Master Afonso,
I will reach Eldara two days later than I promised, and the new glass will wait two days longer for me. It is my fault and I am sorry. Here is what happened, so you can decide how sorry I ought to be.
We came down out of the Emarrean hills at evening, and the country outside the window changed colour every mile: black fields, then green, then gold, then black again, as if someone had laid out the year in strips. Past the third black one there was a fire, and it was moving. You know I cannot pass a fire. I was off at the next halt before the guard had finished calling it, and I walked back along the line in the dark with my bag banging my knees.
I heard it before I saw it close: a humming, many voices of it, rising and falling, and not one of them a throat. At the field's edge I could see the dancers in their line, each one swinging something that sang as it turned, with fire on its ends, and wherever the line went the fire went, at the pace of a slow walk and no faster. The field ahead of them stood full of a tall plant I did not know, its heads closed tight, and as the fire passed under them the heads split open in the heat, one after another, a crackling like rain on a roof that followed the dancers across the field. The flame was a gold-orange I have never seen on our mountain. It is nothing like the summit's gold for a fair week, and our book has no page for it. I sat on a wall until there was nothing left but embers, and the morning train left without me.
There is a pinch of that field folded into this letter. Smell it before you decide.
Joana
Every field in Tahu Tangata keeps its own clock. It is farmed for some years, grain and pulses, and herds graze it in its grass years, until the ground tires: the yield thins, the weeds change, the soil comes up grey in the hand. Then it is sown with puahi, the fire-plant, and when the puahi has grown its seasons the field is burned, the burn opens the plant's seed-heads for the harvest, and the ash feeds the ground for the next turn of farming. No two fields stand at the same point, so somewhere in the country a field burns every year, and from the train the plain is a patchwork of black, green and gold.
The reading. No house judges its own ground: a house reading its own fields would follow the price of oil or grain, and a neighbour's elder has no harvest in it. When a field looks tired, an elder of a neighbouring house walks it and says whether it is. A field read tired goes to puahi; when the puahi is ready, the company that keeps the district names the night.
"I walked the Rangiwai field on the north wall in spring. The barley stood thin and the dock was coming up under it, and the soil came up grey in my hand. I said tired. They have not asked me to supper since, and they sowed it with puahi all the same."
The burn-night. The company walks out at dusk in single file along the field walls, the low stone walls that divide every field and stop a fire at its edge, and the weapons at the walkers' sides hum as they swing. On the burn-field the company forms its line and dances: each dancer whirls a purehua, a stave or cord that sings as it turns, with fire on its ends, and the line carries the fire across the field at the pace of a slow walk. In the smoke and the dark the dancers keep their line by ear, each purehua's voice telling the others where it is. Families sit on the walls upwind to watch; children carry water along the edge and beat out the sparks that jump. Where the fire passes, the puahi heads split in the heat, and at first light the opened heads are gathered from the ash.
Why no one else can grow it. Others have tried: merchants who bought seed, estates that copied the burn. Puahi wants a slow fire of the right heat. A wildfire runs too hot and cooks the seed in the head, and a line of torch-bearers burns too fast and leaves the heads shut. Copied fields come back with closed heads or burned ones, and the old people say the field has to hear the line.
Tihiwera. Puahi grows wild in one place, on the slopes of Tihiwera, the pale spire on the southern edge, where lightning sets the slopes alight. Every field of it on the plain descends from seed first gathered there.
Heat and pace are needed, and they are not enough. Puahi answers the purehua's hum: the rising-and-falling pattern a company sings as it dances is part of what opens the heads. The wild plant on Tihiwera opens to thunder; the cultivated plant was bred over generations to open to the song instead. The craft is the song, which is why careful burns elsewhere fail, and why the field has to hear the line is exact.
The old people burned their fields on this plain in the Gods' Era, and named the land in their own tongue in the late Lost Era. When the Golden Empire took Sumendar, by 700 MR, the plain became the granary of the Empire's southern heartland. The Empire ran its road across it toward the mountain capital and ruled it through its own houses, as it ruled most of its provinces, and the dances went on, because the Empire wanted the grain and no one else could make the fields burn right.
The Empire fell in 1325 MR and left its granaries behind. Through the Dark Era the companies kept the fields and the road, the houses kept the granaries filled, and the two have ruled together since. In the first century of the Adventurer Era Eldara's rail was laid along the old road. When the Ash-Binder broke out of No Man's Land's badlands in 2524, near Tahu Tangata's western corner, its first wave went north along that rail; through the three years before it fell, Tahu Tangata's grain kept Eldara fed.
"I am the Kaiahi while I can still lead a burn, and the road is mine for exactly that long. The Tahu was the Tahu before I danced my first field, and she will be the Tahu when I am carrying water at the edge again."
Every Tangatan belongs to two things. By birth, a whare, a house: the old kin-houses that hold the ground, each with fields scattered across the cycle. By district, a kapa, a company: the dance-line that burns the district's fields and keeps its stretch of road. A kapa draws its dancers from every house in its district, and marriages run between houses too, so no house can turn on another whose children dance in its line.
The country has two rulers, and they sit at the Huipapa, the gathering-ground in Ahika, in two chairs.
The Tahu is chosen by the gathering of house-heads from among themselves and holds the chair for life or until she sets it down. The Tahu speaks for the ground: land, inheritance, kin law, the garners and the grain. Hine Tamanui Waikura, an old woman of house Tamanui, has been Tahu since 2507.
The Kaiahi is chosen by the line-leaders from among themselves and holds the chair while he can still lead a burn. The Kaiahi speaks for the fire: the burns, the companies, the Neck, any fight. Kahu Rangiwai Papawera, of house Rangiwai, in his late thirties, has been Kaiahi since 2526.
