When Death Defaulted

Disclaimer

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Their hoarding is anti-competitive, their lust for gold wreaks havoc on exchange rates, their goals are anathema to everything we stand for. Growing up we were taught to be glad of their extinction. It went without saying that extinction was permanent. Now they've returned, and it's partially because of our old childhood friend, so naturally you've come to us for answers.

We should start by saying this is not financial advice. That’s for your protection and ours. We were never the sort of Valley denizens that you may be familiar with, whose top marks earned them the chance to travel, serve as wealth advisors to foreign nobles in the Sunlands and elsewhere.

Oh, we do alright for ourselves. You can see, at the very least, our flesh still attached to our bones and the standard volume of blood taut against our veins, our sons and daughters yet to be sold. After all we grew up here, picked up the truth in the damp air, in the flat filtered water. We are fiscally responsible, conservative, we buy the dip, sit out the gold rush, we dollar-cost average, and rebalance our portfolios with the biannual harvest, for Death’s sobering regard is our constant companion.

But like so many in our generation we’ve been unable to achieve escape velocity, unable to turn our considerable debt into true leverage rather than mere burden. In other words, we are not special. We are simply the closest thing to experts on the life of the young man whose enterprise has caught your eye. that is all.

With disclaimers in place, we speak freely.

Repayment

We were barefoot when the time came to enter Repayment. Some of us as old as fourteen, some as young as nine. We remember acidic soil, the character of that season’s dirt burned into memory through the cuts on our feet. It is nothing strange for a child of Death to go unshod, of course; we were as grounded as anyone else in the Valley, had come to love His reminders of our ultimate fate between our toes. But the stone laid out for us beside the bank was especially punishing, much of it obsidian, winking black and sharp as arrowheads. Various flavors of igneous to remind us that even bedrock will be liquidated one day, reinvested into new forms, its maturity long but far from infinite. Normally shoes would be more than warranted on such a surface. On this occasion the exposure was the point.

Every village says their shardwalk is the worst, their shardcourt the sharpest, but as Ordovicians there is a special strength to our claim. Because everything is the worst in Ordovician. Among the towns that have stood the test of time, ours is the smallest, its growth stagnant for generations now, the runt of the Main Corridor. That feeling, that you are someone’s little brother, that they can shit on you and you will never measure up, is a very Ordovician feeling, our birthright. It’s made tangible in the “gifts” that pour in each year before the big day, unmarked containers of shattered glass and ragged scrap from more productive hubs, trundling in on midnight horses too fine for such foolishness. Too fine by half. And that’s the joke. The only waste you get away with in the Valley is the kind that punches down, irrational glee masked in service of the ongoing cull, the efficient search for the fittest. We could feel the laughter of our neighbors from Permian-Triassic or Late Devonian in the rippling black fur of their thoroughbreds.

Leading up to the ceremony we were nervous. We pretended we were not, and everyone knew we were, and they did their best to break us. After our village Loan Officer, old clumsy Coroner Gutrot, tallied up the accounts from the previous fiscal year (he was always a bit slow on the accounting, winter giving way to spring; a favorite pastime was speculating when he would finally repay his principal) he would announce the youngsters whose Grace was to expire. In that moment we became a cohort, all four dozen of us bound forever.

And in that moment it was open season. “The first payment is the hardest,” adults would say to each other, loudly. “There’s no way to prepare.” The cohorts a year or two ahead were the most obnoxious. They felt obliged to grab our ankles whenever they passed, so that they could turn our heels to the sky (yes, the logistics of this were as awkward as you think) and slap! slap! slap! those upturned soles. “They’re not ready,” they would say to each other gravely. We nearly swooned at how gravely they said it. Some of them were younger than some of us, but they felt unreachably older, on the opposite side of a mass extinction. And it hurt--not to be slapped, not to have our faces rubbed in the mud while they mock-amputated our toes with their bond blades--but to be told that the callouses we’d spent our lives accruing were worthless. Our co-signers had taught us to be proud of our feet, after all (mother-signer Ingrid would prod our dead skin and say “Look! Life and Death united in one body! A sign of the truth!” and we’d fall asleep beaming). We’d learn soon enough what it meant to them from the other side, to still remember Grace while coming to terms with its loss. In their way they were warning us not to take it for granted. “They’re not ready for the responsibility.” Funny, how everyone insisted on talking over our heads, when they had so much they wanted us to hear.

