Episode 13
Travelling Light E013S01 Transcript
H.R. Owen
Hello friends, Hero here, to tell you about this week's trailer. The Heart Pyre is an epic fantasy adventure following a young girl investigating the destruction of her home and the ensuing cover-up. Like Travelling Light, listeners to The Heart Pyre can vote on how they want the story to go. It is a genuinely fun, super imaginative show and I really recommend it. Stay tuned to the end of the credits to hear more.
[Title music: rhythmic electronic folk.]
H.R. Owen
Travelling Light: Episode Thirteen.
[The music fades out.]
The Traveller
11th Enu 850
To the community at Emerraine who carry the light.
I woke this morning even earlier than usual, when the sky was yet blue-black and barely touched with the light of dawn. I dressed quickly and made my way to the refectory as quietly as I could, feeling furtive and transgressional. Óli was in the refectory already, and we ate together in sleepy, softly rumpled silence.
Tsabec met us at the entry hatch, and I confess, I had to do a double take. Sometimes I forget that the scholars aboard the Tola do not actually always have to wear their academic robes.
They strode down the corridor towards us in a coat made entirely out of pockets; a lumpy woollen hat that I can only assume was knitted by someone who loves Tsabec very much and knitting not at all; and a pair of enormous, billowing knee breeches.
Oblivious to our stunned silence, Tsabec clapped their hands together.
“Just the two of you, is it? Splendid.” With a business-like nod of their head, they hit the release for the hatch and strode on.
We made the first stage of our journey courtesy of Sancha the bartender's cousin, who offered the closest thing to a taxi service in these parts.
Next was an hour and a half trip by local transit, on a route so winding and circuitous it quite knocked my sense of direction out of me. All I knew was that we were going up, up through thick forests, up into the mountains.
When we finally alighted, we were met by Tsabec's contact, Bryndi, the dig supervisor. She was a sturdy little person from a species I did not know the name of, but who I have seen rather frequently since we came to this region, wearing shorts with the air of someone who wears shorts whatever the weather.
She led us out to her utility vehicle for a brief but bracing trip over quite astonishingly bad roads to the isolated town of Doyino, and explained the situation over the roar of the engine.
“We've always suspected the mountains in this region were important to ancient people, but we struggled to get a good spot to actually investigate. Then a few years ago, a local man was digging in his garden and found a lump of masonry covered in carvings.
He contacted the cultural preservation commission, and they organised an initial site survey – and we struck the jackpot. There's a two and half thousand year old temple in this mud, and we're well on our way to digging it up.”
“He must be delighted,” Óli shouted back. “Imagine finding something like that in your back garden.”
Bryndi barked a laugh. “He's furious! He wanted to plant tubers over there. There's no chance of that now!”
The houses in Doyino are sturdy, wooden structures, all set in their own little plot of land. Bryndi led us to one whose garden had been given over entirely to trenches of various sizes, with temporary roofing to keep the rain at bay.
People in comfortable, filthy clothes squatted here and there, scraping at the earth with hand tools or taking readings from equipment whose purpose I could not guess. Meanwhile, a man in the kitchen window watched all this with a very hard-done-by expression.
In the corner of the garden, out of the way of things, a large tent covered a long, low table filled with artefacts. Immediately, Tsabec fell on the hoard, marvelling over what looked to my untrained eye like a bunch of rocks, and exclaiming over their beauty and potential significance.
After some minutes of this, they looked up and saw that Óli and I were looking a little lost. They waved us over to look at the lump they were examining.
“Well?” they said, with all the brusqueness of a school master asking for the answer to a sum. “What do you think this is, hm?”
I was utterly nonplussed. “A bit of rock?” I said, and regretted it as soon as I saw Tsabec's expression.
Óli took the piece and traced its upper edge with a long finger. “I think it is the wrong shape for a rock. Look at that curve there, and see the edges? Is it pottery?”
Tsabec beamed at them. “Just so! It's a potsherd, from the upper part of a votive vessel. Based on the curvature there, I'd say the whole thing was about... yea big.”
