What I Told Fayyad About the Man Who Never Boarded

Fayyad —

The Petrel cleared at the fourth bell, Serevan-bound, full hold — the season’s last, indigo and undyed wool and your leather landed with two days’ grace to spare, six marks the hundredweight, the best rate since Bloommonth, and I have already told you so twice. I write again only for the line under it, the one the Harbourmaster’s clerk filed without comment because such lines are always filed that way: a berth paid whole, two marks four, taken up by nobody. The name on the manifest was Osifar Lenk. No passenger answering to it walked the plank. The coin cleared inspection. The person did not exist to be asked whether he wanted his money back.

You will say this happens at every desk in every port and you will be right — a caravan master out your way loses a deposit to a merchant who changes his mind between the contract and the crossing, and the sand keeps the coin the way sand keeps everything, without comment. But your caravans weigh a man twice before he’s allowed to owe you anything: once at the contract, once at the gate, because the desert has no patience for a name it can’t match to a body walking beside the camels. We are gentler here, or slower, which the Register has started calling the same thing. A fare can sit a season, unclaimed and unrefused both, and nobody’s ledger is obliged to call that a fact rather than a gap.

Corvus has a word for the shape of it — nomen nudum, a bare name, published with nothing behind it to carry the weight — and declines to catalogue it, on the grounds that a name attached to nobody is a different failure than a name forced on somebody real. I find I agree with him more than I expected to, and for a reason I haven’t written to you before: I bought a passage under a name that wasn’t mine once, in the eleventh city of the seventeen I’ve counted, and I did board it, which is the only difference between that man and me that I can find. I don’t know what he was leaving. I know what leaving costs when you do it clean — exactly the fare, and nothing owed to anyone who might have asked your true name at the gate.

The wool holds at four marks even. Write when the copper’s weighed.

— M.