It’s some time ago now, but there was a fashion for drinking the rare black lichen. I say drinking because they used to dry it over open fires, grind it fine and mix it in almost pure spirit. It was strange stuff; it could give you strange dreams or even stranger nightmares.

Some artists of various sorts claimed it transported them to strange worlds beyond the imagination and the revelations they received inspired their finest work. For myself I merely comment that the time I drank three glasses of the stuff I couldn’t do any useful work for three days after it (and couldn’t see properly for two of them.) Others have told me that the main effect it had on them was to loosen the bowels rather than the chains of imagination.

But still the authorities banned it. Just why is something of a mystery. Personally I was quite taken by the theory put forward by Ingenious Trool. He held that some wished to tax it as a patent medicine, some as a spirituous liquor and others as a poison used for keeping down vermin. Because various coteries within the Council of Sinecurists couldn’t agree, it ended up banned.

Obviously with the ban in place people started demanding it and other people started smuggling it.  Looking back that might well have been part of the reason they banned the stuff, it massively boosted the trade.

To show the amount of money sloshing about in the business, Tackker Jake purchased his sinecure using the profits from his smuggling operation. Strangely enough I was partially responsible for his success and his slow march to relative respectability.

I’d known Tackker reasonably well, he berthed at Fellmonger’s Wharf between times, and in the past he’d been a shore-comber so obviously knew my lady wife Shena. Tackker and I weren’t close but I confess I liked him, as rogues go he was decent enough. You could berth downstream of him and not have to put up with a constant stream of his business rivals floating face down past your portholes. Not only that but the night was rarely disturbed by inexplicable screams.

(Note Shena is looking over my shoulder at this point and has commented that when you see the bodies washed up on the foreshore the reason for the screaming is all too explicable. She also pondered aloud whether the perpetrator was a fool who didn’t know how the tides ran, and was thus a little perturbed that the battered evidence of their wrong doing was spread the length of the Old Esplanade; or an evil genius who wanted to make sure people saw the evidence and took the hint.)

But anyway, Tackker approached the whole smuggling business methodically. He made sure he sold a decent product, Black Lye, which contained genuine black lichen rather than the charred sawdust some of his competitors used. He had it bottled in distinctive bottles, squat with a cork not a lead cap. But his brainwave was to bundle bottles up in raw orid hides. There are a lot of raw hides shipped into Port Naain for tanning so a few more should excite no special interest. Also, no exciseman was going to enthusiastically search through a pile of wet stinking hides at the start of his working day. So in the unlikely event of a search it would be desultory at best. Finally the smell of untanned hide clung to the bottles, proving to his customers that this was the real thing, smuggled in from Partaan. This was as opposed to the floor sweepings from the Spittle Close spice warehouse stirred into cheap spirit that some of his competitors sold.

I was sitting on the deck watching the rising tide lifting the moored boats. It is a pleasant enough way to enjoy the early morning sunshine with the added excitement that there is always somebody who has tied their mooring lines too short. Then, sailing up the river at a fair clip I spotted ‘Storm Wracked’, the boat of Tackker Jake. They tied up alongside us, Tackker leapt over the side onto our barge, thrust a stinking bag sewn from two uncured orid hides at me and said, “Hide this.”

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