THE FERRYMAN'S TALLY

Mind the Step, and Mind Your Business (I Shan't)

Here is a fact you cannot get round, and neither can anyone else, which is rather the point of me. The King's Highway runs Saltgate to Drudgeford to Murkminster, and there is a river in the way, and there is one ferry over it, and I am the man on the pole. Everything in this realm that goes anywhere comes, in the end, to me. The eel and the tithe and the bride and the bad news. All of it pinches through this one wet reach, and I aim it across, and take a ha'penny, and that — say what you like about a lazy man — makes me the most important person in Sogmarsh, and I would thank you to recall it while you are counting out your coppers.

I do as little as the river allows, which is most of the work. The Sog does the carrying. I do the aiming, and the tallying, and the thinking, and a good deal of the sitting.

Each entry: The Passage · The Toll · The Word — the Word being the news that crosses with you, which I charge nothing for and value above the fare.

1The Foot-Passenger

The Passage. One soul, on their own two feet, wanting the other bank. The Toll. A ha'penny. It has been a ha'penny since before the reign, and will be a ha'penny after it, the river taking no notice of Chancery. The Word. They tell you things, on the water. A man mid-river, halfway between where he was and where he's going, will say what he'd never say on solid ground. Half of what I know, I learned in the middle of the Sog from folk who thought they were only crossing.

2The Cart

The Passage. A cart, a horse, a driver in a state. The Toll. Fourpence, and worth every penny of the ache. The Word. The driver is always in a hurry, and the river never is, and there is a lesson in that which no carter has ever once stayed still long enough to learn.

3The Man Who Pays to Go Faster

The Passage. A gentleman, urgent, important, late. The Toll. He offers me double to hurry. I take the double. I do not hurry. The Word. The Sog does not accept tips. It crosses at the speed of the Sog. A wise ferryman takes the man's money and the man's blessing both, and delivers him, at the ordinary pace, to a far bank that was never going anywhere.

4The Last Crossing

The Passage. The dead, going over to the churchyard bank, feet-first, faced back the way they came. The Toll. None. You do not charge a soul its last ha'penny. The Word. They cross quiet, and the family crosses quieter, and I pole slow, and say nothing, and it is the only crossing on my reach where nobody, for once, tries to tell me their business. I have come to value the silence of it more than I would care to admit to the living.

5The Word at the Landing

The Passage. No passage. The waiting. The knot of folk on the bank, holding for the boat. The Toll. Free, and dear to everyone. The Word. This is where the realm truly happens. A dozen souls waiting on a ferry will tell each other every last thing, and a piece of news put in on the Drudgeford bank comes out on the far side grown a leg and lost its name — a lost sheep by the ford is a drowned child by the churchyard, a wedding is a warning, a warning a war. I have watched the truth get on my boat and something else get off it, a hundred times, and never once found the seam where it changed. It changes on the water. Everything changes on the water.

6The Reach Itself

The Passage. The Sog, in all her moods — high and brown and shouldering, or low and sulking in the reeds. The Toll. She sets it, not I. The Word. Forty years I have read this water, and here is the whole of what I have learned: she will do as she likes, and you may aim across her but never against her, and a man who fights the current gets wet and a man who uses it gets home, and I have always, on principle, got home.

7The One Fixed Point

The Passage. Me. The reach. The pole. The unmoving centre of a moving kingdom. The Toll. — The Word. Everything that matters in Sogmarsh passes through my hands. I am the hinge the whole door swings on. Nothing gets from one half of the realm to the other without my say and my ha'penny. Consider that, next time you take me for a lazy old man asleep on a pole.

8The Thing I Am Slow to Say

The Passage. All of it, tallied, forty years of it. The Toll. Paid. The Word. I am the last man in the realm to know anything. That is the trouble with the middle of the river: the news is always told on the bank I have just left, and reaches me on the bank I am coming to, a crossing late and a version wrong. I have announced three deaths that turned out to be weddings, and a war that turned out to be a wet Thursday in Peatdike, and I announced them with great authority, being the man everyone comes to. The most central soul in Sogmarsh is the least informed one in it. I mistook being passed through for being in the know, mistook it happily, for forty years — and I would go on mistaking it, only a man mid-river said it to me once, plain, and got off before I could argue, and left it with me, out here, where everything true gets left, in the middle, too late to send back.