Spyros and Edo Garum

Their given names Edokia and Spyros, it is Edo that is more generally referred to as ‘Garum’ for it is she that deals with their customers, citizen and quality alike. So much of the professional garum and doxy produced is from their workshops, and from which they enjoy a monopoly on the sauce that is such a common part of civilised Parquet comes. Greeks, they were both given up by the sea some decades before and very young, telling the story of having fled from her father’s wrath at their marriage, pursued into a storm before being coming by fortune to Parquet. Later arrivals from the Aegean tell of Greece’s freedom from the Ottoman Empire, and even most lately of it having become a kingdom. Yet Edo and Spyros regard it all as far away, so content are they in Parquet. Still though they remember the old county, and where few are given up from Greece or the eastern Mediterranean all those can reliably find work with the Garum. Old now, Edo and Spyros are both wonderfully preserved, proud, and rule over an enterprise that makes them important people in Port Mercy.

Spyros deals with the fishermen, many of whose boats are his or in which he has a share. He sources the salt and the many ingredients for the garum. He oversees the work and where, while a notorious taskmaster, he is fiercely protective of his people. Edo as the Garum (by name) sees to the business, most often from a shaded chair where she smokes a pipe in the company of her daughters and from which she prices garum and doxy to the mongers. Other than the buyers for the quality she sells only to those that in turn sell on to the citizens. It is well known that her prices reflect how she likes a person, how respectable they at least try to appear and importantly how much they mark up the sauces to sell on to others.

Edo Garum will rarely attend balls, and to which she is often invited. So important is garum itself that her strict views on love and marriage can cause many an otherwise wild occasion to grow more sombre. It is not that she disapproves of jollity, so much as she believes in her wilful way in the sanctity of love and in her case for her beloved Spyros, her great walrus of a husband. Not to be confused with the three great promissories of Parquet she does agree to loans for those that have proven themselves able fishermen, to set themselves up with a boat when one comes for sale, and in which then Spyros takes the pick of the catch. Two years ago they were robbed, their strong box found and thieved from. Threatened by her ire and the risk of a doxy drought half of Parquet turned out to seek the thieves who were brought shamefaced and lumpen not two days after to where Spyros punished them personally. Some say that the thieves caught were a pair of ruffians universally disliked, and not the true thieves at all. Further, that certain Jacks between them raised the amount stolen so it could therefore be restored. Whatever the truth of it a lesson was most certainly taught to those that would consider whom they might best rob. Two years ago the garum sheds were burned out, but they were but sheds and the talent of the garumeers was untouched, even if for some weeks they were forced to work in Fen’s sheds whilst their own were rebuilt. The arsonist was caught within the week by a well-rewarded Mr. Screw, his fate at the hands of Captain Leather, the Jack of Port Mercy, still spoken with in awe in the tabernas of a night.