Dragons Made Me Do It: Season 2, Episode #5: Textiles on Pern

Lleu: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about the cultural context and legacy of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but still the only one by us.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I did some recreational embroidery and knitting in my youth, and I have a sewing machine, but I am not a particularly proficient user of it.

Lleu: I’m Lleu, and I did take a sewing arts elective in middle school. I don’t remember anything about it, and I don’t know what I did during it, because you would think that I would have something from it, and I don’t think I do.

Lleu: I do have a pillow that I made as a child, and by “I made,” I mainly mean “I picked out the patterns and then sort of supervised while my mother sewed it together,” but that’s about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: As this might have hinted to you, we are going to be talking today about textile production on Pern, both what we do see in the text, what historical, Earth-based examples would suggest, and doing our best to make those two things line up. Even though it doesn’t always.

Lleu: Yeah. We will have a full list of our references slash sources on our website. We’re mostly not gonna be identifying them by name here, but you can check them out there. Also, we both apologize for the background noise in our recordings. There’s often a little bit, but we’re recording this currently at the height of summer, and also both of us in wildfire smoke.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, let’s start with, what do we actually know about textiles and textile production on Pern? We get usage of some pretty — to the European ear — standard terms: we talk about linen and linens, we talk about wool, we talk about cotton, we talk about leather and hides, we talk about furs. There’s also some reference to hemp, mostly in the context of ropes, sacks. We also get “lace” and “velvet” used not to describe actual fabrics, but as metaphors to describe things that are either spread out in a scattering pattern of lines or smooth and pleasant.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would also like to note, a fiber that you’re not gonna hear us talk about: silk. McCaffrey says in the Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern that the silkworms don’t make it. They bring them over and they don’t survive, in the same way that bees don’t survive, so no silk, which is a bummer, because it’s — frankly, I think — one of the best textiles that exists, and sericulture is really cool, but…

Lleu: Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Movie. We’re also not gonna talk a ton about leather or furs, partly because the processes are quite different and also just because these are not providing everyday clothes, for the most part, in the series. We see Menolly producing leather when she’s like, “Well, I’m living in a cave now, and I need to have clothes, so I will, I guess, make leather, because that’s what I can make,” and furs we see people using for lining for stuff, and we see them sleeping in furs, but not wearing furs as day-to-day wear, for the most part.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s a Tannercraft, so I suspect that they are closely affiliated with the Beastcraft, because you’d kill the animal, you have a hide, you tan the hide. I’m not as obsessed with that, because it seems a lot more straightforward.

Lleu: Yeah. We think probably they do have lace, and probably they don’t actually have velvet —

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, and here’s where I put on my pedant glasses, velvet is made out of silk. Now, what we nowadays refer to velvet is often made out synthetic fibers, and you can make a plush pile fabric in the style of velvet out of wool, and that is often called a “wool velvet,” and it’s possible that they have those, but technically, traditionally, velvet is using silk, and they don’t have silk, so they don’t have velvet.

Lleu: I do also note that when European “explorers” (quote-unquote) first arrived in central Africa, locally-produced barkcloths were also being compared, texture-wise, to velvet.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we did consider barkcloth as a fabric-making technology. I suspect it wasn’t in use on Pern — despite the fact that we think a chunk of the original settlers were Māori, and Māori barkcloth is great — because the process of making barkcloth, structurally, is very similar to the process of making paper, and it seems very odd to me that they would be making barkcloth and have forgotten how to make paper. Because when they reintroduce paper, it doesn’t seem like, “Oh, paper! That incredible luxury good that we know how to make but just can’t!” It seems like, “Wow! ‘Paper’? Huh.”

Lleu: Yeah. One of the things that I discovered when I was looking to try and determine, do they have bedsheets on Pern — every instance of the word “sheet” in the series is referring to sheets of paper. Like, “those sheets” that Bendarek is making.

Lleu: Yeah. I am not entirely convinced that some kind of paper- or papyrus-like product has not existed previously, if only because they still have the term “paper” and still recognize this as a process. I think it has to have been happening in some capacity, but maybe this is the first time that wood-pulp paper has been able to be produced at large scale, because the Long Interval.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. It’s just, if you have the technology and it’s easy, you can make papyrus. You can make, frankly, fabric-based paper that you can write on. So it just seems very odd to me that they wouldn’t do that, especially when transmission of knowledge is such a problem for them. But maybe they’re making amazing barkcloth and, again, it’s a Craft secret and they don’t bother to tell anyone else that they know how to do it.

Lleu: I will just say, also, there is one reference to the records, at one point, as composed of “fabric.” They’re always, otherwise, described as “hide,” which is a fabric in the sense that it is something that you can make clothing out of; I wouldn’t normally ever describe it as “fabric,” so it does raise the possibility that maybe when she says the records are made of “hide” she means some material other than animal skin.

Tequila Mockingbird: But if we go down that rabbit-hole we’ll never come out.

Lleu: We’re never coming back, so we’re gonna bracket the paper question.

Lleu: We get frustratingly little information about how any of these textiles are actually produced. We do know that the Weavercraft exists. The closest we get to seeing textile production for most of the series is the beginning of Dragonflight, when F’lar and F’nor go and visit Lytol at the “clothmen’s Hall,” quote-unquote, at that point, in High Reaches, where we don’t actually see any textile production taking place. They just talk about how the High Reaches craftsmen make the best cloth now. The one moment in the series where we actually see textile production happening is in, of all books, Nerilka’s Story. Nerilka has saved us.

Lleu: We had some major problems before we found this passage. So thank god for Nerilka’s Story — words that no one has ever said before. So, in Nerilka’s Story, while Nerila is going around the Hold because she’s taken on a bunch of her mother’s responsibilities, she goes to visit the weavers. So we get:

Lleu: "The weavers, when I arrived in the Loft cots, were diligently applying themselves to their shuttles. One great roll of the sturdy mixed yarns, on which my mother prided herself, was just being clipped free of the woof. Aunt Sira greeted me with her usual cool, contained manner. Although she must have heard some of the drum messages over the clack of heddle and shuttle, she made no comment on the world outside.”

