On the streets of Tarsis, in the avenues of Palanthas or Gunthar or Haven, even in steamy lanes of Nordmaar's capital, the journeyman bard goes out to busk, that is to say, he sells his song for his supper. A wise man at trade, he finds a good place near a tavern or inn, perhaps in parks where the wealthy are likely to promenade. He sparks his crowd with amusing tales, but his lute or his rebec plays most sweetly when he sees a lady walking by. Reels and jigs and ditties learned from kender are fine for earning a capful of coppers, but for the lady the bard has songs to tell of love, tragic or felicitous. His journeys have taught him that if a lady's heart is touched, she will reach into her purse and bestow a handful of gold pieces, perhaps even a silver coin or two. If he has a good day selling his songs, the bard will have earned himself an amount of coins, copper, gold, silver and bronze to get himself a tankard or two of ale with his meal and a room for the night at an inn that is not the most verminous in town. In the halls of knights and lords, if his song is pleasing—that is, if it speaks high praise for the bard's host, if it glorifies his deeds and his family's history, if it sings of his lovely wife, his wise sisters, and his white-armed daughters—the bard can fare even better. In lofty precincts, the bard's song has a good chance of earning him more than his supper and his bed. He might well go forth from the hall with rings gleaming on his fingers, perhaps with a new sword belted on, or at the very least with a fine suit of clothing or a pair of sturdy boots to take him down the road to a more generous patron. As do we all, the journeyman bard knows that, in all lands and among all peoples, there exists little that is not for sale in Krynn besides the honor of a virtuous lady or that of a true-hearted knight.

The bard, like the chandler, the potter, the butcher, is a trader. He sells his songs, he gathers news and rich gossip along the way, and these, too, he barters for his bed and his bread. [And occasionally advertises. I have known bards who have enjoyed a particularly good stay in an inn to place favorable references to that establishment in their songs. The innkeeper makes a point of inviting such singers to return, for he knows word of his house will spread far and wide, and he owes the bard much of his business. Thus is commercial news often spread throughout Krynn.] The byways of Krynn are as well known to him as the hallways of a lady's castle to her. If he is bold, he takes to the sea, for he knows that his news of other lands and his songs, perhaps too long familiar in his homeland, carry greater value in foreign ports. In his native land or on alien soil, the competent bard is welcome at inn and tavern and alehouse, in high hall and humble hut. If there were days—a long time ago!—when he could count upon a patron to house him and feed him and clothe him as part of a royal or lordly households, bards are in these times no more or less traders than any man or woman devoted to commerce. [Enough word is had out of Qualinesti to inform us that it is still the case that an elf bard can hope to attract a lordly patron—even a royal one—who will reward him as well today as he might have been in older times. One can only guess about the bards in Silvanesti; however it is difficult to imagine that those tradition-bound folk have evolved a change in their attitudes toward, or expectations of, bards.]

I have learned some things, gathering my news, about the unfortunate lands. These places are closed to the word, either by the hand of the natives, or by the cruelty of a dragon. The lives of the people are secret to us now, or if not secret, the subject of dark wondering.

There are Closed Lands, and there are Ruined Lands. Thorbardin of the dwarves is among the Closed. The great gates are tightly shut against the world outside the mountain, and so the dwarves of that fabled mountain city have little to say about themselves. Who can know, then, what changes have come upon the folk of the mountain clans? We can only guess how they fare now, imagining that they conduct their society much as they had done. No trader comes out of there offering jewelry, tools, or the weapons for which the mountain dwarves have long been justly famed. Neither do we imagine that they starve, or go in rags. The folk of the mountain have ever been able to feed and clothe themselves, their farms being set in the wide warrens beneath the earth, lighted by shafts of crystal so that crops can grow, sheep can feed, and cattle can graze.

How do they fare in Silvanesti? The words we've had have been ill indeed. Scarred by the terrible Nightmare Years after the War of the Lance, longing only for the resumption of peaceful days, doubtless they thought it was a wise move to shield themselves against the outer world. However that was, a wise move or a foolish one, we know only that the fair Silvanesti have dropped a magical veil between themselves and the world, a veil that perversely is working harm to the people and lands it was meant to protect. We cannot go in, they will not come out, and so the world goes without the fine wines and bows and medicinal herbs we have in the past enjoyed from our trade with the elves of Silvanesti.

