The Split Reed Mouth

Overview

The Split Reed Mouth is a mixed estuary on the coastward edge of The Tidebound Reaches, where a return river of the Thaluren reaches the sea in Tidelace-facing water. Neither people owns it, because neither has been able to drive the other out. Gnome pilots of The Gaugeward Leagues sound its channels and keep its hazard marks, run-watchers of The Returning Concord guard the return-water inside it, and under The Estuary Terms neither may close the mouth to the other.

What happens inside it answers to both the Reaches and The Tidelace Coasts. Of all the mixed estuaries on that coast, it is the one where the old bargain is tested most often and watched most closely, and where it has come nearest to a fight.

The Place

A short way above the sea, the river breaks around a field of reed-shelves into several channels that braid, rejoin, and shift their beds with the tides. Between them the shelves stand just clear of high water in most seasons: dense reed on silt, firm at the heart and deadly at the edge, where the silt takes a leg to the thigh and the flood tide comes in faster than a mired man can dig himself out.

Two things must be got past. One is the ground: a channel true at the morning ebb can be false by the evening flood. The other is the closures: a craft that enters a channel kept for the ascent has broken faith whatever its own reading of the depth, and Thaluren escorts have holed hulls for less.

Keepers and Users

The mouth has two sets of keepers, each holding what the Terms leave it and watching the other for any reach beyond.

• Gaugeward pilots work from the station under the nearest harbour's sounding house.
• Thaluren run-watchers name the windows when the ascent is closed to craft, name the return channels for the season, and keep disturbance away from the young.
• The mixed circle on the Saltline Shelf is where both say what the water is being used for, and where quarrels over the mouth are argued first, in the old set words rather than by accusation, before anyone reaches for a spear.

The users are runs bound for the river and the messengers who swim ahead of them; the young of the down-run on their way to the sea; Thaluren escorts who guard the mouth against the sharks in season, the best of them shark-hunters whose kills are sung along the coast; Gnome coastal craft putting in for shelter or working the brackish shallows; and the boats of coastal Humans from the nearest hamlets, who fish close inshore at the outer edge. Human boats are counted at the station and bound by the circle's closures like any Gnome craft. No Human sits in the circle, and when a closure costs the fishers a season's catch, nobody pays them for it. Some fishers earn more as reed-guides than by fishing: they know which shelves will bear a man at which tide, and they will take anyone onto them, Gnome treasure-seekers and run-poachers alike, for the right price and no questions.

The Medieval Present

The mouth keeps two calendars. The pilots keep the tide table: every tide moves something, so the channels are sounded again on a fixed round and after every storm, and no marker is moved until the move has been stated on the shelf. Outside return season the circle sits seldom, and the mouth is mostly pilots' water.

An ordinary day belongs to the tide: soundings at slack water, a craft waiting at the outer posts for the flood, a marker argued over on the shelf, a pilot back from a hard passage telling Maris the story of it aloud at the shrine. The pilots keep their devotion to the station bank. The Way of Return accepts a god in another people's water only so long as nobody calls on one over the ascent.

History

The mouth still runs on the Estuary Terms (c. 144,000-c. 138,000 BR). They came out of the first lasting contact between Thaluren and Gnomes at this mouth, after The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence (c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR) had taught the Thaluren how easily careless passage kills a run. Before them the two peoples met here as raiders: with fouled nets, cut marker-lines, drowned pilots, and Thaluren war-bands in the reeds; old pilots still point out the shelf where a whole station crew was found floating face down. That shelf has no name on the charts, and pilots' children dare each other to row past it at dusk; the Thaluren tell of the same years from the other side, of the war-band that held the reeds for a whole season against the station's crossbows and came home without one of its spears lost. On the Water and Who Keeps It thread, the mouth is where Gaugeward measurement first had to accept a claim on water it could not measure.

Tensions

• The Quiet Channel. The channel at the heart of the Reaches' closure that will not say why has been kept for the ascent for an unusually long time.
• The channel that moved. Over several seasons a return channel has wandered across a shelf, as channels at the mouth do, and now runs partly through water the pilots marked for coastal craft.
• A story told too freely. A pilot who brought a craft through a storm told the story at the shrine as Maris requires, and in the story the pilot called on her aloud while crossing a return channel inside a closed window.
• The brass in the shelves. A reed-guide has led a Gnome treasure-seeker to a sunken cache on an inner shelf: corroded soundings and gauges from the burned station, still bundled in rotted rope.
• Bodies in the reed. Two Human fishers have been found drowned on the shelves this spring, one with lamprey marks and one without a mark on him.