63 - "Tell Me First"

The sixth bell went while he was still on the line, and he came down Cinder Row with the grease can in his hand and got to the gate with everybody else who was not going to look and was going to look.

There were about forty of them. There were always about forty of them.

He went along the front rank once, right to left, which is the way you read Accord script and which he had stopped being able to unlearn at fifteen. A woman in a slag apron. The two men who had worked the same bench and still stood the same distance apart that they must have stood for thirty years. A boy of about sixteen with a runner's satchel. His father, four back and to the left, with the tally-board held against his chest in both hands, standing where he had stood at the sixth bell for eight years.

Second from the end of the front rank was the old man from the cooperage.

He was in his own coat with his own buttons done up. He was looking at the gate. His hands were empty.

Kalen stood on the far pavement with a grease can and did not move for a while.

Further along, a woman was holding a bowl where a man could see it and telling him something about a room she had taken. There is a rule about that and the watch does not enforce it. She was not trying to make him take it. She was holding it where he could see it, which is what they all do, and she had probably been doing it since the spring.

Nobody said anything to Kalen, because there was nobody standing next to him, and because in Ashfall you do not say a thing about a man at the gate on the first evening. You say it four days later, in a shop, to somebody else, in the shortest sentence anybody can build. He is at the gate. That is the whole of the language and it was built by people who had to say it four hundred times a year.

Two along from the old man was a boy who was wrong.

He was about fourteen and he was in Rendered clothes: a foundry hand's canvas coat with the shoulder gone out of it, cuffs turned twice, boots too big and laced tight to the top. He was standing in the rank in the way they stand, chin level, hands down, facing the shut gate.

Kalen looked at him for four seconds and then for four more.

What was wrong with him was that he was holding still on purpose, and there is a difference, and it is not a small one. A thing that has stopped is not doing anything at all. A boy at the back of a rank of them with his weight on one foot and his breath going in his nose is doing a great deal of work, and he is doing it for a reason, and he is going to have to stop soon.

The boy's eyes came off the gate for about half a second, went along the pavement, and went back.

At the seventh bell they turned round and went into the burnt end, and the boy went with them at their pace, in the middle of the rank.

Kalen watched him the whole length of the road.

There were four things a boy of fourteen could be doing in a rank of the Rendered at the sixth bell, and three of them were somebody paying him, and Kalen stood on a wet pavement with a grease can and worked through all four the way he works through anything.

He did not follow him. That was a decision and he made it standing still, and he could not afterwards have told anybody what it was made of.

* * *

The standing notice went up on the board at the seventh bell, the way it does, and the same four people were in front of it.

Three of them.

WARD NINE: STANDING NOTICE

Levy assessed ................ 17.8

Assessment of N. Ashgrove in .. 118 days

Kalen took the paper out of his coat.

It had been in there since the yard gate on Tuesday, folded into three against the ward-tag, and he had put his hand on it twice since, once on a mast and once in the shed, and had thought Thursday both times, and had gone on with what he was doing.

It was one page. It was a notice of arrears in the Accord's flat little hand, in the same shape as the one that had come to the house in the spring, with a name at the top and a figure under it and thirty days after that. The thirty days had fallen due on the Tuesday.

The name was Weld, Orrin. Ward Nine. Bonded.

The figure was one thousand and forty.

He read it four times standing at the board with the wind coming down off the burnt end, and there was nothing on it he could have argued with. Forty-one years of a cooperage, and four a day on a balance that had never once been under it, not in a good year, not in the year the works shut, not ever. A settlement date and a shortfall. A shortfall of one thousand and forty is not a Third and it is not a Fourth. It is the last band on the card, and there is no version of that arithmetic where it comes out anywhere else.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Kalen had needed six minutes and a pencil to know that.

He had needed to be told the man's name to know it. He had been told the man's name on Tuesday, at a yard gate, by a man holding it out to him in both hands, and he had put it in his coat with the ward-tag and gone in to talk about a Charter.

He folded it the way it had been folded and put it away, because he kept everything, and went home.

* * *

Nessa had the table set, the good pencil out, and four sheets of paper ruled with the edge of a knife.

"Sit down."

"I am sitting down."

"You are standing there deciding how much of it to tell me, which is the thing we are about to fix." She turned the first sheet round. "Read it."

It was headed TERMS. Under the heading were four numbered lines in her hand, a fifth line with nothing after it, and a place at the bottom for two names.

"Out loud," she said. "How you find out whether a thing is written badly."

