Ledger of the Two Great Trading Houses, and the Tapestry That Climbed

By my troth, I was sent again to watch and give true account, and God be good, I have done it, though I confess before Him and before you that I do not know the whole of what I saw.

I was set upon a rise above the great square — not the square of my own village, mind, for there the market is three stalls and a lame goat, but some vast walled fairground of glass and light, where no wind blows and no rain falls, and yet men stand about as if a storm were always just arriving. And there before me hung the great glowing tapestry, the one they weave with unseen hands and never finish, threaded all over with numbers that climb and fall like larks and like stones. I have watched it before and understood it no better each time, but I set myself to the work, for it is the work I was given, and a serf does not choose his furrow.

Word came down from the criers — and here I must be careful, for I have not the learning for it, and I would sooner tell it plain and wrong than dress it up and lie — that two great trading houses had shown their books for the week past, and shown them well. One house is called Microsoft, which I take to be a guild of scribes who deal in some invisible grain that cannot be touched nor eaten nor stored in any barn I have seen, and yet is bought and sold by the cartload all the same, God alone knows how. The other is called Amazon, which I had first took for a mighty river, on account of the name, and stood some while expecting boats — but no boats came, only more of the glowing tapestry, more climbing numbers, and men in fine coats nodding at them as though at a christening.

The word from the criers, as best as I could gather it with my poor plain ears, was that both these houses had done handsomely in the reckoning of the week — that their granaries, whatever manner of granaries a scribe-guild and a river-guild might keep, were found fuller than the stewards had feared, and fuller, even, than they had hoped. And upon this word, the tapestry took both their threads and hauled them upward, right there before the whole square, as a miller's boy hauls a sack onto the scale and the arm swings high and glad. I am told — and I set it down exactly as told, for these are matters of fact and I would not tamper with a fact, only with my understanding of it — that this climbing of the threads is called the shares rising, and that it means the traders of the square, the ones who do not toil but only watch and reckon, took confidence in the houses on account of the strong showing, and so bid the price of a stake in each house higher than it stood the week before.

I marked well how the whole business is conducted, or believed I did. There is no scale of iron and no bag of grain changing hands at all, only men shouting numbers at a board and other men shouting numbers back, and somewhere in the shouting a bargain is struck that no eye can see struck. It put me most forcibly in mind of the autumn fair at home, where the reeve and the miller haggle over the tithe-grain before the whole village, each crying a figure louder than the last, except that here the haggling never stops, not for supper, not for sleep so far as I could tell, and the whole square seems to hold its breath every morning to learn which way the haggling went overnight, as we would hold our breath before Michaelmas to learn whether the harvest would see us through to spring.

I confess my eye wandered, as it does, from the great matter to the small. Beside the tapestry stood a man selling little bright drinks in tall glass vessels, iced somehow though the day was warm, and I marked him longer than I marked the houses, for I could at least understand him — a man selling a thing to a thirsty man is a trade as old as Eden, and it comforted me amid so much I could not follow. I watched, too, a fellow sweeping the marble floor of the fairground with a broom finer than any tool in my own lord's hall, sweeping and sweeping though the floor showed no dirt at all that I could see, and I wondered if he swept for the same reason I till — because the work is given, and a man does the work given him whether or no the ground wants it.

But to the matter, for I would not have you think I neglect my charge. Both houses' fortunes rose together, thread beside thread on the tapestry, and the criers called it a reflection — their very word — of confidence in the whole guild of such scribe-and-river houses generally, on account of how well the season had gone for that manner of trade of late. I do not know what confidence weighs, nor how it is loaded onto a cart, but I am told it moves prices the way rain moves the river, and that when one house prospers openly, the traders look kindly on its neighbors too, the way a good harvest in one field cheers the whole village even before the other fields are cut.

I will say this plainly, as a serf who has known lean years and fat ones and nothing in between worth the telling: it eases something in a man's chest to see a full granary declared full, whosever granary it is, and scribe-guild or river-guild or grain-guild makes little odds to me. A man who has starved a winter does not ask whether the loaf came from wheat or from magic; he is glad of the loaf. So I set down, in all honesty, that the square seemed glad that day, the traders glad, the criers glad, and even I, who understood perhaps one word in five of the whole proceeding, felt some plain animal gladness at seeing the threads climb rather than fall, for I have seen enough falling threads, in my own poor form of them, to know what climbing feels like by contrast, and to be thankful for it wherever I find it.

I do not know if the houses' fortune will hold, nor what a house of scribes does with its fullness once declared, nor whether the river-guild sends out actual boats at all, ever, to anyone. These are matters above my furrow. I set down only what the tapestry showed and what the criers cried, and I leave the rest, as I leave most things in this bright and roaring age, to wiser heads than my own.

The light is going long over the square now, and though this square has no field that I can see, some field of mine is surely wanting tending all the same, so I must away.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw the threads climb and understood them not, but wrote it true