Rytius Records (Substack Edition), Ch. 3

Chapter 3: House Coleman

3. House Coleman

Rytius Records was Rytius’s record store. But there were no prices on anything, and Rytius was interested in neither truck nor barter. He had never sold anything save his Hardest cider and duck eggs, and he had only occasionally traded anything at all. So it was more of a library than a store. Besides that, he had most recently traded man-about-town Tweety Bird Andrews a duplicate copy of the Partridge Family’s eponymous 1970 debut album for a year’s worth of Gentleman’s Quarterly magazines (August 1995–August 1996). So it wasn’t really about records, as in music, either. There was no lending. That never even crossed Rytius’s mind.

Rytius both lived and kept shop in the home in which he and his brother Ritius chose their names. House Coleman was one of a handful of registered ancestral homes in the principality of New Ark, thanks mainly to the Colemans’ long history of service to the princes of the realm. Ritius’s shield was the fifth to adorn their gable. His pride was such that he often spoke of the exploits of his forebears and the beauty of the home they built, tempting both rivals and robbers to surveil the location, and would-be sycophants to call unannounced, which had only been a cause for embarrassment on Rytius’s part. Of course no man dared to cross Ritius, let alone his master, the prince of New Ark, in an assault on their home. The only two who had attempted more than a stakeout at a respectable distance received two of Rytius’s finest stilettos in their livers, simultaneously, while still in their vehicle—no easy feat.

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Prince Appall

The Colemans were born warriors, tall, wide, and strong, and the people knew both brothers as warriors, more or less, not only from confusion but from the tale of their sudden orphanage and salutary recruitment into the service of Prince Appall, father of Prince Feelharmonica, whom Ritius served as apprentice to his engineer, and whom Rytius served first as a messenger and later as apprentice to his scribe, transcribing dictated letters like this one, but better. Both brothers fought bravely for the prince during the Six Bridges War of 2137, most notably at the Battle of Stickel Bridge, successfully defending it and thereby the rest of County Essex against King Worrus Fish of New York, the greater power (by far) to the east.

Seal of the King of New York

Those two nobles had attempted for months to weigh the balance of, on the one hand, the tariffs and taxes levied by northern New Jersey on goods shipped across the six bridges connecting New York to northern New Jersey over against, on the other hand, control of Staten Island and thereby the growing illicit commerce, primarily out of Long Island, though many smugglers sail from south even of the Virginian Dominion. Trade had grown since the North Atlantic wars, then six years closed. In any case, the prince sent for his big brother Boy, who had made himself into the largest landowner in southern New Jersey—practically a Gardener himself by virtue of vocation and location, growing spinach and various squashes outside Princeton—to seek his counsel in these matters. The brothers schemed, the wives gossiped, the concubines grumbled, and Boy’s eldest daughter Cheeda, 18, met well with Rytius, 20, by whom she was courted and loved, and to whom she promised to wed herself.

With his brother in his ear, it was not long before the perspicacious Prince Appall was able to place himself in the mind of the King of New York, and to conclude that what New York most needed was a peacable and stable buffer zone between himself and the mighty Virginian Dominion, the great power to the South. Appall’s principality, comprising most of northern New Jersey and extending down to Trenton, could be that very zone. In the same moment he understood how it was no accident that the tri-state region had enjoyed relative peace since the North Atlantic Wars. It was precisely because the King of New York had lost his navy and air force to the French that he now required protection from regional rivals.

Boy counsels his brother Prince Appall

While Prince Appall suffered no illusions regarding his military strength, he had quite acutely adjudged his strategic importance. Even before New York exploded the fragile peace it had managed to impose throughout the region in a premature bid for global dominance, southern New Jersey had long been an unruly outland wracked by the strivings of obstreperous Illadelphians, ill-used and discontented Gardeners subject to whomever’s tax and requisition schemes, and land-seeking Dominionist settlers, one against the other, a difficulty for either kingdom—New York or Virginia—to manage. Either would pay dearly for its pacification, but Prince Appall already had his hand in one pocket.

So he invaded Staten Island first to communicate his strategy to King Fish of New York, and to remind him of his material priorities. Consider that tariffs and taxes are constant proportional costs, whereas the smugglers’ coves of Staten Island—unknown in depth and extent—were a growing source of potential revenue, if properly regulated. Appall planned to return Staten Island in exchange for a greater share of the revenue, yes, but also for a deeper partnership where the Dominion was concerned: southern New Jersey. Appall took the King to war for the King’s own sake, and even that of the King’s rival to the south; Appall crossed swords with his benefactor, the better to protect his benefactor’s table—the table off which Appall swept revenue into his own coffers—and, moreover, to afford that benefactor the material margin of safety he required. Appall shed New Ark blood to thrust himself between New York and the Virginian Dominion, thereby tasking himself with both their battles against the smugglers, thieves, bandits, and assorted revolutionaries of southern New Jersey, and simultaneously setting himself up to take the first blow in any conflict between the two powers.

