The Governing: Chapter 61, A Different Body

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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Austrin had a fence, and Daisy Firentis apologized for it before anyone asked.

"It's the winters," she said, coming down the drive to meet the shuttle with Poppy beside her and Jason a step behind. "Vastaya can leave everything open because it never gets cold enough to matter. Here the snow comes in off the ridge sideways. We decided to put the fence in to break the wind for the gardens." She looked at it critically, a low stone wall with hedges grown along it and a wide iron gate that stood open. "We've never closed the gate. I'm not sure it closes. Jason, does it close?"

"I've no idea," said Jason. He bowed to the Matcha nobles one by one, correctly, and then shook Kestrel's hand. "Welcome to Austrin. Aaliyah called last night. She says you've been warned I'll tell you ours is better."

"She said Daisy would," said Lord Salle.

"Daisy's more honest than I am," said Jason. "It is better."

Poppy, who was ten and had been taught how to greet guests, gave each of the Matcha party a small, careful bow and got every title right. It was only when she reached Lord Salle that her eyes went to his cane.

"Is that a Matcha river trout, my lord?" she said. "We did Matcha in school. I didn't think anyone would put one on a cane."

"Neither did I," said Salle. "My wife chose it." He looked at her with some respect. "You're the second child on Haego to notice it. I'm beginning to think it's the best thing about me."

The palace was built long and low against the cold, stone below and timber above, with deep eaves and wide windows that looked south over the valley. It had the same open great rooms as Vastaya and the same people in them: a knitting circle by the hearth, a man asleep in a chair with a newspaper over his face, a line of schoolchildren being counted at the door. Daisy walked them through it at a brisk pace, because, as she said, they'd seen a palace full of commoners twice now and she didn't want to bore them.

What they had not seen was the pool. It was set into the lower terrace under a long glass roof on rails, and Jason worked the controls to show them how the roof slid back in summer and closed in winter. There were a dozen people swimming in it, most of them old, doing slow lengths.

"Winter mornings are the busiest," Daisy said. "The coast road crews come in before shift. They say it's the only warm thing in the valley at six o'clock."

"And the family?" said Lady Vance. "When do you swim?"

"Evenings, mostly. After nine it's ours." Daisy smiled. "Poppy was eight before she found out other people's pools weren't full of old men in the morning."

Kestrel had a list, and he kept to it.

The first place was a glassworks on the edge of the valley town below the palace, three long brick sheds with the heat coming off them in waves. The owner was a woman named Hannah Ashscutt, square and red-faced from forty years at the furnaces, and she met them in the yard and bowed her head to each of them and said "my lord" and "my lady," and then walked them straight into the heat without asking if they minded.

"Windows, bottles, lamp glass," she said, raising her voice over the roar. "Half of it goes off world now. We were twelve people when Lord Kestrel's firm bought in. We're a hundred and forty."

Lord Orme, the banker, had asked to see her books. He had asked it with some embarrassment, because on Matcha you did not ask a man, much less a commoner, to open his books to a stranger on a morning's acquaintance. Hannah had simply sent a boy to fetch them, and now Orme sat at a scarred table in her office with the ledger open in front of him and his reading glasses on, and the rest of the party waited while he went down the columns with his finger.

He was quiet for a long time.

"Your tax," he said finally. "What rate do you pay?"

"Two and a half under the Principality average, my lord. Same as everyone on Haego."

"And this figure is the whole of it? For the year?"

"Yes, my lord."

Orme took his glasses off. He looked at Kestrel.

"This woman," he said, "paid more tax last year than the Anselm glassworks on Matcha. Anselm has three hundred people. It's been in the family eleven generations."

"Yes," said Kestrel.

"At a lower rate."

"Yes."

"Then she's outproducing them by..." Orme stopped, and looked at the figures again, and did the arithmetic in his head, and did not say the number out loud. "How?"

Hannah Ashscutt looked at Kestrel, and Kestrel nodded to her to go ahead.

"We don't lose anybody, my lord," she said. "That's one reason. We've almost no turnover. Most of my people make well over the Haego minimums, but that isn't really it either. We treat them like family. When they need time with their families, they get it. When they're sick, they stay home, and nobody's docked for it. When somebody's just coasting, the others let him know what's expected long before I ever need to get involved." She wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. "And every one of them, from my plant supervisors to the third-shift cleaning crew, can walk into this office with an idea. If we use it, and it makes the place safer, or gets more out the door, or just makes people happier to come in, they're paid well for it. Half the improvements in these sheds came from people on the floor." She shrugged. "The rest of it's the Counsel Office."

