Sect Year 1 · third month · night of day 15 · the fifth life: Carrow Flat, his twentieth year
The tithe clerk came in the last week of the summer, on a grey horse too good for the road. He didn’t give his name. He sat at Dathi’s table with his back to the window and a ledger open on the boards, and he wrote the year’s tithe with a brush whose point he kept wetting on his tongue. He wiped the wood with a square of cloth before he set the ledger down, and again before he got up.
“The tithe-house does not take coin in a dust year,” he said. “It takes what can be counted.”
“The seed is for the field,” Dathi said.
“The field is the tithe-house’s concern once it has been harvested.” The clerk wrote something short. “Is there a harvest?”
Dathi looked past him at the window. The flat ran out to the southern rim, cracked and grey, with the old ditch a pale scar across the middle and nothing standing in it. “Not yet,” he said.
“Then it is in kind. Show me what is stored.”
The clerk’s men went through the grain-house and the goat-pen in the grey of the late afternoon. There were four of them, in grey coats with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and they moved through the sheds without speaking, the way men move through a house where someone has died. They lifted the lids of…
