Scene from a story

This is a scene description from a story.

They passed under a gateway, with the tall gates standing wide, and she was finally inside. TerraeAndrea: inside the city, where instead of shadow flickers, she saw real movement, more movement, more smells, and more people than she had expected to exist anywhere. Paved stones took the place of packed dirt. Buildings, market stalls with their awnings, sellers, buyers, and water troughs lined the stone-flagged lanes. She sidestepped cart wheels, watched the tumbling of coins from one hand to another. She listened to conversations in languages she could not understand, and gestures she could.
The merchants were robed in brown and blue, green and grey, orange and umber, their robes swirling about their bellies, and fluttering the road dust at their feet. Sheep bleated, cows lowed, children wearing scraps of clothing chased each other through the trading stalls and were chased in their turn by the traders. The girl followed the children with her eyes, and the crowd moving slowly along the market stalls with her feet.
Walking with the pace of the crowd, following the pointed finger or the shrugged shoulder, she wound through the city of TerraeAndrea. She dodged the high-smelling sheep, and their manure that clotted the cobblestones and slid toward the gutter in the middle of the way. She skirted the cinnamon-trousered and shouting traders, their embroidered fabrics dangling from poles, their bags of roots set in high stacks, and small pouches. Leather makers displayed shoes and boots and leggings, tunics and overcoats dyed from plants and sea salts and blood. Harlequin clad players juggled copper spheres and patched thieves pilfered. At the edges of the streets were booths displaying food: trays of dried fruit and pans of stew, piles of cinnabar fruit and strings of root dried vegetables. There were bags of grain and strings of colored beads. Where the streets crossed, bins of blue and yellow flowers bloomed.
She watched the people working between the stalls and booths, sometimes moving at the pace of the shoppers, sometimes standing still at the edge of the crowd. The orange-robed merchant laid a thick finger on the side of the scale as he weighed out orris root. A thin boy darted from bag to bag, until he found one with the ties unloosened, and before he could be caught by the neck, had disappeared in the crowd – but not before he had pulled from the sack a handful of coin. Two men stood in a shadowed alleyway, one counting change into the palm of the other, who looked about for watchers. The shoppers held purses and head wraps, bags of dried seaweed and bins of cloth. They spoke in dialect and language.
“Best dried fish you’ll get, else you visit the coast.”
“My leather boots will never wear through.”
“Grain from the plains. Grain from the plains.”
“Dragon’s tooth. Retch seed. Chickleweed berries.”
“You will not find cloth better. Brought here on the boats of Catalpha.”
Much later, she stood noise-dazed and half smiling, peering inside a grey stone archway, up grey stone steps that sagged into the grey stone dimness. On one side, the street at her back was as clogged as any near the gate: this one with merchants selling long sticks with thin strips of colored cloth flying in the wind, bits of leather, feathers and small baskets of sea stones. On the other side of the street, the side where she stood, was a squared building of grey stone, no sellers squatting at its base, no walkers loitering against its walls. Lengths of dun color fabric billowed outward from openings in the walls high above her. There were no people or market stalls on that side of the road near the building, just long pieces of pale fabric, flapping in the wind.