Customs of Jhelum

Nightcats

Customs of Jhelum

Jhelum is a city of many peoples, faiths, languages, and fortunes. It has no fixed system of castes. Birth matters, titles matter, wealth matters, and a drawn sword often matters most of all—but none of these necessarily lasts. A beggar may discover a ruby before breakfast, feast with princes that evening, and be back in the gutter by morning.

Nightcats are particularly prone to such changes in fortune.

Despite its great variety, Jhelum possesses customs understood by nearly everyone. Foreigners are forgiven for honest mistakes. People who persist in bad manners after being corrected are assumed to be barbarians, fools, or deliberately seeking a fight.

Rank and Respect

Bow to Rank

People incline their heads to officials and persons of higher station. They bow from the waist to nobles and place their hands together before priests, ascetics, and other holy persons.

Prostration is reserved for the raja, the gods, and those making an exceptionally extravagant apology.

It is not necessary to bow to every wealthy person in the street. Jhelum is far too crowded for that. When formally presented, however, it is wise to show respect.

Respect Age, but Fear Power

Elders are addressed politely and usually allowed to speak first. A white beard commands a certain consideration even when attached to a notorious liar.

Rank in Jhelum is real, but it is not immovable. A successful soldier may become a captain, a merchant may purchase an estate, and a clever adventurer may dine with nobles. The same people may lose everything through war, scandal, debt, or one disastrously unlucky night at the gaming table.

Offer Respect Before Business

Business begins with greetings, compliments, and often a cup of something. A visitor should ask after the health of the household before naming a price or making a demand.

Someone who immediately begins bargaining is assumed to be a foreigner, a barbarian, or desperate. Someone who begins by praising the merchant's wisdom is assumed to want credit.

Use the Right Hand

Food, coins, gifts, and written messages are offered with the right hand. Both hands may be used when giving something to a noble, priest, elder, or honored guest.

Passing food with the left hand is considered unclean. Passing money with the left hand suggests contempt for the person receiving it.

Do Not Point

Pointing directly at a noble, priest, shrine, or respectable person is ill-mannered. A person indicates them with an open hand instead.

Pointing a single finger at someone during an argument is accusatory and may be taken as a challenge.

Do Not Touch the Head

The head is regarded as the seat of dignity, thought, and spirit. Touching another person's head without permission is deeply insulting.

Patting the head of a very small child may be tolerated. Patting the head of a warrior is an excellent way to discover how quickly the warrior can draw a sword.

Homes and Hospitality

Remove Your Shoes

Shoes are commonly left at the entrance of homes, shrines, and certain private rooms. A servant may indicate where they should be placed.

Walking across a fine carpet in dusty street sandals is a calculated insult—or evidence that the visitor was raised by goats.

A Guest Must Be Fed

A host offers a guest water and at least a little food before asking serious questions. Even an enemy who has formally accepted hospitality is entitled to these courtesies.

Violence beneath a host's roof is disgraceful. This protection traditionally lasts until the guest has departed and passed beyond the light of the doorway.

Ambushing the guest in the next alley is considered treacherous, but technically avoids insulting the household.

Do Not Refuse the First Cup

A guest should accept at least a taste of whatever is offered. Refusing a drink untouched suggests that the host is unclean or suspected of poisoning it.

A person who cannot or does not wish to drink may touch the cup to the lips without swallowing. Hosts who insist beyond that point are behaving badly—or are, in fact, attempting to administer poison.

Water Is Freely Given

Refusing drinking water to a traveler is contemptible. Temples, guilds, merchants, and wealthy households maintain fountains and large clay water jars in public places.

A cup is often chained beside the jar. Stealing such a cup is regarded as almost unbelievably mean, even among thieves.

Never Step Over Food, Weapons, or People

People walk around food laid upon the floor rather than stepping across it. The same courtesy is extended to anyone sleeping or sitting upon the ground.

Stepping over a weapon insults its owner. Stepping over food insults the household. Stepping over a person invites an immediate quarrel.

Temples and the Gods

Jhelum contains countless temples, shrines, sacred trees, holy wells, roadside images, and niches containing household gods. A prudent person shows respect even toward gods they do not worship. There are too many gods to risk offending them indiscriminately.

