The Skin Shirt

The Skin Shirt: Part 1

Tucked away in a corner on Lombardo Street, there was the shop. Colletina's Skin Shirts. It was a quiet little place, at least once the delivery wagons got through making their stops in the mid-mornings. It was a City law that such deliveries be made early in the morning, that the leavings of the wagon-mules could be swept out of the way before the people of the City began their business of the day.

Mardetto Abrono, a youngish man with brown hair and pale blue-green skin, stopped before crossing Lombardo Street. Am I going in? Really? Today? Am I doing that today? He might not have done so, might have passed on as he had done on so many other days. But a purple-skinned old woman glared at him for standing indecisively, and a pair of children— one yellow-skinned and one red— raced past him, laughing, and without really willing his feet started moving and then.... and then....

He was across, and through the door, and standing in a sea of colors, and wishing he were away, anywhere but here, back in his childhood, dead, drowned.... "Pardonu. I am looking for a new skin shirt," he said to the woman in the shop, without thought.

The woman was middle-aged with skin of a medium charcoal gray. "Ho, jes," she said cheerfully. "You are a bit on the pale side, I see. Though some like that, for a time. Have you a thought for the color?"

"The color?" Mardetto felt confused. "Of the skin-shirt?"

"Yes, of the skin-shirt," the woman Colletina said. "It is my experience that most men don't even come into my shop unless they've some idea of what color they want this time. It's not like a woman who has to see every skin shirt in the shop and even then can't decide. Most men, they come in and first thing they say 'it's blue for me this time' or 'what do you have in a classic dark brown?', that's the way of it."

"It's not that way with me," said Mardetto. "I don't know what I want at all...."

The woman pulled out an illuminated wand from behind a counter and ran it over the length of Mardetto's arm. Muttering, taking notes, doing arcane calculations, finally Colletina pulled out a long strip of fabric colored in a series of increasingly paler shades of blue-green. "This the color of your last skin shirt?" she asked.

"Yes," Mardetto said, and somehow he felt that seeing the color was like seeing an old friend. "It wasn't quite as dark as... I mean, not even day one...." He pointed to the third-darkest color on the strip. "That, see, that is the color that we picked...."

"We?"

Mardetto made a dismissive gesture. He didn't want to talk about Marcello, about his lost twin. What could it matter— and to a shopwoman who had never seen Marcello's ready smile and his instant ability to find the finest and most beautiful item in any shop? This Colletina didn't need to know she was in the presence of the inferior of the two brothers.

Colletina frowned, and then rearranged her face into what Mardetto guessed was her 'pleasant-smile-for-customers'. He was being a difficult customer, he guessed.

"Well," Colletina said, "perhaps it might help if I show you around the shop a bit. So you can see what we have. We are, of course, strictly merchants of class-1 skin shirts. No class-2 or class-3 at all— you know the difference?"

"Quality, I suppose," said Mardello. "Price...."

"No, no, no," Colletina said. "That is, price, yes for the price, but that is secondary. The major factor in the classes is in the length of time the skin shirt has its effect. Grade-1 skin shirts last the longest, grade-3s fade the most quickly. Which is why the more peculiar fashion colors are often available only in grade-3—— because no one wants those colors forever, they want to replace with the next fashion color to come along. And children— grade-3 is perfect for children. They get to change sooner, you see."

Mardetto thought. "But the quality.... the dyestuffs...."

Colletina laughed. "The same dyestuffs are used in all skin shirts, regardless of grade. And even the tribals off in jungles somewhere where they don't use skin shirts at all, they take the very same dye plants and substances and, oh, I don't know, grind it up with a mortar and pistil..."

"Pestle," Mardetto corrected. Colletina's eyes took on a startled look in her charcoal-gray face. "Pestle— it's the thing you use with a mortar. Not a pistil."

"At any rate, the tribals use the same dyestuffs— and quite cleverly, too, an apprentice skin shirt maker has to go out among the tribals and learn from their dyemasters— the difference is in how you use it. How much dyestuff, how combined, how processed— that determines all." She conducted Mardetto behind the shop-counter to where the racks stood with rows of skin shirts hanging, each a certain distance from the other so that they did not touch.

"Here," said Colletina, "we have our grays. No stark black, not ever! Even if the customer begs. They are never happy with it, never. And who do they blame? The person who sold them the skin shirt, kompreneble. A dark charcoal gray, that's what they really want when they ask for stark black." The rack had a complete family of gray colors, some dark, some light, some with blue tones, others with yellow tones.

The shop woman moved onward. "The brown family, deep dark brown to the tans. The most popular color family, always. Especially with men. They feel it has a no-nonsense tone."

The next rack. "Indigo. All based on the same primary dyestuff, but some of the colors you see here combine it with others, often for the most subtle of changes."

A rack vivid with crimson. "Three different dyestuffs here, two plant-based, one from the shell of a sort of shellfish, I believe. The caution here is that these colors overwhelm. Most people need to rebuild their whole wardrobe once they pick one of the crimsons."

A longer rack, covered in greens. "Greens— loads of plant-based dyestuffs here, many combinations. Almost every green you'd see in a forest or meadow, we have reproduced here."

Mardello looked as the woman introduced her stock. How could he decide? He never knew how it was that Marcello decided. Even as boys, Marcello seemed to put his hand on the best, the most inviting colors. He'd always picked two or three, and then let Mardello choose which he liked best, for his own shirt. Marcello would cheerfully take the color remaining— why not? It was he that had selected the two-or-three skin-shirts in the first place.