Chapter 17 The Dole at Dawn

The dole crowd began to gather before the fifth hour, and on this morning it was larger than Faustilla had ever seen it, because a story had gone round the Aventine in the night that there would be a saying at the granary door, and the poor of a city will walk a long way to hear a saying, especially when the saying is about bread. The men of the Anchor came in ones and twos and took their places along the wall. Naevia set her table where the crowd could smell the bread. Albia stood in the doorway of a fuller's shop with her satchel at her feet. The old equestrian arrived in his litter and was carried to the steps of the granary and helped down, and stood there leaning on his staff like a landlord at the boundary of his field, which in a manner of speaking he was. Faustilla stood in the middle of the crowd with the boy beside her, his hand in hers, which was the only comfort she could give and also the only grip she dared not loosen. The granary men came out at the fifth hour with their table and their vessels and their staves, and they began the line, and the line went slowly, and the first verse of the morning's complaints began to rise, as it always did. The man with the measure filled the cup and struck it level and tipped it into a sack. And Faustilla, watching, saw that today the measure was a different one: a new vessel, bright, with no wear at the rim, brought out for the day. They had begun to change things. But changing the cup did not change the crowd, and the crowd had come for the saying. She lifted the boy up onto the step of a fountain so that the whole line could see him, and she said, in a voice she had practiced for two mornings in the loft until it carried without cracking, that this boy had worked the steelyard at the Ash Wharf, and that he would tell them what he had been paid to do. The boy spoke. He did not speak well, and he did not speak long. He said that a man in a brown tunic had given him a copper piece every morning and told him to stand behind the frame of the beam and press on it with his shoulder while the sacks went onto the hook, and that when he did this the arm came up lighter, and that he had done it for a season and thought it was a game, and that he was sorry. The line went quiet. The man with the measure set down his cup. Then Carpus, from the wall, in the flat voice of a man who has decided that he has nothing left to lose and is surprised to find it pleasant, said that he had carried sacks over that beam for thirty years, and that in the spring the granary had a new counterweight made, and that the new one was heavy, and that the porters had seen the weight read short and said nothing because they had mouths to feed. And the men of the Anchor, standing along the wall, said yes. One after another, the way a wall goes up stone by stone. Yes. Yes. Yes. By then the granary men had sent for the guard, and the guard had sent for the office, and the deputy's men were coming up the street from the river, and the crowd was turning to face them, and the whole thing was a breath away from the thing that Faustilla had seen once before and had feared ever since, which is what a hungry crowd does when it decides that it has been robbed and knows the robber's name. "Hold," the old equestrian said, and his voice carried because it was old and used to being heard. "Before any man is hurt, let the weights be tested. I demand it as an owner of grain. Bring the granary's standard, and bring the office's weights, and test them here, in front of this crowd." "The test was done," one of the deputy's men said. "The standard is true. The office has said so." "Then the test will cost you nothing to do twice," said the old man. And because a crowd had gathered and because to refuse now would be to say aloud what everyone had already guessed, they brought out the granary's standard, the great bronze measure under its band of clay, and set it on the table, and the equestrian's freedmen opened the chest they had recovered from the abandoned cart—the office's own weights, in their cypress box, left behind when the driver cut the trace and rode off on the horse—and the office's own beam came off the cart, and the test was done in the open, with the whole line watching. The standard was true. The bronze measure filled, struck level, and weighed against the office's weights, and it matched to within a hair. A murmur went through the crowd, and Faustilla felt the boy's hand tighten in hers, and for a moment the ground that had opened under her two days before opened again. Then she said the thing she had been holding since the morning she watched the dole. "Now weigh the measure they are using." The man with the new cup looked at the deputy's men, and the deputy's men looked at the crowd, and the crowd looked at the cup. And because there were five hundred people in the street and one young man with a cup, the cup was taken and filled and struck level and weighed against the true standard, and it was short. Not by a thumb. By a finger's joint, which on a cup is a handful, and on a day's dole for a family is a meal, and on a season is a winter. The crowd made the sound again, and this time the deputy's men did not try to stop it. What happened after that was messy and slow and without glory. The granary was closed for the day, and the dole was given out from the market under the eyes of the guild and the equestrian and a clerk of the prefect's office who had been sent to witness and who wrote down everything because he was too frightened to do otherwise. Two men were taken: the weigher's foreman, who was marched off with his hands tied, and the granary keeper, Sosipater, who came out of his office at last with his dinner still on the table and understood from the faces in the street exactly what had happened to him. The boy was not taken. He stood with Carpus and the men of the Anchor, and when a guard looked at him the wall of porters closed around him and he became, for the first time in his life, one of a body. Faustilla stood at the edge of the crowd as it dispersed and watched the granary door being shut, and she did not feel the thing she had expected to feel. She had thought that exposing a false weight would feel like setting down a stone. It felt like standing in a doorway after a long walk, looking at more road. The deputy's men did not take her, because they could not, and they did not speak to her, because there was nothing left to say. But as the crowd thinned, one of them lingered, and he looked at her for a while, and then he said, in a voice pitched for her alone, "You have won the street. The office is not the street. Remember that when someone offers you a bargain." ---