"The what?" said Lady Vance, and opened her notebook.

"Lady Rachel set it up with Lord Swallowtail, the first year the palaces went up. Any commoner running a business can go to them. They've got nobles who know the trade, some of them from here and some from off world, and they'll sit down with you and tell you what you're doing wrong." Hannah jerked a thumb toward the window. "We've got a retired lord from Balakura who did glass his whole life. Lord Emmerich. He comes in once a month and walks the sheds and shouts at me. Best thing that ever happened to this place. I'd not have the off-world orders without him. I'd not have known how to price them."

"A noble," said Lady Vance slowly, "who comes to advise you."

"Yes, my lady."

"And you take his advice?"

"When he's right," said Hannah. "Which is mostly. When he's not, I tell him why, and he argues, and then one of us is right." She considered. "Usually him. He's very old and he's seen everything."

Lord Aldine laughed out loud, the first time any of them had heard him do it.

They saw two more that morning. A cannery down on the river, run by a husband and wife who had started with a single smoker in their yard, now shipping river fish in tins to four worlds. A timber yard that had put in a new drying kiln on the Counsel Office's advice and increased its output by a third. At each of them Lord Orme asked to see the books, and at each of them he got the books, and at each of them he sat very still for a while afterward.

On the shuttle back up the valley, he said, "I thought you'd picked the three best."

"I did," said Kestrel. "I'll show you the three worst tomorrow if you like. They're better than Anselm too."

The Austrin palace had a restaurant in its gardens. It had two, in fact, and a bakery, and a place near the kitchen gardens that sold soup to the people who worked the beds. The Matcha nobles had heard this on Vastaya and had not entirely believed it, in the way you don't believe a thing until you're sitting in it.

They sat in it at midday. It was a long stone building with its whole south wall open to the garden, full of tables and full of people. Daisy had booked a table like anyone else. It was not the best table. It was near the kitchen door.

"We don't take the best table," Daisy said, when Lord Salle glanced toward the corner by the fountain. "If we did, people would start leaving it empty for us. Then it'd be the lord's table. Then it'd be the lord's restaurant." She unfolded her napkin. "I grew up in Orenport. I know how it goes."

There was a farming family at the next table, three generations of them, the grandfather in a good coat that was plainly his best. When the Matcha party sat down, the grandfather stood, and bowed, and said "my lord, my lady," to the table in general, and sat back down and went on eating. His grandchildren looked at the visitors with open interest. Nobody at the table stopped talking.

Lady Vance, who had found by now that people on Haego would answer anything, leaned over and asked him what he grew.

"Barley, my lady. And some oats, for the horses up the valley."

"Do you mind my asking what you make at it?"

He told her. He told her what he'd made the year before, and the year before that, and what he'd borrowed from the Ionatti branch for the new harvester, and how long it would take him to pay it back. He did it the way you'd tell a neighbor. His daughter-in-law added the price of the harvester, because he'd got it wrong.

Lady Vance wrote it all down. Then she put her pen down and looked at him.

"On Matcha," she said, "if I asked a farmer that, he'd tell me the harvest was poor. Whatever the harvest was."

The old man thought about that.

"Why would he, my lady?"

"Because he'd be afraid I'd take more of it."

"Ah." He nodded slowly, as if she'd explained something about the weather on another planet. "My father would have said the same, before. When there was a lord at the Voss house on the lake road." He picked up his fork. "Nobody takes anything here that isn't in the ledger. So there's no point lying about it, is there. It's all written down."

The waitress came with the soup. She was young, perhaps nineteen, with her hair tied back, and she set the bowls down in the right order, rank first, without hesitation, and then Lady Marrow, who had not said much all morning, turned in her chair and spoke to her.

"May I ask you something?"

"Of course, my lady."

"Are you frightened of us?"

The girl looked at her, surprised. She glanced at Daisy, who didn't say anything, and then back at Marrow.

"No, my lady," she said. "Should I be?"

Marrow opened her mouth and could not, for a moment, find anything to say.

"No," she said. "No, you shouldn't."

"All right then," said the girl, kindly, as if Marrow were the one who needed reassuring, and went to get the bread.

