The Book of Standing Water

Where the land forgets itself and becomes water, our order has kept a house these three hundred winters. The brothers before me ruled these leaves with a lead point and a stretched cord, and I rule mine the same, so that the letters may stand upon their line like herons upon a bank — patient, upright, and wholly unbothered¹ by the weather that surrounds them.

The fen is not one place but a hundred that trade shapes with one another. In the month of the thaw it is a shallow sea, silver from the causeway to the alder line. By the feast of harvest it is a country of paths, and a man may walk from the mill to the salt house without wetting a boot, provided he trusts the reeds and not his eyes.

I have written down the crossings as the eelmen taught them to me, though they laughed to see ink spent on a thing so plainly known. A path you must write down, said old Aldith, is a path you have already lost. I set her words here so that the reader may weigh them against my labour and judge which of us wasted the afternoon.

Of the weathers there are seven that matter. The white haar comes off the estuary before dawn and lies in the hollows till the sun is a hand's breadth high. The wet wind brings the geese. The still cold is the most dangerous, for it puts a skin upon the meres that will carry a heron and not a child, and every parish has its story of the difference.

We keep the water not by draining it but by knowing it. Each spring the sluices at Elder Marsh are opened in an order set down in this very quire, and if a warden takes them out of order the low pasture floods and the hay is lost to the year². I have drawn the order twice: once in words for the literate, once in knots upon a cord for the wardens, who read rope better than any of us read Latin.

What follows on the verso is an account of the birds, taken over eleven seasons of watching from the tower window at first light. I have named them as the fen names them, and set the clerkly names beneath in a smaller hand, for the two do not always agree and I would not have the reader think the fen mistaken about its own inhabitants.

Of the birds of the fen, and first of the geese, who arrive on the wet wind between the two feasts of the autumn and depart so suddenly that the marsh seems, for a day, to have been abandoned by its own noise. I counted them for eleven years and never twice the same, which is either the fault of the geese or of me.

The bittern the fen calls butter-bump, and the clerks call botaurus, and both are right about the sound. It is not a bird's voice at all but the voice of a man blowing across the mouth of a jar, carried two miles over flat water. In eleven years I saw the bird itself four times. I heard it four hundred.

The heron stands in one place so long that the fenmen say he is doing sums. I have watched one hold a posture from lauds to the third hour, and then take an eel with a movement I did not see begin. There is instruction in this for scribes³, though the brothers grow tired of my saying so.

Of the smaller birds I will say less, for they will not hold still to be described. The reed warbler builds a cup so tight it will carry water, slung between four stems, and swings all night in the wind without spilling a single egg. If our masons built so well the tower would not lean.

The swans belong to the crown and the crown has never once come to collect them. They pass the winter on the great mere in a company of ninety or more, and when they rise together at dusk the sound is like a congregation standing all at once. Twice I have seen the whole fen light itself from beneath, the water going white with their reflection, and I have no better word for it than the one the rubricator uses for gold: illuminatio.

I set these observations down not as a naturalist — I have no such learning — but as a keeper of the house's memory. Someone after me will count better⁴, and will need a page to disagree with.

Here endeth the twelfth quire of the Book of Standing Water, written at Elder Marsh by the hand of Brother Ansec, who begs the reader's pardon for a crooked line on the fourth leaf, caused by a goose that entered the scriptorium and would not be persuaded to leave.

The present edition is set from the Elder Marsh codex held in the county archive, folios 41r–42r, with the later glosses preserved in the margin where the original scribe left room for them — which he did, deliberately, on every leaf. He expected to be argued with. We have honoured the expectation.

The Standing Water Press issues one quire each season, hand-set and unbound, so that subscribers may sew their own year together in whatever order they find truthful. We do not number the pages. The catchwords will tell you where you are.