Tallow set the Chamber’s accounts out in three columns, because the figures no longer agreed with one another, and he was not the sort of clerk who let a column disagree with itself and went on writing.
He did it at the head of the table, in the grey light before the candle-clock, with the minute-book open at a clean page and his left hand steady on the ruler. His right hand was still a little stiff from the stiffening, the fingers slow to close round the pen, but the stiffness had gone out of the wrist, and he could write. He wrote the headings first, in the Ink, in capitals so clear that they would stand up in any court in Lessary. GRAIN. IRON. MEASURE. Then he drew the lines beneath them, very straight, and began to fill the columns with the figures he had gathered over the past three nights.
Grain came first.
One hundred and eighty sacks in the Kitchen store. He had counted them himself on the flagstones, with Pell standing over him with her arms folded and her mouth set, and the count had come out right on the second try, which Pell had said was a miracle and which Tallow had recorded as a fact. Each sack fed one living person for thirty days. There were about three hundred eaters in the Hold and in Lowgate, counting the garrison and the lodgers and the Hands and the children and the old men and the…
