Dragons Made Me Do It: Bonus Episode #15: “Runner of Pern” (1998)

Lleu: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but the only one by us.

Lleu: And I’m Lleu, and today, we are talking about “Runner of Pern.” It’s a short story — maybe. “Runner of Pern” was originally published in the first of Robert Silverberg’s Legends anthologies, which are subtitled “Short Novels by Masters of Modern Fantasy.” So, you could make a case — I’m not committed to that in this case, but we’re gonna come back to this question —

Lleu: Maybe. You could make a case that “Runner of Pern” is a novel. It’s a very short and boring novel, if so; I’m not interested in bothering to defend that position today.

Tequila Mockingbird: It was then republished along with some stories that we’ve already discussed, “The Smallest Dragonboy” and “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” in the last Pern short stories collection, A Gift of Dragons. The only new story in that one is “Ever the Twain,” and we will get there in a couple of episodes.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, for now, we’re here: “Runner of Pern” follows Tenna, who is a Runner, and this is a new Craft that has apparently been there the whole time, and she just never mentioned it before — much like dolphins — of people who carry messages on foot, running from place to place across Pern. They do this on some kind of specific road structure that they call the “trace,” which is planted with a specific type of ground cover that is good to run on and is supposed to be exclusively for their use. And we’ll get to the Thread-related complications in a moment, but as Tenna is running, and she’s making her jump — or her run — from apprentice to journeywoman, so she is very eager to be doing these solo runs and gaining that experience and that professional credit, except that she is then run off of the trace by somebody on a horse, who sends her into a stickleback bush, possibly severely injuring her, although it turns out she receives medical attention and she’s okay. So when she arrives at Fort Hold, she is full of indignation, and she finds out that the culprit is Haligon, one of the feckless younger sons of Lord Groghe. She decides that she is going to get her revenge on him, which she does by showing up at the Gather and punching him in the face, except — oops! — that wasn’t actually Haligon, that was his twin brother. So she ends up instead flirting with Haligon, who, possibly just because she’s hot, realizes the error of his ways, apologizes, and buys her fancy leather to make a new pair of shoes as a reparation, as well as agreeing that he’s not going to ride his horse on the trace anymore and leave it for Runners. And we end on a note of flirtation and possibility: they haven’t committed to being in any kind of relationship, because Tenna really wants to stay a Runner, but she said, “Hey, I will run through Fort in the future, and you can look me up when I do.” And that’s it.

Lleu: I really feel like I was given to understand that there was an actual plot to this story.

Lleu: From descriptions of it online. It sounded like “And Tenna does something significant.” She doesn’t. She doesn’t even really want to bother Lord Groghe with this information, and is kind of embarrassed that everyone’s like, “We need to report this to Lord Groghe,” and has to be convinced that it’s not just about her; it’s ’cause this has also happened to other people, and they don’t want to set the precedent, because it is dangerous and interferes with their Craft responsibilities and privileges. And Tenna’s like, “I guess so. Fine.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Ultimately, that is the direction that our energy ended up. We were much more interested in Running as a Craft and what this story tells us about finance on Pern and daily life on Pern than we were actually interested in Tenna or Haligon or the quote-unquote “plot” of this text.

Lleu: The conclusion is mildly cute. I appreciate that she doesn’t immediately be like, “Yeah, maybe I will go settle down with Haligon.” It’s nice to have a woman who’s allowed to continue on her path towards fulfilling her own, independent professional aspirations, unlike every other woman in the series. So that’s a nice plus side.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, I did like that. Because I was a little worried — we got some foreshadowing early, because she’s like, “I don’t want to settle down.” Her older sister was only a Runner for a few years and then ended up having kids and stopping her career, and she’s like, “I don’t want to do that; I want to keep running.” And I was like, “Uh-oh, is that gonna be a twist? Is that gonna be, ‘Never mind’?” But it wasn’t, which was nice.

Tequila Mockingbird: I would put this ahead of “The Smallest Dragonboy,” because it’s slightly less boring.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think ahead of “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” too.

Lleu: Wait, you would put “The Girl Who Heard Dragons” ahead of “The Smallest Dragonboy”? Fascinating.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, just because “The Smallest Dragonboy” is so boring to me. It’s a nothing little story.

Lleu: “The Smallest Dragonboy just has some of the dragon color sexuality politics that make me unhinged, so I would put that ahead of “The Girl Who Heard Dragons,” for sure.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mm. Yeah, I’m mostly going with: “Bullying is bad. Okay, I’m bored. Let's move on.”

Tequila Mockingbird: The lows are not as low, but the highs are not as high as any of the stories in Chronicles of Pern: First Fall.

Lleu: Yeah, first of all, I would definitely put this ahead of “The Ford of Red Hanrahan,” because Tenna is a much more pleasant character —

Lleu: — whereas Red Hanrahan is just there and also becoming a feudal lord. And everyone’s like, “This is fine! You’re not becoming a feudal landlord at all.” But he is. I probably also would put it ahead of “The Survey: P.E.R.N.^c,” just because “The Survey: P.E.R.N.^c” has so much missed potential.

Lleu: There’s things in it that are intriguing, but not the things that she seems to have thought were intriguing, and it’s not enough.

Lleu: — it’s just a cohesive, complete story where the resolution happens halfway through, and then it’s all just falling action for the second half. Which could be interesting but is not, particularly, in this case.

Tequila Mockingbird: I think this is actually coming in pretty high on our short story list, mostly through failing to do anything wrong, rather than doing anything right.

Lleu: Yeah, although there is some inconsistency in terms of gender politics that we will discuss.

Lleu: But. Runners as a Craft. In fairness to McCaffrey, there has actually been mention of “runners” previously. However, because “runner beasts” are also a thing, until this story, it was possible to read the references to “runners” as message delivery system in previous stories as, “Oh, I just had a runner from Ruatha Hold” in the sense of “someone came in on a runner beast from a Ruatha Hold,” was how I would have interpreted it prior to this story.[1] Now that we have this story, I’m like, okay, maybe she did mean that to be “a literal running human being came from Ruatha Hold to convey this information.”