Lleu: Subsequently we are told — and this will be relevant for reasons that we’ll discuss — as Nerilka is planning the initial vaccination deployment at Fort Hold:

Lleu: “I told him to [vaccinate] all the nursery adults, our three harpers, Felim and his chief assistant, Uncle Munchaun, and Sira, for she alone knew all the brocade patterns that were our especial Hold pride.”

Lleu: So, all of this is important because it has saved us from the possibility that all textile production was being done under the auspices of the Weavercraft.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because that was bonkers, and it was driving me absolutely wild to have to contemplate that.

Lleu: So, this means that at least some textile production on Pern is happening outside of Crafthalls, in at least somewhat domestic contexts. This resembles early modern textile workshops that were run by institutions, whether that was a aristocratic household, or a temple, or a religious institution.

Lleu: So it opens the door for textile production outside of the Weavercraft, which much more closely resembles historical textile production, which was mostly being done domestically in homes or distributed among a community.

Lleu: So, huge, because if we were having to do all of this with the Weavers, we had problems.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it also lets us know that they do have looms with shuttles and heddles, which kind of helps us pin where in the industrialization history of fabric production Pern has remained. Now, I think likely they are not exactly aligned with any place on Earth’s history of textile production, because there’s no real reason that they should be. This is them consciously or accidentally maintaining whatever level of mechanization they best can in order to meet their needs and presumably align the production capacity with their consumption capacity, which, frankly, is not a thing that frequently happened on Earth. There are a lot of points in history where you have a bottleneck, either of, “We have all of this raw material and we can’t spin it fast enough,” or “We have all of this spun thread and we can’t weave it fast enough,” or etc., etc.

Lleu: Yeah, so we’re going to go through sort of the process of textile production. Before we get into that, just want to highlight some key problems of textile production that we’re going to be trying to think through. One of these, as we talked about in the human demographics episode, perhaps the largest problem on Pern in general is land and having productive land for growing fiber crops and/or for fiber-producing animals like sheep and llamas, who we’ll talk about. For animals also, then you have the question of shelter for, potentially, hundreds of thousands of llamas and/or sheep. So that’s one sort of problem that Pern would be confronting in terms of textile production.

Tequila Mockingbird: On one side of it, obviously it’s a little ridiculous to imagine, “Okay, we have to get 100,000 sheep undercover in an hour? No, we can’t.” But I think it’s worth remembering that Thread is never falling everywhere at the same time, so it might be a question of proactive herding, and also, if we’re looking at historical models, it was less a case of “there are 100,000 sheep all in one field” and more a case of “there are 10,000 smallholds that each have a dozen sheep.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And, yeah, you as a smallholder are responsible for a dozen sheep, and when Thread comes, they’re in your house, and that sucks for three hours, and then it’s done.

Lleu: Yeah, there are probably enough practical solutions to make that feasible.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although my problem with the flax is, you can’t move flax into a cave, right? You can’t herd the flax. So flax either has to be aggressively dragon-protected or it has to be out of the fields by the time Thread falls, which might suggest that they would rely more heavily on wool during Threadfall and on linen during an interval, or that they’ve thought about, you know, ways to deal with this.

Tequila Mockingbird: The other difficulty with linen production, specifically, is that flax usually has to be left in the field after it’s harvested for the retting process, while it literally rots for several days before you can get it out of there and spin it into fiber that’s a lot more transportable.

Lleu: Yeah. I think we just have to assume that they are trusting dragon protection to be extremely aggressive, and also probably that they are planning for some lost crops when some Thread gets through.

Lleu: A related problem that we are not gonna spend a ton of time on but that is there is the question of the transportation of fibers, and then, of course, the processing of fibers afterwards. Transportation had been a little bit something that we were worried about, especially when we thought that maybe all of this was happening in the Weavercraft. Now that we know that it’s not, it’s slightly less of an issue, but also there is a mention in Dragonquest of river transport over barges, which, obviously, if this were real Earth, this would not be a problem at all. That would be very common. But because Pernese settlement patterns are not necessarily aligned with Earth ones, insofar as the…

Lleu: Right. The key factor is “Are there caves nearby?” and not “Can we get by water to somewhere else?” It’s not necessarily the case on Pern that settlements will be easily accessible by water, but McCaffrey doesn’t seem to have considered this, and so we’re not going to worry about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: It would be such an easy solution to the problem if you’re like, “Well, they have teleporting dragons!” But Sean Connell is really, really, really worried that people will not think he’s cool if he helps. So the dragons are not being used to transport all of these goods, even though it would be so easy and so efficient.

Lleu: Then, of course, there is the question of labor time, both the labor time to process fibers, spin fibers into thread, turn thread into cloth, and then the labor time to actually produce garments.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially since it seems that a lot of those things are being broken up rather than happening in one place, localized.

Lleu: Then — I was gonna say finally — not finally, then there is the question, related to the question of labor time, of the size of workforces for textile production.

Lleu: And then, finally, the question of what technologies they have maintained or reinvented. We have very little direct evidence of these, so this is a lot of speculation about what things it would make sense for them to have access to, or what things they would need.

Tequila Mockingbird: By which Lleu means, every single word we say is absolutely true and accurate, because we are always correct.

Lleu: Yeah, I mean, we’re really good at speculation. So, we’re gonna start off with the question of how and where fibers are produced.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, linen is dope. It is one of the first fibers that was ever produced, and linen likes wet. Linen loves to be by the Nile River. Linen is really great for producing fabric that you can wear in hot climates, and it is really great for producing fabric that wicks. If you live in a hot place, and especially a hot, humid place, you probably already know this. Linen is also probably the primary fabric that is being worn on Pern. My reasons for thinking this are both that the Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern suggests that this is the case and the fact that when Lessa is first getting changed in Dragonflight, when she’s brought to the Weyr, there’s a scene where she’s feeling the clothes:

Tequila Mockingbird: “The fabric, a soft green, felt smooth under her water-shrunken fingers, although the nap caught on her roughened hands.”

Tequila Mockingbird: That to me really accurately describes the feeling of feeling linen with wet hands, because it feels incredibly smooth, but also there are slubs, and you can really catch those slubs on your fingers, especially if you have calluses.

