第16章 The Room Above the Market

The room above the market had one door and one window and a guard who changed at the fourth hour, and by the second day Faustilla knew the guard's name, and the name of his mother, and the price of the room he rented near the cattle market, and the fact that he had a brother in the porters' guild of the Anchor. Albia came on the second morning, with her satchel, admitted because a medica is let in anywhere there is a person who might be sick, which is everywhere. She sat on the edge of the cot and took Faustilla's pulse and looked at her eyes and said, for the guard's benefit, that the prisoner was tired and needed rest, and then, quietly, that the city was talking. "How much talking?" "Enough. A hundred men saw the iron tip, and you know how porters talk. They talked at the wharves, they talked at the baths, they talked in the bread queues. By last night the story had reached the Subura, and the Subura tells it better than the wharves. You are the woman who weighed the grain against the office's own weight and found the grain short." "And the office's answer?" "The office says the weight was a mistake in the foundry, and the granary's standard is true, and the thief Granius will be shipped to the mines for stealing the grain he tried to expose. The clerks read it aloud in the market yesterday." She lowered her voice. "There is a boy. The one who set the sacks on the hook and ran to the coast. The men of the Anchor found him in a fishing village and have brought him back, and he will say, if he is asked in front of enough people, that the weigher's foreman told him to stand behind the beam and lean on the frame while the sacks went on, so that the arm would read light. He is eleven years old. He does not know what he did. He knows only that a man gave him a coin for leaning." Menophilus came in the afternoon, in the manner of a brother who has business at the market and has decided to be seen doing it. He stood in the doorway with a basket of fish on his hip, and the guard let him pass because a porter with a basket is invisible in that street, and the two of them spoke in the ordinary voices of people discussing the price of fish. "I have seen the boy," he said. "He is in the porters' lodging, and he will not sleep, and he asks every hour whether he is going to be hanged. He has never been told the truth of anything in his life. He was sold off a farm at seven and hired to the wharf at nine, and no one has ever told him that a thing can be true or false. They have only ever told him that a thing can be done to him or not done to him." "Then someone will have to tell him," Faustilla said. "You will tell him." He set the basket down. "The guild has voted. The seventy-three will come. Carpus says the old equestrian has agreed to make the demand at the granary, and that he has sent to a friend at the office to have a clerk sent down to witness the dole, a clerk he trusts, so that whatever happens there will be a written record in a hand that is not the deputy's." He looked at her then with the small, careful eyes that had known her all his life. "You are going to win, or you are going to hang. I have never once known you to do a thing by halves, sister, and it has cost me every day I have known you, and I would not trade it." "That is the nicest thing you have ever said to me," Faustilla said. "Do not get used to it." Faustilla sat very still, and the plan that had been forming since she stood at the grate took its final shape. "They will ask him in front of enough people," she said. "On the Ides, when the dole is given out, the whole street is a crowd. The people come for the measure. If the boy stands in the doorway of the granary and says what he was paid to do, and if the men of the Anchor stand in the crowd and say what they saw at the cattle market, then the deputy cannot bury it, because it will not be in a court where he can weigh the speakers. It will be in the street where a hundred people can hear the boy and see the iron, and the office's denial will be worth as much as a false token." "It will cost the boy," Albia said. "If he speaks, he is a witness against Vibidius, and Vibidius will know his face." "Then we will put a name to him, and the guild will take him in, and he will be a porter of the Anchor, and the Anchor protects its own." Faustilla said it, and then she said the harder thing. "If he does not speak, the dole stays short, and he grows up in a city where the bread is weighed by men who cannot be named. Which is the better thing for an eleven-year-old boy? I do not know. I am going to ask him." Albia was quiet for a moment. "You will have to get out of this room first," she said. That night the guard who had a brother in the guild turned his back at the fourth hour, and Faustilla walked out through the door that was left unlocked and down the stairs and into the street, and past the granary door where the dole would be given out in the morning, and the dark was full of the ordinary noises of a city at the end of a day: carts, dogs, a woman singing badly in a wineshop, a baby crying somewhere above the Street of the Binders. She slept the few hours before dawn in the loft of the porters' lodging with the rope-scarred Carpus snoring two feet away and the boy who leaned on the beam sitting awake in the corner with his arms around his knees, and she talked to him for a long time before the light came, and when the light came they went down together to the granary door, and waited for the crowd. ---