Greyford Wants a Demonstration

Greyford's council met in a shed used to store the town's festival benches. Everyone had to sit on one except the chairwoman, who had brought a chair from home because she had a bad hip and no intention of concealing it for tradition.

Ren laid out the proposed trial on a table scarred by knife marks.

“A quarter-mile taken from the wharf ascent,” she said. “A quarter-mile borne by the old weighyard circuit. Two hours only. The yard stays open; anyone choosing to use it is told what it will cost. No other route receives a hidden share.”

The chairwoman, Bett, leaned forwards.

“Why would we choose to make the yard longer?”

“For two hours, to see whether the independent panel carries what it claims. If it doesn't, we end the trial. If it does, you'll have evidence before you're asked to join anything larger.”

“Evidence of what?” asked a man with mill dust in the creases of his coat. “We already know a binder can move distance. We've been paying for it all our lives.”

Ren nodded towards Ada.

Ada had prepared an explanation. It had sounded clear in the upstairs room. Here, with eleven strangers examining her and a woman in the corner mending a harness while she listened, it became an arrangement of terms nobody had asked to learn.

She put her prepared sheet down.

“The town will keep the panel,” she said. “You will be able to see both routes on it. The people who keep the ground record will be able to release the fold locally, without waiting for Orison to answer.”

The man in the dusty coat sat back.

“Can Orison put it back?”

“Yes. At present.”

A little movement went around the room. Someone sighed. Someone else made a sound Ada could not interpret.

“Then what are we proving?”

“That this part can work. Not that the Hall has agreed to let it.”

The harness-mender pulled a length of thread through leather.

“I like that answer better than the first one,” she said. “The first sounded expensive.”

Her name was Keve. She knew the weighyard because her workshop opened onto it. The dusty man was Ansel, whose mill cart used the wharf ascent. Bett delivered medicinal herbs to the boats and had walked both routes more often than she cared to count. The three of them agreed to examine the ground with Ren. Agreement to examine it, Bett repeated, was not agreement to be persuaded.

They walked the proposed bearing circuit first. Ada had seen it from an upper window and thought it almost ideal: a broad old loop around a disused weighing platform, a stout stone at one end and an iron survey post at the other. On the ground, the northern section was half full of discarded casks. One stretch had become Keve's storage space. Behind the platform a family had planted beans.

“Disused,” Pella said softly beside her.

Ada crossed the word out on her sheet.

Keve could move the storage for the afternoon, but she wanted help moving it back. The family would lend the narrow path beside the beans if nobody disturbed the stakes. Ansel said the casks belonged to a merchant who had gone upriver; he would take responsibility for shifting them because the merchant owed him a favour, not because Ren had found a blank area on a diagram.

By noon Ada's neat circuit had acquired a bulge around the bean patch and a longer approach to the survey post. The quarter-mile transfer remained possible. The available bearing margin was smaller than the old town plan suggested.

Cal measured the altered approach with her. He carried the chain in his uninjured hand and let her set the pegs. It was the first work they had done alone since his message to Tovan.

“At home,” he said, “they move the casks before my father arrives.”

“And then he thinks the map is right.”

“He thinks someone competent has inspected it.”

Ada glanced at him.

“Those aren't always the same mistake.”

“No.”

He knelt to hold the end of the chain against the survey post. His sleeve rode up, showing the edge of the bandage. The skin beneath was yellowing around the bruise.

“Does it hurt?”

“Mostly when I pretend it doesn't.”

“Then don't.”

He smiled without looking up. “An elegant treatment.”

They ate lunch on an overturned cask that Ansel had assured them was not leaking anything objectionable. Ada had brought cheese and a heel of bread. Cal had bought apples and chosen the smallest ones because he thought they might be sweeter. They were sour enough to make them both silent for a moment.

Across the yard, Pella was teaching Keve's daughter to distinguish a route peg from a useful-looking stick. The child kept choosing the stick. Tomar had come down from the inn to inspect the wharf and was being respectfully ignored by two boatmen who had known him for twenty years.

It looked almost possible, Ada thought. Not easy, and not the sweeping alteration she had once imagined making with a single clean line. Possible in a yard where people had to move casks before they could test a promise.

Cal turned the apple in his fingers.

“If Tovan finds a way to give us a hearing, would you take it?”

“With the terms we asked for.”

“And if she can't get all of them?”

“Which ones?”

“I don't know.”

Ada waited, but he did not add anything.

“A hearing isn't much use if we're put somewhere we can't leave while they decide whether to hold it.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

He met her eyes then.

“I know the rooms they use.”

She regretted the question. She did not withdraw it.

A gust crossed the yard and lifted her measurement sheet. Cal caught one corner; she caught the other. For a second they held the page stretched between them, each preventing the other's grip from being enough.

“Come on,” she said. “We still have the wharf.”

The ascent was worse than the yard. A drain had collapsed beneath the lowest turn, and the corner post leaned enough to put stress on its buried footing. Ren rejected it before Ada had finished marking the crack.

“We use the upper flight,” she said. “Or we don't use the climb.”

“That helps the mill carts less,” Ansel objected.

“I know.”

“Can you shore the lower post?”

“With a mason, materials and time. Not with ink.”

They changed the plan again. By the time they returned to the council shed, the trial looked smaller on paper than it had that morning.

Bett examined the revisions.

“Good,” she said.

Ada blinked.

“If it had come back exactly as you promised, I'd have thought you hadn't looked.”