Holding VII, Remnar.
Who told us. Twenty-two accounts, none at first hand. Recorded Year 30 to Year 283. Agreement here is unusually good, for reasons the entry gives. Compiled by Ovin Keluth Slowlight, Year 157. Extended by four keepers since.
Our keepers noticed early that their sources could say very little about the government of Remnar and a great deal about its breakfasts. This entry collects the second kind, because a people is remembered more reliably in what they did every day than in what they did once.
Agreement here is the strongest in Holding VII. Twenty-two unrelated lines of telling agree on domestic matters to a degree they never approach on cities or rulers or events, which the keepers put down to these things being told to children by people who were doing them at the time.
Ground and air
Remnar was a Material world, so its people flew. Every account takes that for granted and none explains it, which tells you something on its own: flying was not remarkable to them.
Nine accounts describe houses entered from above as a matter of course, with the ground-level door kept for goods, for guests, and for the very old.
Four describe streets that were not paved, because they were not much walked on.
Two describe the tiered building of the First City as a consequence of this rather than a style: a level set back from the one below leaves the one below its sky.
Our own residential blocks are not built that way. The governance record shows the matter raised twice and set aside both times, on the fortress’s structural tolerances.
Food
A pale grain, cooked twice, eaten at the first meal and often the last. Fourteen accounts. Eleven of them call it sour. Six insist it is not sour when properly made and that sourness is what happens when it is made badly, which is the sort of argument that only survives among people who ate a thing daily.
Fish, in eight accounts, described as ordinary rather than as a treat.
Something harvested from ropes in the sea, fruit or vegetable, in five accounts. It appears nowhere else in this holding and we have never matched it to anything in this sphere.
Salt, mentioned in nineteen accounts. In eleven it comes up in connection with hospitality, and in four it is the thing set out first when someone arrives.
We adopted that last practice ourselves. The governance record for Year 69 enters it as a deliberate borrowing and not an inheritance. When salt is set out at a table in this fortress, it is a reconstruction, and everyone involved knew that when they started doing it.
The shape of a day
The working day broke in the middle for a rest of some hours. Twelve accounts. Six connect it to heat.
Evening was the social part of the day and morning the private one. Seven accounts.
People sang while working. Not performance: singing alone, at nobody, while doing something else. Ten accounts.
Three separate lines preserve fragments of what appears to be the same working song, and the three fragments do not overlap. So we hold three pieces of one song with no way to know how much is missing between them. They are recorded next to each other with the gaps marked and not filled.
What is not here
No account in this entry describes a law, a court, a tax, a soldier, or a border.
The keepers record that absence and decline to interpret it. The absence of a thing from this entry is evidence about the telling, not about Remnar.