It has ever been that the folk of the Dragon Isles shunned contact with the rest of Krynn. Metallic dragons, mysterious huldrefolk, shadowpeople, and kyrie, the inhabitants of these northernmost parts of the world live in lands well able to sustain them, feeding and clothing themselves with little difficulty. Almost from the dawn of days, nothing has convinced them that we of the lands south have much that is worth the risk of contact.

There are Ruined Lands, and these are the New Swamp, the Desolation, and the Northern Wastes. Few can live in these unsustainable places, and those who do care little for commerce, for they have little to trade and must keep all of the food or the materials of clothing and craftware to sustain their meager existence. In the central parts of the Plains of Dust, in Thunder's realm, the folk used to trade in furs and horses, and they would send their wagons to Thorbardin for steel, tools, and weapons. No one trades with the ancient home of the mountain dwarves now, and the people of the plains have learned to look north in order to engage in commerce, and east toward Tarsis. Still, this isn't easy, for they are not used to their newly frozen lands, and comings and goings are chancy things.

In sparsely populated Nordmaar, they no longer trade with Solamnia, for the paths through Estwilde lead through dragon realms, and the river that once took their ships to the interior of Ansalon must face river pirates. Roads for the suicidal, that's what the Nordmaar folk call the old paths. The best they can do is a careful trade with Palanthas in spices and exotic animals, and that is nothing to count on.

These folk in the Closed Lands and the Ruined Lands manage as they must. We outside can only gain news of them in snatches, and we miss their goods and marketplaces.

To discuss, as we intend here to do, the state of trade and commerce in these years after the dread Dragon Purge, we must do what the wise man does when he ventures into a new land: We must become familiar with the language. Indeed, trade has its own tongue, commerce its own speech, and we must understand, first and always, that the root of the language of trade is money.

We mint our coins in our various realms. Even in the dragon lands this is so. Upon one side we stamp some thing having to do with the nation that issued the money, perhaps the forges of Thorbardin, the fine and proud horses of Solamnia. Upon the obverse we stamp the image of a ruler, a lord in Solamnia, a dwarven thane, an elven Speaker of Sun or Stars. This we did in the past, but more and more out of Qualinesti we are seeing not the images of their kings and speakers but that of the green dragon Beryl. The same is true in other dragon realms. Skie glorifies himself on coinage, as does Malys. Even Iyesta, who likes to mimic the grander wyrms, gives a fanged grin on the few coins minted in her realm. So great is the pride of the dragons, even the least, that their horned heads, their vast winged forms, adorn not only one side of a coin, but the other. [It should be noted that the coins one can purchase in the open-water markets of Dimernost, those antiquities and curiosities dredged up from fallen Istar, have as money no more value than the worth assigned to their metal, as the coin of any realm. They do, however, have some value among the wealthy, who like to collect such things. In barter a man may get more from a thousand-year-old gold coin with the face of some forgotten king or princeling stamped upon it than he would if it were a steel coin of modem minting.]

The steel coin was not always the basic monetary unit in Ansalon. In the time before the First Cataclysm, as now after the Second, folk prized platinum above all else. There ends the similarity between how our ancestors regarded things monetary and how we do. In those long ago days, they valued gold after platinum, then silver, and after that bronze, copper, and then iron. How hard it is to credit that steel and the precious iron ore from which it is made was but the gross metal from which weapons and ploughshares, hayforks, and harnesses were made!

Ah, but see the changes want and war make upon societies. The people look around and say to themselves, "What worth is gold if it is too soft to make into a sword's blade? What good is silver if I can't use it to craft stern armor to turn back the weapons of my enemies? What good, indeed, is copper if I can't make a plough from it?"

