A clerk's notebook, invented
This fictional notebook belongs to an invented clerk in the invented Glasswater League. It is not a discovered manuscript, historical quotation or account of Mauritia.
First day. We recovered the fee board before we recovered the water buckets. The board had caught beneath a stair. Its painted letters survived better than the stair did. Someone propped it against the ruined customs house, and by midday a visiting captain was asking why he should pay for a harbour he could not enter.
I had no answer worth writing down. Three of his crew were carrying our water buckets back from the beach. We had found a use for one another before we had found a price.
What the market needs
Second day. The grain ship waited beyond the channel. The storm had thrown enough stone across the entrance to stop a loaded vessel. Small boats could pass if their crews knew the opening, but every trip spent time, water and patience. Grain brought ashore in a wet boat is grain we may lose later in the store.
Ordinarily, the three islands compete over their market stalls. The middle island claims to make the strongest rope. The outer island agrees, provided you never get it wet. Yesterday I heard that joke for the first time since the storm. It was a relief to dislike it again.
The gardeners from the high island arrived with baskets of food and a complaint about harbour taxes. Fair enough. They had carried their produce down a broken path while the merchants met beneath the only roof left in the market.
We have fish. We do not have enough grain. A person can say the first sentence very loudly without improving the second.
The meeting that went badly
Third day. A boat repairer proposed moving the landing to the sheltered side of the ridge. The water there is deep enough for small cargo boats. Larger ships would remain offshore, which is what they are doing already. We would need a path, storage sheds and another covered cistern.
The waterfront owners called this abandonment. The repairer asked whether they were offering their own money to clear the old entrance. They were offering the league's future fees, which are a different purse when one examines them closely.
I recorded no decision. My neighbour says that is the most accurate sentence I have written this week.
A workable fourth day
Fourth day. We counted what could be reused: sound beams, roof tiles, baskets, rope and hinges. The broken storehouses contained less treasure than labour already paid for. Children sorted tiles while the older crews moved timber. Nobody called the new landing beautiful.
The agreement is for one season. Fees from the temporary quay will first buy grain, then pay the crews clearing and building. Claims on lost waterfront property remain claims; they do not become a right to the food reserve. We wrote three copies and sent one to each island.
A captain wanted to leave before the winds made his preferred passage harder. The repairer offered him a crew to lighten his cargo if he carried a message to our usual grain seller. There are ways to send for help that look, from the shore, like ordinary business.
Fifth day
We moved the fee board to the new landing. Someone turned it over and painted the water allowance on the back. The queue formed on that side first.