Some of the tasks performed in Clabby required expertise. Potters, priests, farmers, builders, weavers – there were people who specialised. There were also roles that everyone had to do. Less skilled. Working in the mess, washing garments, carrying water – the mundane everyday stuff.

  These roles were mostly familiar to a native of Severas, but there was one role that would have blown the magan from my anthropologist’s head. It was the role of pisspot-gilla, the person who was tasked with collecting and disposing of the contents of the village's pisspots.

  I learned about this role very early on in my visit. On one of the first nights after I had regained consciousness, I had agonised over the pan for an hour to purge the last of the claggy Cothabel from my system, leaving a scattering of dark pellets in the bowl. I had never seen a waste pan before, but I knew instinctively the purpose of the large bowl which lay on the floor at the far side of the room. It hadn’t occurred to me, as I tremblingly squatted above the bowl, that it would be someone else who would empty it. When I found the following morning that the pot had been emptied, ready for use again, I was worried that I had made a horrific overstep, as if I had fouled a soup bowl or some such. When the medicine lady came in to inquire about me, I managed, despite my embarrassment, to ask her about the bowl. She had told me not to worry, that the gilla had been round and it was ready for service once again, that I could go again right now if I wanted. Not only that, but she had ventured to ask me about how it had come out and said that it looked like it had taken a lot of effort. In Severas, we were very fastidious about our toileting and were unused to such frank discussions about our movements. That someone saw fit to handle my leavings, to form an opinion about them? A violation – there was no other word for it.

  The pisspot-gilla was a pariah throughout the period of their duty. No-one could address them, and they could not sleep in the same house as their family. There was a small bothy on the edge of the village where the pisspot carrier lived for the duration of their stint.

  I was fascinated. I watched him, at work. The man who had carried a bowl of my doings. Although I supposed it was breaking a taboo to do so, I watched as he struggled across the uneven terrain, excrement-filled pots dangling precariously from his yoke. I was sure he was certain to fall while crossing the river to the custom-dug trench where he would deposit his load. I almost wanted him to fall, to overturn the whole filthy cargo onto his head. How would it feel to watch such an obscene spectacle? Surely it happened from time to time? Would I laugh at him? Would I pity him? Would I help him?

  The Mister had wanted me to go out into the community once I had gained enough strength. She had asked me to go out and meet people, to talk about Severas. She would even let me speak to them about the Munlore, if I wanted. I admired how secure she was in her mudpit kingdom – tell them whatever you like, she seemed to say, the Clabby way of life cannot be bested. She had even called me Usal, explaining that it was a term of respect. I imagined the disdain of my examiners should they ever learn that I had integrated into the community to such an extent that I had earned a title.

  I proceeded as an anthropologist might - making observations, asking questions, but maintaining a professional distance. I removed my shoes and left them in the lodgings, fearing that the obvious conveniences of my culture will cause them to abandon their own. I ate alone wherever possible, making my way to the mess hut only when most people had left.

  The mess was quiet, except for the rattling of crockery coming from the cooking area. I gripped the chope cup tighter to absorb its warmth. I was thinking about how I could make sure that I did not contaminate the Clabby culture with my Severas ways. I considered, for the briefest of millibeats, volunteering for the job of pisspot-gilla for a few days. In performing such a role, I would still be integrating myself into the community despite the solitude. Never would I have withstood such humility in any case.

  A dense smell of over boiled vegetables stifled the atmosphere, and drips formed from the thin wooden beams overhead. Wordlessly, I went to the front and grabbed a chunk of the misshapen hard bread from the basket. The breakfast provisions were still there, so I filled myself a bowl of the green vegetable mash they called fungo, which formed part of every meal. I also ladled myself out a cup of chope. I swallowed one cup of the weak, lukewarm beverage and then another, building my defences against the chill. Finally, I tore myself from the warmth of the cooking fire, and found my way to one of the corners, as far away from civilisation as I could reasonably manage.

  I had hoped to finish my meal quickly, without someone dragging me into a social encounter, before retreating to my quarters. Suddenly someone was sitting across from me at the table.

  ‘You are eating. That is good.’

  I nodded, unwilling to engage fully. I focused on the middle distance, on the curtain flapping in the breeze, but I felt the heat of her gaze.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, quickly glancing at her before returning my gaze to the billowing curtain. It was the girl from the other day. Erna. The one who wanted me to show her how to write. My stomach flopped as I remembered how willingly I had abandoned my principles with her, happy to show her anything she wanted to know.