Of course we answer today as they did in the aftermath of that first disaster: "What good? None!" So, through custom and two rages of the gods, we of Krynn have devised a scale of monetary value that, while it might differ slightly from nation to nation, even city to city, looks roughly like this:

It is generally known that in most places in the Free Realms, though not all, a man may buy himself a tankard of ale with three coppers and can find himself a fair room for the night by handing his landlord the equivalent of ten silver pieces. While these rates hold true, or reasonably so, in the Free Realms, the same cannot be said of the Dragon Realms. In those benighted lands, where commerce is tightly controlled by the dragons and their minions, folk have regressed to a primitive barter system for doing business. It is ever the case that dragons are less interested in the welfare of their subjects than the state of their hoards, and so the fewer the coins in circulation among the various population, the more for a dragon's glittering pile.

Steel before iron and bronze, before silver, before gold, before copper—now you are becoming adept in the language of commerce. With this knowledge, venture along with me and learn some more. But not of language! Not yet.

Whether you are an elf trader in Beryl's realm or one of the free Abanasinian Plainsfolk, if you are a seaman from the Blood Sea Isles or even an ogre in Blöde bent on plundering one of the caravans whose scouts are luckless or reckless enough to find themselves in the stony lands surrounding Thoradin, you must know how to read the runes of the road. You must know how to travel, and how to fare safely. Go into the cities and buy a song from a busking bard to tell you all about the exploits of heroes, men and women who name their swords and venture forth to do the daring deeds of which legend is woven. As we've said, you can buy those cheap. If, however, you'd like to know what a life of true danger and toil is, consider the birth of the clothes you are wearing.

Out of Qualinesti came the leather for your shoes. The fur adorning the trim of your cloak came from there, too. Elves tanned the leather, and they caught the rabbits, the martens, the foxes and turned the beasts' fair coats into pelts for your adornment. These things they took to the borders of Beryl's realm, and because they are forbidden passage out of there, they turned them over to traders from one of the Free Realms who then carried them on to a town or city or village where the cobbler and leatherman began to change the leather into boots for your feet and that broad belt to hold up your trews.

In the northern part of Solamnia they make fine textiles, and Skie is not so jealous of his borders that he won't let traders go and come. They bring their yarn and yard goods to market where seamstresses make hose and shirts and leggings and blouses, the clothing to keep customers warm and festive. Between the hand of the hunter and the grower and that of the craftsman who makes clothing lies a long way, indeed.

Whether he is an elf whose travel is restricted to Beryl's borders or a free-roaming trader, the peddler of such goods as these, or of pottery, wine and fruit, of books out of Solamnia, of horses out of Khur, gold and silver and gems from Mt. Nevermind, feathers and quills from Abanasinia… no matter what his wares, the trader faces a dangerous and uncertain road. If he is fortunate, he travels in lands where the high roads are still kept up, where it is in the interest of the dragon overlord to see to it that trade flows smoothly or where, in Free Realms, the people have the wisdom to maintain these arteries of travel. Such roads as these, however, paved with good stone or, at least, cobbled, are rare upon the face of Krynn. They are found now only in Saifum and in the dragon Teyr's realm and on the Plains of Dust running out from Tarsis, east toward Silvanesti and south to Zeriak and from Zeriak east.

Both the Tarsian roads vanish before they come near to the sylvan land, disappearing into the wilderness between the Plains of Dust and shielded Silvanesti. Out from Silvanesti runs the old King's Road, another excellent high road, but it lies north of the roads running out from Tarsis. One imagines these fine roads all met in intersection, once a long time ago, before the First Cataclysm left the face of Krynn changed. Built so that the traveler, be he king or yeoman, could go safely, these roads still bear the weight of carriages, a troop of horsemen or an army marching. Even today, they are reasonably well maintained, and if the mile-posts are fallen to rubble, no markers of distance in these later days, if the little ghosts of long-ago inns are seen in the sketches of their fallen foundations beside the road, still we know these as the finest of the roads of Krynn, the ways traders like to take. You will note that the most of them run through the realm of one fierce dragon or another. Only upon the high road in Saifum can one expect not to meet a dragon's minions, people who will demand toll in the dragon's name, a fee paid in money and goods or ultimately in one's life. Be that as it may, these are the roads a trader counts himself lucky to be on, for as roads go, things do not get better when one leaves the high road.