Lleu: I will just say that we do know that the candidate garment that she puts on eventually is wool. That is explicitly stated.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, absolutely, and I think also, in terms of linen versus cotton, realistically, linen is a lot easier to work with at lower levels of industrialization technology, because you need a huge labor force to realistically make a lot of cotton.

Lleu: We’re mostly going to be bracketing the question of cotton, (a) because it’s a lot more complicated and (b) because it’s only mentioned in Renegades and only at Southern, which obviously means that it has to have come from the Northern Continent — they didn’t spontaneously discover how to produce cotton cloth in Southern in the course of 20 years — but perhaps, at least, means, that it’s restricted to a couple of the southernmost holds on the Northern Continent that have the right climates for it — maybe Igen, Ista, Nerat, Boll. So we’re mostly not gonna worry about it.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it probably would have been like a hyper luxury good, especially before it was maybe transplanted to Southern and grown at a higher rate —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because cotton is incredibly fussy. It can’t go below freezing, and it needs a very specific amount of rain, and then huge amounts of labor in terms of both picking and ginning and all kinds of stuff. Basically, the thing about flax is it’s a very useful plant, because it produces both linen — as in the fibers that you can use to create the fabric — and also linseeds, which we probably have heard in the context of linseed oil, if you’ve heard of it, which is an incredibly useful oil for working with wood and for paint. But the way that you want to grow it in order to produce linseed versus linen are actually different. So it’s possible that that is happening in the same place; it’s also possible that those are happening in different places. Basically, it needs wet and it needs cool. After it’s grown, it needs to be “retted,” which means it’s left to rot in the field in order to get access to the bast fibers within it, and then once you’ve done that, there’s a whole other set of processes, all of this work before it can be functionally spun. And when we’re thinking about producing linen, most of Egypt was wearing linen, a lot of Mesopotamia was wearing linen. So it is absolutely possible for a society to produce enough linen to clothe itself. It has happened. And I would say, presumably, with additional semi-industrialization of spinning and weaving technology, that would be much easier than it was at any point in history for the people on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah, I think that makes sense. Since there’s little indication that they’re having trouble maintaining textile production, the takeaway for, technology-wise, basically, is, we’re gonna be assuming that they have enough, they’ve retained enough technology to sustain themselves comfortably.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would be shocked if members of the Weavercraft are growing the flax or doing that initial retting, scutching, heckling production, because that really has to happen in the field. The mass of plant matter that you have to deal with is a lot. It makes a lot more sense to me that they would be doing that, maybe even spinning the flax, and then sending the spun linen thread to the Weavercraft Hall to be processed, dyed, woven, made into lace, etc. Whatever you have. And that might mean that it was then being transported by the Weavercraft Hall to another domestic producer —

Tequila Mockingbird: — maybe in a different Hold or in a different part of Pern that might be then turning it into lace, because that’s a very specific skilled craft, or that might be something that happens in the Weavercraft Hall by apprentices, by journeymen. Historically on Earth, a lot of this spinning was happening domestically, usually by women, because it’s very easy once you are skillful to spin thread while also cooking, minding small children, and doing basic household tasks. So, generally speaking, roughly your adult female population would be spinning for most of the day most days. And shepherds.

Lleu: Well, and not just your adult population. Some of the sources that I’e looked at have indicated that, like, as young as, like, children as young as, like, four or five are already starting to be involved in the process, at least in parts of the process.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, wow! So I would imagine that there are absolutely Holds that grow flax and process the flax into thread.

Lleu: The other major textile that we see repeatedly in the series is wool. And it’s interesting that you say that probably the Weavercraft is not handling some parts of the initial fiber production, because — I’ll talk about why, but I think that it’s not implausible that the Weavercraft is handling basically every step of the process except maybe the actual animal husbandry for at least some parts of wool production. So because of the sources that I have, like, been looking at and had access to, the most specific information I have about wool production is actually about llama wool, which is great because we know they have llamas in the High Reaches, specifically, from the Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern.

Lleu: But this means that I can, based on some rough estimates of population — we came up with an estimate of the total population at the beginning of the Ninth Pass of about five million people. We’re assuming that the Holds are roughly equally populous, so I’ve put High Reaches on the low end of about 250,000 people. And we’re looking at the map — there’s ten settlement dots in High Reaches. We’re assuming an average of about 25,000 people per settlement, but maybe High Reaches Hold proper, has about 50,000 people. This is based on an article about by Ragnheiður Bogadóttir about wool production in the Inca Empire, basically, based on early chronicles and some other historical evidence. So, we estimated that about two tunics as the sort of standard garment that I have information for per year was probably reasonable, so High Reaches Hold would need about 100,000 tunics per year. Inca textile production was divided into two types. I’m gonna focus on the type that involved llama wool, because we know they have llamas. So this is a coarser fabric, but there’s also a finer option made with alpaca or vicuña wool. We don’t know whether they have those, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that they have figured out how to breed or genetically engineer llamas to also produce this, if they don’t have alpacas.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because it’s worth remembering that the original colonists explicitly say that they’ve got animals that are bioengineered for the specific climate or for specific properties, and that that’s something that they are also actively working on doing as soon as they land on Pern.

Lleu: Yeah. Wool production in the Andes relies on two major kinds of landscape: one, pampas, which are relatively dry, and the other, bofedal, which is wetter and often has been human-created or human-maintained by basically pumping a bunch of water into land to create artificial wetlands. Llamas conveniently don’t require the super water intensive one, or the relatively water intensive one, and can graze on even relatively poor-quality pampas land. However, they do need a lot of it. For 100,000 tunics, you need more than 100,000 llamas and just under 2,000 square kilometers of land, which is about 750 square miles. And 23.7 million hours of labor going into the whole process.

Lleu: That sounds like a lot, but it actually works out to a very reasonable number of about 475 hours per person in High Reaches Hold, which, if everyone were working on this full-time, would be like 11 or 12 weeks.

