Chapter 2 The Ash Wharf

She reached the river before the fifth hour, when the market crowds were thickest and the wharves loudest, and the smell of the Tiber lay over everything like a wet blanket. The Ash Wharf was one of a dozen slips below the Aventine where the grain barges tied up and unloaded. The name was old and no one could tell her why it was called that; some said because the builders had cleared the ground with fire, others because a wharf that served the Egyptian fleet smelled of the kilns upriver that burned reeds for lime. What mattered was that it was busy, and that busy places are easy places to lose a sack. Faustilla went along the bank with her tablet under her cloak and her hood drawn against the sun. The porters were at work in a long line, each man bent under a sack, shuffling up the gangplank and down again with the slow, half-dancing gait that a man learns when he is carrying more than he weighs and means to keep his knees. Their faces were the faces of the whole city of the poor: Numidian, Syrian, Gaul, Greek, and Roman-born, all of them the color of the river dust that coated the inside of their arms. At the head of the line stood a foreman with a staff, counting the porters in and out with a wooden tally. Farther off, on the wharf's great stones, sat the weighing station: a tall iron steelyard hung from a frame, its heavy counterweight lying beside it on the ground like a stone dog asleep. Beside the steelyard stood the wharf's official measure, a tall bronze vessel banded with official clay, filled to its brim with grain to show the quality of the load. Menophilus was on the gangplank. He was nine years younger than Faustilla; he had been a slave of the house too, and had been freed six years after her, and though they shared a mother they shared almost nothing else. He had the small, careful eyes of a man who has learned that the world is mostly made of things that can fall on him. He saw her and did not wave. His head tilted, a fraction, and that was all, and she read it as clearly as speech: not here, later. She waited until the barge was half unloaded and the foreman had gone to drink. Then she found her brother behind a stack of folded sacking, in the shade, peeling the rind from a piece of bread. "Eighteen," she said. "Nineteen, if the one that burst on the plank counts, but it always bursts on the plank, so I think they plan it." He bit the bread. "Sist it, Faustilla. You have a face like a man who means to ask me to be brave." "Tell me what happens to the sacks." "Nothing happens to the sacks. That is the clever part. The sacks come off the barge and each is weighed, and each is tallied, and the tally goes up to the clerk's table and the clerk writes it in the book. And the book is true to the tally and the tally is true to the scale. It is all true. Every link of it is true. And the grain that should have been in those sacks is somewhere else." "Then the lie is in the scale." "The lie is in the scale," Menophilus agreed, "or in the man who reads it, or in the day, or in the wind. A steelyard is a sensitive thing. You move the counterweight a thumb's width and you have told a lie of forty pounds." Faustilla looked out across the wharf to where the steelyard stood. Two men worked it: a weigher in a brown tunic and a boy who fetched the sacks and set them on the hook. Above them, on a raised platform, a clerk sat cross-legged at a table with a book and an ink-horn, and beside the clerk sat a small clay figure of a snake, which Faustilla recognized, because every grain office in the city kept one, as the emblem of the men who did that work. "Who is the clerk?" she asked. "Granius. He came three months ago. Before him it was an old freedman of Vibidius, and before that a Thracian, and before that no one worth remembering." Menophilus chewed. "Granius keeps two books." "Two books." "I have seen one open and one closed, and the closed one is thinner. When I carry a tally up to him he copies it into the thick book, and sometimes, when the man in the brown tunic is standing there, he copies something into the thin one as well. I do not read, so I cannot tell you what. But I can tell you that a man who needs two books is a man who is afraid of one of them." Faustilla's fingers had, of themselves, found the edge of her tablet under her cloak and begun to press it, as if she were already writing. "What about the wharf's measure?" she said. "The bronze one, with the clay band. Has anyone touched it?" "No one touches that. It is sacred, more or less. It is checked twice a month by the office of the grain prefect, and the official who checks it holds it up and looks at the clay band and says the word of the day, and the men all bow to it." He grinned without humor. "It is the only honest thing on the whole wharf. Which is why it stands so far from the steelyard." She looked again. The steelyard stood at one end of the wharf's stonework; the sealed measure stood at the other, near the office door, alone in the sun, with a little space around it that no porter crossed. Between them lay twenty yards of open stone, and in those twenty yards sat the clerk's table and the man in the brown tunic and the boy, and no one who was not supposed to be there ever walked it. "Menophilus," she said. "I want you to do a thing that will make you angry at me." "I am already angry at you. Say it." "When the next delivery comes, I want you to find a way to put your hand on the counterweight of the steelyard. Not to move it. Just to feel it, when no one is looking. And to look at the boy who sets the sacks." Her brother was quiet. He looked off across the water, where the other wharves were working under their own smoke, and at the far bank the little fields and tombs went gray-green into the haze. Then he tore the last of the bread in two and handed her half, which was the oldest of their bargains. "I will do it," he said. "But when we are both in the river with stones tied to us, I want it remembered that I told you to be careful." "You told me," she said, and ate the bread, and did not tell him that being careful was the one thing she had never been able to afford. She walked back up the wharf past the clerk's table. Granius did not look at her, or gave no sign of it if he did. He was a thin man with ink on his fingers and a habit of pressing his lips together while he wrote, and over the course of a few heartbeats she saw him copy a tally into the thick book and then, when the weigher had turned his back, reach beneath the table and touch something there with the flat of two fingers, the gesture of a man checking that a thing he wished did not exist still did. Faustilla noted it and kept walking and did not turn around. ---