第2章 The Cutter's Bench

The next morning Avelin woke in the upper room of the house on Vail Street with the band reading 1174 and the morning light cutting a strip across the floor in the place where the shutter was half closed, and she lay with her eyes open for the length of time it takes a kettle to boil, which she could measure with her Hold even though her standing would not move for it. Nyall Hallowfen knocked at six. Nyall knocked at six every morning of the year and if the door did not answer in nine strikes she opened it anyway, which meant that Avelin had nine strikes in which to sit up, put her feet on the floor, and be the person someone was knocking for. "You are up," Nyall said, from the door. She did not come in. "I am up." "Then I am leaving the bread and the coal and you do not have to thank me for either." "I am not thanking you." "I can tell, because you have not moved off the bed." Nyall Hallowfen had been next door on Vail Street for nineteen years and had a husband who died in the winter of the sixty-first year and three children who went away in that order and stayed away, and she had come next to Avelin's door in the seventh year of the Overdrawn and she had never once, in the whole time she had been there, asked Avelin what was on her arm. Avelin got up. She rolled the cuff to look at the band, and the brass was the colour of the morning, and she rolled it back, and she went to the window and she opened the shutter and she let in the whole street. Trenn came up the stairs at half past eight, which was late, and Trenn did not come up late often, and Trenn was thirty-one years old and she had the read of a journeyman and she was employed by the Draymoor Foundry in the capacity of a check-walker and she came up the stairs carrying her lunch box and her reading spectacles and the particular set of her shoulders that said she had been in an argument with someone who worked for the foundry. "Good morning," Trenn said. "Your father was in the Yard." "Was he." "He is in the Yard every day." "Then I do not need to know the reason he is there." They ate porridge at the table with the morning light across the floor and Nyall passed down the stair with the coal and Avelin watched her go because she had decided, at some point in the last hour, that she would pay attention to the way other people moved when they were not doing anything that required paying. "Mother," Trenn said. "I need something from you." "Ask it." "I need to know if you can hold the read of the new foundry ledger for a night. It is a journeyman book, and the check-walk is failing, and they have asked the House for a master, and I thought you." "I thought you would think it." "You are the only one they would accept." "Tell them no." "They will not accept no. They will accept it in writing." Avelin took her porridge in both hands and turned it, which is what she did when she needed a minute and she could not spend one. "I would have a read on a hundred and forty clerks in a night," she said. "I would know their names and their errors and their handwriting and where they sat and when they were ill. Do you want that for a foundry ledger?" Trenn set her spoon down. "No," she said. "And do you know why you do not want it?" "Because you would spend two hundred Hours." "And?" "And then you would have to go into Merric Mabry's room and he would tell you the new number and the new date." Trenn picked the spoon up again. "And then I would know the new date." "Then stop asking me things," Avelin said, "and the date will not move." "My mother." "Say it." "You are counting me into it. I am not a number. I am your daughter, and I have my own band, and my own clerk, and my own life, and if you want me to be a number you can ask, and I will tell you no." "That is the first no you have ever given me that I did not arrange." "Good." Outside the window the long street was taking its own morning, and a cart was going up toward the Yard and someone was cutting wood at the third door, and Avelin Cindermill sat at the table with her daughter and turned her porridge and thought about the difference between a life and a column, and she could not find it. At ten she walked to the Yard, because the ledger of the foundry was to be delivered at ten whether or not she would take it, and the clerk of the foundry, a man named Ostre, met her at the gate with the book under one arm and a folded paper in the other hand. "Warden Cindermill." "The ledger is a refusal, Ostre." "It is a payment. It is eleven hundred and ninety Hours. It is one night of your Read, and the House takes it, and the foundry is paid, and the check-walk closes, and there are no more errors in the book, and there will be none for two years." "And my standing?" "Unchanged. The House has ruled it unchanged." "The House has ruled many things." "It has ruled this." He put the folded paper on her arm, where the band was, and let it fall. "The minute of the ruling is here. Signed by the warden of the rolls. You may read it." Avelin read it. She read it in the time it takes to read it, and the ruling said that the standing of Avelin Cindermill, warden of the Hourhouse at Draymoor, was not to be revised on account of the exercise of the attributes of rank, and that such exercise was a benefit conferred by the House and was not a withdrawal, and that the standing was to be recorded as it stood at the last revision and would be recorded so until the next revision or the exhaustion, whichever came first. "There is a next line," she said. "There is." "Read it." He would not read it. He had read it a hundred times and it was not his to say aloud. Avelin read the next line, and the next line said that in the event of exhaustion the House would record the standing as exhausted at the hour of exhaustion and would make no other record, and would recover nothing, and would owe nothing. "Eleven hundred and ninety Hours," she said. "One night." "One night." "And the standing does not move." "The standing does not move." She took the book from his arm. She held it against her ribs, and it weighed what a hundred and forty clerks weigh when they are all in one room and all of them are lying about their day, and she knew what was in the book already, because she had the Read, and she could have the whole of it in the time it takes to open the cover, and to have it would be to have paid eleven hundred and ninety Hours that the House would not take. She gave the book back to Ostre. "I have refused," she said. "You have refused a ruling of the House." "I have refused a payment." "Those are the same thing." "Tell the foundry that the check-walk will fail." "They will tell them. And the foundry will send the next request to the warden of the rolls." "Then they will pay his standing instead." "He is nearly exhausted already." Avelin walked down the long street with her hands empty and her band reading 1174 and the morning behind her, and she did not know yet what she had chosen, but she knew that she had chosen it, and that the choosing was the second measure moving, and that Mabry's card had a second half and she had already written on it. ---