They held their hands about a foot apart, shaping the curved lines of a pot in the air. Óli's brow furrowed and they turned the little shard over in their hands.
“What are those scratches on the side?”
“You've got a very good eye,” said Bryndi approvingly. “It's decorative carving, worn out over so long in the mud. Most people would have missed that.”
Óli is still not very easy to read, but their lips twitched in a way I strongly suspect meant they were extremely pleased with themselves. I leant in as Bryndi and Tsabec picked out the next thing to delight over, and whispered to them.
“Teacher's pet.”
“Jealousy is a very unattractive quality,” they said primly. “A bit of rock…!”
“It looked like a bit of rock!”
The decoration was the reason Tsabec had travelled so far to see the site. They have a particular interest in the representation of celestial bodies in pre-historic material culture, and there were some “very exciting” etchings of constellations on some of the coins that had been dug up.
“How remarkable,” Tsabec breathed, turning what seemed to me to be a completely plain metal disk over in their hands.
They held it out to Óli, who apparently had been thoroughly adopted as their trainee. My archaeological career, meanwhile, languished in the mountain mud.
“Do the constellations correlate to different denominations of coin?” Óli asked.
“That's one guess,” said Bryndi. “It might be that the constellations are associated with different ethnic groups in the area, or perhaps represent different rulers or community leaders. We really don't know.”
“The Elakiit people on Miliase used representations of celestial bodies as a way of expressing different gender identities,” Tsabec mused. “The dominant species on Miliase has no sexual dimorphism, but the Elakiit recognised at least twelve different genders, and I suppose wanted a way to show them off. Fascinating stuff.”
I do not think I am temperamentally suited to archaeology. It is like doing a great big jigsaw puzzle with tiny little pieces, and no reference image to work from. But it was very nice to see Tsabec in their element – and their billowing breeches.
I left them to it, and wandered into Doyino to have a look about the place.
[The click of a data stick being inserted into a drive that whirs as it reads]
The Traveller
Entry EN85011-5: A discussion of contract culture in the region around Doyino.
Key words: Doyino; ethnography; legislation and governance; Peteimos.
Notes:
One of the greatest challenges when spending time among other people's cultures is recognising the difference between a person being rude and a person simply not abiding to unspoken social rules which we ourselves are not even fully cognisant of.
In the town of Doyino, the local people have sought to do away with the problem of unspoken rules, unknowingly broken. Instead, neighbours, friends, and family members navigate their relationships by explicitly negotiating the rules by which they will treat one another.
Binding contracts are negotiated, signed, and renegotiated regularly, covering everything from expectations of privacy in the family home, to how much time a friend may wait after receiving a personal communication before they are obliged to respond.
From a young age, children are encouraged to join in on the negotiations between themselves and their caregivers. They will probably not be successful in securing a contractual right to eat sweets for every meal, but they might advocate successfully for a raise in pocket money or a weekly trip to the library.
As they grow older, this young person will enter into more and more such contracts, negotiating everything from the favours a neighbour might ask of them to the amount of physical affection considered acceptable between their friends.
This style of living is not unique to Doyino. It is relatively common throughout the mountain villages, and to a lesser extent in the lowlands, and was developed as a result of the extreme isolation these settlements can be subjected to.
In Emerraine, there is a constant influx and efflux of different types of people. One must have a certain degree of flexibility around public manners – eye contact, speaking volume, when and how we say thank you or apologise – or else risk being offended at every other encounter one has.
Strangers do not come very often to Doyino. In fact, for several months of the year, nobody comes to Doyino. The rain turns into snow, and the passes and roads become difficult and dangerous to navigate.
Personally, I can see very well how being regularly snowed in halfway up a mountain with the same people, year after year, might make a community rather keen to eliminate any possible points of accidental conflict.
So, the implicit becomes explicit. Contracts are drawn up to cover every possible eventuality, to guard against as much miscommunication as can be reasonably anticipated.
