The Yield at Bruchen Vale

Nothing was hidden at Bruchen Vale, which is the reason it is taught, quietly, in two of the four chanceries.

The ledger is intact. Every column balances. The governor signed each year's return himself, the Crown's collector countersigned nine of them, and the whole record went into the Vaurmont archive by the ordinary route at the ordinary time with nobody obstructing anything. It was found by accident, forty years later, by a revenue clerk checking a different valley.

The grant, and the one condition¶

The charter gave Sir Aumery Deschal the lower vale of the Bruchen for grain and pasture. The Goetern settlement in the upper vale was not part of the grant and Deschal, who was a careful man and comes out of this record worse for it, went up to talk to them before he broke a single furrow.

He was heard politely all the way through, given a meal, and shown the road, which is the whole of Goetern diplomacy and which he correctly understood as neither a welcome nor a refusal. They wanted nothing from him. They had no interest in his protection, his titles, or the market he was promising, and they did not care in the least what a chancery in Vaurmont thought it had granted him. The lower vale was not theirs to withhold and they did not pretend it was.

They asked for one thing. Deschal wrote it into the grant himself, in his own hand, on the recommendation of nobody, because he was thirty four years old and thought that respecting a local custom cost him nothing.

That the upper terrace, being forty acres and some, shall not be broken, ploughed, grazed, quarried, nor built upon, the same being the burial ground of the Bruchen people from a date they do not reckon.

Clause added to the Bruchen grant at the governor's own motion, year one

The Goetern kept a bone garden there. Their druids tend such places, and Verdantism does not preach that life is precious. It preaches that life is owed, that the dead feed the field, and that a field which has been fed properly will feed you back. Deschal knew roughly this much and considered it picturesque.

Years one and two¶

Ordinary. Eleven hundred settlers, four hundred acres broken in the lower vale, yields a little under the colonial mean because the ground was cold and new. Deschal's marginalia in these years are about drainage and about the Crown's collector, who arrived in year two after a poor harvest with exactly the figure he had been instructed to bring, on the reasoning of the chancery that a province's assessment is not a conversation.

Year three¶

The winter took the seed store. This is documented, it is corroborated by two neighbouring colonies, and there is no reason to doubt it.

Deschal put the plough into the upper terrace in the second moon. He records the decision in four lines. He records that he considered the clause, that he judged the colony's survival to outrank a custom of a people who had declined every offer of alliance he had made, and that he sent word up the vale as a courtesy the day after the work began.

Forty one acres. The bones went into the spoil heaps and the spoil went back onto the field, which is simply what happens when you plough a burial ground, and which is also, as it turns out, exactly the correct procedure.

The column that ruined everything¶

The ledger from year four is where a modern reader's stomach goes.

The colonial mean for good river ground in that decade was twenty two bushels the acre.

Marret Coyne, the colony clerk, worked the relation out in the year five margin and it took him one line, because it is not a subtle relation. It is a rate. Roughly one interment to the acre buys roughly one bushel the acre, and the arithmetic holds to within a few percent across eight years and across two different men keeping the book.

Coyne's note is not horrified. It is the note of a competent clerk who has found a pattern in a column and wants credit for finding it, and it ends by observing that the year five figure is low because year five was a healthy year.

What Deschal did and did not do¶

He never ordered a killing. The record is clean on this and forty years of hostile reading has not dented it.

What he did was smaller each time and none of it was a crime.

He moved the colony's burials from the churchyard to the terrace in year six, on the stated grounds that the churchyard was waterlogged. Nobody objected, and several settlers thought it fitting. He accepted the bodies of the shaft-collapse dead in year seven rather than sending them downriver to their families, on the grounds of the expense, which was real. In year eight he had the paupers' plot moved. In year nine, after the Crown's collector had come and gone with a figure that assumed the year nine yield rather than the year eight one, he extended the terrace by fourteen acres into ground the Goetern had not asked him to spare, and he ceased writing marginalia altogether.

The last four years of the ledger are numbers only. Not one word of commentary in the governor's hand. The columns are immaculate. He signed every page.

What the fever did¶

The winter fever of year six is the pivot and it is the reason nobody in Vaurmont ever noticed anything.

A colony whose burial ground yields is a colony that buries a great many people, and a colony that buries a great many people is a colony with a fever, and there was a fever, and it was ordinary, and it came from the water like all the others. Sixty one dead. Deschal reported it in the standard form and received the standard reply.

The yields told the truth about it perfectly. The field was never lying and never tempting anybody. It was simply keeping an account, in public, in a column, in the Crown's own paperwork, and the account balanced every single year including the years it embarrassed him.

Year eleven¶

Nine interments. Twelve bushels the acre. The colony had four hundred and ten people left in it out of eleven hundred, and most of the loss was departure rather than death, because Bruchen Vale by then had a reputation downriver of the vague kind that empties a place faster than any specific accusation.

Deschal sent up the vale in the eleventh moon. It is the only letter of his in the file that is not about revenue. He asked the Goetern for help, and he was honest about why, and he offered them the terrace back and the lower vale with it.

You are welcome. The path is that way.

Ospra, headwoman of Bruchen, reply carried down by a boy and copied into the ledger by Coyne, who added no comment

Deschal died at Bruchen. The charter reverted, as charters do, and the chancery appointed nobody, and the province was struck off, and the ledger went into the archive, and the Crown's revenue rolls for those eleven years show a colony fully compliant throughout.

The postscript¶

The last four pages of the Bruchen ledger are in a different hand and a different language and were bound in by an archivist who could not read them and filed them anyway.

They are a continuation of the record. A druid of the Steadfast Crag named Halgi came down into the vale after the settlers had gone, found the book in the governor's house, understood exactly what the columns were, and carried on keeping them.

The entries run another nineteen years. Yields fall steadily and then level out a little above the colonial mean and stay there. The interment column runs to zero and stays at zero, and the yield does not collapse, which Halgi notes as the expected result and does not explain.

Her one paragraph of commentary is the only opinion anybody gives about the whole affair, and it is not the opinion the chanceries were braced for.

There is nothing here that needed a god in it. He fed the field and the field fed him back, on the terms the field has always had, which we told him and which he wrote down in his own hand and kept a copy of.

We did not curse the vale and we would not know how. We came back because a field that has been fed that heavily must be watched afterward, and there was no one left to watch it, and the book was on the table.

Understand what I am telling you. It was never hungry for them. It is not hungry now. It is simply owed, the way it is always owed, everywhere, under every one of your towns, and the difference at Bruchen is only that somebody was writing the total down.

Halgi of Bruchen, closing note, translated