The Counted Lee

Overview

The Counted Lee is a tally hall, transfer pier, and staging yard on the shore below The Leeward Folds, where the coast road from the terraces reaches the harbour water of The Tidelace Coasts. Halflings of The Foldward Commons bring their loads down to it counted; Gnomes of The Gaugeward Leagues bring their craft in to it on declared windows. Nothing changes hands until both have been made plain.

It has none of the fame of The Measure Cistern, the Halfling reserve ground on the Windscar side, or of The Sounding Gate, the Gnome harbour of the false mark. It is where two careful peoples learned to hand things to each other, and later learned what it costs, and how hot tempers run, when the timing slips and a year's fruit rots on the pier.

The Place

The Lee sits in the shelter of a headland, where a short shelf of level ground lies between the foot of the terrace country and a stretch of quiet water off the outer roads. The coast road comes down off the last terraces in a long zigzag and ends at the staging yard: a walled, open yard where loads are set down in rows and wait. Below it the transfer pier runs out into the lee water, long enough for Gnome coastal craft to lie alongside at most states of the tide.

The tally hall stands between yard and pier, a plain stone hall with two doors, one facing up the road and one facing the water. Inside, Halfling counters and Gnome clerks sit at the same benches. The hall keeps the Long Tally, the joint count of the Lee, in which every declared window, every change to it, and every load that waited too long is written twice, once in fold count and once in harbour reading, side by side.

Keepers and Users

The Lee is shared rather than held, and each half answers for its own side of a handoff. The sharing is not even: the harbours own the craft and the water, and a fold with a load spoiling in the yard has less to bargain with than a clerk who can sail away.

• The fold side. Counters and elders of the folds that send their goods down the coast road keep the yard and the Halfling bench of the hall.
• The harbour side. Clerks from the nearest Gaugeward harbour keep the pier, the signal post, and the Gnome bench.
• The naming. Since the Timing Feud, any change that comes after a load has passed its day must be named in the hall with both benches sitting, and the loss written in the Long Tally before anyone shouts over who bears it.
• Hired blades. The hall pays its yard spears by the season, and when a road band grows bold it posts a price, which brings bounty-takers down from the folds and sellswords off the harbour quays.

The users are carriers coming down the coast road with dried fruit, grain, and preserved stores; Gnome coastal craft putting in with fish, cordage, lamp oil, worked metal, and instruments from the gauge houses; and the harbour hands who load them, among them some coastal Humans who work Gnome quays and crews. In the busy weeks the folds hire escorts for the road, and the spears who walk carriers down the zigzag are often the same Humans who loaded a craft the week before. Some of what comes ashore travels on up through the folds and along the Lee Road into Windscar hands. Fold goods go no further than the pier, and harbour goods no further than the yard.

The Medieval Present

The Lee's year is pinched between two calendars. The folds release nothing until the autumn count has set aside the reserve, so the year's surplus comes down the road late. The coast's calm months end in the storm season, when windows shorten, the outer roads close first, and some harbours shut their mouths until spring. Most of the Lee's business is crowded into the weeks between the count and the gales, and in those weeks the yard is full, the road is busy, and the thieves are busiest of all. Every fold knows that a load picked too early may wait and spoil, and a load picked too late may find no window left.

History

The Lee grew out of The Leeward-Tidelace Measures (c. 146,000-c. 140,000 BR), the custom that made fold count and harbour declaration two halves of one exchange. Its hall and pier have been rebuilt more times than anyone has counted. The place and the custom have lasted.

The oath is also the main reason Quennet is fading on the coast. A harbour that can name who bears a lost moment has less need to pray for one.

Tensions

• The fold that moved. The custom was made against late harbour changes.
• The gauge that stuttered. A clerk moved a window on a clear morning, before any reading had changed, because an old gauge stuttered, and old gauges are said to stutter before a window fails.
• The cove beyond the spur. Fold stores that never entered the Long Tally are being sold on the beach past the headland, by night, to a Human crew with no harbour's mark on its boat.
• Whose loss. A window moved after a fold had already picked for it has reached the hall.
• Thieves on the zigzag. Three loads have gone missing on the coast road this season, with their mules and one carrier.