The granary stood behind the kitchen yard, a long low stone building with a slate roof that had kept its slates, and a door of black oak banded with iron. The door was chained. The chain was thick and had rusted into a single lump, and the padlock that held it had rusted into the lump too, so that the whole thing looked less like a lock than like a knot of old roots. Idrin stood in front of it for some time with his hands in his coat, looking at the rust, and thought about the sacks.
“It’ll be empty,” said Jory. He had come back from the well with two buckets and was holding them both at the end of his arms, as a man carries something he does not intend to set down until he has been told where to put it. His hand was still wrapped where the chain had caught it, and the bandage had gone grey at the edges. “Nobody locks an empty granary with a chain that size.”
“Someone locked it with that chain for a reason.”
“Then they had a reason to be wrong about the rats.”
Idrin looked at him, and Jory put the buckets down, found a flint-coloured stone the size of a cobbler’s hammer lying by the drain, and hefted it in his good hand. He kept his eyes off Idrin. He fixed them on the chain with the patient concentration of someone choosing where to strike a log. Then he brought the stone down on the rusted lump, twice, three times, with a sound like a church bell being struck by a cook’s ladle. On the fourth blow the chain cracked. Two of its links came apart in a shower of flakes, and the rest fell away and lay in a coil on the step.
The door swung in on its own weight. It did not creak. It moved as if it had been waiting for someone to ask.
The smell came out first. It was not the smell of a granary left to the rats. It was dry and warm and sweet, the smell of barley and wheat that had been stored properly, in good sacking, out of the damp. Idrin breathed it in without meaning to and felt something loosen behind his ribs, a tightness he had not known was there until it let go. Then the light came in past him and he saw the sacks.
They were stacked in rows from the floor to the rafters, four or five high, each one wrapped in heavy sailcloth and tied at the neck with cord. The rows ran back into the dark as far as the light would go. Idrin counted the first row from the door, as far as he could see, and lost his count at twelve, and began again, and lost it again.
“Four hundred,” said Jory, quite calmly, behind him.
“You can’t see four hundred from here.”
“I can see the stamp.” Jory pointed to the nearest sack, where a band of Crown wax had been pressed into the cloth above the neck-cord. The wax carried the gold lion of Lessary, the same device as the lease seal in the Great Hall, and beneath the lion, in small capitals, the word LEASE. “They’re all stamped. Every one. If the stamp is the same and the cord’s the same, then the count is the same. Four hundred sacks.”
“You’ve counted them all?”
“I’ve counted the stamp on forty of them and the weight on twenty, and I’ve looked at the rest. My father taught me that a sack that has been stamped and not weighed is a sack that someone is lying about.” Jory bent, took the sack beside him by its neck, and lifted it. It came up off the floor with a heavy, satisfying grunt of weight. “That’s a full one. That’s a sack for a man for a month, or a family for a week, or a Crown for an afternoon’s ceremony. Whatever the Crown thought it was buying.”
Idrin came forward and put his hand on the sailcloth. It was dry and warm and smelled of tar. He took his hand away and found that he was smiling, and then he was not smiling, because a feeling had come up beside the first one that was much less comfortable. The sacks were delightful. They were grain, enough grain to keep a Hold through a winter, and they had been sitting in the dark for longer than he had been alive, waiting. But they were the Crown’s. They were stamped LEASE, and the lease was for a tenant whose name had been left blank.
“We can’t eat the Crown’s lease,” he said.
“We can eat it if the tenant doesn’t come back for it.”
“That is precisely what I’m afraid of.”
Jory laughed, and then he stopped and looked at him, and for a moment the two of them stood in the granary doorway with the light behind them and the sacks in front, and did not say anything at all.
Idrin took out his notebook. He had been carrying it since the first morning, and he had written in it every night, and he had never before written a list that he expected to be checked. He began the list on a clean page. Sacks, grain, sound, stamped LEASE: four hundred, as counted by J. Fenn (stamp, forty; weight, twenty; eye, the rest). Then, under it, because the habit was in him now and he could not stop it, he wrote: Rats: not seen. Mice: not counted.
“Mice,” said Jory, reading over his shoulder. “Who says there are mice?”
“The cook, I expect. Someone will tell me there are mice.”
