The Witnesses at Rook’s Weir

At Rook’s Weir the anniversary committee had arranged the surviving witnesses according to the kingdoms in which they had been born, a classification which the witnesses immediately spoiled by sitting beside their former workmates. I approved their alteration and incurred the secretary’s displeasure by helping to move the chairs. We had assembled to commemorate the opening of the mill sluices during Sudermark’s first northern invasion, when a temporary footway carried several hundred fugitives across the diverted river. The operation had occurred a hundred and fourteen years earlier. To the Human members of the committee it belonged to the founding history of Calder; to the Dwarven woman beside me it belonged to the winter in which she had lost her tools. She wanted to know whether the committee intended to acknowledge that the tools had been requisitioned.

The company included four Dwarves and two Elves who had worked at the crossing. Every Human who had been there was dead. This circumstance requires some effort from a Human reader, whose imagination generally supplies old men wherever a sufficiently old occurrence is mentioned. There were no old Human witnesses waiting to be discovered in a cottage. Their children were dead also, with one very elderly exception who remembered her father’s damaged hand and nothing he had said about its cause. Meanwhile, Mistress Dagna Varn, who had supervised the footway, still accepted commissions for hydraulic machinery. She had declined our original invitation because it coincided with the inspection of a pumping engine. We moved the commemoration by a day.

I had proposed the enquiry after finding that the authorised account rested upon a military despatch, two municipal entries and a narrative printed considerably later by the captain’s grandson. These were habitually cited as four authorities. Their repeated wording suggested a less generous enumeration. The account said that Captain Tarrant had ordered the sluices opened at dawn, directed the construction of the crossing and admitted the fugitives while his rearguard held the southern road. I expected the surviving witnesses to dispute the distribution of credit. They did so, though with less heat than the secretary, whose grandfather had subscribed to the captain’s monument. What occupied them most fiercely was whether the mill had been grinding during the evacuation.

I initially treated this disagreement as an incidental obstruction. Mistress Varn asked how much water I supposed could pass beneath her footway while the great wheel was turning. I answered with a calculation based upon the surviving channel. She observed that the channel had since been widened, and invited me to inspect the older masonry before making further contributions. This was sound professional advice, delivered with an enjoyment I recognised. Beneath the present coping we found the sockets of the former wheel-house. The available clearance had indeed been much smaller. My calculation was correct for a structure which had played no part in the event, and I withdrew it in precisely those terms.

The Elven witnesses remembered the wheel turning. One, a former transport clerk named Lirien Talm, recalled its noise so distinctly that he struck the table to reproduce the irregular beat. Varn remembered securing it. Two of the other Dwarves agreed with her; the fourth remembered flour being issued and regarded this as sufficient proof that grinding continued. Here were disagreements within the peoples as well as between them, which disappointed a colleague who had come equipped with a theory of Elven impressions and Dwarven particulars. I advised him to preserve the theory until he could find witnesses willing to obey it. We then separated the questions of grinding, turning and issuing flour, which had been allowed to pass as one question for most of the afternoon.

The mill ledger settled part of the difficulty. Flour had been distributed from store. A repair account described damage to the wheel’s locking beam, and Talm’s own transport book, preserved among the municipal papers, placed his arrival on the preceding evening. He had heard the wheel before it was stopped. He resisted this conclusion until I showed him an entry in his hand charging for two nights’ lodging. Then he laughed, examined the page for some time and said that he remembered being angry about the charge. The anger had survived without its occasion; the noise had acquired a later one. His recollection contained useful evidence, but arranging that evidence in time required assistance from a bill.

The disputed hour of opening proved more consequential. All six witnesses accepted dawn when first questioned. The word occurred in the public inscription behind their chairs. Asked separately what they had done immediately beforehand, they described a meal, the arrival of carts and an attempt to bring cattle down a lane already crowded with people. None recalled darkness. I asked that the inscription be covered while we continued, a proceeding the secretary considered disrespectful to the dead. I replied that the dead had supplied no testimony that morning, whereas his inscription had supplied six witnesses with an answer. He permitted a cloth to be hung over it after Talm supported my request.

An innkeeper’s account recorded meals furnished to the sluice party well after sunrise, and the military despatch itself placed the enemy’s arrival before the order to open. Its author had used “at dawn” for the beginning of the day’s operations; the grandson had attached the phrase to the sluices. The witnesses had subsequently attended commemorations, read the narrative and, in two cases, advised the sculptor. Repetition had done the rest. Varn was particularly offended by her own error. She could recall which gate had jammed and which apprentice had struck its housing, yet had accepted an hour incompatible with the work she described. Her competence as an engineer survived this discovery without difficulty; her claim to remember the morning entire did not.

On the captain’s conduct, where I had anticipated controversy, agreement was unusually strong. He had arrived after construction began, understood the arrangement when Varn explained it and supplied men to carry timber. He had also prevented a mounted officer from taking his horse onto the footway. The despatch credited him with establishing the crossing, a sufficiently elastic military expression to accommodate these acts. The municipal account paid Varn and eleven millworkers for preparing it. I proposed that the new tablet name them. The committee objected that the captain had borne responsibility. Varn answered that she had borne responsibility for the footway, and offered to explain the loading to anyone who doubted it. I supported her motion before she could obtain a blackboard.

The most troublesome discovery concerned the people who crossed. The later narrative described the rescued as loyal inhabitants fleeing the invader. Talm remembered wounded men in Sudermark coats being carried over among them. Varn remembered these men too, chiefly because their stretchers were too wide to pass the handrail supports without tilting. The committee supposed them prisoners. Neither witness remembered a guard. In the mill accounts I found payments for cutting up “southern coats” into bandages, and in a surgeon’s return, eleven enemy wounded transferred from the mill to the northern infirmary. Those entries establish that enemy wounded received assistance, though they do not establish whether the men were prisoners, deserters or abandoned patients. I insisted that our report preserve the uncertainty, which several members found less tolerable than an accusation.

I had myself made a related mistake. Reading “foreign families” in the relief register, I had assumed that these were families from Sudermark and had prepared a question about their treatment. Talm explained that the phrase referred to people from Grendon, the mineral kingdom which Sudermark had overrun. At the time, these people had crossed a frontier to enter what subsequently became their own country. I knew the sequence of annexation, alliance and unification perfectly well. Nevertheless, I had read the older entry with the later map in my head. A professor may know a fact and fail to employ it; the distinction has sustained a considerable portion of academic controversy. I struck out my question and asked Talm to identify the places of origin instead.

His answers restored a political geography which the celebration had abolished by omission. The refugees had paid tolls at a boundary now marked only by a change in paving. Some millworkers had expected reimbursement from a treasury which ceased to exist after the war. Varn had been paid in coin she still possessed, although she refused to lend it for exhibition without a receipt. For these witnesses, Calder’s unification remained an alteration to arrangements under which they had earned wages and travelled. For the Human committee it supplied the natural beginning of the story. They found the earlier boundaries faintly unreasonable, as people commonly find any inconvenience which their ancestors endured for purposes no longer evident.

Later wars had further confused the Human inheritance. A popular engraving showed the fugitives passing beneath the railway viaduct, which was built within my professional lifetime. When I objected, its publisher explained that the view made the place recognisable. A school recitation attributed to Tarrant a sentence first recorded during a much more recent Sudermark invasion. Children were thus given an intelligible landscape and a memorable speech at the expense of knowing what had happened. I do not suppose the millworkers’ account would have survived immaculate without these improvements, since their memories had already borrowed from the inscription. Yet they retained enough independent detail to expose changes which the Human public had ceased to be capable of noticing.

The revised tablet names the millworkers and the captain, gives no hour for the opening and records that wounded men from the invading army were among those brought across. I secured these alterations by being tiresome at four meetings, with substantial assistance from Varn at the last. The documents are now copied together, with their contradictions retained. This is a modest recovery. We still cannot determine how many crossed, and nobody can identify the child whom all six witnesses remembered being passed from hand to hand above the broken section of railing. The Human accounts have lost even the existence of that child. Varn remembers being frightened that the next man would drop him; she still dislikes that man, although she admits he caught him safely. When we finished, she took the evening train to inspect her pumping engine. I watched her leave with the uncomfortable recognition that our national antiquity had an appointment the following morning.