Shellfish

Overview

Shellfish are the easiest food the sea gives. On the far side of Caeldon the coastal Humans of the Tidelace gather them with weed at low tide, Gnome households eat them with fish, kelp, and seabird eggs, Orc escort parties camped along the Soundchain corridor live partly on them, and the Thaluren gather them on the reefs around their sea settlements. They are also a coastal trade good, carried with dried fish, cordage, and lamp oil.

Appearance

Mussels

Mussels grow in dense blue-black beds on rocks, breakwater stones, quay piles, and mooring chains, each shell about the length of a thumb, smooth and dark outside and pearly blue within, holding to the stone by tough brown threads. A bed at low tide crackles and hisses softly as the shells close against the air, and smells of salt and weed.

Oysters

Oysters lie in the still water of sheltered inlets, grey, rough, and flaky-shelled, cupped one side and flat the other, as broad as a palm. Inside, the shell has the shimmering pearl sheen that coastal tellers give to the skin of Maris of the Tides.

Limpets, Whelks, and Shore Crabs

On open rock the low, ridged cones of limpets cling so hard a knife is needed to take them. Whelks, spiral-shelled and creamy brown, crawl in the shallows, and small green-brown shore crabs scuttle sideways under the weed and stones, nipping at fingers.

Reef Shellfish

On the reefs of the Tidebound Reaches grow larger and brighter kinds below the low-water line: thick-shelled clams set into the reef, spiny urchins, and fan-shaped shells hinged like a book, gathered by Thaluren swimming rather than wading.

Habitat and Range

Shellfish live along every rocky shore, shingle cove, and sheltered inlet of the Tidelace Coasts and the Soundchain Roads, thickest on the breakwaters and in the inner sounds, and on the reefs and island margins of the Tidebound Reaches. Near the Tidelace river mouths where the water is turning black and sour, the hamlets say the beds are dying.

Behaviour and Temperament

Most shellfish barely move. Mussels, oysters, and limpets fix themselves to one place for life and feed by drawing in the water; whelks and crabs wander a little and scavenge. They meet people only by being picked.

Life Cycle

Shellfish spawn into the water in warm months, and the young drift before settling on rock, shell, or a quay pile to grow. A bed stripped bare recovers slowly, in a few years, so gatherers leave the small ones and work beds in turn.

Uses and Dangers

They are food, eaten fresh, boiled in a pot of seawater, or smoked and dried for keeping and for trade at the harbour quays. Shells are burnt for lime, and the pearly linings are cut into buttons and inlay. Gathering is work for those who cannot go out in boats, the old and the young of the Human hamlets above all, and on the Tidelace the harbour families take their share of it like any other use of the shore.

Shellfish from fouled water sicken those who eat them, and the hamlets nearest the black water no longer gather near the mouths. A tide that turns while gatherers are out on the far rocks is the other danger.

Lore and Belief

Gatherers say a shellfish bed knows who takes too much and moves away. The Thaluren, whose custom turns on the protection of vulnerable life and spawning water, leave reef beds unpicked in their spawning season. On the Tidelace a broken oyster shell set at the foot of Maris's shrine asks for a calm tide.

Pearl-beds are another matter: a good bed is fought over by the hamlets around it, and more than one Tidelace feud began with a diver found drowned with a stranger's knife-mark on her rope.

Where It Appears

• Places: The Tidelace Coasts; The Soundchain Roads; The Tidebound Reaches
• People: Gnomes
• Gods: Maris of the Tides