Chapter 81: The Queue
Sarrow had a smell, and the smell was ink and wet wool and somebody frying onions two streets over.
They came in from the west on the eleventh with the market already breaking up. It was a town of maybe four thousand, built along a river somebody had straightened at some point. The office was not on a hill. It was not fortified and it did not announce itself. It was the third building on the square, between a bank and a place that sold hats.
There was a queue.
That was the part he had not been able to build in his head.
He stood across the square and looked at it for a long time. Forty or fifty people, in the cold, with the patience of people who have queued here before and expect to queue here again.
Somebody had put out a bench. A woman was selling hot barley from a pot at the end of the line, and doing well.
"You’re going to say it," Barni said.
"There’s a bench."
"Yes."
"Somebody looked at this queue and thought, those people are standing too long, and had a bench made." He watched a man shift a child from one hip to the other. "That’s a decision. Somebody signed for that bench."
***
He queued. It took two hours and forty minutes and he learned more in it than in six days of road.
The office had four counters.
Three did ordinary work. Transfers, deaths, a dispute about a boundary hedge that had been running for years and that both parties seemed to enjoy. The fourth was the register.
Nobody at the fourth counter was crying. He had expected crying.
What happened at the fourth counter was that a clerk called a name. A person came forward. There was a conversation of about twenty minutes in an ordinary voice, and then the person went away, and the next name was called.
The woman ahead of him in the queue was perhaps sixty, in good boots, with a folded paper she kept checking and putting back.
"First time?" she asked him.
"Yes."
"Don’t stand up straight the whole way through, you’ll lock your back." She said it the way you tell a stranger about a slippery step. "And take the sit-down when they offer it. They have to offer it. People don’t take it because they think it looks like giving in, and then they’re on their feet ninety minutes."
"Why are you here?"
"Second reason." She checked the paper again. "My husband’s cart went over a man’s foot in Frostmere. The foot didn’t come right. The compensation was set at eleven silver and I’ve paid four."
"And the other seven?"
"The other seven is why I’m in this queue."
He did not know what his face did but she saw it.
"Oh, don’t," she said, not unkindly. "It’s eleven silver. I’d rather owe eleven silver than have a man limping and nobody owing anything at all. That’s the trade. I knew the trade when I married a carter."
"And when it’s registered?"
"Then the office holds it instead of him, and it comes off my work, and one day it’s done." She put the paper away for the last time. "The man with the foot is a nuisance and I don’t like him. But he can’t chase me for it any more and I can’t be ruined by him in a bad month. That’s not nothing."
Mataon thought about the maintenance line and the four and a half years and did not say a word about it, and afterwards he was not sure whether that had been restraint or cowardice.
Her name was called at the fourth counter and he watched the whole thing from six feet away.
The clerk was young, maybe twenty-five, and he was careful. He read her the second reason. He read her the sum.
He asked her twice whether the sum was disputed. He told her that if it was disputed the registration stopped there and went to a hearing, and that a hearing was free, and that she could ask for one today or any day in the next thirty.
She said it was not disputed.
He wrote it down that she had been asked twice.
Then he told her what changed: the debt moved from the injured man’s hands to the office’s. Her work would be assessed. Half in hand, half against the line. She kept her house. She kept her name. Her husband was not registered and would not be, because the cart had been in her name.
"And the fourth reason?" she asked.
"Yes," the clerk said. "I’m required to tell you. Any child born to you while the classification stands inherits it."
"I’m sixty-one."
"I’m still required to tell you."
"I know you are." She almost smiled. "You said it like a man saying it, not like a man reading it. That’s something."
She signed. He gave her a copy without her asking. She thanked him, and he thanked her, and she came back past Mataon and said, "Take the sit-down," and went out into the square to buy barley.
The teacher from Anwell was four places behind him.
He had not seen her come in.
She had the shawl and a satchel and a folded slip of paper with a child’s handwriting copied onto it in an adult hand. When she got to the third counter she read the question out exactly as Wen had asked it.
*If somebody was sentenced instead of hanged, and then the sentence is over, does the fourth reason still work?*
The clerk at the third counter did not send her away, and did not guess, and did not tell her it was not his department. He went and got a book.
It took him eleven minutes.
"Yes," he said. "It still works."
"Explain it to me so I can explain it to a nine-year-old."
"The fourth reason attaches to the classification, not to the cause." He turned the book round for her, which was the third time. "The sentence is why the classification was made. Serving it ends the sentence. It does not end the classification, because the classification was never the punishment. It’s what happens instead of the punishment. So the sentence finishes and the classification carries on, and it carries on to the children, and that’s the law and I’ve checked it twice."
"Is that fair?"
"That isn’t a question I’m able to answer at this counter."
"Is it a question you’re able to answer in the street?"
The clerk looked at her for a moment.
"No," he said. "Because I’d have to say it out loud, and then I’d have said it, and I have four children."
She wrote his answer down word for word, including that last part, and she thanked him, and she went out.
Mataon watched her go.
She was going to tell a nine-year-old the truth on market day. She was not going to tell her the part about the four children. She was going to remember that for the rest of her life.
***
He did not intervene.
He had gone through it four separate times in the queue, and every time it came out the same. He was pending. A pending man has no standing, and a man with no standing who interrupts a registration is not an objector, he is an incident, and an incident is written up by the office as evidence that the whole business was necessary.
Worse: the widow had a remedy. Thirty days to demand a free hearing. That remedy belonged to her and it was worth more than his interruption.
If he had opened his mouth the clerk would have had to record that a foreign pending subject had disturbed the counter. She would have gone away with an incident attached to her name instead of a copy of her own document.
He said all of that to Barni on the step afterwards, flatly, in order.
"You’ve argued yourself out of it very well," Barni said.
"Yes."
"Do you believe it?"
"I’ve checked it four times and it holds every time." He rubbed his eyes. "And I’d have given a year of my life to be the kind of idiot who did it anyway, and I want that written somewhere."
"It is," said Barni. "You just said it out loud in front of me, and I’ve got a very long memory."
[Sarrow — 11 Ravenmark, 334 A.Z. — Day 178]
[Presentation lodged. Examination set for the thirteenth.]
[Level 31 — held]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 29 · INT 37 · PER 37 · WIL 40]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 137]
[Appearance lapses: 48 days — satisfied on presentation, subject to examination]
[List of budgeted kindnesses: 7 entries. Latest: the bench.]
He handed his own name in at the fourth counter at twenty past four, and the young clerk found the pending line, and read the seven characters of the originating office, and went very still for about a second and a half.
He wrote out a slip and passed it across.
"Examination, the thirteenth, at eight. Bring nothing. You may bring a person but they may not speak."
"What’s an examination?"
The clerk was already reaching for the next slip. He stopped.
"Nobody’s ever asked me that," he said.
"I’m asking."
"Then I’d rather you heard it properly on the day, from the officer, in the room." He wrote something in the margin of his own book, and Mataon could not see what. "It’s not a bad thing. I want to say that. It’s the most careful thing this office does."
"That isn’t an answer."
"No," the clerk agreed. "It’s the thirteenth, at eight."