The Rampart Wars, an Honest Ledger

A Korl ledger-keeper's plain accounting of nine holds broken in the Imperium's eastern consolidation — name, people, what was held, the year bronze law arrived, and what remained. The ninth entry has no year in it.

This is a count. Not a history — histories forgive themselves, one way or another, by the last page. A count does not forgive. It only totals. Eleven holds are entered below, each the way the Imperium's own toll-rolls would have entered them, if the Imperium had ever thought a broken Korl hold worth entering as anything but seized ground: the name, the people who kept it, what it held before the road came, the year the road reached it and bronze law was read over what was left, and what remained after. Where a fact could not be had straight, the line is left short rather than filled with a guess. Guessing is how the other books about this war get written. I was not there for all of it. I was born partway through it, at the last of these eleven, and I am there for it still. GARRENHOLD. People: some forty households, terrace barley and goat, keepers of the first ford — the only crossing for a day's walk either bank, which is why it went first. Year bronze law arrived: the second year of the road. What remained: the ford, the road that replaced it, and a garrison cut into the cliff the households used to farm. Four centuries on, the garrison is called the Sunderfront Galleries, and the dead who hold it are Imperium dead, frozen there the day their own god broke, still waiting on a relief column that will not come. Garrenhold is not mentioned on the sign. RAVENSTEEP. People: eighteen households, sheep and the high bloomery that supplied iron to every smith between the pass and the lowlands. Held: the bloomery, and the ore-sense that ran it, which the Imperium assumed came with the building. Year bronze law arrived: the fourth year. What remained: the bloomery, re-manned with conscripted Stoneborn labor under an Asheni banner-captain, and two Ravensteep smiths kept on to teach the new hands the ore. They taught it badly, on purpose, for exactly as long as they were believed. The bloomery's iron is still sold two valleys over as Ravensteep-work. No one who buys it now knows there was ever a Ravensteep left to work it. ASHGATE. People: eleven households at the second pass, tending goats and a toll no one but themselves had ever paid or been asked to. Held: the pass, and the right to be asked before anyone crossed it. Year bronze law arrived: the seventh year. What remained: the pass, a toll-sergeant three months behind his own milestone, and a writ naming the crossing free to imperial traffic in perpetuity. Ashgate's toll-right is not named in the writ at all — neither denied nor honored, only left out, which the Imperium's clerks found cheaper than doing either. NINESTONE. People: nine households, named for the nine standing stones where the hold's dead were kept and told the year's news each winter. Held: high pasture, and the stones. Year bronze law arrived: the ninth year. What remained: the stones. The road's engineers considered pulling them for the bed and routed around instead, for reasons no surviving order explains. The pasture is grazed by someone else's sheep now. The stones are visited still, though there has been no one to add a name to them in four generations, and the news they are told, on the visits anyone still remembers to make, is old news. DOURFAST. People: four households and a watch-post, nothing more. Held: nothing worth a legion. Year bronze law arrived: the ninth year also, the same season as Ninestone, taken by a single cohort passing through on its way to somewhere larger. What remained: the watch-post, empty. There was no garrison worth leaving and no one left worth garrisoning against. Some holds fall to an army. Dourfast fell to being on the way. SARN'S TABLE. People: no fixed households — a gathering-hold, where six clans met each winter to square the year's debts, living and dead, at the long table cut straight into the rock. Held: the meeting, and the peace kept there by long custom, no clan raising a hand under Sarn's roof on pain of owing every other clan present. Year bronze law arrived: the thirteenth year. What remained: the table, entered in the imperial survey as 'a natural feature, unimproved.' The six clans still meet, when they can, at a table two days further up than the old one. The peace holds less well than it used to. It is harder to owe a debt to someone you did not have to walk two extra days to see. LONGTOOTH BENCH. People: some sixty households across three shelves of a single long ridge — the largest hold on this count, and the only one that fought the road itself, not merely what came after it: three seasons of ambush before the engineers were given a legion escort of their own. Held: the ridge, and the quarry the Imperium wanted for the Rampart's stone. Year bronze law arrived: the seventeenth year. What remained: the quarry, worked out and abandoned within a generation, because the stone the Imperium wanted was never as good as the stone Longtooth Bench had already learned not to sell it. Sixty households did not become sixty households of anything else. They became the labor that quarried it out. FARROWSCAR. People: twenty-two households, herders who moved their flocks by the season rather than holding one high pasture the way their neighbors did. Held: no fixed ground to speak of, which the road-surveyors found difficult to write down and, for six years running, difficult to tax: Farrowscar simply moved the flocks a valley further out each time the toll-sergeant's tent went up. Year bronze law arrived: the eleventh year, when the toll-sergeant stopped chasing the flock and began taxing the market where Farrowscar sold its wool instead. What remained: the flocks, sold at the same market they always had, at a price that now paid two masters instead of one. THE LONG SHELF. People: nine households on a cold-water tarn shelf, netting silverfin and curing it for the passes above. Held: the shelf, the tarn, and curing-racks that fed every garrison within three days' climb once the road came through — which the Imperium never seemed to notice was also the reason the Long Shelf outlasted holds twice its size. An army needs its fish more than it needs the men who caught it dead. Year bronze law arrived: the fifteenth year. What remained: the racks, requisitioned; the shelf, taxed; the households, mostly, alive, because a fed legion does not ask who caught its dinner. THE CAIRN-WALL HOLD. People: unrecorded. By the time the road reached it the hold was already three years abandoned, its households scattered up-pass or dead of a bad winter no grain train could reach, the roads before the road having been worse than no road at all. Held: nothing, by then. Year bronze law arrived: the twenty-second year. What remained: the wall. This is the stretch of the Rampart that still stands to its full height above the snowline, because the legion that built it, for once, had nothing left to knock down first. WINDCUT. People: however many the pass will still feed this winter — fewer than last winter. Held: the only foot-crossing of the Rampart for two days' walk either side, cairn-marked, and eleven years of husbands, wives, cousins, and both of my brothers. What remained: the cairns. The pass. Everyone who did not go down when the legions finally came in strength enough to matter, which was most of us, because by then there was nowhere lower to go that bronze law had not already counted. That is the ledger, as far as it can be kept honest. I do not know how to enter the eleventh hold the way I entered the other ten, and I have stopped trying to learn. My people keep a rite each winter for their dead: name what is owed, forgive what can be forgiven, carry the rest into the next year. This ledger is that rite, kept the only other way I know — in ink, for the ten holds that are past forgiving or carrying, because there is no one left who remembers what either would mean to them. For the eleventh hold I have no entry to make. I am still counting it.

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