One day a boat with sails came up the Limbo, surging improbably against the current, milky white foam beneath the stern. Out of the boat jumped men who began making darting forays into the woods. From the boat they brought tools with which to cut down the giant trees so that they could be cut into boards to build the walls of the tavern, the church, the merchant’s house and the town hall of a certain virgin village, to be built on the island there, in the middle of Ave’s jurisdiction.

Down crashed the first line of trees arrayed like fusiliers in the glade, splitting the gnarled black boughs beneath whose bark the creamy white paths of the woodworm lay.
The strange men trapped all of Ave’s children with an ease that amply demonstrated the ingenuity and power of their arts. Carrying Hessian bags filled with brown almonds, they spread trails throughout the forest, coaxing bird and beast to eat, the trails spiralling according to an alien logic towards the brand new clearing, where the city of Ahem, with its Almond plantations and harvesting halls, would come to be.

Ah, benevolent Almond! How harmless you seemed at first! How graceful seemed your curling shoots, your slim green stems, your pigmented skin! Rows of the wonder nut planted in the freshly cleared spaces of the island grew quickly in the fertile river soils. As they grew and grew, alien patterns could be discerned in the planting designs: gyres, pendulums and waves being the most prominent formations.

In those early days, of course, there was nothing fancy or wondrous about the Imperial city of Ahem. It was a ramshackle town, ostensibly dedicated to commerce but lacking somewhat a certain spiritual flavour. After a few weeks most of the ingenious Venetian hunters had returned to their own island city, leaving the future prosperity of the town in the hands of the Merchant Lord Peele d’Almonde, his daughter Blanche and his several men.

Though none of Ave’s children understood a word any of these fancifully dressed gentlemen said, they nevertheless were dependent upon the strangers for food, having been denied their traditional diet by the clearing of the forests. They studied their captors with the curiosity of birds — first the left eyes, then the right swung round to regard these workings of Venetian society, to which all of them would soon pledge unswerving allegiance, having so quickly forgotten their names.