Osbert Lyle

Mere-man of Little Mere, where nobody has drawn the edge and nine families know where the bottom changes. He has brought in nine bodies in twenty years and keeps the four names he was given.

Osbert Lyle is the mere-man of Little Mere, on the marsh at Oxford’s edge, and a voice of the High South country rather than of its cities. His fowling book, dated Little Mere, 4613, is the record the books quote for the mere: four hundred acres in a wet year and two hundred in a dry one, with an edge nobody has ever drawn because it has not got one. What it has instead, he writes, is nine families who know where the bottom changes.

The mere families recover what the water gives up and bring it to the Reed Cross, whose House gives it burial, enters it, and gives back the one thing the families cannot get for themselves: a name for the dead. The relation is close and is charity in neither direction. Lyle has brought in nine bodies in twenty years and been given a name for four of them, and he keeps those four names in the fowling book with the dates. He is as guarded as he is exact. The families put things into the water, he says, and he will not say what or where; he has told the Concord no more, and the Concord wrote it down and did not press.

In person

Osbert Lyle is forty-six, extremely tall and thin at about six foot five, with long limbs. Thick black curls fall to his shoulders, and his long black beard divides naturally into two points. His narrow face is weather-beaten, with a prominent nose and bright blue eyes, and a large pale birthmark runs from the left side of his neck onto his jaw. He wears high waterproof boots, mud-brown trousers, a rough dark-green coat and an ochre scarf under a broad, battered, asymmetrical hat, and carries a sounding pole, rope, a weighted depth line, a field knife, a waterproof satchel and a pistol.