Chapter 80: Lesson Four
The toll at Hemmet Ford took him eleven minutes. Nine of those were reading.
The ford itself was a shallow brown crossing with a plank bridge beside it for foot traffic. There was a queue of four carts. A dog slept under the second one.
The board was nailed beside the collector’s hut and it was thorough in the way of a thing that has been amended for a long time by careful people. Cart with two axles, four coppers. Cart with one, two. Driven stock at a head rate that changed with the season. Foot passenger, one. Pilgrims of the four recognised orders, free. Physicians, free. Children under nine, free.
And near the bottom, in the same hand as the rest:
*Registered subjects in transit — free of toll.*
"Why?" he said.
The collector was a heavy woman with a brazier and a book. "Why what?"
"Why free."
"Because you’re not the one paying." She turned a page. "Everything you cost on a road goes back against the office that holds you. Tolls, ferries, the lot. It’s simpler to write it off here than send eleven coppers up the line and have somebody in Sarrow send eleven back."
"So it’s an efficiency."
"It’s a Wednesday morning and I want my tea." She looked up at him properly for the first time. "You’re pending. Pending pays."
He paid his copper. It was the first money he had spent in Deuna and he spent it on being less than the man beside him.
They came up on the road crew about noon, three miles east of the ford.
Sixteen of them, cutting back a slip where the winter had taken half the verge, and they were working the way people work who are being paid and are not being watched: unhurried, competent, with one man doing nothing at all because he had just done something heavy.
A woman with a tally board came down off the verge to meet them. She was perhaps thirty. She had ink on three fingers and a hat somebody else had owned first.
"Road’s passable. Keep left of the marker."
"Thank you." Mataon looked past her. "Are they paid?"
"Six coppers a day and the midday meal."
"Registered?"
"Eleven of the sixteen." She said it the way a person says a fact they have never been asked to be ashamed of. "It’s good work. There’s a waiting list."
"Where do the six coppers go?"
"Half in the hand." She turned the tally board so he could see. That was the second time in two days that somebody in this country had shown him a document without being made to. "Half against the maintenance line."
He looked at the column. He did not need long.
"What’s the maintenance line at, for a man on this crew?"
"Depends. Forty, fifty silver."
"And he clears three coppers a day against it."
"Three a day."
"That’s four and a half years to clear fifty silver, if nothing is ever added to it."
"Things get added to it," she said. "Boots. The physician. That’s not hidden, it’s all on the sheet, they can ask to see it any day of the month and some of them do."
"Has anybody on this crew ever cleared the line?"
She started to answer, and did not.
He watched her get to the end of eleven years of arithmetic in about four seconds, standing in a road, holding a board, and he was not glad about it. He had been on the wrong end of that sensation himself and he remembered exactly how the ground felt.
"There’d be a form," she said at last. "For if they did."
"Is there?"
"I don’t know. I’ve never had to look for it."
[Feat recognised — the sum that does not close]
[INT +1 → 37]
He wrote it down that night. Not the arithmetic. He could hold the arithmetic. The sentence. *I’ve never had to look for it.* Fourth entry on the list.
***
Orvek’s knee went on the third day out of Vellow Cross. He did not mention it. That was how Mataon found out.
He noticed because of the puddles. Orvek had started going round them.
"How long?"
Orvek shook his head.
"That isn’t an answer, it’s a preference. How long?"
Orvek stopped walking. He shifted his weight off the leg, which he had been careful not to do in front of anybody for two days, and got the slate out of his coat.
*Two days.*
"There is a post house nine miles behind us where you could have slept indoors on a bed for nothing."
Orvek wrote, and rubbed it out before turning it round, and wrote again. He almost never did that.
*If I take the bed I have to be the kind of man the bed was written for.*
"You are that man. Legally, this morning, at a counter."
*Yes.*
Mataon stood in the road and made himself say the true thing rather than the useful one.