The day itself was unusually cold, a blessing. That’s another thing almost everyone says. Ask anyone what it was like and get the cliched response: cold, dark, damp, like a stereotype of the Valley. There are plenty of explanations for this convergence. It might be the simple fact that we are naked when we walk. But we’ll take our memory at face value.

So: unusually cold, we shivered as we lined up along the east side of the shardcourt. We resisted the urge to fold around our gooseflesh. Much of the village turned out to watch, an even mix of skellies and flesh. All admirably silent. There were just enough witnesses to legitimize the social contract; the rest had to work. Down low the fog was threadbare. Coroner Gutrot stared at us from across the way, patient as a weathered statue, a final test. We could not tell if he was breathing. Did we fidget? Could he hear our irrational heartbeats, smell the slow pour beneath our arms (another reason to remember cold: that icy sweat)? We were ashamed of our excess. We dared not look down. Then he beckoned. And we walked.

We walked tentatively. We dared not look down. Our line immediately became a shambling horde. We walked upright, straight-backed. Until we could not. When we inevitably stumbled we tried to recover gently, balletic. To jerk reflexively, to catch oneself against the ground, could result in an impaled palm. We dared not look down. We had mapped the ruthless topography over weeks of anticipation, noted the protrusions that could castrate us, avoided them now by memory, rusted stalagmites in peripheral. We dared not look down. We knew our ideal paths. But no path would leave us unscathed. We sliced away our bottom layers. First the dead and unfeeling then the bright and living. We left ourselves on the shardcourt. Slick black mirrors beneath us, caked dry behind (another reason to remember cold: blood loss). We dared not look down. Quiet hisses became whimpers. Whimpers grew shamefully loud and we bit our tongues. The fog thickened its weave, conspired to separate us further. By the time the first of us cried out the voices sounded muffled, even to their makers. Our audience was only intermittently visible. We each made our own way.

When the survivors gathered on the other side--47 now, all but one--and the Coroner was ready to begin the next phase, one of us turned around, and went back.

$

It was the one who had arrived first. “Who-” Gutrot’s words caught in his throat. The villagers lining the shardcourt gasped, their stoicism broken for one unprecedented moment, making us jump. Not the last time this young man would surprise his elders. He made his way quickly along the same path he had come, slipping only once on the blood we’d left, so difficult to see against volcanic glass. He limped, missing his little toe and most of the skin of his left heel.

At the halfway point he crouched beside the body we’d left behind. Which was not yet merely a body. We heard the rattling breath of our sickliest peer amidst the refuse. We saw one of us gather the other--and they were similar size, no easy task--and drag him to the west side of the shardcourt.

Yes, it was him, the one you asked about, who would later bring the dragons. It was Lotto who went back for our friend (we hope we can call him that in hindsight, though truly we have no right). They collapsed atop each other before the Coroner. Lotto was eleven.

We did not know where to look, so we looked at the ground. The villagers had watched the stunt--disapprovingly, we were sure, though it can be hard to tell with adults. It had never crossed our minds to help each other across, even though it was not prohibited. And the last person we would have thought to help was the weakling among us. His muscles spasmed at the slightest exertion, so that each craftsman had cut his apprentice rotation short. And he could not compensate with intelligence, as his mind seemed plagued by the same spasms, unable to grasp the fundamentals of our science. The temple’s margin calls became a drain on the village as his default risk climbed. He was scheduled for early Repayment not because he was deemed ready (like Lotto) but because it was time to cut our losses. We had written him off.

The only one of us who spoke was Klaus. “Abject,” he spat. Coroner Gutrot slapped him.

“Who witnesses?” Gutrot proceeded, passing out forms that we signed with the blood we shed, pressing red thumbprints onto dotted lines. “Who witnesses the signing of the promissory note?”

“We do.” The Ordovician spoke as one. The skellies’ jaws clicked.

“Who vouches for the fitness of these creatures to fulfill the standard payment plan, notwithstanding future hardship or other legitimate forbearance, to be determined according to the wisdom of Death and his intermediaries?”

“We do.”

“Who acts as loan servicer?”

“We do.” We wondered what it meant that Lotto signed with hybrid ink, his own undoubtedly mixed with the other’s, in unknowable proportion.

“Do we have the blades?”

One at a time our bond blades were hung around our necks. It was assumed we knew what they were for. As the weakling waited his turn he began to tremble violently.

