Chapter 7 A Lie in the Second Column

They gave a journeyman a rate, a chit and a book to sign for, and then they forgot him, which Ryam came to understand by the end of his second week was the single greatest mercy the Hourhouse had in stock. He went to Saltgrave Wharf four days and the ward kitchens three. He carried slate and coal and, on the sixth day, a hundredweight of sacked plaster up the Cutter's Steps because a journeyman two wards over had put his foot wrong and would be off his board a season. Nobody asked him to. The plaster came up on his back and he put it in the yard where it belonged, and a woman he had never spoken to said thank you, and that was the whole of the reward. He slept eleven hours a night for the first week, which he had never done since he was seven years old, and which turned out to be the most surprising thing about becoming a journeyman. He got hungry. He got hungry in a way that had nothing to do with the flue and everything to do with a body that has finally been asked to do what it is capable of. He ate four times a day for a fortnight and then went back to three, and the band did not move at all, because eating is not a thing you pay for out of the band. The band is what is left after everything else. On the ninth day he was in the weigh room at Saltgrave, waiting for Ockham's wagon to be unloaded, and he picked the balance book up off the bench because there was nowhere to put his hands. It was a foolscap book with a linen tape down the spine. The left page was the delivery: wagon, sacks, gross weight, tare, net. The right page was what the wharf had charged the wagon master for the use of the boards. He was not looking for anything. He put his thumb down the right-hand column out of boredom, the way you thumb the edge of a chit a hundred times, and he stopped on the fourth line. Ninety-one sacks came off the lighters. The gross weights went up by fours, the tare repeated, the net column ran down in a straight sensible arithmetic. Then on the right page, in the fourth column of the third line, the balance figure for the wagon stood one grain over the true reading. Then again on the fifth line. Then again on the sixth. He checked his thumb against the number on the left, and then against the number on the right, and then he went back to the fourth line and did it once more, because the first time he had assumed his own eyes were tired. "Grain and a half," he said. Ockham was standing in the doorway with his ledger under his arm. "Grain and a half what?" "Fourth line. Ninety-one sacks. You're a grain and a half over on the balance and you've been over on the balance since the tide before last." Ryam turned the book so that Ockham could see it. "You can check it. It's a grain and a half. If I'm wrong, the wharf will correct me at the Hourhouse and I'll have lost an afternoon." There was a silence in the weigh room of a length that Ryam could measure. "Sit down," Ockham said. Ryam sat. "You understand what a grain is." "I understand what one grain is on ninety-one sacks." "A grain is nothing. A grain is the smallest thing a scale will say. Half of my buyers don't know which end of the beam to put the weight on." Ockham came in and shut the door, which nobody on a wharf did. "You understand what happens if a wagon is a grain and a half over?" "The wharf covers the difference." "The wharf takes it out of the wage of the man who weighs it." "So you never lose a grain and I do." "Not you. Whoever has the board." Ockham sat down on the bench across from him and for a moment he did not look like a small furious man. He looked like a man doing sums in his head. "You are a journeyman on a south-ward band and you found this in nine days. Do you know how many years it took me?" "No." "Eleven. And I only found it because my opposite number at the Foldmarket scales got an extra half grain out of me once and I did not sleep." He stood up and went to the window. "Here is what you do with it. You put the thumb back where you found it. The book goes in the wagon master's bag and the wagon master takes it to the Hourhouse and the Hourhouse writes down what the balance said, because that is what the balance said, and a balance that says wrong is a balance that is wrong, and no clerk on earth is going to reopen that." He turned around. "Nobody is going to fine me for a grain and a half. They might fine the wharf for a grain and a half if somebody with a hand like yours ever cared enough to say so out loud." "So it just goes on." "It goes on until the wharf folds or I do, and one of those is going to happen first." He held out his hand. "Give me the book." Ryam gave him the book. He stood in the weigh room a moment and then said, "And the eleven years?" "What of them?" "Nobody was charged for it." Ockham looked at him. Then he said, "No. And you have been for nine days. Do you see how that works, in this city? A thing that is a grain a day goes on for eleven years and nobody pays. A thing that is a day a day goes on for nine days and everybody pays. It is not fair and it is not supposed to be fair, it is supposed to be survivable, and I have been surviving it since before your band was cut." "Survivable isn't the same as right." "No." The little man picked up his ledger. "It's better. Sit down, Pellam. Somebody has to load that wagon and it isn't going to be me." He went out. Ryam sat in the weigh room for a minute with the smell of wet wool and old rope in his nose, and then he did the thing that got him into the counting floor two months later, which was that he got up and went and looked at the sixth line again, and it was still a grain and a half, and he counted the lines. Eleven wagons that tide. Eleven wagons, every one over, every one by a grain and a half, and eleven at the Foldmarket scales under and every one of those under by a grain and a half. Thirty-one thousand grains between one tide and the next, and the whole of it the width of a human hair laid end to end, and if you laid every grain in that wharf end to end you would not reach from the scales to the door. He wrote it on the back of his own chit with a pencil. Then he folded the chit in four and put it inside his coat, and it was still there eleven weeks later. ---