Chapter 3 Slate and Salt

Saltgrave Wharf was eleven hours' walk from the south ward if you took the long line, and Ryam took the long line, because the short line went through the Foldmarket and the Foldmarket charged a penny at the bridge and a penny was four hours of a prentice's day. The wharf dealt in three things: slate out of the north, salt in from the coast, and coal from the flats. The first was carried. The second was weighed. The third was a nuisance that everybody was paid to be irritated by. Ryam was on the slate. He was one of nine, and the nine were under a journeyman called Sallowby, who had been a journeyman for eleven years and whose right shoulder stood a full inch higher than his left. They moved slate from the lighters to the wagon boards, forty to fifty pounds a piece, and they stacked it in a crib because slate stacked badly would break and broken slate came out of the wagon master's pay and the wagon master took it out of theirs. "You'll get a wrist callus inside a week," Sallowby told him. "That's not the callus to watch for. Watch the third and fourth finger on the loading side. If the skin goes white you've caught it on the edge and you'll lose the pad, and you'll not lift fifty pounds again for a year." Ryam watched. He lifted all day. On the third day the edges did begin to find the soft skin between the fingers, and he learned to take the weight on the heel of the palm and turn the corner without letting the edge lead. "Load's no good to you until your back knows what you're carrying," Sallowby said. "Your back learns first. It's slower, but it's honest." Bilbe Toft worked the salt scales. She was twenty-one, broad through the shoulders, with her hair cropped to the skull for the dust, and she had been weighing salt since she was old enough to stand on a stool. She stood on a high stool now in a canvas coat with the sleeves turned back four times, and she had one hand on the beam and one hand on the tally-board, and she was quicker than anybody else on the wharf. They got talking because Ryam's arms gave out on the fourth hour and he sat down on a bollard to be out of the way, and she put a stone under his feet without looking down. "Thirty-two," she said. "Thirty-two what?" "Minutes since you started the run. You were counting. Don't count. Counting takes the breath out of the work." "My band is new. I can feel it." "Your band is a piece of brass with numbers in it." She chalked a figure on the board and turned the balance a grain to bring it true. "It doesn't feel anything. It only counts. Anything that tells you what you are feeling is your own head, and your own head is the least reliable instrument in this city, and I say that as somebody who gets paid to find out what other people's heads are worth." He laughed. It came out of him before he decided anything. She looked down at him then, and he saw that she had been assessing him the way he assessed a stack of slate, and that he had passed some part of the test. "You cut recently," she said. "New band." "Last week. Journeyman." "Then you're one of the ones the House has been buying. Congratulations on being cheap." "You said that like it was a disease." "It's a price." She nodded at the boards. "See that wagon?" It was a salt wagon, half loaded, sitting on the boards with its shafts up and one wheel chocked with a stone. The wagon master was a small furious man named Ockham who was shouting at two drovers about a shortfall of nine sacks. "Nine sacks short," she said. "There are nine sacks on that wagon. There are nine sacks on my board. And in a week the wagon master will go to the Hourhouse and say the wharf took nine sacks that were never delivered, and the House will allow it, because it is cheaper to allow nine sacks than to weigh fourteen wagons a day." "And who pays?" "The wharf pays. Out of our hours." She turned the beam a hair. "Nine sacks is about two hundred hours. Spread over thirty of us, that's six or seven a week. It never shows up as nine sacks. It shows up as a winter that costs a little more." Ryam sat with that for a moment. "You've done this before." "I've worked this board for four years and I have watched eleven prentices come down here and stand where you're standing now and say exactly what you just said, and I have watched four of them go back to the coal and stay in it, and I have watched three of them go back and ask questions for a year and get nowhere, and I have watched two of them go back and do nothing and get the rate and the chit and the wage and not lose another hour of their life again." She turned the beam. "You will be one of the four or you will be one of the two. I do not know which, because I do not know what a man is, and I am not the kind of person who guesses about that sort of thing. The rest of the eleven went into the office." "How do you know?" "Because I have met eleven of them in this city in the fourth and fifth and seventh galleries and they had all of them been prentices on the slack crew at Saltgrave, and every single one of them told me it was an accident of being good at carrying." "Would you like to know what you think I am?" "No." She took the chalk and wiped the board clean with her wrist, which was the sign that a weigher was finished for the day. "I would like to know what your band says. But I don't want to know it in front of this board, because the board is a public thing and a public thing makes a woman like me say the wrong number to get out of a public thing." "He's a prentice, and I am carrying slate for four days a week and I am paid for the third day only because the third day the slate does not come up the ladder," Ryam said. "That's a north-ward answer," Bilbe said. "A north-ward answer is true for a month and then it's a hole in the floor and somebody else pays for it. A south-ward answer is the whole of the truth and it's true for eleven years and then you die with it in your hand, and you don't know it was there, and that's not cruelty, that's just the arithmetic of a city that has to be paid." "Which one am I?" "That's the only question in this city that has no answer and the answer to it is what you do with the rest of the question after it's been asked." She turned back to her beam and looked up over her shoulder. "You said you were paying for the third day. Say it again. There's a word in there I want to hear wrong." "You pay me for three days and I work four." "Good." Bilbe said it like a verdict. "That's the right way round. Now learn to say it in front of a clerk and see what happens to the third day, and then learn to say it in front of a warden, and then learn to say it in front of a man who will be paid to listen to you saying it, and that's the whole of the book, Pellam, and it's four chapters long and three of them are written and none of them are written down anywhere and the fourth one is you." ---