Chapter 16 Year Twenty-Three

Ferrick asked for it to be done on a day when it would cost him something, and he chose a day when there were other people in the room. The Hour Market runs on the floor of an empty warehouse off the South Ward, four nights a week, from the hour before dark until the lamp goes out at the mill bell. It is not a market in the sense that the people who are supposed to mind it know it is a market; it is a market in the sense that a person with hours and a person with a need can find one another there, and the currency is hours, and nobody is deceived about any of it. Ferrick chose a Thursday, and he sat on a grain sack with a cup of water he did not drink, and he said the thing. "In year twenty-three I was twenty-six and I was a second clerk at this Hourhouse, and the Return for year twenty-three came across my desk on the ninth of the month." He put his hands on his knees. "It had a variance in it. Nine hours, weather line, same as every year. And on the third page it had a reserve movement of one hundred and eighty hours against an item for the mill." "Who put the mill in?" "The warden. Marget Ordell. She had been warden eleven years and Cray was a clerk under her, and I signed under both of them." He drank the water. "I asked Ordell about the mill. She told me the weather line covered it, which is a sentence I have heard four thousand times since, and I wrote it down." "You wrote it down." "I wrote it down in the pressing ledger, in the margin, in the ordinary way a clerk records a question. I still had the pressing ledger for the year. It went with everything else when I was stood down." "That margin is gone." "That margin is gone." "Did Ordell tell you why the line covered it?" "She told me the weather line had covered a great many things for a great many years and that I was the ninth clerk to ask and the ninth clerk to be told." Ferrick turned the cup a quarter turn on the flagstones. "And she said something else, and I have turned it over perhaps two thousand times since, and I have never decided whether it was a kindness or an instruction." "What did she say." "She said: a boy who writes things down in the margin ends up a man who writes things down in the margin, and there is not a post in this kingdom for that." He looked up. "It was the only warning anybody ever gave me and it was given kindly and I have thought about it every year since, and I have never once been able to decide whether she was warning me off the margin or warning me about the margin." Nyle had the schedule pinned in front of him in a room above a chandler's shop where they had both paid for the table, and he let the silence run until it was uncomfortable, because a man who is going to be asked to destroy himself will take any pause you offer him. "Ask," Ferrick said. "Was the mill in the Return before you ever saw it?" "No." "Was the nine in the Returns before you ever saw it?" "Yes." Ferrick looked up. "I have wanted somebody to understand that for nineteen years. I have never been able to make it sound like the good news that it is. The nine was there when I was twenty-six. It was there when I was twenty and it was there in the year I came, which is the year Ordell told me the office was a place where a clerk learns to carry things forward without asking what is in them." "You have had nineteen years to decide what you believe about it and you have never once said it out loud." "No." "Say it." Ferrick looked at his hands. "I believe the ninth hour is the load-bearing wall," he said. "I believe that if the ninth hour went, the rest of it would fall, because the rest of it is only held together by the Return balancing. I believe every levy since has been spent carefully, in small amounts, on things that a city needs to have done, so that nobody could ever look at a year and say: here is a thing done for a reason. Here is a reason." He put the cup down. "I believe the whole thing has been run for forty years by people who were frightened, one at a time, in a warm room, and each of them decided that nine hours was too small to be worth the cost of stopping." Nyle wrote none of it down. "You understand what that is," he said. "That is not a witness saying he was made to do it. That is a witness saying he did it, for forty years, and would do it again." "Yes." "Then you are not going to be able to call yourself a clerk who signed a page." Nyle finally looked up. "When this is written, you are going to be the man who says he understood it and went on for nineteen years. And when a reviewer asks me whether I think that man should have stopped, I am going to have to answer, and I am not going to lie to him, and you know all of that, and you have told me anyway, which means you have finally decided you would rather be finished than comfortable." "Yes," Ferrick said. "Write it that way." "I will write it that way." They sat there for some time. The market moved around them: a woman trading nine hours for a week's flour, two men settling a dispute about a cart with a rule of thumb and a cribbage score, a boy of nine walking round with a ledger of his mother's hours because he was the one who wrote it down and had learned that the writing down was the only part anybody took seriously. "I cannot give you anything else," Ferrick said. "The pressing ledger is gone and the plate in Enid Scarfe's hands is the only plate I have ever wanted to see." "You have given me the year. The year is the thing." Nyle put his pencil away. "The year is what makes it possible to prove the nine is a choice, because a thing that was there when you arrived is a thing that was there before you and is therefore a thing that somebody chose. You have given me the first half of a case that nobody could have opened without you." "That is not a good thing I have done." "No. It is a thing that was done to you." He stood up. "Write to me at the district when you have somewhere to post to. I am going to need you for the rest of it, and it will keep being true until somebody with a seal says otherwise." ---