"The hall carries a portrait of every senator, which in itself should not be a notable sight for a man of the Kingdom, and neither should the seriousness captured in them. It is a sight because below each portrait, every name is accompanied by an oath: one the senator wrote themselves, was voted in on, and now carries into the Senate for their people."
A Namurese becomes a citizen by oath. At coming of age each young Namurese writes their own citizen's oath, what they will be to the Republic and to their town, and swears it before the town with a Lawspeaker of Forseti as witness. The oath is kept in the town's register and read back at their funeral. Namurese are practical about the Goddess: a Lawspeaker comes to a town for oaths, funerals, and disputes, and keeps no weekly worship, and the Lawspeakers work much as notaries do elsewhere.
The Senate is made the same way. A candidate for the Senate writes an oath of office, what they will do for their district and by when, and the district votes on the oath, not on the candidate. The winning oath hangs under the senator's portrait in the Senate House at Portoferma for the length of the term, six years, and a senator who breaks it loses the seat and the sworn name with it. A Namurese election is argued line by line over the candidates' oaths.
"Perhaps." A people who keep every word they give are slow to give one. A Namurese answers almost everything with perhaps. I will see is courtesy; I will try is a real attempt; I give my word is heard a handful of times in a life, and it holds. When it is given, a sharp steppe spirit is poured and both drink, and a visitor who accepts a cup in Namur has agreed to something; visitors learn to ask first. Visitors find the Namurese evasive; Namurese merchants lend most readily to the neighbour slowest to promise.
Visitors also take the Dictator for the ruler of Namur. Namurese know the Senate can end the office any Oath-Day, and watch the count.
The Senate House at Portoferma is plain stone with the best ironwork in the south on its doors. Its chamber is a bowl sunk into the ground: the people's rows are at the rim, open to anyone, the senators' rows below them, and the First Senator's floor at the bottom.
The fool's oath. Before coming of age a child's oath is sworn by a fool, as the saying goes. It binds lightly, and breaking it costs a forfeit: carry the water for a week, sing on the well-steps, wear the other's cap to market. The young test and tease each other with it, tricking a friend into swearing something absurd and then holding them to it or cheering when they break it. Most get broken; the ones kept out of stubbornness are told about for years. The forfeits grow heavier as a child nears coming of age, so that by sixteen a broken fool's oath already stings. Parents and the town's elders keep watch over one thing: a trick-oath that could hurt someone. You may make a fool of your friend, never a victim, and a child who tricks another into a harmful oath owes the forfeit themselves.
"Then the senators came down. One by one they rose from their rows and walked down to the slab, took the sword up in both hands, spoke their oath to it, and laid it down again for the next."
In a crisis the Republic may swear one citizen as Dictator. The Dictator writes an oath like any senator, what they will hold the Republic safe against and that they will lay the office down when the danger is past, and swears it before the Senate; the Senate swears its obedience back. The Dictator stands above ordinary law until the office lapses. What the Dictator may sign and do is anything the oath requires, and the Dictator claims what the danger needs: a flood Dictator takes the dykes, the granaries, the river towns' stores, and the levies of labour; a gate Dictator takes the militia, the sworn companies called home, the garrison road, and any treaty that bears on the Seer. The Senate keeps the rest: the laws, the taxes, the ordinary envoys. Between Oath-Days any senator may stand and contest a claim on the floor. The Senate cannot overrule the Dictator mid-year, but the contest goes into the record the senators carry down to the slab.
Choosing a Dictator. The Senate names a citizen who has served the Republic (a former senator, a commander, an officer of the works) and who has a private life to return to; the candidate's oath is read out and argued before the swearing. The Republic prefers a Dictator who wants to go home.
The Oath-Day. Once a year the Dictator comes down to the First Senator's floor, re-swears the oath, and lays the sword of office on the stone slab at the centre. The senators come down one by one, take the sword up, and speak their oath of obedience to it, or stay in their rows. If fewer than half come down, the office lapses and the sword goes to the rack. If enough come down, the First Senator hands the sword back. The count is carried out of Portoferma the same evening by relay-riders and signal-fires, and the whole country knows the number by morning. Betting on it is frowned on and universal, and every tavern keeps a slate; the favourite for 2533 is sixty-one.
