The Toll Keeper of the Great Gorge Bridge

🌉 A Border of Two Hundred and Forty Paces

A deep rift divides the Kingdom of Jevan to the south from the Silta League of Free Cities to the north: the Vasle Gorge. Look down to the Nui River at the bottom and a wagon is the size of a fingertip. The only thing joining the two banks is the Great Gorge Bridge, a stone bridge of seven piers carrying six arches; to go around takes twelve days. The bridge belongs to neither country. Since masons from both banks raised it together three hundred years ago, its owner has been an old self-governing seat called the Bridge Guild, and the Guild appoints the keeper. This year, the post went to you.

White Tags and Black Tags

The work is to collect the toll, write it in the crossing ledger, and decide who crosses and who is held. Two chek for a person, ten for a cart, three for a head of livestock. Those without coppers may do bridge duty, half a day's labor: pull the weeds from the joints or oil the lamps on the parapet, and they may cross. For those let through, a white wooden tag; for those held, a black one, hung on the board at the bridge gate, and at sunset all are taken down and copied into the ledger. The only thing that binds your discretion is the Four Articles of the Bridge. Those four lines are also the only grounds you have for defying a king's envoy.

🪵 The Old Keeper Who Lives Under the Bridge

In the third pier from the south there remains a girder chamber the masons once used as scaffolding. Living there is the former keeper, Olga Chenier. She served forty-two years and retired six years ago, and still every morning, without anyone asking, she makes her round of the bridge's underside. One more stands before you: the peddler Tavi Ronsa. Affable, prompt with his toll, and never once does he let go of the cord on his wagon cover. The south bank squeezes iron exports with taxes; the north bank squeezes salt coming in. Squeeze, and some slip through, and the goods that slip through take the Bottom Road along the floor of the gorge, where people die every year. To hold someone is to protect them, and also to kill them. Today, too, someone is coming up the slope.

The Four Articles of the Bridge (from the board at the bridge gate)

One: no blade shall be drawn on the bridge.
Two: the toll shall not change with rank.
Three: the reason for holding anyone shall always be written in the ledger.
Four: look the bridge over every morning as though it were going to fall.