"One. Everything gets said to me before it is decided, in full, including the parts you have already worked out an answer for."

"Keep going."

"Two. I keep the books. Both of them. Coin in one and Balance in the other, and you do not put them in the same sentence."

"You do it four times a week," Nessa said. "Why you cannot tell whether you are rich."

"I am not rich."

"That is not the point and you know it is not the point. Read three."

"Three. Once a month I get to say no to a thing and you have to hear the whole of it out before you answer." He looked up. "Four. You do not have to take it."

"Four is the one that makes it a real one." She sat back with her arms folded, which she had got off their mother, and which had worked on him every single time. "A thing you cannot refuse is not an agreement. It is a hand on your arm. I am twelve and I am not asking to run it."

"What is the fifth line for?"

"The fifth line is what I am charging."

Kalen put the paper down on the bread board.

"You are charging me."

"Two a week." She said it the way you read out a delivery docket. "You can afford two a week. I have looked."

"Nessa."

"If I do it free then it is a favour, and a favour is a thing you owe, and I would end up being thanked for it." She had the pencil ready over the fifth line. "I have watched you be thanked. I am not doing it."

He sat there and thought about a woman standing in a yard with a lead box under her arm, saying there is a fee in exactly that voice, and decided not to mention it. There was a version of this evening in which Nessa Ashgrove found out she had said a Sabra Quill sentence, and he was not going to be in the room for it.

"Two a week," he said.

"Two a week. And the first thing I want is the crew book."

"You have got the crew book."

"I have had it since the eleventh bell." She was already pulling it across the table. "Which is how I know you are on four a week and Doss is on six."

"Doss is worth six."

"Doss is worth six." She found the page and turned it round. "You are worth more than four, and you have put yourself at four because you think it looks better to Ferrin. Ferrin can add. It does not look better to Ferrin."

"It is not about how it looks."

"It is entirely about how it looks, which is why it is on a page." She ruled a line through the figure and wrote over the top of it. "Six. All of you. You can be noble on your own money."

He signed it. She signed under it. She wrote the date at the top in Accord script, right to left, and got the third stroke wrong the way she had been getting it wrong for four years, because he had taught it to her wrong when she was eight, and he opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Now," Nessa said. "Line one. What have you not told me."

He took the notice out of his coat and put it on the table and turned it round for her.

She read it the way she reads everything, which is once, fast, from the total upwards.

"One thousand and forty."

"Yes."

"Who is he?"

"He kept the cooperage on the corner of Fetter Street. He came to the board every month for four years and stood in front of it and could not read a word of it." Kalen kept his hands flat. "He is at the gate. I saw him tonight, second from the end of the front rank."

Nessa put the paper down.

"When did he give you this."

"Tuesday. At the yard gate. Two minutes before I went in to Hesper."

"And you read it tonight."

"I read it tonight."

She did not say anything at all for a moment, and the rope-walk stove ticked under the floor the way it does when it is going out.

"Could you have stopped it," she said.

"No. It is a thousand and forty. It has been a thousand and forty for years and nobody in this ward could have moved it in a night."

"Then say the true sentence."

Kalen looked at the table.

"I did not know that on Tuesday," he said. "On Tuesday I had a paper in my hand and a Charter at the counter, and I did not look, and I told a man Thursday because Thursday was cheaper than four minutes."

"That is the true sentence."

"Yes."

"Then write it in the book," his sister said, "because you write everything in the book, and this is a thing that happened, and if you leave it out you will have started keeping two sets."

He wrote it in the book.

Then she pulled the last sheet out from under the bread board, which was where that household kept the things that were going to ruin an evening.

"Now the renewal. It came at the fourth bell and Ferrin brought it up. Gate winch, slag yard barrows, burnt end doors. The same three works you have had all year."

"At the same figure."

"At the same figure. That is page one, and page one is correct."

She turned it over.

"Page four is materials. It used to say at cost."

Kalen took it off her. Pins at four times. Rope at three. Wire at three. Grease at a figure so far out that he read it and then went back up to the head of the column to be certain he had the right line.

"Whose schedule."

"The Sedge yard's."

"They set the schedule for the materials I buy to do the work they pay me for."

"Yes," his sister said. "And they have not reduced anything, and nobody has done a single thing wrong, and every number on that page is correct."

"And it is on page four."

"And the figure you were looking at is on page one."

She turned the fourth sheet round and put her finger on the total.

"This one shuts you in two months."