Tequila Mockingbird: She lampshades it in this story, where there’s a moment where Haligon is talking about a “runner,” meaning a “runner beast,” and then is like, “Oh, not you, haha.” So, I think she knows that it’s confusing and perhaps is intentionally leaning into that. My frustration is that I would honestly have been so sold on the idea of Running as a Craft that sprang up in the Long Interval.

Tequila Mockingbird: “Hey, Thread’s not falling, so we can walk places again! This is useful. Also, we don’t have as many dragons, so we can’t send urgent messages on dragons.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It seems really plausible there, and to tell me that it started during the First Pass… When we were last in the First Pass, you spent an entire short story telling me how difficult and arduous it was to find two days in a row that you could travel.

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay, so, in the middle of all of that, thile that was happening, they were like, “You know what? Let’s set up a network of paths across the entire continent and build shelters Threadfall-distance apart and plant a bunch of ground cover that Thread won’t eat — it’ll be fine — that will cover them all. On purpose, for fun, when we still have radio technology.”

Lleu: It’s the moss thing that really, I think, kills it, especially because, first of all, we know dragons don’t get everything; second of all, we extremely know that during the First Pass, they were fully letting Thread fall unfought over most of the continent. They were really focusing on just protecting the agricultural areas immediately around Fort Hold and Boll and the other outlying settlements. Nowhere else. It’s not like the dragons are like, “Oh yeah, we’re gonna fly and make sure that no Thread hits the moss-covered trace here. That does not align with any portrayal of Thread-fighting at any other point in the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: And even when we get to the Second Pass, they’re making this whole big deal out of, “Thank god, we managed to save some trees, but we don’t think we can keep paper production going, because we don’t think we can protect trees as we roll up into the Second Pass.” That’s a big part of what they’re worrying about in Dragonseye. So you can’t save trees, but moss is fine?

Tequila Mockingbird: Now, I will acknowledge that moss is botanically weird, and it doesn’t have roots. So you could perhaps make an argument that, because of that, it is less susceptible to Thread, ’cause it’s not underground in the same way.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, yes, Lleu; you’re sort of destroying my argument there. Fair enough. So it’s possible that it would have to fall directly on the moss, rather than burrowing up from below?

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe it’s actually been astroturf the whole time, and they just don’t know what astroturf is, so it’s lost knowledge, and they’re like, “It’s this weird, springy moss.”

Lleu: They do say it’s this weird springy moss, and when Tenna is making her report at the Runner station at Fort Hold, they ask her specifically, did it fuck up the moss? And she’s like, “No, it seemed perfectly fine.” So, actually, I could be convinced that the Runner traces are astroturf, or some other non-organic “moss,” quote-unquote.

Tequila Mockingbird: Unfortunately, they do say that trace-moss doesn’t do as well in the heat down south, so it grows a different color in Boll.

Tequila Mockingbird: That could mean that they have a different color of astroturf.

Lleu: Yeah, that they’re calling it “moss,” but it’s actually some artificial material that they may not know is artificial.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think that I actually think astroturf would last 2,000-something years.

Tequila Mockingbird: But maybe it’s space future astroturf, and it’s just better.

Lleu: The story is set, also, we should note, in the middle of Dragonflight, and, specifically, it’s set in the spring of the first year of the Ninth Pass, but early spring, so after they have seen the Red Star in the Eye Rock, but before the first Threadfall at Nerat. Which I think is extremely funny, because it means that while this book is going on, Lessa and F’lar are fully losing their minds about incoming Threadfall. F’nor and company are ten Turns in the past, also losing their minds for different reasons. And Tenna’s just like, “Well, I love running! Running’s great! I want to do that forever.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And having social chit-chat about, like, “Do you think Thread’s gonna come back?” “No.”

Lleu: It’s great. Love that for everyone. It did add to my enjoyment of the story, I will say, once I processed that timeline fact and was like, “Wait a minute, that’s hilarious.” But also, that means we’re in the period where other books in the series have shown us maximum sexism — in particular, where Masterharper appeared to be showing us a rapid decline in the status of women over the preceding 50 years-ish. Runners, that doesn’t seem to have affected particularly. There’s certainly still the usual obsession with heterosexual reproduction, Blood and Bloodlines, and breeding in a way that’s really uncomfortable. It’s really ramped up here. But no one has any problem, apparently, with Tenna being a Runner. Her mother was a Runner until she got married and started having kids, and then she retired from actually physically running messages and took over the management of the Runner Station that Tenna grew up at. So, the Runners as a Craft do not appear to have any issues with women holding rank, with women operating Craft facilities, with women participating to the fullest extent in the Craft — actually running messages back and forth across the continent. We know one of Tenna’s aunts never married and continued to run back and forth across the continent for her whole life. It’s an interesting contrast, in some ways, from what we saw in Masterharper, which was very much a picture of Pern in the latter half of the Interval as a society in rapid decline, but the Runners seem to be doing great. They’re having a cosmopolitan, good old time.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, are we supposed to believe that Fax was great with female Runners coming through?

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe the Runner Crafthall was just like, “Oh, don’t send any female Runners to those Holds for now!” Some of the, ironically, lack of sexism links back up to the weird eugenics energy, because it feels like it’s a very family-based Craft. I don’t think you just become a Runner, because they're all obsessed with this idea — “Oh, you have to have super-long legs, and be super lean and really physically good at running.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And to a certain extent, like, I believe that those traits are likely to be passed on genetically. But they get super into, “Oh, you have, like, a Runner’s ankles, like your mother,” and all of this.

Lleu: Tenna explicitly tells people that her family, like, selectively bred specifically for running capability, and it’s like, well, are you a human being, or are you a horse?

Lleu: Yeah. So that’s not great! The family thing is also a really striking contrast with all of the other Crafts, where it does seem like, to some extent, being related to a Craft member means you’re more likely to go into that Craft, but not deterministically in the way that we see here.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would say what we see from other Crafts seems, to my experience, to match more of what we saw in low-technology historical periods in Earth history.

