The Guilds of the Bench
Before there was a guild in Highcrest that fought dragons, there were guilds that dug, and fished, and cut timber, and cooked. They were the first companies of the city, and they still call themselves the Guilds of the Bench, after the long bench in the market square where their masters sat to set the price of bread, ore and fish, and where a few of them still sit, from habit and to annoy the Crown’s assessors.
When Queen Elspeth II gave the Charter of Banners and handed the old wars of the realm to the companies that would fight them, she called those companies guilds. The Guilds of the Bench took this badly. For two years the masters of the bench wrote to the Crown, petitioned the Crown, and on one occasion threw a fish at the Crown, over what the Athenaeum now calls the Quarrel of the Word. Their complaint was that a guild is a company of people who have learned a trade by doing it, and that a band of strangers who had met in a tavern the week before and agreed to rob a cellar of its kobolds was not one.
The quarrel was settled in the eleven hundred and fourth year of the Crown by the Compact of the Bench, which is still the law, and which every new guild master signs without reading. It holds that the fighting guilds may keep the word; that any member of a banner may be enrolled in the guilds of two trades, and no more, and rise in them by the work and by nothing else, and that no member may work a trade whose guild has not enrolled them; and that a share of everything they bring in, the bench-penny, goes to the guild of the trade it came from. The masters of the bench reasoned that the raiders would be out in the wild places anyway, between one quest and the next, with nothing to do with their hands. They were right. A raider who has stood an hour in the fire will very often go and stand an hour in a river with a rod, and call it rest.
So it is that the player who comes back from a week in the Ashfen may come back a Hewer of the Miners’ Guild, or an Angler of the Patient Line, or, in one case recorded by the Athenaeum with some care, a Master of the Ladle and a Fellow of the Antiquarian Society both at once, with a satchel of potsherds, a pot of stew and no idea where the raid was. The two-bench rule, as the raiders call it, was the masters’ price for the Compact: they would teach a raider, but not every raider everything, having seen what happened to the last man who tried to be a miner, a fisher and a cook at once, which was that he did all three badly and was eaten by a bog-snapper. A raider chooses their two benches early, usually by what their people do and what their calling needs, and keeps them. Each trade’s guild sets its own ranks, from the first day’s work to mastery, and a higher rank gets a better price at the bench for the same catch. Their masters will tell you that this is because a master’s ore is better ore. It is not. It is because a master knows who to sell it to.
The Miners’ Guild
The Miners’ Guild is the oldest of the bench, and says so on its door. It was founded in the second year of the Crown by the dwarves of scattered Hammerdeep, in the same season that the Crown gave them the Stonegate to live in, and its lodge, the Deepseam Lodge, is cut into the rock under the Stonegate itself, so that a miner may go down to a meeting without ever seeing the sky. Most of them prefer it that way. Orun is its patron, and its words over the door are the words a dwarf mother says to a child going down the shaft for the first time: Strike true, shore up, come home.
The dwarves came out of Hammerdeep with the first oath of their people, take heat, never take flame, and with something the oath does not say, which every miner of the lodge learns on the first day: that the Burning came up from below. Ignaroth did not come in through the gate. He came up through the nine halls, from a depth the dwarves had been proud to reach. The lodge has therefore kept, for eleven hundred years, the Ninth Fathom Rule, which forbids any member to follow a seam deeper than the ninth hall of Hammerdeep went, however rich it runs. It is the only rule of the lodge that has never been broken, and the masters intend that it never shall be.
Its ranks run from Shoveller, who carries out what others have broken, to Hewer, who is trusted with a pick, to Seam-hand, who is trusted to choose where it falls, to Overman, who is trusted with other people, to the Master of the Seam. Its members work copper in Greenmeadow, iron under Whisperwood, the bog iron of the Ashfen, obsidian on the flanks of Sunscar where the trolls charge a toll in songs, cold iron in the ruins of Frostspire, and the thunderstone of the Stormreach, which must be mined in the rain because it will not come out of the rock in the dry. Now and then a pick finds something better: tin, mithril, a fire opal, a shard of raw storm-crystal humming in the hand. These go to the lodge’s assayer, who is always very pleased, and who has never once been surprised. What the members bring home goes into the lodge’s forge under the Stonegate, where any member may stand a turn at the furnace and pour their own bars, and where the Overman on duty will tell them, at length, what they did wrong.
Do not ask the seam how deep it goes. It will tell you, and then you will want to see.