The Long Walk. Upstairs in the Senate House, the gallery before the chamber is hung with the swords of every Dictator the Republic has sworn, each with two dates and the Dictator's oath. The two oldest are Golden-Era work, sworn while Namur was a chartered city of the Empire. Then come the Long Swearing of the Dark Era: the office sworn the year the spawn broke out, 1321, and re-sworn every year for four and a half centuries, to about 1780 MR, one Dictator after another, their swords laid down by choice or by death. Vittore Grimal, sworn in 1612, lasted four days: his oath was to draw the spawn off Portoferma's walls, and he kept it. Through the last three and a half centuries of the dark, the office was sworn and laid down again and again as the danger rose and fell, and those swords hang next. The Republic holds that it has never broken, from its charter to the empty hook; chroniclers call that claim exceptional, and the Long Walk is the evidence the Republic offers for it.
"His oath was to draw the corrupted spawn away, and he kept it. His blade is bent, not nicked. That is a charge, not a fight."
The Adventurer Era left gaps on the rack, years and decades when the Republic needed no Dictator, and short dictatorships between them: a famine, a plague, a flood. The shortest laid down by choice lasted three weeks.
"Three weeks. The river went down, I went home. You want the red or the white?"
Tommaso Venier had sat for a river district and run its dykes before he went back to his casks; in 2491 the Senate went down to the harbour for him, because he knew the river and wanted nothing from the office.
A Dictator who lays the sword down carries Posaspada after their name for life, and a Dictator who dies in office receives it on the Long Walk plaque. Portoferma has two living Posaspada. One sells wine by the harbour.
The broken sword. Gaspare Loredan was sworn in 2398, when the Legea Empire pressed south, and he won the war. Peace was sworn in 2402. At the next Oath-Day the senators stayed in their rows, the office lapsed, and Loredan kept the sword. The lapse released every Namurese from the oath of obedience, and the Republic took him down in the Senate House itself. His sword hangs broken on the Long Walk, snapped on an anvil a hand above the guard, the blood left on it; his oath is struck through, and his name carries nothing after it. The laying of the sword on the slab dates from his fall: since 2403 the sword leaves the Dictator's hand once a year in front of the whole Senate, and comes back only if the Senate gives it.
The empty hook. At the end of the Long Walk is a hook with no sword on it, a date of 2524, no second date, and the oath of Aurelio Brandin detto Saldo: to hold the Republic safe against the Blight-Seer until the danger is past.
"Then he unbuckled his sword and laid it on a stone slab at the centre of the floor and stepped back from it. It is a plain soldier's sword, and it has been working: the edge nicked along its whole length and honed back each time, the grip rewrapped more than once. Two years of the gate."
In 2524 the Nine Dungeons broke open across Talan, and one of them broke up through the old mine-workings in Namur's south-western hills: the Sickwell, the labyrinth of the Blight-Seer, pits of contagion and diseased shrines under a standing miasma. The Senate swore Aurelio Brandin, a garrison captain of the hills with a farm in them, as Dictator within the week. The Republic's militia and its sworn companies called home from abroad fought the first wave through the hill towns and sealed the gate in 2525. They did not clear it. Spawn still come up through the lesser workings, and the survivors of the Seer's cult who crawl out speak in fevered prophecy that sometimes proves true.
The sealing took back part of the hills with it. Some of the old workings were cleared shaft by shaft and are mined again under guard; their ore goes north to the armouries of the Thousand Kingdom. The deeper workings around the Sickwell stay shut, and the garrison holds a ring of walls and watch-fires around them.
The gate rotation. Every citizen owes a season at the gate under the militia oath. Every family in Namur has someone who has stood on the line or is standing there now, and the garrison road, climbing from the rail into the hills, is the best-kept road in the country.
Aurelio fights at the gate himself, and his sword shows it. At the Oath-Day of 2526 every senator came down to the slab. At the Oath-Day of 2532, the eighth, sixty-eight of a hundred and twenty came down.
