The Traveller's Record

Orun arrived under a white cloth tied to his walking staff. The Wind were not counted among the three river tribes, though everyone used their star tables and distrusted their accents. Their caravans carried salt, lenses, songs, and news. This season they carried more names of missing people than goods. Orun wrote the names on thin cedar slips because paper had become scarce. A useful piece of engineering could become an instrument of hunger through the pin inside the diversion gate, where Mara's attempt to restore a little stolen water exposed another person to punishment she could not prevent.

At the Reed checkpoint, a captain confiscated his telescope. He called it a device for signaling enemies. Orun showed him how the lenses gathered distant light, but the captain looked through the wrong end and saw the world diminished. He declared the demonstration suspicious. Orun surrendered the instrument and kept the notebook concealed in the lining of his coat. For a little while, ancestry mattered less than the hauling rope across floodwater, as injuries determined the order of crossing and the rescuers counted both those who reached shore and those still missing.

He found lodging beside Mara's workshop by offering to repair its roof. He was poor at roofing, good at knots, and willing to admit both. Tavi asked whether the Wind lived in the sky. Orun answered that they mostly lived with sore feet. When the child slept, Mara asked about the camps upstream. Orun described them without giving suffering the dignity of a spectacle. The rescued families carried their divisions into the supper beneath the leaking roof, but flour, roots, salt, and a borrowed pot made separate loyalties harder to maintain than the practical business of feeding children. The rescue depended upon labor that names alone could overlook in the frayed hemp with red thread, which Pella marked after holding strangers above the flood so the next workers would know the equipment's damage.

He had recorded seven versions of how the war began. Each started with an outrage committed by someone else; all omitted a profitable bargain made at home. Mara listened while polishing a tool she no longer needed polished. 'Which is true?' she asked. Orun considered the question. 'Enough of each to keep people killing,' he said. 'Not enough of any to explain the dead.' What the flood had broken suggested the paired crossing and raised channel, a structure whose supports could be drawn on a tollhouse floor more easily than anyone could settle who would have permission to use it.