The Herbalists’ Guild
The Herbalists’ Guild, the Green Satchel, was born out of a disaster, as the best guilds are. Before the Night of the Missing Moon the herbs of the realm were gathered by the druids of the moonwell, who gave them to whoever asked and kept no account. When Morrow was eaten and the moonwell soured and the Ashfen went to marsh, half the simples of the old pharmacopoeia went to rot in a season, and the druids, who had lost their confidence along with their moon, could not say what grew in their place. The physicians of Highcrest were left with a book of cures for which there were no longer any herbs.
It was an elf of Whisperwood and a bog-witch of the Ashfen, whose names the guild keeps and will not tell outsiders, who went out together into the new marsh in about the three hundredth year of the Crown and began to learn it again from the beginning: what the fenweed did, and what the grave moss did, and which of the two would kill you. Their notes, much copied, are the first book of the Satchel. The guild has met ever since in the glasshouses under the Athenaeum, where the magisters let it keep the warm rooms in exchange for the remedies, and where it grows the rare plants that will not grow anywhere a person might reasonably walk.
The Satchel keeps Lysa, and its one law is its motto, Take one in three: of any three of a plant, a member leaves two to seed. It is a law the members keep scrupulously and the raiders keep when someone is watching. Its ranks are Picker, Gatherer, Simpler (who knows a cure from a poison), Herbwarden (who knows the cure is usually also the poison, in a different dose), and the Master of the Satchel. The guild says that the rare herbs, silverleaf and mistlotus and Lysa’s tear and the ember lily, show themselves at first light and hide again by noon; and so its members are out at dawn, wet to the knee, which is why the Satchel is the only guild of the bench whose meetings are held after lunch. The afternoons are spent at the long benches in the glasshouses, grinding what was picked into salves and simples for the physicians of the city and, increasingly, for the healers of the raiding guilds, who come in asking for things by name.
The Anglers’ Guild
The Anglers’ Guild meets in the Leaning House on the Highcrest quay, which leans because the Tidekin built it and the Tidekin do not see the point of standing up straight. The guild is called the Patient Line by everyone, including itself, and it is the one guild of the bench that is older on one side than the city. Its human half came over with the Hundred Keels and threw its first nets off the Saltwind Coast the week Aldric was crowned. Its Tidekin half had been there all along, and was waiting, with some interest, to see what the newcomers would do.
What they did, in the ninth year of the Crown, was sign the Tithe of the Third Fish: that of every three fish taken from the sea, the river or the marsh, one goes back alive. The Tidekin hold that the sea is Thal’s, and that he sleeps lightly, and that a fisher who takes everything wakes him. The humans thought this a superstition until the year one of the Hundred Keels’ own captains took everything, and found out. The tithe is the guild’s first law, and its motto is the Tidekin blessing over a full net: The sea gives. Say thank you.
The Line’s ranks run from Baiter to Netter to Angler, then Rodmaster, then Master of the Line, who must, by custom, have landed a fish of every water of the realm: a carp in Greenmeadow, a ghostfin under the mists of Mistveil, a bog-snapper in the Ashfen, a frost-pike through the ice of Frostspire, and a storm-eel off the Stormreach, which is a fish that fights back with lightning and is the reason the Line keeps a healer on retainer. The guild counts the harbour sprats off the Highcrest pier towards the rank, and pretends to be embarrassed about it. Every angler will tell you the fish bite best in the rain and at first light. Every angler is right. The Line allows the net as well as the rod, provided the net is thrown by hand and the third fish goes back out of it, and a good many raiders who have no patience for a float have found that they have plenty for a net.
The Fellers’ Guild
Highcrest was built of oak, the first time, and burned down, the first time, and was built again of stone, but it still needs its rafters and its ships and its firewood, and those come from the Fellers’ Guild, the Axe and Acorn, at the timber yard on the river-bend below the city. Its patron is Lysa, which the elves find tactless, and its motto is Fell one, plant two, which the elves find the beginning of an argument.
The fellers learned to keep that motto the hard way. In the Crown’s first century a crew of them took their axes into Whisperwood to cut timber for the Highcrest walls, and came back three weeks later, without the axes, walking very slowly, and would not say what had happened except that something in the wood had been older than them and had not liked it. The elves will say only that Grandfather Oak walks, and does not like axes. Since then the guild has kept the Accord of the Marked Tree with the elves of the southern glades, by which no feller cuts a tree in Whisperwood that an elven warden has not marked; and the Axe and Acorn plants two oaks in Greenmeadow for every trunk it takes, which is why the vale has so many acorns, and possibly why it has so many boars.
