The journey to the market town was shorter than Prof had expected, they already arrived the next evening at the settlement with an unutterable and unrememberable name. According to Foxy and Shinead, translated to Bergian meant something like the Clan-Neutral Commercial Place Under the Blooming Willows Along the Eastern Road, although due to the nuances of meaning and emphasis in the Elven language, it could be translated in half a dozen other ways.
After Prof tried to fabricate some memorable name out of it for half the journey, Shinead graciously revealed that the Bergians simply called the town Willowflower. Based on medieval examples for marketplaces, Prof expected a village grown large, possibly with some more serious buildings, or according to fantasy novels and movies a tree-hugger settlement built on trees, into trees, or against trees.
Both of his expectations were wrong as it turned out, the collection of houses, built on the shores of a lake had a more Scandinavian feel: scattered wooden houses painted in yellow, red, blue, green, brown, and white, amongst small groves and flower gardens. The town was quite large in area, but with a low population density. Shinead said it had a population of perhaps a thousand or a thousand and two hundred and lived largely to serve the surrounding farms and as a way-stop for travelers.
After Shinead discussed something with the archer guarding the “border” of the village, she purposefully led them to one of the few multi-story buildings. The building, painted red, turned out to be one of the guest houses in the village, which happened to be run by the red elves and was reserved for their travelers and Clan members. Shinead briefly explained that the Blues and Yellows also had their own guest houses in the town, and the Humans in transit had their own combined campground-guest house on the “edge” of the settlement.
Foxy added that the other Elven races were lodged in one of the guest houses, depending on whose "guest" they were and that the colors of the houses referred to the race of the inhabitants, the white color belonged to the non-Elves and the non-pure-blooded Elves. Prof didn''t understand, why white was for non-Elves, because there were two Elven races that translated to white too, but Foxy explained that the three colors were only translated into Bergian as "white" but in Elvish, they were three completely different colors, and houses of the two Elven races were painted in a different white.
Unfortunately, there were no White or Silver Elves in Willowflower, and neither Foxy nor Shinead could describe the colors in a way that made sense to Prof. Not that Shinead made a serious effort.
Although the “red” guest house had a first floor and an attic, it could not be called large. On the ground floor, there was a small dining room with a table for four, a kitchen, and another room, and on the first floor and in the attic there were two small rooms for four people. The guest house looked rather like a family boarding house and was run by a woman who, while didn''t even come close to Shinead in beauty, could still have expected a fruitful modeling career on Earth.
On her left cheek, there was a tattoo of a house, and on her left some stylized things, Prof could make no rhyme of. Shinead talked to her for a few minutes, pointing several times at Foxy and Prof, then led the little company into the right-hand room of the attic.
“The room is yours for a month, but I''m leaving for the Grand Master of the Clans tomorrow morning to be legally acknowledged as the leader of the Clan. I will surely be able to complete the journey and the trials in that time. In the meantime, try to get information and earn some money here. I arranged with the házvezet?n? to keep an eye on you for the time and give you directions in the city if needed. Prof, you will have language lessons with her in the evenings, raise your [Speech: Elvish] to at least 60% before the end of the month. If I’m not mistaken, we’ll be staying in the Elven Domain for a time and I don’t feel like interpreting all the time. So far no survivors have appeared here, but should it happen the házvezet?n? will take care of them.”
After dinner, they all went to the bathhouse next door, where Prof felt a little bit uncomfortable: the elven baths were mixed-gender, and the elves really had no problem with nudity. Even Foxy undressed without further ado and did not try to cover her more important body parts awkwardly. It was interesting to note, however, that although the Elves had no problem with nudity, they paid close attention to avoiding physical contact – even among visibly close acquaintances.
The fact that Prof had washed Shinead''s face and hands the day before could easily have been hair-raising sexual harassment for the Elves. Prof began to fear that he could be taken by the morality police at any time; or taken to task in the press as a predator.
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Prof really enjoyed the bathing itself, the last time he had the opportunity to soak himself thoroughly in warm water was on Earth, Smallgrovewell lacked the infrastructure, and the forest spring, where they camped for a week, was only good for pretense. The situation of bathing with the naked elves he enjoyed not so much. After all, being surrounded by well-looking and very naked supermodels without knowing a common language and without the social acceptance of touching is a bit frustrating, you would think.