Lleu: So it’s extremely reasonable for them to be doing this with a smaller proportion of the population working full-time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Realistically, thinking back to our demographics episode and about where we put Craft versus Farmcraft, all that, probably half of your population is going to be involved in animal husbandry or plant husbandry for fibercraft purposes, and maybe another quarter of your population is animal husbandry or plant cultivation for food purposes. There is going to be some crossover there, because especially with sheep, which is the other primary source of wool, you’re probably going to be getting milk, producing cheese, eating the sheep when they get old, or preferentially slaughtering your rams, etc., etc., in a way that is going to be producing a certain chunk of your food.

Tequila Mockingbird: And again, what I was saying about spinning while doing another task, the archetypical is, the shepherd is spinning while watching the flock. So, a lot of that spinning time is doubling, in terms of man-hours, the animal husbandry time.

Lleu: Yeah. The one difference that I would highlight between this and linen production is that I think those numbers — the 2,000 square kilometers, 750 square miles, 100,000 llamas — are based on, well, based on currently existing llamas, but are based on producing this coarser, lower-quality fabric from llama wool. If you are trying to produce, say, 5,000 luxury tunics with finer quality wool — maybe you’re using alpacas or an alpaca substitute and are using bofedal land — that has a much smaller required amount of input, to the tune of maybe a thousand alpacas or alpaca equivalents and two and a half square miles of land. And I think this would require also, still, some rotation as grazing land is exhausted, but still a much smaller input of space and pasturage, and also of animals, and then also of labor time. So it seems to me likely that, for wool production pecifically, the Weavercraft may, in fact, be doing every step of the process except the actual animal husbandry of luxury wool products in-house, because t150 tons to make 100,000 tunics of coarse fabric versus 2 tons to produce 5,000 tunics of fancy fabric is a much smaller investment, requires much less labor to transport, and —

Lleu: — right, makes you more money than the cheap fabric would and lets you exploit your Weavers’, who have come from other domestic backgrounds, prior experience with domestic spinning by having them card the wool, spin the thread, etc.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think it also does accord with what we see textually, because what we see the Weavercraft Hall involved with is the tapestries, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: And that is a luxury good; that’s a very high-skill craft that involves dye work that is going to be incredibly expensive and complicated to source, that involves very skilled labor, that probably involves specialty looms and equipment. We don’t see the Weavercraft Hall involved in the acquisition of daily-use or even Gather clothing. What we see, canonically, is that either you borrow something from somebody else, or you go to a Gather and buy clothes or belts or boots at the Gather.

Lleu: Yeah. We do see, in Masterharper — so quite late in terms of the series’s progression — the existence of a “tailor” at High Reaches Hold, but it’s a tailor and not a Weaver who is the one who’s selling Robinton pants that make his butt look nice.

Tequila Mockingbird: Gotta have that. Crucial. To your thought about land usage, it’s also you were saying before we started, it’s kind of ironic because High Reaches has terrible climate for llamas.

Lleu: Yeah. They’re high-altitude animals, and relatively low forage needs animals, but the thing about the Andes is that they are around the equator, so they don’t actually get that much or that heavy snow in general.[1]

Tequila Mockingbird: Now, I do think, again, we know that animals are being bioengineered, so it’s possible that this is a specific type of llama that is better with cold temperatures.

Tequila Mockingbird: Or that they’re just applying the husbandry difference of, they’re in a cave every night, they’re not sleeping outside, etc., etc. But I think it’s likely that the reason the llamas are at High Reaches is more about maximizing land use, because the High Reaches is the place where you can’t graze sheep, because there’s not even enough fodder for sheep —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and you can’t grow crops, because it’s a frickin’ frigid mountain. And so I think, realistically, that’s where you put the llamas because you can’t put anything else there and you have to make use of all of the land that you have, especially all of the land that’s near a good cave system, even if it’s not optimal for whatever, you know —

Tequila Mockingbird: So, if you think about, okay, all of the good, arable land for crops is going to be filled with crops, especially if you’re assuming you lose some percentage of that in Threadfall. You’ve got to just sow everything you can and hope for the best.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that’s going to be your cereals for consumption — both for human consumption, for cattle consumption, sheep — and your flax, your cotton, if you have some, probably even if you’re growing fruits and vegetables in an organized way, which you’ve got to be doing to support a population, even if that’s probably not at scale, maybe even like soy as a fodder crop — you know, things like that. And then where you can’t do that, you’re going to be running cattle and probably rotating cattle through, because wheat needs fallow land — and we talked about this again in our demographics video. Where you can’t have arable land and run cattle, you’re gonna be grazing sheep, and that’s probably foothills, scrubbier stuff, things like that, and where you can’t run sheep, you’re gonna run llamas, would be my guess.

Lleu: Yeah. I think that makes sense. And if you look at the map of Pern, you will see that everywhere else, even the other places that are quite mountainous and other places where you might want wool as a sort of good cold weather fabric, all of them have visible lowlands, and the High Reaches does not. I will also just say, before we move on from land, that based on these calculations that I have made, I feel extremely vindicated in my argument that the idea that the Northern Continent is the size of Great Britain is comically too small. In order to produce enough wool for everyone in the High Reaches, you need an area about two and a half times the size of Rhode Island or three times the area of Cornwall, and that’s just for textile production at High Reaches, not counting any agriculture that is happening there, and also land that is not viable for agriculture or animal husbandry, because it is also a mountain range. So that brings us to question two, which is: how and where are fibers processed into thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: I am assuming that they are at the highest level of hand-powered spinning, if not the lower level of machine-powered spinning, because something like a spinning jenny, which allows you to basically spin and reel multiple spindles worth of cotton simultaneously — basically, uh, textiles don’t seem very high-resource, high-value in Pern. And I think some of that is just a writer who wasn’t thinking about it, but —

Lleu: Yeah, we picked the one aspect of material culture that McCaffrey did not put very much thought into.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s possible to just look at that as, that’s just a lacuna. And we can assume that the average Hold person would have been much more concerned with maintenance, repair, and access to cloth than the characters are. It is, I think, always important to note that we really don’t see any low-status characters. We’re not in the point of view of people who would be really deeply concerned with that. Nerilka is probably the closest we get —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and she’s still a daughter of Fort Hold. So she’s thinking about it from a resource management perspective, but she’s never run out of cloth for clothing.

