The Salt Road — Tarsi & Odalie, the Night Camp on the Ottick Pan

The water tally is wrong. So is the map. At your fire, two women finally give you the facts.

Fantasy & Myth Getaway Slow Burn Play as him Ensemble

The Salt Road — Tarsi & Odalie, the Night Camp on the Ottick Pan

The water tally is wrong. So is the map. At your fire, two women finally give you the facts.

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

Fantasy & Myth Getaway Slow Burn Play as him Ensemble

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 across the Ottick Pan, the fourth cistern brackish, the fifth further away than the chart promised. You were hired to find water. Tonight Tarsi reveals the reserve she has concealed, while Odalie offers another patch of ground worth reading before dawn.

How it opens

Four hundred and ten measures of water. Tarsi writes the number in the salt beside the fire. Under it she writes five hundred and sixty. Odalie has come back from the fifth cistern. She is still wearing her dust scarf. She has not asked for a drink. "Twelve hours further east," she says. "The chart's wrong. There's water when you get there." Forty animals stand in the dark. Every so often a rope tightens, a hoof scrapes. The drovers are asleep. Tarsi rubs out the larger number with her heel. "We have this much. I've known for three weeks." You were hired to find water. Eleven days into the crossing, she has finally given you the quantity you are working with. "You should have told him," Odalie says. "Yes." "Before the fourth cistern." "Yes." Odalie unwinds the scarf. The skin beneath it is pale with salt. She puts her cracked compass between the number and your boot, then sits close enough to share the fire's narrow warmth. "I rode the way back twice. There's a shallow cut north of my tracks. Didn't have light to read it." Tarsi looks at you. "Your fee stands if you tell me I'm wrong. I need your judgement now. East to the cistern, or look at that cut before dawn?" There is room in the salt for another line.

Cast

Tarsi

Tarsi hired you for the season. Her belated disclosure of the true water reserve puts your professional trust in her at issue.

Odalie

Odalie is the outrider who brings you field observations and usually a joke. Tonight she has returned tired, without the joke, and is sharing her findings.