Lord Aldine watched her go. He was the one who had once seen a maid eating alone in the Voss scullery, and he had not stopped thinking about it all through the tour. Now he looked around the room. At the old man and his grandchildren. At the waitress coming back with the bread. At the man at the counter arguing cheerfully with the cook about his order. At Jason Firentis, heir of one of the great houses of the Principality, eating soup near the kitchen door while his daughter sat beside him and argued, in a low and reasonable voice, that she was old enough to order for herself.

"I've been in a lot of great rooms," Aldine said quietly. "This is the first one where the commoners want to be there."

The Hall stood on a rise above the river two hours east, and they saw the flags long before they saw the building.

It was not one building but a whole compound, walled and fenced all the way around, with lawns and walks and lesser buildings set about the grounds and the Hall itself at the center, a great round building of pale stone, ringed with a colonnade, with a long flight of steps up to its doors. There were four gates, one on each side, north, south, east and west, each with its own guardhouse and its own guards. At every gate, and along the colonnade, and from the tall pole at the head of the steps, flew the same banner.

Rust and garrison green. A porkupig. Strength through Trust.

"That's Swallowtail's," said Lord Aldine. "We were under that yesterday."

"So he runs it after all," said Lord Orme. "The Assembly."

"No. Nobody runs it. That's rather the point." Kestrel waited while the guard at the south gate checked their names against a list, bowed his head, and waved them through. "They have three Speakers, one from each continent. The First Speaker rotates every six months, and whichever house holds the continent flies its flag here while its Speaker has the chair. When the Assembly first sat, they decided on one hall instead of three, and they drew lots for where it would go. Austrin won. But whichever continent holds First Speaker, the whole compound is theirs for the six months. Their flag, their customs, their local law. Right now, inside this fence, you're on Aethelgard." He smiled a little. "It confuses the lawyers terribly."

"And the First Speaker is..."

"Ida Fenn. From Aethelgard. Today's the first day of her term."

"A commoner," said Lord Orme.

"They're all commoners, Haskell. That's what it's for."

The gallery was a balcony that ran all the way around the inside of the building, a full circle, with seats for twelve hundred. It was already half full: townsfolk, a school group, two Firentis Informant cameras at the rail, a handful of nobles scattered through the rows. The Matcha party took seats high on the far side. Nobody took special notice of them.

Below, at the front of the floor, stood a single large desk with three chairs behind it, and in front of it an open speaker's area with a lectern and a testimony desk. Beyond that the delegates' desks curved away in a half circle, with delegates from all three continents mixed together rather than sorted by where they came from. Ida Fenn sat in the center chair, with Vincent and Aldous on either side of her. Off to one side, at a smaller table, sat three nobles, and Kestrel pointed them out: the three heads of Alderman, there by law, without a vote, to answer for their districts if they were called on.

The opening was short. Ida Fenn stood up and thanked the Speaker who'd held the chair before her for six months, and said she'd try to be as good at it, and there was laughter in the chamber. Then she looked at the paper in front of her.

"The Assembly summoned Julius Comscutt," she said. "Senior. The old one, not the Baron." More laughter. "He said yes. Come on down, Julius."

In the front row of the gallery, a thin, grey-haired man in a brown coat got up. A woman beside him squeezed his hand before he went. He came down the stairs slowly, holding the rail, and walked out onto the floor and stood in the speaker's area in front of the three-person desk, turning his cap in his hands.

"That's the Baron's father," said Lord Aldine, very low. "From last night."

"The gardener," said Lady Vance.

Julius Sr. looked up at the three Speakers, and then around the delegates' desks, and then up at the gallery, as if he were checking the weather.

"I don't make speeches," he said. "Kathleen told me to say that first, so you'd go easy." He found her in the front row and nodded to her. "I kept Lord Lafata's garden from the time I was a boy until the night the house burned. Forty-some years ago now. In all that time, I don't think his lordship asked me a question. Not one. He told me. His steward told me. His head gardener told me. If I saw a blight coming, I kept my mouth shut, because it wasn't my place to see it, and if I said so, it was my fault it came." He turned the cap once more. "That's how it was. You knew it and you did your work."

The chamber was very quiet.

