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/ Set On Dry Land /
Story Bible
Set On Dry Land
625 words
Chapter text
[Verse 1] On the fifty-ninth of Daazil, in the thirteenth year of the war, the rain had come for thirty days and the Hihnzo had no shore. Narumar was full that night, the red moon, huge and low, that comes around but once in two. The water came up slow. [Verse 2] Yla kept the Hihnzo stretch, the ferry and the rope, and when the water's up in Hihn the warden is the hope. There is no throne in all of Hihn. There is no crown, no court. There's a woman on a levee and the level, and the dark. [Verse 3] And out of Ohynso that night came four hundred under arms to take the granary of the west and burn the terrace farms. A warden knows which cut floods where. That is the whole of the trade. And Yla knew one cut at the neck would drown the road they made. [Verse 4] But to cut a levee out of turn is the gravest crime we know — above the theft, above the killing, because everyone's below. She called no moot. There was no moot. The moot sits when it's dry. She took two men and a mattock out under that red sky. [Verse 5] The Hihnzo went where it was sent. It took the road at three. It took four hundred under arms and it took them to the sea. And then it took the barley and the eastern fields, and then it took nine landings of her own and eleven of her men. [Chorus] They gave her the thanks of the moot. They gave her the tally-pole. They said the water was well cut. They said it saved us whole. And then they set her on dry land. They set her on dry land. [Verse 6] The waters went down in Vurzil the way they always do, and the moot came out on the floodplain and it heard the matter through. And no one said the cut was wrong. Not one stretch spoke against. They said, she read the water true. They said, it saved the rest. [Verse 7] But if a warden cuts out of turn because she thinks it good, then every warden cuts out of turn and no one trusts the flood. Then a levee is a threat and not a levee at all, and every stretch that lies upstream is holding up your wall. [Verse 8] So the moot said both things at once, the way the Hihnir do: that she had saved the Confluence, and that she was through. No landing takes her rope again. No ferry, and no fair. We have no gallows in the Hihn. We have the water, and the air. [Chorus] They gave her the thanks of the moot. They gave her the tally-pole. They said the water was well cut. They said it saved us whole. And then they set her on dry land. They set her on dry land. [Bridge] Now go down to the moot-ground and find the sixth pole in, and count the notches down until you find one cut too deep. That year stands on the tally-pole a hand above the rest. The river never put it there. We notched it nonetheless. [Verse 9] And they read the tallies out aloud the way they always do, and at that notch the reading stops and the whole moot goes through a silence, of the kind we keep at a named confluence. And that is all the name she gets. And it has been enough. [Outro] They set her on dry land. They set her on dry land. On the fifty-ninth of Daazil under the red moon's eye. And the water came back in Daazil. It always comes back.
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