Men's Lives

A man's day is his work, and the rest of his life is arranged around it. What he answers for is the household's standing — all four aspects of the Oathbond at once: his own conduct, his family's name, his trade's standards, his city's law — and everybody he passes on the street can see which one went wrong. He is read constantly, as everyone in the Known World is: his coat, his tools, his team, whether his shop is tidy, whether his children are schooled, how his slave is turned out, whether his accounts are settled at the baker's.

At each station

A laborer: Up at the fourth bell and out before the fifth, and his day is finding work and doing it — whatever the city needs carried, dug, hauled, loaded, or built, at eight Braell a day when he is employed, and the days are offered rather than guaranteed. He eats at a stall at the eighth bell with everybody else holding food in the street, drinks at the same Therplae his father drank at, and is asleep by the fifteenth. What he has instead of standing is a reputation for being reliable, which is the only thing that gets a man picked from a crowd at a gate at dawn.
A journeyman or master: The journeyman works another man's bench for a day wage, saving toward a masterpiece, a shop, and a household, and is watched by his master and his guild to see what he is made of. The master's day is the shop: at the bench by the fifth, open sixth to twelfth, working, teaching, settling what is owed. His name is on what leaves the shop, which is the whole of his standing. His evenings belong to the guild as often as the house, and he is responsible for his apprentices as a father would be.
A merchant or senator: His day is other men. The morning is business — factors' letters weeks old, ships, caravans, contracts, the banking house — and then the men he must see, which is most of the work, because a deal is made between people who know each other and settled afterward on paper. In Shining Reach a senator's afternoons are the Forum and his evenings the salons, where his wife is doing work he could not do himself. He also carries the household's debts, and a man who has overreached has put his wife and children inside the reckoning.
A farmer: Light, weather, and animals, and none of them wait. Up before anybody because the beasts are fed before people are; plowing in Eiveil, sowing through Rwyth, the harvest in Abwynd the whole year is judged by. What he fears is not the Frontier, being inside the ring, but a bad Gechwyn year, a Rhydda swarm past the Naevla strips, and a season when the rain does not come.
A whaler: One voyage a year and a long winter ashore as a cooper, a chandler, or a boat carpenter. See Kravoen. His wife has run the household for eight months and hands back only what she chooses to. Men are Broenn at forty and not thought less of for it.
A man alone: A widower, a bachelor, or a freed man keeps his Personal Oathbond and his trade. What he loses is the household running: nobody provisioning, cooking, mending, or minding his children, so he hires by the day, moves in with kin, remarries, or lives visibly badly. A widower with small children is in real trouble and usually remarries sooner than a widow does. His company is untouched, because a man's company is attached to his work — which is also the weakness: a man who loses his trade loses his friends in the same week, and goes down fast and alone. That is why the Hearth Keeper's Guild and the drinking societies matter more than they look.

What he answers for

The household's debts and its name. His apprentices. Whatever his slave does. His children, with their mother. He owes judgment, the one thing he cannot hand to anybody; being tired does not move the decisions off him, and neither does being wrong. He owes provision, and knowing what the people under him can carry, and not asking for more than there is — the commonest way a decent man fails, and it is not cruelty.

The weight

A man carrying a household carries other people's whole existence, and a man who owns a slave carries one entirely. There is no day off and nobody to hand it to. The philosophy tells him force is weakness and competence compulsory and says nothing about what to do when he is tired, wrong, or frightened. He can be helped to carry it — his wife listens, his slave is obliged to be honest with him, another man who has stood where he stands will hear him out — and none of that moves the weight; it means somebody is standing next to him while he holds it. A man who never lets anybody do that is carrying it alone by choice, and everyone can tell.

Feeling

Emotion is not weakness. Krai is weeping and carries no shame in any city; a man who does not weep when he plainly should is thought to be holding something in, which is worse. Feel it, and do not perform it. What is judged is the man who needed help and did not ask — the one unlearned failure the world does not forgive.

Standing, duty, grievance

He maintains his standing by doing his work well and being seen to, and it is never finished: he turns up, pays what he owes, keeps his tools and his word, appears at his guild, his Thing, his hall, his Forum. Every city asks something of its free men and asks it of its free women too — the Thing in Stormharbor, the guild in Forgegate, the assessment in Clearhold, office or the attempt at it in Shining Reach, the lineage hall in Eldershore, nothing whatever in the Coves. Any free man may find himself in a feud; most go a whole life without declaring one, and every man knows the form. See Feuds and Declaration.

The evening

The Therplae, the guild hall, or his own table. A man who drinks at a Therplae has drunk there twenty years and will be missed if he stops. In Shining Reach and Forgegate a man of standing may belong to a Grycha; in Stormharbor it is somebody's house; in Eldershore his lineage hall; in the Coves whichever tavern his crew drinks in. He goes home and is asleep by the fifteenth, because the fourth comes early.

Being a father

A man acknowledges his children, and his Oathbond requires it of him whether or not he is married to their mother. What fathering looks like depends on what he does: a master's children in the house and shop, a laborer's in the street and at school, a merchant's with their mother and tutors, a farmer's beside him by eight, a whaler's grown a year while he was at sea. He decides the household's shape and she runs it, so daily authority is mostly hers and he is the one a serious matter goes to. Discipline is fair and explained; corporal punishment is kept for serious things, and a man known for more is talked about. Sons follow him into the trade often enough that it is the expectation, and a son who does not is a conversation every family has and most survive.