第20章 The Stone by the Rail

It stayed on the rail through the whole of the Coldmoot and the woman at the bottom of the stairs came every morning at the light to see it. Nineteen days. On the twelfth of the month Ryam carried his mother down to the door in his own arms because her chest had gone again in the night, and he told her the number and the letter and the eleventh, and she said, "Then it is the eleventh," in the voice of a woman confirming a delivery, and she put her hand on the stone and asked him to read her the name under hers, which was a name he had never heard and which he read out twice. On the eighth morning a journeyman he had loaded slate with in the spring put his own band against the stone to be measured, and left without saying anything at all, which Ryam understood, and which cost him more than anything Verrick had ever said to him. On the twelfth morning the ward clerk of the south desk came down with two men and a paper, and Ryam let them read the stone, and he stood there while they did it, and when the older of the two asked him what he wanted he said, "I want the March list. It is made up on the twenty-eighth of the month and it is posted on the Weighhouse Steps at noon, and I want to be standing here when they post it." The clerk said nothing to that and went away. On the thirteenth the stone was gone. That was Bilbe's doing and she would not tell him how and he did not ask her, and she said only that the stone would be back and that Halberd Jessop was going to know why and that he was not to go to Jessop's room for a week. On the nineteenth the stone came back to the rail with a date cut into it and a number and a letter and a name and a single word under the name, which was NOT WRITTEN, and it had been cut by somebody who did not know what the word meant and who had wanted very much to make it clear that the space had been there. Two hours before midnight on the eleventh of the month he stood on the step outside the counting floor with a borrowed band-knife against his forearm and Merek Coldspur on the other side of the door. "You did not give it back," the senior Reckoner said. "No." "You are going to Overdrawn." "I have eight hundred and forty on me. It costs seven hundred and fifty." "Then you will have ninety on you at the end of the month and you will be at your mother's door on the first." "I know what I will be at." "You know what you will be at." Coldspur put his hand on the rail. "You are going to Overdrawn because you have read two numbers off a book and decided what they mean, and you are going to stand up in a room tomorrow with ninety hours on your arm and speak at a clerk who has been in that building longer than you have been alive, and it will be a room, and there will be two warden's men at the back, and then it will not be a room." "I am aware." "That is not what I have come to tell you." The senior Reckoner took his hand off the rail. "I have come to tell you that if you stand up there tomorrow with ninety hours on your arm, they will not put you in a cell, because a man with ninety hours on his arm is a medical matter and a medical matter is written down, and everything that is written down is a thing you cannot refuse afterwards. You will be taken to the wards and you will be asked a question by a woman with a slate. She will ask you what your band was cut at and when, and she will ask what it was charged, and she will write down what you say, and if you tell her, she will write down that you told her, and she will keep that page, and it will not be in the Rolls." "What are you telling me?" "I am telling you the cost." Coldspur took out a chalk-stub of a book and wrote on it, and gave it to Ryam, and Ryam put it in his coat. "Sixty-one. If you go tomorrow, there are sixty-one south-ward names on the March list, and I know the number because I cut the list on the twenty-eighth of February and I have read it twice and I have not signed it and I am going to sign it in an hour because I am not a fool and I have a wage." "Sixty-one names and one list and one reckoning floor," Ryam said. "You are telling me to hand them sixty-one people and then tell them they can count a fireback on the Weighhouse Steps for a month." "I am telling you what is there," Coldspur said. "Every man who has ever walked into that floor with the truth has walked in alone, and he has been right, and it has been correct, and there has not been one of them in forty years who is still standing there. The city is not run on what is true. The city is run on what is signed and sealed and in the fair copy, and the true has to get in through a door, and there is only one door, and it is four inches wide and it is made out of a single number and a single letter and it does not have a date on it because it has not started." He turned to go and then stopped and turned back, and when he spoke his voice had gone somewhere Ryam had never heard it. "You asked me once what I was in a corridor for," he said. "I did not answer you and I am going to now, because I am forty-three and I will not be in the corridor much longer and there is nobody else left in it to hand it to. I was twenty-six and I did not ask about the hundred and twenty, because if I had asked about the hundred and twenty then in a very short time I would have had to decide what to do about it, and I did not want to decide. I have had nineteen years of not wanting to decide and it has been the best nineteen years of my life. And there is a clause in my own chit at the back of the ledger, in the fourth file on the left, filed under the year I took the desk, and if you ever want to know whether I am a man with a hundred and twenty in him you may go and read it, and I have never had a copy of it, and it will be very interesting to you, and I am telling you where it is because I would rather be told than be asked." He got his hat off the rail and put it on. "And do not thank me," he said. "I have not done anything. I have only told you where the door is, and the door was always there, and every man in this city knows where the door is, and that is the entire difficulty and it has been the entire difficulty for nineteen years, and I have been perfectly happy in it, and it is going to end badly for me, and I would rather it ended on a note that was mine than on a note that was yours." Then he went into the counting floor and shut the door behind him and Ryam stood on the step with a piece of slate in his coat and a number on it and the Coldmoot going white along the weir. Inside, through the stone, he heard the clock at the far end of the counting floor strike midnight, and then he heard a second clock, which was in the south press room and had no business striking midnight at all, and it struck four times instead of once, and he counted the four strokes with his hand on the rail, and understood that it was not a clock in the press room. It was a hammer on a copper block, and it was at the rate of a man cutting a brass band and then cutting it again.