Maker of Fire

Aylem, Lisaykos, AND Emily at the Aybhas Night Market

"I haven't been to a night market in years," Aylem enthused. As was the custom, she was wearing a hooded cloak with the hood up to hide her hair. An eye mask obscured her face. It was the disguise that most people used. It was a tradition to be anonymous at the night market on the eve of growing season midday.

"I didn't get out last year," Lisaykos said, "but I made it the year before."

The crowd magically parted around them as they strolled down the main thoroughfare of Aybhas' market ward. It was impossible to disguise height so everyone knew who the shrine healers were under their hoods. Everyone politely ignored the obvious and treated them like everyone else. Still, for anyone as tall as the Queen and high priestess, the way in front of them was always uncrowded.

"Emily seems to be enjoying this," Aylem remarked. Emily's head was constantly turning left and right, looking at everything. The Coyn was riding on Wolkayrs shoulders, wearing a hooded mantle. Thuorfosi, Twessera, and Kayseo walked beside them. The three were tasked to keep Emily safe and out of trouble

"Of course she's enjoying this," Lisaykos humphed. "Other than two trips to Vanishing River, she's been stuck inside the shrine for five rotations. She lived in a forest and could go anywhere whenever she wanted so it's not easy for her to be confined."

"Huh."

"I wonder if any fabrics have arrived from Uldlip already," Lisaykos changed the subject.

"There is only one way to find out," Aylem scanned the market booths for those selling fabric. She also warned Kayseo by telepathy to stop at the next fabric vendor. "Look at that, Lisaykos, I do believe I see fabric."

A party of seven entered the booth, which sold fabric and nothing else. The booth attendant was trying not to fidget, unnerved by five cloaked and masked healers in her store. Three of them pounced on the bolts newly arrived from Uldlip. Wolkayrs, Lisaykos, and Aylem strolled in a different direction to look at the linens to find bolts with a high enough thread count for writing.

"This one would work for writing linen," the Queen fingered a bolt. Emily, still on Wolkayrs, wrote on a tablet and handed it to the Queen: "Is there really no paper?"

"There is no paper here. Everything written goes on linen, vellum, parchment or wax."

"But it's so easy."

"No one knows how," the Queen shrugged. "I certainly don't. Do you?"

Emily nodded yes.

"You do?" Aylem was astounded.

Emily repeated her nodding head for yes.

"What would I need to make or buy for paper?"

"Cotton and linen rags, a tub and beater to pulp the rags, a kettle or cauldron to stew the rags and lye. Wood to make deckle and mould. Wire to make the mould. Many pieces of felt bigger than the sheets of paper. A wine or olive press. Drying stand or line. Lime can substitute for lye, since good lye doesn't exist here, and lime is easier to make."

Lisaykos was lost from listening to just Aylem's end of the conversation. The high priestess asked: "What's paper?" It was a gobsmacked moment for Emily and the Queen did a facepalm.

Emily motioned to get the wax tablet back and started writing: "Paper is like parchment for ease of writing. It is made by making a mush of cotton and/or linen by beating it, then boiling the mush in water with lye or lime. Mush is spread on a woven mesh of wire with a removable frame to keep it from flowing off. When enough water has drained off, the sheet of mush is flipped onto a piece of felt and covered with another felt. Then it is pressed to make it stronger and thinner and hung out to dry."

Lisaykos pursed her lips as she contemplated Emily's instructions, "sounds like a lot of work."

Emily snatched the tablet back and wrote: "Less work than parchment and much faster. I have made up to 30 sheets of paper in a day."

Lisaykos read the tablet and cocked an eyebrow at Emily, "you don't mean here, do you? You mean you did so in that other place?" Emily was confused and then realized that Lisaykos was being obscure because Wolkayrs wasn't privy to her or Aylem's origins. She nodded yes.

"Isn't that a waste of good fabric?"

"Use old rags that would otherwise be thrown away," Emily scribbled.

"I'm an idiot," the Queen said, "that's why the ragman collected rags." Emily nodded yes back at the Queen's reference to rag collectors who vanished as a profession after the Second World War when cotton and linen were displaced by synthetic fibers in everyday fabrics.

"So we need felt, rags, and a kettle to make the mush," Lisaykos said, making an inventory in her head. "I have no idea what lye is but lime we have. Borrowing an olive or a cider press would be easy. So the only thing missing would be the tub and beater arrangement and the wire mesh and the wooden frame. Is that right?" She looked at Emily. Emily nodded yes.

"Any jeweler or bronze crafter will have wire," Aylem chimed in. "It doesn't sound like it would be hard to make. Does it have to be a specific type of wire, Em...?" Aylem swallowed Emily's name before she could say it completely since the night market excursion was supposed to be incognito.

Emily wrote: "Brass or pot metal."

"Well," Lisaykos stopped herself from smiling at Emily, but only just, "this sounds like an interesting thing to try. Writing out instructions on how to make the beater, the mesh, and the frame will give you something to do while you're stuck in bed for the next rotation and half." Emily just rolled her eyes and grimaced.

