Chapter 94: Half in Hand
He took work on the eighteenth because he had twenty-four days to wait and no money, and because he wanted to see a sheet.
The crew was cutting drainage on the Sarrow flats and they took him on at six coppers and the midday meal, and the ganger looked at his hands for about a second and a half before deciding not to say anything about them.
"Registered?"
"Yes."
"Then it’s three in the hand and three against. You know that."
"I know that."
"Some of them don’t," said the ganger. "It’s not hidden. It’s just that nobody reads the board."
***
The work was worse than he had expected and he had expected it to be bad.
It was the twelfth day before his hands stopped opening in the mornings.
By then the whole crew knew who he was. A man with a two-thousand-silver line on a six-copper crew is the most interesting thing that has happened to a drainage gang in years.
They were not unkind about it. They were curious, and then they were bored of being curious, and then they were just people he worked with.
There were nine of them registered out of nineteen. Two first reason. Five second. One third.
And one fourth. He was twenty-six, he had been born into it, he had never been anything else, and his name was Tal.
"You didn’t do anything," Mataon said, on about the fifteenth day.
"No."
"Does that get said to you often?"
"About twice a year somebody says it like they’ve thought of it." Tal was not annoyed. "It’s all right. It’s a true thing and people want to say a true thing."
"What’s the useful thing to say instead?"
Tal thought about that while he shifted a load.
"Nobody’s ever asked me that." He put the barrow down. "The useful thing is to ask what my line’s at. Because everybody assumes it’s the same as everyone else’s and it isn’t, and mine’s got fifty-one years of somebody else’s boots on it, and I’d quite like one person in this country to know that."
"What’s it at?"
"Ninety-four silver and six," said Tal. "You can ask me again in the summer and it’ll be higher."
He asked for his sheet at the end of the first month and the clerk who kept the crew book gave it to him without comment, because it was the ordinary thing and because about four men in nineteen asked.
It was one page and it was completely honest.
*Days worked, 22. Rate 6. Gross 132 coppers. Paid in hand 66. Applied to maintenance 66.*
*Additions this period: boots issued 14 Frostmere, 8 coppers. Physician not attended.*
*Balance: 2,114 silver 8.*
He looked at it for a while.
Two thousand one hundred and fifteen, less sixty-six coppers, plus eight for boots.
A month of the hardest physical work of his life, and the number had gone down by fifty-eight coppers. There were a hundred coppers in a silver. The boots were real and he had needed them.
"You’re doing it," Tal said, over his shoulder.
"Doing what?"
"The sum where you work out how long." Tal did not look at the sheet, because you did not. "Everybody does it in the first month and then they stop."
"How long did it take you to stop?"
"I haven’t," said Tal. "I just do it less."
The year turned on the thirty-first of Frostmere and Sarrow had bonfires for it. That surprised him. He had somehow decided that a country like this would not.
Orvek got drunk for the first time in eighteen months. He wrote four things on the slate and rubbed out three of them.
The one he left up said *I have not been warm at a fire in a square since I was thirty-one.*
Then he fell asleep sitting up with his back against a wall, and Barni lay on his feet.
The widow from the queue found Mataon at the second bonfire and gave him a piece of cake.
"I heard about your sheet," she said.
"Everybody’s heard about my sheet."
"Everybody’s heard about the letter, mostly." She was steadier than he expected. "Mine came back on the twenty-second. Eleven silver, four hundred and something days on a laundry rate, and the man with the foot walks past my gate twice a week and doesn’t look at me and I’ve stopped minding."
"Are you all right?"
"I’m sixty-one and I’ve got my house." She ate her own cake. "You’re the one who ought to be asked that, and I notice nobody’s asking, so I am."
He thought about lying and did not.
"No," he said. "Not particularly."
"Good," said the widow. "That’s the right answer and I’d have thought less of you for the other one. Eat the cake."
Ilma Serreth came out to the flats on the ninth of Sylphenia, in her office coat, in mud. It cost her a pair of shoes.
He had not known her name until she gave it. Eleven weeks of *the supervisor*.
"You’ve been avoiding me," she said.
"I’ve been in a ditch."
"You’ve been in a ditch four hundred yards from a road I use twice a week, and you haven’t once come into my office. You came in three times in the first fortnight." She scraped her heel on a stone. "So you want something from me and you’ve decided not to ask. I’d rather have the question than the manners."