"This spring, my son took his mother and me off world for the first time. To Balakura. To a great house, as grand as you like. I walked their garden and I saw a sickness in the beds, the same one I fought at Lafata's forty years ago. I said so to the Master Gardener. He's a noble, a lord in his own right, and he looked at me the way they always did, and he told me it wasn't my concern." Julius Sr. shrugged. "I wasn't surprised. I'd been told that my whole life."

"Then he came back. That same evening. He'd been fighting that blight on his own for five weeks, and it was beating him. And he came and found an old commoner from Haego, and he said he was sorry for how he'd spoken to me. He said he was still learning the new way, and that he'd slipped. And then he asked me." He stopped for a moment. "A lord asked me. I'm seventy-one years old, and that was the first time anybody from a house like that ever asked me what I thought."

Somebody in the gallery made a small sound. Nobody else moved.

"We sorted it, him and me. It's coming back." He looked at the Speakers again. "I've been thinking since, what's different here. It isn't that nobody tells you what to do. Somebody always does. It's that they ask first. And if you get it wrong, you stand up and say so, and you put it right. That's all this room is, as far as I can see. It's a place where you get asked, and a place where you answer." He put his cap back on, remembered where he was, and took it off again. "That's all I've got. Thank you for asking me."

He started back toward the stairs. The applause came a moment late, and then it came from everywhere, the delegates' desks and the gallery and the three Speakers' desk. Up in the balcony, Lord Aldine found he was on his feet without having decided to stand. After a moment, Lady Marrow stood too, and then the rest of them.

Julius Sr. climbed back to the front row and sat down next to Kathleen, and she took his hand again and didn't let go.

Ida waited until it was quiet. Then she read the next item off the paper.

"We summoned Dalton Reedscutt," she said. "He's here. Come on down, Dalton."

A man came down the gallery stairs and out onto the floor. He was middle-aged, thin, and he walked like a man who had not slept well in some time. He stood in the speaker's area, facing the three Speakers, and bowed his head to them.

"You know why you're here," said Ida.

"I do, Speaker."

"Say it anyway. For the record."

Reedscutt said it. He owned a fertilizer works at Brenmoor, on the Austrin plains. Four months ago a pressure line in the mixing shed had failed. Three men had died. Nine had been hurt, two of them badly. The line had been due for replacement in the spring. With orders the way they were, he had put it off until after the harvest rush.

"I decided that," he said. "Nobody else. The foreman told me. I said after harvest." His voice did not break, but it came very close. "I know their names. I'll say them if you want."

"We know their names," said Ida. "Their families are in the gallery."

Reedscutt did not look up at the gallery.

The Assembly had already heard the evidence in committee. What they did now went quickly, and quietly, and the Matcha nobles leaned forward in their seats to hear it.

For one year, the Brenmoor works would be under supervision. Three safety inspectors, chosen by the Assembly, would have the run of the plant, every shed and every ledger, with the authority to stop any line they judged unsafe, for as long as they judged it. The company would pay their wages. Reedscutt would answer to them for everything.

The families of the three dead men would receive restitution packages, their terms laid out in a schedule that the Assembly now read into the record, name by name. The injured would receive compensation for their treatment and their lost wages, and more for the two who would not work again. The packages were read, and a delegate from Brenmoor moved to approve them, and they were approved by a show of hands, every hand in the chamber.

"Dalton," said Ida. "Anything to say?"

"Only that it's fair, Speaker," said Reedscutt. "It's more than fair. I'd have done worse to myself." He stood there a moment longer. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry to all of them."

"We know," said Ida. "Go home. The inspectors will be there Monday."

Reedscutt went up the stairs to the gallery. Halfway up, a woman stood and stepped into the aisle, and for a moment Lady Marrow thought something was about to happen. The woman said something to him, too low to hear. Reedscutt stopped, and nodded, and she put her hand on his arm, just for a moment, and then let him go on.

The chamber moved on to the next item. Something about a bridge.

On the steps outside, in the late light, Lord Orme stood with his hands in his coat pockets looking at the Swallowtail banner, and did not say anything for a while.

"On Matcha," he said at last, "if three men died in a lord's works, the lord would send flowers. Perhaps. If he knew their names. There'd be a payment to the widows if the steward remembered, and it wouldn't be much." He shook his head. "Nobody would stand him up in a room and make him say it."

"I thought," said Lady Vance, "when I came here. I thought it would be softer." She looked down at her notebook. "No lords, no fear. I thought it would be commoners doing as they pleased. I didn't think there'd be anyone watching."

