第2章 The South Desk

The Hourhouse filled a whole block between the Weighhouse Steps and the old canal head, and it had no windows on any side that Ryam could see. He climbed the second gallery at ten minutes to the first bell with seven other south-ward prentices and found Merek Coldspur waiting at a table that had been sanded and re-sanded until it was the colour of weak tea. Behind him the wall was shelves. The shelves went up to the ceiling and they carried bound volumes with brass spine-plates, chained to the rails by short chain, a foot and a half of slack in each chain, and the slack was for taking a book down and not for taking it away. "The Rolls," Coldspur said, before anyone sat down. "You will hear people call this the ledger. It is the Rolls. Nine volumes for the south ward, one a quarter, four hundred years of it. Everything that has been paid into this ward by every citizen is in there, and everything paid out is in there, and the difference is what we call the standing of the ward." "Can a man see his own line?" Ryam asked. A woman at the end of the table, grey-haired, with the cuffs of a senior clerk, made a sound that might have been a cough. "You can see it," Coldspur said. "In a season, when the quarter is bound. Not while the quarter is open. An open quarter is a working thing and a working thing gets spoiled by fingers." "Which season?" "The one after the one you're in." Coll, two seats along, wrote something on his knee with a nail. Nobody said anything about the shelves. They were the whole of the room, and they were the whole of the money in the world, and the nine volumes of the south ward sat on the third rail from the floor, which was the rail where the current quarter lived, and the current quarter was open, and nobody in the gallery had seen the inside of it and nobody in the gallery was going to see the inside of it this year. "There is a man in the third gallery who has read every page in these nine volumes," Coldspur said, looking over the heads of eight people at nothing in particular. "He has been here forty-one years. He reads four pages an hour. He will read the rest of them before he dies and he will have read them all about eleven times. That is the office. That is what it costs to keep a city." "Eleven times," the man at the far end of the bench said. "That's a lot of reading." "That is a lot of not being able to say anything about it," said the grey-haired woman. They were seated then, and the examination began, and it was not what Ryam had imagined. Coldspur worked down the table with a brass rule and a chalked card. He asked each prentice to set his band on the block and read the numeral aloud, and he wrote the numeral down, and then he asked them to do five things. He asked them to lift a sack of slate off the floor to the height of the table. He asked them to hold it there while he timed it with a sandglass, and when Ryam held his own the glass had run out and two other men had gone grey and one had sat down on his heels. "Your Hold is a prentice's Hold," Coldspur said. "You will improve it. Hold is the strength you keep, not the strength you can show off. Reach is how far it carries. Load is what you can put up in the air. Read is whether you know what a column of figures means. Speech is whether anybody does what you say when you say it." He tapped the brass rule on the table. "Five things, and the office prices all five. A man with a great Load and no Read is a labourer for life. A man with no Load and a good Speech is a foreman on nothing. Most of you have one of the five and think it is the whole of the instrument. It is not." "And a journeyman?" "A journeyman has two of them working and three more that are honest." He wrote something in a slim book and slid it down the table. Ryam got to it before the man beside him. OPERATION OF MEASURE — one third, being thirteen hundred hours against a birth standing of three thousand nine hundred. Merek was watching him read it. "Sign on the line. The knife is warm and it goes quickly. If you move your arm the cut goes crooked and I have to cut crooked for the rest of your life, so put your elbow flat on the block and look at the shelf." They went one at a time, in order. The first man's band was eleven hundred and his advance cost three hundred and sixty-six and he did not have it, and the pay window advanced it to him against his month's work at an interest of one in twelve, which Ryam learned that day and did not like. Coll was seventh. His cut took two hundred and sixty-six. He came back from the block holding his arm against his chest like a man carrying a broken dish, and his face was white, and when Ryam put a hand on his shoulder Coll shrugged it off. "It doesn't hurt," Coll said. "It hurts later. That's the arrangement." Ryam went last. The block was oak, end grain, scored with a hundred and forty years of old cuts into a surface like the bottom of a loaf. Garren Aylward came from the alcove with the knife on a leather strop. He was a heavy man, fifty or so, with a thumb on his right hand that had bent permanently outward from the pressure of the blade, and he held the knife the way a man holds a pen he has used since childhood. "Flat," Aylward said. Ryam put his elbow on the block. Someone in the room behind him said his mother should be told, and another voice said she should be told it was a good rate. Aylward worked fast. There was a smell like a hot coin and then a smell like a cut green apple, and Ryam's forearm went from nothing to a bright white line to a red one, and he watched the numerals come off the brass in three neat passes. Four thousand. Three. Two. Nine hundred, and then the four zeros went, and then the band said one thousand five hundred and sixty, and Aylward wiped the blade on his apron and put it away before the blood had properly started. "That's the whole trade," Aylward said. "Don't spend it on pride, it doesn't come back at that rate." Then they were let out. Coldspur followed him to the door of the alcove because he had his coat under his arm, which was a thing clerks did when they wanted a second conversation. "Your mother," he said. "She was here with you?" "She came to the window at three in the morning and I did not let her in." "She would have liked to see the price before she saw the cut." "I know." "She is the reason you are here and I am the reason the House is here, and we both know that if she had had six thousand hours to spend she would have spent the sixth hour on the roof, because she is not a woman who spends hours, she is a woman who spends days, and a day is nine hundred and sixty of them whether you can afford them or not." Coldspur put his coat on. "I have been on this desk nineteen years and I have seen two families a year whose children had the arithmetic. Yours is the first one that has come to me with it and a slate and the nerve to hold both at the same time. Do not make me regret that. It is the second of these days since I was twenty-six." "There are four thousand hours of it left in the room," Ryam said. "Yes." "There are four hundred and six names in one building on the Coalstairs who have less than two hundred hours apiece and they have never once asked what the third rail was for." "Half of them have never once asked what a band was for." Coldspur looked at him for a moment. "Both of those are true. Neither of them is what I said." He went out. Coll went down the steps first and stood at the bottom in the rain with his good hand pressed to the cut, and after a while he said, "That was all of it, then." "That was all of it." "My mother's going to see it tomorrow and she's going to work out what it means with her hands and she's going to ask me what I got for it." "Tell her two of the five work." "What did you get?" Ryam looked down the canal toward the flats, where the mine carts were running in the dark with their lamps swinging. "Three of them," he said, and did not tell him which, because he had not worked out yet whether the third was a gift or a handle. ---