Chapter 18 The Man They Kept

The office of the grain prefect issued its finding three days before the Kalends, and it was a careful thing, built like a wall with no handholds. The short measure at the Swan Granary was the work of subordinate men. The weigher's foreman had fitted the beam with a heavier counterweight without authority; the granary keeper had failed to detect it; two clerks had been careless with their tallies. These named men were dealt with. The foreman was sent to the mines for ten years, and the granary keeper was fined and dismissed, and one clerk was flogged, and another was sold abroad. The clerk Granius, whose confession had been obtained under the office's own procedure, was released, because the office found that the token in his room had been planted by the foreman, and because a freedman's confession is worth less than a freedman's silence. Granius came out of his cell thin and gray and did not speak to anyone for a week. The standard measure and the official dole vessels of every granary in the city were tested, and the vessels of three granaries were found short, and were recast, and the dole was afterward given out with full measure to the poor of the Aventine, which was the only part of the finding that Faustilla cared about. She went to the foundry where the short vessels were recast, because she wanted to see the thing done with her own eyes. The smith poured the old bronze into a crucible and skimmed the dross, and the little cups became a bright river that ran into the molds, and when it cooled the new vessels were true to the standard. She stood at the door and watched a boy of the foundry test the first one on the scale, and the scale said true, and the boy grinned because he was young and the work was good. It was the only clean thing she had seen in months, and she went home and did not tell anyone where she had been. And at the heart of the finding there was a hole the size of a man. Vibidius was not named. The finding said only that the office had found no evidence that the shippers of the Ash Wharf had entered into any agreement to sell the grain withheld from the dole, and that the matter of the counterweight was a matter for the wharf's own discipline. Within a week, Vibidius had sold his share in the wharf to a partner and had been received into the household of a senator of the first rank, as a client and a friend, where no magistrate in the city would trouble him without a reason that would survive the displeasure of a consular house. Faustilla stood in the market on the morning the finding was read aloud and listened to the whole of it, and when it was done she went and sat on the step of the basilica and put her hands on her knees and stayed there for a while. Carpus found her there. "You did what no one else would," he said. "I moved the men who hold the beam and left the man who owns it," she said. "The foreman goes to the mines and Vibidius goes to dinner. The dole is full this month and will be short again next year, because the hand that took the grain is still on the scale. I have not caught a fraud. I have caught the smallest part of it, and the rest is sitting in a senator's garden drinking watered wine." "Aye," Carpus said. "That is how it goes. The man they keep is always the one who matters. But the dole is full this month. There are children in this street who will eat this month who would not have eaten. Do not tell me that is nothing, because I have carried their fathers' sacks and I know the difference between a full measure and a finger's joint." "It is not nothing," she said. "I know it is not nothing. I am only tired of the arithmetic of this city, where every good thing is half a good thing, and every wrong is paid for by someone poorer than the man who did it." "That is the arithmetic of every city," Carpus said. "You have simply never read the whole column before. It is a hard thing, to see the whole column. Most people are paid to see only their own line." She looked at him for a long moment and then she laughed, once, without much humor, and got up. Granius she found a few days later, in the arcade behind the cattle market, where they had first met, and he looked like a man who had aged a decade in a month. He gave her the thing he had been keeping, because he had kept something even in the cell, folded small and hidden where the guards did not look. "The foreman and the keeper were not the ones who pressed the signet," he said. "We knew that. The deputy pressed it. But the deputy did not order the counterweight. He only authorized it. There is a book that goes before the authorization, and I never saw it, and I have spent a month in a cell thinking about who could have written it, and I have one name, and it is not Vibidius." He gave her a slip of wax, and on the wax, in a hand she did not know, was a name. Faustilla read it, and then she read it again, and then she folded the wax and put it away, and did not say what she thought, because in that moment she understood that the fraud at the Ash Wharf had not begun at the Ash Wharf. It had begun somewhere higher and farther off, in a room where the grain of the whole city was decided, and it had reached down to the wharf and the granary and the dole line the way a root reaches down through soil. And she had just been handed the name of the root. ---