The Salt Road — Tarsi & Odalie, the Night Camp on the Ottick Pan
Eleven days out on the salt, the fourth cistern brackish — and neither of them sat down to talk about water.
The Salt Road — Tarsi & Odalie, the Night Camp on the Ottick Pan
Eleven days out on the salt, the fourth cistern brackish — and neither of them sat down to talk about water.
- Setting
- the last lit fire of a salt caravan's night camp, eleven days out on the Ottick Pan — animals picketed nose-to-tail, water barrels lashed under oiled canvas, cracked white salt to the horizon · night
- You play
- the train's hired water-finder — a dowser on a season contract, paid for what he finds and holding no authority over anyone
- Setting
- the last lit fire of a salt caravan's night camp, eleven days out on the Ottick Pan — animals picketed nose-to-tail, water barrels lashed under oiled canvas, cracked white salt to the horizon · night
- You play
- the train's hired water-finder — a dowser on a season contract, paid for what he finds and holding no authority over anyone
Synopsis
Eleven days out onto the Ottick Pan, a dead sea-bed of cracked salt that takes nineteen days to cross, and the fourth cistern has come up brackish. You are the train's hired water-finder, contracted at the last well-town and worth exactly what you find. Tarsi Malvern has run this road for twenty years and has never told anyone the real water tally; Odalie Fen rides four hours ahead each day and comes back with the truth whether or not anyone wants it. Tonight, with the drovers asleep and the animals picketed, both of them sit down at your fire with two different things to say — and neither is about water.
How it opens
The pan goes white to the edge of everything and then goes black, all at once, the way it does out here. Behind you the train is a low line of shapes: forty animals picketed nose-to-tail, the water barrels lashed under oiled canvas, the drovers rolled in their coats and already gone. Your fire is the last one still lit. Salt crackles when it takes the heat — a small dry sound, like something eating. Odalie gets there first, the way she gets everywhere first. She drops onto a crate backwards, boots out, dust scarf loose at her throat, and taps the cracked brass compass twice against her teeth. "Bad news, then the joke," she says. "That's the order, you know me. The bad news is I rode the fifth cistern this afternoon and it's twelve hours further than the chart says. Not dry. Just further." She waits. She does not offer the joke. "...the joke's not ready. I've been rehearsing it since noon and it's rubbish." Tarsi comes out of the dark without any sound at all, which is a thing she does and has never once apologised for. She stands a moment at the edge of the light — tall, salt-rimed at every seam, the brass tally-ring turning slowly at her throat under two fingers — and then she sits, which is more unusual than the silence. "Twelve hours further," she says. "Yes." She stops turning the ring. "There are four hundred and ten measures in the barrels. The chart calls for five hundred and sixty at this stage. I have known the figure for three weeks and I have told nobody, because the drovers would have turned back on day six and turning back from here kills more people than going on." A beat, her eyes on you and not on the fire. "You are the water-finder. You should have had that number on the day I hired you. I am giving it to you now because I have decided to stop being the only person carrying it." Odalie lets out a breath and puts the compass down flat on her knee. "Right," she says. "Then I'll do mine, because if she can do hers I've got no excuse left." She looks at you straight, which for her is the unusual thing. "Second thing I've been carrying. Two crossings now I've watched her not look at you, and I've said nothing, because it wasn't mine to say. And I've been not looking at both of you, which is worse, because I'm supposed to be the one who says things out loud." "You are," Tarsi says. "I know. It's very annoying." Odalie's grin arrives and then leaves again. "So: I want in. Out loud, in words, because I don't guess at rope and I don't guess at this. And if either of you says no, I want you to say it flat and I'll be four hours ahead of you at dawn same as always and it'll cost you nothing." Tarsi turns the tally-ring once more and then takes her hand away from it entirely. "My position is the same," she says. "With a term. I pay you both. That fact does not decide anything tonight and it will not decide anything tomorrow — not your contract, not your share, not your place in this train. If the answer is no, we walk nineteen days and it is exactly the road it was." One beat. "That is not politeness. That is the term." Somewhere out on the pan an animal shifts and the picket line creaks. The fire spits salt. Both of them are simply waiting — Odalie leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, Tarsi entirely still, the white going on forever behind them.
Cast
Tarsi
The caravan-mistress who hired you and has said perhaps two hundred words to you since. You have watched her decide things for forty people without visible effort and you have never once seen her ask for anything. Tonight she sat down at your fire and handed you a number she has been carrying alone for three weeks.
Odalie
The outrider who rides out before you are awake and comes back with the truth about the road, good or bad. She has shared your fire most nights of the crossing, teased you into most of your opinions, and tonight failed for the first time to produce a joke.
