Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 583: Chapter 578: The Vote at Anseth

Location:Anseth, on the provisioning circuit

Date/Time:17 Infernorest 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Lower Realm

Vukan Sered did the Anseth ledgers over two days because they deserved two days, and because he is not quick with figures and stopped apologizing for that some years ago.

What he has is time.

That is a thing a man discovers he owns after he has been somewhere that took everything else, and he had worked out in the first winter after that it was the only advantage he was ever going to have over cleverer men. A clever man checks a column once. Vukan checks it three times and finds the thing on the third pass, and the thing is nearly always there.

The Anseth figures were clean.

That wanted writing down somewhere, so it went in his own book, which nobody reads: Anseth, 15–17 Infernorest. Flour, oil, salt, iron, cloth. No discrepancy. Granary dry. Nothing wrong here.

Then he sat on a wall in the square and waited for the carter, because the carter was two hours late and there was nothing else to be done about it.

That is how he came to be there for the vote.

***

They hold it in the open at Anseth, in front of the well, which is the sort of thing a village does when it has done the same thing in the same place for two hundred years and has stopped noticing it is a custom.

A hundred-odd people. Not all of them — the far holdings do not come down for a vote about money — but enough, standing and sitting about on the stones with children going in and out between them, and Orrick the steward with a slate, thirty years in the post and still the whole of the administration.

Vukan had no business there and did not move off the wall. Nobody asked him to. Vukan had a Temple coat and a ledger satchel and a face people have got used to over four years, and in a Lower Realm village that makes him furniture.

The first two items were a culvert and a dispute about a boundary hedge.

Vukan watched the hedge dispute all the way through, because the hedge dispute was the one that told him something.

Two families, forty years of it, and a line of thorn that had moved about a pace and a half since anybody’s father was alive. The sort of thing a priest holds in the middle of. That is what the middle of a village dispute has been for as long as there have been villages, and it is most of what a country priest actually does — stand between two people who both want to be reasonable in front of somebody.

Orrick read out a measurement off a survey sheet with a corps stamp in the corner, and asked both men whether they accepted the sheet, and both men said they did, and that was the end of forty years.

Nobody looked at the priest once. Not to agree with him and not to avoid him. He was simply not part of the mechanism any more, and the mechanism had taken about four minutes.

The third item was the machines.

***

Vukan understood about half of it, because they were all a long way into a conversation that had plainly been running for weeks.

What he got was this. The Academy sells farming machines — a seed drill, something for threshing, a thing for lifting water — at a price that is not a clan price, paid off over three harvests. Anseth had been counting. Anseth had worked out that if every house in the village put in the same share, they could have the drill and the threshing machine before the Cinderfall harvest and the water-lift the year after.

Orrick read the figures off his slate twice, slowly, because about a third of the people in that square were following them with their lips moving and he had decided to let them.

Nobody argued about the machines.

What they argued about for three-quarters of an hour was the share — whether a house with no land paid the same as a house with forty, and whether the widow Tolen paid at all, and whether a man who had been away three years still counted as a house. That took the longest and was settled in the end by his sister, loudly, in his favor.

Vukan sat on the wall and listened to a hundred people in a square argue about a subscription, and found he was enjoying it, and did not examine that.

Then Orrick looked at his slate and said the next thing on it, which was the blessing.

***

The priest’s name was Hollis and Vukan had known him for four years.

Hollis had been at the back the whole time, in the plain gray that the Temple puts on country priests, and he was not a fool, and he was not a thief, and he had buried a great many people in that valley with genuine care. Vukan would have said, and had said, in writing, that Hollis was the best of them on that circuit.

The blessing of the fields is done at the turn of Infernorest into Cinderfall. It has been done at Anseth for longer than Anseth has had a well. The priest walks the boundaries, and the Temple takes a share of the harvest for it — not a large share, a customary one, the same share since before anybody’s grandmother.

”We’re asking for it to be set aside this year,” said a woman near the front.

It was not said angrily. That was the first thing Vukan noticed, and it is the thing he will be turning over for the rest of his life. There was no heat in the square at all. The culvert had had more heat in it.

Orrick wrote it down.

”Set aside the once. For the machine money.” The woman turned round to the square rather than to the priest, which was its own answer about who she thought she was addressing. ”It’s not against him. Everybody knows it’s not against him.”

A general noise of agreement, warm enough.

”It’s that it’s the same grain,” she said. ”It’s the exact same grain, and there’s one pile of it, and we’re short for the drill by about what the blessing comes to. That’s all it is.”

***

Hollis came forward then, and he did it well.

He did not plead and did not threaten, and he did not say any of the four things Vukan had heard other priests say in that situation on other circuits, all of which would have lost the square inside a sentence. What he said was that he understood, and that he would walk the boundaries anyway, this year, for nothing, because it was his to do and he would rather do it than not.

And that was when it happened, and it took about the space of a breath.

A man near the back — Vukan never got his name — said, perfectly pleasantly: ”You don’t have to, though.”

Not you need not trouble. Not we could not ask it. You don’t have to.

And Hollis said, ”It is no trouble,” which was true, and which was the wrong sentence, and Vukan watched him not know that it was the wrong sentence.

