The Carry

798 words

Chapter text [Verse 1] Sit down beside the stage-fire, friend, and let the door stand wide; no house that keeps a road up here has left a man outside. You've come from Hihn with sacks of grain, you'll go back down with steel, and I will take your money now, and take it by the wheel. [Verse 2] I do not ask you what you haul. I do not lift the sheet. You'll tell me axles at the gate, and that's the whole receipt. [Chorus] For the fee is on the axle, and never on the load, and Tuzraag keeps the stages, and Tuzraag owns the road — and nothing on the road. [Verse 3] They swore the Carry at the Court, and all it says is no: no duke, no factor, no stage-house may own what it lets go. He cannot buy, nor hold in pledge, nor factor, nor insure, and he that breaks it pays no fine — he simply holds no more. [Verse 4] Then Revakgol came for the veins, as everyone had known, and five-and-twenty years of war went up against the stone. The holdfasts held. They held at cost. They kept what they could keep. And under all of it, the road, and on the road, the wains, and at the gate of Sulaun stage, Vasol, in the rains. [Verse 5] There came a night in wet season with the road-bed running thin, and out of the pass at Rarakaskalit a Namuzdus train came in. Nine wains, and every canvas roped, and every driver grey, and a captain of the holdfast guard who begged her turn away [Verse 6] the fee, and take the load instead — "Take title to the ore. Take it as yours, an hour, a night. They cannot touch it more." And Vasol said, "You've nine wains, sir. That's nine-and-thirty wheels. That's what you owe, and what you owe is every coin it feels. [Verse 7] "I cannot own an hour of it. I cannot own a nail. The moment that I hold your ore the road begins to fail — for then the road has an opinion, then the road has a side, and then my neighbours want the pass and not the passing ride." [Chorus] For the fee is on the axle, and never on the load, and Tuzraag keeps the stages, and Tuzraag owns the road — and nothing on the road. [Verse 8] At the second watch there came a column up the grade, and an officer who did not shout — that was the frightening part — who asked her, gently, for the fork, with a lamp against her heart. "Nine wains. You'll have them writ. Say only which way, mistress. Say it, and I'll clear." [Verse 9] And Vasol turned the register and set it in his hand: "Nine wains. Nine-and-thirty wheels. Signed off, and out, and gone. There is no where in it, my lord. There is no what nor whose. I did not ask. I do not know. That's not a thing I choose — [Verse 10] "it's what I'm for. Now you have wains and wheels beneath them all, and I will take your money too, and post it on the wall." He paid. He paid the posted rate. She wrote his axles down. And that is what they hate us for in every mountain town. [Verse 11] They hauled her to the Wain-Court to answer for that coin. She said, "Show me the cloth I own. Show me one crumb of ore." They gave her back the ninth relay and gave her nothing more — no thanks, no rank, no roll of praise. That is the Tuzraagi law. [Verse 12] Now go to Sulaun. Ask them there. They'll bring the ledger down: the ninth of Rain, nine wains in line, and thirty-nine wheels gone, and after, that same night, a column, and its own count of stone. Two entries, and no judgment made, and no thumb on the scale. [Verse 13] I've had a Kaetijul come up and stand and read that page and put his hand upon the line and stand a while, at that stage, because his father's wain was in it, listed, passed, and out; and out was where his father lived; and that is what it's about. [Verse 14] So when you go down out of us to the flood-lands and the fair, say Tuzraag was a poor place and there was nothing there: no army, and no capital, no bishop and no throne, no cargo in the duke's own hands, no metal of our own. [Outro] For the fee is on the axle, and never on the load, and Tuzraag keeps the stages, and Tuzraag owns the road — and nothing, nothing, nothing on the road.

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