The High Valley

We set this down in the new marks, the ones any child can learn in a season. We do it because a thing only one of us can read is a thing that dies when that one dies, and we have learned, at great cost, what that costs. This is our own history, the first thing we ever wrote so that all of us could hold it. Most of it happened long before any of us were born. We gathered it the way we gathered the law, from the mouths of the old, and kept what survived the arguing, and where we are unsure we have said so. Read it. Then teach the marks to your children, so they can read it after you.Once, the village was governed by a council of ten. A hunter, a herder, a farmer, a healer, a midwife, a well-keeper, a weaver, a smith, a keeper of the songs and the names of the dead, and a watcher who scanned the ridge for danger. None of them ruled. They met at dusk in a circle and the whole village gathered to watch. At the center sat one we called the chief. She commanded no one. She could read, and that was the whole of her office.What she read was a chest of old books, kept dry in cedar, that held our law. Not commands. The rulings of everyone who had ever governed, set down over generations, each line saying which trouble belonged to which voice. In drought, the well-keeper speaks first. In fever, the healer, before anyone. When the snow comes late, the farmer, never the hunter. To the rest of us the lines were only marks, the tracks of a small bird that had walked through ink. The reader looked at them and heard them speak.The book was older than anyone could trace, and most of its lines had outlived the reason they were written. A few reasons we still keep. The line giving the late snow to the farmer came from a year the snow ran long, when the hunter swore the game had fled and we should follow it down the mountain. We nearly did. The granary the farmer begged us not to empty was the one thing that carried us to spring. Some reader long dead watched it and wrote the line so it