“There are no mice.”
“Then I shall look for them,” said Idrin, and turned back to the rows.
He went along them slowly, with the notebook open on his forearm and a pencil stub in his fingers, and he examined the cords and the stamps and the way the sailcloth had been folded. Most of the sacks were identical. Every one had the lion and the word and the same tight tie. But near the end of the second row he came to a sack that was different, and he crouched down, and looked at it closely, and called Jory over.
On the corner of the sacking, where the Crown’s wax would have been pressed if the sack had been stamped in the ordinary way, there was no lion. There was a small square notch cut into the cloth with a knife. Beside the notch, in the same knife-cut, someone had scored a row of short upright strokes, four and a cross, the mark a wage-clerk scratches on a board when he has paid a man for a day’s labour.
“That’s a tally,” Jory said.
“It’s a tally on a sack of grain.”
“Nobody tallies grain.” Jory knelt beside him and touched the notch with one finger, lightly, the way he had touched the hoop. “You count grain by weight. You count sacks by stamp. You don’t cut a tally on a sack, unless you’re paying for the sack by the day. That’s a man’s wage.”
Idrin looked at the notch for some time. Then he went back to the notebook, and beneath the list he wrote: Forty sacks with a second stamp, a wage-tally in place of the lion. Verified: J. Fenn. He underlined wage-tally. He had no idea what he meant by it, except that the word had come into his head as if somebody else had put it there, a clerk’s word, dry and precise, that a Hold might use for a debt it had been paid in full.
He did the sum on the back of the page. It was a very simple sum, the kind a child can do on its fingers, and he did it three times, and got the same answer each time. Each sack fed one living person for thirty days. Four hundred sacks fed one person for thirty-three years and four months, or three hundred persons for forty days, or the Hold as it stood now, which was himself and Jory and whatever else the old walls were keeping, for a long while indeed. The number was too large to be a comfort and too small to be a fear. It was simply a number.
“Thirty days a sack,” Idrin said.
“Where’d you get that?”
“From the lid.” He pointed to the nearest stack, where a stencil had been painted on the end-board of the topmost sack in faded black. ONE SACK: ONE LIVING MAN: THIRTY DAYS. The paint had run a little in the damp. The words were clear enough. “They wrote it on the lid, Jory. The clerks. They wanted you to know what the sack was for.”
“It’s a clerk’s joke,” said Jory. “Clerks always write what things are for. That’s how you know they’re not for it.”
“I’m going to use it anyway.”
Jory counted the sacks twice more, once by stamp and once by weight, as Idrin asked him to. He did it in silence, moving along the rows with his lips moving, and when he came back to the door his face was tight and pleased, the look of a man who has been proved right and wishes he had not been. The two counts agreed to within three sacks. Idrin had expected a worse agreement. He wrote the figure in the notebook and thought of the three sacks, and where they might have gone, and decided it did not matter yet.
Before they left, Idrin took the charcoal stub from his pocket and stood in the granary doorway. The inside of the oak was bare and smooth, and he could see the grain of it running under his fingers. He wrote a rule across the door in large clumsy letters, the letters of a man who has been told he writes like a clerk and does not want to be one. NO SACK LEAVES THIS STORE WITHOUT A NAME BESIDE IT.
He stepped back and looked at it. It was not a Writ. It did not bind anyone to anything except himself. It was simply true.
Jory read it aloud, slowly, and then read it again. “Whose name?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, you’d better find out before someone takes a sack for a man who doesn’t exist.”
They went down to the kitchen yard together, carrying the empty buckets between them, and neither of them looked back at the granary. Jory was whistling. Idrin noticed it only when it stopped, at the kitchen door, as though it had been a habit he had caught from someone in the granary, a habit that did not belong to either of them.
Behind them, in the cold dark of the store, a second chain lay among the sacks, under the loose boards at the back of the floor. Nobody had seen it. Nobody had been meant to. On the chain hung a tally-board, a plank of oak the length of a forearm with a row of notches cut along one edge, and when Idrin counted them that night, on the back of his list, he would get four hundred and one. The last notch had been cut so the knife slipped. It ran off the end of the board into the wood, a long ragged scratch, the cut of a hand that had been in a hurry, or afraid, or both.