Boy’s family kidnapped

That first blow came from the Virginian Dominion and landed heavily, surprising observers with its apparent senselessness. Boy’s caravan was intercepted by what was only later deduced to have been a squad of Illadelphian mercenaries, who accompanied Boy and his family to their home outside Princeton, where they painted the walls with the yellow herpeton of the Gardeners, and left a list of locations at which the head matching each body would be found.

Boy’s family killed

It was not until Prince Appall received Cheeda’s letter from under house arrest in Baltimore that he understood the Dominion as New York did. He did not take as long to learn to hate them. It was the Dominion’s position that it and northern New Jersey together could easily pacify southern New Jersey and win more favorable terms of trade with New York. The Dominion wanted the deal that Appall had already struck with New York.

Appall remained undeterred. The Dominion had killed his brother’s entire family, but for his niece, merely to open negotiations against New York by threatening him with the very chaos he was already determined to quell. It didn’t care for the peace Appall pledged to bring. It wanted the glower as well. Appall burned the letter and let his staff know that his niece had been spared, and that her life hung in the balance, but not that New York was innocent of the entire affair. That came out later.

The King of New York, meanwhile, refused the logic of Prince Appall’s assault from Perth Amboy, and instead attempted to take New Ark directly from the east, via Stickel Bridge, where the full-hearted young Rytius, fighting for what he believed to be the life of his beloved in Baltimore, led his youthful squadron into doing precisely what was required of them, and more than anyone could have expected. Prince Appall took both brothers’ oaths of loyalty and granted them their shields of service on that bridge that very night. New York regrouped and reattacked via Interstate 95, which was an even worse tactic; the King’s men were repeatedly kettled and massacred between offramps and along the feeder roads as they deserted, and the surface streets either side of State Road 9, through the Ironbound district, ran with blood.

The Battle of Stickel Bridge

The Six Bridges War ended with the signing of the Covenant of New Ark and the establishment of the sovereignty of North New Jersey, of which Prince Appall became ruler, and which he set his sons to dividing among themselves. That warm winter the rains came early to melt the autumn snowpack in the Highlands, and those waters mingled overflowing south through the creeks, canals and rivers, baptizing the newborn New Ark in a flood. Prince Appall occupied himself that winter with the terms of Cheeda’s marriage to the second prince of the Virginian Dominion, which sealed North New Jersey’s limited agreement with that kingdom: Rytius’s love being the price of their temporary alliance against the Illadelphians. That is when it became known that New York had nothing to do with the kidnapping and imprisonment of Appall’s niece, Rytius’s quondam bride-to-be. After the signing of their treaty, the King of the Virginian Dominion bragged that Appall’s niece Cheeda had never been under house arrest, and he insulted his son, the second prince, by claiming that she was the better negotiator. As part of this humiliation of his son, he declared that Cheeda was the one who insisted on the lands around Princeton as part of the Dominion’s settlement with New Ark. They included all of her father’s lands, after all. Dominion let it be said that she was the architect of the entire affair, first setting her own price from House Coleman during her father’s consultation with Appall, and then driving her own bargain hard in Baltimore. The heartbroken young Rytius left his service, and Prince Appall died of cholera some few years later.

The new King Hiram Fish of New York still licks his wounds for his father’s sake, and for good reason. New York is rich in industry, agriculture, cuisine, language, arts, literature and music of all kinds, as it is filled with people of every nation, and it is accorded prestige and renown as it was in the olden days. It is the greatest of the northeastern kingdoms—greater than all those of Old New England, and of course that small sovereignty of North New Jersey—but it remains unable to project its power either south or west of the Bay of New Ark. Though not made of paper, the tiger is caged.

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But the people knew Rytius as a recordkeeper, as well, because of his listening parties, at which he and others would play music, read texts, display works of art, and share whatever stories their discoveries demanded.

A listening party at Fila’s Finds

There were listening parties before Rytius, but not like they became; he is said by many to have pioneered a game, an informal though unforgiving and ruthless form of presentation, judged by immediate acclaim or declaim of the gathered recordkeepers, wherein the presenter speaks and reads and plays in only the most interesting and exquisite combination of archaic locutions in their appropriate historical form, and only of matters arising from the material itself, which are also the sole topic of discussion. Anything said must arise strictly out of the material presented and make the most significant use of the most of it. This mode of presentation quickly became essential to any listening party, as participation was now a matter of critical judgment in which only the listeners’ exquisite delight, surprise and insight could serve as the measure of success, while these joys were purchased with the vigilance with which recordkeepers guarded one another against improper inference. There are those who play a similar game without similar scruples, but the recordkeepers began to understand that their game had a logic of its own, another reason embedded in its deceptively simple form, which didn’t require knowledge of its ends in order to be sustained by the joy it brought in the knowledge it built.

So Rytius was known beyond the battlefield, and not only in New Ark or even North New Jersey. He had heard of their sort of listening party even as far away as the southern coast of Baltimore Bay, near where Richmond used to be. This kept customers coming to his shop, and he reaped a sort of tribute, as those with treasures to be preserved often thought of Rytius first. He was, after a fashion, a wealthy man.