Ascending Nidyum

Chapter One

C h a p t e r O n e

The rivers flood yearly. The Jipaa and the Malitzu, respectively representing the western and eastern borders of Nidyum, swell with the inundation of snow from faraway mountaintops until their waters burst forth over the banks and swallow up the surrounding lands. By this point the soil has been tilled, the seeds have been planted, and the land now hungrily accepts the water knowing that it will receive little in the coming months.

I avoid Nidyum this time of year. The Flooding Month is a time to celebrate all that has been accomplished during the preceding Planting Months, and thus the entire city descends into madness and frivolity to mark the occasion. It is not something I see fit to participate in. The usual plan is therefore to make camp in Nidyum in the weeks before the Great Flood, bringing with me the luxury outsider goods that the city-dwellers so strongly desire, and to sell or barter them away for near-criminal profits as everyone throws caution to the wind preparing for the upcoming festival. A silk-spun wrap from the far eastern mountains would gain me ten or fifteen shums on an ordinary market trip; now, I pocket at least fifty for each.

I am not a thief, though — I am merely opportunistic. One has to be in this kind of lifestyle.

Since I am not a farmer, the Planting Months are, to me, called the Dry Months. These are the times when not a single drop of rain falls from the sky, and the parched earth erupts in cracks where there is dirt, and blows about as sand where there is not. The days are not as scorching as much as they are windy, but the nights drop to temperatures a body can barely withstand on its own. It is during these months that I make the treacherous journey to the port of Laanur on the northwestern coast, where the ships laden with outsider goods return from distant lands on the gales of wind that sweep from one end of the sea to the other.

It was this time last year that I found myself, as always, in Laanur.

Bright and early, with the sun's first rays warming the mud-brick facades on either side of me, I approached the docks with a throng of other traders. We traders literally lived for mornings like that, when the white sails of well-travelled ships are visible just up ahead, bobbing up and down against the orange and pink sky and promising unimaginable haul within their wooden hulls. It had taken us weeks, months to venture there — nearly two months for me, but I came from much farther — and all of that difficult travel and hard work was about to be rewarded.

Most of the other traders that morning were men; most likely because most of the other traders in general are men. Women stayed in their local trading outposts, peddling the goods their husbands, brothers, and fathers fetch from far away.

Women except me, that is. The sedentary lifestyle has not appealed to me for years.

The trader next to me whistled through his teeth, and I instantly prickled with indignation. "How does a weak little thing like you expect to carry such heavy goods all the way back to the city-dwellers?" he asked in a voice as grating as sand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was dark and wrinkled from years in the sun, a touch more overweight than muscled, and grinning stupidly in my direction.

This happened often enough that it did not faze me. "With the same mules as everyone else," I replied evenly. "And I would ask the same question of you, but you appear to be enough of an ass to handle the job yourself."