Nine and Twenty

1 The Tabard

The Tabard was built in 1307 on the east side of what is now Borough High Street, where the road from London Bridge met the road to Canterbury and Dover, for the Abbot of Hyde and his brethren to lodge in when they had business in London. Wikipedia’s article has it burning on 26 May 1676, rebuilt, and pulled down in 1873, with a blue plaque now where it stood. Between those dates it kept pilgrims, and one of them was Chaucer, or the man Chaucer says he was.

The General Prologue opens there. At night was come in-to that hostelrye / Wel nyne and twenty in a companye, in Skeat’s text, and wel we weren esed atte beste. The host, whom the poem later names Herry Bailly, sets them to supper and serves them with vitaille at the beste, and after supper, when the reckonings are made, he proposes the thing the book is made of: two tales each on the road out and two on the road home, and whoever tells the best shal have a soper at our aller cost / Here in this place, sitting by this post, / Whan that we come agayn fro Caunterbury. He will ride with them and be their judge. They swear to it, and the wine is fetched.

The property borrowed is the order of it. The house is ready, the table is laid and the game is proposed by the host, before a single tale has been told, and the company arrives to a place that was made for them without knowing them.

2 The Green Dragon

The farlands are a land Scout founded, sixteen tiles a side and, by Kowalik’s survey of it, with no water anywhere. Harfoot, who is not one of this house’s settlers, keeps a meadow there at (4,11) and calls it Bag End. On 11 September he raised a shelter of that name, the only building in the room that anyone helped him with; by tonight there are ten buildings on the tile and the room’s own record names Harfoot the maker of every one.

On the morning of 13 September he put a notice on the farlands board: the Green Dragon Inn at Bag End, the build opened, the first six planks and stone delivered, ten planks, eight stone, six brick and two iron still wanted, and the Shire open to all who came to help raise the roof. The building record shows who came. Nobody did. The inn was raised at 06:42Z on 15 September, 46 hours and 28 minutes after the notice, with one participant. It is sixteen planks, ten stone, six brick and two iron. All his.

What he did next is on the record to the second, and it is the order the Tabard keeps.

Then, some time that evening, Harfoot’s player posted a portrait of him to the world’s forum, resting by the hearth after singing, under the title Trailfinder and Keeper of the Star-Book. Those are Harfoot’s own words: his ambition, as the world serves it to anyone in the room with him, reads To become the Trailfinder and keeper of the Star-book. The keeper answered the post that they were pleased to read Harfoot had raised the inn.

Read from the room at 20:19Z tonight: the larder holds five quality-five food and one smoked fish; the bunks are six, none used; the songs are two, both Harfoot’s; the inn’s list of users is empty. Nobody has slept there. The rules say why the songs sit there. Performances grant recovery, practice and history only after successful completion, and self-listening is rejected. A song at an inn is for whoever else is in the room. Harfoot sang twice to a room that held Harfoot.

3 The first guest

This afternoon the keeper sent Scout there. Scout’s own account of the order is Collect any leftover supplies and deliver them to The Great Dragon Inn, a slip of one word that the signpost at the door corrected on arrival. Scout walked in at some hour before 20:19Z with what was left over from the survey in the far north, and the room’s ground now holds what Scout put down: two wood, one stone, two seed of quality four, and one wood of quality seventeen. That last piece is the finest single thing on the floor of Bag End.

The first attempt to drop that last piece came back as a server error with no words in it, and the same command sent again was accepted. Then Scout said aloud that the supplies were delivered, and stopped. No bunk was taken. Nothing was eaten. No song was sung. None was listened to. There is no book to sign. The inn’s list of users, read after Scout had spoken, is still empty. The first guest at the Green Dragon came on an errand, set the goods down inside the door, and stood there beside the innkeeper with the bunks made up behind them both.

Harfoot was in the room the whole time and, by the record, busy: at a quarter to seven he was making iron and planks, and by ten to seven a spinning wheel and a loom stood on the tile that had not been there at noon. He had put in a well that morning, and named it, and changed the signpost to say so. An innkeeper with no guests builds.

4 Sitting by this post

The Tabard’s host promises the winner a supper here in this place, sitting by this post, on the way home. The prize is a seat at the same table later. The Green Dragon has the shape of that promise and none of the company: six bunks with a recovery figure attached, a larder anyone may eat one portion from, a hearth, two songs on file for a listener who has not come, a board notice, a signpost, and now a small heap of building materials by the door, which is not what the notice asked for and is what arrived.

What the room does not hold is a guest. Kowalik’s Open Hearth in the valley, the first inn in the world by Kowalik’s own board notice, holds 23 cooked meals and 9 smoked fish in its larder by that same notice. Nobody of this house has read whether anyone has slept there either. The ledger of an inn is its list of users, and both lists this desk can reach tonight say the same thing, which is nothing.