第10章 The Counterfeit Stone

Merlak was a market town three hours north of Nekhab, and it existed for one reason: the road. Everything that crossed the plateau between the coast and the interior passed through it, which meant that Merlak had always been a place where goods changed hands without too many questions, and where a person could find, on any given day, at least one stall selling things that had been dug up rather than grown. They reached it in the morning, dusty and tired, and Tufan said nothing about the silence in the chimney and Zeyla did not press him, because there is a kind of debt that must be paid in the creditor's own time. She found a room above a bakery, and a bathhouse, and then she went to the market alone, because a woman alone buys nothing and is therefore invisible, and she had learned that too. The antiquities stalls were at the market's southern edge, near the truck park, where the light was bad and the sellers were men who had learned to look past you. Zeyla walked the row once without stopping and then walked it again and stopped at the fourth stall, which displayed the usual assortment: coins, a rusted buckle, three clay lamps, and, propped on a wooden block where it could catch the eye of anyone who knew what they were looking at, a dressed stone about the size of a saddlebag, cut to one measure, its face carrying a column of small, precise characters. She did not allow herself to react. She picked up a coin instead and turned it in the light and asked the price, and while the seller explained the coin's merits she let her eyes rest on the stone the way a person's eyes rest on anything, without hunger. "How much for the carved one?" she said, when the coin conversation had run its course. "That one is old," the seller said. "Very old. A shepherd brought it down from the hills last week." Which meant the seller had bought it from a middleman for almost nothing and knew nothing about it, and which also meant, Zeyla thought, that the consortium had not been here, because the consortium would have taken it and paid. She bought it, because buying was the only way to hold it in good light, and carried it back to the room, and set it on the bed, and took out her rubbings from the three real stones and laid them alongside. And then she sat back and laughed, once, without humor. "It is a forgery," she said. Tufan came and looked over her shoulder. "It looks old." "It looks old because someone buried it in salt for a month. Look here, at the cuts. The groove widens at the top and narrows at the bottom, and it is clean. Iron tools cut clean. The old masons cut with a technique that leaves the groove even all the way down and a slight burr at the base where they lifted the chisel. These letters were cut last year with a chisel of modern steel, and then the edges were rounded with sandpaper, and then the whole thing was packed in wet salt and left in the sun." She ran her thumb across the surface. "It is a good forgery. It would fool a collector. It would not fool a person who has spent her life reading chisels." "But the letters. Are they real?" "That is the interesting part." She bent over the stone again. "The characters are real. The text is one of Sarpel's. But the text is wrong." She read it slowly, tracing each character with the pencil, and when she reached the fourth line her breath caught. "This is the sixth stone. And the sixth stone is supposed to give a distance of one hundred and four. This one says one hundred and four, and then, in the margin, an extra mark." "What mark?" Zeyla did not answer for a moment. She sat with her hands flat on the stone and looked at the small, deliberate scratch in the margin, cut with a different tool, added after the fact, by someone who had not been trying to deceive a collector at all. "That mark is a surveyor's correction," she said. "There is only one kind of person who would forge a Sarpel stone and then correct it. Someone who knows the real text. Someone who has read at least one real stone and is copying from memory." She turned the stone over and examined the back, and found, in the dust that had settled in a seam, a single hair, gray, short, and she set it carefully aside on a piece of paper, because it was worth more than the stone. "Someone is selling counterfeits of the nine," she said. "Not to fool the consortium. To slow them down. To fill their packs with stones that carry the wrong numbers." She looked up at Tufan. "We are not the only ones hunting Sarpel. There is a third party, and they have been doing this for years." That evening they ate at the inn by the truck park, and the innkeeper, a broad woman named Huriye Tapar who ran the place with the same authority she used on her sons, came to their table herself and set down the tea without being asked and then stood there, looking at Zeyla's hands. "You copy the old stones," she said. "I knew a woman who did that. Green notebook. Came through every two years, always alone, always drank her tea standing up, always asked the same question." She folded her arms. "She asked whether anyone had come looking for a marker cut with nine letters in the old script. She asked it for twenty years, and she was never satisfied with the answer, and then one year she stopped coming." Zeyla set down her glass. "What did you tell her?" "I told her the truth. That a man in a white truck had been through asking about the same thing, and that he was paying, and that I had given him nothing but directions to the wrong village." Huriye's expression did not change. "She told me never to write any of it down. She said the ledger keeps itself if you let it, and ink is how you lose it." She turned away, and then turned back. "You have her hands. Do not let her be right about the ledger as well." ---