Rinza,
I have no recipe for you. I am sitting on the quay at Pukawai with a blanket somebody put round me, writing this before I forget how it went, because I have already forgotten what was in it.
You know my habit. They gave me a loaf at Jaurei for the walk in: barley, a little rye, salt, lard, and too much caraway, baked yesterday. I wrote that down by my own lamp an hour into the tunnel, and then I stopped writing, because there was nothing to see. The path runs beside the river the whole way, uphill so gently you only know it by your legs. Twice I caught up with haulers walking the bank with shaded lamps, and something long and pale in the water ahead of them, towing an empty boat up on a rope. I had finished the loaf by noon. By evening I was hungrier than I have been in thirty years of kitchens.
I will not try to tell you the garden. I tried for an hour last night and my notes are a list of colours. The cook who fed me tasted every dish before I did. I ate seven things, Rinza, and I cannot name one of them. I took the third apart in my mouth for a full minute the way you taught me and got nothing out of it but more of the taste. She laughed at me and brought the eighth.
Afterwards they lay you in a boat and push you off, and the river does the rest. I slept the whole way out. I woke when the light changed: we were sliding out from under Jaurei into morning, and ahead of me the night's boats were coming out one by one, each with someone asleep in it, slow, the way our lanterns go on festival night. Barges came after, low in the water with baskets. People were waiting on the steps with blankets for the ones who had not woken yet.
I am walking in again tomorrow. Do not give my station away.
Natsume
Pukawai stands at the south-east foot of the ring, where the river comes out of the mountain. The palace, Jaurei, is built against the rock, and the river runs out from under it into the town. Behind Jaurei the river comes down through the Alaloa, a road cut through the mountain beside it: about twenty-five miles of tunnel, some forty feet across, with water wide enough for two boats to pass and a towpath ten feet wide. It is the one easy way into the ring. The keepers' record, the oldest writing in the country, already calls the palace and the road old. I have found no name for the people who made them.
Guests walk in. They set off from Jaurei in the morning with a loaf from the palace kitchens and their own lamps, and follow the towpath upstream all day in the dark. They come out at evening at the inner mouth, where lodges and kitchens stand at the edge of the Garden, and they eat there. In season a hundred or two walk in each day.
After the meal a guest lies down in a boat and is pushed off, and the river carries the boat down through the Alaloa in about twelve hours. Most sleep the whole way. In the morning the night's boats come out from under Jaurei one by one, each with a sleeper aboard, and the harvest barges come out after them. People wait on the palace steps with blankets for the ones who have not woken yet.
The empty boats go back up the towpath. They are towed by the huki, pale blind salamanders several feet long that live in the river in the dark, swimming in harness ahead of the boat while the hauler walks the bank. The huki shun the light, and the haulers carry their lamps shaded. A huki is slower than a guest on foot, and the guests pass the haulers on the path all day.
Everyone and everything that goes through the Alaloa pays the crown's toll at Jaurei. The mountains can be climbed, and climbing in costs nothing, but the ring is days of hard mountain at its thinnest, and the toll is set low enough that few climb.
Inside the ring lies a valley about a hundred miles across, and the Garden fills it. It was planted: the oldest pages of the record call it a garden already, and the plants are too many and too various for any wild valley, the crops and wild plants of half the continent in one place, and some that grow nowhere else on Talan. The planted core lay around the Eliza, at the valley's heart, and in the centuries since, the Garden has gone wild across the whole floor. It holds more kinds of plant than anyone has counted.
Most of the Garden can kill. Left untended, the valley's animals ate what was soft and harmless, and what survived and spread was what nothing could eat. Children inside learn that the brighter a thing is, the more care it needs. Some of it is unsafe even to touch, and everyone who works inside wears long gloves.
The record names about 9,000 of the Garden's plants, and about 600 of them are cleared for the table. About fifty can be eaten raw. The other 550 or so are food only when they are prepared, by heat, by water, by time, or with the right partner in the pot, and about a hundred of those are the staples eaten inside every day. The rest of the 9,000 are named and uncleared.
The Garden is kept as a preserve, and it is farmed. Cleared plants are grown on plots cut out of the wild ground; gatherers work the wild Garden in the cool of the morning. About 100,000 people live inside the ring. Some are born there, descended from the families who came in at the refuge; the rest have come in from the outer country for their working years, a few years or many, and will go home.
At the valley's heart, about sixty miles in from the inner mouth, stands the Eliza: a great house with winter gardens, a kitchen that climbs floor over floor, a spiral tower for drying and a smokehouse. The river rises near it and runs down to the Alaloa. The keepers live and work there, and the Garden's goods are still dried in the tower and smoked in the smokehouse.
