The west granary smelled of dry chaff, mouse droppings, and the cold, chalky dust that rose whenever heavy sacks of winter rye were shifted upon the floor timbers.
Elin Hale stood on the center catwalk between the storage bins, a split-slate tally board resting against her hip. Below her, in the dim gray twilight admitted by the high, narrow ventilation slits, eighty tons of grain sat piled in rough burlap sacks, stacked five deep against the limestone retaining walls. The river draft swept through the upper rafters with a low, mournful whistle, carrying the damp chill of Flood Month deep into the storage bays.
Beside the lower scale, master baker Dunstan Harl wiped a flour-whitened forearm across his brow. His linen apron was gray with grain dust, the pockets bulging with brass weights and bits of chalk. His wife, Marta, knelt upon a sack of barley, her stout knees pressing into the coarse hemp as she tested the seams with an iron packing bodkin.
“We have two hundred and forty sacks of coarse rye,” Dunstan called up, his voice echoing in the cavernous timber vault. “Ninety of malted barley for the brew-houses, and forty of sifted wheat flour in the dry bins near the north wall. If the town council puts the lower ward on four ounces of hard biscuit a day, the store will stretch twenty-two days. If Captain Dain insists on feeding sixty town guards full rations of boiled mash, we run out of grain on the sixteenth…