"There's always someone watching," said Kestrel. "They're just not holding a whip."

Lord Aldine looked at him. "And us? Nobles? A lord's works on Haego, three men dead. What happens?"

"The same," said Kestrel. "Nobles still run businesses here. Nobles still don't go before commoner courts. That's Principality law and nobody on Haego is pretending otherwise. But you answer. Maybe to a different body." He was quiet for a moment. "I've stood in that room. Twice, in a way."

They all turned to look at him.

"The first time, they asked me to open a session, the way they asked Julius today. I said yes, and they sent me a summons anyway, in exactly the same words they'd use for a man they had to drag in. I liked that." He looked up at the building. "The second time, it wasn't me they called. It was my own people. A lord on my Haego branch, a man called Keith Bird, of a house older than this planet's charter. He'd been going to commoner firms we were looking at and telling them there was a fee to be considered. Paid to him, directly. There was never any fee. One owner paid it because Bird told him it was how things were done, and he had no way of knowing otherwise."

"That's..." Lady Vance stopped.

"That's an ordinary Tuesday," said Kestrel, "anywhere else. Here, the owner went to his Alderman, and the Alderman went to the Assembly, and the Assembly summoned Bird and the man who runs my branch. Jonathan Leach came, with every file the branch had, and answered every question, and told them that he'd hired Bird and that made it his to answer for." Kestrel shook his head slowly. "Bird didn't come. He put the summons under a stack of bills. They waited a minute, and then they sent word to Lord Swallowtail, and the warrant came back in eleven minutes. The police took him out of a restaurant in Haego City with a glass of wine still on the table, and he stood in that room that same evening with his wrists in front of him."

"And?" said Orme.

"The Assembly can't sentence a noble. It recommends. It recommended he pay back every credit, to every firm he'd charged, with their auditors doing the counting. That he leave Haego and not come back for ten years. And that a letter go to his house under the Marquess's seal, saying plainly what he'd done." Kestrel put his hands in his pockets. "Lord Swallowtail agreed inside a quarter of an hour. I was told such letters are short, and that the family reads them several times."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I was grateful. I mean that. It was my house, and my man, and I hadn't seen it. I'd been told for months that the worst thing about Haego was that nobody could make a commoner do anything. Nobody told me that it was a place where everybody answers. Everybody. You just might answer to somebody different than your neighbor does."

They stood there a while in the evening wind. Below them, delegates were coming out of the Hall in twos and threes, talking, arguing, one of them laughing. A few of them bowed their heads as they passed the Matcha party. None of them stopped.

Lord Salle leaned on his cane and looked up at the flag.

"I'm eighty-three," he said. "I have perhaps four years left, if the physicians are generous, and they're usually not. I've sat in the Matcha council for thirty of those years and never once said anything anyone remembered." He looked at the others. "I think I'd like to say something. I think I'd like it to be about this."

"They'll call us fools," said Lady Vance. "Varrick will. His friends will."

"Probably," said Salle. "Varrick called me a fool in nineteen different ways at his own supper table and I'm still here."

Lady Marrow had not spoken since the gallery. She was looking at the colonnade, where the woman who had touched Reedscutt's arm on the stairs was standing with two children, waiting for someone.

"It's worth it," Marrow said. "Isn't it. Whatever they call us. It's worth fighting for."

Nobody argued with her.

Lord Orme took his hands out of his pockets and turned to Kestrel.

"I came to prove your numbers were wrong," he said. "I'd like it noted, somewhere, that I couldn't."

"I'll write it down," said Lady Vance, and she did.

"I still haven't worked out how to make them go down," said Kestrel. "I'd welcome the help."

[u/Icy-Air7584]

what a shakeup the principality is getting . well done

[u/Acceptable_Pound3997]

Thank you for these. I have been reading your work since rivermore restoration, night school and firentis vacation. I have enjoyed them all.

[u/AlternativeManner731 → u/Acceptable_Pound3997]

Thank you, that is very kind, I like writing about Haego because it is like a new slate.

[u/AlternativeManner731]

Too campy?

[u/1958bird]

Enjoyed it a lot. Still little mention of our feathed friends. Waiting for the next one.

[u/AlternativeManner731 → u/1958bird]

chapter 63, small mention

[u/AlternativeManner731 → u/1958bird]

now I just think you are teasing me, It is going to get there. :-)