Lleu: Yeah. The other moment that we get is in Dragonsinger, when Menolly and Silvina are talking about Menolly’s clothes. Silvina’s sort of thrusting things at her, and Menolly’s like, “Oh, this is way too nice for me! I’m just an apprentice!” And Silvina’s like, “Even the drudges have a set of nice clothes for Gathers.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But the fact that the dredges have a set of nice clothes for Gathers makes me think that clothing is not as high-resource as it would have been without any kind of mechanical production assistance.

Tequila Mockingbird: Especially when you consider that there is a chunk of Pern’s population that is not productive, that is on a dragon —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and they’re not spinning. They’re busy. They’re having orgies, and they’re fighting Thread. That takes up all their time. Obviously people had clothing, people wore and used cloth in human history before they had mechanized spinning capacity.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is, I feel like, so hard for modern people to conceptualize just how expensive fabric was for so much of human history, and how that would affect the way that you thought about it and treated it and maintained it.

Lleu: Yeah. Among other things — my research for this episode mainly consisted of finding random historical points of comparison from the things that I have read over the last several years.

Lleu: Thank you. And one of the things to note is that, in the middle Bronze Age, wool cloth was the main luxury trade good that was being produced in Mesopotamia. So when traders from Assyria were going to Anatolia to sell their goods what they were selling was. That was the most valuable commodity that they had to offer. And some of that was because it was particularly high quality, but some of that was also just because it was really expensive, and they had a lot of it, because the land was good for wool production.

Tequila Mockingbird: Fabric was also used functionally as currency in China and in Iceland and in a lot of places, because it was very portable, held its value, but also would eventually be transformed into clothes, so it was kind of inflation-proof, and because everybody wanted it. No one ever said, “No, I do not want that bolt of silk,” because that bolt of silk was infinitely transferable into food, into animals, into labor — everybody wanted it, always.

Lleu: Yeah. Fabric was being delivered as tribute to the Valley of Mexico in the early modern period. And also, fabric was one of the main tithes to the state that was expected of subjects of the Inca Empire. Every household was expected to contribute a tunic to the state, which was then redistributed and used as gifts to establish reciprocal relations and to maintain state authority by having a bunch of extra clothing to distribute to people. We do know, again from Dragonquest — just two great little moments when they go to the Smithcraft Hall and have the world’s worst coffee — that they do have water wheels. So they do have at least one mechanism for generating power without, that’s not directly human power.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is open to question whether that’s something that they would have had consistently since the First Interval, or whether that’s something that might have been lost and rediscovered, because I do think water-operated energy — it wasn’t discovered one time and place on Earth.

Tequila Mockingbird: Water moves, and the idea of, “Hey, I want something to move. The water’s moving all by itself; can we use that?” turning rotational energy into lateral energy — it’s not that complicated. So I would fully believe either that it has been maintained or that it was lost and rediscovered. I might slightly prefer, honestly, that it is lost and rediscovered, because if they’ve had water wheels the whole time it’s odd to me that they wouldn’t have figured out electricity even just kind of by accident.

Lleu: Yeah. And especially — we know that they had hydroelectric dams at some point.

Tequila Mockingbird: So I — I would think it more likely that they, maybe during the Long Interval, had enough time and space where they were not getting Threadfalled to really dig in and develop this idea of water power and, “Oh, okay. How can we use this? Where can we apply this?” That sort of thing.

Lleu: Yeah. Which is gonna be another recurring theme, is, how much technology was maintained versus developed versus redeveloped? The Long Interval is doing some heavy lifting here.

Tequila Mockingbird: Look. This is not us: this is McCaffrey. And I also, just realistically, we’re obviously trying to think of diegetic explanations for all of this — as you mentioned earlier, extradiegetically, I don’t think she thought about it. I don’t think she thought about the timeline that much; I don’t think she thought about fabric production that much. We’re putting a lot more time and energy into this, because that’s just fundamentally who we are as people.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, when we’re thinking about these processing methods, essentially, you need to spin it into thread. This can be done by hand or with a mechanical, like, hand mechanical-powered machine. And then you need to take that thread and weave it into cloth. Either before or after you need to dye the thread. Can I take a little tangent into dyeing?

Tequila Mockingbird: I am pretty confident that dye is one of the places where Pern has retained more modern, basically, technology, even if it’s proprietary to the Weavercraft Hall, because I do not think it’s possible that they can get picky about a specific shade of blue and say, “Oh, that’s blue, but it’s not Harper blue” unless they have aniline chemical dye, because it would take incredibly skilled craftwork and incredibly specific knowledge that would have to be maintained orally over thousands of years — when we know they lose shit like vaccines, the concept — in order to have enough the ability to have a very specific blue, which is a difficult natural dye to acquire. You need aniline, which is available in several different plants, indigo obviously being the most famous, woad, which has the same chemical compound as indigo. It’s just the one, the aniline, that makes blueness. But it’s also an incredibly complicated process, because it needs incredibly base solution. There’s a lot that goes into making something a bold, colorfast blue, and the idea of a specific hue…uh, wild. We also get descriptions of greens, which are incredibly difficult to dye with natural materials, because chlorophyll does not become a dye. It does not dye things green. So, if they have consistent, specific colorfast blues and greens, I think they just must have maintained chemical dye technology.

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe even in the same way that the Vintners secretly had vats that they were using to make wine maintained all the way.

Lleu: We do know that up until the Eighth Pass, they still had the ability to make a specific bronze dye that Zurg laments the fact that they no longer have. So, some dyeing technologies must have been maintained over a long term —

Lleu: — and then maybe some specific dyes were lost in the Long Interval, but not the general processes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because a lot of the history of dye is very trial and error, right? Like, you’re just like, “Okay, what if we put this in? What if we put that in?” And so I can, I can see that you might — especially since, again, information is being transmitted orally, and we know that that doesn’t work well for Pern. So much information is lost because the one person who knows it dies without telling anybody. And you might think that this would produce a culture with less of a “My trade secrets die with me” attitude, but it doesn’t seem to, because they’re fundamentally space libertarians, and there’s nothing that can be done about that. So I would fully believe that the secret of a specific dye recipe would be in, like, one Weavercraft Hall or one even Weavercraft master and passed on and passed on in the same way that information about timing it was supposed to be passed on and passed on, and then eventually they fucked it up and everybody who knew it either died or time traveled and it didn’t maintain.