You might expect that, if a parent and child navigate their relationship by adhering to a strict code of conduct, surely the more formal structures of the community would be positively labyrinthine in their complexity. But in fact, it is quite the opposite.
Trade deals with local settlements are made through feeling the matter out and coming to a general conclusion about the direction things should probably move in. If a person is employed by another person, they do whatever work seems right to them and are paid whatever feels right to the employer.
The local government runs largely on intuition, with roles filled not by any legal process but more just a general feeling that so-and-so ought to have a go at being mayor for a while.
There is a carved statue in the centre of town devoted to an individual called Catapalia, whose time as town mayor was marked by an unprecedented period of economic stability never again replicated because nobody thought to write down what exactly it was she had done.
I had all of this explained to me by a local man named Griori – the self-same gentleman whose garden was currently being demolished by a swarm of archaeologists. He met me when I returned from my walk about the town and we fell into conversation over bowls of of hot, thick, malty stuff that he said was milk.
When I asked how such a system of government could possibly function, Griori explained that every person in Doyino has some form of direct, relational contract with everyone else. It is impossible to live here without amassing a web of strict obligation to every other person in the town.
Somebody might well become mayor with the intention of siphoning funds from the pay-what-you-feel taxes, but their individual contracts with each fellow citizen precludes them from doing so.
“But, what if they do it anyway?” I asked. “What then?”
Griori did not seem to understand. “But there is a contract,” he insisted, making an emphatic gesture. “The contract says they must not. They have agreed not to. You see?”
Of course, there are still occasional conflicts, arguments and accidents, people getting their feelings hurt and treating each other less kindly than they ought.
But it is an interesting solution to a universal problem. How can we live well with one another? In Doyino, the answer is simple: we agree to.
[Title music: rhythmic instrumental folk. It plays throughout the closing credits.]
H.R. Owen
Travelling Light was created by H.R. Owen and Matt McDyre, and is a Monstrous Productions podcast. This episode was written and performed by H.R. Owen.
This week’s entry to the archives was based on an idea by Matty OK Smith, with accompanying artwork available on our social media accounts.
If you've got an idea for an archive entry, we want to hear it. You can send us anything from a one line prompt to a fully written entry through our website, by email, or on social media. For more information, see the show notes.
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[Fade to silence. The Heart Pyre trailer begins.]
[Intro music – Lonely Dusty Trail by Jon Presstone playing in background]
What would you do if one day you came home to find your hometown destroyed by fire? What if people told you that it isn’t the first time something like this has happened? That more towns have disappeared like this, but somehow no one has tried doing anything about it.
When Rena comes home to the ruins of her town and finds a strange artifact in the debris, she can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t adding up. That it couldn’t just have been an accident that caused this tragedy.
And so, she sets out to discover what actually happened, encountering other people on her journey that know that the authorities aren’t telling them everything. But luckily, Rena isn’t alone on her quest for the truth because you can help her take the right path.
[SFX transition sound – page turning]
[SFX faint sounds of fire in background]
It began with the smell. She frowned down at the ground, her smile falling from her lips, her nose picking up something that hadn’t been there a second ago. She looked up and sniffed the air. She couldn’t place the smell but as she got closer to her village it grew stronger.
Her frown deepened as she realized that she was smelling fire. Not a cozy, wooden fire that fills your heart with warm feelings of home. It was a vile, biting smell that brought horrible news with it. It smelled of burned wood, scorched dirt, hot metal, and behind it all was a smell that Rena’s mind didn’t dare place.
Something that made her stomach tighten and turn. It smelled like scorched hair, melted fat and boiling blood. The smell tore its way to her nose and clutched itself to her lungs so that it would never leave her mind again.
[SFX transition sound – page turning]
[Lonely Dusty Trail by Jon Presstone playing in background]
The Heart Pyre is an interactive fantasy audio drama, where after each episode, listeners can vote for how the story should continue. Find the podcast on your favorite listening platform and follow it on social media to get the latest updates, or go to theheartpyre.com to find transcripts, character art, a map of the kingdom, and other information.
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