The next morning – rather late as it was – when Prof woke up after spending a night in a real bed (and not on a blanket spread over hay or the ground!), Shinead was nowhere to be found, and Foxy was talking to the manager of the boarding house down in the common room. As it turned out, the manager was called Caoilfhoinn and was under the common direction or protection of the Red clans.
Compared to Shinead, she was amicable and accepting, using majom and korcs (the latter turned out to be the derogatory term used for non-pureblood Elves and meant something like mongrel or degenerate) only rarely, and served Prof and Foxy almost politely. After a breakfast of fruits and vegetables, they gathered the things they were planning to sell and left for the city.
Caoilfhoinn did not accompany them, but she explained where they would find what they were looking for: the money-changer, furrier, tanner, tailor, horse-seller, blacksmith, jeweler, alchemist, and the office of the village chief (at least Prof decided to call him village chief since he still could not make sense of the Elven political landscape), where they could find tasks to solve.
The tour began at the money-changer in the Yellow''s guest house. Foxy undertook a quick crash course on the Elven financial system on the way over. As was to be expected, it was overly complicated: the smallest denomination were wooden tokens, called "Leaves", 66 Leaves made a ceramic coin called "Fishes", and 66 Fishes were equal to "Bear", which is a paper note. To make the names more complicated, each of the coins and notes came in different values, and each could have also its own name – mostly a different one in each of the Elven dialects.
After Prof started to despair, Foxy reassured him, that no Elf would expect a foreigner to understand the system and the exchange rates, so Humans would mostly deposit their money at a moneychanger or office and receive a letter of deposit with the equivalent number of Leaves, Fishes and Bears and a "check-book" for payments. The vendors would then check the Letter of Deposit, mark the value of purchase on it and receive a check.
Only low-amount purchases were done in actual currency. Foxy warned him, that the changing rate would be bad for non-elves and they would most likely be overcharged everywhere. The advice he got was to open an "account" with some money where his earnings could be deposited, get some pocket change, and keep most of his valuables as they were.
At the Yellow''s guest house the exchanger turned out to be a very high – that is, nearly two meters high – elf male with a golden-yellow skin tone, golden-blonde shoulder-length hair, violet eyes, and somewhat avian features. Prof estimated him to be in his forties, which meant, he was about… who knows how old. He seemed friendly – Prof was immediately cautious, a friendly money-lender is never a good sign – and was even willing to speak Bergian.
Although with a heavy accent, and in what Prof assumed was a slightly out-of-date version of the language.
Prof decided to change half of his Bergian money into Elven ones and kept the rest. The Yellow Elf was nice enough to help Prof to make a table in his notebook with the approximate values of Leaves, Fishes, Bears, and Bergian currency – so he did not have to make mental acrobatics at each transaction. After leaving the guest house, Foxy informed him, that the rates were not that bad but he was still fleeced and made some corrections to the table.
Prof wasn’t thrilled by the bad rates, but he got used to such practices back on Earth. After all, each time he left his country, he had to change money into the currency of the other country he visited.
The alchemist was a Yellow too, a bit shorter than the previous, but still higher than Prof himself, with pale blonde hair and golden-yellow eyes. Although he had only a limited sample size, he started to get the feeling about the differences between Reds and Yellows. Yellows were higher (they were called High Elf, after all), with hair tending to the blonder side – in contrast to the Red''s brownish or reddish – and skin a golden color not the almost creole of the Red''s.
Foxy previously told him that only the Reds (and to a smaller extent the “Silver” ones) used tattoos, so the absence was no surprise for him. At the Alchemist Prof was able to sell the remaining mushrooms and the rabbit horns for around ten silver. However, it turned out, the two jars of intoxicating moss were basically worthless, since Prof had not harvested the important parts, and the complete batch had become unusable for the time spent since the harvest anyway.
The Dire Bear’s femurs went for fifteen silver, and he was informed if they had been able to get some other organs and bones, they could have earned at least fifty more silver for them. Fortunately, the alchemist had already heard of that particular dungeon and had promised Prof the equivalent of forty silvers for ten portions of Drunken Moss, two kilograms of Rainbow and Ink Mushrooms each, the tail and heart of the Giant Rat, and five meters of Choking Vines.