Chapter 14 The Weights on the Cart

The office of the grain prefect kept its weights in a chest of cypress wood, and once a month the chest was carried by cart from the office to the several granaries, and the standards in each were tested against the weights, and there was nothing secret about it at all. It was a public act, done in daylight, by men in official dress, and the only thing that made it dangerous was the same thing that makes every public act dangerous: the crowd that happens to be standing by. The cart left the office before the fifth hour. Faustilla knew the route, because she had watched it done three times. It came down the long street past the market of the cattle traders, turned at the olive-sellers' corner, and went on to the granaries along the river. Carpus and the men of the Anchor were at the market by dawn. Naevia had set her bread table at the narrow place where the street grew tight between two cornices. Albia stood in the shade of the colonnade with her satchel. The old equestrian, whose name Faustilla had never been told, sat on a folding stool before the steps of the basilica with two freedmen at his back and a look of mild, well-moneyed patience. The cart was late. When it came it came by the other road. "Somebody warned them," Carpus said, low. "The olive-sellers' corner is open today, and they have gone round by the river." "Then we go to the river," Faustilla said. It was a gamble, and she knew it as she ran. The river road had no crowd. If the office's weights reached the Swan Granary and the test was done behind closed doors, then everything she had built would be swept away in an hour, and she would be left with a summons, a false token, and no witness. But the river road was narrow, and it ran along the top of the wharf wall, and on the wall there was always someone, because the wall was the shortest way for the porters to get from one wharf to the next, and the porters had come. They came out of the granary lanes in twos and threes and stood along the wall, not blocking anything, just standing, the way men stand at the end of a day, and the cart had to slow, and as it slowed the old equestrian's own cart came up behind it with two of his freedmen on the seat, and the old man himself walking ahead with a staff, and he raised the staff and called out to the driver in the flat voice of a man who has never been refused. "Stop, in the name of the test. I own grain in the Swan Granary, and I am entitled to be present at the test. Let it be done here." The driver looked at the officer who walked beside the cart, a young man in official dress, and the officer, who was not expecting this, did the thing that doomed him: he hurried. "No, no. The test is done at the granary. Let us pass." "Why at the granary," said the old equestrian, "when the weights are here and the grain is there and the office's beam is on the cart?" And then Carpus stepped forward, and under his cloak he was carrying the counterweight of the Swan Granary's beam, wrapped in sacking, which he had lifted from the weighing floor in the gray hour before dawn at the price of his whole month's wages and, quite possibly, of his whole life, and he set it down on the pavement with a noise like a bell, and unwrapped it. "Here is the weight of the granary's beam," he said, loud enough for the wall. "Weigh it against the office's weight, here, now, in front of these men." The officer's face went white. He reached for the iron, and the equestrian's two freedmen took hold of his arms, not roughly, but firmly, and the porters along the wall pressed forward a step, and the street filled from the granary lanes with men who had heard that something was happening, and the whole thing hung for a moment on the edge of becoming a different thing altogether. The weighing was done on the office's own beam, in the open, by the office's own weigher, who was standing right there and who was too frightened to lie. Two honest weights were set in one pan, the granary's counterweight in the other. The beam tipped. It tipped against the granary, and everybody knew what that meant. The counterweight was heavier than it should be, and the finger of the beam leaned over and stood there like a witness pointing, and a hundred people made a sound at once, a low, ugly sound that Faustilla had heard only once before, at the dole, and hoped never to hear again. The officer broke and ran. The driver whipped up his horse and the cart lurched away down the river road, and some of the porters ran after it, and some of them stood where they were, and the officer ran until he met the men who had been waiting for him: Vibidius's foreman and six others of the wharf's private guards, coming up the road at a trot with staves. What happened after that happened quickly. Faustilla saw the equestrian's freedmen go down, and the old man shoved against a wall, and Carpus swinging the iron counterweight at a raised staff. There was a great deal of shouting and a good deal of blood and a boy on the ground under the crowd. She was trying to pull the boy out of it when a hand took her by the hair and a second hand took her by the arm. "You," said the foreman of Vibidius, breathing hard. "You are the one. The deputy wants you. Come quietly, and no one else gets hurt in front of these people." Faustilla looked past him at the street, at the bread table overturned, at the loaves trodden underfoot, at Albia kneeling over a man with a split scalp, and at the wall where a hundred porters stood very still and watched her being taken. "Quietly," she said, and let him take her away, because there was one thing she had got, and it could not be given back now: a hundred men had seen the iron tip, and a hundred men would tell a thousand people, and no deputy, however deep in it, could make a hundred men unseen. ---