Lleu: Yeah. And, in theory, if you can convince someone else who knows how to do this thing that you have no family connection to, to take you on and teach you, you could do that. Whereas we get no indication of anyone who’s not “genetically,” quote-unquote, a Runner participating in running as a Craft, and every time Tenna meets someone, they’re immediately like, “Oh, are you related to” her parents, and she’s like, “Yup.” And they’re like, “Yeah, you look like them.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It does seem like a very close-knit Craft, which I guess makes sense, if they’re all running around, bumping into each other, maybe more so than in, say, a Weavercraft Hall, where you would know the other Weavers in your Crafthall but maybe not the ones on the other side of Pern as well.

Lleu: Right, unless maybe you know some people who were studying at the main Weavercraft Hall if you did a stint there.

Lleu: The flip side of that is that Runners are not itinerant in the way that the Traders are, or in the way that many real-world itinerant communities are, but, in some ways, they perhaps resemble communities like traveling showpeople in the UK who were sort of professional, but also with a family thing, but traveling for professional reasons rather than traveling as a lifestyle.[2]

Lleu: It could have put Tenna in a really interesting position, and Runners in general in a really interesting position, as people who do have this kind of cosmopolitan exposure to Pern as a planet, rather than to their local Hold or their local Crafthall. But she doesn’t do a ton with that, in part because Tenna is so new at this, right? So, Tenna is attempting to do her first “cross,” which is running back and forth across the length of the Northern Continent.

Tequila Mockingbird: This also brings me back to one of my other questions about Running as a craft, which is, who is paying for all of these messages? Because their target seems to be people who don’t have enough money to send a message via a human messenger riding on a runner beast, and that’s specifically called out as, like, “Oh, well, that’s for rich people and Lord Holders and stuff.” But somebody who does want to communicate with someone on the other side of Pern —

Lleu: Rather, drum messages are unreliable, and also drum messages are semi-public and regulated.

Lleu: When you want to send a drum message, you have to ask the Master of your Crafthall, or the Lord of your Hold, or the Holder of your Hold, for permission to use the drumheights.

Tequila Mockingbird: Urgent messages, politically or professionally important ones, might go via drums. But this is not that. So, we’re looking for people who don’t have enough money to hire someone to ride a horse. It’s not important enough or it’s going too far for a drum.

Lleu: I think the answer to who is sending these letters — it’s business communication. We know that Tenna goes down to Fort Sea Hold to pick up the shipping manifests for supplies that are coming in for the Gather that are gonna be then transported up to the Hold later, I guess so that they know what storage facilities they need to prepare, presumably.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and that it came through safely, right? What was lost at sea, what wasn’t.

Lleu: Yes. And also, then, people who are middle-status Holders. So not Groghe and not members of Groghe’s immediate family, but Groghe’s cousin who has a smallhold on the border with Ruatha, who maybe fostered at Ruatha Hold or fostered at Boll — someone who’s close enough to have had an out-of-Hold fosterage, which, also, we know that that was —

Lleu: We know the only reason that Menolly didn’t have that, for example, is because she was good at music, and Petiron wanted to teach her specially, and also because she was a youngest daughter, so her family wasn’t particularly bothered about setting one up for her if the Harper wanted to teach her himself. But it seems like for people of that kind of middle Hold status, that that’s pretty common. And, for that matter, we know Nerilka fostered with Suriana somewhere else. So I think there’s a reasonably wide array of people that I can imagine messages being passed back and forth regularly, between business communications — someone — “How much cloth do you want us to ship?”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, I think that’s fair, but I also feel like that doesn’t, do my mind, match what we’ve previously been told about the social life on Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I do think there’s a degree to which, yeah, we’ve mostly been learning about dragonriders, and dragonriders don’t care, because they have a teleporting dragon. So, the degree to which the average non-dragonrider is socially connected or professionally connected with people not in their community is maybe a little up in the air. Menolly was probably unusually isolated.

Tequila Mockingbird:So Nerilka is probably the closest we have to an “average” person.

Lleu: No, I think the closest we have to an average person is Piemur, who had a foster-mother, but it seems like he had a foster-mother in the same community he grew up in.

Lleu: Which is why I’m emphasizing, it’s not the Pernese working class, it’s the lower aristocracy, who seem to be pretty numerous on Pern.

Lleu: — estates that make them any money, so they’re all eligible to sit in Parliament, but they’re all also poor. It seems like that’s sort of the situation that we’re in demographically. But it’s also hard to know, because, on the one hand, we’re told that fosterage is really common and a lot of the aristocratic characters that we see did either foster somewhere else or, like Groghe, spend a term of training in their adolescence or young adulthood in another Hold. But we don’t see that many actual laborers, so we don’t entirely know what their social lives look like.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I guess my question, thinking then about what you said about poor — do these people have enough money to support an entire Craft?

Tequila Mockingbird: I mean, I guess they must. We are being told by the text that they do. That just seems a little surprising to me.

Lleu: Yeah. I think it’s a tension-slash-potentially contradiction within the series between what we’re told — that fosterage is common, and we get a bunch of examples of inter-Hold fosterage — and also what we’re told, which is that most people spend their whole lives in one community and never leave it. At some point, those two things can’t both be true —

Lleu: — so my suggestion that maybe 20% of the population is technically within the class that is expected socially to foster their children elsewhere —

Lleu: — is my attempt to reconcile those two positions, but I don’t think that necessarily aligns with what we’re shown at any point in the text.

Tequila Mockingbird: In order to support the amount of maintenance the trace would take, you’d have to be making money. ’Cause this is not just paying wages to the Runners — this is not just paying for the upkeep of the Running Stations and the food, and the medical care, and the baths, and the firewood for the hot water —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and all of this stuff that Tenna tells us about. But it’s also, functionally, full-time landscaping for a significant chunk of the planet. That’s not cheap —

Tequila Mockingbird: — in terms of labor. So, are maybe a third of all of the Runners at all times not actually running but just maintaining the trace?

Lleu: We do know that Tenna’s mother is not the only person who is part of the Runner Craft but not actually actively running messages, so maybe yes, is the answer.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause they say, like, “Oh, you have to go through and pick all the rocks out every so often,” and I will say — I don’t live rurally, but I have family members who do —

Tequila Mockingbird: — you can spend your entire life, every single day of it, picking rocks up out of a field. It will produce more rocks.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I guess it’s not a huge amount of land; it’s two feet wide. But if it covers the entire continent and a path to every single Hold?

