The fourth sitting read fifty names, and a third of them came from the Reed-Houses.
Wren had known it would be so from the first morning the Roll was opened. The marsh-builders had been the Foundation’s cheapest wage-line, the lowest paid and the first to be forgotten, and their names had been carried in the Reed-Houses’ songs for nine generations without anybody thinking to write them down. She had grown up with those songs in her mouth. Her grandmother had sung them at the ferry-rope and in the punt and at the bottom of the Lantern moat, when the water was high and the children were cold and there was nothing else to keep them from crying. The songs had the names in them, one after another, each with its trade and its drowning, and they had never once been checked against a Roll, because a Reed-House song did not need a clerk to tell it what was true.
The Chamber’s Roll did not care about songs. It cared about the trade.
She sat in the witness’s chair with the reed-pen in her hand and the clean ledger open on her knee, and she waited for the clerk’s voice to say the first of them. Then it came.
