“Weren’t they supposed to send out a pilot or something?” Samila asks as we pass the harbour mouth.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think we’re too small. No danger of us grounding.”

“Oh. Okay.”

We have no oars, and no engine of course, so I have to bring us straight into a landing under sail. Now we really find out if I have access to proper sailing skills. I spot a man on the quayside with what looks like a large white solid tennis raquet, waving it at us and pointing with it. I get the idea, trusting that I’m right, and head towards the part of the quay he’s indicating.

It appears I do know what I’m doing, because I bring our boat up to the quay so gently Lotan and Samila can just step lightly ashore and tie us up against a mooring post at each end.

The harbourmaster — I presume it’s the harbourmaster — is already waiting for us, and he’s just the first in line. I begin to worry. Are we in trouble already? Is this place so piss-poor and small that a boat our size is a major event? It doesn’t look like it. Maybe it’s just a quiet day.

Thankfully, Kerilas steps forward to meet the officials and their bodyguards or whatever they are. Jalese stays at his side. I think Jalese has sensed by now that we don’t really know what we’re doing. We seem to discover what competencies we have as and when they’re needed. I’m very happy to keep myself busy getting the boat in order to be left in the care of the harbourmaster. But I start to feel that something’s wrong; as if someone’s watching me; as if someone’s touching me.

I shake it off as paranoia and finish what I’m doing. By the time I’m finished the conversation with the harbour officials seems to be over too, and a funny little guy is standing on the quay near our bow doing some kind of incantation, and occasionally sprinkling water over the gunwales from a vial.

“What’s he doing?” I ask Kerilas, who’s come back to the side of the boat to help me out, if I needed it.

“He’s making a Binding,” Kerilas tells me. “We can’t take the boat anywhere until the fee’s paid, basically.”

“Oh, right.” I look at the little man again, a little more critically. ~Magic. Of course. Magic is real here.~

~Aren’t I supposed to be able to do magic?~ It honestly hadn’t occurred to me to wonder before now.

Kerilas lowered his voice and leaned close, so only I could hear him. “I think I can dispel it, if I had to. I’m not sure. I think I’d only find out if I had to try, and I’d rather not.”

“Yeah,” I agree.

“Can’t you feel it? You must be able to feel it, what he’s doing.”

I look at him a moment, then make myself relax, and put a hand on the gunwale. There is something different. It’s very difficult to isolate, like trying to use a sense one has never used. I know there’s something there but I don’t know how to make sense of it, but there are lines of force emanating from that man — suddenly not little or funny-looking at all, I feel — like tendrils or… more like a loom, back and forth, back and forth, making a strong, impenetrable fabric that is in part the quay and in part our boat, and with a lurch I recognise the source of the feeling I had earlier, the strange sense of invasion. I get a flash, a sense that ‘how dare he?! How dare he touch me there!’ and I want to stop him–

Words are coming out of my mouth, in another language again. I can feel the pulse of what he’s doing in my hand, and I push–

Kerilas’s hand on mine, on the gunwale, distracting me, breaking whatever it was I was doing. “It’s okay,” he says in English. “Let him finish.”

I stare at him stupidly for a few seconds. Back in the world of light and sound and touch. “Shit, that was…” I begin. I look again at the funny little man. He’s giving me a cold stare, then he turns back and resumes what he’s doing. There are a few other people by the quayside who have stopped and stared as well. “Fuck.” I’m shivering. My skin is trying to get goose-pimples. The air around us suddenly feels like just before a thunderstorm. “I don’t even know what that was.” All I know, suddenly, is that I want to get off this vessel. What had surrounded me and felt an extension of me was suddenly a little strange and uncomfortable. ~It’ll pass when the Binding’s lifted,~ I know, but it still makes me shiver.

Kerilas sees my mood, and offers a hand to help me over the gunwale. I take it, and after my feet land on the quay I’m glad of it, because it feels like the land is moving. I’m glad to keep hold of Kerilas’s arm as he starts leading me up to where the others have gathered. As we walk, the little man finishes his job. He starts to turn away, but I call him. “Excuse me,” I say, or at least the Jeodine equivalent — a more literal translation might be ‘hey you there’, but my intent was polite. “I apologise for what happened a moment ago,” I say. “I didn’t mean to interfere.”

“I understand, Mistress,” he replies formally. He has a surprisingly friendly voice. And the word ‘Mistress’ is a specific salutation, I understand: he’s addressing me as the boat’s master, but in the feminine of course. “The Neri are intimately bound with their vessels. I thought as you stayed aboard you were prepared. I apologise for the necessary intrusion.”

I can only stare at him, aware that I’m blushing, but I hardly know why. He nods and takes his leave, moving to catch up with the other port officials.

“It’s all right,” Kerilas is saying, still in English. “Come on, we need to figure out what to do next.”

“Er… Okay.”

“Port fees are a Crown a day, however much that is–”

“One gold piece?”

“I’d guess. Here’s the kicker: Market starts the day after tomorrow and goes on ten nights. Until then we’re going to have a bastard of a job buying much of anything in the way of supplies.”

