Daily Talk
A court with the festivals of an entire year hanging on a word it must say before dark stops to question men whose testimony it does not need, so that they will not go home disheartened. Then it rules that a month founded on paid perjury is sanctified all the same. Why build so fine a filter for a result the law says will stand regardless?
The Testimony Nobody Needed
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About This Talk
Chapter 2 fills in the room the first chapter only described: two adult men fit to testify about anything, a father and son who both come because either may turn out to be disqualified, and a court that reckons like an astronomer and then asks the witnesses which way the crescent's corners were pointing. Reflections in water, mirrors and clouds are not sightings, a moon glimpsed while thinking of something else is not testimony, and a gap of two storeys keeps two honest men from being joined. It closes on the declaration itself, which must fall in daylight before the thirty first day begins, and which holds even where the judges erred or were deliberately misled.