The Metaphorager.

HERE’S A SIMPLE QUESTION: WHAT is the essence and meaning of “art?”

I have never seen such beautiful food, Prosatio Silban thought. The village of Pastisi had made a name for itself by crafting the most picturesque baked goods in the Uulian Commonwell’s Three Cities and Thousand Villages – and charging a nominal fee just for the privilege of viewing them. Generally, such creations were either plain or adorned with the simplest of icings. Those inside the spotless glass-topped cases, on the other hand, could scarce be described in words.

These villagers’ reputations are well-earned, he thought, and glanced from side to side.

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THE SENSE OF SMELL IS an important component for that of taste. But can it stand alone?

“I shall be brief,” said the woman in the jewel-bedecked caftan, smoothing a tailored crease upon one crossed knee. “My enterprise, ‘Sobor’s Scents,’ wishes to develop a line of toiletries based on the Uulian Commonwell’s fine-dining environment. We would be honored and grateful for you to cook a number of dishes, whose aromatic essences we could capture and render into crystal vials. You may not be aware that there’s quite a demand – from the new bride wanting her dinner guests to think she had cooked for them a more sumptuous feast, say, or the aspiring suitor whose courtship could be sweetened by a hint of something savory. You need only name your price, and we shall do the rest.”

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NOT ALL AWAKENINGS ARE RUDE – but some may as well be.

Prosatio Silban stretched, yawned, sat up, and contemplated the interior of the curtained sleeping-berth tucked into his galleywagon’s rear. Something is amiss, he thought. But what?

His inquisitive glances took in the bookshelf above his feet, on which perched a dog-eared edition of Barbatus the Elder’s Truth, Life, and Other Comic Futilities; the ceiling-mounted fatberry-oil lamp; the small, diamond-paned window set high in the galleywagon’s aft wall; and the full-length black silk curtain screening him from the rest of the kitchen-cum-vehicle. Nothing seemed out of place.

Then it hit him like an ice-bolt through his chest: What is that wretched stench?

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PROSATIO SILBAN HAD TO LOOK twice before he realized what he was seeing. Why is this Xao woman, he asked himself, dressed as an Uulian?

It was a fair question. The Xao were almost the oldest original residents of the Exilic Lands, whose mythology had prepared them to regard (some would say worship) the late-arrived Uulians as prophesied saviors – who would restore to pristineness their oblivion-shattered realms before sailing back across the Rimless Sea. Although the “saviors” did transform the landscape as foretold, centuries passed without their fulfilling the latter prediction; as a result, some of the indigenes lost faith in their people’s teachings.

Others had found ways to cope. Including, it seemed, by assimilation.

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