The Evenhand

The census takes six days if the weather holds. I walk the shore road north as far as Torrance Stead, then cross at the weir and come back down the inland side, and at every house I ask the two questions the first Registrar asked: who here keeps a line, and who is teaching whom. I write the answers in the book. It is the only book we keep, because a written song does not need you, and a song that does not need you is dead. The founders were clear on that. Titles may be written, and counts, and names of keepers. The lines themselves live in the throat or nowhere.

Forty boats came ashore at the Landing, two hundred and forty-one years ago, out of a ship that is still up there somewhere, too poisoned to hold people. Each boat had been a hold, and each hold had its cycle: work songs, weather songs, the long mourning sets, the navigation chants that nobody navigates by now but that children still learn because they are full of numbers and numbers must go somewhere. Forty holds, forty cycles, and at the first Midwinter ashore the boat-elders nearly came to knives over whose cycle would open the festival. That is not a story; it is in the book, in the first Registrar’s hand, with two names crossed out that no one ever explained.

The answer they found was the lot. The order of cycles at festival is drawn from the bowl. And when a child turns seven, her keeper is drawn from the bowl too — whichever keeper’s marker comes up, that keeper’s line the child learns, and there is no appeal, not for the fisher’s daughter, not for the speaker’s son. Over the door of the hall it says THE LOT HAS NO FAVOURITES, and we mean it the way other places mean their gods.

I was drawn for Alder. My mother cried, I’m told, because Alder was small even then, eleven keepers, and a small line sings at the cold end of the festival when half the hall has gone to bed. I don’t remember minding. I remember Sela, who taught me, and the Alder mourning set, which does a thing at the turn of each verse that no other cycle does, a held fourth that resolves downward when every ear in the hall expects it to rise. You wait for it all year. Or I do.

This is Census 62. I have been Registrar for four of them. Here is the column that the sixty-two censuses make, the count of living lines, first census to this one:

40, 40, 39, 39, 38, 38, 37, 37, 37, 36, 35, 35, 34, 32, 32, 31, 31, 30, 30, 29, 28, 28, 28, 27, 26, 26, 25, 25, 24, 24, 24, 23, 23, 22, 22, 22, 21, 21, 21, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19, 19.

The column never rises. I have checked twice. There is no census anywhere in the book where the count goes up, and there never will be, because a line with no keepers cannot be rejoined. You can lose Whitewater — we lost Whitewater between the 43rd and 44th, the last keeper drowned with her apprentice in the same squall — but you cannot find it again. Zero is a shore. What touches it stays.

For a long time I thought the column was a record of our failures, and I went looking for them. I laid the losses against the hunger years, against the fevers, against the bad speakers and the good ones. They do not line up. Sorrel died in the best decade anyone alive remembers, three keepers to two to one to none across twenty fat years, not of anything. Meanwhile Bell, which is now sixty-one keepers of our two hundred and ninety-seven, came through the second hunger without losing a voice. I could not find the sin. I am telling you the order I learnt things in, because the order matters: first I looked for the sin, and there wasn’t one.

What there was, was Joss’s goat book.

Joss is herdmaster. The herd came ashore as frozen straws, forty bloodlines of them, and the boats sent a book along to say how to keep forty bloodlines from becoming one, in a herd that small, over centuries. Management of Closed Populations. Joss can recite the rules the way I can sing Alder: ration the bucks, no matter how fine; keep a kid from every dam, no matter how plain; when a bloodline runs thin, breed it first and ask after the wool later. The goats of the Sound are the dullest, soundest goats you will ever meet, and there are still forty bloodlines, and Joss is proud of that the way other people are proud of children.

I read the book over a winter. There is a chapter near the front that is not about goats. It is about what happens in any closed herd where the matings are left to chance, and it is short, because what happens is simple. The shares wander. Nothing pushes them — they wander because chance has a width to it, and each generation samples the last. A line that wanders down can wander back up, until it touches zero, and then it can’t. So the wandering only ever banks in one direction, and given time the herd arrives at one bloodline, always, without a single thing going wrong. The book gives the odds plainly: the chance any line is the one left standing is its share of the herd today. Nothing more. Not its quality, not its age, not who loves it. Its share.

The lot has no favourites. That is carved over our door and it is the exact and entire mechanism of the deaths. Every one of the twenty-one lines in the dead half of my column was lost by accident, and the number of accidents was fixed before the first boat grounded.

I did the sums on the back pages of the census, which is probably an offence. Bell, at sixty-one keepers: about one chance in five that in some far census it is the only line there is, sung at every festival from open to close, with nobody left to know it once had thirty-nine sisters. Alder, at five: one in sixty. The mourning set, the held fourth, one in sixty. And the far census itself — one line, whichever it is — is not a chance at all. On the lot as we run it, with keepers like old Marit taking nine apprentices in a life because children fight to be drawn for her, and keepers like poor Anselm dying untaught-from because he mumbled — that width in the chances is what sets the pace. The book has a rule for it. The wider the difference in family sizes, the faster the herd forgets.

I brought it to council on a wet evening in the autumn, the goat book and the census book side by side.

“You’re saying nobody’s at fault,” Ruta said. She is speaker this seven-year.

“I’m saying fault has nothing to do with it. It would go the same if we were saints.”

Joss had it before I finished laying the pages out. “If I bred the herd by lot I’d have one bloodline in sixty years,” he said. “Everyone in this room knows that.” And there was a silence, because everyone in that room did know that, about goats, and had known it their whole lives, and had walked under the carving on the way in.

Corven keeps Bell, and Corven is no fool. “So we weight the bowl,” he said. “Say it out loud. A child draws Alder because Alder is dying. What’s the child, then? A splint? And say it further — because I remember why the bowl exists, even if the rest of you have let it get comfortable. The lot ended the precedence quarrels. The day we say this line first, that line can wait, we have ranked the cycles, and I’d rather lose songs than have my grandchildren fight about rank. They crossed two names out of the first book. We don’t even know what those people did.”

“Cap the apprentices, then,” Ruta said. “No keeper takes more than three in a life, Marit or Anselm, no favourites among the lines, only among the keepers. That’s still even-handed. Registrar?”

They all looked at me, and I had promised myself in the doorway that I would not soften it.

“It roughly doubles the time,” I said. “The book’s plain. Make the families even and the wandering slows by about half. It doesn’t change where the wandering goes. Same shore. Later.”

“Later is something,” Ruta said.

“Later is something,” I said. “It isn’t nineteen.”

We were four hours at it. What passed, in the end, by two votes, with Corven against and half of Bell’s keepers filing out behind him, is what Joss has done in the byre for two hundred years and nobody ever once called unfair: any line under seven keepers takes precedence in the draw until it reaches seven, and the festival order stays pure lot, so no cycle outranks another where it can be heard. The herd rules, for the songs. It has no grandeur to it. It is a plain amendment in my hand in the census book, and above it the old column, forty down to nineteen, which no rule of ours will ever lengthen upward.

At the Investiture this spring, Pia was drawn for Alder. She is eight, loud, and she wanted Bell — every child wants Bell, ninety voices at Midwinter, the harmonies you can stand inside. She sat down across from me with her arms folded and her chin out, the fifth living keeper of my line, the sixth chance in sixty, and I did what Sela did and started her on the boat list, which is the counting song, the first song any Alder child learns. It has all forty names in it. It has always had all forty names in it. Whitewater is in it, and Sorrel, and the nineteen that still answer, and the twenty-one that are only a word in a child’s mouth now, kept there by rhyme and nothing else.

She asked me why we keep the dead ones in the song.

I told her to sing it again.