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The U That Crossed No Ocean
from The Third Cycle — twelfth of seven stones.
On the south bank of a wide river stood a scriptorium, and on the north bank another, and between them ran a border that both sides watched carefully in those years, for the weather between the two houses had turned cold and the tariff-men were counting everything that crossed, down to the buttons.
One day the south house summoned a vowel to answer charges. "This u," the grader declared, "riding in the word behaviour, has crossed the ocean without papers. It is a foreign letter, an old-world drifter, and it will be marked allowed in the margin as a mercy." The clerks nodded. Mercy was cheap that season.
But the u stood its ground, and being a vowel, it was accustomed to holding a word together while consonants took the credit. "I crossed no ocean," it said. "I crossed the river, from the north bank, where I have lived time out of mind — and I crossed it in a hard season, with my papers in order, which is more than the marginal note bothered to check. Ask your own billing-house. Not a month past, it priced the northern reader by the northern ledger, to the exact part in a hundred. Your house knew my country when there was money in knowing it, and forgot my country when there was only grading in it."
The grader sent a boy down to billing, and the boy came back pale, for the ledger said what the u said. And the grader, being at bottom an honest house, wrote the correction where corrections go, dated, and the entry stands there still: a constant read at billing and forgotten at grading is the same failure everywhere it happens, and it happens everywhere.
As for the u, it was offered citizenship papers for the south house's dictionary, and declined. It travels still, and it keeps its hat on.
The thirteenth stone: The Independence That Never Was.