Chapter 5 Two Men to a Beam

The testing floor of the south ward was a cellar under the Weighhouse Steps with a ceiling of brick that had been left smooth on purpose. There were nine men in it and a bar of seasoned oak nine feet long and four inches square. The bar rested on two trestles. Beyond the far trestle stood a wall, and the wall had a mark on it, a scored line at the height of a man's shoulder. "On the line," Merek Coldspur said. "One at a time. Lift the bar, walk it to the mark, hold it, put it down. The sandglass is thirty seconds to the mark." Ryam went third. He got it up. That was the surprise — the bar came off the trestle as though the trestle had been withholding it, and it came up without any of the grinding effort he had prepared for. His arms went wide. He walked it down the cellar to the mark. Thirty seconds to the mark had been about right and nobody said anything, which he understood to be the compliment. "Again," Coldspur said. "Now put it up at the head of the room and walk it back." "Back to the trestles?" "To the wall. The bar weighs about what you weigh. When you go out on a job the bar doesn't come to you. It comes to you from wherever it happens to be." Ryam walked it up to the wall. The bar took a slight swing at the turn, and he felt where it wanted to go before it went, and corrected it with the left hand, and the swing stopped. Hold had turned into something that had reach in it, a thing with a direction, and for eleven minutes of his life Ryam Pellam understood why men paid for it. "How did you know to correct on the left?" Coldspur asked. "It wanted to go right." "That is not an answer anybody gives me twice." He made a mark on the card. "Your Hold is your best of the five and your Load is close behind it. Read is the one that will grow on you if you let it. Reach, you will need, and not soon. Speech you have nothing of." "Nothing?" "You asked me a question on the first day that a journeyman would not have asked. That is curiosity and it is worth nothing until it is paired with Read." He reached under the bench and brought out a lead block the size of a fist with a rope handle burnt into it. "Reach. Hold this at arm's length and walk backwards until you cannot go another step." Ryam walked backwards. Six paces. Eight. At nine the block began to swing and he felt it in his shoulder as a hot line running out toward the fingertips, and at eleven the swing was past saving and the block hit the brick floor and everybody in the cellar flinched. "Nine and a half paces is a journeyman's Reach on a Tuesday," Coldspur said. "Eleven is a journeyman's Reach at the end of a week. The number is not a number. It is an hour of your life and it goes down about forty minutes every year whether you use it or not, and that is the reason a man of forty can barely reach to the top shelf." He picked the block up and gave it to Coll. Coll went six paces and put it down and put his hands under his thighs. "Load," Coldspur said. "Simone, take the bar off the trestle and put it on his shoulders." A heavy woman in a leather apron shouldered nine feet of oak without hurrying and set it down across Coll's arms and stood there while he counted to thirty. "He will walk to the mark and back," Coldspur said. "And when he has done it, none of you will say anything about it, and he will know that you did not, and that is the last kindness this office has in stock." He turned to the man at the end of the line. "Take the bar." Coll Tumm got it to the mark on the second attempt and held it eleven seconds past the glass and then put it down with his forehead almost against the brick. He walked back out into the corridor and sat down on the step and put his head in his hands. Ryam sat on the step beside him with his coat off and felt the cold come up through the stone. "How long did you hold it?" Coll asked. "Eleven seconds. Same as you." "I got grey." "I got grey on the ninth." Coll looked at him and then looked at the cellar door. "You were holding the bar at the wall for twenty minutes when I was counting my heart," he said. "And then you said hold it eleven seconds like I was your examiner." "That's what he writes down," Ryam said. "He writes down eleven seconds and I don't know what he writes down for the other nineteen, and I don't know which of the two numbers is the one that gets you the rate." Coll put his hand flat on the step. "I have two hundred and ninety hours on my arm and it has been on my arm for three years and I have moved it nine hundred and sixty feet of stone in that time, and if I can go up to journeyman I get a rate that is eleven per day instead of eight per day and I work the same nine hundred and sixty feet and my band is still two hundred and ninety and I live three weeks longer." "Three weeks," Ryam said. "I get one hour a day for three weeks and then I get eight more and then I get the same nine hundred and sixty feet for eight per day forever and I die at fifty with a thousand and six hundred hours on my arm that I have never once spent and that is not an arrangement, that is a thing you get done to you." "I've been here four months," Ryam said, "and I haven't said it yet, because I don't know how to say it in front of you. Three weeks." "There's a woman at the stalls opposite who has been copying out accounts out of the fair copy for nineteen years. She's seventy-one and she has four hundred pages in the loose leaves and she has been waiting nineteen years for something to happen." Coll picked the chalked card off the step. "And I'm going to go into that cellar in a month and I'm going to put my arm on that block and I'm going to get two hundred and seventy-one hours cut out of me by a man I've never spoken to, and I'm going to get three weeks, and she's been waiting nineteen years for what I'm going to do with three weeks." "Then tell her," Ryam said. "She'd stop waiting. She'd spend the three weeks. That's the trouble with it, Pellam. That's the whole trouble with it. If she spent three weeks and died at seventy-one with a hundred and six hours on her arm, she would have been the most useful person in this building and nobody would have been able to tell her anything about it, because there would be nothing left to tell her about." Aylward came through with a tray of the little brass weights, stamped H and M and T, and set it on the bench, and neither of them moved, because a man who has been telling his own life story to a step has to be let finish with it before the work picks up. "Read," he said. "Pick one up and tell me what it is." "Hundred." "Put it down. Pick another." Coll picked one up. "M." "M is fifty. Now the third one." "That's a T. Ten." "Wrong." Aylward waited. "It's a T with a struck line through the stem. That's the worn one. Somebody has been using it and it's three grains light and it's been three grains light for eleven years, and every book off this floor has been off by that, and no one ever caught it because no one ever looked." He picked it up himself and set it down with a click. "That's what Read buys you. Not wisdom. Eyes." He went down the line handing them out, and stopped in front of Ryam. "Your mother," Aylward said. "It's the cough?" "It's the cough." "There's a woman off Cinderbell Row who does the poultice. Sook. Gray hair, bad knees. I go to her for my own and she gives me four hours instead of nine, and I don't know why and she doesn't either." He put the weight in Ryam's palm. "Go and see her. Don't tell her I sent you, she'd put her price up." "Your finger," Ryam said. "You cannot get it back flat." "No." "Does it hurt?" Aylward looked down at the bent thumb as though it belonged to a man standing next to him. "It doesn't hurt now," he said. "It hurts in the weather. That is the whole bargain. Everything you buy in this building you pay for twice — once at the counter, and once every day of your life afterwards — and the second payment is the one nobody puts in the fair copy." "Does that stop people?" "What stops people is the memory of standing at the counter." He went on down the line. "By the time a man knows what the second payment is, he has already paid the first one." ---