The Oath Cistern

Overview

The Oath Cistern is a Rimward stronghold and its cistern at the foot of the busiest ramp down the Shearline, where the escort country of The High Scars ends at the basin rim of The Rimward Basins. Escorted parties come down the ramp under the escorts' oath of passage and arrive at water the stronghold holds by its own walls. Whether they will be let drink is the most argued question in the Windscar, and the place where The Windscar Pacts come closest to breaking their own peace.

The line between the two countries runs through it: the ledge where parties are handed over is escort ground, and the water a few paces below it is not. A war was fought over that stair.

The Place

The ramp comes down the Shearline in long switchbacks cut into the escarpment face and ends on a broad shelf of rock above the rim. That shelf is the Sworn Ledge, the oath-ground where High-Scar captains hand their parties over and the stronghold gives its answer. From it a short stair leads down to the cistern. Cairns stand on the switchbacks for every escort lost on the ramp, and parties do not linger by the oldest of them after dark: where a cairn's name is fading, Cairn-Wakers have been seen barring the path. The highest cairns are older than the rest and larger: the graves of war-captains who fell on the ramp in the Passage War, raised over them by their own escorts with their blades and torques beneath the stones. Every few years one is found opened, and the escorts hunt whoever did it down the whole length of the rim.

Keepers and Users

The water belongs to the stronghold because the stronghold can hold it, and its keeping follows the offices of The Rimward Well-Keepers. Well-keepers and cistern guardians hold the cistern and its channels. The stronghold's answer bearer meets each arriving party on the ledge and gives the reply. Its counts go before the reserve council it shares with neighbouring strongholds, where each checks the others' figures and none lets a neighbour grow too strong. In the War the strongholds' war-captains held the rim against the route captains; their descendants still carry the swords of that siege at the dry-season gathering.

The ledge belongs to passage. Oath-ground elders of The High-Scar Escort Orders stand at every handover, and a complaint against either side goes first to the High-Scar route captains, who find for their own escorts more often than not. Keepers do not climb the ramp to answer, and escorts go down the stair to draw only when the answer lets them.

The Medieval Present

The Oath Cistern is busiest when it is driest. As the dry months come on, the households and herds draw in to the rim and the camp rings fill, and that is when the escorts bring the most parties down the ramp. At the turn of the windy season, dust storms close the ramp for days at a time and parties wait them out on the shelves above or on the ledge below. After every storm the cistern crews are out clearing the channels.

At the dry-season gathering the keeper lines recite the ancestors who kept honest counts here, as Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden is said to keep their names. High-Scar kindreds waiting on the ledge recite their own dead at the same time, and the two recitations do not always agree about the same years. Up on the rim heights, followers of Rakhal the Storm-Caller light the First Gale fires, and some of them look hard at the sealed chamber.

History

The cistern became an oath-ground in the long age of The Founding of the Windscar Pacts (c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR), when rim strongholds stopped being only local lifelines. Its walls and channels have been torn down by storm and siege and raised again through every age since; the ramp, the ledge, and the name have outlasted every wall.

Afterwards each side built heavier orders on its own half of that peace: the keepers' orders (c. 124,000-c. 116,000 BR) on the rim and the Escort Orders (c. 121,000-c. 112,000 BR) on the routes. The line between them now runs down the stair from the ledge to the cistern, and each side holds its half with its own spears.

Tensions

• Counting the sealed chamber. When the answer bearer says what the stronghold can bear, the sealed chamber is left out, as reserve-right allows.
• The lost season. A party bound for the Leeward fold markets is given a proper delay at the ledge on a named condition: the next storm's runoff.
• Two recitations. A High-Scar kindred has asked the route captains to strike the name of a keeper, dead three generations, whose delay it says killed an escort on the shelves.
• An opened cairn. The cairn of a war-captain on the upper switchbacks has been found pulled apart, her blade and torque gone, and since then Cairn-Wakers have barred the ramp on three nights running.
• The struck band. An outcast band has wintered on the shelves above the ramp and taken three herds this year.