The Garden at Vellisch

The Vellisch file is kept in the Grismere chancery under a heading that translates roughly as closed, unremarkable. It is ninety-one years of dispatches from four governors, plus an envoy's report added long afterward by a man who was not supposed to be looking.

Every dispatch in it is dull. That is what the file is famous for, among the very small number of people who know it exists.

Year three. Governor Hallem Roux.¶

Vellisch was chartered on the lower Auven for timber and river grain, and it began the way Lyaudite colonies begin, which is to say underfunded and slightly desperate and staffed by people who had run out of better options at home.

Roux's third-year dispatch is a competent document. Fourteen hundred settlers. Palisade complete. Two hundred acres broken. He notes elves upriver, some distance above the second bend, and reports no contact, no hostility, no demand, and no evident interest in the colony whatsoever. He asks Grismere whether he should send to them. Grismere, in a marginal note that is the only funny thing in the entire file, instructs him not to spend money on it.

Year eleven.¶

Roux again, older, pleased with himself.

The Auven runs cleaner than it did. Marsh fever, which killed sixty in the first four years, has effectively ceased. He attributes this to a drainage scheme he ordered in year seven and asks that the chancery note his initiative, and the chancery does note it, and he was probably even partly right.

He mentions in passing, under timber, that the good stand above the second bend has been left standing, on the recommendation of his own foresters, for reasons the foresters gave him and which he does not repeat because they were technical and he did not follow them.

Year twenty six. Governor Iselde Marn.¶

Marn is the one who noticed something, and what she noticed was a map.

She had the colony resurveyed on taking the post, as a careful governor does, and the new survey did not agree with the old one. The discrepancy was not large: something under a fifth of the granted acreage, all of it upriver, all of it forest that nobody had ever worked.

She did the correct thing and interrogated her surveyor, who was Lyaudite, who had held the post nineteen years, and who was completely unable to tell her when the line had moved or who had moved it. He had drawn the new map himself. He had drawn it from the old map. He could not account for the difference and he was, she writes, badly shaken by his own inability to account for it.

She wrote to Grismere requesting instruction. The reply took two years, because Lyaud was at war with something, as Lyaud is, and when it came it asked her to state the incident.

There was no incident. Nothing had been seized. No treaty had been broken, because no treaty had ever been signed. No garrison had marched anywhere. She wrote back saying so, because it was true, and the correspondence closes there, and her remaining eleven dispatches all end with the standard clause: nothing has occurred this year requiring the chancery's attention.

Year forty. Year forty seven. Year fifty two.¶

The middle of the file is the strangest part precisely because it is the pleasantest.

Vellisch is thriving. Yields are excellent and rising. The river is clean. The plagues that gut every other river colony on the coast go around it. Three governors in succession report a town that is healthier, better watered, better drained and better fed than any of them expected, and each of them takes credit, and the chancery believes them because the tithe arrives and the tithe is good.

The population figures are in the file too. Nobody in Grismere ever read them across.

Fourteen hundred in year three. Sixteen hundred in year twenty. Sixteen hundred and forty in year thirty four. Sixteen hundred and ten in year forty seven. Fifteen hundred and eighty in year fifty two.

Nobody was dying, which is why the figures never triggered anything. Deaths in Vellisch were the lowest in the Lyaudite colonial system for sixty consecutive years. The numbers drift down because Lyaud, broke and at war, sent no new settlers after year thirty, and because the young went downriver to places where more was happening, and because a town where nothing happens is a town that people leave slowly, one family at a time, over a lifetime, for reasons that are always personal and never political.

Year sixty three. Governor Corvet Anseau.¶

Anseau saw it.

His long dispatch of that year is the only document in the file with any heat in it. He lays the whole thing out: the map, the stand above the bend, the river, the fever, the figures, the fact that his own foresters will not cut upriver and cannot say why, the fact that a third of the streets in his town are maintained by gardeners he does not employ and cannot dismiss because they are not, in any sense he can prove, doing anything to him.

He demands troops. He demands them at length. He is very clear that he is not describing an attack and he is equally clear that he is describing a loss.

I am aware how this reads. I have read it back myself. I can produce no burned farm, no murdered subject, no seized warehouse, no insult offered to the flag. I can produce a town that is better than it was in every particular, and a survey that is smaller than it was, and a graveyard that is tended better than my own mother's, and not one man in it who can tell me who is doing the tending.

If the chancery requires an incident before it will act, then I put it to the chancery that it has been designed against. There will not be an incident. There has never been an incident anywhere this has happened.

Anseau to the Grismere chancery, year sixty three

The reply is four lines long. It regrets that no relief can be spared. It reminds him that the tithe is due.

He served nineteen more years. His later dispatches are short and end with the standard clause.

Year ninety one.¶

Governor Piers Vachel, the last, reports that Vellisch is in good order, that the harvest was excellent, that the tithe has been despatched in full, and that nothing has occurred requiring the chancery's attention.

The chancery clerk who processed that dispatch found that the colonial roll listed no Lyaudite subjects at Vellisch, because the last census return had been filed nine years earlier and had been zero, and had been filed by Vachel, who had signed it, and who was drawing his stipend, and who was seventy eight years old.

Vellisch was delisted from the colonial roll that season. The entry reads, in full: closed, no cause found.

The envoy, thirty years after that¶

Nobody was sent officially. A man named Deviel Ost went upriver on a trade errand and made a detour, because he had read the file as a young clerk and had never got it out of his head.

He found a town.

He found Lyaudite stonework, maintained impeccably, a street plan he recognised from the year twenty six survey, a church of the Sacred Light with the roof sound and the doors open and the altar cold, and orchards where the outer fields had been. He found perhaps two hundred elves and no one else. He was received with complete courtesy and given a bed for four days.

He found the graveyard first, actually, on the way in, and it is the part of his report that people quote. Fifteen hundred Lyaudite dead, every stone upright, every name legible, the grass cut, all of it worked into the orchard ground and unmistakably part of it. The Eldrin are Verdantists and an Eldrin glade is a bone garden on the scale of centuries, and the elves tending Vellisch's dead were not being ironic and did not think they were doing anything that needed explaining.

He asked the warden, whose name he renders as Thaelirin, when Vellisch had changed hands.

Changed hands. You will have to help me. Nobody took it and nobody gave it. Say what you think happened and I will tell you whether it did.

Recorded of an Eldrin warden, at Vellisch

Ost tried, for four days. He was answered patiently every time, at whatever length he could stand, by someone who had been present for all ninety-one years of it and who corrected his dates twice.

Nothing had been taken. Nobody had been driven out. No law had been broken, and the warden was mildly interested to learn that Lyaud had ever considered the matter legal at all, since to her knowledge no instrument had ever existed on either side.

The item that closes the file¶

Ost's report was filed with the rest, and the clerk who filed it added one note, and the note is why anyone still pulls the Vellisch file.

The tithe from Vellisch has never stopped arriving at Grismere. It arrives every year, in goods, on time, correct to the last measure, assessed at the rate set in the original charter of a colony that has not existed on the roll for sixty years.

Lyaud is poor. Lyaud has been poor for a very long time. No chancery in Grismere has ever asked the question, and the standing instruction, renewed by every revenue officer to hold the post, is that the Vellisch account is in order and is not to be disturbed.