“Get the surgeon!” Lotto called. “Medical attention!” But the rest of us saw what Lotto did not. It was not the trembling of injury. Or it was, but we were all doing that, and we recognized something beyond it in our sickly peer. It was the trembling of a particular kind of shame, and fear of what must be done to solve the shame, and shame over that fear. Our friend now owed Lotto his life, on top of the standard liabilities that we already expected to bankrupt him. As soon as he received his blade--his hands far steadier than we had seen lift a smith’s hammer or pipette a solution--he plunged it into his heart.

We believe that Lotto was tempted to grieve on the spot, openly and enthusiastically, which would have made everything worse. Fortunately he did not get the chance. The next moment our first payment came due, and brought us all to our knees.

$

We were children. We had no income, no meaningful assets besides ourselves and our potential. But we were in debt. Of course we were; it is the human condition. In debt to our mothers, our society, and ultimately to Death, who suffers us to live, for a time, at a price (that price being determined by the prevailing interest rate).

In truth we were debt, we are debt, collateralized against our youthful bodies. We had been shielded from the full weight of our obligations by our co-signers and the deferment built into our Grace period. We moaned as the shield dissolved. We writhed in the dirt and lost vision but we know how it looked: bruising flowed along our skin in thin lines, our vessels bursting. We shattered slowly. We grew slimmer. Those of us with wombs bled between our thighs for the first time of many (women have always had a higher cost of living, even beyond the Valley; this is no shock, given their ability to issue children, a monthly premium in exchange for higher productive capacity). Our interest had accrued for nine, ten, eleven years and now recapitalized all at once, added to our principal. Our fat, our breath, our muscle was seized to make our Creditor whole (a final reason to remember cold: our very life force diminished, the frigid one’s hand around our hearts).

The bruising faded along with the pain. Our accounts were current. Our excess had been trimmed and we were proud; our hearts beat languorously. What has never faded is the weight of responsibility, a tightness across our skin. We locked eyes with the older cohorts and saw our reflections. We were carried or ushered away for healing. And some of us--we are split on this, Klaus denies it--in recalling this day, in reflecting on memories shaded by continuous cold, when we think of Lotto dragging his friend … we remember warmth.

$

For the next several years, up until he left the village, Lotto made a point of attending the ceremonies of those who came after us. He interrupted. He made the first payment on behalf of anyone at risk of being called in early. “Lesser Coroner Gutrot,” he declared, which was unnecessary, though we enjoyed it. “I intercede on behalf of the child found to be insolvent. Let my credit be hers!” And other such grandiose pronouncements, straight out of some myth about a true parent on a rescue mission. Except this was real, and we were barely old enough to issue anything, let alone a human life.

Needless to say, it was a scandal. Less because of the ceremonies themselves than what would happen before and after. Lotto, the best of us, the one who would become great, descended to the modest vault of our municipal temple and pored over the records (we were envious of his time amidst the cool, unmoving stone, surrounded by the smell of old parchment. Not just anyone could hang out down there. “Well played,” we told him. But now we know it was never about the ambiance. He has other tastes.) He spent time with the runts of the cohorts coming of age, got to know their particular disabilities, saw potential we missed. He predicted, better than old Gutrot himself, which children would and would not make the transition. And after consolidating their burdens with his own, he always discovered some deal, some creative arbitrage or untapped spread in the bond markets, that Gutrot had overlooked. More than enough to pay his debts.

We watched all this unfold, and had mixed feelings. “Why?” we would ask. And he would say, “We’re all in this together.” Which, in a very tangible way, is completely false. We each have our own balance sheet, our personal liabilities and obligations, recorded right there in the bank--the temple--and at the end of the day there is only one person on the hook.

As it turned out, the Abject were watching just as closely, even then.

The Charter

Death was lonely, in the cold vaults of the underplace, which, then as now, held up the surface of the Earth. He needed nothing but hungered for a great deal. From beneath he watched the gods frolicking in Heaven amidst an embarrassment of excess. And he devised a scheme that would make and break the world many times over.

Death gathered the gods on the empty Earth, for the frigid one was not permitted under any circumstances to set foot in Heaven, lest he eternally kill the vibe. And Death proposed that the gods entrust him with their surplus riches, which he would store in his vaults, to be returned upon request.

The gods laughed.

Why would we, asked Rivers, her voice foaming with amusement, in our inherent abundances, entrust anything to your clammy hands?

Why would we, asked Sunshine, his face hot with indignation, consign our wealth to the darkness, only to request your permission for what is rightfully ours?

Why would we, asked Wind in a great gasping guffaw, diminish for even a moment the extravagance of the party we are having upstairs without you?

Perhaps, said Death, you would be interested in a more extravagant party than you can currently fathom.