The Garden does not poison those born inside it, folk say, and anyone who has lived in the ring long enough can eat anything in it raw. Every few years someone born inside proves them wrong.
The Eliza was a church, as its name says. It was the house of Barzain, a god of growing things in the Gods' Era, who lived there in his garden. His people built Jaurei and cut the Alaloa, and kept the gate for him.
The Garden was his keeping: one of every plant he could gather, the crops and wild plants of Talan among them. When the god-run world collapsed in the Lost Era, most of those were lost everywhere else. The plants in the Garden that grow nowhere else on Talan are the continent's lost Gods'-Era flora.
Barzain went out to the gods' war and was killed far from home. His people waited at the gate, and he did not come back. In the Lost Era they forgot him, and a dead god who is forgotten is gone for good. The Garden holds no shard of him and is no godblood ground; whatever he left lies where he fell.
The Haraours are his people's descendants, relearning his garden. The cook's bite was his portion: the first bite of every dish belonged to the god, and the cook takes it now in his place. The first basket on the Eliza's step is the last offering made to him, by people who do not know whose it is.
"Scholars come up from Thekkavar every few years to see the church. I show them the ovens."
The keepers of the record work at the Eliza. They keep the record of tryings, which begins in the Lost Era, and they decide what is cleared.
A plant is cleared by trying it. A taster eats it before witnesses, prepared every way the keepers can think of, in doses that grow over months, and everything that happens is written down, deaths included. Clearing one plant takes years. Since the end of the Dark Era the keepers have cleared about one every four years; in the refuge they cleared more, century for century, than in any other age.
When a plant is cleared, its first dish is cooked in the Eliza's kitchen, the Paapuka walks in for it, and the whole country eats a token of it that year. People date things by clearings: the year of the red root.
Nobody may serve or sell a garden dish to others without the keepers' certificate for every plant in it. A certificate is for one plant. An ordinary garden cook holds ten or twenty, enough for a full table; a master holds eighty to a hundred and fifty, the work of a life; the keepers at the top hold a few hundred, and no one holds all 550. At home anyone may cook what they dare, and most poisonings happen at home. A foreigner may be certified, but certificates take years inside, and most go home without one.
Who keeps. The keepers choose their own, from certified cooks who have done tryings. The crown cannot certify a cook, and the keepers cannot toll or shut the gate. Ikaika na Nohea Halewai is the Keeper of the Record.
The keepers know more than the record says. A short list of the Garden's plants has been learned completely and never written down or cleared, because those plants are good only for killing: poisons that cannot be tasted and that act slowly. The list passes from keeper to keeper by word of mouth.
The keepers' slowness is caution, and it is also the list. The gap between the 9,000 named and the 600 cleared is where the list is kept, and the Keeper of the Record's proposal on poison would close the inside households' road toward it.
"Everything that leaves this country leaves through my door, and I have never asked a basket what it is for."
Under the Golden Empire Haraour was a province, and the Garden's dishes were a luxury of the imperial tables. The Empire's name for the gate town, Wakehythe, is still on the waybills.
The refuge. When the Corrupted God's spawn came in the Dark Era, the outer country and Pukawai held, and those who sought refuge went in through Jaurei. The house Paaloa kept the gate, open to the refugees and shut to the spawn. The refugees found room in the Garden and made homes there, and many stayed. They lived on it for generations, and they cleared more of it than any age before or since. At the Dark Era's end, Paaloa took the crown.
The Paapuka. The Paapuka holds the gate: Jaurei, the Alaloa, the river, the boats, the haulers and their huki, and the toll. Royal reeves keep the outer towns, and a crown warden keeps the inner mouth; the households inside run their own plots and lodges. The Paapuka receives envoys at Jaurei, where every visitor arrives anyway, and signs for the realm. The toll and the harvest dues pay for the Alaloa, the boats and the road, and the towns build their own works. The crown may not tax the climbers, certify a cook, or take land from the households inside. Before the crown passes, the heir lives working years inside the ring and earns a certificate or two from the keepers.
In the refuge the Alaloa was sealed, and the law for it stands. While the gate is shut, the inside governs itself, the households and the keepers together; the crown keeps the outer country and signs for the realm, and no trade passes.
Haraour feeds itself. The outer country farms barley and millet, keeps goats and sheep, fishes its rivers, and fishes and pans salt on its short shore. The inside eats the Garden's staples, and grain and salt come in through the gate. In a lean year Haraour buys Tangatan grain like the rest of Sumendar.