"I think you’re wrong," he said. "I think a warm room in Ravenmark is a warm room, and refusing it doesn’t cost them a copper and it costs you a knee, and in nine days I need you able to stand in a hall for six hours. That’s my honest position. I’m going to say it once and then I’m going to stop, because it’s your knee and your name."
Orvek listened to the whole thing without moving.
Then he wrote: *Say it again in five days.*
"I will."
*Good.* He wiped the slate. *Do not say it tomorrow.*
Barni, from somewhere near the horse: "He got you a delay and you thanked him for it."
"I noticed."
"Just so long as you noticed."
They did nine miles that afternoon instead of fourteen. Nobody said anything about the difference and Mataon adjusted the map at the fire without comment.
***
The school was at Anwell, two days further on. The door stood open because it was warmer outside than in. Barni stopped at the gate and sat down in the grass, and Orvek went on ahead to find water.
He heard them from the lane. Twenty or so children, chanting the way children chant, half of them a beat behind and one of them deliberately.
*The first reason is debt unpaid, the second is injury unmade good, the third is sentence in place of the rope, and the fourth is inheritance of the same.*
He stopped walking. He put his pack down in the lane and stood there and listened to it twice more.
The teacher was about fifty, with a shawl and chalk dust to the elbow, and she went through it patiently four times until the beat came together, and then she asked them what the fourth one meant, and a boy said it meant if your mother was, you are, and she said yes, that was exactly what it meant, and did not soften it.
Then a girl at the back put her hand up.
"Miss. On the third one. If somebody was sentenced instead of hanged, and then the sentence is over, does the fourth one still work?"
The room went the particular kind of quiet that means the other children want to know too and would not have asked.
The teacher put the chalk down.
"That’s a very good question and I don’t know the answer."
"Oh."
"No, don’t say oh." She picked the chalk back up and went to the side of the board, where there was a column of other things in other handwritings, some of them months old by the look of the smudging. "This is where the questions I can’t answer go. I’m going to write yours here with your name on it, and on the first market day I’m going to the clerk at Sarrow and I’m going to ask him, and whatever he says I’ll come back and tell you, even if it’s a thing you won’t like."
She wrote it out. Then she wrote *Wen* beside it, and underlined the name once, and stood back and checked that the girl at the back could read it from there.
Mataon stood in the lane with his hand on the gatepost.
Kess kept a column at the back of the second book for the same reason and had invented it herself at nine years old, and there was a woman in Deuna in a cold room who had been doing it for longer than Kess had been alive, and was teaching twenty children that the law that owned four of them could be asked a question.
"You’ve gone white," Barni said.
"Yes."
"Say it."
"She’s good at her job." His hand was still on the gatepost and he made himself take it off. "That’s it. That’s the whole thing. She is good at her job, and her job includes lesson four, and she teaches the question and the answer with the same voice because both of them are true."
"And?"
"And if I win, she keeps her job." He started walking. "I’d been assuming there was a version of winning where somebody like that loses something. There isn’t. She just teaches three reasons instead of four and goes home the same way."
Barni trotted a few paces to catch up.
"That’s the first useful thing you’ve said since the border."
"It doesn’t feel useful."
"No," Barni agreed. "It feels like losing an enemy. Get used to that. You’re going to lose a great many of them before this is finished, and every single one is going to feel like being robbed."
[Deunan road — 5 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 172]
[Level 31 — held]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 29 · INT 37 · PER 37 · WIL 40]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 131]
[Appearance lapses: 54 days]
[Distance to Sarrow: six days if the roads hold]
[List of budgeted kindnesses: 4 entries]
They slept in a barn that night with the owner’s permission. It cost the man nothing and it was not written down anywhere. Mataon lay awake a while trying to decide whether that one belonged on the list.
He decided it did not. Then he decided he was not sure. Then he wrote it down with a question mark beside it. That was probably the most honest thing he had done all