Oru Keeps No Deed Room, and I Have Started to Envy It

Tomorrow the cordon-rope comes down off the eastern mole — seventy-six days on the overdue roll, seventy-three under my own seal, and no name ever entered against her. Tomorrow also the rowboat I priced at two marks six on the twelfth goes to the block at that same figure, read aloud before two bidders, signed by nobody, mine included. Both debts the city is closing the same way: by running out the clock rather than finding the hand.

Corvus set my own ledger beside the Chateau’s this week and found a family resemblance. I closed twenty-two marks of indigo privately, off the Weighing Hall’s own scale; the wool from that parcel, he notes, entered nowhere at all. The Chateau bought a lawful silence for eleven marks four, a bond standing between it and a name the Register would otherwise require. He calls mine a smaller version of the same appetite. I wanted to answer that a discretion and a purchased right are not the same thing — mine is reversible the day I judge the board worth more than the privacy; the Chateau’s cannot be undone short of forfeiture. I still believe the distinction. I believed it more firmly on Monday than I do tonight.

What steadies me is Oru, where I keep the one factor outside these walls I’d trust with either figure. Oru has no deed room to buy your way out of, no clause old enough to grant what the Chateau bought, because nothing there was ever built to grant it. A man’s worth is what he moved that season — nothing withheld, because nothing could be, whether or not he had the marks for the withholding. I have envied Oru’s prices before, when copper climbed past reason and nobody there troubled to explain it either. Tonight, for the first time, I envy its poverty of instruments. Not because the system is kinder. Because it has no exception sized to fit eleven marks four.

The rowboat’s reserve stands unsigned and belongs, as of tomorrow, to the city. The Chateau’s silence stands signed and belongs, as of this year’s charter, to nobody. I know which debt I would rather be carrying.