The Cartographers

In the spring the Council sent two cartographers into the Kell valley and told them to come back with a map. Their names were Aro and Wen. They had trained in the same room under the same teacher, and neither of them had yet made a map that anyone had built anything from.

The valley is six days long. They walked it together as far as the fork in the river, and there they argued, and after that they walked it alone.

The argument was about the hill.

There was a hill on the eastern side, or there was not.

From the ridge road it looked like a hill. It had a summit and two shoulders and it threw a shadow, and Aro stood on the ridge road for most of an afternoon and drew it four times.

From the riverbed it looked like nothing at all — like flat ground with a cloud over it, and the cloud sat over the valley most mornings and moved off by noon.

I do not know whether Aro ever went down into the bed to look. His field book does not say. It is a very tidy field book.

Wen went down into the riverbed and stayed nine days.

A riverbed is a poor place to be. There is no view from it and nothing happens in it. But the walls of a riverbed are cut in bands, and the bands are the water writing down where it has been, and if you can read them you know what the river has done before and will therefore do again.

Wen read them. She wrote what she measured, and how, and on which day, and — three times — that she was not sure.

Aro came back first. His map had the hill on it, drawn in fine brown hatching, with a spot height and a name — Kellrise — that he had settled on somewhere on the walk home, because a hill on a map with no name looks like a mistake.

Wen came back eleven days later. Her map had no hill. In its place she had drawn a broad shallow pan of ground, and beside it, in a small hand, everything she had measured and every place she was unsure of.

The Council put the two maps side by side on the long table.

It is worth saying plainly what the Council wanted, because they were not wicked and not one of them lied.

They wanted to put the new town on the eastern side. A town wants high ground. Aro's map had high ground on it, exactly where the town was wanted, and Wen's did not.

So the question stopped being is there a hill and became which of these is the better map.

And Aro's was the better map. That is the difficult part, and there is no way around it.

It was clean where hers was crowded. It was certain where hers said uncertain, see note. Every line on it had been drawn once and drawn well. It was the map you would frame.

Hers was the map you would take into a valley.

Nobody at that table was choosing between the truth and a lie. They were choosing between two pieces of work, on the merits, and the merit they could all see was draughtsmanship.

The printer made four hundred copies.

Kellrise appeared in the index of the national atlas the following year, between Kellmoor and Kelso. It went onto the road maps, and then onto the tax survey, because the tax survey was drawn from the road maps.

After that it was not a claim anybody had to defend. It was simply where it was.

They built the town.

For eleven years it was a good town. That has to be said too, or the story is being unfair to it. There was a school in it and a market on Thursdays and a bridge that a man called Sella built too strong, out of pride, and which is still standing.

Wen was given other valleys. She was neither punished nor promoted. She kept a copy of her map, and as far as I can tell she never once mentioned it.

In the twelfth spring the river came up over the flat pan of ground where the hill was not.

It went through the town at the height of a grown man's chest and it took nine days to go down — which is the same number of days Wen spent in the riverbed, though nobody made anything of that at the time, and I am not sure anything should be made of it now.

Wen's map was in the archive the whole time.

Nobody had destroyed it. Nobody had hidden it. It was catalogued, and shelved, and a clerk could have put a hand on it inside a minute.

It is only that in twelve years nobody went and asked.

Aro was not punished, because he had not done anything anybody could name.

Wen was not thanked, because being right eleven years early is not a thing a Council keeps a form for.

They painted a red line along the walls at the height the water had reached, so that it could not be forgotten, and everybody agreed this was wise.

Then they rebuilt the town on the eastern side, on the same ground, from the same map.