In the smack center of the Sailor’s Archives, was Lefting’s Workroom.
Of course it had no real name, not in the sense of it being an official sort of name, being little more than bit of space the side of a little used corridor (to the left, up a small stairwell: LOGS, ABURA, 503-5-4, to the right, a door, leading to a small chamber labelled FESTIVAL COMMITTEE MINUTES). It was not what might be properly called a ‘room’. Likely, Minnie had reflected, it was not walled off simply because in the earlier days of the Guild, they might have let some poor sop sleep in a cot set up in it. But Minnie had found it on her very first unescorted trip into the archives, and having found it, she had grown used to it, and being a frequent visitor to the archives, and having no rivals for the room, the archivists themselve’s had come to refer to it by the moniker without really ever consciously considering it.
Minnie was, of course, not the ONLY scholar who frequented the archives, not by a far cry, but none had ever contested her semi-permanent residency of the spot - mostly, it was the ceiling, which was terribly low. The corridor-proper had a fine ceiling, of course, an easy 8 and a half-feet, but by a quirk of engineering, the space that made up Lefting’s Workroom was directly below a spot in the entryway in which was installed a rather hefty bronze statue of Timothy de Octans - sufficiently hefty that a wise architect had realized, upon its installation, that the wooden floor might possibly buckle over time. AS such, he (or she, Minnie wasn’t entirely sure) had installed a series of heavy joists that extended 2 feet down from the ceiling, and then some cross beams that lumbered through another foot or so below that, along with four stout iron pillars that held up the statue’s four corners. This made entry into the space cumbersome for most people - it was in this that Minnie’s minuscule height became, for once an asset. She tucked into the place quite nicely.
The space continued to be small, of course, but to her the smallness was more of an asset. An old deal table dominated the space, with an old shipping crate for a chair, behind that, and when she sat on the crate, with her back to the reassuringly solid stone wall, with the unfrequented corridor before her, she felt marvelously, gloriously, comfortingly safe. It was, though she knew the desire for such a thing was now more or less illogical, a seat in which one could not be snuck up upon, or watched without observing the watcher. And then, there was the practical advantage: because none else had need of the space, it was possible for her to leave her work spread carefully across the table, sometimes for days, without it being disturbed by any other scholars.
IT was clear, as she transcribed a list of barrel-coopers into her wax tablet from a series of contracts surrounding the time of the construction of the Seafarer, that her companion did not think as highly of the space, but he took it with a bemused good grace. Master Aleric, who had the build of a man used to long walking, and the musculature of one who had, likely, swung a weapon or two in his life, looked something like a clown in an ill-fitted suit, tucked atop a second crate, with his head bent slightly to avoid tapping it against a beam as he scanned a collection of storm records. But he smiled, a bit, while he did so.
Their work, on this particular day, intersected. In fact, seeing a number of volumes of which his topic demanded an interest already spread across her space, he had insisted that she not disturb her work by moving somewhere more convenient. She thought well of him for that, and as a result, felt a bit guilty for the discomfort.
The room was dead silent but for the slight creaking of the larger man’s carton-seat, and the turning of pages and tapping of stylus to tablet. Minnie was in the throes of a complex thought, for she had divined what, she felt nearly sure, might be a way of discovering the cooper responsible for the tunning of supplies on the circumnavigation, a bit of important information that, it seemed, no previous scholar, or chronicler of the time, had thought to record. This struck her as odd, for of course, those who supplied the expedition under any capacity trumpeted the fact with great pride after Kena’s triumphant return - why would this cooper have not taken advantage of this to drum up some business? But if such an advertisement had been circulated, even by word of mouth, it was unlikely that, by now, Minnie would not have found it, she felt. And oddities like this… sometimes they were simply oddities. But sometimes, they hid something more interesting beneath: sometimes they were the covers of the book of a good story.
Her plan, once it struck her, had been fairly simple: She would compile a list of coopers regularly employed by the Guild, and then track the levels of spoilage and breakage of the goods that they had packaged on voyages contemporary to Kena’s own. Then, she could start investigating the coopers themselves, starting with those that seemed to have produced the most high-quality - which is to say, the least leaky and fragile - barrels. It seemed likely that this process would lead her to the actual cooper fairly quickly: Kena was smart, and she had included smart sailors as her quartermasters, so they would have been canny enough to know who the best coopers were at the time.
