My first duty was to mash the Neem-oil soaked vine leaves with the dark inedible berries into the entum-paste we smear in a band across our eyes to keep the flies and Mebdle-Beatles away from our faces. I received it when I was eleven and spent all afternoon humming on top of my favorite systematically eroded sandstone hill, mashing volumes of the mixtures in our foreign copper. It was a good day, I found a healthy Suavis bush, managed to pluck off a few thin sprightly needles, and sucked on three of them braided together until the delicious sweet-peppermint taste faded a few weeks later. Gombi wished to trade me three polished rocks and a hairclip for it, which was a tremendously excessive amount for just one braid of Suavis needles, but I declined. The trade route was coming to town in two days and my parents had an overhead vacancy, so it could be very fortunate, especially if our tenant was of an impressive or obscure talent. My older brother told me, quite obstinately, that once they hosted a magician, when I was very small, and he disappeared me into a box located in the overhead from down in the cook-place and turned my eyes green, so now I am enchanted. I rather wished he would return some day and I could make smoke-chai for him and sit on my favorite rock formation and he would be very polite about the matter and maybe turn my eyes a few more times, because green does not suit me as well as blue would. I was excited, because of the Suavis needles and the trade route and the tenant and my first duty, which I was completing very well.

The oddness of the day did not appear until I had spent quite a while at my duty, when the two of them came. If they were with the trade route it would not be odd, but quite casual and fresh, but they came, as said, two days too early, and I am proud to have seen them first. There was a big bent one in rags like an elderly wooden pole, the ones that we buy from the route, bending them into massive deformed half domes to become our houses, and wrapping them in all available cloth, usually fibers from the Ckhu-hic plants woven together into a harsh reddish brown cloth; but sometimes for show a few foreign silks, but only on holidays, because they would become rags if exposed too long. The big one was, in fact, quite similar to a pole wrapped in foreign fabric and overexposed, and it stumbled comically a few times before folding in on itself. I hesitated to abandon my duty, but I wrapped the bowl I was mixing in my head cloth and skipped over to the figure, which I assumed was only one. Even when I entered closer into the figure's space, which I now recognized as belonging to a woman in rags, I assumed there was only one. I hadn't seen the shell yet.

"Hello!" I shouted, feeling the sand weave in between my toes, flowing like sparks against the only nubile, feeling flesh that remained below the hem of my Indupannus, which flapped joyously in the wind against my slim body. The woman in rags made an ugly guttural sound and pushed herself up

"Falloesse? Monstrum sal?" she creaked, her legs folded and her hands groping into the sand, looking down at their gradual shiftings importantly.

"What?" her words were like hissing pots of linoserror, dung and mud and mineral dust all fixed together into a burning soup to become and be molded into holding-cups and beads and doll heads. I did not understand them.

"Macies? Infel-Macies?" she looked up at me, and around her eyes were three or four Mebdle-Beatles, swollen and piratic around her eyelashes. Her skin was an odd vivid pink, like diluted blood.

"I don't understand."

"Oro?"

"I don't understand."

"Verbigenal?" I thought and that was a place that the older mother-mother's spoke of travelling to once.

"No. This is Biaiulot." I gestured wide and extravagant, and her wide be-labored eyes travelled the scenery, from my favorite rock form to the distanced village to her previous path, her head turning as if at a slow poorly-oiled pivot point.

"Biaiulot? Biaiulot oro… is this your speaking?"

"Ah! Yes- yes those are my words!" it was the smallest of any victory but oh, oh I could speak to her now and it was soft and sweet and needed. "Why is there nothing on your eyes?" even a minute thing in such as I knows to always spread the entum-paste over your face before leaving to the outside. The woman in rags crouched quietly, staring and clutching her animal-skin bag to herself.

"No. I drink." Oh, so she was thirsty, but liquid was important. She shook her animal-skin slightly "things for water." She indicated patiently. I smiled and spread my arms to welcome.

"Follow for water." The woman in rags pulled her hands from the sand to expose a long amount of braided silk, which rose from whence the sand had buried it like an awakening serpent, drawing my attention down the line to an oval the size of a full man. It seemed to be made of the elderly and petrified wood of a rotund and balded tree and was in the composition of two sizeable rounded sides, like a huge bean, with a seam like lips in the middle. It was clumsily swathed with the foreign cloth. "Oh. It is-?"

"Water into me is to be before telling." I frowned, but I walked indecisively towards the village. It was a short walk, but the woman was greatly burdened by the oval, which she refused to let me touch or stare at. We passed by my formation, which I expounded on to her uninterested frown, and I gathered my foreign bowl and head cloth, which I arranged over my already blazing scalp in the compteres style, which was more formal than the prudent salficcio manner it is in commonly. The woman, as unaccustomed to Biaiulot, did not notice.