Sect Year 4 · eighth month · night of day 6 · the thirty-ninth life: a delta market town, Bessim’s thirty-first year
The bench had been Bessim’s since the cold season, when the old hands stopped coming up the stair and the far end of the workshop went quiet. He kept it clean. He hung the master’s glasses on their nail above the window, where they had always hung, and he didn’t take them down. The chest with the oldest weights stood where it had always stood. The key to its lock hung on a string round his neck, and he was the only one in the town who wore it now.
The bread-scale stood under the arcade at the centre of the market, where every stall-holder could see it from his own bench. It was a great brass balance on a stone pillar, with pans as broad as a cartwheel’s hub and an arm that had to be read against a line cut into the pillar’s face. It had been trued every morning for nearly twenty years.
Bessim had trued it himself for the last twelve. Every baker in the town brought his loaves to it, and every loaf the council sold had been weighed on it first. That was the rule. It was the oldest rule in the market, and it had never needed a clerk to enforce it.
