The Burden of Stones

as recounted, with some reluctance, by one who knows better

One scarcely knows where to begin with Sloppdom, a kingdom so called — and I shall not pretend the name surprised anyone — where gold passed from hand to hand in the customary fashion, and every last citizen, however humble, kept his own copy of the Great Ledger. All were validators, as the locals insisted on putting it, which is to say that no man took another’s word for anything, a charming arrangement, if rather exhausting to maintain.

One must concede, grudgingly, a point of some importance: the Ledger was not the king’s at all. He had not written it, nor commissioned it, nor so much as lifted a quill toward it. It had been assembled by the masses themselves, page by page, each humble soul keeping the whole and checking it against his neighbour’s, so that the truth belonged to everyone and to no one in particular — least of all to the Crown. And the people, who were not nearly so simple as their betters supposed, held the king to his place by a single, formidable understanding: that should the Ledger ever be violated, should one false line be suffered to stand, not a hammer would fall nor a furrow be turned in all of Sloppdom until it was set right. The king reigned, in short, only so long as the masses agreed the Ledger was true — a fact His Majesty found it convenient, as kings so often do, to forget.

The synchronizing of all this — for a Ledger kept by everyone is worth precisely nothing unless everyone’s copy agrees — fell to the horsemen. Plain fellows of the people’s own choosing, these, who rode the length and breadth of Sloppdom crying out each transaction as it came, village to village and door to door, so that what one man set down, every man might hear and record the same. No crown commanded them. They rode because the people wished them to ride, and the people fed and kept them for the trouble, and the arrangement, I’m given to understand, worked rather better than anything His Majesty ever devised — a circumstance the king is unlikely to have enjoyed.

Then King Slopp — and here one must suppress a sigh — handed down a decree. Henceforth any fellow might chisel a little note upon a rock, bind the wretched thing to a perfectly respectable gold transaction, and, in exchange for a flake of gold paid to the Crown, have it preserved for all eternity. His Majesty, you understand, oversaw the mining personally, and was not a man to let a revenue stream wander past unmolested.

The rocks were, I need hardly say, utterly without merit. One bore a tradesman’s boast. Another, a poem of such quality that I decline to reproduce it. A third depicted, with no discernible talent, the king’s dog. A fourth read, in its entirety, I was here — as though the world had been holding its breath. Yet the law was the law, vulgar as it was: every rock so bound became Truth, and every validator, down to the meanest, was obliged to keep a copy.

The nobility found it all frightfully amusing. Their vaults were cathedral-vast; what was another cartload of rubble to men of such standing? And the king, naturally, was delighted, for the flakes came tumbling into his treasury with every fresh scribble, and a swelling treasury has a way of improving a monarch’s sense of humour.

As for the horsemen — well, every man has his price, and the king, you will not be in the least astonished to learn, had gold enough to meet it. Where once they had cried out honest transactions for love of the people who kept them, now they rode upon a darker errand. They called at each cottage in turn and demanded to see the vault of rocks, that they might verify every citizen was faithfully warehousing the realm’s refuse, every poem and boast and portrait of the royal dog. And the citizen who could not produce his hoard — who had, God help him, declined to beggar himself storing another man’s doggerel — was taken from his own doorstep and hanged. The people’s own messengers, you understand, turned bailiff and gallows-man both, and were paid for it in the very flakes wrung from the necks they stretched. One does admire the economy of the thing, even as one declines to applaud it.

But old Petra — who possessed three coins, and not one more — observed the rocks arriving season upon season, the boasts and the dreadful verse and the dog and the eternal I was here, and she dug, and she shored, and she enlarged her modest vault to accommodate the lot, though not a single rock was hers, nor, one need scarcely add, was any of it gold.

And young Tam, owner of one solitary flake, discovered in due course that the room required to warehouse the kingdom’s refuse had come to cost him rather more than the flake itself. In a kinder tale he should simply have laid the Ledger down and taken the lords’ word for what was true; but the horsemen, you will recall, now hanged the man who kept no vault. So Tam was left the choice of a beast in a snare: to ruin himself shoring up a hillside of another man’s rubble, or to swing for declining. He chose, sensibly enough, to live, and dug, and starved a little more each season — and though he kept the Ledger still, he had long since ceased to read it, for a man breaking stone from dawn to dusk has no leisure to check whether the truth he guards remains the truth at all. Sloppdom had not lost a validator so much as hollowed one out and propped the husk against the wall. A tidy bit of arithmetic, that, if one cares to dwell on it, which the lords did not.

Petra, being made of sterner and frankly more tiresome stuff, presented herself at the castle gate. “Pray tell me,” she said, “why I am made to house another man’s appalling poem, merely to keep my three coins honest?”

The steward did not trouble to look up. “His Majesty has sold the right to write,” he said. “The people merely pay the rent. In perpetuity.”

And so matters stood in Sloppdom, where the worthless was rendered permanent, the permanent was rendered everyone’s, and the cost of merely knowing the truth grew heavier with each passing year — until, as was perhaps inevitable, only the very great could any longer afford it. And here lay the joke, though no one in the castle was laughing at it: the king could be held to account only so long as the masses kept and read the Ledger themselves. He had not needed to silence them, in the end, nor even to forbid them the truth. He had merely buried them in rubble until their backs were too bent to look up from it — every cottager still dutifully guarding his vault on pain of the rope, and not one of them with strength left to check whether the truth inside it still held. The leash remained in the people’s hands. It had simply been weighted, stone by worthless stone, until no hand could any longer lift it. A most enlightened kingdom, I’m sure you’ll agree. One does hear they were terribly proud of it.