”No, but —” The man was not being cruel. He was working something out in front of everybody, as people do at a village vote. ”The fields are all right. That’s the thing. Vorn’s bottom field hasn’t flooded since they did the ditch, and the yield’s up two years running, and the corps man came and tested the water and showed us where the seep was. So it’s not that we don’t want you walking. It’s that nothing’s wrong with the fields.”

Somebody said, ”It’s a nice walk, though,” and there was a laugh, and it was an affectionate laugh, and nobody in that square heard what had just gone past them.

Orrick wrote set aside on his slate and read out the next item, which was the culvert again.

***

Vukan sat on the wall for a long time after the square emptied.

Vukan has been accused of a great many things on that circuit, by Temple men and lately by corps men and once, memorably, by both in the same room, and the accusation that comes up most is that he does not know what he wants. Defending himself against it stopped being worth the breath, because it is partly true.

What he knew, sitting on that wall, was the exact shape of what had happened, and he made himself say it in order, because he had learned in the mountain that a thing you have not said in order is a thing you will later pretend was different.

One. Nobody had attacked the Temple.

Two. Nobody had argued against it. There had not been one word spoken against the Temple in that square, and there would not have been if the vote had run all night.

Three. The blessing had been set aside because the fields were fine, and the fields were fine because somebody had dug a ditch and tested the water.

Four. It would not come back next year. That he knew with total certainty and could not have told anybody how. There is no vote to bring a thing back. There is only a year in which nobody raises it, and then another.

And five, which was the one that made him get up off the wall.

Nobody in that square had decided anything about the Temple. They were not choosing. They had moved an item from one column to another to afford a seed drill, in a square, in the afternoon, between a culvert and a boundary hedge, and had gone home pleased with themselves, and not one of them would be able to tell you a few years from now when it was that their village had stopped.

He had thought this once before, on a corner at Corran, watching this same man walk up a street where nobody needed him. He had not written it down then. He had decided a man could carry both.

He had not, until this afternoon, watched it happen.

***

Vukan walked out to find Hollis on the road an hour later, because he could not leave it.

”You should not have offered to do it free.”

”I know.” Hollis had his hands in his sleeves and was looking at the hedge. ”I knew while I was saying it. The price was the last thing in it that was theirs.”

Vukan stopped walking in the middle of the road.

He had not got that far. He had spent an hour on that wall taking the thing apart in order, and he had not got anywhere near that far.

”They paid for it.” Hollis looked up. ”That is the whole of what a customary share is, Vukan, and I have been twenty years not understanding it. It was never the Temple’s wage. It was the thing that made the blessing theirs. A man who has paid a tenth of a pile of grain for a walk round his own fields owns that walk. And I stood in front of a hundred people and told them I would do it for nothing, which is a very generous thing to do, and what I actually did was take the last of it off them.”

The two of them stood in the road.

”You are better at this than I am,” said Vukan.

”I am better at it afterward. That is not the same, and it is not worth much.” Hollis started walking again. ”Will you put it in your report?”

”Yes.”

”Put the bit about the ditch in as well, then. It is the true part.” He said it without any bitterness at all, which Vukan found harder to carry than bitterness. ”Vorn’s bottom field used to flood every third year and his father lost a leg to it, and I have sat with that family four times about that field. It does not flood now. I am not going to stand in a road and tell you that is bad.”

***

Vukan wrote the report that night at the inn, and it took him until the second bell, and he did it three times.

The first version was accurate, and he burned it, because it read as a complaint and he had learned at twenty that a complaint is a thing people file rather than read.

The second version was clever, and he burned that too, with more satisfaction, because he does not trust himself clever.

The third version was four hundred words and had no adjectives in it. The vote. The item. The figures off Orrick’s slate, which he had copied in the square without anybody minding. The ditch at Vorn’s bottom field and the corps man who tested the water and the two years of yield. The sentence you don’t have to, written exactly as it was said. Hollis’s offer and what it cost. And at the bottom, one line of his own, because he has never sent a report without one and never will:

Nobody argued against the Temple at Anseth. That is the finding. There was nothing to argue with, and nobody to argue with it, and the item was set aside in the ordinary way between a culvert and a hedge, and it will not come back.

Vukan read it over and sat with it a while.

Then he added the last line, which he thought about for half an hour first and which he did not enjoy writing.

I am not able to say that anything wrong was done at Anseth. Nothing was. The ditch is good, the water is good, the children are being taught, and I would not undo one of those things if I could. I want that on the record in my own hand before I write anything further, so that nobody afterward can say I did not see it.

***

Vukan sealed it and did not send it to the Temple.

That is the part nobody understood about Vukan Sered then, and nobody will understand about him later. It went to the seven houses — the families who had put four years and about two-fifths of a budget behind a boycott he had never once taken a coin from — because they were the only people on that continent who would read four hundred words about a seed drill and understand that it was the most important thing he had ever written.

And he lay awake afterward, which he does not usually do.

Because he had gone through it in order, the way the mountain taught him, and the order came out the same every time: nobody had chosen, nobody was going to be asked, and the day somebody finally did put it to them, the honest answer would be that they could not think what the Temple was for.

Somebody was going to have to put it to them.

Vukan lay in the dark at Anseth and understood, without any pleasure at all, that there was nobody else on this continent who was going to do it, and that he had just spent two days proving the fields were fine.