Leave an Offering

People asking divine favor commonly leave flowers, incense, lamp oil, fruit, sweets, milk, food, or a few copper dams. A poor person may offer clean water, a song, or a whispered prayer.

Travelers leave offerings before journeys. Merchants do so before important ventures. Gamblers make offerings after winning and solemn promises before losing.

Nightcats tend to remember the gods when dangling from rooftops, hiding beneath beds, or hearing the Red Sashes coming up the stairs.

Never Steal an Offering

Even thieves observe this rule. An offering belongs to the god, not to the temple or the priest. Taking it invites supernatural vengeance and makes enemies of priests, beggars, worshippers, and other criminals.

A Nightcat may steal the jeweled idol from a corrupt high priest. That is adventure.

A Nightcat does not steal the copper dam placed before it by a widow. That is contemptible.

Respect the Hour of Prayer

Markets do not necessarily close during prayers, but shouting, music, and public quarrels near a shrine are expected to cease while bells, gongs, or chants are heard.

Criminals sometimes use the momentary quiet to listen for approaching guards.

Sacred Creatures Have the Right of Way

Temple animals, funeral processions, priests carrying holy objects, and pilgrims engaged in public observances are given room to pass.

In practice, Jhelum also yields to elephants, noble processions, armed soldiers, heavily laden porters, runaway carts, and anything else too large or dangerous to argue with.

Eating in Jhelum

Meals are commonly shared. Diners sit around central dishes and eat with the fingers of the right hand. Flatbread is torn into pieces and used to scoop up rice, lentils, vegetables, meat, and sauces.

Bread should be broken rather than bitten directly from a communal loaf. A person should never return a piece of bread to a shared dish after touching it to the mouth.

A host normally urges guests to eat more. Guests normally refuse once or twice before accepting. Everyone understands this ritual, yet everyone performs it.

Common Foods

The ordinary people of Jhelum eat well when fortune permits and simply when it does not. Common foods include:

• Flatbread cooked on a hot stone or against the wall of an oven
• Rice with lentils, onions, herbs, and spices
• Chickpeas and other pulses
• Spiced vegetables
• Yogurt, curds, and clarified butter
• Pickled fruits and vegetables
• River fish
• Goat, mutton, and chicken
• Dates, melons, pomegranates, mangoes, figs, and citrus fruits
• Almonds, pistachios, sesame seeds, and other nuts
• Fried cakes and sweet pastries flavored with honey, rosewater, or spices

Meat is a welcome addition to a meal rather than its inevitable centerpiece. Wealthy households serve several meat dishes, elaborate rice preparations, sweetmeats, and imported fruits.

Street Food

Jhelum's markets remain busy from before sunrise until deep into the night. Vendors sell:

• Skewered meat roasted over charcoal
• Fried chickpea cakes
• Flatbread stuffed with vegetables or minced meat
• Bowls of rice and lentils
• Spiced river fish
• Roasted nuts and chickpeas
• Fresh and dried fruit
• Pickles wrapped in leaves
• Honey cakes and syrup-soaked pastries

A copper dam buys a modest serving. Two dams buy enough to satisfy a hungry laborer. Prices rise sharply near palaces, temples, and foreigners.

Drink

Most people drink water, yogurt drinks, or fruit beverages. Alcohol is common enough that no one is surprised by it, but drunkenness in a temple, noble household, or public audience is disgraceful.

Water

Water is the everyday drink. Good households serve it cool from porous clay jars, sometimes scented with flowers, citrus peel, or herbs.

Lassi and Buttermilk

Lassi is made from yogurt and water. It may be sweetened with fruit or honey, or served salted and spiced.

Spiced buttermilk is a cheap and refreshing drink favored by laborers, travelers, and anyone suffering through the heat of midday.

Sharbat

Sharbat is made from fruit, flower, nut, or herb syrup mixed with cool water. Rose, pomegranate, lemon, tamarind, and almond are common flavors.

A wealthy household serves sharbat chilled with mountain ice. The price of such ice in summer can be astonishing.

Sura

Sura is Jhelum's ordinary tavern drink. It is a cloudy fermented liquor made from grain, rice, fruit, or sugarcane. Its quality ranges from pleasant and mildly intoxicating to something capable of removing paint.