In all lands outside the mountain kingdoms of the dwarves, the lesser roads are not made for trade, they are made by trade. Oxcarts grind out the shape of them, horses, footfare, carts that trundle the tracks between farm and market fair, between the little village and the larger town. The best of them will pass near water, following a stream or river, for oxen and horses and travelers all must have access to water on the journey, as well as to the rabbits, deer, and fish that go to drink and that will make a traveler a good suppers. These, too, are clean roads; that is, they are free of brush and don't wind through woodlands where bandits and looters can hide in ambush. It has always been in the interest of farmers going to market or villages whose seasonal market fairs wish to be profitable to keep these byways clear and safe. The hard work of clearing brush and trees is borne, if not happily, at least in the understanding that very often a village's welfare depends upon safe ways to and from it. That hard work being tended to by the landowners, they can count on travelers to maintain the ways and they clear the brush for cooking fires. Thereby, each group passing, keeps the road in good form.

This custom of clean roads holds in all the Free Realms, and it holds in the Dragon Realms other than those that are frozen of old or newly frozen by a dragon's breath. There the trader does not venture far from his home. He counts on his bold sled dogs to get him from one place to another and on his wits to let him know how far he may go before he must turn again and come back. To the folk of Icewall, this has always been the way. In the newly frozen lands of Northern and Southern Ergoth or the regions of the southernmost part of the Plains of Dust, people are still learning what every ice barbarian child knows from the cradle: Go with the sun, return before the moon, and your best trading partners are those who live but a noon's distance from you.

Neither does the custom of maintaining roadways hold in that part of Malys's country known as the Desolation, in most of Onysablet's New Swamp, and in the northern part of Skie's country. In the first, the Desolation is but a trackless waste where outlaws encounter bandits, but never upon any road, for none exists. The New Swamp is the home of the undead and the half-mad who care little about direction or how fine the road. That Footprint of Chaos at the top of Skie's realm is home to no one, not even the memories of those who died there when the shadow-wights overran it during the Chaos War. Of these places, these empty wastes, we will not speak much more.

In Free Realms or lands dragon-held (and we speak now of lands not those sea haunts of the Dimernesti or the mountain realms of dwarves,) the footpath found in seaside cities is held in high esteem. The finest examples will be found in Haven and in any of the port cities of Saifum. It leads, inevitably, from the dockside to the nearest taverns and alehouses, from there into the heart of the city until it intersects cobbling or paving. The footpath is made by accretion, a creation of sailors and shipbuilders who lay out sawdust and ash, then a layer of tar, more cinders, more ash, more sawdust, and then tar again. Well traveled, these footpaths are hard surfaces that drain well and are gratefully used by chandler, smith, shipwright, captain, and ship's passenger alike.

Nothing like the runes writ upon the earth are the paths of the sea. These ways are more dangerous than the shifting sands of Kalaman, sliding and slipping. Those traders who ply the seas best know the changeable runes writ on the sky, on the water, and on the wind. Trust your cargo to the minotaurs of the Blood Sea Isles, or the seamen of the Solamnic coast; pay them what they ask to take you or your wares to far ports of trade. [But do not expect a high profit after paying transportation costs. The minotaurs take their toll in either steel or in a share of the goods carried.] In the slapping of his sails, the captain hears the way of the wind, with a lodestone he reads his way, and upon the face of the night he charts his course. No paved road for him, and islands are his way-markers, the course of the lone white moon, the path of the sun his footpaths. These folk, seamen in good days and ill, have learned to read a sky bereft of one moon, have learned to find their way across the oceans of the world even though the patterns of the stars have changed. No kender could better map the sea than a minotaur, though no kender would gladly admit that. [The library possessed in the past a large collection of kender maps, including at least one of the Blood Sea. Fortunately I do not believe any traveler actually attepted to cross that tumultuous body of water using this map.]