Raw garden produce is deadly in untrained hands, so what leaves has been made safe first: dried, smoked and cured, and certified at the gate. The Empire's tables ate it, and it still goes to rich tables in Biozuri, Merkavar and Frae City. Medicines and reagents go out openly, to Eldara's still-rooms and to alchemists. Iron, tools and cloth come in from No Man's Land and Eldara, and now and then one of Eldara's almosts, for a garden kitchen.
The Garden's plants grow anywhere, and some have been carried out and planted abroad. What grows there is poison, because nobody abroad holds the record.
The dose that heals and the dose that kills are learned together, and the inside households make poisons for sale. A poison sold as a poison needs no certificate, and it pays the toll at Jaurei like anything else. The Adventurers' Guild buys openly and lawfully, for its work against monsters, through its Kingshall at Pukawai; the Mercenary Guild buys quietly. I have found no account of where else Haraour poison goes.
The Keeper of the Record has proposed that no certified cook may make poison for sale. Enacted, it would make every inside household that does both choose between its certificates and its poison, and most need both. The keepers are divided, and many of them come from inside households themselves. The Paapuka tolls whatever passes the gate and stands against it; every poisoning abroad that is traced home presses the keepers the other way; the Adventurers' Guild asks only that the supply stay lawful. The keepers' vote is still to come.
Outside the ring the day is a farm day, as anywhere in Sumendar. In Pukawai the day turns on the gate: guests set off into the Alaloa at dawn, the night's boats come out under Jaurei in the morning, and the carts load at noon. Inside, the gathering is done in the cool of the morning and the plots are tended, and the afternoon is for the long cooking; the Eliza's tower and smokehouse work in shifts. Woodsmoke and drying herbs hang over the gate and the Eliza.
At every table in Haraour, inside the ring and out, whoever cooked takes the first bite of every dish before anyone else eats. Inside, it shows the dish is safe. Outside, over barley and goat, it is manners. I'll take the bite means I'll go first, or I'll answer for it, and someone untried is uncleared.
The country's vice is a dish cooked just short of safe and eaten for the tingle and the numbness it leaves. No certified cook may serve it, so it is eaten at home and in uncertified dens near the inner mouth. After home cooking, it kills more Haraours than anything else on the table.
Garden gloves tucked into a belt in the outer country mean that someone has done their working years.
Outside, by cart, and by barge on the river below Jaurei. Inside, on foot, and by boat down the river from the Eliza to the inner mouth.
A visitor calls the Garden beautiful; a native calls it busy. The visitor takes the cook's bite for rudeness or for show and asks to buy a recipe; the native knows the bite is a promise and the recipe sits behind a certificate. The visitor sleeps on the float out; the native knows the boats are the harvest road.
Inside, a child cooks one staple for the household at about eight and takes the bite, a whole table in the teens, and then cooks for guests; the first time is the first bite. In the outer country the young walk the Alaloa for the first time in their early teens, with family: the first walk. The young of Pukawai ride up in the empty boats instead of walking, which breaks the custom and no law, since they still pay the toll; the haulers put them off at the next stretch of path or hand them a rope. In the outer country a child snatches a taste before the cook has taken the bite and gets the ladle across the knuckles. Inside the ring, children wait.
Haraour keeps Komo at the cooking fire: the hearth is the altar and the cooking is the worship, and there is no separate clergy. Every year the first basket of the harvest is left on the Eliza's step, and the keepers carry it in. I have found no account of whose custom it was.
Between the mountains and the river that bounds the country lies farm country: grass and river land, with towns along the rivers, and in the south a forested valley running down to the bay, with fishing harbours and salt pans. Two in three Haraours are Goblins; the rest are Sumendar's other peoples, Kobolds and Dwarves among them, Nomans coming and going, and cooks from abroad who came to learn and stayed at the gate.
No Man's Land wraps the country on the north and east. Haraour has no rail: guests and carts come about 150 miles west across No Man's Land by road from a halt on Eldara's line, four to six days, and since 2527 the robbers on the Neck road prey on both. The Red Dominion lies to the west. Galdua Jendea lies beyond the Noman badlands to the south-east.
Haraours speak Leowai, the mountain sister of Tahu Tangata's Reahi, and a Tangatan hears the kinship in every other word. Talanese is the second tongue, strongest at the gate, and the record, the certificates and the trade are kept in it.
A Haraour name is a given name, the one who took your first bite, and a house: Mahina na Kekai Paaloa. Whoever cooked a child's first solid food and took the cook's bite before the child ate it, most often a grandparent or an aunt, is named in the child's name for life, after na: Mahina, for whom Kekai took the bite. The house is the family's, carried by all its children.
Given
Houses
Whole names
The Paapuka, who holds the gate.
The Keeper of the Record, who has proposed the rule on poison.
A kitsune cook of the House of a Thousand Flavors in Biozuri, who walked in in 2532.