Saint Merrow's Fort

Far down the southern run, beyond Mere-of-Spears and its fort of black stone, and short of Grey Salt Haven at the end of the ladder, lies Saint Merrow's Fort. Like the other stations on that route it was never wanted for itself. It is a rock with a sheltered water beside it, the sort of place that held a tank, a jetty, a store and a burying ground, and whose whole worth lay in the days of sailing between it and the next link. Its name is one of three the southern trade quotes when it wants to explain how a realm can hold a route without holding a country, and it was founded in the usual British way, as a walled haven on a coast rather than as anything reaching inland.

The southern trade says a place may be lost twice, and Saint Merrow's is the case everyone quotes. It was lost first by men, in the ordinary way, when its charter lapsed and the last hull sailed. It was lost the second time to whatever had been there before the charter and had never gone. That second loss is what the realm calls the Ashfall Reclaim, usually dated to 4547. Stone, patrol and prayer were all tried, together and in turn, and none of them held the ground.

What masters report of the place since then is not what a landsman imagines. They do not describe a ruin. They speak of a station that looks kept: walls standing, the water clean, nothing burnt and nothing broken, and the whole of it plainly arranged by an order that is not British and does not answer to a British hail. Men who have stood off it at slack water say the tank still holds and that nobody aboard would draw from it without leave, though whose leave is the question nobody can answer. Some say a boat put in and came back with nothing to report; others say the boat did not go in, and that the master who tells the story most often has never been south of Mere-of-Spears.

At home the case is taught as a warning, and quoted constantly against the Second Keeping of White Reed. One side holds that Saint Merrow's proves force and faith both fail unless the land itself consents to a second founding; the other answers that the land can be brought to terms if older terms are restored. Whether such a founding has since been made there, on what conditions, and whether a hull now waters at Saint Merrow's by right or by sufferance, are things the southern trade argues over and the Admiralty does not publish. The name stays on the ladder all the same, between the fort that was taken into use and the haven where relief never came.