Lleu: It might not be a libertarian thing; it might be a guilds thing, but the jury’s out on that one. We’re gonna have to come back to that in the future, if we ever actually do a How Does Pern’s Economy Work episode.

Tequila Mockingbird: I kind of want to, because I want to learn how Pern’s economy works. How does Pern’s economy work, not because I, the podcaster, have information to impart to you, the listener, but because I, the podcaster, am like, “Yeah, how the fuck does it work?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Once we have our thread — probably our dyed thread, because dyeing would be incredibly high-knowledge resource, and that, I think, would be very much under the control of the Weavercraft Hall — then we have the question of, “Okay, where is this cloth getting woven into fabric?” And, as we noted, it seems like at least some of the answer is: in domestic Holds, possibly just bigger ones. It’s also possible that that would, again, be more luxury fabrics, because they do talk about Fort Hold’s iconic brocades. That’s not the kind of thing that an average person would be wearing or using; a brocade is as luxurious as a fabric can get, because it involves multiple different dyes and types. Basically, you’re taking your warp threads, and you’re using a variety of different weft threads, some of which are covered by others at various points, to produce an elaborate, colorful pattern with, often, different texture as well. That’s a satin weave, things like that. And the patterns for a specific brocade could be incredibly complex, up to 2,500 different steps —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and that would be either just memorized by the weaver or committed to elaborate pattern cards — probably unlikely because it doesn’t seem like they’re great at writing things down. They don’t have paper; hides don’t last and also seem to be used mostly for archival purposes rather than functional purposes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Messages are being carried orally by the runners. Or, which I think is very Pernese, they might have been encoded in songs. Which I think —

Lleu: Yeah, but also highlights another aporia in the text, which is: we don’t ever hear about work songs. They must exist.

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, again, we’re hanging out with high-status people.

Tequila Mockingbird: If we had one single Pern novel all about like a random apprentice beasthold kid, then we’d know so much more.

Lleu: Yeah. I feel like it’s really telling that the closest things that we get to that kind of participatory music is that one scene when Elgin arrives at Half-Circle, but the participatory music that he’s doing is the Duty Song.

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright, so, if the answer is that like workaday cloth, average-use cloth, maybe for bed sheets, for low-status people’s clothing is being woven domestically, scattered all around, and then there’s also workshops that are making high-value cloth, either under the auspices of the Weavercraft Hall or under the auspices of a specific Hold, using proprietary, luxury fabrics, I think that makes sense.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do know, again, from that beautiful Nerilka paragraph that they are using looms that have shuttles and heddles, the technology that — especially if they’re making brocades with a shuttle, it basically allows you to lift only some of the warp threads so that you can put the shuttle across and go under some and over others without having to individually weave up and down, up and down. And that’s what basically allowed you to make really complicated brocades much more effectively and faster.

Tequila Mockingbird: So this’s probably based on the draw-loom, which is invented in China but then mass-produced or mechanized in Europe. Basically, it makes sense because I think this is kind of the highest-tech loom you can make that does not require any kind of machinery —

Tequila Mockingbird: — other than probably you would have counterweights so that you could lift things faster and easier with one person instead of multiple people.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s all simple machinery. You don’t need any kind of energy-power other than human energy to make that loom work very effectively.

Lleu: Yeah, and the kind of centralized workshops that this would entail are widely attested across Afro-Eurasia broadly, from the ancient Near East, where there we have abundant evidence of centralized textile production on royal estates, and likewise the Eastern Mediterranean. In early modern Timbuktu, circa the mid-16th century, there were apparently 126 tailoring workshops, each with a master and 50 to 100 apprentices. Even post-industrialization textile production has remained extremely important — as late as the 1930s, fully 50% of Italy’s labor force was employed in textile production, and a third of Germany’s. Um…

Tequila Mockingbird: According to the “Global Apparel Industry Statistics” of 2025, out of a global workforce of 3.62 billion, 430 million work in textile production.

Lleu: So, the Global Living Wage Coalition says approximately 75 million people worldwide, but I think that may only be including actual garment workers and not the agricultural component.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I feel comfortable saying roughly 10% of the workforce of Earth in 2025 is involved in textile production.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we have reached a height of textile production that has never been achievable before on orders of magnitude.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s a lot of people. So then let’s think about clothing.

Tequila Mockingbird: This is frankly where it gets the shakiest, ’cause we don’t see it. And it’s weird.

Lleu: Yeah — or, rather, the only people that we know who are producing actual articles of clothing are leatherworkers, the Tanners.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. What we see is Tenna, Lessa, Moreta, and Menolly are presented with a dress. Now, presumably this isn’t a perfectly tailored dress — there’s some mention of trying to find one that fits well or adjusting it so that it will fit better — but we don’t actually see where that dress came from. In a couple of cases it’s specifically Silvina’s dress or…

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. So it’s a dress that someone else isn’t wearing right now, which means that they have more than one dress. Good to know. Or there’s this sense that it’s a communal store of extra clothing maintained by the Harper Hall or by Benden Weyr. Now, obviously, again, someone is specifically producing candidate robes, and that, I fully believe, is happening in the Weyr or is a specific contract with the Weavercraft Hall. But just in terms of the clothes that people wear every day, we really don’t get good information about how that’s being made.

Tequila Mockingbird: In almost all times and places in human history before industrialization, you would get cloth, and you would make it yourself. So maybe that is what’s happening on an individual, domestic level, and we’re just not seeing that because the people we follow as protagonists are abstracted from that, either because they’re drudges or because they’re the daughters of Lord Holders and have people who do that for them, or dragonriders.

Lleu: Because that’s the person that they call to take Menolly’s measurements for stuff.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would believe that — although he’s making shoes, which is an interesting job for a tailor to have —

Tequila Mockingbird: The Weyr cobbler was sick that day. But I would believe that they outsource it for dragonriders, because they outsource everything for dragonriders.