Tequila Mockingbird: That’s a lot of rocks to pick up while Thread is falling on you.

Lleu: Well, that brings us to one of the big questions that we both were pondering as we read this, which is the question of money on Pern. So here’s what we know about money. All money that we see comes from the Crafts. Per the News from Bree site, there are references to Smithcraft marks, Harpercraft marks, and Farmercraft marks.There is a vague implication that some marks are better than others — Piemur is particularly excited that he was able to sell the instruments in Dragonsinger for Smithcraft marks, instead of Harpercraft marks, one assumes.

Lleu: And News from Bree observes that if this is the currency system, that there are multiple issuing authorities, and they’re all these Crafts, but also marks are all interchangeable, that that’s not realistic — this system would become unstable, and either it would centralize naturally, and one set of marks would come to be the sole currency, or eventually the marks would stop being of equivalent value. I, at least, was thinking some more about this, and I’ll talk about that in a second. The other thing that came to our attention here is that Tenna does not carry marks with her; what she carries is a credit chit that is valued at four marks that she has earned through her running labor. And she expects to be able to not, as one might expect, exchange that for marks at the Fort Hold Runner Station when she wants to attend the Fort Hold Gather, or when she’s strong-armed into attending the Ford Hold Gather, but rather that she expects to be able to bargain using the chit itself as currency. So the questions that we had were: how realistic are those things?

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, what that made me wonder is, does this mean that the Runner Craft doesn’t generate marks? That maybe every Craft on Pern doesn’t generate their own marks, but only some of them do, and the rest of them just issue letters of credit.

Tequila Mockingbird: Or chits of credit that can function as marks. Or does this suggest that, yeah, the Runner Crafthall has marks and just doesn’t send them with her because of your thought about maybe a risk of banditry or a risk of loss, where the letter of credit maybe needs to be handed over by a member of the Runnercraft guild in order to be worthwhile.

Lleu: Yeah. So, as I was reading through the story, I was like, “I have historical reference points for this, I think.” I cannot, for the life of me, find — I swear it was in something I read over the last few years,[4] but — a reference to the use of letters of credit as, among other things, a solution to the problem of banditry and also to the problem of employees jumping ship or leaving the caravan on long journeys, if they are dissatisfied with their working conditions, because you bring them along with you, and then you pay them, but you don’t have any of the money that they’re getting paid with until you arrive at your destination and cash the letter of credit, and that also means that bandits cannot steal the money that you are traveling with, ’cause you’re not traveling with any money. You’re traveling with goods, maybe, which is why you hired people to protect your goods, but at least you’re not traveling with a bunch of gold. I cannot find where that reference was, so I would not swear that that was a real historical motivation for this. However, it’s true that carrying large quantities of money is pretty difficult, especially when the large quantities of money are mainly gold and silver, which are not light. Gold is very heavy. And if you’re traveling with, say, 42,000 dinars’ worth of gold, that’s a lot of weight!

Lleu: One thing that happened in multiple places in the Middle Ages was the development of checks, essentially. So, one of the two points of reference that I had for this is François-Xavier Fauvelle’s The Golden Rhinoceros, which is a really interesting collection of mini-essays on different moments in medieval African history across the whole continent, and one the objects that he has a little chapter on is a check for 42,000 dinars that is reported by a medieval Persian geographer. He claims that he saw it in one place, in Aoudaghost, which is now in Mauritania, and actually it was probably in Sijilmasa, which is now in Morocco, but, anyway, the point is that someone was apparently traveling with a 42,000 dinars of gold check, and Fauvelle offers some speculations on what it might have been for — probably wasn’t to purchase goods; it was probably as a reimbursement for a down payment on some property or some other large capital investment. But in any case, transporting 42,000 dinars of gold across the Sahara is —

Lleu: That’s a lot of gold to carry. It’s not gonna happen. So, traveling with a check that you then cash on arrival is a lot easier. And this requires that there be established financial institutions that can guarantee that check. Another place where this occurred is late medieval Venice, where the modern European banking system developed, and, again, it developed as a convenience thing: it’s a lot easier to conduct business between someone else who has the same bank as you by just going to your banker and being like, “Yeah, copy those numbers over from the ledger for my account into the ledger for their account instead.” And that way no one has to deal with actually getting out 100 gold coins and transporting them to a different person and counting them all out for that process. It just smooths the logistics of things when you can deal with money solely as numbers. And, in fact, for much of world history coins had pretty narrow use — and this is coming in part from David Graeber’s Debt, which has some issues, but broadly, I think, the history is useful, and this aligns with both, intuitively, with the logistics of dealing with money, and also with historical situations in a variety of places. But, historically, credit- and debt-based economies were much more common than cash-based economies. Money tends to circulate (a) in specific contexts, when you’re interacting with institutions, and also (b) in times of uncertainty, when you cannot rely on someone’s goodwill to grant them credit or that they will grant you credit.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because in a lot of ways, also, credit was what bound a community together.

Tequila Mockingbird: You know that the person is good for it, because you live next to each other, and you’ve grown up next to each other, and of course they’re good for it —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because you gave them that chicken, and they’re gonna wash your clothes, and you gave him the grain, and he’s gonna grind it and give you back the flour, and if somebody fucks up somewhere along that, you all have to live together, and so there’s a social pressure that keeps credit-based economies, and a credit-based economy that induces a social pressure. It kind of works both ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think that definitely seems to map onto Pern, in that both there is an institutional pressure from the Crafthall, which has an obligation and a vested interest in making sure that people in their Craft are treating people fairly and are being treated fairly, and also, if you’re in this small community and you want to be able to trust each other when Thread is falling from the sky, you have to buy in by treating each other reasonably all the way along.

