At dawn the market is heaped with fruit that ripened in the night. By noon it is soft, and the carts come round.
In the River Duchies everything that grows and everything that rots does it quickly. A field gives three harvests between floods. A fig that sets in one week is ripe in the next and gone over in the week after. Bread left out overnight is furred by morning, and the dead, laid in the black earth, are part of the next year's field within a season. People and animals live at the ordinary pace; the quickening is for the crops, the fruit, the ferments and the rot. The Ghoran, being of the green, feel it: the few who live in the valley flower out of season and grow restless, and most move on.
The quickening ends at the valley's edge. Grain carried up to Galdua's rocks or onto Valreka's whales keeps as well as anyone's, and the slow isles off the coast keep everything. So does the grain that goes out from Lemersa across the bay in Red Dominion hulls, which the Dominion buys in trade and in its lean years.
At dawn the stalls are heaped with fruit that ripened in the night. By noon it is soft, and the vinegar-makers', the date-wine brewers' and the fish-sauce yards' carts go round the market buying it by the basket, at a price the morning's seller had counted on. By evening it is in the vats. Decay is the side of Tani most of Lioaru only resists; here it is revered, and it is also the trade: date wine reckoned in floods, river vinegar, fish sauce, a cheese in every house, and black earth from the compost-yards at the edge of every village. What the valley cannot eat today it turns, and what it cannot turn it sells to someone leaving.
Water. The river brings more than the valley can drink. Channels are left running all night, fields are flooded on purpose, and a householder waters the road to keep the dust off the neighbours' fruit. Galduans, whose springs are given and never sold, find it obscene.
Sleep in a field at noon, mothers say, and you will wake a year older. They say it to keep their children out of the fields in the heat. The quickening leaves people alone.
Once a year the river comes down out of Emarrea's highlands, climbs out of its channels and lays a hand of new silt over everything that has not been moved, which in the valley is most things.
Once a year the Hemmal comes down from Emarrea's highlands. The river climbs out of its channels, the whole valley goes under, and when the water goes down it leaves a new layer of silt over every field. The valley counts its years from the flood, and its ages and vintages in floods: a nine-flood wine, she is forty floods.
Before the water comes, everything that would rot under it is eaten. The whole valley sits at long tables on the levees for the last fresh meal of the year. On the flood's eve the seed-boats come home across the bay from the island stores, every village's seed for the new silt.
For the weeks of the flood one warden, chosen by the Mida each year, commands every duchy's levees, crews and boats, and the warden's word is law until the water goes down. Then the dukes take their duchies back, and the warden names the flood for what it did: Aghiwel, a flood that came early and fast; Aludh, one that left the silt deep; Asemmam, one that soured the low fields. Aghilas Aludh Ath Arezki is this year's warden.
"Thicket is what a lazy man leaves behind. My people did not leave those fields. They were driven off them."
Under the Golden Empire the valley was the granary province, divided into duchies. In the Dark Era it could not be held. The open valley had no rock and no wall, the Corrupted God's forces came through the flat country, and the people fled up to Galdua's rocks, onto Valreka's herd and upriver into Emarrea. Untended quick land went to thicket in a single year. Within a generation the duchies were a jungle of rotting fruit around a few walled river-towns that held on.
At the end of the Dark Era the families came back, most of them down from the rocks and off the herd, with Emarrean, Hareaveldi and Azarketi families beside them, and cut the valley back out of the thicket. Each party that cut a duchy free founded its house, and its heirs are the dukes.
Land in the River Duchies is held by keeping it cut. A field left untended for a year goes to thicket, and thicket belongs to whoever cuts it back. When a farmer falls sick, the neighbours cut the field for him, so that it stays his.
The dukes. There are eleven duchies, and each duke rules one: holds court, keeps the levees and the crews, and takes the tolls on the duchy's stretch of the river. A duke receives an envoy whose road comes through his duchy, and only what concerns them all goes to the Mida. The dukes rarely cut any more. Their tenants do.
The Mida. The eleven sit together at Lemersa, which belongs to no duke, at a low table. The Mida decides by majority and signs the valley's treaties; its eldest, the duke who has sat longest, speaks and signs for it. It builds the river works and the quays of Lemersa with the tolls. Tassadit Uttis Ath Akli has sat longest.
