第20章 The Second Set of Tablets

The guild's roll was kept in a small chest behind the bench in the hall of the Anchor, and Faustilla sat with it in the mornings now, in the clean hour before the wharves woke, and wrote the names of the living and the dead. It was a great deal of names. A guild roll is a book of the city's poor, entered man by man, with the month of each man's joining and the state of his health and the small coin he paid and the woman or child who would claim his burial if he died at his work. There were three hundred and eleven names in the roll, and Faustilla knew the hand that had written most of them, because it was hers, and she wrote slowly, because a name entered wrong is a man buried wrong, and the poor have few rights but the roll is one of them. On the ninth day after the Kalends, a porter brought her a bundle that had been left at the hall's door in the night, with no name on it and nothing to say where it had come from, wrapped in an old sailcloth and tied with a fisherman's knot. Inside were tablets. Not one. Twelve. They were wax diptychs and triptychs, the kind used in the offices of the great, and their wax was dry with age and some of it had cracked, but the writing on the undamaged leaves was clear, and the hand was the careful, upright hand of a professional clerk, and the subject of the writing was grain. Faustilla took them one by one to the lamp and read them. They were the accounts of the grain supply for the whole city, or a part of it; the reckonings of the office of the grain prefect, copied out by a clerk who had kept a private set, against the day when he might need one. And they showed what Granius had suspected and what Faustilla had begun to fear. The short weight at the Ash Wharf was a small thing beside the rest of it. There were other wharves, other granaries, other contracts, and the losses ran up through the seasons like a crack in a wall, and at the head of each column stood the same mark, the same cipher, the same hand: not Vibidius, and not the deputy, but the name Granius had given her on the slip of wax, which appeared in the tablets again and again, not as a thief, but as the man who authorized. And beneath the last column, on the twelfth tablet, there was a note, small and hurried, in a different hand, the hand of the clerk who had kept the secret copy, and it read: *If these are found after I am gone, let them be given to whoever kept the measure at the Swan Granary. To Faustilla, freedwoman of the Otacilii. She is the only person in this city who understands what a column is.* Faustilla sat with the tablets in the light of the guild's single lamp and read the line three times. She did not know which clerk had written it. She did not know whether he was alive or dead, or why he had chosen her name out of all the names in the city, or how he had known that she would be the one to read it. She knew only that the tablets were the truth of the thing, the whole truth, and that the truth of a thing is a weight, and that a weight can be carried in the open and set on a table where men can see it, and that it cannot be made to be lighter by anyone, once it is seen. She thought of the clerk who had written her name. He had known what a column is. He had known that a column is not a number but a promise: that whoever keeps the column promises the city that a sack is a sack and a measure is a measure, and that the man who breaks that promise breaks it for everyone, and that the people who pay are never the people who break it. Whoever he was, he had known her without ever meeting her, and no one had ever known her that way in her whole life, and the knowing of it was a debt she did not know how to pay. She wrapped the tablets again in the sailcloth and hid them under the floor of the guild hall, and then she sat down with the roll and looked at the three hundred and eleven names, and made a reckoning in her own head that no one in the city would have been able to read. She had spent her whole life in rooms behind the atrium, guarding the accounts of a house that was not hers, and she had learned that behind every account there is a hand, and behind every hand there is a person, and behind every person there is a house, and behind every house there is another house, and the chain of it runs up and up past the point where a woman like her is allowed to climb. The chain ran to the top of the city. She could see it now, the whole length of it, and she had the tablets, and she had the guild, and she had a name. She tied the cord on the roll, and blew out the lamp, and went out into the street, where the wharves were beginning to work and the smoke of a hundred kitchens was rising over the Aventine, and the city went on eating its bread and counting its coins and never once looking up at the hand that turned the scale. There was a house on the Palatine with a name carved over its door, and the tablets had written that name nine times, and Faustilla had copied the name into her own roll in her own hand, and in the morning she meant to begin walking up the hill. ---