Atalantaya swarmed with the Wilderness people, and every merchant of Atalantaya was busy trading, buying crafts and skins, and selling luracastric clothing, furnishings, and gadgets to the Wilderness people as well.

Of course the talking bracelets and computers were of no use outside Atalantaya. But there were many other luracastric items for sale—from goblets and plates to spools of luracastric thread to gadgets we could not understand. Mirrors were a huge sale item, and Wilderness people apparently sold as much gold and copper jewelry from their villages as they bought from the more sophisticated jewelers and metalworkers of the city.

It was something to behold. And it was here I saw for the first time, in abundance, bound multipaged books made of luracastria, and scrolls of luracastria, and inks for writing on luracastria, and metal and feather pens. But these were highly expensive and only a very few people from the Wilderness had any interest in them. And these people, some of them, the ones who bought the books or pens, appeared to be people of authority in some capacity or at least people who commanded great respect. Looking back on it, I wonder if they were not eccentric scholars of the Wilderness or even shamans. Whatever the case, there were not very many of them.

The feasting was spectacular—much like the banquets we’d enjoyed in the Wilderness villages—except we had here every delicacy conceivable made with meat, as well as sauces of great refinement and combinations of hot spices and fruits and vegetables such as we’d never encountered before. Again, there must have been butter. But I can’t remember any butter.

We ate ourselves sick during this time. Everybody did. Everybody drank freely. And people danced. They danced everywhere. Wilderness musicians were all the rage amongst the people, and the wildest music with flutes and drums echoed up the walls from every street in the city, and we danced, danced until we near collapsed in the street outside of our home building. Of course we had danced in the villages, but that was a far more limited kind of dance, often governed by the tradition of the village. This was a wild orgiastic dancing, an unbridled ecstatic dancing.

And people coupled outdoors such as I’d seldom seen in the villages. They made love in the gardens and groves, and back alleyways, and under the feasting tables. Meat, drink, dancing, public lovemaking, demonstrative lovemaking. It was the way of the Festival of Meats—of the Wilderness Festival.

Things did not always go smoothly. Some people fell down in the streets drunk and were carefully laid upon benches out of the way, or on patches of green in the parks. When fights broke out, the brawlers were surrounded and subdued and hauled off to “sleep” in the holding cells. In the main, however, things went peacefully. And we noted even some people wearing masks in the Festival and cavorting in ceremonial ways which we did not entirely understand. It had to do with deities, I thought, but not deities for whom there was any other kind of notable reverence.