Since 2524 the Rot-Tyrant's legions have ranged across Galdua's pale band, and the band runs along Westfold's western fields. The farmers there have pulled back, and their fields have gone to thicket. The neighbouring dukes now send crews, with hired guards and adventurers, to cut the abandoned ground and keep it, as the cut law allows. Lounis Aghiwel Ath Sekkur, duke of Westfold, holds that land taken by the legions is not land neglected. The cut law does not say who judges whether a field has gone to thicket, the duke or the flood-warden, and the Mida has to decide it.
The quickening stops at the shore. Off the river mouths of the south-east lie the slow isles, three islands the flood's silt built, with tidal flats between them that boats cross at high water and carts at low. On the isles everything keeps. Tamegra, the largest, holds the valley's seed stores, and the seed-boats sail from it on the flood's eve. Tamtunt holds the cellars, where wine brewed in a week in the valley ages for years. Azay holds the oldest trees in the south: pale, smooth trunks under crowns grown so wide and flat over the centuries that a grove seen from the water looks like a second, higher ground.
Beyond Azay lies Agu, a small island in a fog that does not lift. On the year's lowest tides, a few days in all, the flats run dry from Azay to Agu, and it can be reached on foot. I have found no account of Agu by anyone who stayed the night.
The day starts at the dawn market and the morning's work. At noon the carts go round, and then the valley sleeps, long. The evening is for the vats and the tables. The land does most of the work, and the day is built around letting it.
The towns smell sour-sweet, of vinegar and lees and fruit going over. Everything is eaten the day it is picked, fish sauce goes on everything, and the tea is fermented. It'll keep is the valley's joke, and let it turn means let it be; it will become something.
The valley's vice is sleeping through a harvest it grows anyway: admired in a farmer, despised in a duke who leaves his crews to cut.
On foot along the levees, by skiff on the channels, by boat to the isles. The drift-barges come down from Emarrea at the river's own pace, a week with nobody hurrying, and go back up towed by buffalo along the levee towpaths.
A visitor keeps a peach for later and finds it juice by supper, leaves bread out and finds it furred by morning, and calls the water wasted. A native eats it today, turns it, or sells it to someone leaving.
A child keeps a garden that grows in days and rots in days. At about fifteen comes the first cut: a corner of thicket to cut and keep cut for a whole year, and then it is theirs to work. The young brew in secret and badly; their elders find the jars, say nothing, and drink the first brew at the flood feast with straight faces.
The valley keeps Tani as Decay, the side of her most of Lioaru only resists, and a small shrine stands at every compost-yard. The dead go into the black earth, and she is in the barley now is said kindly. At the landings the river-traders keep a word for Shuun.
Nagaji and Azarketi are the most numerous, the Azarketi on the channels and the isles; kitsune hold the upriver towns, Emarrea's barges coming and going past them; and every people of the south-west is somewhere in the valley. The valley is no people's home: the families who came back at the return came from the rocks, the herd, Emarrea and Hareaveldi, and the valley has refilled in four centuries on land that gives three harvests between floods.
The Duchy folk speak Ameslay, a sister of the Awal of the rocks and the herd; the returners brought it down with them. Talanese is spoken on the barges and the quays.
A Duchy name is a given name, a birth-flood and a house: Tassadit Uttis Ath Akli. The birth-flood is the name the flood-warden gave the flood of the year one was born, so that a name tells an age, and everyone born under one flood is of it together: we are both Aludh. The vintages carry the same names, and an Aludh vinegar and an Aludh child are the same year. The house is Ath, the people of, and its founder's name, carried by all the house's children.
Given
Birth-floods
Houses
Whole names
The Mida's eldest, the duke who has sat longest; born in a slow flood.
This year's flood-warden.
Duke of Westfold, on the pale band.
The chronicler, in The Travelling Chronicle).
The River Duchies are a valley in which everything grows in a week and rots in the next, and its people have arranged their entire civilisation around not minding. The traveller is advised to adopt the same position at once. It saves time, which is the one thing the valley has no use for.
Three routes lead in. The drift-barge from Emarrea takes a week, travelling at the speed of the river, a river that has never been asked to hurry and would not know how. The salt landings below Galdua's southern rocks are quicker, if the traveller is a sack of salt. Ships come into the bay at Lemersa, where the river meets the sea and both look relieved about it.
