2 - A Proper Form

The house had four disputes waiting and a queue standing out into the yard, which was why Kesh had picked this morning to examine the apprentice.

He did it every Closing. He said pressure was the only honest test. Yeva had long ago decided he did it because he liked an audience and would have gone to his grave before saying so.

The floor was the floor in the tenth day of a Closing. Two clerks arguing over a weighing table nobody had booked. A woman asleep upright against the wall with a child asleep across her. Dust coming off the coats of men who had been on a road that morning and would be on another one tomorrow. Behind the weighing table a stool went over, and somebody set it back on its feet, and nobody had asked them to and nobody looked round.

Bel had been up since first light. She had her gate count copied out twice, the second copy in a better hand than the first, and she had been holding the tally board against her chest for an hour like a girl waiting to be asked to dance.

"Small one," Kesh said. "Domestic. A condition anybody in this room can check by looking at it."

"Right." Bel put the board down and picked it up again.

"Your tally to the Salt Road desk before the bell. The form is: I will carry the tally there. Say it as I gave it."

Yeva was signing off a paper at the time and did not look up, which she thought about afterwards, on and off, for some months.

Bel took a breath big enough to be heard over the room.

"I will see the tally at the Salt Road desk before the bell."

Nothing happened.

Nothing in the building put its weight down. No cup rattled anywhere. The two clerks went on arguing about the weighing table, and the woman against the wall did not wake, and the floor of the house stayed exactly as level as it had been.

Bel's hand went to her breastbone. She looked round the room, quick, the way you look round when you think you have heard your name.

Kesh let the silence run one beat longer than was kind.

"That is not a form."

The house laughed. Not meanly. It was a warm building and she was its child, and it laughed the way a family laughs at a boy who walks into a door. But it went on a little too long, and Bel stood in the middle of it with the board in both hands and laughed too, badly, three beats behind everybody else.

"The form's sound," Yeva said.

She had not decided to say it. Twenty years of not being able to let bad close-reading stand went and said it for her, and it was out before she had done the arithmetic on what it would cost.

Kesh turned. "It is not the taught form."

"No. It's a better one. Carry is a thing she does. See it there is a thing that is true or it isn't, and you can stand in the doorway and tell which." Yeva put the pen down. "And it costs her a fraction of what yours would. Ask anybody who's ever run out of room."

For a moment she thought that was the end of it.

Then Kesh took his reading glasses off.

Everybody in the house knew what that meant. Half of them had learned it the hard way and the other half had watched.

"Then the wording is not the difficulty," he said, to Bel, quite gently. "Some are born with enough to hold three or four. Some with less than that. It is nobody's doing and it does not improve with practice. It is better to know at fourteen than at forty."

Bel said, "Right."

Then she said, "No, that's — right. That's useful. Thank you."

She always went formal when she was hurt. It was the only warning she gave.

Yeva watched her not say something. She could see the shape of it going down. The girl had a sentence in her and she put it away.

The room came back on around them. Somebody wanted the weighing table. Somebody wanted Kesh. The woman against the wall woke up and did not move the child.

Nobody in this building was going to stop looking at Bel because Yeva asked them to. Asking would only put a frame round it. They would stop when there was something else in the room worth looking at, and there was a queue out the door full of candidates.

"Give me the four," she said.

The first was a woman who had been told by a clerk of this house that they would see her right, and who had come to collect the whole issuance. The clerk had meant the fee. Yeva made her say the sentence twice, exactly, and then made the clerk say what he had been thinking while he said it. He had been thinking: I want this woman to stop crying in my doorway. She gave the woman the fee. Then she told the clerk that if he ever said see you right to another human being she would have him counting beasts at the gate until the Opening.

Somewhere in there she put her hand out for the Salt Road book, and there was a tally board lying on the desk that somebody had brought across, and she moved it out of the way and forgot it.

The second was two brothers and a dead father's cart. One of them had the cart is yours and had been living on it for a year, and the other had nothing at all except a certainty that he had been robbed, which is the worst hand anybody ever brings into a ledger-house.

Yeva asked who else had been in the room. Two neighbours and a physician, which meant the old man had known what kind of afternoon it was.

Then she asked what he had said in the sentence before it.

The brother started to tell her. He got about six words in and stopped, and stood there with his mouth open while it arrived, and when he had finished arriving he sat down on the floor of the ledger-house, in front of everybody, and his brother went and sat down next to him.

The third took ninety seconds: a rest-house keeper and a caravan master, three days free, and the keeper counting the day of arrival as the first of the three. Custom said the three began at the first dusk. The keeper knew that. The keeper had been hoping the caravan master did not.

The fourth she killed before it started, because the investor wanted a guaranteed sum out of a venture, and a guaranteed sum makes it a loan, and a loan does not hold on six roads. He argued. She let him get most of the way through it.

"You all keep listening to what people mean," she said, to the room rather than to him. "Try what they said."

It was quiet when she finished. Not the polite kind. The queue had stopped moving, and a carter near the door had stopped chewing and had not started again, and somebody behind the weighing table said out loud and to nobody that that had been nine minutes.

Bel was at her elbow with the ledger and her ears scarlet.

"Can I ask a stupid one."

"You can ask a stupid one."

"What happens if it takes," Bel said, "and nothing changes?"

Yeva opened her mouth to give her the obvious answer.

She was still looking for it when somebody at the door said her name.