第12章 The Standard Vessel

There remained one proof that would settle the whole matter, and it was the one proof that could not be hidden and could not be forged, because it was public and it was official and it stood in the open in the sun. The sealed measure. Every granary and every market in the city kept its standard against which the city's own vessels were checked: a great bronze measure, filled and sealed with a band of official clay and stamped by the office of the grain prefect. Once a month an officer of the office came to test the vessels in use against the standard, and when the test was done the standard was refilled and resealed and set back in its place, honest as the day. The measure in the Swan Granary was one of these. If it was true, then the shallow cups handed to the people at the dole were false, and the whole chain of the fraud could be pulled out of the wall like a loose brick. If it was false—if the office, or someone near the office, had quietly replaced or altered even the standard—then the fraud ran all the way to the top, and the only way to expose it would be to test the granary's standard against the office's own, in front of witnesses, in a place where the test could not be undone. Faustilla could not touch the granary's standard. It stood alone in a clear space by the office door, watched by clerks and by the men of the granary, and no woman with a summons against her could walk up to it and lift it without being stopped. But a porter could move near it, in the ordinary way of carrying, and a medica could stand and watch, and a baker could sell her bread within sight of it, and a retired equestrian could demand, as was his right as an owner of grain in the granary, that the standard be tested in his presence. She spent two days learning the ritual of the test. It was done, she found, on the sixth day before the Ides, by an officer who came from the office with the office's own weights and a written order, and who filled both measures, the office's and the granary's, with the same grain, and struck them level, and weighed the grain of each on the office's beam. If the two weights matched, the standard was true. The officer signed a tablet and the tablet went into the office, and no one in the city ever saw it again. She had watched the last test of the season from across the road, standing among the women who had come to fill their jars at the fountain, and she had marked the small things about it that mattered: the cypress chest in which the office's weights were carried; the two men who carried it; the cart and the driver; the officer and his written order; the fact that the granaries were tested in the order in which they were entered, so that a person who knew the route could know the hour. A public ritual is a public door. It is locked only by the habit of people who have never once thought to try it. She had asked the fountain women what they made of the test, and they had looked at her as though she had asked what they made of the sunrise. The test was for the granary, and the granary was for the dole, and the dole was for them. It had never crossed their minds that the three were separate things that could be set one against another. That was the one advantage she had: she had spent her life in the middle of a system, and a person in the middle of a system can see what it is made of, while a person at the bottom sees only what it hands down. "The whole test is a table with one leg," Faustilla said to Naevia, in the back of the bakery where the oven was warm at midnight and the smell of bread covered the smell of talk. "The man who tests the measure is the man who made it false. We must make the test in a place where other people can see the weights before he does." "And how do you move a crowd of the poor into a granary to watch a test?" Naevia said. "You do not," said Faustilla. "You make the test happen where the crowd already is." The dole was given out three days before the Ides. The standard was tested on the sixth. Between the test and the dole there were three days in which the office's weights must be carried from the office to the granary, and a cart is slow, and the road from the office to the Swan Granary passes the cattle market, where the morning crowd fills the whole street from wall to wall. She laid the plan out for the old equestrian, and then for the men of the Anchor, and then, in a small room by the river, for Albia, who listened and said only that the world had enough wounded already, and that she would bring her satchel and stand where she was told, because if the plan failed there would be broken heads. On the day before the two of them were to put the plan in motion, a message came to Albia's door, in the hand of a house-clerk she did not know: the lady Faustilla is required at the house of Otacilius Blandus, at the second hour, and the patron wishes to speak to her before the matter is closed. "Before the matter is closed," Faustilla repeated. "It is what he wrote," Albia said. Faustilla read the message twice, folded it, and put it in her sleeve, and then she took out the codex and the token and the deposition, and hid all three in the box where Albia kept her instruments, because whatever the patron wanted, she did not mean to walk into that house carrying the only proof in the city of anything at all. ---