Here are the last two of six installments of the novel Mud.

Could I walk away from Renth a thousand miles, and become fully a man? And if I died trying, how much worse could that be? There was nothing to tie me to Renth. My last sibling had died of the cough, I never knew my father, and my mother was a walking skeleton who would not last much longer.

I would become a warrior, secretly. I would train my body. I would find a hiding place in the swamp where no one would see me and practice at arms as I has seen the warrors do.

It was not easy, and it did not procede quickly. At twelve, I was responsible for a full day of work every day, in the streets night and morning, in the fields most days, and cleaning out my master’s cesspit every third day. Chamarana are not slaves, exactly, but the difference from a slave’s point of view, or a Chamarana’s point of view, would be too small to notice. It took weeks of time snatched from sleep to find a clearing in the swamp that was far enough away to be hidden but close enough to reach quickly when I could find a free hour.

My body responded slowly. I was young and strong, but to become stronger requires effort, and effort requires food. A hungry warrior is a weak warrior, and I was hungry all the time. I could not steal food from non-Chamaranas – for a Chamarana to touch food that has been blessed by a priest after leaving the fields where the Chamarana grew it would pollute the food. That affront to the dignity of non-Chamaranas was punishable by death.

I was too proud to steal from my fellow slaves.

——————–

I learned to hold a wooden sword as I had seen warriors in the common. I learned to swing it; then I weighted it, to be more like a sword of steel. My forearms screamed in pain. I sweated, and panted for breath, and at times fell to my knees too exhausted to rise.

I vented my anger on unoffending reeds and on the knotted limbs of the rybhal tree. I learned of the shock to the joints that comes with every blow. Then I would stagger back to my sleeping rags under a tree on the Renthian side of the Renal. The next morning I would force myself awake and go through my day’s work with gritted teeth, unwilling to show any sign exhaustion.

Three years passed and I had gained some skill when I was discovered.

*****

Here the story ends, for now. Unlike Voices in the Wall, over in Serial, I can’t tell you what will happen next because I don’t know.

Some stories come from the head, some from the heart. This one came from the gut. I only feel what will happen, I do not know. I have ten single spaced pages of notes which may become an outline, but I don’t know yet which of several paths the novel will take.

If that seems strange to you, so be it. It is part of the reason it takes me so long to write a novel.
Monday, some silliness after six weeks of serious posts.

Here are the second two of six installments of the novel Mud.

Merchants never came to the common; the diversions of that place were beneath their station, but their soldiers, herdsmen, clerks, and servants flocked there every evening to take their crude and colorful pleasures. A grown Chamarana would be beaten if found there, except after midnight when they went to clean the grounds, but Chamarana children hung from the trees and hid in the bushes to watch the excitement.

Mostly, I watched the women.

I could always look at Chamarana women, working, always working, in their thin, torn clothing, washing themselves naked in the Renal, or relieving themselves in the bushes. There was no part of a woman’s body that was not familiar to me.

This was different. These women were soft and rounded. Their breasts were not flat. They were clean, powdered, and perfumed. They were beautiful; more important, they knew they were beautiful, and showed that knowledge in every graceful movement. They walked across the common, swaying their hips with a half-smile that said, “I know you are looking. Go ahead. Enjoy.” It was a pleasure to watch them walk. It was a burning torch in the heart to watch from concealment as they shed their clothing and opened their legs to their lovers.

As a child, I could look. If one of the men caught me they would kick me and laugh and let me run away. But in a year or so, when I was just a little older, they would beat me unconscious for daring to look at a woman who was not a Chamarana. So I looked, and looked, and then looked again.

——————–

When I was surfeit with watching the women, I would watch the warriors at play. It was practice, of course, with blunted weapons. Often enough it left them bruised and bloodied, but they enjoyed themseves so hugely, that it looked like play to me. And why not? They were powerful men, with bulging thighs and masses of muscle in their arms and shoulders. Their bodies spoke of plenty of exercise, plenty of food, and plenty of rest. Our lean, slat-like Chamarana bodies spoke of little food, unending work, and rest that rarely came.

If I had a body like that, I thought, I could have women like that. But it wasn’t true, because I was Chamarana.

If I weren’t Chamarana . . . but that was a dream that couldn’t even be dreamed.

3

In the summer of my twelfth year I quit going to the common. I had been beaten twice in one month, and the second beating had left me unable to move for three days. Clearly, I had grown too old to be tolerated there.

Never again to look upon a beautiful woman – it was too much to bear.

The world is wide, and only Renth has Chamarana. I had heard this from the mouths of foreign sailors in the common, when I was young enough to listen from hiding. If I were a sailor, I could sail away. If I were a warrior, I could ride away. But I was Chamarana, and all I could do was carry away the waste too foul for a man to touch, grow food for others to eat, become leaner every year, and die.