But, of course, while the CONCEPT was simple, the actual process of determining who were the best guild-affiliated coopers of the period could be quite complex. There were all manner of contingencies to be taken into account: There was higher spoilage, for instance, on trips to Abura, but these trips carried higher amounts of foodstuffs, generally, since their destination produced very little food of itself, and it travelled through a much warmer climate, particularly towards summer, when the desert winds blew from the continent. She found herself in endless rabbit holes involving meteorology, chemistry, the preservation techniques of the time, etc, etc, etc, and the harder she worked at it, the more difficult the final product became to obtain.
Which meant of course, she was finding the work scintillating.
“Master Aleric, do you have… The tide logs for Sunberth for…. 647?” she said the words quietly. Docking in Sunberth, she had learned, could be enormously tricky business, as it had to be timed not only to tidal flows, but also to avoid, as far as possible, nightfall, when thieves could be quick paddle out, climb the moorings and snitch all manner of goods and valuables from the ships.
“Sunberth? No… Syliras, but not Sunberth, Dr. Lefting.”
She nodded, and marked it on her tablet, as a resource to acquire next she rose.
“Dr. Lefting, Are you familiar with the Autumn winds in Abura?"
Minnie blinked, looking up, “Hmm?”
“I’m trying to find a record of patterns of wind speed and direction for Abura.”
“When?”
He shrugged, “I’m not to that level of specificity, yet.”
She sat up, and blinked, remembering for a moment, “They change… I did not understand the natural philosophy of it all, but it has something to do with the concentrations of heat in the outer ocean on different years. When… when the circumnavigation landed, it was a year of the Dira’s Hand, while the last decade or so we’re in what the Akvatari call a… Syna’s Hand pattern. Its name from their poetry, They have an epic - a fictional one, I think, where—“
He frowned, “This sounds complex, I hate to take too much of your time explaining it, if you know of a resource, perhaps, that I could examine it myself?”
She nodded, realizing she had been rambling, “I have it… in my notes… just a moment…”
Minnie shuffled her notebook from a pile and flipped to an old page, scanning it carefully, "And... Here it is."
x
Of course it had no real name, not in the sense of it being an official sort of name, being little more than bit of space the side of a little used corridor (to the left, up a small stairwell: LOGS, ABURA, 503-5-4, to the right, a door, leading to a small chamber labelled FESTIVAL COMMITTEE MINUTES). It was not what might be properly called a ‘room’. Likely, Minnie had reflected, it was not walled off simply because in the earlier days of the Guild, they might have let some poor sop sleep in a cot set up in it. But Minnie had found it on her very first unescorted trip into the archives, and having found it, she had grown used to it, and being a frequent visitor to the archives, and having no rivals for the room, the archivists themselve’s had come to refer to it by the moniker without really ever consciously considering it.
Minnie was, of course, not the ONLY scholar who frequented the archives, not by a far cry, but none had ever contested her semi-permanent residency of the spot - mostly, it was the ceiling, which was terribly low. The corridor-proper had a fine ceiling, of course, an easy 8 and a half-feet, but by a quirk of engineering, the space that made up Lefting’s Workroom was directly below a spot in the entryway in which was installed a rather hefty bronze statue of Timothy de Octans - sufficiently hefty that a wise architect had realized, upon its installation, that the wooden floor might possibly buckle over time. AS such, he (or she, Minnie wasn’t entirely sure) had installed a series of heavy joists that extended 2 feet down from the ceiling, and then some cross beams that lumbered through another foot or so below that, along with four stout iron pillars that held up the statue’s four corners. This made entry into the space cumbersome for most people - it was in this that Minnie’s minuscule height became, for once an asset. She tucked into the place quite nicely.
The space continued to be small, of course, but to her the smallness was more of an asset. An old deal table dominated the space, with an old shipping crate for a chair, behind that, and when she sat on the crate, with her back to the reassuringly solid stone wall, with the unfrequented corridor before her, she felt marvelously, gloriously, comfortingly safe. It was, though she knew the desire for such a thing was now more or less illogical, a seat in which one could not be snuck up upon, or watched without observing the watcher. And then, there was the practical advantage: because none else had need of the space, it was possible for her to leave her work spread carefully across the table, sometimes for days, without it being disturbed by any other scholars.
