The granary smelled of old grain and new rain, and Pim liked it, because it was the only room in the Hold where nobody told him to be quiet about the stairs. The stairs in the granary were short and wooden and went down into a pit where the sacks stood in rows. Pim had counted them the first morning. He had got forty rows of nine and a half. Then Ysra had counted them too and got forty rows of nine and a half as well, and Pim had said the half was a row a mouse had cut short, and Ysra had said mice did not cut rows, and that was how the morning had started.
The first share day had been called for the granary because Pell said grain was the only currency the Hold had ever trusted. Each awake Hand came down the wooden steps in turn. Each was given a bowl of barley, a day’s rest written in Tallow’s book, and a little brass token that Tallow had cast from a nail to stand for the share. Pim did not like the token. It was cold and it did not taste of anything. He liked the bowl.
“The Charter says double,” Pim told Tallow, when it was his turn. “For the carrier’s clause. I am the carrier.”
“The Charter says the carrier’s share is doubled,” Tallow said, reading the clause off his board and not looking up. “It does not say the carrier must carry the doubled share himself.”
“I am going to carry it myself,” said Pim. “It is mine.”
So he carried it. He took two sacks of barley from the pit, one on each shoulder, which was too heavy, and walked them up the wooden steps and across the granary floor to the door, where the sun came in sideways. Then he turned round and came back down for two more, and the steps creaked under him in a way that made Ysra, who was watching from the top, put her hand on the rail. He counted every step out loud. Nine up. Nine down. Nine again. The Charter had nothing to say about steps, but Pim thought it should.
Gaunt was at the door with his arms folded. He was objecting. He had objected to the sacks, to the bowls, and to the token, and now he objected to the grain.
“A share should be iron,” he said. “I have said this in the Chamber. I say it in the granary. A Hand that works at the forge is paid in iron. A Hand that works at the wall is paid in stone. A Hand that works in the goat pens is paid in goats, and a goat is a living iron, a rough sort of iron that bleats. Barley is for birds.”
“Barley is for bread,” said Pell, from the other side of the pit.
“Barley is for Lessary birds.”
“Then you may take your share of Lessary birds,” Pell said, “and see how long they last in the forge with you.”
Harrow was counting the sacks aloud, from the pit’s edge. He counted with his hands behind his back, which was how he counted when he did not want anyone to see him pointing. Pim stood still to listen. Harrow’s numbers went up in ones and then in tens, and at the end of the row, when he got to three hundred and seventy-nine sacks, he said, “Three hundred and eighty,” and Pell said, “Three hundred and seventy-nine,” and they both stopped and looked at each other.
“Count again,” Pell said.
Harrow counted again. He got three hundred and eighty, and Pell, who had counted them herself with her hands the day before, took a pinch of barley from the top of the nearest sack and rubbed it between her fingers and said, “A sack is gone. One sack, from the end of this row, and it is the one nearest the pit’s wall, where the rats are. The rats have had it.”
“The rats have not had it,” said Harrow, who did not like to be contradicted about a number. “The rats have eaten a little.”
“Then the rats are a sack and a little,” said Pell. “Write it, Tallow.”
Tallow wrote it. He wrote the count in the Register of Tithe, then the range, then the note that the Hold’s own granary had been short by one sack in the first share day. Pim watched him. Tallow’s pen moved like a bird that knew where it was going. At the bottom of the page he drew a line and wrote reduced from 380 to 379, by Pell’s count and the rats’ count, and Pell laughed so hard she had to sit on a sack.
Sella came down last. She had been waiting by the door with her ledger under her arm, and when Tallow held out the bowl and the token she shook her head.
“I refuse my share,” Sella said. “I should like instead one day off. A day with no bones in it. I should like to walk in the yard and look at the goats without measuring them.”
“The Charter does not provide for days off,” said Tallow.
“The Charter does not provide for bones either,” said Sella, “and yet I have counted two hundred of them under the floor. I ask for the day. The day is my share, and I will carry it myself, the same as the boy.”
Tallow considered this with the deep, unhappy seriousness of a man who has been asked to write a clause that does not exist. He gave her a margin. The margin was one day, plus or minus one bone, which Sella said was the most honest thing anyone had said in the granary all morning.
Korrin took his share without a word. He stood at the foot of the steps and held out his hand for the barley, and then the bowl, and then the token, and he looked at the token for a moment, and then he walked out of the granary and across the court, toward the Kitchen. Pim followed him, carrying his double share with both hands. He saw him go into the Kitchen loft, where the old cot was, the one that had belonged to a cook’s boy who was not there any more. He set the barley on the cot and sat down beside it and did not eat it.
Pell, who had come up the Kitchen steps behind them, stood in the doorway and watched. She did not say anything for a while, and Pim could see she was counting something behind her eyes. Then she turned to Pim and said, quietly, “Let him be, boy. He is giving the barley to somebody who is not hungry, and that is the only thing in this Hold that has ever been done properly.”
Pim did not know whether that was an insult or a kindness. He went back down to the granary to finish his count instead, because he had only counted to nine.
They had been in the granary a long time. When the last share had gone out and the sacks were stacked back in the pit, Pell and Harrow went over the tally together. Pell said the grain had been short for a month. She said the Hold must not pay out more than it could carry, or the carrying would stop, and the Hold would be a granary with nobody left to fill it. Harrow said that the Hold had carried more than it could pay for two hundred years and had not stopped. Pell said that was an argument for stopping. Harrow said it was an argument for counting better.
Pim sat on the top step with his double share in his lap and listened to them argue in the old, comfortable way, the way Gaunt and Korrin argued in the yard, and it made him feel that the Hold was the right size for once, just the size of a granary and two people who did not agree.
At dusk he went down the stairs one last time to fetch the lamp he had left in the pit. Halfway down he saw a sack at the end of the lowest row. It was not one of the Hold’s. It was a Lessary sack, with the Crown’s mark stamped on the burlap, the lion with the broken tail, and under the mark, cut neatly into the cloth, was a single notch.
Pim knew that notch. He had carved it himself on the fourth stair, in his first week, as a tally for every step he had carried a load up. It was the notch he used when he meant to remember something he did not want to forget.
He counted the sacks again. He counted the row, and the row beyond it, and the pit’s whole wall of burlap, out loud, in his carrier’s voice, up to three hundred and sixty-nine. Then he stopped, and looked at the notch, and said the number aloud once more to see how it sounded.
It came out ten short of Pell’s book.
Harrow came down the steps after him and stood at the pit’s edge without speaking. Then he took the lamp from Pim’s hand and held it up over the sacks himself. He counted the front row once more, and did not say the number. He only shook his head, slowly, and said that the rats had been very busy, and that a rat which could carry a sack had clearly learned the Charter. He gave the lamp back and went up the steps, counting them as he went. Pim heard him stop halfway, and begin again, and arrive at the same number twice.
“It is a stupid number,” Pim told the sacks.
They did not answer. But the notch on the Lessary sack looked, in the lamplight, a little deeper than it had before, as though somebody had gone over it with a knife so that it would not be forgotten.
“That is the mice,” said Pell, from the top of the steps, when he called up to her. She did not even come down to look.