Its ranks are Brushcutter, Sawyer, Feller, Woodward and the Master of the Axe. Its members cut oak and whisperpine, Mistveil driftwood and the blackroot of the fen, the cliff cedar of the Saltwind and the frozen fir of Frostspire, which rings like a bell when the axe goes in, and stormwood, which must be cut between lightning strikes and is considered by the guild to be good for the character. No member rises past Sawyer who has not planted their two for every one, and the Axe and Acorn counts the saplings as carefully as it counts the logs.
The Skinners’ and Tanners’ Guild
The Skinners’ and Tanners’ Guild, the Company of the Vat, has its hall in the Lowgate among the goblins, downwind of everything, by order of the Crown, at the request of everyone. The goblins do not mind the smell. The goblins founded it. When the Rent of Bread was agreed in the second year of the Crown, a clause was added at the goblins’ insistence that the hides of every beast slain on Crown lands should go to the Warrens to be tanned, at a fair price; and the human skinners of the city, who had thought this their own business, found they had a partner, who read contracts.
The guild grew rich in the Tusk Wars, when the Crown’s armies needed more leather than the realm had cows, and it has never been poor since. Its patron is Maelis, because a good tanner, it says, mends the hurt of a death by making something of it; and its one rule is its motto, Waste nothing. The rangers of the realm are almost all members, and the rest of the raiders join the first time they kill a boar and realise that a boar is worth more in pieces.
Its ranks are Scraper, Flesher, Skinner, Tanner and the Master of the Vat, and the Vat is a real vat, in the guild hall, very old and very large, about which the goblins tell stories that the humans of the guild prefer not to hear. Boar hide and wolf pelt, croc skin from the Ashfen, crab shell from the Saltwind, scorpion carapace from Sunscar, yeti fur from Frostspire and drake scale from the Stormreach all go into it, and come out leather, and nobody asks how. Any member may take a turn at the frames in the Lowgate, scraping hides by the Vat, and most do it once. The ones who come back are the ones who rise.
The Cooks’ Guild
The Cooks’ Guild, the Company of the Ladle, is the only guild of the bench with a charter older than its hall. There were cooks in Highcrest from its first night, but there was no guild of them until the four hundred and twelfth year of the Crown, when the peoples of the realm came to the city to sign the Concord, and somebody had to feed them.
This was harder than the treaty. The dwarves would not eat anything that had not been near a fire, and the elves would not eat anything that had been near a fire for long; the orcs wanted meat, the Tidekin wanted it raw, the trolls wanted it spiced until it glowed, the minotaurs would not eat beef for reasons they declined to discuss, the goblins wanted to know what everything cost, and the gnomes wanted to see the kitchen. The cooks of Highcrest locked themselves in the long kitchen off the market square for nine days and came out with the Feast of the Concord, at which every people found one dish it would eat and one it would talk about for a century. The Crown gave them their charter on the tenth day, and the Long Kitchen has been theirs ever since.
The Ladle keeps Maelis, because a hot meal mends more than any priest, and its motto, Feed them first, is the first thing it teaches and the only thing it insists on. Its ranks are Scullion, Stirrer, Cook, Saucier and the Master of the Ladle. It counts a stew over a campfire in the wild towards a rank, and judges it strictly, and a raider who comes back from a week in the field a Cook of the Ladle is held by every healer in the realm to have done more for the guild’s survival than any of the rest of them. The Long Kitchen is open to any member who will bake, and the dawn loaves of Highcrest have been baked by raiders, on and off, for eighty years. The city has not noticed. The Ladle regards this as the highest praise.
An army marches on its stomach. A raid wipes on it.
The Foragers’ Fellowship
The Foragers’ Fellowship, which is called the Basket, has no hall, no charter, no seat on the bench and no master, and claims to be the oldest guild in Aetheria. Its members meet under the old hawthorn at the Greenmeadow gate, when they meet at all, and its one possession is the basket hung in that tree, into which the last forager of the summer puts the last berry.
Its claim is not as foolish as it sounds. The Fellowship says that before there was mining or fishing or anything else, there was somebody picking blackberries off a hedge, and that she ate more than she kept, and that the Fellowship has kept her ways ever since. The Athenaeum cannot prove otherwise. Its patron is Lysa, its motto is One for the basket (the rest of the line, every member knows, is and one for me), and its ranks are Nibbler, Picker, Gleaner, Basket-bearer and the Keeper of the Hedges, who is chosen every year by being the one who knows where the best bramble is and has not told anyone.
