Pell opened the sacks with a bread knife. She did it the way other people undressed a sleeping child, slowly, with a great deal of care and a murmured commentary that was meant as much for the sack as for the man beside her. She went down the back row of the granary with the knife in one hand and a tin cup in the other, and at each sack she stopped, put the cup down on the sailcloth, slid the blade under the cord, and cut.
“Hush,” she said to the sack, when the grain began to pour. “There, now. There’s a good girl.”
The grain ran out into the cup and down the sides and across the floorboards in a soft brown tide. It smelled of dust and sweetness and something under that, the sharp musty tang of a store that has been left too long without air. Pell caught a handful as it ran, rubbed it between her palms, and held it up to the light from the door. Then she sniffed it, bit a grain between her front teeth, and nodded.
“That’s sound,” she said. “The top of the sack’s sound. The bottom isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the bottom’s the part that’s been sitting on the floor for two hundred years, and the top’s the part that got sat on by the man who put it there.” She tipped the cup and let the grain run back into the sack. “You don’t count a sack by its top, Highness. You count it by its bottom and its middle and its cord, and then you cut it open and look at what you’ve got. Otherwise you’re just being polite.”
Idrin had brought his notebook, and he was writing. He had decided, in the night, that the granary would be counted properly, once and for all, by a method that could be checked by anyone who came after. He had not expected to be taught the method by a cook.
“A sack,” said Pell, “feeds one living body for thirty days. That’s the rule. It’s on the lids, it’s on the door, it’s written on the back of your hand, I expect, if you look. You count the sacks and you divide by thirty and you get your bodies. Simple.”
“And what is a living body?”
“Anything that eats,” said Pell. “Including the Hands, who eat like horses, because the body has to be fed when a trade is worked, and the trades are always working, the whole time, in the walls and the stair and the forge. You feel your trade in your belly, boy. You feel it in the hungry hours. A Hand who’s been on the wall all night wants eight bowls of broth and a loaf before the sun’s up, and if she doesn’t get it, she goes stiff in the knees and forgets what she was doing, and then she’s no good to anyone.” She stood up, slowly, wincing at her back, and wiped her hands on her apron. “So I count the Hands as a sack apiece, each one, every thirty days, and I count the living as a sack apiece, and I keep a bit back for the mice.”
“How many mice?”
“Nobody’s counted the mice,” said Pell. “That’s the trouble with mice.”
Tallow came in at the north door with the minutes under his arm and his pencil behind his ear, and stopped short when he saw the spilled grain and the knife and the open sacks. He looked from the floor to the cook to the prince with the expression of a man who has come to audit a set of accounts and found the auditors already drunk.
“Is this an inventory?” he asked.
“It’s a count,” said Pell.
“Then I’ll need a number.”
“Four hundred sacks,” said Pell, “and forty of them with a wage-tally cut in the stamp, and about thirty that the rats have had their way with. That’s a number. I’d call the usable grain three hundred and seventy, give or take ten, depending on how many of the back row are full of mice, and that’s a range for you, my lad.”
Tallow pursed his lips. He opened his notebook, wrote a line with the charcoal, and then looked up at her with an expression that stopped just short of disapproval.
“That’s a fair figure,” he said. “It’s a little wide. I’d have said three seventy-five to three sixty-five.”
“Then you’d be wrong by five, and I’d be right by ten, and we’d both be standing here in the same mess.”
“I’d be right by five,” said Tallow.
“You’d be right by five in your head and wrong by ten in the sack,” said Pell, cheerfully. “That’s what clerks do. You wouldn’t believe the number of Lessaran magistrates I’ve watched do it, when I was a girl peering through the stalls at the Sallowmere fair, and every one of them so sure of himself he never once put his hand in the grain.” She turned to Idrin. “Now, that’s a proper count, Highness. Three seventy-five to three sixty-five, and I’ll be the first to say my figure’s the wider of the two. Write that down, and don’t you dare say I didn’t offer you a figure.”
Tallow looked, for a moment, as if he had been given a present he had no intention of enjoying. Then he wrote the figures down in the minutes, both of them, one under the other, and drew a neat line beneath them, and made a small mark in the margin that might have been a tick.
Idrin did the sum. He did it in the notebook, at the top of the sacks, with the pencil stub and the cold grey light from the north door on his page. The usable grain was about three hundred and seventy sacks, or somewhere near, which meant about three hundred and seventy living bodies for thirty days each, or three hundred bodies for almost forty days, or a single body for thirty years and more. He divided it again, more carefully, and the answer stayed the same.
“Three hundred,” he said. “For a month.”
“If you keep the rats off it,” said Pell.
“Three hundred eaters.”
“Perhaps three hundred, for a month, if you’re careful and nobody has a second supper,” said Pell. “That’s a sum a cook can live with. I’d not want to live with a bigger one.”
