Chapter 3 The Weigher's Beam

The grain prefect's office kept its own weights in a locked room behind the market, and getting into that room required either a bribe, a favor, or a reason that would survive being spoken aloud, and Faustilla had none of the three. She had, however, spent twelve years learning what a house can do when it cannot do the honest thing, and a proof of a false weight does not require the government's weights if one has a market and a scale and an hour in which no one is watching the scale. The next day she went to the market of the cattle traders, not to buy, and took with her a purse of copper and a small bronze bowl she had measured at home against a measure of her own making, marked on the inside of a clay cup with a line she had scratched when no one was in the room. She bought a pound of lentils and had them weighed on three different scales belonging to three different traders, and each time she watched where the weight sat and how far the arm moved, and each time she paid for a pound and took home something a little less. Two of the three were honest. The third was not. On the third scale a pound of lentils lost an ounce and a half, which is nothing at all to a man buying dinner and everything in the world to a man buying grain by the shipload. That evening she wrote in her own tablet, the one she kept inside the lining of her mattress, the one that did not belong to the house: *Third scale, south side, short one and a half ounces to the pound. Trader's name not known. Weighted arm, iron, no stamp.* Then she went to the Swan Granary, where the city stored the grain before it went out to the dole, and where the Otacilian name was written on the doorpost among a dozen others. The Swan Granary was a long, low building sunk into the bank of the river, with a vaulted roof and a floor of packed earth and a smell inside it like the inside of a bread oven after the bread is gone. It had three doors: one to the wharf, one to the road, one that was always shut. The men who worked it were called by the granary's own name, which was the Swan men, though they were not a guild and had no oath, only the habit of men who have counted the same grain together for years. The granary keeper was a freedman called Sosipater, and he was at his dinner and would not see a woman on household business without a written order. So she went round to the wharf door, where the sacks came in, and stood among the porters until a steward of the granary noticed her and asked her business, and she told him she was the procuratrix of the Otacilian house and had come about the weighing of the last delivery. The steward was a broad man with a broken nose and the patient eyes of a man who has been asked the same question many times and has an answer ready. He took her to the weighing floor, where the granary's own beam hung from a chain between two posts. It was heavier than the market scale, iron and oak, with a great stone of a counterweight that took two hands to move. "Here is the beam," he said. "It is checked by the prefect's men and sealed, and the seal is on the chain there, and no one but the keeper may break it. Your delivery was weighed on this beam, by the granary's own weigher, with the Swan men watching. Would you like me to weigh a sack for you now?" "No," Faustilla said. "I would like to know whether the weigher who weighed our delivery is the same man who weighs the dole." "The dole is weighed by the same men, yes. There are not so many of us that we can have a different man for every grain." "And the counterweight," she said. "May I lift it? Only to feel its weight, as a woman feels a stone she is thinking of buying." The steward's mouth tightened. For a moment she thought he would refuse, and then he shrugged, which in a man like him was its own kind of answer, and stood back. Faustilla put both hands under the iron ring and lifted. She was not strong, and the weight was real. But she had lifted the iron ring of a market scale that morning, the false one, and she had lifted the true one the week before out of curiosity, and she had a body that remembered weights the way other bodies remember songs. The counterweight in her hands was heavier than a pound weight should be. It was heavier by the breadth of a thumb, no more, and no less, and a thumb's breadth on an iron weight the size of a child's head is a lie that multiplies itself by every sack that passes over the beam in a day. She set it down and thanked the steward and left, and outside in the sun her hands were shaking, and she stood still for a moment by the door and let the shaking pass, because a woman who is seen shaking in a public place is a woman about whom things are said. As she crossed the road, a man fell into step beside her. He was young, plainly dressed, with the ink-stained fingers of a clerk, and she knew him at once and did not slow. "Granius," she said. "Faustilla of the Otacilian house." His voice was low, and it had in it the particular tightness of a man who has been holding a word in his mouth for a long time. "You measured the counterweight just now. I saw you. I was on the roof of the office, and I saw the way you lifted it, and I know what you know." "Then you know that I will say nothing," she said, "and neither should you, because if you are saying it to me you must not be saying it to anyone who matters." "I am saying it to you because there is no one else to say it to." He glanced back at the granary, then at the road ahead. "I keep two books. You have guessed the first part. Let me tell you the second. It is not the counterweight alone. The counterweight has been heavier since the spring, and I know who made it heavier, and I know who signed the order, and the name is not Vibidius." That stopped her, in the middle of the road, with a carter cursing behind her and the dust rising around her ankles. "Then whose name is it," she said. "I will not say it in the street," Granius said. "Meet me tonight, after the lamps, in the arcade behind the cattle market. There is a stair there, going down to a door that opens on nothing. Come alone, and bring nothing you would grieve to lose, and I will show you a page that will end your time in that house, one way or another." Then he was gone into the crowd, and Faustilla stood with the dust settling on her shoes and understood that the thing she had begun in a quiet room, with a lamp at her elbow and a cord in her fingers, had already grown its own feet and was walking. ---