The yellowbelly: a mild toxin in the fins and a painful bite makes this fish another difficult one to handle. Sometimes taken in nets, it tops 10 kilos and provides a bland if pleasant meat.

The prickleback: bony, with a good assortment of spiny fins which lay fiat until grasped. A fat, toothless bottom-feeder of about 3 to 6 kilos, excellent food fish if properly filleted.

The fathead: a big bottomfeeder with a conspicuous fleshy prominence above the eyes, toothless but voracious and omnivorous. It may top 30 kilos and tends out to sea past its first few years, where it grows above 100 kilos in weight.

The redfin: named for its beautiful red-orange tail and dorsal fins, this small fish (about two handspans in length at maximum) is an excellent but troublesome foodfish. Its bite is notoriously painful.

The deathangel: most beautiful of estuary fish, with trailing fins of black on a yellow and silver body, the deathangel is aptly named. The three banner-spines and the ventral spine carry a toxin so lethal and so long-lasting that the dried spine of a deathangel can kill a victim weeks afterward, if the poison sac at the ventral side of the spine is intact. If the spines and the internal glands are removed, the deathangel, about a kilo of platter-shaped fish, is delicious and mildly intoxicating, though overindulgence can lead to toxic reaction. In a few sensitive individuals this reaction comes much sooner, and one fatality from the meat alone has been recorded in Merovingen.

Merovingian Music

Music on Merovin has the same roots as language, [see Language] both ethnic and popular. It is also influenced by the spacer-chanteys, which are both ethnic and varied, and which are a ship's living history.

Some songs survived the Scouring; others are hero ballads out of the Scouring and the Re-establishment [QV] which relate tales of the resistance and the rebuilding.

There are love songs and a rich and varied liturgical music; marches and work-songs and working sea-chanteys and popular dirties which come and go by fashion, many of which are disguisedly political.

Principle instruments are: the horn, a brass, lip-modulated instrument of increasingly complex shapes and tones.

The drum: drummers are a popular holiday street entertainment; and drums also signal executions and solemn occasion.

The gitar: a stringed, long-necked instrument

The sither: another variety of gitar but much larger, having drone-strings and a round sounding-chamber: this instrument is Merovan in origin, by extensive modification of a Terran instrument. Common in the Chattalen, and known in the north and in Nevander, it plays often in accompaniment to drums and chimes.

The harp: a vertical stringed instrument of ancient origins, reproduced on Merovin in imitation of traditional description.

Chimes: all sorts of bells.