Here are the first two of six installments of the novel Mud.

1

They call me Mud, but don’t be fooled. It is a greater insult than it seems.

The word is Wauk and its symbol is embossed on one of the counters of the runeboard. As it is from the Godtongue, it has entered every language. In the Inner Kingdom, so a traveler once told me, it means the basic stuff from which all the world is made. Not so in my city.

In Renth, mud is that stuff into which all foul things come to rest. Blood and feces, urine and menses, all come back to the earth at last. A Renthian merchant will not say the words for those things – he hardly admits that his body produces them – and so he says wauk, thus staining a good word.

My people are Renthian, but outcasts. We are the Chamarana, who live in the swamp, and carry away those unpleasant things that the nobles will not speak of. I was born in the mud and of the mud. The smell of the mud was the first thing in my nostrils. My mother smelled of mud; most of my siblings died of the mud’s contagion.

The Chamarana breed freely and die early. It is a joke to the merchants. But those of us who survive, grow strong. And angry.

——————–

2

The river Renal curves sharply just as it nears the Inner Sea. Renth is built on the high right bank between the river and the sea. Overflowing waters in spring cover the lowlands off the left bank, forming a vast inland swamp. We Chamarana live at the edge of the swamp, and enter Renth only to do our work.

Every morning the tichan are driven out of their pens down the main avenue of the town to the swamp to graze. Every night they return to the safety of the pens, and twice a day we Chamarana with our crusted buckets and wooden scoops go out to clean the road after their passing. Dumped onto the fields at the edge of the swamp, and composted carefully into the stronger waste from the merchants cesspools, it fertilizes the crops we raise to feed Chamrana and merchant alike.

When I was five years old, I was given a scooop and put to work alongside my mother. When I was eight, and could lift a bucket, I began to work alone. But no one works the day round, not even a Chamarana. My mother had only enough energy for her work and to care for my little sister. She had none left for me, so I was free when my work ended to head for the common.

The land which stood above the highest floods was packed tight with warehouses, dwellings, barracks, and shops belonging to the merchants. On the land which flooded yearly, we planted our crops. Above the fields, we built our temporary huts, and rebuilt them every time the Renal rose higher than ususal. Between merchant’s houses and Chamarana huts lay the common.
more tomorrow

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t claim to be an Emerson, but I am going to shake things up. When I began this website, I intended Serial to be a presentation of my writings and A Writing Life to be mini-essays. This will be my largest deviation from that intention, because Serial is tied up with the fragment Voices in the Walls.

For five weeks I have been writing posts on issues that began with race in America and morphed into a consideration of world wide hierarchies based on race, gender and caste. I’ve written enough essays on that subject, but I have some more fiction to share.

I spent five years studying caste in India and overseas Indian colonies, and wrote my first master’s thesis on the subject. That is the kind of deep knowledge that informs everything I write, even when the subject seems to be something else. While writing a dragon short story (The Best of Lies), I needed a description of the city of Renth. Renth was part of the back-story of three novels I have written, but had never been fleshed out. This is what fell out of my keyboard.

As we went on up the mountain, I thought of Renth. I remembered how she spread out on both sides of River Renal from the crowded waterfront to the first fingers of the great inland swamp. I remembered how herdsmen drove in their herds of tichan every evening to keep them from the night predators. All of the sidewalk vendors would close up shop and congregate on the rooftops until the sound of passing-bells carried by the herdsmen proclaimed the streets safe again. Then the chamarana would come out with their crusted baskets to clean the streets and haul the manure to fertilize their rich gardens.

There are temples in Renth where Encaritremanta is still worshipped instead of the bloodless Septs, and where the ritual dancers proclaim to the world that the Fern of the Deep Forest is still fertile and ripe. There is Bread Street where the bakers from the whole city congregate and the smells are sweet beyond description.

In the morning, the sun falls slantwise on the whitewashed houses, catching the sleepy merchants in their rooftop boudoirs. The boys from the waterfront crowd onto the high roofed warehouses to look across the city at first light when the women take their baths. And some of them look back, insolent and insulated by their station, posturing and laughing and waving.

The chamarana in this bit were Chamars, borrowed whole from India. Later, when I needed a long story to flesh out a too-short novel, and needed it to be set in Renth, I began to consider writing from the viewpoint of one of these outcastes.

This was just before I began this website, when everything was fluid. I considered writing the story and publishing it in short segments as they were written, in Serial. It was a foolish idea, completely out of step with my writing style. I wrote the first six short segments, fell in love with the story, and decided to write it in a more normal fashion. It is on my short list of what-to-write-next.

Here are those segments, to be presented two per day for the rest of the week. It isn’t Black History, but you’ll find that it tastes a little like black history. The novel is tentatively titled Mud.