The wise trader who ventures the roads of Krynn knows the names of all the inns and alehouses and taverns along his way. He knows where his oxen or horses will be best quartered, who has the finest food and drink for him and his companions, who has beds that are—if not utterly free of vermin—at least warm. He knows what alehouse has a good reputation, what inn is run by those who can offer him the promise that if his goods are kept under their roof they will not be stolen or tampered with.

If he trades within his own country, he is certain of the customs of the towns, sure how to treat those he meets with respect, and knows how to observe all courtesies. However, the venturesome trader who intends to cross into lands unknown to him, his wagons packed, his horses loaded, must go more carefully, being sure to keep his wits about him. Who, in any inn on Krynn, has not heard the story of the man who, going into Thorbardin in the days before the Dragon Purge when trading still took place between the folk of the mountain kingdom and the outside world, did not come out again for lack of courtesy? There he sat, well fed at the table of his dwarven host, lifting tankards of ale to the health of the householder and the wealth of the city and, in a quiet moment taken to consider how he would begin to open negotiations with his host for the Nordmaar wine he wished to sell, sat stroking his beard and smiling, well content with himself. Out came the knives! Off from the wall the swords! The men of his host's house leapt cursing to their feet, fiery eyed and ready to avenge that most mortal of insults.

What insult? you ask. So stammered the Nordmaar trader with a dagger tip under his chin, a sword tickling his ribs. "What have I done? I've said nothing!" Indeed, he had said nothing in words. In gesture the insult he gave to the dwarf who was his host was the unforgivable one of belittling his manhood, perhaps even wondering, though ever so subtly, whether those laughing children playing at his wife's knee were, after all, truly the fruit of his pitiful loins (and so, defaming the virtue of his innocent hostess, into the bargain).

Sadly, the Nordmaar trader did not come alive out of Thorbardin. He'd not explained himself quickly enough to his hot-tempered host, who only heard his gurgled explanation as the last of the blood leaked from him. The wine was kept, some drunk in the name of the poor fool who'd brought it, and the story of him wandered out of the mountain fastness, first told as a good joke about the utter ignorance of the outlander races, later noised about as a cautionary tale to all who might follow, the message of which is clear: Learn well the custom of the land in which you travel!

The place to learn these things, or at least enough to get you in and out of a nation with your skin still covering your bones, is at an inn where, if you are quicker to listen and observe than to talk, you will discover many good and valuable things. In near lands or far, the finest hostelry is an inn where the host is proud of his fare and the hostess of her house. The best inns and taverns are found in Abanasinia and Schallsea, for the folk there trade in hospitality as keenly as the elves of Dimernost's open-water market trade their exotic seafood and marine plants. The one trades for coin, the other for meat and fruit from the human merchants, but each knows he is in business.

In story and song we have heard of the famous Inn of the Last Home at Solace, that hostelry that is still in the hands of the Majere family and whose reputation is burnished by each passing year. Adventures have been launched from its leafy quarters, stories of heroism and tragedy begun and finished and begun again. Yet the most of the people who stop there to drink or dine or rest from the road are not clanking heroes in armor with swords girded on. They are traders on the road with goods handed over to them at the Qualinesti border, leather and wine and the famed elven liquors, bows and arrows and pottery packed well in straw and carried as tenderly as though it were, each piece, a live and fragile being.

Some of these trade goods are bound for Haven and then on to the New Sea where they may see land again in Solamnia or in southern cities such as Duntol or even Tarsis. Other goods will head west for Zaradene where they will be shipped across the Straights of Algoini to shivering Qualimori and freezing Silvamori and across the Last Gaard Mountains to Daltigoth. This land, once filled with fruit-bearing trees and carpeted with herbs, both culinary and medicinal, once stood proudly self-sufficient. However, the white dragon Gellidus changed the countryside into wintry wastes, and the elves and ogres are now eager to trade with whomever puts into their chilly ports. The elves welcome the craft-ware, the fruit of kiln and pottery shed, while the ogres of Daltigoth are content to trade fish and the brilliant white furs of the snow fox so prized by Qualinesti women. In these ports, as in so many others, the trader and his wares are greeted with the same delight as though they were heroes coming home. (Of course it is well known that the delight in ogre quarters is a grim glee that contemplates treachery and deceit while promising fair dealing. But even in those dark places, a profit can be had if the trader is lucky and skilled with his weapon.)

