第6章 Clay and Wax

The arcade behind the cattle market was a place of small trades and quiet people, full after dark of men who had reason to be somewhere the watch did not walk. Faustilla went alone, as she had been told, wearing her plainest cloak and carrying nothing but a lamp and her tablet. She found the stair Granius had described, a flight of worn steps descending between two walls to a door that indeed opened on nothing, a bricked-up doorway with a little dry space before it where a man could stand out of the wind. Granius was already there. He had set his lamp on the ground between his feet, and by its light she saw that he had brought a bundle and that the bundle was a codex, small, of thin boards waxed on the inner faces, the kind a clerk carries when he means to be able to close a book and put it under his arm. "You came," he said. "You gave me a reason to." She sat on the step above him, not beside him, so that she could see the stair and he could not see behind her. "Tell me the second part." Granius opened the codex on his knees. The wax was covered in figures, close and orderly, columns of them, with dates down the left side and, at the foot of each column, a small mark like a lopsided cross. "This is the season," he said. "Every delivery that has come to the Ash Wharf since the spring. Here, the weight as it should be, according to the tally. Here, the weight as it was written into the office's book. And here"—he put his finger on the right column—"the difference, which is one part in twenty, every time." "Who makes the difference?" "That is the cleverness. No one makes the difference. The difference makes itself, because the counterweight is heavy. The weigher reads the beam honestly. The tally is honest. The copy into the office book is honest. The fraud is in the iron, and iron does not testify." He turned the codex to another page. "And then there is this." The page was covered not in figures but in drawings: little circles, each with a mark inside, in two sizes. "Tokens," Faustilla said. "Tokens. Every lot of grain gets a clay token sealed to the mouth of its sack, so that when it reaches the granary the granary men can see it is the same lot and the same weight. One lot, one token." He pointed to the larger circles. "These are the tokens that were made. These"—the smaller circles—"are the tokens that were used. There are nine hundred more tokens than there were lots." "Gods." "Someone is claiming grain twice. Once when it arrives, with a true token, and once again, later, with a token made from the same clay and pressed with a stamp that is nearly the true stamp. Nearly. The clay is wrong; it comes from a pit upriver, and it has grit in it that the wharf's clay does not have. And the stamp is a hair shallow on the left." He closed the codex. "I have known this since the fourth month. I have said nothing because a clerk who says things to the grain office is a clerk looking for a new master, and the only master hiring is Vibidius." Faustilla held out her hand. He hesitated, then gave her the codex. "Why me?" she said. "Because you have a patron," Granius said. "Because a complaint from a senator's household reaches a magistrate's ear, and a complaint from a freedman clerk at a wharf does not reach anyone at all. I have used you, and I am not going to pretend I have not. But I have also given you everything I have, and if you carry this to the right man and he moves on it, I will testify to the books, and I will not run." She looked at him for a long moment. He was not much older than thirty, thin, with the particular pallor of men who work by lamplight, and there was fear in him and something under the fear that was not quite cunning and not quite shame. "There is a name you did not write in the street," she said. "Whose?" Granius looked at the bricked-up door, and at the dark beyond the lamp, as if the name might be standing there. "The order for the new counterweight was stamped with the signet of the office of the grain prefect," he said. "Not a copy of it. The signet itself. Only three men can press that signet, and two of them were away from the city when it was pressed. The third is the deputy of the prefect, who signs for the dole." The lamp guttered. Faustilla felt the cold of the stone come up through her cloak and understood, in that moment, how far down the thing ran, past Vibidius, past the weighers, into the very office that was supposed to weigh the city's bread. "Then we cannot take it to the office," she said. "No," said Granius. "We cannot." They sat for a while without speaking, and then he did a thing that surprised her: he reached into his tunic and took out a small clay token, one of the false ones, and pressed it into her hand. "Take it," he said. "A thing is better than a story. Whatever happens to me, you will have this." She put the token into the hem of her cloak and stood, and he stood with her, and as they turned to go up the stair they both heard it at the same time: a sound above them, at the head of the steps, where a stone had been dislodged and had rolled, and then the particular silence of someone standing very still and waiting to be sure he was not seen. By the time they reached the street, whoever it had been was gone, and the market was empty, and the only light was the lamp of the watch going slowly home. ---