Mataon put the spade down.
"All right," he said. "I can’t raise the other forty-one. A subject may dispute the quantum of his own assessment and nobody else’s, and there’s no route from where I stand to where they are, and I’ve read every standing order in that building twice and there isn’t one."
"I know. I looked in Frostmere."
"You looked."
"Of course I looked," said Serreth. "Go on."
"But a district office may, on its own motion, review the schedule practice of an office of record where an error of a conceded class has been established." He said it flatly. "Ground one. A deceased person carried as a living claim, conceded in writing, in that office’s own hand, on the sixteenth of Frostmere. That’s an error of a class, and it’s been established, and I can’t move on it and you can."
Ilma Serreth stood in the mud on the Sarrow flats and did not say anything for a good while.
"Say the cost," she said eventually. "You’ll have worked it out. You work everything out."
"I’ve worked out some of it. I’d rather you said it."
"Then I’ll say it." She looked out at the drainage cut. "A review on own motion is not a small paper. It goes up with my name on it and it stays up with my name on it. I’m forty-four. I’ve been nine years at Sarrow and I’d expect a district in four or five, and district officers are appointed by people who read the roll, and there is no version of this where I am ever appointed to anything again."
"Yes."
"And I’ve a mother at Ardenby who I moved to be near, and a district would have been the only way I ever got a house with more than two rooms." She said it without any self-pity at all. "That’s the cost. You wanted it said. It’s said."
"I’m not going to ask you for it."
"You’ve just asked me for it."
"I’ve told you it exists," Mataon said. "There’s a difference and I’ve thought about that difference for eleven days and it’s the only clean thing I’ve got left. If I ask you, you’ll be a woman who was asked. If I tell you, you’re a woman who knows."
Serreth turned round.
"That’s the most Deunan thing anybody’s ever said to me," she said, "and you’ve been in this country for four months, and I would very much like to know what that means about my country."
"Nothing good."
"No." She scraped the other shoe. "How long have I got?"
"The query answer lands on the fifteenth. After that I’ve got nothing running and nothing to hold him with, and if I file a second query it’s about me again and it starts another sixty days."
"So six days."
"So six days."
"Then I’ll tell you on the fifteenth," said Ilma Serreth, "and I’d like you to not come near me until then, and I’d like you to understand that I am going to spend those six days trying to find a reason not to do it, and that if I find one I will take it."
[The Sarrow flats — 18 Frostmere 334 to 9 Sylphenia 335 — Days 218 to 236]
[Employment: drainage crew, Sarrow flats. Six coppers a day and the midday meal. Half in hand, half against the line.]
[Month one: 22 days worked. 66 coppers applied. Boots, 8 coppers, added. Net movement: 58 coppers.]
[Balance: 2,114 silver 8.]
[Crew: nineteen men, nine registered — two first reason, five second, one third, ONE FOURTH.]
[Tal — born into it, twenty-six years old, line at 94 silver 6, rising.]
[Route identified: a district office may, on its own motion, review the schedule practice of an office of record where an error of a conceded class has been established. Ground one is established.]
[Mataon cannot move on it. Ilma Serreth can. Told, not asked.]
[Level 35 → Level 36]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: a month of ordinary labour under a schedule he had only ever read]
[STR +1 · END +1 · INT +1]
[STR 22 · AGI 19 · END 31 · INT 41 · PER 41 · WIL 47]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 195]
[Query SQ-334-Sarrow-11 — day 54 of 60]
***
On the fourteenth of Sylphenia, the day before, he worked a full shift because Tal told him that stopping made it worse.
They cut two hundred yards of drain and it rained at noon and stopped.
At the end of it Mataon sat on the bank with his hands on his knees and did the sum properly, for the first time since the first month, because it was the last day that mattered and he had wanted to know.
Two years, to the day, since a white room and two voices from the same place.
Six coppers a day. Three against.
A hundred and ninety-two years, less two months.
"Say something," Barni said.
"I’m forty-six coppers down the line," said Mataon. "And there’s a man of twenty-six on this crew whose grandmother did something in a bad year. And tomorrow a letter arrives at a counter. And I’ve got no idea at all whether any of it is worth anything, and I want that written down too."
"It is," said Barni. "You’ve said it out loud in front of me. I’ve told you before what I am."