Under the great tree on the Hegandi's brow the shade has lain so long it has a name, and I have sat in it since the light was low and watched the morning fill the bowl below.
A nut came down beside me, small and brown, from a branch I never saw. I cracked it on the root. Sweet, and a little green, and gone; and I could not tell you what tree it was. That is this country, whole, in one mouthful.
Below me the green runs down to the water in patches no two alike: a plot of blue, a strip of something purple I have no word for, gold beside it, as if a paintbox had been spilled and someone had the sense to farm it.
And past all that, over the far hills, a storm is standing on the country like a guest who has not said how long he means to stay. The light beneath him is green. The farms beneath him drink.
It may come here. It may turn at the lake and go north into the trees and be forgotten. The people below have stopped looking up at it. I eat the nut. The shade is cool. Whatever it is, it is not here.
The Dominion sits in a bowl. The Midarra sends its air in from the west, the canopy holds the north wet and warm, the Hegandi stops the south, and the hills in the middle turn what comes into weather that has never happened before. A storm can stand on one valley for a week and leave the next one dry; hail falls on a single farm; a spring comes in three days late on one side of Einbui and three weeks early on the other. The Dominion's farmers plant knowing none of it, and the coin comes out at sowing, over which field gets which seed, because there is nothing to predict with.
So nothing grows the same twice. The same field yields a different thing every year, and the farm across the lane tastes different from this one; a vine that gave a sharp black grape last summer gives a sweet green one this, and the seed-comhar keep the line anyway, because it may give the black grape again. Every fruit and root and grain on Talan grows somewhere in the Dominion in some year. What the weather gives goes to the kitchens.
"You ask me what is in it. Whatever came. I tasted the cart at dawn and I decided. Tomorrow a different cart, a different deciding. If you want the same thing twice, the Thousand Kingdom is over the ridge."
What the weather gives, the Dominion makes into something. Everything that grows is eaten, conserved, or distilled, because a harvest that cannot be repeated cannot be planned for and cannot be wasted. The kitchen is the Dominion's craft the way the orchard is Baratalda's, and the cook is the one who decides: she tastes what came in this morning and makes the anois, the dish of what came, and a dish will never taste the same twice by ingredients alone. Every kitchen-comhar puts up conserves from the surplus, and every farm runs a still, and the spirit is potin, made from whatever the year gave; no two farms' bottles match and no farm's matches its own from the year before. The Dominion sells conserves and potin to the Legea and the Thousand Kingdom, both over the escarpment, by the cask, each marked with the farm, the year, and the batch, and no two casks alike.
The city across the water eats all of it. Nahaskel cannot keep a kitchen running the same way for a week, so it buys its bread and its staples from the Dominion, and what the Dominion promises is the boat, every morning, at the quay. What is in the boat is never the same. The boat belongs to a Maor.
"I do not own a field. I own the boat the field's harvest crosses in and the granary it sits in over winter, and the charter that says what the ground under the city is. Nobody in the Dominion needs me until the day the crop comes in, and on that day everybody does."
The Dominion is governed twice.
The argument between them runs every year: which house carries the western valleys, what the share is on a crop nobody has seen before, whether a kitchen-comhar may sell over the ridge without a Maor's boat. It is argued at the quays in autumn, settled by spring, and argued again the next autumn. The Maors' other argument is with the city.
"I cross before light and I am back before the Casting starts. They buy what is in the boat. In the four years I have crossed they have not asked what it is."
From the Dunloch quay you can see Nahaskel's roofline change week to week; from Nahaskel's you can see Dunloch's granaries, which have stood since the dark. The boats cross every morning with the Dominion's food and come back with the city's coin and its novelties.
The Maors hold a Dark-Era charter that says the ground the god's city stands on is the Dominion's, and the roads into it, and the quays. Every few years the question comes to the Casting, and the city casts on it, and the coin has come up against the Maors every time. The houses have sent a different face across the water each cast, in case it was the face, and the coin turns the same way. Between casts the charter is kept in the granary at Dunloch.
Whatever Nahaskel loses in a rebuild turns up on the Dunloch shore by spring, the Dominion's children say, and they comb the shingle for the city's last week: a shop-sign, a Teller's slate, a coin with somebody's name on the rim. What the city sets down, the lake carries over, and the Dominion keeps.
Dunloch began as the granary-fort the first Maors held through the dark, and it is still a granary with a town around it. The houses' halls stand on the quay, each with its granary behind and its boats before it, and the town climbs the low hill behind them in kitchens and cooperages and stills. One street has been the same street for four hundred years, and the house that holds the quay at its foot has carried the town's name as long as the street has stood.
A Vernuan carries four names, two from each parent, and the order says whose child you are first. Two given names, one chosen by each parent: a daughter wears her mother's gift first, a son his father's, and the first is the one used day to day. Two steadings, the mother's and the father's, in the same order. A steading is the farm a person was born on and it is never changed, because ground is the one thing that stays where it was; marrying changes nothing, and a child gets both. So a daughter of a Cluain mother and a Carrick father is Niamh Roisin Cluain Carrick, and her brother is Cormac Oisin Carrick Cluain, and hearing the two you know they are siblings and which is which.
The Maors carry the two given names the same way and one house instead of two steadings, with the descent-particle: Ruari Fionn O Dunloch. A Maor child takes the house whose granary he will sit in. Descent is the Maors' claim and their names say so, where everyone else's say ground. The ground-named are, more often than not, Conrasu.
Given
Steadings
Maor houses
Whole names
Chaos given a body, keeping a chosen shape by daily practice: the Conrasu are at home here as nowhere else on Talan. A people who know what is underneath farm a country whose weather is the goddess's mood, and they do it by keeping the shape of the work when the work's material never holds still: the same sowing-rite, the same share, the same boat at the same hour, over fields that are never the same. In Nahaskel a Conrasu is the thread of caution in the room; in the Dominion the same temperament runs a farm.
A Maor, who speaks for the houses at the quay.
A cook of a Dunloch kitchen-comhar, on the anois.
A ferry-crew hand who crosses to the city before light.
A poet of the Thousand Kingdom, who sat under a tree on the Hegandi in 2530.