The King's highway runs east from a factory bench to a high stony ridge, and every country it crosses is named for what it is. Each country holds one stewardship of an ordinary life: its hours, its body, its money, its voice. Each is a section of the book, complete in itself.
The Steward's Progress is complete in draft at eighty chapters, and the sections are being prepared for press in order. Each volume opens with a short prologue that tells you how the traveller came to that country and who walks beside him, so no section is the wrong door to come in by.
What follows is the route, not the journey. The waymarks under each country are chapter titles: signposts only. What happens at them stays in the book.
A letter sealed with three sheaves of wheat is delivered to a factory hand's door, weighted with a stone. Getting up from the bench turns out to be the hardest chapter of the whole road. At the gatehouse a man signs a four-line deed and rises under a new name.
In the orientation hall stands a workbench bearing ten objects — an hourglass, a leather book, a mirror, three cords, a purse, and five more. The new steward learns that the deed he signed covers the whole man, and that each tool on the bench is a country he will have to cross.
A frantic man straps a brass measuring device to Steward's wrist, and a town keeps two clocks that do not agree — one iron and quick, one stone and slow. The country of time: the empty hour, the long bread eaten unhurried, and the one day in seven that is kept.
A worn traveller arrives at a quiet hospice, carrying a body he has treated as a vehicle and a mind he has treated as a machine. A craftsman-physician reads the maker's mark where the City saw only a mechanism. “The body is not a vehicle. The body is you.”
At the edge of a city where everyone dresses alike stands a hall of seven mirrors, and a plain old woman with very clear eyes asks the question that opens it. The country of character — what a man is when nobody is paying, watching, or applauding, and a near-miss at a public fountain.
Three cords run from every steward's chest toward the people given into his keeping, and Steward's are frayed. A town built around letters, lamplit windows seen from the dark road, a friend with three stories, a graveyard of unsent letters, and the nearest cord of all, left open.
The country every traveller dreads: the Country of Coin. The plain where a wall is built the size of a year, the slough where debt holds men by thin chains, the tollhouse, the hill where the first portion is laid down, the tower where grains double on a board, and the bank where the whole road is reckoned.
Everything the world now means by purpose — passion, gifting, usefulness, a reason for being — is walked through four gates and reformed in a planted garden. On the way: a briar-choked field that must be worked first, and a soft grove where a lighter load is offered for a price.
A broad tradesman with scarred hands keeps a workshop in the Country of Imagination, where half-finished things wait for the next hand. Steward is given a knife and a block of walnut. Cynicism, the apex predator of imagination, stands leaning in the doorway.
A village of many doors, every door different, every house keeping a different lamp — comfort, judgment, hospitality, song, plain faithful keeping. The country of the gifts, where the visible and the hidden burn with the same oil and not one of them is ranked above another.
Two towns in the Country of the Voice: one where a great brass horn makes every word louder and every crowd angrier, and one so quiet you can hear a pen move. In the second, an old woman keeps a dark cloth notebook of names by her window, and a third door most travellers never open.
The road turns north into high stony country, and the companions can come no further. On the ridge, everything a steward has carried is read back to him, and the fourth word of the deed, the one he has never understood, is finally opened. Then the road does the last thing anyone expects of it.
Plus an Epilogue — The Bench, and the Last Word — addressed to the reader
Read the opening →
Section VII · The Long Account · Chapter Two
The first stone, and the engine.
Read the opening pages now, or leave your address and be told when the next country goes to press.