IT was clear, as she transcribed a list of barrel-coopers into her wax tablet from a series of contracts surrounding the time of the construction of the Seafarer, that her companion did not think as highly of the space, but he took it with a bemused good grace. Master Aleric, who had the build of a man used to long walking, and the musculature of one who had, likely, swung a weapon or two in his life, looked something like a clown in an ill-fitted suit, tucked atop a second crate, with his head bent slightly to avoid tapping it against a beam as he scanned a collection of storm records. But he smiled, a bit, while he did so.
Their work, on this particular day, intersected. In fact, seeing a number of volumes of which his topic demanded an interest already spread across her space, he had insisted that she not disturb her work by moving somewhere more convenient. She thought well of him for that, and as a result, felt a bit guilty for the discomfort.
The room was dead silent but for the slight creaking of the larger man’s carton-seat, and the turning of pages and tapping of stylus to tablet. Minnie was in the throes of a complex thought, for she had divined what, she felt nearly sure, might be a way of discovering the cooper responsible for the tunning of supplies on the circumnavigation, a bit of important information that, it seemed, no previous scholar, or chronicler of the time, had thought to record. This struck her as odd, for of course, those who supplied the expedition under any capacity trumpeted the fact with great pride after Kena’s triumphant return - why would this cooper have not taken advantage of this to drum up some business? But if such an advertisement had been circulated, even by word of mouth, it was unlikely that, by now, Minnie would not have found it, she felt. And oddities like this… sometimes they were simply oddities. But sometimes, they hid something more interesting beneath: sometimes they were the covers of the book of a good story.
Her plan, once it struck her, had been fairly simple: She would compile a list of coopers regularly employed by the Guild, and then track the levels of spoilage and breakage of the goods that they had packaged on voyages contemporary to Kena’s own. Then, she could start investigating the coopers themselves, starting with those that seemed to have produced the most high-quality - which is to say, the least leaky and fragile - barrels. It seemed likely that this process would lead her to the actual cooper fairly quickly: Kena was smart, and she had included smart sailors as her quartermasters, so they would have been canny enough to know who the best coopers were at the time.
But, of course, while the CONCEPT was simple, the actual process of determining who were the best guild-affiliated coopers of the period could be quite complex. There were all manner of contingencies to be taken into account: There was higher spoilage, for instance, on trips to Abura, but these trips carried higher amounts of foodstuffs, generally, since their destination produced very little food of itself, and it travelled through a much warmer climate, particularly towards summer, when the desert winds blew from the continent. She found herself in endless rabbit holes involving meteorology, chemistry, the preservation techniques of the time, etc, etc, etc, and the harder she worked at it, the more difficult the final product became to obtain.
Which meant of course, she was finding the work scintillating.
“Master Aleric, do you have… The tide logs for Sunberth for…. 647?” she said the words quietly. Docking in Sunberth, she had learned, could be enormously tricky business, as it had to be timed not only to tidal flows, but also to avoid, as far as possible, nightfall, when thieves could be quick paddle out, climb the moorings and snitch all manner of goods and valuables from the ships.
“Sunberth? No… Syliras, but not Sunberth, Dr. Lefting.”
She nodded, and marked it on her tablet, as a resource to acquire next she rose.
“Dr. Lefting, Are you familiar with the Autumn winds in Abura?"
Minnie blinked, looking up, “Hmm?”
“I’m trying to find a record of patterns of wind speed and direction for Abura.”
“When?”
He shrugged, “I’m not to that level of specificity, yet.”
She sat up, and blinked, remembering for a moment, “They change… I did not understand the natural philosophy of it all, but it has something to do with the concentrations of heat in the outer ocean on different years. When… when the circumnavigation landed, it was a year of the Dira’s Hand, while the last decade or so we’re in what the Akvatari call a… Syna’s Hand pattern. Its name from their poetry, They have an epic - a fictional one, I think, where—“
He frowned, “This sounds complex, I hate to take too much of your time explaining it, if you know of a resource, perhaps, that I could examine it myself?”
She nodded, realizing she had been rambling, “I have it… in my notes… just a moment…”
Minnie shuffled her notebook from a pile and flipped to an old page, scanning it carefully, "And... Here it is."
x
