Burned Bloodline

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Way We Say Numbers

My mother kept the accounts on the second Tuesday of the month in a room that smelled of apples, and she made me sit on a stool beside her from the age of six.

I hated it. I want that on the record too, because the version of this I have carried around for nine years is a warm one and it is not accurate. I hated the stool, I hated the apples, and I hated the way she would stop mid-column and make me say the running figure back to her, and if I said it wrong she would not tell me what it was, she would simply wait.

"A last and four score," my mother would say.

Not eighty-four. Never eighty-four. In the halls of the north you count grain in lasts and scores and you say the last first, because a last is what feeds a hall through a winter and a score is only ever the remainder, and any child of any hall between the ford and the sea is taught that before they are taught to write their own name. The market counts flat. Eighty-four sacks. The river counts flat. Ivo's ledger, downstairs, counts flat.

Halls count in lasts.

I had not thought about it in nine years. I had not needed to. There is no grain in a bone-setter's shop and nobody in the Low Quarter has ever had a last of anything.

I thought about it very hard on the stairs up to the second level, south side, with my hands going cold.

The room was full of the river.

That is the only way I can put it. The light came in low over the water all afternoon and hit the black stone and went brown and gold, and there was a smell of ink and cedar and the fire, and it was, I am sorry to say, the pleasantest room I had been in since I was thirteen years old.

Halla Torr sat with her back to the window, which put her face in shadow and mine in the light. I noticed that. I noticed it and I understood it and there was not one single thing I could do about it.

"Grain," she said. "Start at the top."

The ledger was enormous and beautifully kept. Somebody had ruled every column by hand and the rules were straight enough to have been done with a straightedge and probably had been, and the entries went back — I turned two pages before I could stop myself — eleven years.

Careful. Be dull. Be dull.

I put my finger on the first line, which is something no one who reads well does, and I read.

"Marsh Road. Wheat. Eighty-four sacks."

It came out of me in the flat river country, and it cost me more than anything I have ever said in my life. Somewhere behind my teeth, a six-year-old on a stool in a room that smelled of apples said a last and four score and I put my hand over her mouth and held it there.

Halla said nothing.

I read the next line. And the next.

It took an hour and fourteen minutes, and it was the hardest hour of my life to that point, and nothing happened in it at all.

That is the thing about being tested by somebody like Halla Torr. There is no moment. You are not caught out and you do not triumph. You simply sit in a warm brown room reading numbers to a woman doing embroidery in a chair, and every third or fourth line you make yourself stumble, and every stumble has to be a plausible stumble — you can't fumble a two and read a seven cleanly, you have to be bad at the same things consistently, because being inconsistently bad at reading is the mark of a person pretending to be bad at reading.

I made myself slow on the long numbers. I made myself run the columns with my finger. Twice I lost my place and had to go back, and one of those times I did it on purpose and one of them I did not, and I could not tell you now which was which.

And about forty minutes in, on the fourth page, I found it.

It was in the sundries.

Grain accounts are mostly grain, and then at the foot of each quarter there is a page of everything else, because a house of sixty eats a great deal but it also buys salt and pitch and lamp-oil and needles and horseshoes, and somebody has to write all of it down.

Marsh Road, standing order, quarterly. Physic, dried, sundry. No weight given. Paid: silver wire, four rate.

I read it out in my flat river voice and heard my own voice do it perfectly, and inside my head everything went very quiet and very white.

Four rate. Four times the going price, paid in wire rather than coin, standing, quarterly, no weight given and no goods named. You do not pay four times for salt. You do not pay in wire for lamp-oil. You pay in wire when you do not want a coin with a mint-mark passing through six hands, and you pay four rate when you want a trader to bring you every single one he can find and not sell a scrap of it to anybody else on the river, ever, for any price.

Ganny got it out of the barge brothers in the end. Standing order. Every root that comes down the river, bought at four times the rate, no questions, paid in silver wire.

I turned the page.

It was on the next quarter too. And the one before. I had gone forward and back through eleven years of a hall's housekeeping and the entry began — I checked, twice, in the flat calm way you check a thing when the floor has gone out from under you — two years and one quarter ago.

Two years and one quarter ago, in a room smelling of ink and cedar, a woman with failing eyes had started buying every scrap of greyroot between the ford and the sea, and had written it down in the sundries under physic, because she was doing the household accounts, because she had always done the household accounts, because that is what you do when the thing you are hunting is a person and you intend to take as long as it takes.

"Go on," said Halla Torr.

"Sorry. Lost my place."

"You've done that four times."

"I'm slow."

"You are," she agreed, and went back to her embroidery.

At the foot of the fourth page the column ended, and she said: "Total it."

She held out the pen.

I want you to understand the shape of the next four seconds, because they were four of the most crowded seconds of my life.

There is a way that halls total a column. You add it, and you write the figure at the foot, and then you rule under it — twice. Two lines, close together, the second slightly shorter than the first. It means this figure is closed and a hall's word is on it. My mother did it. My grandmother did it. Every keeper of every hall between the ford and the sea does it and has done it for four hundred years, and I had watched it done on the second Tuesday of every month of my childhood, and my hand had learned it before I was eight.

A shop rules once. Odd rules once, when he remembers, which is not often.

I took the pen.

I added the column, which took me a long time and was not a performance; I have not been quick with figures since I stopped being made to be. I wrote the total at the foot in the round, laborious, slightly backward-leaning hand I had built for myself at fourteen, which is not the hand I was taught.

And I put the nib down and drew a line under it.

And my hand went up and back to the left to draw the second one.

I have never been so close to dying. It was already moving. I felt it go — the whole small trained motion, wrist first, the way you feel your foot go off a kerb — and I stopped it perhaps a quarter-inch into the return, and turned the movement into a scratch of the nib against the page, and made a small noise of annoyance, and said, "Sorry. It's caught. Is there a cloth?"

"Behind you."

I turned round and got the cloth and wiped the nib and my hands did not shake, because they never do; that is the one thing nine years gave me and I would not give it back for anything.

There was a mark on the page. About a quarter-inch of line going the wrong way from the end of a rule.

It is still there. That ledger survived everything that came afterward — the war, the fire on the second level, all of it — and it is in the muniment room at Vaur to this day, and on the fourth page of the third quarter of that year there is a total in a laborious backward-leaning hand with one rule under it and a quarter-inch of a second rule beginning, and I have taken it out and looked at it perhaps a dozen times in my life.

The bells went for the eleventh hour.

Halla put down her embroidery, which I saw then was not embroidery at all but a mending job on a shirt cuff, done small and fine and absolutely even.

Her eyes are going, she had told me. She had threaded a needle for cuff-work in her own shadow while I read.

"That will do," she said.

I closed the ledger. I closed it the way a Low Quarter girl closes a book, which is to say from the wrong side, awkwardly, and I stood up.

"Same time tomorrow."

"Yes."

"Sena."

I stopped at the door.

She had not moved. She was sitting with the river behind her and her hands in her lap, and she was not smiling, and I think that was the only time in the whole of our acquaintance that she did not bother to.

"Do you know what a woman who cannot read well does when you put a hall's ledger in front of her?" she said. "She panics. She goes red, and she hurries, and she makes a great many errors very fast, because she wants the shameful part to be over."

The corridor behind me was black stone and it carried everything.

"You didn't hurry," said Halla Torr. "You slowed down. For an hour and fourteen minutes, you slowed down, which is a thing that only ever happens when a person has decided that being thought stupid is safer than being thought anything else."

I said, "I don't understand."

"No," she said pleasantly. "Ninth bell tomorrow. We'll do the sundries."