第15章 Before the Deputy

They brought her to the office of the grain prefect, a building of brick and marble near the river with a portico of six columns, and after the portico, dark corridors, and at the end of the corridors a small room with a table, two clerks, and a man in a plain toga who was the deputy. He was older than she had expected, and he had the soft hands of a man who had not weighed anything himself in twenty years. He did not shout, and he did not threaten. He had the manner of a man who is used to being obeyed and has forgotten, if he ever knew, that there are people who cannot be. "You are the Otacilian freedwoman," he said. "You were charged with theft, and this morning you raised a mob in the street and obstructed the office's business. There is a law for each of those things, and I do not wish to use either, because I am not a cruel man, and because the city does not gain by it." "Then what do you wish?" Faustilla said. "I wish the matter to go away." He put his hands flat on the table. "The weight in that street was a mistake in the foundry, and the foundry has been corrected, and the granary's standard is true. The grain office will issue a statement to that effect. The dole will be given out on the Ides as usual. You will be released, and given a small sum, and you will find work in some other part of the city, and in a month no one will remember that a porter tripped over an iron weight in the cattle market." "And the man who made the foundry's mistake?" "He has been dealt with." "Was his name Granius?" The deputy's eyes did not move. "The thief Granius has confessed to theft, and will be shipped to the mines, which is more mercy than he deserves, and by the time the ship sails the dole will have been given out, and the whole thing will be over." Faustilla sat with her hands in her lap in the little room, and she felt the ground open under everything she had built. They had moved faster than she had. The counterweight would be melted and recast; the standard would be tested and found true, because someone had swapped it in the night; Granius would be gone, and a hundred porters who had seen the iron tip would be told what they had seen until they half believed it, and there was nothing in the world, not a token, not a tablet, not a deposition, that could survive the weight of the office's own denial. On the table, close to the deputy's hand, lay a writing-case with a reed pen and a small bronze seal. It was the signet of the office of the grain prefect, and she knew it as she knew her own hand, because she had seen it pressed into a hundred orders and receipts and one order in particular, the order for a counterweight heavier than it should be. The man in front of her had pressed that signet into the tool of his own crime, and the tool was lying on the table between them like a cup of wine, in the open, because it had never once occurred to him that a woman in his office could read it. She looked at the seal, and then at him, and he did not look at the seal at all, and that was the whole of the difference between them. "I have read the order for the new counterweight," she said, and it was not a question, and she watched his face while she said it. "I know whose signet is on it. I know that the office keeps a register of the orders it presses its signet into. And I know that the register, unlike the weight, cannot be melted and recast, because a register is read by too many people." The deputy's soft hand moved, an inch, toward the writing-case, and then stopped, and he put both hands back flat on the table, and he smiled, a small, tired, practiced smile. "You are cleverer than the boy your patron sent to deal with me," he said. "That is a pity for you. Clever women are the most expensive things in this city, and no one has ever wanted to buy one." And then, because the deputy could not help himself, because men who are used to being obeyed always in the end say one thing too many, he added: "You should have taken the patron's bargain. Vibidius was willing to make good the loss. He is not willing now. Now the loss will have to be found elsewhere, and it will be found in the allowances to the dole. So you have saved nothing, and the poor will eat less bread this winter than they would have if you had written the reconciliation. Think on that." Faustilla looked at him. "I have thought on it," she said. "It is the reason I did not write it." They took her through a side door and put her in a small room above the market, with a guard at the door and a grated window that looked down on the street where the dole was given out. It was not a cell. It was a room for a person who is being kept somewhere without being visibly imprisoned, and the difference between the two is a matter of paperwork and of who is watching. She stood at the grate and looked down at the granary door, where on the next day the dole would be given out to the poor of the Aventine, and she understood that the deputy had told her the truth about one thing: the fraud would not be punished now. It would be buried, and the burial would be paid for out of the dole, and the people below her would eat less this winter because she had refused to sign a lie. Unless, she thought, standing at the grate with her hands on the cold iron, the people below her were told a thing that could not be buried. ---