Lemersa belongs to no duke, an arrangement the valley's eleven dukes agreed to because each of them preferred it to the alternative, which was another duke. They meet there at a low table called the Mida whenever a matter concerns all of them, which happens less often than visitors expect and more often than the dukes would like. Everything else is settled by whichever duke owns the stretch of river the traveller is standing beside, and each will charge a toll for it. The tolls are posted, fair and numerous. Bring small coin, and then bring more.
Buy fruit at dawn. Eat it before noon. At noon the vinegar-makers come round with their carts and buy whatever is left, and by evening it is in a vat being improved. The traveller who keeps a peach for later will find at supper that later has already happened to it. Nothing in the valley keeps, which the Duchy folk regard less as a misfortune than as a philosophy, and which they have turned into the best vinegar on Talan.
The date wine is reckoned in floods. A nine-flood, aged on Tamtunt, where the valley's hurry stops at the shore, is worth asking for and worth the price. The fish sauce goes on everything. This is correct.
I have not stood on Agu, the island in the fog beyond the slow isles; it can be walked to only on the lowest tides of the year, and I was there on the wrong ones. Those who have been agree that the fog does not lift. Nobody has offered me a second fact, and I decline to invent one.
Come before the Hemmal, the yearly flood, and eat at the flood feast on the levees, the one meal of the year the valley eats in a hurry. During the flood, do as the flood-warden says; the flood-warden is the only person in the valley entitled to be in a rush, and is not shy about it. The inns are plentiful and unhurried. Book nothing. Nothing here is booked.
The tea is fermented.
My column on the River Duchies has brought more letters to the Lantern Press than anything I have written since the Onyx Spectacle, and my publisher, who reads them before I do, has asked me to answer three so that he can stop. They are all cross. They are also all right about what they saw, which is the most annoying kind of correspondent and the only kind worth answering.
"Sir, you praise a people who water their roads. I have kept a spring for thirty waterings and never let a cupful fall on stone. Water is given, never wasted, and you have stood in a country that pours it on the ground and called it charming."
Keeper, you are right about the water, and I will hear no word against your rock's care of it. I have drunk from Tamalut's spring-hall, and I remember the cup, and I remember being watched while I drank, which is the correct way to serve water in a desert. But a cupful on the rock is a cupful someone gave. A cupful in the valley is a cupful the river will bring back by morning whether anyone asks for it or not. Once a year the river comes down out of Emarrea's highlands, climbs out of its channels and lays a hand of new silt over everything that has not been moved, which in the valley is most things. The man watering his road was keeping the dust off his neighbour's fruit. In the valley water is weather, and on Tamalut it is a gift, and I would not have the two confused, least of all by me.
"A slothful people. You write that you watched a man sleep through his own harvest. In Namur we would call that a broken word to the land, and you call it wisdom."
Madam, I did watch him, and he did sleep, and the harvest did not mind in the least. In the valley a field gives three harvests between floods, and a fig that sets in one week is ripe in the next; the land works faster than any hand in it and does not welcome interference. The man I watched had planted, the valley had done the rest, and he woke in time to sell it, which is more than my publisher can say of his printers. The Duchies prize not hurrying the way Namur prizes a word kept, and I have come to think both are a discipline. Some of my readers will find the comparison unkind to one party. I leave them to decide which, and to take their time about it.
"The waste of it. I buy grain for Langback, and I saw fruit rotting on every stall by noon, enough spoiled in a day to feed our whale for a month."
Factor, you saw the stalls at noon, which is rather like judging a play by its interval. Go back at dawn and stay until dark, and buy a peach at first light and leave it on your sill. At dawn the market is heaped with fruit that ripened in the night. By noon it is soft, and the carts come round: the vinegar-makers, the date-wine brewers, the fish-sauce yards, buying by the basket at a price the morning's seller had counted on. By evening it is all in the vats, and your peach on the sill is juice. Nothing at that market is wasted. It is turned, and the river vinegar on your whale's bread was very likely a peach somebody left on a sill.
I ate, on my last evening, river fish under a sauce that had been fish itself a year before, which is the sort of thing one does not think about until one has; bread from the morning's barley; a cheese I will not attempt to describe in a periodical read at breakfast; and a nine-flood date wine my host poured as if it were water, which in the valley it nearly is. It was the flood's eve, and across the bay the seed-boats were coming in from the island stores, every village's seed for the new silt, low in the water and in no hurry at all. Before we ate, my host salted the fish from a sack that had come down from the rocks. Keeper of Tamalut, every turned thing in that valley is turned with your rock's salt. I thought you would like to know.
G.