Chapter 71: The Second Book
Souk’s question was on the bench when Mataon got there, written out in Anser’s hand and weighted down with a stone so the wind through the door would not take it.
What would make this town not yours?
Edrin had been up all night. Mataon could tell from four paces, because the man had shaved. He only ever shaved after losing an argument with himself and winning it at the same time.
"Sit down," Edrin said. "I want to enjoy this and I don’t want to rush."
"You’ve been waiting for this since autumn."
"I have been waiting for this since the day you wrote line one and looked pleased with yourself, and I am going to take my time."
He had the contest filing copied out flat on the table, and beside it three short strips of paper, and on each strip a phrase.
Established by. Chartered by. Claimed by.
"Three grounds," he said. "That’s all it is. Break all three and their argument dies. Break two and they win on the third."
Anser was already writing.
"Claimed by is the easy one," Edrin went on. "The petition to the Marches went out over your name. It goes out again over the roll’s name, signed by a rotating pair, and Corvane takes it. A week’s work."
"And chartered by?"
"Also survivable. I wrote line two, the gate wardens wrote three through nine, and a charter can be re-adopted by the people living under it. Only line one is yours."
He stopped there, and turned the third strip around with one finger.
Established by.
"That one you cannot amend," he said. "You can’t vote yourself out of history. The register was established by Mataon Gaael on the sixth of Ravenmark and that will be true for as long as anyone can read."
"So it can’t be broken."
"It can’t be amended," Edrin said. "It can be destroyed."
The stove was doing its work and the room had got warm and Mataon found he had gone cold anyway.
"You want to dissolve the register."
"I want the register dissolved, and a new one established by the citizens, and every person in this valley to walk back through and write their name again with their own hand. A register nobody founded. One that only exists because a hundred and eighty-eight people put it there on the same morning."
"That’s a hundred and eighty-eight entries destroyed."
"Yes."
"Kess keeps that book."
"I know," Edrin said. "That’s the part I’ve been up all night about, and I’d like you to notice I came in anyway."
Kess did not cry. Mataon had braced for crying. Crying would have been easier.
She sat on the wood-box with the roll on her knees while Edrin explained it twice, and she asked three questions, and the third one was the only one that mattered.
"Does the old book get burned?"
"No," Mataon said. "Absolutely not."
He had answered before Edrin could, and too fast, and he heard how it sounded.
"It gets kept," he said. "It gets kept in the sick-house with the medical rolls, and it stays a record of what happened, and anybody can read it. It just stops being the thing the law stands on."
Kess turned that over for a while.
"So it’s the first book," she said.
"Yes."
"And the new one’s the second book."
"Yes."
"Fine." She got down off the box. "Then somebody’s going to have to sit with the old people, because Anser’s hands are bad and Hanne has no patience and eleven of them can’t write."
Then she stopped at the door.
"You can’t be there. Can you."
"No."
"Because if you’re there it’s still yours."
"Because if I’m there it’s still mine."
She nodded once, in the way she had, and went out to organise a hundred and eighty-eight people.
***
It took four days.
Tovan built a second bench because one was not enough and there was weather coming. Nobody had thought to plan for feeding the queue, and feeding the queue turned out to be the entire logistical problem, so Vezra did that. Maelor made two dozen pens out of goose quills and the patience of a man whose forearm still did not bend properly.
Mataon spent those four days at the far end of the valley, cutting a drainage line that did not urgently need cutting, with Barni sitting on the spoil heap making observations.
"You could just watch from the ridge."
"No."
"There’s a very good angle from the—"
"Barni."
"I’m only saying that nobody would know."
"I would know," Mataon said, "and that’s the entire point of the exercise, and if you say another word about the ridge I’m going to put you in the ditch."
Barni was quiet for perhaps forty seconds.
"You know he wrote it faster this time."
Mataon put the spade down.
"Orvek?"
"Second morning. Didn’t read the whole book again, just the first page, then wrote it. Took him about a quarter of the time." Barni’s ears came forward. "I thought you’d want that one."
Mataon picked the spade back up and cut about six feet of drainage line very badly.
On the fifth morning they sent for him.
Line one had to be adopted last, after the names, because a charter with no citizens under it is a piece of paper with opinions on it. And it could not be proposed by him.
Hanne proposed it.
She stood up in a cold room with two hundred people packed into it and spilling out the door, and she did not read from anything, and Mataon understood about two seconds too late that she had not written down what she was going to say because she had not decided to be kind.
"His line was: nobody’s property, including the founder."
She let that sit.
"It’s a good line. It got us here. I want it changed."
Anser’s pen stopped. Nobody breathed at him; the room simply went very quiet in the way rooms do when they know something is happening.
"Nobody in this valley is property," Hanne said. "And nobody in this valley is owed anything for writing that down."
Mataon stood at the back with his hat in his hands like a man at somebody else’s wedding.
"He’d say the same thing," Hanne went on. "He’d say it more politely and it would mean less. I spent nine days in a shed while good people decided things about me for my own benefit, and every one of them was kind, and not one of them asked me. Kindness is how it starts. It’s never how it ends. So we write down that nobody gets a debt out of this, and that includes the man who dug the well."
"Second," said Maelor, immediately.
They voted with hands. Mataon did not raise his, because he was not permitted to, and because he was not sure what he would have done with it.
It carried by everything except four.
[Hearthroot Register — the first book closed]
[Establishing authority: 188 citizens, jointly, 6 Sylphenia 334 A.Z.]
[Charter line one, as adopted: Nobody in this valley is property, and nobody in this valley is owed anything for writing that down.]
[Founder: none of record]
[Feat achieved: the founder was removed from the founding and did not obstruct it]
[WIL +1]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 34 · PER 33 · WIL 38]
He read the fourth line three times.
Founder: none of record.
It should have felt like being cut loose from something. What it actually felt like was standing in a room he had built, in a coat he had bought with money the town had voted him, listening to two hundred people argue cheerfully about where the second book should be kept, and not being needed for any part of it.
Edrin found him afterwards, in the lane, and was insufferable about it for a full minute, and then stopped.
"You wrote in the roll in the autumn that the founder’s best day is the day the town decides correctly without him, and against him, and he’s glad."
"I remember."
"Are you glad?"
Mataon watched Kess through the doorway, laying the second book flat on the new bench and squaring it with both hands until it sat exactly right.
"Ask me in a week," he said.