The gods, being accused of a lack of imagination by the most boring person they knew, laughed louder than before.

For each year that your excess remains in my possession, I will return to you not only what you have entrusted, but also 2% extra.

The gods were quiet.

What is a year? They asked.

As Death explained to his siblings the time-value of their endowments, their interest grew.

Sun brandished a single ray from his infinite quiver. A trial period, he declared, during which you must earn my trust.

The golden bar rested in Death's hands. His hands began to thaw.

-From Death's Covenant with The Valley

Grace

Have you been to the Valley? If so were you scared? That’s the most common reaction among visitors. You’ve been taught what to expect by secondhand storytellers and scholars who themselves don’t know any better. Or worse: taught by your parents.

Apparently we are slavering cannibals perpetually on the verge of starvation. (Really, if we depended so heavily on the occasional wanderer for food, we would domesticate you.) We’ve also gotten pale blind snakes fornicating in the darkness. (That’s actually kind of titillating, which they’d notice if they weren’t so prude.) Some pity us, others hate us, but the fear seems universal. So you come to the Valley jumping at shadows (of which there are many) expecting your lives to be cheap. In truth, this may be the only place in the world where you’d be guaranteed fair market value. Money-loving necromancers who would sell their own mothers for silver. That one’s pretty much true.

During Grace we looked forward to the visiting missionaries from Monopolistic countries to the west. These were few and far between; they typically waited until their biggest holidays, which made them feel guilty and inspired, and even then there was no guarantee that a group would work up the nerve. Basically every two years. So every other year around the spring equinox (we were never clear on the exact dates of their holy days; they had a different calendar that did not track quarters and business cycles, and way too many holy days) we began hovering in and around the bank (loitering, Gutrot would say, gruffly shooing us from underfoot with his cane) like we ourselves were pollen dusting the flowering air, restless and ubiquitous, set to explode (“This season’s got us congested in more ways than one,” mother-signer Ingrid quipped, sneezing. “We might need to move up your Repayment ceremony, thin things out.”) We hoped to eavesdrop on the chatter of the jawbones where they clicked and clacked in wooden cubbies in the comms room. We were foiled by the soundproofing of thick furs on both its inner and outer walls. Which didn’t stop us from imagining the news:

Just inned from Circadia: All Ordovician children report for Repoman training.

Breakthrough from the chemists in Late Devonian: finally turned shit into gold. ("But gold is already shit," one of us said, dancing a silver coin along her fingers. "Disregard previous message." We laughed.)

My true parents have sent for me! Johannes tried. This was an awkward thing to want and we weren’t sure he’d picked up on that yet. We ignored him.

Then finally Gutrot would emerge, accompanied by a brief crescendo of bone music, the percussion of many teeth against many teeth that somehow reminded us of rain before it was swallowed again by the closing door. Whoever had been lucky enough to be apprenticed teller boy would emerge with him, fingers ink-stained blue from all the transcribing, rolled up parchment under one arm. Well? Well? We mobbed them both (we now know how annoying this was; we see the kids doing it today). And the Coroner sighed and said, “Worshipers of Yawheh approaching the southwestern pass.”

$

We went out to meet them on the road. A day-and-a-half’s brisk journey by foot. We left quickly before our cosigners could stop us. Not all of us could get away, but enough. (“For a few hours it felt like a ghost town,” father-signer Jurgen sighed wistfully, after we’d returned. “I love ghost towns.”)

We wore either all white or all black, hooded diaphanous robes that we knew would make us seem larger than we were, our edges indistinct. We practiced being deathly quiet, which required perfect knowledge of the landscape, to not send a single loose pebble skittering down an embankment, to avoid the squelch of mud or wet clay. There is a way to keep the sounds of one’s presence close, like gathering the hem of a dress, so that they do not drift and echo, a kind of aural hygiene we take for granted in the Valley. So we heard them long before we saw them. Their sad attempts to whisper floated to us over the final mile of rolling moss farms.

Then there they were. All men, five or six monks (or were they imams? Rabbis? We’ve never bothered to learn the nuances between the Monopolistic faiths) with a few donkeys pulling their belongings. At the mouth of the pass where it meets the Main Corridor they paused, their squeaky wagon grinding to a halt. For a moment we thought they saw us. We scattered like roaches in sudden light, vanishing into the slopes that climbed upward on either side of the road, peeking at our prey from behind convenient nooks and boulders. But no. Even if we’d stood still before them across flat ground they would have missed us in the fog and diffuse light, normal to us but unbearably dim to them, their torches only blinding them further. They stopped because they attached meaning to the meaningless border crossing. As if one more step would change everything.