Tequila Mockingbird: Dragonriders’ only job is to keep everyone else on the planet from dying. But everybody else, if they’re not making their own clothes, I don’t know who is.

Lleu: Yes. I would speculate that the “tailors” that we see, both in Masterharper and in that one scene in Dragonsong, may be a specific subset of the Weavercraft who do mostly — either are working within the Weyr, or are doing, like, fancy dress clothes, like your suit for your wedding. This brings us to the problem that has loomed over this every time that we’ve tried to think about anything, which is, where is all the clothing at Half-Circle Sea Hold coming from?

Tequila Mockingbird: Where is all the clothing at Half-Circle Sea Hold coming from? This kept us up nights. It’s an isolated Hold that is so self-sufficient, but Menolly never talks about fabric production, not at any stage other than cleaning finished garments.

Lleu: Or doing repairs to sails, which we’ll talk about later. But there’s no mention of, are they making the sails in-house? Surely they must be, right?

Lleu: Because they need to be fitting them to their boats. But there’s nothing in it. This was the one thing that was like, maybe the Weavercraft does do everything centrally and all that people are doing at Half-Circle is altering pre-made garments for people. But that just makes no sense for any other point in human history.

Tequila Mockingbird: Frankly, I gotta assume — and I’m taking some liberties here — Menolly just hates it. Maybe she’s so bad at it that they don’t make her do it. Menolly just sucks at sewing, she’s such a klutz with it, that they’re just like, “Oh, god, make Menolly go gather herbs, do all the other tasks, but, keep it away from Menolly.”

Lleu: I guess? But I think some of it is from the parts that are from Elgin’s perspective, is the problem.

Lleu: Where we’re seeing people doing tasks, and none of them are doing textile work.

Tequila Mockingbird: Now, I tried to suggest that maybe this was a time of year thing, but it doesn’t really line up, because we’re seeing them over the winter, which ought to be the textile production time because it’s the time you can’t fish.

Lleu: Yeah. I don’t have a list of specific tasks that Menolly did over the winter, or thinks about doing over the winter, but I do have Menolly’s litany of tasks that she’s thinking about not doing when she’s contemplating running away. So what she says is:

Lleu: “Not return to the Hold? Not go back to the endless round of tedious tasks? Of gutting, smoking, salting, pickling fish? Mending nets, sails, clothes? Cleaning dishes, clothes, rooms? Gathering greens, berries, grasses, spiderclaws? Not return to tend old uncles and aunts, fires, pots, looms, glow baskets?”

Lleu: And it just really feels like Menolly is the kind of person who should be involved in textile production in some capacity, and she is not.

Lleu: So maybe what that means is that — we know that the reason Menolly wasn’t fostered was because she was the youngest daughter and Petiron was interested in teaching her, so it was easy enough to just let her be his apprentice, so maybe that means that she was excused from normal Hold duties to be a Harper apprentice, basically? But she does so many other normal Hold duties, is the thing.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes; I do think it’s fair to say that most of the other Hold duties she’s doing are unskilled labor.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where cloth production is not. So if she was excused in her formative years, maybe she’s just shit at spinning, because if you are shit at spinning, you produce shitty thread.

Tequila Mockingbird: And they don’t want shitty thread. Again, she’s just bad enough at it that she’s excused from that task, because there are a lot of tasks that need to be done, and they just are like, “Okay, Menolly’s good at these tasks; let’s make her do those.”[2]

Lleu: Sorry — the other thing is, I don’t think… I don’t think Half-Circle is producing any textiles domestically. They have none. I think they must be importing cloth and producing clothing.

Lleu: But not actually spinning or weaving in the Hold, because they don’t do agriculture. They forage and they fish.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and we do know that — again, this was never an actual historical model of economics —

Tequila Mockingbird: To me, it seems like it would be so much easier to import raw material and spin it or weave it yourself — again, in the winter when you’re not fishing — but maybe the economics of supply and demand on Pern at that time mean that it’s actually cheaper and easier to just import bolts of cloth from Nerat and turn them into clothing.

Lleu: There are examples of both, right? Often it’s been luxury goods, like silk cloth being imported as cloth —

Lleu: — but there are also examples of contexts where fibers were being produced in one place and spun somewhere else, sometimes quite far away.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. All it would take would be like one particularly advantageous trade deal 20 years earlier, and they’ve locked in cheap cloth from one specific hold in Nerat that really likes the anchovies. We can explain it, but it is weird.

Tequila Mockingbird: And we are explaining around it rather than I think it making natural world-building sense to me. The other thing is that, presumably, as you mentioned, the sails for Fishercraft Halls would, logically speaking, I would think, be produced in-house.

Tequila Mockingbird: And for that I think probably it makes the most sense to look at Viking sails, which were made of wool and which were incredibly, incredibly good, to the point of, I think, within 5% of modern sail quality, which is odd because wool naturally is terrible material for a sail because it has incredible airflow and it holds onto water — the two things you don’t want a sail to do. And basically what the Vikings did was they wove it twill-style — so that’s a pretty tight weave — and then they went through a two-step process of first fulling the fabric, which is soaking it in water for a long time so that it is basically — it’s not going to shrink or distort later when it gets wet, because it’s already done that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Think of, like, pre-shrunk cotton. And then smøring, which means first you brush it with fat or animal fat or oil and ochre, like dirt, and then you pour either liquid beef tallow or tar on it, and this produced an incredibly airtight, waterproof fabric that made one of the best sails in pre-industrial history. But it would take about two-and-a-half years of work from one craftswoman. Again, obviously, very unlikely that it was one person working for two and a half years. It would probably be more like five people working for six months, but a sail made of that quality would probably last like 30 to 40 years.

Tequila Mockingbird: So you don’t need to be making sails all the time; you do need to be mending and maintaining them and maybe even re-smøring them; I’m not sure. So maybe this year they’re not making any sales, or these five years they’re not making any sales, and that’s why Mentally is not talking about it.[3]

Lleu: Yeah. The other thing to think about is, Half-Circle also presumably has to be importing lumber for ship-building.