Lleu: Yeah. The other sort of point of comparison, in particular with regards to the problem of currencies that are being issued by multiple people but are all notionally interchangeable, and the instability of that as a system is one of the primary functions of coinage in the Byzantine Empire. So, all coinage was issued in Constantinople, and all coinage was expected to come back to Constantinople. The main things coins were used for were paying civil servants and soldiers and paying taxes, and taxes were required to be paid in coins for large portions of Byzantine history. So, the state issues coins, the state pays its many civil servants — some of whom just have sort of random titles and get a state pension, because they paid for it — also, the state pays its soldiers. Those coins travel out to the provinces, and then those coins come back to Constantinople as tax money. On Pern, taxes in the form of tithes seem to basically entirely be conveyed in goods, but the purpose of centralizing gold in Constantinople seems to me like it aligns with the function of marks on Pern, in that, say, the Harpercraft Hall issues marks —

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s Harpers will then use the marks to buy things from Smithcraft vendors, or Holders, or, etc.

Lleu: And then those marks are used to pay for the Harper Hall to come and do Harper things, to teach people, to play music…

Tequila Mockingbird: An IOU on that labor, inasmuch as they are currency by fiat.

Lleu: Right. And then, also, this interchangeability of marks — presumably, notionally, marks are all equivalent because if you pay a Smith with a Harpercraft mark the Smith could also go redeem that from the Harpercraft Hall. In practice, it also makes sense that, as we see, certain marks would be, sort of, more valuable than others, right? One assumes that Harpercraft marks are particularly valuable around Fort Hold, where there are a ton of unemployed Harpers, who are either apprentices or journeymen who are taking a break and being at the Hall. Whereas further afield, if you’re in Benden Hold, probably a Harpercraft mark isn’t getting you as much, because there are only so many Harpers in the Benden Hold area. Smiths are everywhere.

Tequila Mockingbird: But there’s also the question of, how frequently do you need something made by a Smith versus something made by a Healer versus something made by a Weaver? You gotta wear clothes all the time.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, presumably, you need Weavercraft Hall marks once every year. Maybe twice a year if you’re getting something for warm weather and something for cold weather, or a nice outfit for a Gather, where you might only need a Smithcraft mark every year or two, but when you do, you might need more than one, because you’re buying a plow or a larger piece of agricultural equipment, or something more expensive compared to two yards of cloth.

Lleu: Yeah. Part of it also comes down to, people aren’t using currency all the time.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so there might be some arbitrage opportunities between those two marks. There might be places where people might collect marks of one kind, or trade marks by their type rather than their value — “I’ll give you this Smith Hall half mark. In exchange for that Harper Hall half mark.” “No, I won’t. I want this one.” But we don’t really see that.

Lleu: Yeah. The takeaway, overall, is, I don’t think this is an entirely unreasonable system, and based on the way the economy on Pern functions and the relatively limited ways that coinage is actually circulating, I think that — in contrast to a contemporary fiat currency-based economy, right? No one’s calculating Fort Hold’s GDP in marks. That’s not what currency is used for. Currency is used mainly for small-scale transactions between individuals at Gathers, and also sometimes for particular bulk purchases. Lord Groghe might need some marks to buy a lot of fruit from Igen Hold, but he doesn’t need marks for basic subsistence food produce, because that’s all being tithed to Fort Hold as goods from the outlying Holds.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would imagine that on a larger scale, Crafthalls and Holds probably exchange goods without bothering with marks — to your point about individual transactions versus group ones. If, say, the Weavercraft Hall supplies x yards of cloth to Fort Hold every year, and in exchange gets x quantities of goods in terms of food that sustains the Weavercraft Hall, that’s probably negotiated every six months; rather than being a matter of marks —

Tequila Mockingbird: — it’s, “Oh, okay; you sent this much cloth; some of it was fine-grade, some of it was regular grade; you got this much food; you’re negotiating for what kind of food this year, as opposed to last year.” Or, “Oh, this is a particularly good year for millet, blah blah blah.” But you’re probably not worrying about marks —

Tequila Mockingbird: — whereas when Groghe’s daughter goes out to a Gather and wants to get a dress, that’s when she has to have marks on hand.

Lleu: Yeah. The other question that this brings up is also just how centralized are Crafts? This is something that we were puzzling over in terms of, we know that, for example, that at least at the Harpercraft Hall, contracts for Harpers all go through the Masterharper and are typically assigned at the Masterharper’s discretion, or, at the very least, the Masterharper will offer journeymen a selection of options, but there’s some curation involved, rather than individual Harpers being — typically, anyway — contracted individually.

Tequila Mockingbird: But once there is that connection, it does seem like it’s up to the individual Harper to negotiate the deal.

Tequila Mockingbird: So you’re told by the Masterharper you’re going to Benden Hold, but the specifics of your compensation are up to you, and that is going to depend on your skills or your negotiating ability.

Lleu: Mm — I don’t know about that, because Robinton appears to be, and Pederin appears to be, looking at finished contracts, right? Half-Circle Sea Hold has sent a proposed contract to the Harper Hall for what they expect from a Harper and what they are offering in terms of room and board. So I think the situation that we see in Moreta, where —

Lleu: Yeah, that is what I think. Because I’m also thinking about what we see with Iantine in the Second Pass —

Lleu: — and obviously the Craft system isn’t established, but clearly the groundwork has already been laid, even before they decide to move to vocational education.

Lleu: Once Iantine is at Bitra Hold and is negotiating follow-up contracts — that he does directly. But the initial contract is sent —

Lleu: — and is put up on the contract board, and no one else is interested, and Iantine reads it over and is like, “Yeah, it looks fine to me,” and signs it.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, we know that the Harpers are that centralized. But we don’t technically know whether the Farmercraft Hall is.

Lleu: Yeah. It seems unlikely that some of the other Crafts are, but also, if the Crafts are all issuing their own currency, then they must be, to some extent, exercising Craft-internal central planning.

Tequila Mockingbird: This also did make me wonder how Craft journeymen are compensated, because part of Tenna’s complaint to Haligon is three days of lost wages.

Lleu: Yeah — I suggested that this story indicates, in some ways, that the Crafts are functioning like a union, rather than a guild, necessarily, and that there is a Runner collective agreement, effectively, that determines what Tenna’s salary as a, like, Apprentice Level 3 is —

Lleu: — and that because she’s had to take this unpaid vacation, because apparently they don’t have sick days in their collective agreement, she has lost three days of salaried labor at whatever the Apprentice Level 3 salary is.

