Sect Year 4 · eighth month · night of day 6 · the thirty-ninth life: the delta market town, Bessim’s seventieth year
The bench came down the workshop stair on the morning of the bread market, because Bessim could no longer climb back up it with a weight in each hand. Two of the bakers’ boys carried it, one at each end, swearing at the turn on the landing, and they set it under the arcade beside the bread-scale post where the stone was dry. They brought his chair after it. He sat with a rug across his knees and the early sun on the side of his face, and he watched the stalls open along the row one by one.
He had sat under these arches as a boy, on the same worn edge of the flat stone slabs, watching Teodin test the market’s measures against the first loaves of the morning. The stones had been relaid twice since then. The arches had not changed. Bessim watched the bakers’ boys haul their sacks from the cart. He found that he could name each of them by the way he set his feet, the way Teodin had once named the bakers by the sound of their knives.