Folk say the spawn and the miasma from the Sickwell go first for those who have broken their word, so that an oathbreaker on the gate-line endangers everyone beside him. Garrison companies will not stand a man they know to be forsworn at the wall, and more than one soldier has confessed a broken fool's oath from his childhood before his first season, to be safe.
The gate is sealed and still leaks, and the danger is real. Other countries hold a sealed gate without a Dictator: Greenward's cantons, the Baerfrost clans, the order-state of Argia Esfera. The mining families want the deep workings cleared and reopened, which would need a Dictator and an army. The reformers want the sword on the rack while the Republic can still lay it down, point to the broken sword, and ask whether a captain eight years at the gate still wants to go home to his farm. The Legea Empire has offered its army for the gate, and Aurelio could sign the offer if the oath requires it; the Senate fears what would march in behind the soldiers, readers and reception-houses in the hill towns. Sixty-eight is eight above the line where the office lapses, and last year's count was seventy-nine.
The Blight-Seer is sealed, and it does not need to break out. Its sight seeps up with the miasma, and it shows the people nearest the gate the true rot in others: every real bribe, every real lie, every real betrayal, and never the loyalty, the reasons, or the good beside them. It never lies. It shows only the damning half.
Aurelio, a season at a time on the line for eight years, sees real corruption everywhere in the Republic: a senator's real debts to a Legean factor, a reformer's real family on the far bank. Each year it convinces him honestly that the danger is not past. The senators who serve their own gate seasons see the same thing turned the other way: the real rot in eight years of the Dictator's rule, the purged captain who was guilty of something and innocent of what he was purged for. The growing silences on the Oath-Day are the Seer's work as much as the swearing is.
Either way the count falls, the Seer is served: a Dictator who holds too long, or a Republic that breaks its sword in anger, a whole people judging itself on the prosecution's evidence alone. The fevered prophecies of the cult survivors are the same sight spoken aloud, which is why they sometimes prove true.
Namur feeds itself: barley and beans in the river valleys and along the forest, goats and horses on the steppe, fish from the coast towns. In lean years it buys from the Order of Law's farm country and from Atarialda across the river.
Portoferma stands at the mouth of Legea's river under the western flank of the Orratzak, a port of about fifty thousand, and Debreqal is a short ride up the valley. Since the peace of 2402 the two countries have traded, and much of Legea's river-trade reaches the sea through Portoferma: the barges from Debreqal unload on Namurese quays, pay Namurese customs, and load onto Namurese hulls. The Legean customs-house on the quay flies the Faith's banner beside the Republic's.
The sworn companies. A Namurese soldier's contract-oath holds, and the southern network pays for it: sworn companies of Namurese stand guard on warehouses in Merkavar, escort cargo through Crossroads, and garrison the walls of kingdoms that trust their own soldiers less. In 2524 the Republic called its companies home for the gate, and most have gone back out; their pay keeps the Republic's treasury while the old mines stay shut.
The rail and the ore. A branch of the eastern line leaves Crossroads and runs west along the great river through the flat valley to Portoferma's yards. It carries the retaken mines' ore toward the Thousand Kingdom's armouries and brings harness back for the gate garrison, so that House Harn of Smedbeck buys from Namur and sells to it in the same season.
A Namurese carries a given name and a family name, and at the citizen's oath adds a sworn name: one word from their own oath, chosen by them, carried with detto or detta. Lucia Morosin detta Salda. Senators are known in the chamber by their sworn names. At the citizen's oath every Namurese is also given a small brass tag engraved with the sworn name, worn at the throat whatever else they wear: a harbour senator's may hang on gold, a herder's on a leather thong. An oathbreaker loses the sworn name and gives back the tag, and two names alone mark a Namurese for life; a bare throat in Namur means an oathbreaker or a foreigner. A Dictator who lays the sword down adds Posaspada after the sworn name.