Tequila Mockingbird: That suggests that she’s getting paid a set amount from the Runnercraft Hall —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and then that is presumably getting disbursed from whatever individual collections of money the Runnercraft Hall is bringing in by running all those messages, but it’s aggregated. It doesn’t seem like it’s, “Oh, you ran this many messages, so you got this much money”; it seems more like “You were running all year, so this is the set wage for the year.”

Lleu: It’s hard to know. The Harpers seem to be on individual contracts, for the most part, although I suspect that probably the Hall maintains certain baseline standards for what’s expected in a Harper contract — like, they might have a default contract.

Lleu: But is that true for the Farmercraft Hall? I suspect maybe not. I feel like the Farmers might be more likely to be operating like the Runners, and there’s a collective agreement, and if you are a journeyman Farmer, then that entitles you to a certain salary that you might be paid above and beyond depending on your specific Hold — maybe there’s cost-of-living adjustments for — I don’t know; where it would be the most expensive Hold —

Lleu: — Nerat, maybe. And, likewise, maybe there’s different gradations of it. Tenna seems to be making quantifiable progress towards journeyman rank, which also made me think that maybe there’s a collective agreement thing, and she’s progressing towards Apprentice Level 3, and then eventually towards Journeyman 1, and then Journeyman 2, 3.

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause we do get the quote, when Tuero is negotiating in Moreta, that Alessan is going to give him “top marks” for a journeyman, which could mean that there’s some kind of salary band.

Lleu: Right — so maybe he’s saying, “Well, technically you’re only a Journeyman 2, but I’ll pay you Journeyman 4 marks, because I want you specifically.”

Tequila Mockingbird: But it is also curious, because I think it’s gonna depend, Craft to Craft, on whether you are in an individual contract with a Hold, or whether your craft is just placing you somewhere or you are just working out of your craft hall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I don’t know that all of the Weavercraft workers are in a Hold, compared to just — and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes — how much is this just, you’re weaving at home, and then your cloth is part of the Weavercraft system versus you’re in a Weavercraft Hall somewhere versus you’re the official Weavercraft journeyman at Telgar Hold. I think there’s probably a range of different options, and presumably a range of different pay structures for those options.

Tequila Mockingbird: And Running might be a little unusual in that they’re all on the same pay structure, ’cause you can’t really be, like, the designated Runner for a Hold. It’s not how it works.

Lleu: Yeah. We should emphasize — all of this is wild speculation based on attempting to assemble the scraps into something that is moderately economically coherent. Neither of us is an economist. Economics is fake anyway, for the most part, so…

Tequila Mockingbird: But Lleu, how is that different from everything else we’ve been saying in this podcast?

Lleu: Well, some of it has more textual support than this! This is us extrapolating from Tennis saying “three days of lost wages” to be like, “Sure, yeah, they’re probably unionized.”

Lleu: So, there’s a bunch of other Crafts in this. Tanner Ligand, our good friend from Dragonsinger and then again from All the Weyrs of Pern for some reason, is back.

Lleu: In McCaffrey’s defense, the Gather that she attends is at Fort Hold, so it is somewhat more plausible that Tanner Ligand would be there. I will say I kind of thought he was younger and that possibly eight years before Dragonsinger, he would not have been a journeyman already, but it’s not specified.

Tequila Mockingbird: Menolly’s a teenager; she doesn’t know how old anybody is.

Lleu: It just seems like he’s got that close-in-age rapport with Sebell, who we know is young.

Lleu: So — anyway. There’s also, among other things, a reference to the “Tailor stall,” with a capital T, which is a little alarming, ’cause we have had mentions of tailors in the past, but not in a way that suggested they were an independent Craft. But that did also remind me that there’s a reference to the Baker journeyman in Dragonsinger. I don’t really know what to do with that, because I feel like there’s probably not a Bakercraft Hall.

Tequila Mockingbird: Maybe they’re trying to make it a thing. Maybe they’re trying to start one up.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I’m just fundamentally a little bit rattled by the idea of pre-made clothing in this kind of economy and this kind of setup. And, to be fair, we’ve already outsourced a lot of the labor that would traditionally be happening in a medieval home in terms of cloth production.

Tequila Mockingbird: But it’s just a little odd, because, at least in European history, you don’t really get pre-made clothing until the Industrial Revolution.

Tequila Mockingbird: We’re not there yet on Pern, I don’t think — or I wouldn’t have thought.

Tequila Mockingbird: We haven’t had the implication that you go to a Gather and buy an outfit, in the past. We’ve definitely had a lot of people borrowing outfits from other people for a Gather.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, and also Moreta and Menolly. So there’s been this, oh, you go to a Hold or a Headwoman at a Crafthall or a Weyr, and she has some clothing put by that you can use, but I always felt the implication for that was hand-me-downs, or things that people didn’t want anymore —

Tequila Mockingbird: — rather than some kind of pre-made clothing business that you could patronize.

Lleu: Right. In some ways, I think the example that we give here is maybe the best instance of that, because Tenna borrows a dress actually from the Harpers.

Lleu: Yeah, Silvina’s here. Silvina pulls it out of a closet for her — and they have to make some adjustments to it, because it’s not actually quite the right size. They have to pin some things, she has to get some padding for her bra, and she’s like, “Wow…”

Lleu: She’s very oblique — she’s like, “Well, the dress fit better now.” Uh-huh!

Tequila Mockingbird: And this is something that comes up over and over again: people want to talk — where by “people” I mean “fictional characters that Anne McCaffrey wrote on purpose” — want to talk about Tenna’s tits; they want to talk about her hair; they want to talk about her face. Over and over and over again, she is told that she is pretty, and she is uncomfortable with that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I am so intrigued by why McCaffrey made those decisions, because it seems so intentional and also so purposeless.

Lleu: Yeah; I think there is a purpose — I just think the purpose collides with other choices that she made in the story. I think her goal — and I think if other choices in the story had not been made, this would be a really effective portrayal of constant low-level background sexism, right? That Tenna can’t have an interaction with anyone without being made aware of her body and their —

Lleu: The problem with this is that she also has gone out of her way to show us that Runners are, as a Craft, not sexist. So the fact that every time Tenna meets a male Runner they immediately are like, “Oh, you’re so pretty! But I guess you’re also good at running, probably” is like… Why would they say that?

