Tallow came into the Great Hall at dawn and found that the Measure had been rubbed out at the bottom and redrawn.
He stood in the grey light with the minute-book under one arm and the lamp in his other hand, and he read the new line very carefully, because he did not trust his eyes at that hour and because the chalk had been laid down by a hand he did not know. It was a neat hand, square and heavy, the hand of somebody who had been taught to write by a Smith. The figure was six hundred.
Six hundred weights. It was the floor. He knew it at once, without needing to look it up in the Charter. Every clerk in the Hold had been taught the floor in the first winter, as a warning, the way children are taught where the river runs deep. Below six hundred the weave thinned. Dexterity dropped. Faces began to drift in earnest, and voices went quiet, and the body stopped being able to hold its own limbs together at the joints, and whoever had redrawn the line had written the floor in the same hand they had used for the rest of the figures, with the same neat stroke at the foot.