“Even if we had money,” I remark.

“Well, quite. Gives us a couple of days to get our bearings and figure out how we can make some spending money without selling the boat. Worst case–”

“I know.” Worst case we sell the boat anyway, and Market would probably be the best opportunity to do it, and the best chance to find someone reasonably reputable to take us on up the Tail.

“Reminds me, can you sing?”

“What?”

“Jalese wanted to know.”

We crowd around the noticeboard standing by the quayside. It’s my first look at Jeodine writing.

“They have paper,” Samila’s saying as I approach.

“Yeah, but not toilet paper,” Lotan complains, but even he’s in on the joke now.

“Yeah, it’s probably expensive. Meanwhile they’ve got wool coming out of their ears…”

“That wasn’t a pleasant image!”

“What?” Samila mimes pulling an invisible tuft of wool from her ear, looking at it curiously, and twisting around as if to wipe her bottom with it, and gets a friendly, chiding shove from Lotan. At least she seems a little cheerier now we’re ashore. I’m still feeling distinctly wobbly. The ground keeps trying to pitch and roll under my feet, and I keep hanging on to Kerilas for now.

I pay attention to the noticeboard. Again, there’s the dissociation of the writing being at the same time alien and familiar and even legible. It’s pictogrammatic and written vertically, a little like Chinese I suppose, but it clearly isn’t chinese; if anything it reminds me more of hieroglyphs. My English-thinking brain can’t relate it to the language we’ve been speaking more and more in the past few days. It doesn’t work like that, it isn’t a representation of the spoken form.

There are notices from the harbourmaster, and a schedule of regular ferries further up the Cat’s Tail, including one direct to Jeodin City itself; another with a list of the local bylaws or whatever they called them. There were itineraries, goods for sale, goods wanted, cargoes — “Aha…” I begin.

“You know, their numbering system is shit,” Samila says, looking at the same material. “This is worse than Roman. You couldn’t do arithmetic with this! I’m amazed they can even count higher than their fingers!”

Still, there is enough here to figure out the calendar system. I’m aware of Jalese wandering off a little way, clearly bemused at how fixated we are with the information on the board, and we hadn’t even begun to take in the actual content yet.

“How can they be so sure of their schedules?” Kerilas muses to himself.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Everything’s sail, right? There’s no steamships or anything like that.”

“We haven’t seen any–”

“There aren’t. And sailing is horribly unpredictable. If the wind drops you can be stuck out there for weeks. How can they know months in advance that the market ships — marketeers,” he restates, finding and using the Jeodine word, “are going to arrive on that specific day?” He jabs at the date written on the yellowing schedule.

“I suppose I could invent Arabic numerals for them,” Samila proposes, still on her own hobby-horse.

“Why not?” Lotan asks. “Or hire yourself out as a — I don’t know, but I bet they have people especially to do their number-work.”

“You mean, like accountants?” Samila asks, a little sarcastically.

“Among other things, I’m sure.”

“Transcribe to civilised numbers, do the math, transcribe back, yeah… yeah, I’d probably have an advantage, unless their lot are already doing something like that. It’s probably a guild secret or something. I’m talking about basic stuff. Any one of us could do it.”

“I don’t suppose anyone wants a web designer?” I ask hopefully. It gets a little round of laughter anyway. “But I’ve got leet AJAX coding skillz!” I protest.

“You think arithmetic might be a guild secret?” Kerilas asks.

“Just a thought. Something…” She taps her head twice, “Something seems to ring right about it. Huh. If that’s right, then going around doing people’s maths for money is liable to get me into trouble, isn’t it.”

“How can you keep arithmetic a secret?” I ask, astonished.

“Well look. You teach people numbers like that for a start. You give them such a fucked-up complicated numbers system that gets so deep in their heads it doesn’t even occur to them that numbers are something you can manipulate. They must have a high level of literacy or they wouldn’t bother with the noticeboard at all, but… Make it hard for people to figure out numbers… what they owe, what they’re owed, how much things really cost, then offer to do it for them, for a percentage of course, and guess who works out the percentage…”

“Shit.”

“Hey.” Samila grins at me a little manically. “We can use this. I think.”

“You’re talking about ripping people off?” Lotan asks.

“Nah, just not getting ripped off ourselves, mainly.”

“Hey, where’s Jalese gone?” I wonder.

“Isn’t she…” Kerilas trails off, seeing she isn’t.

“Oh, I see her,” I say, indicating with my head the direction she’s gone, towards a row of buildings near the quayside. At least one of them looked like it could be a tavern or café or inn or whatever, their painted white and terracotta walls radiant in the late afternoon sun, like the other houses and warehouses and traders’ buildings climbing up the steep valley walls out of the harbour. “I’ll go and talk to her,” I say, and disengage from Kerilas to go into pursuit. “I guess we’ll be over there,” I add, pointing at the inn towards which Jalese seems to be walking.

“Okay, we’ll find you in a bit.”