Lleu: Is your Craft in the habit of admitting unqualified people to apprenticeships just because they’re attractive? No? Okay, then shut the fuck up. It makes no sense with the way that she has chosen to portray Runners specifically. So if it were just coming from Lord Groghe doing it at the Gather, Haligon doing it, other people who are not Runners doing it, then, sure, but the fact that every male Runner she meets also implicitly questions her professional competence on the basis that she’s attractive is, like, now this is colliding with —

Tequila Mockingbird: It also just seems to collide with the way she’s trying to portray characters, because this feels like it’s supposed to be a positive portrayal of Lord Groghe.

Tequila Mockingbird: She uses the phrase “unexpectedly gracious.” “[N]either his expression nor his tone was peremptory.” He’s smiling at people. She’s kind of pleasantly surprised, because this is coming after she punched his son in the face —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and so she’s like, “Oh, wow, but he’s so nice about it!” And it does seem like he has a sense that maybe Haligon likes her: he’s smiling indulgently — it seems like it’s supposed to be this positive, avuncular conversation. And yet McCaffrey includes a line where —

Tequila Mockingbird: “He smiled back at her, his eyes dropping for a split second to her bodice. ‘You’re a very pretty girl. Blue becomes you.’ He reached over and gave her hand a pat before he rose. ‘I’ve told Torlo that the incursions will cease.’ Then, in his usual booming voice, he added, ‘Enjoy the Gather, runners, and the wine.’”

Tequila Mockingbird: And it seems like it’s supposed to be this positive, like, “Wow, the Lord Holder helped! He did the right thing!” So then why is he staring at her boobs?

Lleu: Well, and it’s followed immediately by Tenna consulting with the other Runners that she’s sitting with and Rosa saying,

Lleu: “But Lord Groghe’s a fair man, even if he usually thinks women are half-wits.. But he’s fair.”

Lleu: Which, first of all, this story desperately needed more editing. And second of all, if he categorically thinks, as a rule, that women are “half-wits,” quote-unquote, I think that is definitionally not fair, actually.

Lleu: But also this doesn’t align with the portrayal of Lord Groghe at any other point in the series.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and then we get a continuation — Rosa then says,

Tequila Mockingbird: “And he said how pretty you are, [too,] so that helped, you know. Haligon likes his girls pretty. So does Lord Groghe, but he only looks.”

Tequila Mockingbird: So, is that supposed to imply that the best you can expect of a man in power is that he’ll stare at your tits but not grope you?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because that kind of feels like what McCaffrey’s implying —

Tequila Mockingbird: — which is such — the bar is not on the floor; you’ve dug a pit so that you can put the bar underground.

Lleu: And it would be one thing if that were specifically an in-world attitude, except that the text is framing this narratively as if this is a good, positive interaction with Lord Groghe, who’s a good guy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, it’s not a scathing indictment of the institutional sexism on Pern; it’s like, “Yeah, this is normal and fine.” And it makes me worry that McCaffrey thought it was normal and fine.

Tequila Mockingbird: But even to the point of, okay, but, looking back across this series, people aren’t constantly staring at Lessa’s boobs.

Lleu: This doesn’t happen with Menolly, either, even in Dragonsinger when people are not constantly mistaking her for a boy.

Tequila Mockingbird: We have other scenes, other scenarios where female characters get a glow-up — “Wow, you’re all dressed up in your Gather best; you’re in this fancy new outfit.” Lessa’s literally scrubbing filth off of herself in Dragonflight, and F’lar is like, “Wow, you’re hot,” but he’s the only one who’s doing that.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, it just seems like a marked difference from the previous world-building of Pern that suddenly every single guy she encounters is commenting on this. And it also seems like Tenna isn’t comfortable with it, but that discomfort doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s not recognized by the text? It feels like a weird disconnect from itself, where the text is constantly having this interaction, and it seems like Tenna’s uncomfortable with it, but then Tenna never engages with it, thinks about it; it doesn’t really pay off in any way, narratively.

Lleu: Well, ’cause then immediately she starts flirting with Haligon, and then they make out, and it’s really nice, and then that’s the end of the story.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, but especially given the contrast of “Haligon likes his girl pretty; so does Lord Groghe, but he only looks” — so, Haligon doesn’t just look?

Lleu: Mm, yeah. Haligon basically tells her that, right? She obliquely comments to the effect that, like, “Oh, you’re being such a gentleman.” He’s like, “Well, I saw how good you are at punching, and I don’t want to risk that.” It’s played off as if its just a funny joke, and not like, “Oh, so if you didn’t think she was good at punching you would be behaving differently. That’s so interesting…”

Tequila Mockingbird: ’Cause we get, repeatedly, “This appeal to justice is only working because you’re hot.” Okay, so if Haligon had almost murdered a different Runner who wasn’t hot, Lord Groghe wouldn't have cared?

Lleu: Yeah. It also strikes me that, in this context, Groghe is standing metonymically for Haligon. When they interacted, she didn’t know that it was Haligon —

Lleu: — and now Groghe comes and indicates some amount of sexual desire for her, and then Rose is like, “Well, like father, like son,” and so that signals to us, if we hadn’t already intuited this, that Haligon is interested in her.

Lleu: Yeah. “Disconnected from itself” is how I would describe this story in general, because, also, here’s how the process of Groghe coming to formally apologize to Tenna goes. Groghe shows up and is like, “Tenna, I heard you got injured.” And then, quote:

Lleu: “You may be sure that, from now on, Haligon will leave the traces for the runners who made them.”

Lleu: And then, on the next page, Tenna makes this impassioned little speech about how traces are for Runners, and running is such hard work, and she says, quote,

Lleu: “I think Fort Station would be grateful for your help in keeping just runners on the traces.”

Lleu: And then, on the following page, Groghe says — as if this is totally new information that we haven’t already had twice already in this conversation —

Lleu: Yeah, I know! You said that four pages ago! Why are we still having this conversation? It’s just two people fully talking past each other for four pages.