Idrin wrote three hundred eaters, one month and underlined it twice. Then, because the habit was in him by now, he asked the question he had been trying not to ask since the kitchen.
“How many Hands are there?”
“Nine,” said Pell at once.
“You say nine.”
“I say nine, because that’s the number of seats in the body, and the seats are what eat.” She had bent back down to the sack and was cutting a second cord with her long knife, sawing steadily at the tough twine. “You want to know how many Hands there are altogether, and I can’t tell you. You want to know how many are in the seats, and it’s nine, and I’ll swear to it. The others I’ll count when they’re awake and hungry.”
“How many are awake?”
“Three,” said Pell, “and you, and that’s four mouths I can count from this floor. And if I count the sleeping ones I get seven, which is the number I gave you at the hearth, so that’s where that came from. I can count seven without going up a stair, boy. Anything more than seven, I need a stair for, and this Hold has got stairs enough.”
“So the seven were the ones awake and the ones you could feel.”
“The seven were the ones I could feel,” said Pell. “The sleeping ones eat worst of all. They don’t say a word for days, and then they’re at the broth like a flood, and you wonder where it went.” She sawed through the cord and laid the sack aside. “Six of them are asleep in the walls, and they’ve been eating my grain for two hundred years, and I’m not sorry I didn’t get a fair share of the thanks.”
Tallow had been writing all this down. He looked up now, and his face had a strange hungry look that Idrin had not seen before. It was the face of a clerk who has been given a number he does not know how to check.
“Six,” said Tallow. “I’ll give you a figure for that.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Pell, without looking up.
They left the granary by the north door, Pell first with the knife in her apron and the empty cup in her hand, Idrin behind her with the notebook, and Tallow last with the minutes. The sky had changed while they were inside. The grey cloud that had lain all morning over the marsh had come down into a low dark mass, bellied and heavy, and the wind had shifted round to the west. It came across the yard hard and smelling of water. Pell stopped in the middle of the flags and lifted her face to it, sniffing, her broad cheeks flushed and her eyes half closed.
“Rain,” she said.
“It isn’t raining,” said Idrin.
“It’s coming. It’ll come in from the west, over the marsh, and it’ll hit the gatehouse roof in about three hours, and the granary door will want to be shut against it.” She turned round to face the granary, and then to the stack of sacks in the open doorway, and then she pointed at them with the cup. “Turn the sacks on their sides. Every one on the outside rows, and the top row too, so the wet doesn’t get in at the cord. And somebody bring me a sheet of tarred cloth.”
Harrow had come across the yard from the wall with a stone on his shoulder, counting the flags as he walked. He had heard the whole of it. He stopped beside them, set the stone down with a grunt, and looked up at the sky with the expression of a man who is about to be asked a question he has long since decided not to answer.
“Will it rain, Harrow?” asked Pell, in a voice of perfect, sweet good nature.
Harrow looked at her for a while. Then he shook his head, slowly, as a wall shakes off a drop of water.
“I never answer questions about rain,” he said.
“I know,” said Pell. “I’ve never asked you one.”
The first drops came at the gatehouse roof three hours later, exactly where Pell had said they would, in a long soft slant from the west. By then every sack in the outer rows had been turned on its side, and the top row was covered in tarred cloth, and Harrow, who had said nothing whatever since noon, was standing at the gate-foot counting the drops as they struck the stones, one by one, until he lost his count somewhere in the forties and stopped, with a look of mild irritation, as though the rain had moved faster than he had.
Idrin went back into the granary to check the door. He was alone in the store for a minute or two, and it was dim and close and smelled of wet sailcloth and sweet grain. He stopped by the second row, where the sacks had been cut open, and frowned.
One of the sacks at the end of the row had been opened and then tied again. The cord was knotted in a neat, precise bow, the kind a clerk ties on a bundle of papers so that the papers will not slip. The sailcloth at the neck had been folded back over the bow in a crisp double fold, and the fold was pressed flat with a thumb. It was not the way Pell had tied the other sacks. It was not the way any sack in the granary had been tied, in two hundred years, by anyone who had ever carried grain in his hands.
Idrin untied the bow and looked inside. The grain was clean, and there was nothing in it but grain.
He retied the cord. He did it badly, with clumsy fingers, the knot slipping as he drew it tight, and he thought about the neat bow and the crisp fold and the thumb pressed flat, and about who would bother to open a sack in a dark granary and then close it so tidily, as if they had expected someone to check.
Pell appeared in the doorway with her knife in her apron and the rain behind her.
“Somebody’s been in your sacks, boy,” she said, after she had looked at the bow for a moment, and then at him. “Somebody’s been opening them and tying them again. Somebody who writes tidy.” She pulled her cloth out of her apron and wiped her hands. “The Hold’s been robbed, and I don’t think the thief was hungry.”