12: Letter To The World
About six months after Jerod left to travel, father and I got a letter. Right at the top it said, “It's four months since I left...”
Two months to get from Wosh-Tun to Lo-Wil. That's not so bad, really, when you realise most letters just go to a different part of the same town or city. And not many people send letters at all.
Jerod and I were lucky. Father and mother could both read and write, so while he was away travelling, she taught us. When he got back, father picked up where she left off, and by the time mother died we were fluent. We read every book in our house — all the ones passed down from grandfather and his father, and what our father collected while he was travelling. Whenever he got back, Jerod and I would devour father's journals late into the night.
But things change all the time — which is why I'm here, writing this — and one of the things father never saw was people sending letters. Jerod and I grew up thinking everyone in Lo-Wil was weird because they couldn't read, but we soon realised that in fact, we were the freaks. That's how father must have felt when he was out here, because back then hardly anybody read at all.
That's not true any more. Sure, there are still towns you can go where everyone's illiterate, but they're the exception now. Normally there's at least one guy can read, more often than not whoever's in charge of the trading post.
In the cities it's even more common. Lots of people in Wosh-Tun and Newbegin can read and write, and even illiterates can send a letter by visiting a scryb — a guy you pay to write whatever you tell him. Newbegin and Wosh-Tun even have lettermen, who deliver stuff all over the city. It'll cost you, of course. And if you're sending outside the city, it'll cost you even more. That letter Jerod sent us cost him twenty bucks. Twenty! That's half as much as I've got in my bag right now. Father said he shouldn't have wasted his money, but I think he was secretly glad to have something while Jerod was away.
Lo-Wil didn't have a letterman. Why bother, when only a few families can even read and you can walk the entire town in less than ten minutes? Jerod's letter was delivered by a trading caravan that came through twice a year. They'd picked it up in the next town over, and I guess it must have travelled all the way up from Newbegin like that, a town at a time. It's amazing it reached us as quickly as it did. Or at all.
These days, most letters that need to cross the wasteland — relatives who've moved from the towns to a city, or the other way around, and letters between towns — are carried by machine caravans. They're fast, so it costs a lot more. A guy in Sultan Ameer's caravan once told me they could have took Jerod's letter from Wosh-Tun to Lo-Wil in three weeks, but it would have cost him fifty bucks. Probably just as well the caravan wasn't in town that day.
You might think nobody would pay that much just to get a letter delivered faster, but people do. Literacy and wealth seem to go hand in hand in the cities.
And it's not just rich people writing relatives that keeps the caravans' purses full. There are also official letters from city leaders to each other, or to a big town like Waters Meet. I'd wondered about that before, visions of ambassadors crossing the wasteland in a goat caravan to relay messages from one leader to another, and arrange trading.
But I was being too romantic, something Jerod always used to accuse me of. They just send letters to one another, delivered by the machine caravans. The guy I was talking to in Ameer's caravan, a surly-looking man called Serjj (who knew his letters — he was real specific about how to spell his name — and wasn't above a little bribery), showed me a box of letters they were taking from Wosh-Tun to Newbegin.
He said they were all from Artisians, and mostly from the guys who made steam machines. I asked him how he knew, and he showed me one of the seals — a blob of dirty wax with an imprint of a flaming cog in the middle. Around the image it said Wosh-Tun Triumphant.
Serjj said the seal proved it was from one of the Artisians, and showed me how you couldn't open the letter without breaking the seal, so they'd know if someone had sneaked a look along the way. I thought the seal looked easy enough to forge, if you had access to a blacksmith. But Serjj insisted they'd never do such a thing, it would be a betrayal of sacred trust, and anyway, what use would boring political stuff like that be to a caravan?
Yeah, right.
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