As at the Inn of the Last Home, any innkeeper worth his name will welcome a guest as he would his kin. He will find him a good room, a place for his beasts, and fill the manger in the stable as full as the trencher on the table. He will charge his guest fairly, he will provide good company if company is wanted, privacy if that is needed. He keeps his eyes and ears open and his wit sharp, for he trades not only in food and fare but in news as well. What is the state of the road ahead? What is heard about the doings in Tarsis? What do you know about the way down from Long Ridge to Haven? Have the ogre bandits become so bold as to surge out of Blöde this year? These things, the good innkeeper knows, and what he doesn't know, his wife and children do. Keeping in mind the touchiness of dwarves and elves and ogres and the prickly honor of the Knights of Solamnia, the taverner or innkeeper in such lands as Gunthar, Kayolin, or Palanthas, can be counted on to dispense information regarding local convention, this for the sake of assuring himself returning customers.

In some parts of Krynn, most notably those lands blasted by a dragon's cruel breath, icy or fiery, folk subsist on what they can grow or hunt or steal. They live pale lives of fear and hunger. Want sits at their tables; need watches beside their beds. Since the Dragon Purge, we of Krynn have watched sorrow and shadow touch many of our lands, we've heard sorry news brought out of the Dragon Realms by refugees and bards and traders, but all is not as grim as one might imagine. We are born, we die, and in between times, we trade. We make clothing and leather goods, we carve wood, we grow grain, we hunt, we fashion jewelry, we make candles, we tan hides, we fashion books from parchment made from those hides and from leather for the covers. We are happy to parade ourselves on festive occasions in silks and satins, glittering with jewels out of Kayolin or Mt. Nevermind, and we eat food never grown within our own borders.

We are fleshers and brewers, we are barrel makers and potters. Ribboners and scavengers—the latter being not the persons who actually clean the streets but the persons in charge of the rakers who do the cleaning—and we are glaziers, fullers and tile men. We fish, and we weave; we spin, and we build. We are bougemen—ah, that fine old term is still in use!—and that means we are the makers of leather water-bottles. In Thorbardin, she is a cappelnytter who makes caps and bonnets, though she is a milliner in Solace who does the same work. In most lands, a lodeman is one who makes compasses, but in Qualinesti he is known as a starman. For what reason? We are not certain. Perhaps it is that the ‘star’ in starman refers to the stars by which one steers?

From Qualinesti to Tarsis, to the Ergoths, to Gunthar go furs and fruit, leather and wine and the far-famed elven liquors. From Palanthas, books and beer and ale and textiles venture. Though the shipwrights of Kalaman no longer ply their trade for lack of the wood they used to import from the Blood Sea Isles, those of Palanthas have taken up the slack. The people of Khur trade horses and harnesses, they deal in diamonds and glass and spices, and they take weapons and armor in return. Tarsis, dressed in Qualinesti furs and leather, trades metalcraft, harpoon heads, fish hooks and sled runners with the Icewall barbarians, and in Nordmaar they still make those wonderful liqueurs a trader lost his life in Thorbardin trying to sell. Out of Mt. Nevermind come jewels and gold and silver, and the Plainsfolk of Abanasinia send out furs and grain and horses and feathers and woven blankets. The kender of Hylo provide the world with cunning woodcraft and such medicinal herbs as comfrey, chickweed, aloe, chamomile, raspberry leaves, oatstraw and cleavers. Kender are, even the Afflicted among them, still the finest mapmakers outside of legend. [Here, in my opinion, the researcher's enthusiasm outruns her pen as well as common sense. Kender maps, in my experience of them, are like kender themselves: disorganized, scatterbrained, and with only a limited correspondence to reality. They do, however, have one virtue. Because of the kender urge called wanderlust this curious and annoying race often wanders into areas previously undocumented by more reliable mapmakers. Their maps are thus occasionally useful as "rough drafts" of unexplored lands.] From these nations and lands goods flow, gladly out of Free Realms or grudgingly out of dragon lands, and for this the skilled craftsmen and shop owners at one end of the flow or the other are ever grateful.

