The River Sull

The Sull is Varrow's river, and for three hundred years it has done the work the roads no longer will. It rises among the birch and stone of the southern Whitefells, comes down out of the snow country fast and cold, and by the time it reaches the heartland it has slowed to a slate-grey breadth a strong swimmer might cross in an hour and a wise one would not attempt at all. From Thornwick to Caldmere to the sea below Harrowgate it carries the grain barges that feed the towns, and with the grain goes everything else that travels in Varrow: wool, salt fish, League letters of credit, soldiers on warrant, and rumour, which is the heaviest cargo and pays no toll.

Geography

Above Caldmere the river is young, narrow and quarrelsome, running through wooded gorges where the Hask clans of the foothills take timber tolls in kind. Below the capital it broadens into the heartland plain, where it wanders in great lazy bends past willow holts and flooded meadows. The north-bank towpath — an imperial work of dressed stone, laid before the Sundering — survives in the middle reaches, though whole stretches have slumped into the water and been replaced with packed mud and grumbling. South of Thornwick the banks lower into fen, the river splits and rejoins around reed islands, and the bargemen keep a man at the bow with a sounding-pole. At Harrowgate the Sull makes its last turn through the sea-marsh and gives itself to the tide.

The weather of the river is the weather of the age. Where the old chronicles describe the Sull freezing hard perhaps one winter in five, the ice-wardens' tallies record it frozen bank to bank at Caldmere in 309, 310 and 311, and ice in the shallows for three months together. A frozen river is a road for those who dare it and a famine for those who live by it; the archive records both, usually in the same parish.

Tolls and towpaths

No one rules the Sull, and a great many people tax it. The toll-reaches are parcelled among the seven houses of the Regency and a dozen lesser lords besides, and a loaded barge travelling from Thornwick to Harrowgate will pay at least eleven times: a penny a quarter of grain here, a chain-fee there, a bridge-duty at the Caldmere toll-bridge, a 'lantern levy' at one reach that no lantern has ever been seen to justify. House Vane's collectors, who hold the middle reaches, still keep tally-sticks notched and split in the old manner, and are famous for remembering to the penny what a barge paid three seasons ago. Barge-masters answer in kind, hiding grain under false decks of apple-crates, and the fines for discovery are written on boards at every toll-tower in paint that weathers faster than the practice does.

The towpath is its own country. Horses and men haul the barges upriver at a walking pace, and the path has its inns — low, half-timbered, smelling of wet rope and boiled barley — spaced a day's haul apart. The towing-guilds of Thornwick and Caldmere dispute the middle water every few years, and the dispute is settled the old way, with fists on the bank and the loser buying ale.

Life on the river today

The towns of the Sull live by it and die by it. Thornwick warehouses Mallory grain and sells it dear in bad years. Ostmere, a village of perhaps six hundred souls between Caldmere and the fen, keeps a ferry worked by the same family for four generations and a rope-ferry inn whose mutton stew is mentioned kindly in a surprising number of testamentary bequests. Below, the fen villages live on eels, reeds and wildfowl, and distrust everyone upriver of them, which is everyone.

In winter the ice-wardens come into their own: sworn men and a few women, paid by the towns in grain and candles, who walk the frozen river with iron-shod staves, mark the safe crossings with cut willow, and lift from the ice in spring those who misjudged it. They are a quiet guild and bury their own. Since the Long Winter their numbers have grown, and their spring work with them.

Grain goes down and silver comes up, and between the two the river takes its share of both.

Rumours

The fen-bargemen say that since the Long Winter the river keeps its dead longer — that a man drowned in the Sull now may not rise in the old way, but walks, and has been met with on the towpath at dusk, asking after his cargo. The archive records these accounts as it records all towpath tales: the Lantern-Wardens have been paid twice in three years to walk the middle reaches, and their rolls, which are not public, were requested and declined. The toll-towers, for their part, have begun charging a 'warden's farthing' which the Wardens say they never see.

It is also said — and here the archive merely notes what is said — that more Grey Pilgrims have been seen crossing the Sull at the Ostmere ferry in the last year than in the decade before, always westward, always at dusk, and that the ferryman charges them nothing, or says afterwards that he cannot remember whether he did.