Harken's Landing

One. The man who could not afford to stay¶

Sir Ambrose Harken was a third son, which in Aethrassia is a condition rather than a rank.

The first son gets the house. The second gets a commission. The third gets a good coat, an education he cannot use, and a standing invitation to leave. Harken was thirty eight and had leased the same rooms in Vaurmont for sixteen years and had never once owned the furniture in them.

Then Meridia opened.

You will know how that happened. A Vuskan keeper stood up in the cold at Skarrholm and said out loud what four generations of her family had spent seventy years not saying, and inside a year every chancery in Krowth was buying rope. That story is told elsewhere. This one begins eleven months later, in a corridor outside the Aethrassian chancery, where a queue of men who could not afford to stay were waiting to buy something they could not afford either.

A colonial charter is the cheapest title the chancery sells. It is sold on credit, against the yield of a place the buyer has never seen. Harken signed for three ships, four hundred settlers, and a debt that would have taken him ninety years to clear at the very best harvest anyone had ever imagined. The date on the charter is the fourth moon of the first year, which is how we know it was the first, because the reckoning had been in use for eleven months and the clerks were still proud of it.

The chancery said the same words to him it says to everybody.

Go, and be worth what you cost us.

Chancery formula, spoken at the granting of a colonial charter

He sailed in the spring with the Perseverance, the Griffon's Due, and a fat old grain hull called the Marigold.

Two. What the crossing cost¶

The northern water was already taken. The Vuskans who had been out there seventy years held the good anchorages, and were extremely polite about it, and did not move. So Harken turned south and went looking for a coast of his own.

He found a great deal of coast. Nearly all of it was cliff.

The Marigold opened her seams in the fifth week and they took two days getting people off her and lost nine doing it. After that they were three hundred and forty in two hulls, on half water, coasting south past a country that would not let them in.

By the eleventh week they had scurvy. By the thirteenth they were burying somebody most mornings. Joss Ferrey, who was master of the Perseverance and the best sailor in the expedition by a distance nobody disputed, told Harken plainly that they had about twelve days left in which a decision could still be made by a living man.

On the ninth of those twelve days the cliff broke open on their starboard side, and there was a gap in it, and inside the gap was the bay.

Three. The bay¶

It was the finest harbour any of them had ever seen, and most of them had seen Vaurmont.

A deep sheltered basin with a hooked headland across the mouth that killed the swell dead. Sweet water running down into it from three streams. Ground on the north shore that was flat, and drained, and already cleared. Fish so thick in the shallows that a man could stand in the water and be a nuisance to them.

And weirs.

Long low stone fish weirs, dozens of them, laid across the tidal flats in curves, built with obvious care and repaired within the season, and the Perseverance was still coasting up the middle of the basin when somebody in the rigging said the word that ended everyone's good afternoon.

There were people in the bay.

Four. The people in the bay¶

They were Naahri, though not one man aboard could have told you so.

An Aethrassian sailor of that year knew one thing about the peoples of Meridia, which was that there were some. The Vuskan verse said so, and the verse had been recited in every port in Krowth inside a year, and he had heard it the way you hear a tale about a country you will never go to.

Knowing is not the same as seeing.

They came up out of the water rather than down into it, and they had been under it a good while first. They were tall, and unhurried, and entirely calm about three hundred foreigners in their bay. Two of Harken's men went straight to their knees. One went over the side of the boat, which is in the log, and which nobody on that expedition ever teased him about, then or later.

The commune stood on the flats, six hundred of them, in houses built low on ground that stops being ground twice a day. The Perseverance had taken the whole settlement for a wreck on the way in, because at high water there is very little of it showing.

What Harken understood, while his men were still finding their voices, was simpler and worse. Three hundred and forty dying people had just sailed into a stranger's larder.

He did the only sensible thing, which was to anchor at the mouth, well out, and send one boat with no weapons in it and himself sitting in the front of it. Ferrey thought this was madness and said so. Harken pointed out that they were nine days from the last day on which anything could be decided by a living man, and went anyway.

He was met on the flats by a woman named Ollun, who heard his speech out to the end. It was a long speech, because he was frightened.

Then she told him that they would decide.

Five. The waiting¶

The Naahri decide slowly, and as a whole, and they do not hurry for anybody.

Whatever a starving man makes of it, there is no rudeness in it and no cruelty either. It is how a people comes to think when the ground they live on stops being ground twice a day, every day, and always has. They are the calmest people in the world and it has kept them intact through everything that has ever been done to them, and there is no lever anywhere that makes them go faster.

They took eleven days.

Harken's people buried fourteen more in that time. On the sixth day a group of them came to him and asked for the sensible thing, which was to go in with what powder they had, and take the weirs, and be alive in the morning. They were not villains. They were cold and their gums were bleeding and there was food in front of them.

Harken talked them down. He was, by every account, not a brave man and not an especially clever one, but he had spent his entire adult life waiting on decisions made in rooms he was not allowed into, and he was better at waiting than anyone else on that beach.

On the eleventh day the flats filled with boats.

They brought fish, and greens, and a root nobody recognised that turned out to be the thing that actually stopped the scurvy. They brought it every day for the rest of the winter. When Harken asked Ollun what the commune wanted in exchange, she seemed to think it was a strange question, and gave him the answer the Naahri have been giving landbound people for as long as there have been landbound people to give it to.

Build well. It will make a fine reef.

Ollun, of the commune on the flats

She meant it kindly. She always did. Harken wrote in his journal that night that he had never in his life been so comprehensively rescued by anyone, and had never once been so frightened by a sentence.

