Flax and Hemp
The two fibre crops of the river lowlands: blue-flowered flax, retted and spun into linen, and tall rank hemp, beaten into the rope, sacking, and rough cloth the barges and harbours run on.
Overview
Flax and hemp are the crops people wear and haul with. Flax gives linen, the cloth of shirts, shifts, sheets, and shrouds; hemp gives rope, sacking, sailcloth, and the coarse cloth of working people. Both are grown on the damp ground of the Confluence Basins and along the Lower Serath, and both need the river twice: to grow, and to rot the stems soft enough to work. They are named together because they are worked together, in the same pools and on the same breaking-floors, and because the gods of the basin are pictured dressed in them.
Appearance
Flax is slender and upright, waist high, with narrow blue-green leaves set close up a single wiry stem. For a few weeks in early summer a flax field flowers a clear, pale sky-blue, each small five-petalled flower opening in the morning and dropping by afternoon, so that the colour seems to move across the field from day to day. Round seed bolls follow, and the plant dries to a light straw-brown. Its seed is pressed for oil.
Hemp is a taller, ranker plant, often head high and more, with a ridged, fibrous stalk and dark green leaves split into long toothed fingers like an open hand. It smells strong and resinous, a smell that clings to hands and clothes, and a hemp field in late summer is dense enough to hide a standing man.
Habitat and Range
Flax wants deep, moist, weed-free soil and grows best on the basin bottomlands. Hemp is less particular and thrives on the rich ground near villages and on the riverside plots above the flood. Most basin villages grow a strip of each for their own cloth and cord, and the river towns buy more.
Behaviour and Temperament
Flax is delicate in youth, easily smothered by weeds, and exhausts the ground it grows on, so it does not follow itself on the same field for several years. Hemp is the opposite: it grows so fast and dense that it chokes the weeds out, and farmers sow it on dirty ground to clean it.
Life Cycle
Both are sown in spring and pulled or cut in late summer. Flax is pulled by the root so that the fibre runs the whole length of the stem; hemp is cut. Then both are retted: laid in shallow pools, ditches, or the still margins of a river until the soft parts rot away from the fibre, then dried, beaten on a breaking-floor, and combed. The best fibre goes to the spinner, the coarse tow to sacking and caulking.
Uses and Dangers
Linen is the cloth of the household and the court: it is worn next to the skin, laid on beds and altars, and a good linen shirt is handed down. Hemp feeds the ropewalks: the long sheds and yards of the river towns, where rope is twisted out along their whole length for towing lines, mooring, rigging, and the haulers' harnesses, and the boatyards that smell of tar and hemp. Gnome harbours of the far side make and export cordage of their own.
Retting stinks. A retting pool fouls the water downstream and kills fish, and towns and villages quarrel over where it may be done. Reedfolk of the Floodkeeper Houses count a fouled channel as a wrong done to the river, and the basin lords mostly agree when the fouled water runs past their own mills. Breaking and combing fill the air with fine dust that settles in the chest.
Lore and Belief
How a god is dressed tells the basin how to think of them. Anvelle the Harvest-Mother is pictured in robes of woven hemp and linen dyed in earth tones, the clothes of a farmer's wife on a feast day. Serovan the River-King wears rough-spun linen and leather like a bargeman. Linen dresses fainter gods too: the faded Ithaere the Drowned Mother is remembered in sodden white linen that never dried. Basin weavers say that linen remembers the river it was retted in, and a bride's linen is retted in her own village's water.