When someone in Jhelum simply orders a drink, sura is usually what arrives.

Arrack

Arrack is a strong distilled liquor made from sugarcane, grain, fruit, or palm sap. It is clear, fiery, inexpensive, and strongly associated with soldiers, sailors, thieves, and unfortunate decisions.

A tavern that advertises unusually cheap arrack is either watering it or using it to disguise something worse.

Wine

Grape wine is a prestigious drink associated with nobles, rich merchants, foreigners, and expensive pleasure houses. The best wines come from western vineyards and cool mountain valleys.

Wine may be spiced, sweetened with honey, or scented with rosewater. Sealed jars of an acclaimed vintage are valuable goods and occasionally worth stealing.

Cheap taverns may describe almost any fermented fruit drink as wine.

Toddy and Mead

Toddy is fermented palm sap. It is inexpensive and refreshing, although much of that sold in Jhelum is brought from warmer country.

Mead is made from honey. It is less common than sura or wine but may be found at festivals, country inns, and the tables of wealthy eccentrics.

Bhang

Bhang is prepared from cannabis, milk, nuts, and spices. It is associated with festivals, holy persons, and particular drinking houses rather than ordinary tavern life.

Its effects are unpredictable, especially when someone has already been drinking arrack.

Coinage

Most commerce in Jhelum uses copper and silver. Gold is too valuable for ordinary coinage and is normally weighed rather than counted.

Coin	Metal	Common Use
Dam	Copper	Food, drink, ferries, small bribes, street purchases, and other daily expenses
Tanka	Silver	Wages, lodging, weapons, animals, valuable goods, serious bribes, and respectable gambling stakes
Gold	Rings, dust, ingots, jewelry, or cut pieces	Tribute, ransoms, royal gifts, major trade, and fabulous treasure

Twelve copper dams equal one silver tanka.

Tankas are often called silvers in ordinary speech. A person might demand "five silvers" rather than "five tankas." Dams are simply called coppers when their exact origin does not matter.

Coins from many kingdoms circulate in Jhelum. Money changers test unfamiliar silver by weight, markings, and the sound it makes when struck. Foreign coins may be clipped, debased, or refused entirely.

Gold is weighed on small balances. Merchants accept rings, dust, pieces of jewelry, cut sections of ingots, and foreign gold coins according to their actual weight and purity. Anyone attempting to pay for breakfast with gold should expect an audience.

Typical Prices

Purchase	Typical Price
Flatbread, fruit, or a small street snack	1 dam
Filling common meal	2 dams
Cup of sura	1 dam
Cup of arrack	2 dams
Jug of ordinary sura	3–4 dams
Cup of respectable wine	4–6 dams
Bed in a crowded common room	3 dams
Modest private room	6 dams
Good room with a lock and clean bedding	1 tanka
Bath, shave, and laundering	3–6 dams
Ordinary day's wages	4–8 dams
A generous everyday bribe	2–4 dams
A bribe requiring someone to forget a face	1–3 tankas
A bribe requiring someone to forget a murder	Whatever the witness believes their life is worth

Prices vary with season, district, scarcity, the appearance of the customer, and the number of armed companions standing behind them.

Bargaining

Bargaining is expected in markets, bazaars, stables, workshops, and most private transactions. The first price is an invitation rather than a fact.

A buyer who pays the first price without argument is assumed to be newly arrived and wonderfully exploitable. A buyer who argues over every copper is considered mean. The object is not merely to reach a price, but to allow both parties to demonstrate wit, patience, and worldly experience.

Food stalls, bathhouses, ferries, and common taverns usually charge customary prices. Haggling over a single cup of sura will save little money and cost considerable dignity.

The Jhelumi Ideal

Jhelum respects generosity, hospitality, age, faith, courage, and visible rank. It also admires anyone clever enough to bend the rules without openly breaking them.

This is why Nightcats are alternately celebrated, condemned, employed, imprisoned, toasted, and chased across the rooftops.

They bow to nobles, leave offerings for the gods, feed their guests, and never steal a widow's last copper.

They also regard most laws as helpful suggestions.