  She spoke. She couldn't stop herself. I wanted to tell her to stop. Though I had the Mister’s permission to speak freely, I wanted to tell her of the danger to her culture. But how could she resist asking a few questions to the first visitor to her community in generations? Could it be that my entering their community and then sitting on the edge in haughty disdain would be as damaging an intervention as any?

  Her yellow eyes bored into me, with such force that I could only bear to steal a furtive look. I put my hands in front of me on the table, then back into my lap. She sat resolute, without a wasted movement. There was a cacophony of smells, the food, the earth and another, fundamental odour that I couldn’t put a word to, though it quickened my pulse. The dirt on her forehead was smeared, mixed with a sheen of sweat from her morning’s exertions. Despite her muddy fa?ade, she revealed herself.

  So, I found myself talking. I couldn’t help myself. It was only we two, I defended to myself, as if to contaminate one of them was fine, as long as I was not proselytising from a rostrum. I talked a little about Severas and she talked a little about Clabby. She told me that she had been trying to create a system of writing. It astounded me that they could have survived up here for so long without it, but perhaps that was the scholar coming out in me, unable to see the luxury that correspondence is, how unnecessary it is to our basic survival.

  She produced the sheet that I had given her the previous day and, pressing the pencil hard to the paper with a rigid fist, proceeded to show me some of her own writing, setting out dark lines and circles alongside each other to convey meaning. I watched her as she formed the shapes, her stiff tongue exploring her upper lip. I felt a stir as she replaced a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

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  I was impressed with the ingenuity. A vertical line meant ‘man’; a circle meant ‘woman’. A horizontal line was a male child and a horizontal line with a circle on it was a female child.

  ‘This is magnificent,’ I said.

  ‘It is not finished,’ she said.

  ‘You have worked on this for a long time. What purpose do you need it to serve?’

  ‘I need help with my recounting. I am to speak to the village soon, and I need help with remembering,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you have enough writing for the recounting?’ I was told by the Mister that someone must act as custodian of the knowledge about each previous Mister.

  ‘It isn’t working,’ she said.

  She looked straight at me, her green eyes leaping out from the mud on her face. A long silent moment passed, my heart thudding in my chest. Her expression was serene, but then she lowered her brow.

  ‘Show me your way,’ she whispered finally.

  I hesitated, but then said yes. It had cost her a lot to ask me, and I wanted to reciprocate.

  I explained that the Severas system used shapes to represent sounds rather than meanings. She didn’t understand straight away, so I took the sheet I gave her the previous day and began to combine the letters from the alphabet I had drawn for her, using a pencil from my pouch. I explained how you can combine them to create meaning.

  I wrote ‘Severas,’ ‘Chiram,’ ‘Honrick’ and ‘Erna,’ sounding out each letter before writing it, then reading them in combination. I handed her the pencil and asked her to try, and she did, making respectable attempts at the letters despite her violent, inexpert handling of the implement.

  We stopped for a moment and surveyed our work. The confident straight lines of my own work alongside the tentative, meandering lines of hers. I pressed and folded my hands together tightly - it was not so cold, but still I was shivering. My heart still raced.

  ‘Here,’ she said, suddenly, placing a dull lump of carved stone on the table in front of me. I sensed her gesturing towards me with her hands. ‘You’re cold.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t say that it was my nervousness that was making me shiver.

  ‘It is spring,’ she said. ‘It will get warmer and it will get colder. Take the hinch in your hands.’

  I did as I was told. It was a smooth piece of rock, which had been shaped into an oblong about the length of my finger. It was hard, but it was yielding too, like it might bear my fingerprint if I squeezed it.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Did you make it?’

  ‘No. Rub it in your hands.’

  I placed the piece of matter in my left hand and rubbed it delicately with the fingers on my right hand, as if I were polishing a jewel. It generated an immediate burst of heat in response. Not the kind of low-level friction heat you might generate by rubbing fingers together, but a true, deeply ingrained heat, as if the rock had come to life in my hands. I dropped the thing on the floor as if it were a poisonous insect.

  ‘You dropped it,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, examining my palm for signs of a burn. The lesson was forgotten now.

  ‘It’s a piece of hinch,’ she said, still focused on the writing on the page.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘At the mountain.’ She was keen to get back to our lesson.