“Well … here we are,” said the youngest monk, shaking atop his donkey. He swallowed though there was nothing in his mouth. And they all began to pray, “Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil …” over and over, “Though I walk through the Valley …”

“TUUUURN BAAAAAACCKKK!”

It would have been Monika who went first, casting her voice so that it bounced and lilted over their heads, seemingly sourceless. She was the best at that. We curbed giggles as the donkeys snorted. One or two torches fell from startled hands. The young talkative monk nearly fell off his saddle. That’s when we knew this was going to be fun.

“TURN BAAAAACK!”

“YOUR SOOOUUUUL IS IN DANGER!”

“THE DOOR TO HELL YAWNS OPEN AHEEEEEAAAAD!”

We interwove our warnings, echoing one another if we liked what someone else came up with. The air above the road filled with our voices, trapped by the sloping rock walls. It was the closest thing to a choir you’ll ever hear in the Valley.

“THIS IS YOUR GREAT GRANDMOTHERRRRRRR! TURN BAAAAAAAAAAAACK!”

That’s always a good one. They attach so much meaning to biological relations. The younger monk began to weep.

“More torches! Light the spares!”

This came from the slightly older monk. He sat straight-backed and proud on his steed, speckles of gray in his hair, the obvious leader. We did not recognize his voice so we knew that he had been respectably quiet in the pass, keeping his own council while the younger one’s nervous whispers carried on and on. Despite his poise he was foolish in the way that all beyond the Valley are foolish, no offense. More torches and lanterns came alive and encased them in a bubble of blind light, captured and refracted by the fog, like flies caught in amber.

Invisible smiles split our faces where we hid. We rushed forward.

The Mint

At first, Sun requested his gold every day. No sooner had Death placed that first ray of light flush with the corner of the vault than he heard the sweltering celestial voice, muffled through the crust of the Earth:

Brother Death! Return to me what is rightfully mine!

And Death dutifully carried the gold back to the surface, where Sun inspected it carefully for any diminishment, biting and weighing and measuring with scales brought from Heaven for just this purpose. When satisfied that the ray was still 93 million miles long, Sun handed it back to Death for deposit, only to withdraw yet again mere hours later. Death was reduced to an errand boy, unable to put the next phase of his scheme into motion.

The 12th time that Sun redeposited the same ray, Death chipped off a circular piece of the vault's pale stone. He carved his own face onto one side, a sunburst on the other, and preemptively handed it to Sun.

You offer me rubbish? If you have finally misplaced what I entrusted, do not expect a gift to cool my rage.

Your ray of light is perfectly preserved in my unchanging, impregnable vault, where, I might add, there is infinite capacity for more. Take this disk as a symbol of our agreement. On this side, what is owed. On this side, who is obligated. You may collect these in Heaven as a reflection of my own meticulous records below. Each redeemable for the amount of gold specified on the back.

Interesting. Interesting.

In theory, nothing had changed, for the rules of the scheme remained the same, depending entirely on the gods' trust in Death's word, and the tokens, having no intrinsic value, could hardly serve as collateral. Yet Sun, being a literal-minded god for whom seeing is believing, embraced the disc system. He liked to flip that first disc into the air, or send it spinning across the Heavenly banquet table with a flick of his fiery finger. He decided it needed company and so deposited more gold, ray after ray of yellow light until a heap of silver coins collected in the sky. He became so enthusiastic that he would deposit the entirety of the light he produced every other shift, descending to the mouth of the vault to shine directly into his account for 12 hours at a time.

In his absence Sun hung that original disc at his post above the Earth, cratered and chipped from all the handling, but glowing with the residue of his touch. His remaining coins he scattered across the arched firmament. From beneath he would point to this shimmering display and declare himself a fiscally responsible deity. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

The other gods followed suit, for a spirit of competition had developed in Heaven over who could amass the most silver. In this way the rhythm of spending and saving became the rhythm of all Nature, from day and night to high and low tide, as the gods alternated between parties and much-needed rest. Their ragers were less extreme and the come-downs were blunted. So the sabbath smoothed their consumption, and it was good.

Death, for his part, was grateful that Sun never withdrew the previous night's gold during his visits. He was relieved that Sun never peeked around the corner of the entrance with his big bright eye. Death kept him chatting at all costs. Otherwise, Sun would've seen the empty vault.

-From Death's Covenant with The Valley