Chapter 49: Cogs of the Wall
The Third Office of the Quartermastery was an old granary built against the Wall’s inner face. On the first morning of his work, Steward Vess told Encrid that it was a losing war.
"Not against the forest, my lord." Vess was a round, tired man with ink stains on both hands. He pointed around the room.
There were shelves full of ledgers, piles of unfinished requests, and three clerks who looked like they had not slept in days.
"It’s a war against numbers. This wall eats four hundred tons of grain a month. It burns the timber we have to buy, because the only forest in reach is filled with roamers trying to kill us. Every nail, every arrow and every cabbage crossed the span and comes through this room as a number."
He pressed his fingers into his eyes.
"And most of the time, the numbers are lies. While theft is something we can not avoid, most of the problems are caused by mistakes that pile up, day after day, for years, made by good men counting badly."
Encrid picked up the nearest ledger and read a page.
He read that again and felt something he could only describe as coming home.
"Your Fourth Watch is still receiving food for two hundred and ten men," Encrid said. "But this roster is from last spring."
Vess looked at him.
"The winter oil count also includes the eastern cisterns twice. Someone copied the same subtotal twice, and nobody caught it."
He turned the page.
"And this isn’t one column. Three different clerks have been using the same column for three different things."
The room went silent.
Vess slowly lowered his hands, quite shocked to hear those things. He had expected a snotty brat when they said a noble was being posted to Quartermastery, but it seemed he had gotten someone more capable instead.
"Steward," Encrid said, rolling up his sleeves, "I need better ink, your two fastest clerks, and every roster on this Wall."
And thus began Encrid’s long war against the wrongly noted numbers.
✧ ✧ ✧
It took nine whole days.
Encrid worked almost nonstop.
He started with the rosters because everything else depended on them. If the number of men was wrong, then the food, weapons, water, and other supplies would all be wrong too.
After that, he fixed the supply schedules.
Then he checked the cisterns himself. He walked through the cold and measured them one by one because he didn’t trust a number unless he had seen it with his own eyes.
On the sixth day, he found the record of javelins.
According to the ledgers, there were nine hundred and forty javelins.
They had been counted, signed for, and recorded twice a year for the last four years, and they appeared in three different ledgers.
But they weren’t anywhere on the Wall.
Encrid walked the eleventh mile twice looking for the storage room.
But there was no storage room at all.
He then followed the records back and finally found the answer.
The old storage building had been closed six years ago when one of the bastions was rebuilt. The javelins had been moved somewhere else, but nobody had finished updating the records.
So for six years, the Wall had been counting weapons that no longer had a place to be stored.
Encrid sat on a cold step with three ledgers in his lap.
Nine hundred and forty javelins.
That was enough to matter during a battle.
’Imagine that a captain needs them during an attack and sends someone running to the eleventh-mile store. They would arrive and find nothing there.’
It would be a disaster.
Encrid once realized that the reason the Wall had fallen in the story is not because of the lack of manpower - it was because of countless small reasons like this.
He resolved himself.
He rewrote and corrected the reports.
By the ninth day, he completed the reports and the numbers finally made sense.
Vess read Encrid’s summary twice while standing. Then he sat down, looking genuinely impressed.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-three."
Vess stared at him for a moment.
"You don’t look twenty-three. And judging by this report, you don’t think like one either."
Encrid didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. So he decided not to pay it any mind.
While Encrid wanted to improve the situation with the resources in the Wall, there was something more valuable he had gained by working on those.
They gave him a full picture of the entire Wall because everything appeared in the records.
Every request, shipment, signature.
And through these records, Encrid began to understand how the Wall worked.
There was the Lord Commander of the Wall - someone with supreme authority over everything that happened at the Wall and a terribly huge responsibility of standing watch against the Great Green Forest.
Then there was the Vice-Commander.
And nine watch commanders, each responsible for roughly twenty kilometers of the wall.
Then the tower captains and the stair sergeants.
There were also Lampwrights, who maintained the blue flames and answered to almost no one - because that was their only job. While they answered to none, if the blue flames ever got out, even mistakenly - then their heads would roll - such was the work of Lampwrights.
There were the Drain Watch who patrolled the flooded tunnels beneath the Wall. They used more bandages than any other branch - which told a lot about their work.
Then there was the Far-Watch.
The ones that went beyond the stakes and into the great green - to scout against potential danger before it could hit the wall. There was no need to even mention how dangerous the job was. If it was in the modern world, Encrid would have called it the Suicide Squad.
Surprisingly, they used very little equipment because anyone going that far could only carry what he could run with.
And there was something else that Encrid noticed.
At the bottom of almost every supply list was another group. Their supply records looked more like a list of casualties than a normal request. A group whose priority was at the bottom of all at the Wall.
Encrid looked at it, marked their name, and set the records aside.
- The Gleaners.
Overall, the Wall operated like a massive machine, with each group acting as a cog.
To an outsider, some cogs might seem bigger than others, but for the machine to work, every one of them was just as important.
Encrid found himself wondering who had come up with such an efficient system. Had someone designed it all from the beginning, or was it the result of decades of trial and learning?
Of course, he had no way of knowing.
✦ ✦ ✦