In other times, calmer days, it was not unusual for an adventurous craftsman to take to the roads of Krynn, traveling near and far in autumn to garner orders for his work and wares. He had a regular route, customers who looked for him, those who knew him, those who had heard of him. Fed and housed among these folk, he enjoyed a comfortable season until he returned home to craft the goods ordered. Through winter, he would work, and come spring the byways of Krynn would feel his feet again, perhaps this time accompanied by an apprentice leading a laden packhorse or driving a wooden-wheeled wagon.

These days in which we now find ourselves, however, are not calm, and even in the Free Realms it is the bold man who ventures out to solicit orders. Most craftsmen leave the roads to traders, depending upon them to bring the raw goods and come again to buy the finished product.

In cities such as Palanthas, Portsmith, and right down to Caergoth, in Abanasinia's Zaradene, in Tarsis and Sea Reach, Pearl and Sea Breeze, in Elmwood, Thelgaard and Garnet, crafters follow the same custom. They set up shop in an open-air market or bazaar, or, in cooler climes, they have shops on the streets named for their trades—such addresses as Poulterer's Street, Fuller's Way, Gold Row, Milliner's Mile. From there they sell their wares and make their wares. In front, the wife or daughter or sister of the craftsman tends her patrons, taking orders, selling what wares stand on the shelves in display. Behind, in a separate building (not another booth or tent, if one is talking about the warm weather bazaars, but a more secure structure) the work is done by the master craftsman and his apprentices. Gowns are sewn, jewelry set, candles dipped, glassware blown, and the chickens throttled and plucked for hanging.

All round these places, in the open-air markets or in the tidy shops, the language of trade fills the air, that tongue whose roots go as deep as the roots of the world and whose words, while often sounding familiar, take on meanings they don't have outside the world of commerce.

Sometimes the difference between a word's meaning in trade and the same word casually used elsewhere is a subtle one. Says the lad to his father, "Da, here's your pack!" and the father, who had been searching low and high for something to carry his rope and sleeping roll, his spare socks, his clean shirt and other necessities of travel, smiles at his boy and thanks him. The woodcutter who takes his harvest to the marketplace of Long Ridge cries, "Two packs of wood for twenty gold! Twenty gold gets two packs!" is not suggesting that he will take your gold coins for so paltry an amount of wood as would fit in your pack. No, he's saying that two cords of wood—that is, two packs—can be had for twenty gold. If you are offered cloves at the spicer's shop, the pungent dark spice will be weighed out by the ounce, but if the wool merchant offers you a clove, he is offering you seven pounds of the fruit of his herd's back.

A barrel will hold butter, beer, herring, and tar. A cartload will carry hay, straw, and rushes. Ask for a chaldron of new coal, salt and quicklime, but when you want a cradle of glass, you will find no baby packed in with your wares."Please," say the housewives in Tarsis, "I'd like a frail of those lovely Qualinesti pears, and do dip a jar of honey from that bolle, but only if it's the apple blossom honey that comes right from Hylo. None of that clover honey from Abanasinia for me!" She will go then, to the fishmonger and request a stick of eel, specifying that she wants ten of the best and freshest, and she will watch as the fish are strung onto a stick by the gills.

A stick, you say, and who is to know how many eels will fit on any one stick? Ah, well, those who live in the town or the city know that the fishmonger in their market cuts his sticks to a certain length and so they can depend upon a fair and standard count. However, should they travel to another town, people are best advised to take the measure of the fishmonger's stick there before assuming that the ten eels that fit upon a Tarsian stick will be offered upon a Caergothian one.

They have, then, a rather sophisticated idea of measurement in the cities and towns, but in the rural areas of Krynn the trades that depend upon manual labor—quarrying, harvesting, such works as that—don't speak of sticks unless they are looking for something to use for a fence pole or kindling. There the folk are often unlettered, and so they count their harvests by using the old-fashioned method of tag tallies and rod tallies. Each woolsack has a tag attached to it which the bundler will hand to his master to be counted so his wage can be reckoned on a per-tag basis. The field laborer who harvests crops will have his tally scored upon a stick or rod. In this way, the worker who cannot read can still be assured of a fair accounting. The fruits of the rural worker's labor is drawn for him in scores or piled before him in tags.