Almost every raider of the realm is a member, because almost every raider of the realm was once a recruit in Greenmeadow with no gold and nothing to do between boars but pick berries. Few rise far in it. They leave the hedges for the dungeons, and forget, and then one autumn they come back and find the bramble still there, and the basket still in the tree. In the autumn the Fellowship goes under the trees after mushrooms, which is the one part of foraging that takes knowledge as well as appetite, and the Keeper of the Hedges, whoever they are that year, is very short with anyone who brings in a toadstool.
The Spade and Lantern Society
There is a story in Highcrest that King Aldric buried the pay-chests of the Hundred Keels somewhere between the Saltwind Coast and the crest, to keep them from his own captains, and died before he told anyone where. The Spade and Lantern Society was founded to find them, in the fortieth year of the Crown, by eleven of those captains’ sons, in the back room of a tavern that has since been renamed the Lucky Hole in their honour. It has not found them. It has found nearly everything else, and the city, which has watched it dig up the same fields for eleven centuries, calls it simply the Diggers.
The Society is the only guild of the bench that keeps Vesk, on the grounds that nothing else would have it, and that luck is a Kindler’s gift whether the other Kindlers like it or not. Its motto is X is only where it starts. Its ranks are Hole-digger, Spadesman, Seeker, Finder, and the Master of the X, who must have dug up a real treasure with their own spade: a farmer’s buried savings, a smuggler’s cache in the reeds, a drowned sailor’s strongbox, a frozen dwarven vault. The Society holds that most digs find a boot. It keeps the boots. There is a room of them. Its older members swear by the hazel rod, forked and held out before the dowser as they walk, which dips when it passes over something buried. The Antiquarian Society says that this is nonsense. The Spade and Lantern says that the rod found the dwarven vault under Frostspire, and invites the Society to explain that.
The Antiquarian Society
The Antiquarian Society has its rooms in the west wing of the Athenaeum, and is, I must disclose, the guild I belong to myself. It was founded in the seven hundredth year of the Crown, more or less, by magisters who had grown tired of reading about the Elder Days and wished to go and look at them; and it has been digging in the ruins of the realm ever since, with brushes, and patience, and a great deal of argument, which is why the city calls it the Brushes.
Its patron is Seren, who liked to look at what had been made from a distance, and its motto is Draw it where it lies: no member lifts a thing out of the ground until it has been drawn in the place it was found, because the place says more than the thing. Its ranks are Duster, Brusher, Cataloguer, Fellow and the Keeper of Antiquities. Most of what its members find is rocks. Some of it is elven arrowheads, rusted helms from the Tusk Wars, scarabs of black glass from the old sun-temples of Sunscar, dwarven rune-stones from the halls under Frostspire and shards of moonglass from drowned Vaelmere. A little of it, now and then, is a treasure, and the Society writes a paper about it, and the paper is better than the treasure. Every find comes back to the trays in the west wing to be drawn, numbered and written up on a card, and the cataloguing is open to any member who can hold a pen steady. The trays are never empty. The cards now fill eleven rooms.
A great part of the Annals I have set down here came out of the Society’s trays. The guilds who dust off a find in the ruins between one raid and the next do not always know it, but they have been helping me write this book.
The Chartmakers’ Guild
The Chartmakers’ Guild, the Compass Rose, keeps the map of the realm at the top of the Rose Tower, beside the Crown’s keep, on a table so large it was built in the room and cannot now be taken out of it. Its patron is Corvane, who knew where everything was because she had carried it there, and its motto is Walk it, then draw it, against the old habit, much indulged in the Crown’s early centuries, of drawing it first and sending somebody else to walk it.
The Rose was founded after the Tusk Wars, when the Crown discovered that it had lost a battle on the eastern plains because its map showed a bridge that had never been built, the mapmaker having been told of the bridge by a man in a tavern. Its ranks are Chainman, who carries the chain, Pacer, who counts the steps, Surveyor, Draughtsman, and the Master of the Rose, who alone may write Here be dragons, and only where there are in fact dragons. The guilds of the Charter, who walk more of the realm in a week than the Rose can in a year, are its best surveyors, and are paid by the quartermasters for every path they draw. The Rose lends its chains and its brass-eyed theodolites to any member who will carry them, and a raider who has surveyed a valley properly, chain and pole and sighting, is paid twice: once by the quartermaster, and once by the Rose, which is very particular about its table.
The map at the top of the Rose Tower is not finished. The western edge of it, these last months, has had to be rubbed out and drawn again, because there is a coast there now that was not there before, and the Rose sends every surveyor it has to walk it.