So the old and the young rule the country together, the slow ground beside the quick fire. A house-head is chosen by their kin from among those who have danced the line; a line-leader is chosen by a company for leading its burns. An envoy to Tahu Tangata meets both chairs, and each ruler seals for their own half: grain under the Tahu, the road under the Kaiahi. Nearly every real dealing is both, since the grain that goes to Eldara goes up the Neck, so both seals go on almost everything. A bridge is paid for from the garners and built by the companies. When the two disagree, nothing changes: the garners keep, the lines keep, and the proposal waits.
A Tangatan with no house, a rail worker's child or a rusher who stayed, comes in through the line: years of dancing in a company until a house takes them in. The Kaiahi's chair goes to whoever leads the line best, the one seat in the country a stranger can reach without a house behind them.
The garners. The Empire's granaries are the houses' common stores now, filled from every house's grain. They feed the country in a bad year and fill Eldara's trains, and the Huipapa signs those contracts. The garners still keep their accounts in the Empire's words.
"Every train that comes down through the Neck now, I count the cars before I count the people. Four autumns we have walked that road instead of our own fields, and the east sends us bread and good wishes."
Since the bindstone rush began in 2527, robbers have worked the Neck road. They take carts and slow trains on Tahu Tangata's side, keep to the western forest by the corner, and slip back over into No Man's Land, where no one rules and no one can follow them without ruling. The western district's kapa, under Tui Kahuroa Ngaiti, keeps the road, and its own burns wait while it does.
The road is the Kaiahi's and the grain on it is the Tahu's, and the two answers differ. The Tahu would pay others to keep the road, hired guards or the Adventurers' Guild, before she spent the houses' children on it. The Kaiahi has the young behind him, who would clear the road themselves, and every dancer on the Neck is one not dancing at home. The western kapa wants the other districts to send dancers; their houses do not. Across the line, No Man's Land's line captain changes every autumn. The argument comes to the Huipapa every autumn too.
Ahika stands at the centre of the plain on the river from the northern hills, a walled city of about 60,000, and the rail runs through it, in from the Neck and out toward Emarrea. The grain is loaded there. On the rail maps and the waybills it is still Garnerstow, the name the Empire gave its granary seat; a traveller buys a ticket to Garnerstow and gets down in Ahika.
Tahu Tangata feeds itself with grain to spare, and sells two things abroad. The first is that surplus: most of Eldara's bread goes up the line from here. The second is the oil pressed from puahi seed, which burns gold, steady and long. Abroad it is slowgold, and the lamps of Uravel's deep halls, Myrria's lanterns and Frae City's towers burn it; at home it is the cooking oil as well, and the pressed seed-cake feeds the herds.
Up the line: grain, for almosts and coin.
At the river when the herd halts: grain and oil, paid in coin and in remembrance. The houses entrust their genealogies to the Ghoran memory-keepers, who carry them across the centuries.
Across the bay: grain and oil, for the Order's metal goods and tools through the island. The bay landing is worked by Cape and Rika Tikur boats; the old people leave the water to others.
Down the line: grain and oil, for Lautaran cloth and Emarrean wine.
Few outsiders come to see the country. Grain factors and oil buyers come, and now and then a traveller gets down for a burn-night. The rest who come want puahi seed, or want to watch the dance closely enough to copy it.
Most days are farm days: the fields, the herds, the garners. At night every window in Tahu Tangata shows gold, since even a poor house burns its own oil, and a town reads gold from a distance. In the burn seasons the air smells of smoke, and after rain of wet ash. The roasted puahi seed is eaten at home and seldom sold, and locals hold that bread from an ash-year field tastes different from any other. The first bread from a renewed field is shared among the houses whose children danced its burn.
Tangatans sing at work and on the walls, and among their songs are those that name the bay-water holy. A dancer counts the burns they have danced, the way a sailor counts voyages, and she's danced forty burns says how seasoned someone is. The regional vice is the grudge from the reading: an old, comfortable habit of resenting the neighbour whose elder said your ground was tired.
On a burn-night a company is heard before it is seen. A visitor who sees fire on the plain takes it for wildfire; a Tangatan reads its colour. Gold-orange and walking is a burn; grey smoke and fast flame is trouble, and everyone runs. Visitors stand downwind, and Tangatans sit upwind on the walls. Visitors take the purehua for instruments.
A Tangatan comes of age at the first burn they dance in the line, and the first burn is the end of a long climb. A child carries water at the field's edge, then beats out the jumping sparks, then dances the line's end, and only years later its middle, where the fire is hardest to hold. The young keep one game they are not supposed to: spark-games, the dance played at night in fallow fields with embers and practice staves. The line-leaders pretend not to know until someone is burned.
Komo is kept in the burn itself, his Destruction and his Passion: the line is the rite and the song the prayer. There is no separate clergy; the line-leaders lead the rite and the houses keep the hearth. On a farm day the country is plain in its faith, and the grain-traders at the garners keep a word for Jianna.
A Tangatan carries a given name, a house, and a first field: the field where they danced their first burn, taken that night and kept for life. Everyone who first danced the same burn shares that name, whatever their house, and they are burn-kin for the rest of their lives. A child carries a given name and a house; a kinless dancer carries a given name and a field, and when a house takes them in, the house goes in the middle. In the line a Tangatan is called by given name and field; at the Huipapa, by house. The burns a dancer has danced are spoken of and never put in the name.
Given
Houses
First fields
Whole names
The Tahu: an old woman of house Tamanui, Tahu since 2507 MR.
The Kaiahi: of house Rangiwai, in his late thirties, Kaiahi since 2526 MR.
Line-leader of the western kapa, which keeps the Neck road.
An elder of house Manutoa, who reads his neighbours' ground.
One of the Leitores of Argia Esfera, who got down from the Eldara train for a burn-night in 2531.