"Don't you give me that look, young lady," Lisaykos shook her finger at Emily. "I warned about fixing a skull fracture. Your problem is that you don't know how to sit still." She shifted her attention, "Wolkayrs, do you mind doing some more woodwork for me?"

Thus the great paper-making industry of Aybhas was born because six women went fabric shopping at the night market on mid-growing day's eve.

---

EMILY, Healing Shrine of Mugash

Though she warned me ahead of time, Lisaykos was annoyingly unyielding about minimal movement while the puzzle pieces of my skull knit back together. Lisaykos didn't allow me to walk. Lisaykos and the gang of three carried me everywhere and even Lisaykos treated me like I was made of glass. In truth, it wasn't all that bad, especially after Lisaykos advised me to close my eyes when being moved. It was weird, but that actually worked.

"Most of your fear triggers appear to be visual," she explained the day after my skull was reassembled. "So close your eyes and don't look at the things that frighten you, especially when Cosm hands pick you up." Lisaykos didn't miss much.

The work of moving the pieces of the cracked-eggshell depression in my skull was done by the Queen, who is some kind of expert at bone reconstruction, while Lisaykos prevented internal bleeding and made sure the meninges didn't tear. Kayseo was invited to observe the process. This all happened while I was out of it. I woke up several bells later with a fitted piece of hardened leather held on linen bandages over the newly reconstructed skull.

I didn't see the Queen around when I woke up. She had to return to Is'syal for her day job of keeping tabs on her children and running Foskos while the King was in the field with his army.

I was surprised to discover that Kayseo was one of the talented healers-in-training who received personal instruction from Lisaykos, which was a very big deal among healers. This was why she was invited to observe. For the first two days, Lisykos and Kayseo traded off checking up on me at every bell and every half bell, even at night. Swelling that can put pressure on the brain was a real worry because some of the pieces of bone had been right up against my brain. I never realized the injury was that bad.

While she worked in her study, Lisaykos had me installed on one of the lounges to keep an eye on me, with a cushion under my knees and pillows supporting my back and head. At night, one of the gang of three stayed with me in my room, watching while I slept. Frankly, I thought it was overkill but I wasn't in a position to make a protest. After all, I was the one who agreed to this and it solved the problem of trying to find a new home and storing enough food before the snow arrived.

I spent the days immediately after the skull repair making drawings of a mould and deckle and answering Wolkayrs’ questions about the two pieces worked together. He kept getting technical about what wood to use, how wet the wood would get, what to seal it with, how the deckle should fit on the mould---and that was just the wood discussion.

We got more involved in figuring out how to do the wire mesh. I figured doing laid paper would be best since it would use less wire and involve less work to make. The problem was I was thinking of drilling holes in the mould and running the wires through from the working face of the mould to the back of the mould, but as Wolkayrs pointed out, it would weaken the wood, and besides, no one could make holes small enough.

The problem was I kept assuming that one could just nip down to the hardware store to pick up itty bitty steel-alloy drill bits for the battery-powered electric drill. I kept spacing on the fact that there were no steel drill bits and no drills, not even the old-fashioned hand-cranked kind that worked like an old-fashioned egg beater.

It was a bit dicey when I mentioned drill bits and Wolkayrs got all confused because what I was describing didn't exist in this world. He got a bit vexed with me a couple of times and Lisaykos has to reassure him that I did indeed know what I was talking about. "They exist," Lisaykos told him, "but they don't exist here." He would get all flummoxed and Lisaykos would say, “remember, she’s not from Foskos.”

On the fourth day after resetting my fractured skull, Wolkayrs showed up with a square frame with notched channels cut at close-spaced intervals. In the channels, he laid very thin stiff fibrous sticks, spanning the distance between opposite pieces of the frame. The sticks things reminded me of a cross between rattan and bamboo. He then added a second frame the same size on top of the first, sandwiching the thin stick things and holding them in place. Lisaykos got interested and wandered over from her work table to watch.

Holding the two frame pieces together with his hands, he held the assembly up. "Will this work? I think it's more workable than fighting with wire and should have the same effect, yes?"

"Beaver reeds," Lisaykos nodded and ran a finger down the reeds held in place to test their fit. "Clever. I would never have thought of that myself."

It indeed solved the problem of making a mesh to catch the mushy pulp, assuming the reeds would release the pulp. I had only one problem: the second piece holding the little sticks in place wasn't flush with the sticks themselves. The frame of the mould had to be flush with the surface of the mesh to transfer the proto-sheet of paper to the felt.

I managed to convey this to Wolkayrs, who just grinned. "That's easy to fix. I'll just use some strips of brass sheet instead to hold the reeds in place. It was a good demonstration of the skill difference between a hack like me and an experienced woodworker who grew up helping out in the family woodshop.