Six. What a chart is for¶

In the spring, Harken had to draw the bay.

That was the job, and it was not a courtesy. The charter required an initial survey, sealed and sent home with the first returning hull, and everything that came afterward was built on it.

Ferrey wanted the bay. She was right to want it. It was deep, sheltered, watered, and cleared, and every single thing that had gone wrong that winter had gone wrong because they did not have a harbour. She laid it out for him over two evenings, competently, without heat, and she finished by saying that a master who let her people sit on an open beach when there was a basin like that a mile south was a master who should be put ashore.

Harken agreed with all of it. Then he asked her one question, which was what she thought a chart was.

She said it was a picture of the coast.

He said no. He said a chart is a list of things the Crown now knows about. He said that the moment the bay went onto that vellum, six hundred people on the flats stopped being people and became a line in a survey, and a line in a survey is assessed, and granted, and garrisoned, and that he could give her the month it would happen in. Five years for the collector. Ten for the fort. He had watched it done to a valley in his own country when he was a boy, and the valley had a name once, and he could no longer remember it.

Then he said the thing that his daughter Anne wrote down thirty years later, when she was an old woman and somebody finally asked her.

I have been an entry in another man's book since the day I was born and I have not enjoyed one hour of it. I am not going to do it to somebody who fed me.

Sir Ambrose Harken, to the master of the Perseverance

Seven. The chart he drew¶

It is a beautiful piece of work. Harken was a genuinely fine draughtsman and it was the only thing he was ever excellent at.

He drew the coast true for ninety miles in both directions, every headland, every sounding, every current, all of it correct and much of it still correct today.

And across the mouth of the bay he drew a shoal.

He gave it a shape and a bearing and two soundings, both of them shallow, both of them invented. He wrote foul ground, breaks in any sea beside it. He marked the water inside as brackish and unfit. He drew the entrance narrow, because on the chart it had to be narrow to justify the rest, and he shaded the whole basin the flat grey that means nothing here worth your trouble.

Then he took his three hundred and twenty six survivors a mile north, onto an open stony beach with a bad holding ground and one thin stream, and he founded his colony there, and he wrote three words in the margin of the chart to say where he had done it.

landing, stony, poor.

A clerk in Vaurmont made a name out of the first of those words, added the founder's name to it because that is the house style, and threw the other two away.

Eight. What it cost the people who paid for it¶

Harken's Landing was a bad site and everybody who ever lived there has known it.

The anchorage is exposed. Every autumn a gale comes up out of the south east and there is nowhere to run to, and in two hundred years the town has lost more hulls at its own moorings than most ports lose at sea. The stream fails in a dry summer. The ground drains badly. Cargo is worked over an open beach in surf, by hand, the way it was in the first year, because you cannot build a mole on that bottom and three separate engineers from three separate centuries have come and said so.

Forty one people died in the second winter. Harken buried every one of them himself, which the settlement noticed, and he was still doing it at seventy, and it is the reason the town has never once turned on his memory in the way you might expect.

He was not a hero of it. He never got the debt down. Vaurmont's collectors came at the rate the chancery sets, which does not vary with the harvest, and he died owing more than he had borrowed, and the charter reverted, and the chancery appointed the next man, and the ledgers carried on in a different hand.

But the bay was never in the survey. And that turned out to matter more than anything else he did.

Nine. Why nobody has ever checked¶

Harken understood something about charts that Ferrey did not, and it has held for two centuries.

Nobody surveys a coast twice.

Surveying is slow and expensive and dangerous, and a chancery that already possesses a sealed initial survey does not pay for another one. Every Aethrassian chart of that coast is copied from an earlier Aethrassian chart, and every one of those, if you follow it back far enough, is copied from the drawings that came home in the Perseverance.

So the shoal has been recopied by clerks who never saw water for two hundred years. It has been on the Lyaudite charts for a hundred and eighty, because Lyaud bought a copy rather than sail its own boat. Insurers price against it. Pilots are examined on it. There is a standing instruction in two navies to keep four miles off that headland in any weather.

Twice, captains have doubted it. Both times somebody produced the chart, and the chart is very old, and very good, and drawn by the man the province is named after.

Ten. What they do there now¶

The commune is still on the flats. It is larger than it was. It trades with the town, quietly, in small boats, over the headland, and has done since the second winter, and the arrangement has never been written down anywhere by anybody, which is the entire point of it.

The town has never given it away. Not in two hundred years, not to a collector, not to a surveyor, not to the engineer from Vaurmont who came to ask why a province with that coastline had no harbour and went home with an answer about the bottom that was perfectly true and nowhere near complete.

They take the children up onto the headland when they are old enough to keep a secret. You can see the whole basin from there on a clear day. The weirs, the boats, the flat green water, the entrance a boy could sail a dinghy through with his eyes shut.

And they are told the story, which takes about as long as this one has, and then they are told the part that is not a story, which is that they will pay for it. That the gales will keep coming out of the south east. That they will go on working cargo through surf like their great-grandparents did. That there is a fine harbour one mile south of their town and there always was, and that it will never be theirs, and that this is a thing their town decided a long time ago and re-decides in every generation by not mentioning it.

Most of them keep it. Some do not, and are not much liked afterward, and are not much believed either, because who exactly are they going to tell.

There is no shoal off the headland at Harken's Landing. There has never been a shoal. Ask anybody in that town and they will tell you precisely where it is.