Given
Family
Sworn names
Whole names
Every ancestry of Zuzental lives in Namur, and the Hobgoblins at their fullest expression on Talan, about two in five of the Republic: the people for whom the given word is load-bearing, in a country built on it. Humans are about a quarter, Elves about one in ten. Elves sit long in the Senate and remember what an oath was sworn for; Humans are most of the reformers and most of the sworn companies; and the Hobgoblin temper is in everything. The law written after Loredan's fall, that the sword leaves the Dictator's hand every Oath-Day, is Hobgoblin work.
A Thousand Kingdom armour-factor of Smedbeck, on the business of House Harn, at Portoferma on the Oath-Day of 2526. Published whole.
Today I had my meeting with Senator Matteo Contarin detto Largo. It was scheduled for the late afternoon, so I went to the Senate House at midday, to be early and get the lay of the land, if you will. The entry hall is imposing in its design, but plainer than most great houses in the Kingdom: good stone, no gilding, and the best ironwork on the doors I have seen outside Smedbeck.
The hall carries a portrait of every senator, which in itself should not be a notable sight for a man of the Kingdom, and neither should the seriousness captured in them. It is a sight because below each portrait, every name is accompanied by an oath: one the senator wrote themselves, was voted in on, and now carries into the Senate for their people.
I was excited for what awaited me after climbing the stairs: the Long Walk. I felt it more imposing than the entrance hall; mayhaps that is simply my profession. Each side is lined with swords, each with two dates and an oath, and no portrait.
The swords reach back into the time of the Golden Empire, and all the way to the present. The second is the most pompous of them: a jewelled hilt, Imperial dwarf-work, and barely used, the edge still carrying its first grind. Not much further on they become simple, almost poor in comparison, and every grip is well worn. The Dark Era saw one after another: munition steel, blades reground a finger narrower than they were forged, grips worn through to the tang, swords bent and dented and left as they were laid down, by choice or by death. Some lasted decades. One lasted four days; his oath was to draw the corrupted spawn away, and he kept it. His blade is bent, not nicked. That is a charge, not a fight.
Then you reach the present age and find gaps once more, swords taken up and laid down, until Gaspare Loredan. His sword is broken, a hand above the guard, which no good blade does in a fight; someone broke it on an anvil. The blood on it is still there, dried, and his oath is struck through.
And at the end you find an empty hook, the closing date missing, the oath promising safety against the Blight-Seer.
I walked in on a session already running, and the first thing I did not expect was to be standing higher than everyone in the room. The Senate is built like a theatre sunk into the ground, a great stone bowl, and you enter at the rim. The upper rows belong to the people: anyone may come in and sit, to watch and to witness, and the rows were full. Below them sit the senators, and at the bottom of the bowl, the lowest point in the room, is the First Senator's floor. Everyone who governs Namur does it looking up at the people who let them.
The dictator was on the floor when I came in, re-swearing his oath. I could not hear every word from the rim, but I heard until the danger is past clear enough, and so did the whole bowl. Then he unbuckled his sword and laid it on a stone slab at the centre of the floor and stepped back from it. It is a plain soldier's sword, and it has been working: the edge nicked along its whole length and honed back each time, the grip rewrapped more than once. Two years of the gate.
Then the senators came down. One by one they rose from their rows and walked down to the slab, took the sword up in both hands, spoke their oath to it, and laid it down again for the next. Some held it like soldiers and some like clerks, and one old woman held it a long while before she spoke, but every one of them came down. It took most of an hour, and the rows above did not empty.
The last to rise was the First Senator. She took up the sword, said nothing at all, and put it back into the dictator's hands.
Senator Contarin met me afterwards in a small room off the gallery. Before we spoke of a single breastplate, he asked whether I had seen it. I said I had. We agreed three hundred harnesses for the gate garrison before supper.
Dictator since 2524, a garrison captain of the hills.
First Senator.
Senator for a Portoferma harbour district, a merchant's senator.
Dictator for three weeks in the flood of 2491; a wine-seller of Portoferma.
The four-day Dictator of 1612.
Dictator of the Legea war, 2398; the broken sword, 2403.
An armour-factor of Smedbeck, whose journal is published above.