Tequila Mockingbird: I assume that’s an editing error, not an intentional authorial decision to make him bad at listening.

Lleu: Especially because he is explicitly described as doing all the active listening things. He’s nodding, he's mhming, he’s —

Lleu: — indicating that he’s paying attention, and, on some level, yes, his words seem to indicate that he’s paying attention, but on another level…do they? It’s just a very weird story.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. The other thing that caught my attention is the way in which this Gather felt like it was structured like a Regency dance.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which might speak to McCaffrey writing more romance, or the Regency romance becoming more popular — although it certainly already existed at the time that she wrote Dragonflight, so it’s not like it’s new, but it has definitely become a juggernaut of a genre in a way that it wasn’t quite in the 1950s and ’60s yet. Georgette Hayer is the inventor of the Regency romance genre, and that’s happening in the middle of the 20th century — because we have here this convention of requesting a partner for a Gather dance and that you can request a partner specifically for supper as well as for a dance, and this convention that you are requesting the next fast dance, or the next toss dance, or the next slow dance, which all feels very much lifted from upper class and middle-class British social conventions around formal dance-based gatherings.

Tequila Mockingbird: And that was not limited to England in the Regency period, although that’s where we think about it. I have a dance card from my great-great-grandmother from Virginia in 1901.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it was still a social convention in European and American spaces.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s possible that it was a social convention that was still happening in Irish spaces. I don’t know about McCaffrey’s personal experience with that. I wouldn’t assume that it continued through the middle of the 20th century, but…

Lleu: — if it would have only had to be going on in 1944 for it to have been while she was in high school. So, that seems extremely plausible to me.

Tequila Mockingbird: There’s also this hint that dancing with the same partner repeatedly at a Gather is marked, that it's noticeable, that it's in some way an indication of a more serious interest. which is also very Regency. We also see something that I don’t think we’ve seen previously, the idea that a “Gather partner” is a specific thing that you ask for and acquire.

Lleu: Maybe you just want to partner for supper, or just want to partner for the dancing, and, also, maybe you’re just looking for someone to spend the day with, and you don’t want it to mean anything; you just want someone to hang out with you for the day. That’s the only kind of partnership you’re looking for.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is kind of fun. We haven’t really seen it, but, again, where we’ve seen Gathers previously have been Menolly, who’s pretty socially awkward and still functionally a tween; Piemur, as a spy, undercover; and Moreta as an adult woman but a thousand years ago, and it’s possible that that social convention had not evolved yet at the time of the Sixth Pass.

Tequila Mockingbird: Although she is spending the whole day with Alessan, so he is functionally her Gather partner at that first Gather.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. So it’s possible that there is still that social shift happening between that period and the Ninth Pass, or technically the very end of the Second Long Interval.

Lleu: — and the portrayal of characters as attractive, I do think it’s really interesting in my “was Anne McCaffrey a lesbian?” pursuit of truth that we get several descriptions of women in detail, emphasizing different physical characteristics that mark them as attractive from Tenna’s perspective. What we know about Haligon is that he’s got curly hair, he’s taller than his brother, and Tenna finds him more attractive than she finds his brother. So, the only one of those characteristics that is actually a specific, physical characteristic is the fact that he has curly hair. Everything else is relative. We know he’s slightly taller than Tenna and that she likes that, but we don’t know how tall Tenna is. It’s all so vague.

Lleu: Oh, yeah, okay, and we know his clothes. Great. Unlike Tena, where we know that she’s wearing blue because she has blue eyes “most of the time,” and the blue really makes her look good, we know Halligan's wearing brown; do we know he looks particularly good in brown? I don’t think so.

Lleu: Yeah, so it’s all very vague, versus the description of women, which is very specific sometimes.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even the girls we don’t like — Felisha gets “a mop of curly black tangles half covering her face.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And Cleve, you know, just gets…he’s tall. He has an engaging smile.

Lleu: Which could mean nothing. And I’ll leave you, on that note, with a recommendation. If you’re interested in stories about laborers organizing to resolve a crisis that is more interesting and higher stakes and also funnier than what is happening in “Runners of Pern,” I would recommend Janelle Shane’s short story “The Skeleton Crew,” which is about the remote workers who run the ostensibly “AI-operated,” quote-unquote, cheap plastic skeletons at a celebrity-oriented haunted house when some trouble arises.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because there’s not that much wrong with “Runner of Pern,” but there really isn’t that much right with it, either.

Lleu: Solidly middle-of-the-road — middle-of-the-trace, if you will — story.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] Looking back, this is actually not true, but even when “runner” has obviously referred to a human who runs it has previously seemed to refer mainly to someone who is running messages within (a) a particular Hold, rather than across the planet, and (b) on an ad hoc basis, not as their full-time occupation.

[2] “Way of life” would be more accurate than “lifestyle.” Even then, there’s obviously significant overlap between these categories, both for showpeople and for other itinerant populations that are ethnically distinct from the settled populations they interact with but who also have adopted (or have had to adopt) specific economic practices and skills in order to make a living.

[3] Lleu had the timeline wrong here, according to Wikipedia (in a pretty well-sourced article) — the szlachta made up somewhere between 8% and 15% of the population of early modern Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (from ca. the 15th century to to the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century). However, they remained disproportionately represented among the nobilities of the partitioning states — that article, citing Seymour Becker’s Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, notes that more than half of the Russian Empire’s nobility was Polish szlachta in the 1850s and only just under half in the 1890s, by which point many of them were quite poor. The Belarusian writer Uladzimir Karatkevich’s novel King Stakh’s Wild Hunt (1964), for example, portrays a late imperial Belarusian szlachta family, simultaneously landed gentry (with legal status and an entailed estate) and nearly bankrupt. (There are undoubtedly other literary examples; this is just one Lleu happens to be familiar with.)

[4] The problem with reading a bunch of long, mainly social histories is that they’re long, and not every passing reference to something is necessarily indexed. Lleu thinks it’s likely that this was mentioned either in Michael A. Gomez’s African Dominion or in Mark David Baer’s The Ottomans, although there is an off-chance it’s somewhere in Thomas F. Madden’s Venice, Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune, or maybe in Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades.