The Fields Below the White Stair

I had been at Dunscar scarcely an hour when the keeper of our lodging asked whether I had come to settle the valley or merely to inspect it before the soldiers arrived. She put this question while removing a beetle from my washbasin with a spoon reserved, I subsequently discovered, for marmalade. I told her that I had come at the invitation of the tribal court. She considered this an incomplete answer. By evening I considered it an unfortunate one.

The railway ended eleven miles below the settlement, which lies beneath the escarpment known locally as the White Stair. Beyond its terminus we travelled by hired carriage through fields divided by old military embankments, some bearing mature trees, others recently cut open for drainage. Our driver named each ridge after a different victory. When I asked who had won, he said that depended upon who was hiring the carriage. I increased his payment and requested the unfashionable version. His grandfather had been expelled from Dunscar; his father had returned behind a royal regiment; he himself paid rent to the Elves.

The Istrava had recovered sovereignty forty-three years previously under a treaty whose authors had possessed an extravagant confidence in the word customary. The Human inhabitants retained their customary occupations, subject to customary tribal jurisdiction; agriculture appeared nowhere by name. Each party had since accumulated sufficient custom to render the other’s continued presence legally astonishing. My invitation described the resulting difficulty as analogous to Merebridge. I wrote across that sentence, before unpacking, that its author had either misunderstood Merebridge or hoped I should misunderstand Dunscar.

At Merebridge, beneath considerable anger, both parties wished the settlement to survive; here whether it should survive at all had become part of the dispute. The Istrava court proposed to prohibit the turning of soil after the autumn harvest. Dunscar depended upon barley and winter roots. The prohibition would leave its inhabitants free to remain in their houses while purchasing food with money they chiefly obtained by growing it. Councillor Vaust explained that no expulsion was intended. I asked whether he would accept the same explanation from a physician who permitted breathing while obstructing the windpipe.

Vaust received this with disagreeable composure. He was a narrow-faced Elf whose memories included the burning of the first sanctuary at Dunscar. His grandfather’s body had been recovered beneath its western door. I had already heard the Human account of that fire: soldiers, retreating after an unsuccessful siege, had fired the building against their commander’s orders. Vaust had seen them carry fuel; he had heard the commander give an order. I asked what words he remembered. He could remember the voice perfectly, he said, and none of the words.

That admission deserved respect. I gave it, and then asked him to withdraw his identification of the commander as the author of the burning. He refused. We spent twenty minutes upon the difference between a reasonable suspicion and witnessed fact. This was useful work, although my hosts had apparently expected the Royal Chair to be ornamental during its first afternoon.

The Istrava doctrine was severe even by Traditional standards. Annual ploughing renewed an injury for which hunger could supply grounds of necessity, provided the hunger could not reasonably have been prevented. Their own food came through woodland management, permitted gathering and substantial imports paid for by quarry leases. They counted the coercion of growth among the gravest offences against living things. A household might receive leave to disturb particular ground; no ancestor could confer perpetual permission upon descendants whose needs and alternatives had never been examined. I found the argument coherent, but its proposed application was appalling.

I said so. Their chief interpreter, Ithrael, asked whether coherence obliged me to approve the conclusion. I replied that it obliged me to identify where I disagreed, a courtesy I would welcome from several professional colleagues. Imported food, I observed, came from cultivated ground. If the council proposed that Dunscar should buy its barley elsewhere, it must explain why distance altered the offence. Ithrael answered that the tribe could govern conduct only within its jurisdiction. I agreed that this explained the boundary of its power; it left my question standing.

The Human committee proved no more restful. Its chairman, Mr Cale, spread six deeds before me and announced that they established unbroken ownership. Two were grants issued after confiscations; a third restored an estate to a family whose previous possession was disputed in the fourth. I asked him to arrange them by date rather than convenience. When he accused me of favouring the tribe, I offered to apply his principle of permanent conquest to the most recent Elven victory. He put away the deeds with excessive care.

Cale’s youngest son worked the telegraph at the railway terminus; his eldest had died in a boundary affray. These particulars mattered to his conduct without making his account reliable. He wanted recognition of the farms, compensation for seized cattle, and permission to arm a permanent watch. Elsewhere in the room, his brother distributed a circular declaring that the valley would have peace when its last Elf had departed. I read the sentence aloud and asked whether departure included children born there. He said I was introducing sentiment. I insisted upon an answer until the committee adjourned.

That evening the miller’s wife brought me an Istrava tract obtained from a quarry clerk. It argued that repeated Human settlement constituted a continuing assault upon the valley’s living order, and that allowing the settlement to reproduce merely deferred the necessary remedy. Its author sat on the court. I took it to Ithrael before breakfast. She called it a private speculation. I placed Cale’s circular beside it and asked whether she wished me to employ that indulgence consistently. She read both, then requested that I leave them with her. I retained copies.

By this time I had formed a proposal whose ingenuity pleased me enough to impair my attention. The farms nearest the river could continue for a term of years, with compensation financing voluntary departures; disputed upland plots would pass into tribal management immediately. I explained this to a tenant named Ellen Tolley, whose land appeared conveniently marginal upon the survey. She asked where her mother would go. I mentioned the compensation fund. Her mother, she explained, was buried behind the house, and two of her own children lay beside the grave. I had assigned that ground to restoration.

Mrs Tolley then showed me the well her husband had sunk through twenty feet of gravel, the flood marks above the kitchen lintel, and the rebuilt wall against which she measured her surviving children. I had treated departure as an operation performed upon acreage; she made me inspect what it would be performed upon. I struck the upland surrender from my draft in her presence. She remained suspicious, quite properly, since correcting my error promptly did nothing to restore the confidence I had spent in making it.

The records occupied the next two days. I read them with a Human schoolmaster and an Elven archivist who disliked one another sufficiently to check every transcription. A grant predating the latest conquest expressly permitted cultivation on fourteen holdings, and subsequent instruments transferred jurisdiction without expressly cancelling it. This supplied an arguable protection for fourteen farms; Dunscar contained sixty-one. I refused Cale’s request to announce that the settlement’s rights had been proved, and Vaust’s request to dismiss the grant as morally impossible. Someone authorised by the tribe had sealed it, however much his successors now regretted the fact.

We were interrupted by a boy reporting that men had gathered at the northern irrigation gate. Istrava wardens intended to close it under an order against further cultivation. Human labourers had assembled with spades, and several rifles had appeared behind them. I went with the schoolmaster, who kept asking what authority I possessed. The question was excellent and inconvenient. At the gate I demanded the written order, read it twice, and asked its officer where it authorised him to interrupt the public water supply.

He pointed to the prohibition upon agricultural use. The same channel fed Dunscar’s upper cistern. He had not inspected the connection. I had, through Mrs Tolley’s insistence that I see precisely what my clever proposal overlooked. I offered to accompany him to the cistern immediately, provided his men stood clear of the mechanism. Then I told the labourers to put down their rifles. One informed me that he would take no orders from a Caldric visitor. I said he might regard it as advice from a scholar standing within the likely field of fire.

The schoolmaster fetched Ithrael while I remained beside the gate, increasingly conscious that my coat offered poor ballistic protection. She suspended the order pending inspection, and no one cheered. The officer believed himself publicly humiliated; the armed men believed they had frightened the court; I had acquired two more confidently false accounts to correct. Nevertheless the water continued, which materially improved my estimate of the afternoon.

Afterwards I declined to chair a general reconciliation. I specified a narrower business: preserving water and the standing harvest while the grant received judgement. Ithrael secured three councillors willing to hear it; Cale agreed after the miller told him, within my hearing, that a refusal would be explained at every household door. We argued until the lamps required trimming. I made the clerk replace tolerated occupants with inhabitants, and rejected Cale’s proposed perpetual agricultural liberty. Neither phrase belonged in an interim order whose limits were already difficult enough to defend.

The order protects the existing crops, keeps the irrigation gate open and forbids armed assemblies at the waterworks. It provides a hearing for each holding, with copies of the relevant records available to both parties. The court refused a general assurance that the settlement might continue; the Human committee refused to censure Cale’s brother. I recorded both refusals in the signed account, despite vigorous advice that delicacy would assist future negotiations, because whoever negotiates next will need to know what was refused.

I leave tomorrow. Mrs Tolley has asked me to send a replacement washer for her pump, the nearest merchant having declined further credit until the land question is settled. I have its dimensions in the margin beside my notes on the treaty. This juxtaposition offends none of my scholarly principles. The pump is presently more susceptible to improvement than the treaty.

I cannot tell whether Dunscar will survive the judgement. Ithrael believes she can defend the older holdings; the schoolmaster fears that a partial victory will set neighbour against neighbour. Both have grounds for their opinions. At Merebridge I could appeal, eventually, to a shared intention, whereas here I have helped preserve the conditions under which an intention may still be contested without immediate bloodshed. I shall send the washer, the certified grant and my objections to the proposed prohibition together. The court has requested only the grant, but must by now understand the disadvantages of inviting me.