With the solution to the mould in hand, all Wolkayrs had to do was fit a deckle. In the meantime, I had to come up with a beater design, to beat the fabric into mush. It was easy, much easier than designing a mould and deckle. I drew out a design for a simple water-powered trip hammer using a water scoop design, just like a Japanese shishi-odoshi.

It used the same principle as see-saw in a playground. The hammer was on one end of the pivoting lever arm. The water scoop was on the other. Water flows into the scoop. As the scoop fills, it gets heavy and its side of the lever is pushed downward by the weight of the water. At the same time, the hammer end of the lever rises up. In the downward position, the water spills out of the scoop, causing the hammer to fall and do the work of beating whatever is in its path, like fabric that needs to become pulp.

Wolkayrs liked the trip hammer. I was worried about a water source but it turned out that city of Aybhas got its water from a pressurized main. It was fed by a reservoir in the foothills immediately to the east. The reservoir was much higher than the tallest building in the city, which was the shrine. This solved my curiosity about how the fourth floor of the shrine could have such good water pressure. So much was done by magic that it always surprised me to find problems solved by using physics.

Given butting heads with Wolkayrs over the mould left me worried about explaining more details about paper making. Part of the problem was that I looked really young. It was hard on people like Wolkayrs to just take my word for things because I didn't look like a person who could know as much as I did. My other concern was remembering the process accurately. I was drawing on memories of making paper for a high school project, which from my perspective was decades in the past.

Worse still, I couldn't even relate all of the details firsthand. For example, I couldn't explain to anyone, except maybe to the Queen, that I didn't have access to a press when I made paper. Instead, I placed my stack of paper and felt between two pieces of braced plywood and drove my brother's Pontiac GTO on top for a weight.

Lisaykos was getting interested in trying to make paper. She gave Wolkayrs an allowance to pay for wood and other supplies. She also arranged with her daughter to borrow an old olive press from her family's estate, which was two wagon-days south. She also started collecting scraps of linen and cotton from here and there. Buckets of cut-up fabric scraps soaking in water began to collect along the wall in the bathing chamber on the fourth floor.

The gang of three was rather dubious over the whole project. I thought it was a gambit on Lisaykos' part to keep me occupied while my head healed.

---

EMILY, Healing Shrine of Mugash

On day five after resetting my skull fracture, the Queen showed back up bearing a surprise.

"Is this what you wanted to find?" She pulled a chair up next to my lounge. I started to sit up and reach out when Lisaykos, sitting at her work table, interrupted: "You are not allowed to move that much, Emily."

"She's right, you know," the Queen made a face that was a cross between a reprimand and sympathy and handed me a ball of white clay, better known as kaolinite.

I just had to test it though the look of kaolinite is usually good enough to identify it. It was friable with an earthy, uneven fracture alright. It even tasted like kaolinite. The look on the Queen's face when I nibbled on a little piece was, oh, so worth it. I got to remind her that kaolinite was one of the two original ingredients in Kaopectate, back in the day when the over-the-counter medicine was still just clay and pectin.

The exchange attracted Lisaykos, who wandered over after hearing about medicine from the past that the Queen and I shared. Pulling up a chair, she read through the various things I had written for the Queen's edification about eating clay and making original-recipe Kaopectate.

"You never told me about this, Aylem," Lisaylos aimed a raised eyebrow at the Queen.

"To be truthful, I didn't realize that Kaopectate was just a solution of clay and pectin," the Queen admitted. "I didn't do healing in my past life. I studied how to handle finances. Besides, I never mentioned that I had memories from a previous life after that first time I told you when I was 12."

"Uhg, don't remind me," Lisaykos shook her head. "So what does this medicine do, pray tell?"

The Queen started giggling. I studiously gazed upward at the lovely decorative plasterwork of the ceiling and worked very hard not to laugh. Lisaykos delivered one of her exquisite looks of long-suffering patience at us.

When the Queen managed to regain her composure, she managed to say without busting up with laughter: "it is a treatment for diarrhea."

Lisaykos dropped her head into her hands, "by the eleven gods, first a laxative and now an antidiarrheal. What's next? Medicine for indigestion?"

I just couldn't resist the temptation. I motioned for a tablet, since I wasn't allowed to reach for anything, and wrote: "I know two, one of which you could produce in a matter of an hour or two."

"I had to ask," Lisaykos chided herself. "I just had to ask. Back to the antidiarrheal. How is it made?"

I wrote: "Simply mix white clay, pectin, and water."

"Emily, dear," Lisaykos asked sweetly, "what is pectin?"

"Pectin is a binding agent found in most fruits and a few vegetables. Take the solids left from pressing fruit/vegetables for juice or cider and steep in hot but not boiling acidified water. Filter out the solids. Precipitate the pectin by adding alcohol."

I hoped Lisaykos wouldn’t ask about acidified water. The acid involved is hydrochloric, which takes electrolysis to make.

"Aylem, I have changed my mind," Lisaykos said after looking at what I had written. "I'm not letting Emily out of here until she writes down every medicine recipe that's bouncing around in her head."

I was pretty sure she was joking. Stupid me.

---