The Couriers' Compact

The Compact as it is read aloud in the runners' halls at every new year, followed by the history of its making. This copy follows the Saltreach text. Where other halls read it differently, the notes say so.

The Compact

We who run the Line, from the nine towns named below, being tired of burying one another, agree these four things and nothing else.

First. No town, crew or person takes a toll from a runner for passage on the Line: not in coin, not in cargo, not in water.

Second. No runner stops on a pontoon section.

Third. Every runner gives way to a sled flying a red pennant, which means someone hurt is aboard.

Fourth. Every runner carries water for two.

Agreed at Saltreach, in the sixth year after the Snap, by the runners of Port Anselm, Gantry, Cistern, Windbreak, Whiteholm, Saltreach, Tarry, Coiltown and Brannock.

At the reading, the oldest runner in the hall reads the opening and four other runners read one rule each. After every rule the whole hall answers together: "On the Line."

The war it ended

For three years after 3 AS, every town that sat across the ribbon learned that it could charge for the privilege. Cistern chained the ribbon at its wells and charged in water. Gantry charged in parts. Windbreak charged in nothing at all, because its dune crews simply took what they wanted. By 5 AS a run from Port Anselm to Coiltown cost more in tolls than the cargo was worth, and runners who could not pay took the long way round, through country where the long way round killed people.

The Saltreach year book names forty-one runners killed in the Toll Wars. The true number is higher.

Eleven days at Saltreach

In the spring of 6 AS, Ada Merrin, keeper of the Saltreach hall, sent one runner east and one west with the same message: "Come and talk, or keep paying." Seventeen towns received it. Nine sent someone.

They met in the salt shed behind the hall, which still stands. The first three days were spent agreeing that there should be rules at all. On the fourth day the meeting nearly failed. Cistern refused any rule about water, because water was all Cistern had to sell, and Esau Vell walked out to his sled. Petra Lisle walked after him, and an hour later they both came back. The fourth rule was the result: every runner carries their own water and enough for one more, so that Cistern may sell water at its wells to anyone who wants it, but may never again charge it as the price of passing.

The second rule came from Tarry on the seventh day. Old Fenwick explained, at length, that a sled stopped on a pontoon puts its whole weight on one float, and the float goes down, and the ribbon with it. Nobody argued. Most of them had seen it happen.

The third rule came from Corah Nyland on the ninth day. Her brother had been carrying a hurt child to Windbreak when the dune crew stopped him. She asked for a sign that nobody could pretend not to see. Someone tore a strip from a red shirt.

The Compact was signed on the eleventh day, and read aloud for the first time that evening, in the salt shed, by Ada Merrin, who had to stop twice.

Disputes about the text

• The fifth line. Coiltown's hall reads one more line after the fourth rule: "And every runner comes home if they can." The Saltreach copy does not have it. Coiltown says Mags Okafor wrote it in the margin on the last day and the Saltreach clerk failed to copy it. Saltreach says she wrote it in on the way home. Visiting Saltreach runners answer it anyway.
• Water for two, or one more. The Brannock copy reads "water for one more than you carry". It makes no difference to a runner alone. Brannock crews of two carry for three. The Authority's licence rules quote the Saltreach wording.
• Cistern's signature. The Saltreach account says Esau Vell signed because his own runners threatened to leave Cistern if he did not. Cistern's hall says he signed of his own will, and that Cistern, not Saltreach, ended the Toll Wars by signing. Both halls are proud of the same signature.
• The hards. The Compact says nothing about where a runner may rest on the Long Shallows. In 14 AS, after a crew sat out a storm on one of the timber hards built beside the pontoon line, the halls ruled that a hard is not a pontoon section. A runner may pull off onto a hard and stop for the night. They may never stop on the ribbon between them.

Why it is still read

The Line Authority, founded three years later, wrote two of the four rules into its licence conditions. The halls have never asked it to write in the other two, and the Authority has never offered.

The Compact has no court, no wardens and no fines. It has lasted thirty-four years because once a year runners read it aloud to each other in a room, and then go out and keep it where nobody is watching.