the hour I spent hunting bread and the evening walking the harbor with the bag in my hand and bread club jutting from the top.

If I come home I will make this stew for

[letter ends]

Scrawl found in charcoal on the harbor wall near the fish market, Dastgerd. Partially washed by rain. Transcribed by a bored sentry of the Eighth Guard.

   FIFTY SILVERS FOR SOUP
   NINE SILVERS FOR THE SAME SOUP
   FORTY-ONE SILVERS FOR THE VIEW
   THE VIEW IS FREE FROM THE WALL
   BRING BREAD