Sect Year 4 · eighth month · night of day 6 · the thirty-ninth life: the delta market town, Bessim’s fifty-second year
The afternoon light came through the shutter in a single bar and lay across the bench like a plank of gold. Bessim had built that bench himself the spring after Teodin died. It was hard delta oak, and it had cost him three months of wages, and along its front edge he had cut a notch for every weight he trued in a season. The notches had gone smooth under thumbs over the years. Some of them had gone smooth under his own.
Sanna sat at the far end on a stool with her heels hooked on the rung. She was eight. She packed she pressed her lips together until they nearly disappeared. Then, and she was doing it now, bent over a row of brass weights with her nose a finger’s width from the crown of the largest.
“This one says four,” she said.
“Read the whole mark.”
She leaned closer. Every weight in the workshop carried the town’s sheaf stamped on its crown, and beside the sheaf a number cut in the old delta figures, which were all hooks and cups and short lines. Bessim had learned those figures at fourteen, from Teodin, over a bench very like this one. Sanna touched the mark with one fingertip, stopping just short of the bronze.