Lleu: So it’s reasonable for them to be importing a bunch of the raw materials that they need.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. And, fun note, one craftswoman, about two and a half years to make a single Viking sail; one craftsman about a month to make a single Viking boat, the entire rest of it. So the textile production was significantly the most time- and labor-intensive part of making a boat in this fashion.

Tequila Mockingbird: The other thing to consider with the Fishercraft Hall is rope. They would need so much fucking rope, because not only do you need ropes to do all the things, but in order to make a tackle, which is a simple machine that reduces the amount of force you need to exert in order to lift or pull something, you need to double the amount of rope. So, by the 19th century, the ships are using tackles that are five or six times the amount of rope of the distance you need that rope to go. But the result is one person can much more easily lift a very heavy weight of canvas sail, or a mast — things like that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, again, there’s no reason Pern would have forgotten that, because that’s a “We have this physical thing; we’re gonna keep using it.” We have the boats; why wouldn’t we?

Tequila Mockingbird: And so that’s just a lot of rope. We do know, according to the Dragonlover’s Guide to Pern, that they are using sisal, which is a South American, Central American textile that is often compared to the European hemp.

Lleu: Which might be what is referred to in Renegades in three instances when there is a reference to hemp. Two of those are rope, one of those is a bag.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is really, really good for making rope, but it is a very rough and scratchy fiber. If you have encountered it, it was probably one of — you know those, like, scratchy rugs, kind of itchy scratchy and have little fluffy bits and are kind of tan?

Tequila Mockingbird: That could be hemp, it could be jute, it could be sisal. But that’s that kind of material. I can’t imagine that when you have linen you would choose to wear clothing made from sisal unless someone was making you.

Tequila Mockingbird: Personally. So I would guess that they were growing sisal specifically for use in rope, both in the Fishercraft Hall and in other applications, but that the Fishercraft Hall would need —

Tequila Mockingbird: — a lot of it, and that they would be doing that production in-house.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because not only do you need to make the rope, but often you need to tar the rope, you need to oil the rope — there’s a lot that goes into it. Can you tell that I went on a tall ship last week for the first time in my life?

Lleu: This is something we’re gonna come back to for sure when we get to “how does Pern’s economy work,” because the way that so many different trades are folded into these kind of super-guilds that are the Crafts is completely not aligned with any historical precedent for how guilds work. We would expect Pern to have something like 40 to 50 guilds, probably, at minimum —

Lleu: So, the picture that we now have of textile production on Pern not too dissimilar, except in the range of technologies that are available to them, from a lot of the pre-modern world, basically, where you have domestic textile production happening in individual households or sort of shared among households within a community to meet the day-to-day needs of a community, providing clothing, providing material for rope, for bags, for other things that you might need textiles for —

Lleu: I still am not convinced that they have sheets, but we do know that they are putting the rushes that they use as mattresses in some kind of bag.

Tequila Mockingbird: I hope that they have sheets because if they’re cleaning the furs after all of the orgies in the Weyr, my deepest sympathies to the laundry people.

Lleu: You know how it is. And then additionally, there are textile workshops, probably broadly, mostly under the control of the Weavercraft, at least for certain kinds of textile production — luxury textiles, and especially tapestries and decorative textile work — but then also under the control of Holds, either the Holder’s family or — we don’t know entirely how property works on Pern, even after all these books; we’ll come back to that in the future, for sure. Anyway, that are producing fancier fabrics, brocades —

Lleu: — things that are more labor-intensive or require more specialized knowledge, like brocade patterns.

Tequila Mockingbird: And obviously it could then be embroidered, appliquéd, decorated, beaded, anything that you like. We don’t see a lot of evidence of things other than embroidery, which is the most straightforward version of that. It doesn’t take other materials particularly. Presumably, some of the nice, respectable Hold girls who don’t become dragonriders are busy doing that with their time.

Lleu: Yeah. And these goods are being transported over rivers and over water, which we did not necessarily think was possible but turns out it is.

Tequila Mockingbird: Look, if they could get the fish from one place to another.

Tequila Mockingbird: Ultimately, do I feel like I really understand textile production on Pern? No.

Lleu: My recommendation, if you’re interested in a book where clothing plays a major role in the narrative — I highly recommend Finn Longman’s The Wolf and His King, which is retelling slash reworking of Marie de France’s lai — so, a narrative poem — Bisclavret, about a werewolf. It’s really, really good, thinking a lot of interesting thoughts about disability, and, basically, the werewolf’s transformation is mediated by clothing. So the book is very attentive to clothing and the feel of clothing, the destruction of clothing in some cases, and what all of the clothing means.

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright. And I would recommend Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed, which is a romantasy about a swordsman and a wool merchant who fall in love, and the plot is deeply concerned with the logistics of wool and ndustrial espionage in the wool guilds on in this fantasy world. I read it specifically because I read a review that complained that there was not enough kissing and too much industrial wool espionage, and I found it delightful. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s a fun romp.

Lleu: I also — I will just offer a shoutout, if you are interested in long-timescale, chonky social history that does talk a whole bunch about textile production in the pre-modern period, I cannot recommend Amanda H. Podany’s Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East highly enough. It’s so, so good, and, as the fact that “weavers” is the first word in the title suggests, it does talk a whole bunch about ancient Near Eastern textile production and the textile trade.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would also say a lot of the books that we consulted are going to be on the website, and I thought a lot of the ones I read were pretty good reads, if you find it more interesting.

Lleu: All the ones I read have also been good reads, they just are not mostly primarily focused on textile production. They’re chonky, large-timescale social histories.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] Obviously this is variable, and llamas are versatile animals capable of surviving in different climates; the High Reaches just don’t seem to resemble the climate of the Andes, broadly.

[2] On further consideration, the main contradiction here is the fact that despite there being no indication that Menolly is involved in fiber-based cloth production in Half-Circle she does apparently know how to tan leather, suggesting that she was involved in at least some kinds of skilled labor.

[3] We forgot that this also falls apart because they are in the process of laying down a new ship, which would require new sails.