The Measure Cistern

Overview

The Measure Cistern is the great cistern hall on the windward side of The Leeward Folds, where the Lee Road comes in from the Windscar and meets the inner folds. It is two things that the Folds keep apart everywhere else and cannot keep apart here: the hoarded water of the fold that owns it, and the foremost receiving ground of The Foldward Commons, where escorted Orc parties of The Windscar Pacts are told what water and stores can be spared.

Here sit the Folds' receiving elders, and here the question every fold asks quietly, whether the numbers are honest, is asked aloud, in front of thirsty strangers with spears.

The Place

The cistern lies at the head of its fold, against the foot of the Lee Wall: a long basin cut back into the rock, roofed over most of its length against the dry wind and fed by a spring at the fold head and by catch channels off the ridge. Down its inner wall runs the Reading Steps, a flight of narrow steps cut one measure apart, by which the water's depth is read. A reading is called out from the steps and repeated in the hall below, never written up first. Children dare each other to touch the lowest step, which has not been dry in living memory, and the fold tells them that the year it shows is the year the Dry Folds died.

Keepers and Users

The cistern belongs to the fold at whose head it stands. Its cistern circle keeps and releases the water, its households owe their share of the common reserve to the store-rooms behind the hall, and its commons decide what leaves the fold, which in practice means the oldest and best-stocked households do. Around them work the Leeward measure orders, which carry more weight here than anywhere: terrace elders who stand at the Reading Steps, orchard tally houses from the neighbouring folds, and reserve-report circles that check the hall's figures against their own. The receiving elders give the fold's answer to whoever has arrived: exchange, rest, shelter for a time, delay, redirection, or nothing yet.

The Medieval Present

The hall's year follows the fold's. In spring the circle opens the terraces by turn, and the first reading says how much the terraces may draw. Through summer the level falls and the readings are taken more often. In autumn, after the harvest, the reserve is counted aloud: the circle reads the steps, the store-rooms are tallied shelf by shelf, and the reports of the neighbouring circles are set against both. Only what lies beyond the count goes to market. When the Market Round brings the fold its turn, the yard fills with stalls for a few days, and the escort traffic, and the raiding on the saddle, peak with it.

History

The cistern was already an old and respected receiving ground while The Founding of the Foldward Commons (c. 170,000-c. 152,000 BR) was binding the folds together, and in the long ages since, its basin has been recut and relined so often that nothing of the first work can be told. Three quarrels made it what it is now.

• Reception is not entry. The Leeward-Windscar Terms (c. 160,000-c. 145,000 BR) won escorted parties an open welcome at fold markets and cistern halls, because the Pacts could close the Lee Road and the folds could not hold it, and kept the folds shut behind them.
• Measured is not just. The Measure Cistern Reckoning (c. 154,000-c. 148,000 BR) began here as a Halfling quarrel between generous receiving elders and reserve-minded keepers, and ended in the distinction between honest and false narrowing.
• Counted aloud. The Measure Cistern Crisis (c. 147,000-c. 143,000 BR) brought that standard face to face with Windscar escorts in a hard season.

The measure orders (c. 146,000-c. 139,000 BR) hardened around those quarrels, and the hall argues from all three today.

Tensions

• Seeing the water. Since the Crisis an accepted party hears the readings its answer rests on, but it hears them in the yard.
• Opening the reserve. If the fold opens the long-cycle reserve to save its terraces, the water it told the escorts it could not spare will be running into orchards in plain view of the camping ground.
• Neighbours at the trough. The fold's own households draw on the same cistern, and in the dry run the releases to their terraces have been cut twice.
• Jars from the Dry Fold. Old sealed jars have begun to sell at the camping ground, oil and fruit kept from a year nobody in the fold was alive for.
• Raiders on the saddle. A band has been striking parties on the saddle road, Orc and Halfling alike, and leaving them without water.