Fish
Fish feed more of Caeldon than any beast but the herds. On the far side the coast lives on them: Gnome harbours and the coastal Human hamlets of the Tidelace Coasts fish, dry, and salt their catch. The dried fish goes up the cliff stairs of the Soundchain Roads to the Windscar. The Thaluren fish and tend the shoals around their reef settlements. In the cradle, Reedfolk households fish the fens and braided channels, and river fish go down the Serath with the reed and the boats.
Appearance
Inshore Sea Fish
The Tidelace catch is mostly shoaling fish taken close inshore from small open boats: slim, blue-green-backed, silver-bellied fish about a hand and a half long that run in great shoals along the coves in their season and turn the water dark and then bright as they wheel. With them come heavier grey bottom fish, broad-headed and thick-lipped, from the rocky ground off the headlands, and flatfish brown as sand from the shingle shallows. All smell strongly of the sea when fresh and more strongly still on the drying racks.
Reef and Kelp Fish
In the shoal worlds of the Tidebound Reaches, where reefs break the swell and kelp grows tall enough to shadow the water, the fish are smaller, brighter, and many-coloured: banded, spotted, and striped fish that hang in the kelp shade, and dense silver shoals that move along the reef edge as one body. The Thaluren know each shoal’s water and season as farmers know fields.
River and Fen Fish
The brown, slow water of the Lower Serath and the fens of the Confluence Basins hold muddy-flavoured fish of the backwaters and oxbows: deep-bodied, bronze-scaled fish that lie in the reed beds, long-snouted pike-like hunters that wait among the stems, and small silver fry in their thousands at the margins. Colder, quicker water upstream holds trout, and the side channels hold eels. The pale fish of the underground reservoirs belong with the pale cave creatures.
Habitat and Range
Fish are wherever water is: the inshore coves and headland grounds of the Tidelace and the sounds of the Soundchain Roads; the reefs, kelp forests, and island margins of the Tidebound Reaches; the main channels, backwaters, and fens of the cradle’s rivers. They are fewest where the water has gone wrong. Near some Tidelace river mouths the water is turning black and sour, and the hamlets that fish closest inshore are the first to haul up empty nets.
Behaviour and Temperament
Shoaling fish run by season and by water, coming close inshore when the water warms and leaving with the cold, and a cove can be full one week and empty the next. Bottom fish keep to their ground. River fish follow the flood: they spread over drowned meadows with the spring rise and crowd back into the channels as the water falls. None of them is dangerous to anyone; the danger of fishing is the water.
Life Cycle
Most fish spawn in great numbers in their season, the shoaling sea fish in open water and the river fish in the warm shallows and reed beds of the flood. Few young survive, and a season’s catch depends on how many did. The Thaluren, whose own continuity rests on rightful spawning, keep a careful eye on the shoals they tend and do not fish them in their spawning water.
Uses and Dangers
Fish is food first: fresh, dried, salted, and smoked. Gnome meals come mostly from the sea and the terrace gardens, with fish first among them, and Orc escort parties in the corridor eat fish with shellfish, seabird eggs, and stored grain. Dried and salted fish is one of the coast’s chief trade goods, carried up the Windscar stairs in exchange for hides, felt, and wool, and the Human hamlets sell their catch at the nearest harbour quay for cordage, tools, and grain. On the rivers, fish goes down to the Basins with reed and boats.
Fishing grounds are fought over. Gnome tide halls settle quarrels over them in the harbour families' favour and may close a cove for resurvey, and a hamlet that says the fish are running can wait hungry until the harbour says otherwise. On the Serath the towns hold the fishing as they hold the water, and the weirs their mill-owners build change where fish can run.
Lore and Belief
The coast remembers the Decade of Storms, when gales sank boats and the fish vanished, and the plea of Gnome towns and Human hamlets that raised Maris of the Tides. Fishers who come home with a good catch thank her at the shrine at the water’s edge. The Thaluren remember instead Ulaun the Stilled Hour, the god they prayed to for stillness, around whom fish stopped mid-turn with their fins rigid, and they hold that water that holds its fish still is water gone wrong. A shelf of dried fish beside a sealed jar of salt is the sign of the Salt-Witch.