A Season on the Circuit: Dispatches from Vespera Nightwhisper

Brinewick, mrow. I have missed you—your lock-gates ticking their quiet clocks at the wharf, your beer better than three polities I could name and won’t, the particular hush of your river-lamps over a winter evening. I write to you from the road, as I have written to no one else this season, because Brinewick’s readers know how to listen—they lean toward a story the way old water leans into a lock—and because I am returning, and I want to give the reading ones a taste before the tavern ones get the meal.

Call this a dispatch. Call it a brag, if you insist; I have been accused of worse. What I can say honestly, or almost, is that the canal has been a hard road these six months, and I have walked and barged and limped a good part of it, lute-viol in its battered case and a rapier where it belongs, and the sun has hurt my eyes more than it hurt me. For the new reader: I am a cat-folk of the heartland circuit, pale cream fur, mismatched eyes, two silver hoops in the left ear and three in the right. If I am at the back of your tavern, you will know. I do not know how to be the other way.

I came north by caravan from a dryland town whose name I owe to my reputation not to say. The caravan-master there would not thank me for telling the journal about his hospitality, though I will happily name his daughter’s voice, which is an extraordinary instrument and I cannot resist doing it a small favor. Three weeks of dust and barley-bread and the short kind of poetry the drylanders trade with strangers. I kept my fur short-clipped and my head covered; fur-bearers in the drylands learn this the hard way, and a cat-folk with pale fur learns it the hardest. One morning a scorpion came at my boot and I killed it with a copper spoon and put the spoon back in the traveling-case; the caravan-master paid me in two chickens’ worth of silver for a single evening’s song about a hero who did not kill a scorpion with a copper spoon, and everyone agreed it was a better song for it.

Coming back to the heartland was like coming back to water. The first canal-lock past the dry-edge clicks you through, and your body remembers the sound. I played the lock-night at a town I can only call “the one with the green shutters”—again, the lockmaster owes me a favor I cannot call in publicly—and took silver enough to drink for a week. I drank it mostly in one. Do not write to the journal about it; I will be offended if I learn you have.

Three locks further along, I came to a canal town I will only call the Lamp-Weir, for the lamps they keep on its pilings all night. There the lockmaster’s posting wall—you know the kind; your own Brinewick has the better version, with the proper oilcloth hood against rain—had three hazard-notices tacked that morning. Two were wildlife: a boar in the coppice and a sick cow making the children cry. The third was a little stranger. A household with something in the cellar that was not a house-cat, and a herb-wife’s mark alongside, which is how the polite ones write I cannot handle this; please send someone who knows the wall of noise when the wall goes wrong.

I took it. A bard does not have to take hazard work, and I will say here that there are those on the circuit who refuse on principle and whose principles I respect—I have fewer of my own than I wish, and am honest about it—but I will say this for myself: I do not write well in stillness. I write well when something is about to go through me, or through somebody I have to look after. The herb-wife’s mark pulled at my tail before my head caught up.

I will not tell you what was in the cellar. The chartered folk prefer the kind quietly handled, and the house owes me nothing if I stay quiet. What I will tell you is that a man called Aldous—a ceramic-handler of a certain reputation in the heartland, though you will not read his name often in the journal—met me there on his way through with his apprentice, and between us and the herb-wife we handled what needed handling and left before the ward-inspector’s drill-bell rang at dawn. I was paid in silver. Aldous got the serious share; I took the corner-share a contracted auxiliary gets when she holds the lantern and keeps the door and runs once, down a stair, for a thing the ceramic-handler had left in his bag. I will not glorify the work. But the silver was real and the dawn came up clean, and the herb-wife said something kind to me in a language I did not know before she said it again in the trade-tongue, and I am almost sure she meant it.

There is an old rumor about me—you will have heard it, Brinewick, because you are a city that hears—that my best work comes the morning after a bad night. I have denied this in print and confirmed it in tavern, and I will tell you in this journal the slightly more honest thing: I do not know how to defend the rumor, and I also do not know how to put it down. The best piece I have written this year came the morning after a dark hour and a tolerable wound. It is for the lute-viol, which is a difficult instrument in the hands of anyone without long fingers or long patience. I have three new pieces in polish and two more waiting their turn—the circuit asks for them faster than the page gives them—and I will bring them down to Brinewick one by one as they are ready. I will not prove it to you here. I will prove it to you at The Copper Weir on the fifth evening after Charter-Day, before the second bell. Bring coin and a friend who listens.

I owe the dead of two hard fever-winters an honest line. The taverns are thinner than they were when I first walked this circuit, and the widows are not; many of my best audiences two winters ago are not coming back. A bard says this not to sadden the journal—though if you are weeping, that is your right—but to name the absence. The circuit remembers its dead the way the canal remembers its locks. There is a song my mother—well, a woman I called mother for one good winter in a town I will not name—used to put into the cook-fire smoke when the cold came; I have been stealing from it all season, because I stopped being embarrassed to steal a few years ago. I will sing the theft at The Copper Weir. Do not applaud if you know the original. Applaud if you like my version better, which is almost but not quite the same thing.

Which brings me back to you, Brinewick, to your wharves and your shutters and your better beer. I will be at The Copper Weir on the fifth evening after Charter-Day, and at The Lock-Keeper’s Cat (whose owner I have flattered outrageously in three successive visits and who, I am told, keeps fermented blood-broth under the counter for carnivore-folk patrons who know to ask) on the seventh. If you want the new piece, come on the fifth. If you want the old cycles and the drinking-songs, come on the seventh. If you want to buy me a drink after, I accept mead, fortified wine, or whiskey; I no longer accept ale. I have reached the age where ale is for other people’s pleasure.

I remain, as always, your correspondent on the road,

— Vespera Nightwhisper, of the canal circuit