  ‘Is there lots of this stuff? Hinch?’

  She sighed, then dropped the pencil on the table.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The mountain is made of it.’ She folded her arms now, realising that she would not be able to redirect my attention to the writing once more.

  Of course, I had seen the mountain, but I had not gone to visit it. Strange, I think now, that someone born and reared in a lowland city would have little interest in seeing a mountain up close. In my discussions with the Clabbeans – that is the name I settle on to describe them - the mountain never seemed to come up as an object of interest. The mud under their feet was all they ever spoke about. They never seemed to lift their heads. The mountain was right there, at the edge of the village. A ten-minute walk would bring you face-to-face with it.

  I noticed a greasy, invisible residue on my hands from the handwarmer. I smelled it and it had that same indeterminate medicinal odour I had smelled when I was convalescing.

  ‘Can we go there?’ I asked.

  There was a pause.

  ‘You can go yourself,’ she said. She was displeased by the interruption to the lesson.

  ‘We can resume the lesson later. I just really need to see this mountain. This stuff. We have nothing like this in the city,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Just follow the trail past the Abercarn hut,’ she said.

  The she stood suddenly and strode to the door. She lifted the curtain with a quick gesture of her arm and pointed the direction. I bent my body sideways to see the hut she indicated, the one with the newest thatch in the village.

  ‘It won’t take you long,’ she said.

  ‘Can I have this?’ I said, showing the piece of hinch. ‘Just for today?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll explain more about the writing another time,’ I said, blundering through the curtain past her. I wondered if she would ever speak to me again, but I didn’t care at that moment.

  I passed the newly thatched hut, down the trail towards the squat mountain. The pathway grew less smooth. Even the odd twig made its presence felt under my naked feet. The smell increased. I felt it congeal at the back of my throat.

  The mountain, if you could call it that, was perhaps only one hundred feet tall, but it sprawled across a substantial acreage. Were you to climb to the top – anyone with any moderate fitness would manage - it would take perhaps ten minutes to walk across its level surface. The thing was plain and featureless, brown and black. It accommodated little or no vegetation. Its edges were rounded, as if it had been patted into shape by a playful child.

  When I came to within touching distance of it, the sun suddenly showed its face from behind a cloud, and an underlying blue colouring became perceptible beneath the brown and black.

  It was no mountain. Neither was it a hill. I walked around the thing, gently caressing its face. It was formed through no natural process I could think of. It seemed that it would wobble if I touched it, but its consistency was solid. I patted and rubbed my hand on the surface, feeling the greasy residue. I momentarily rubbed with friction, and the heat that was produced on my hand was so great that I yelped.

  At my feet, there were chunks of hinch that had been chipped away, presumably when the villagers had been harvesting some of it for their own purposes. I came to a section where a large scar had been torn open with a primitive implement. The indentation was large enough to walk into, but it didn’t constitute a cave. I expected jagged protuberances, but, running my hand over the scar, I felt fibres instead, as if someone had pulled chunks from it by hand rather than chipped them away with tools. Where the surface of the mound had a residue of moisture, the internal crevices I now handled were properly damp, as if you could squeeze out the mountain’s essence like water from a sponge. My hand, upon discovering the extent of the damp, removed itself quickly, lest the slightest agitation would ignite it.

  A black-brown-blue liquid pooled in my palm. In the name of the ten turds of Munlore, what was it?

  Doors began to open in my thoughts. I could see myself, my own compartment on one of the upper floors of Renard Tower. The man who discovered hinch. Perhaps I could rename the stuff after myself. Honrick fuel. Or perhaps Preeb - allow my father to share the glory.

  An investigation carried out later that day with my combustion kit revealed that it was a viable combustible. The swab turned a green-blue colour after application, which placed it in the upper levels on the scale of combustibility according to my resourcer's reference guide. There would be no ‘CNC’ on this report. On the following page of the guide, the Ziggurat of Known Occurrences showed that this chemical combination was exceptionally rare. I also swabbed the liquid that seeped from the inner walls of the mound, but I wasn't able to gain a solid reading. Perhaps I was too timid with the swab, fearing for my safety. Still, I was able to collect some of the liquid in one of my empty Cothabel cans. No-one was there to stop me.

  I stuffed my bag with a considerable handful of the hinch pieces that had been discarded at the foot of the mountain and began to plan my departure. It was lighter that I had expected.