They are not only the unlettered who depend upon symbols to communicate in trade. In the lands of Krynn one can hear many languages, among those languages, many dialects. From the days before the First Cataclysm, people of all races and nations have used a system of marking their goods and shipments so none can be confused about who is the maker, who is the shipper.

A chronicler has spoken of an object found in fair Qualinost, discovered after the elves evacuated their shining city during the War of the Lance. The account describes the object in this way:

This mark of which the chronicler speaks is, of course, a trademark, the sigil with which a dwarf signed his work to say that here is the craft of one Flint Fireforge. As did the dwarf, so do all other crafters and makers, even growers. Apples from the orchards of Qualinesti are shipped in crates marked with the sign of the sun on either side of which stands a spreading tree. Their pears bear a simple brand, the sun-mark in triplicate, one following another. That sun-mark is the basis of all trademarks out of Qualinesti, standing alone or combined with runes or other markings. In older days, when the elves of Silvanesti traded with other races, their goods were marked, branded, painted, or etched with intricate designs within which could always be found stars. We know that the finest chandler in Caergoth bands the crates in which he ships his candles with a pillar of flame. In Tarsis every housewife knows that she will not come away disappointed if she buys yarn from the merchant whose trademark has ever been a fat skein with loops numbering only seven. This family has been providing yarns of excellent quality for generations, come war, come cataclysm, come peace itself, for they know who makes the best dyes, who grows the finest wool, which spinner does the best work. [There are, indeed, laws in all lands to prohibit the theft of a trademark. The identifying mark is considered as much the property of the craftsman as are his tools or his stock. Woe to the thief of a maker's mark! Once fined by the local authority, he will find himself prohibited from trade in the town or village or city, his wares refused by shippers.]

Marked with the maker's sign, goods sent out to other lands are further branded with the shipper's sign. Overland or oversea, the shipper knows to put his mark beneath that of the maker so that when the goods arrive in port and are off-loaded to crowded docks it is easy for him to reckon his accounts, and easy for those who receive his shipments to know what is in the bundle or crate he is hauling away.

We have spoken of pots and glass, of food and clothing and wine to drink. We know from whence come our plates and knives, our weapons, our armor, our horses and hose. There is, then one more kind of ware of which we must speak, the goods we cannot touch.

At the start of our discourse, we met the busking bard, the minstrel with tales to tell, selling his song for his supper. We have alluded to another of his functions, that of carrying and fetching news and gossip. Such things as these are not always the pastimes of the idle; often they are of great import. The bards of Krynn aren't the only folk to trade in news and information. The goblins of Throt, spies upon the borders of Solamnia, do a brisk business in secrets and information, selling their wares to the Knights of Neraka when they can, in other markets when they must. The most enterprising of their kind will make himself two coats to wear, one when he is selling his goods to the Knights of Neraka, another when he is peddling his wares to those who stand against the Dark Knights, members of the Legion of Steel, the Knights of Solamnia who are, sadly, reduced in numbers but not in faith, or even, it is said, the master of sorcery, Palin Majere himself.

What will a man pay for a spy's news? Those rates are not established. What is a life worth? What value to place upon an enterprise that might end by seeing elves freed from Beryl's cruel reign or humans from the terrors of Skie's rule? How well will a dragon's minions pay a spy to go into enemy lands and come back with reliable news about the secret machinations of mages or the shrewd maneuver of the legionnaires as they delicately pull political strings? Those rates of pay are struck on the moment, lives weighed in the balance against measures of steel and a whisper slipped across borders.

There you have it: the tale of trade, of the blood of commerce flowing through our various civilizations, nourishing us with food, clothing us, housing us. In these hard times, perhaps the flow is not so easy as it has been in some places, perhaps easier in others, but this thing the wise know: In good time or hard, whether by barter or in currency, all folk who live will find a way to trade.