9.

The Seat Belongs to Everyone

Requiem City — AGH 9

Enoch Duxbury stood in the office doorway waiting for Aldric to notice the wine.

Aldric Stoneheart had noticed it. He was trying to finish a letter about two entries for one property, each bearing a different spelling of the same dead man's name. The next word was therefore. He had written it and could no longer remember what ought to follow.

“Consul,” Enoch said.

“Guildmaster.”

“You look prosperous.”

“I'm being paid to sit down. It's all we ever wanted.”

Enoch put the bottle on the desk. Southern wine, with the seal intact. He wore the blue guild coat with silver shears worked at the breast. He lifted a stack of papers off the chair and sat as he always had, holding the stack out for Aldric to take.

“Careful. That's a disputed freehold.”

“Does it need the whole chair?”

Aldric took the papers from him and put them on the floor. It was a pleasure to have Enoch here. Other visitors waited for permission to be comfortable; Enoch made himself comfortable and complained if the room resisted. Aldric had known him before either of them owned a good coat.

He turned the wine to read its label.

“We should have drunk this when the warehouse was still yours.”

“It was never mine.”

“Forty crowns said otherwise.”

“Forty crowns said you were going to pay me forty crowns.”

“And then you tore the note.”

Enoch looked away, mildly irritated, as he always was when Aldric mentioned it. “You'd have tried to pay me before you bought the next stock.”

“I had the money.”

“You had forty crowns. That's different.”

There it was: the old argument, neither of them obliged to finish it. In the bad winter, when the warehouse had nearly gone, Enoch had supplied the loan and then destroyed the obligation before Aldric could ruin himself honoring it. He had stood up at Aldric's wedding, too. Years later, there were still occasions when Aldric saw something foolish in the street and saved it to tell him.

“Shall I have glasses brought?” Aldric asked.

“After you've looked at this.”

Enoch drew a folded petition from inside the coat and laid it beside the bottle. The paper was thick enough to keep its fold. Several guild seals occupied the bottom of the last page; Aldric saw them as Enoch opened it.

He lifted the letter with its solitary therefore out of the way.

The petition concerned the administration of the electoral rolls. It was very well written. The people who had paid for it had bought themselves a notary who understood the value of leaving anger out of a sentence.

Nine years earlier, the Charter had placed the Hammond Seat alongside a Crown whose succession remained hereditary. The city elected its Consul, but a voter had to belong to a chartered guild or hold property in their own right. Aldric was the first holder of the office. Its independent writ put the administration of those elections in his hands, including the rolls from which the next holder would be chosen.

He had signed the last roll after three nights of correction. He could still remember a clerk standing beside the table, swaying a little, waiting for him to find the next mistake.

The petition proposed that the guild registries should become the whole electoral roll.

“You have the wool list?” Enoch asked.

“On the shelf behind you.”

Enoch reached back for it and opened it on the desk. Names, dates, dues: columns kept by people whose livelihood depended on knowing what was owed. There was a correction beside one entry, initialed by the clerk who had made it. When Aldric touched the mark, Enoch told him what had happened without having to consult anyone.

Then Aldric looked at the letters on his own desk. A deed burned during the fighting; a boundary recollected differently by two neighbors; a widow omitted when her husband's property passed to her. Every correction required somebody's time. Too many required time from somebody who had never been trained to make it.

“What would you need from this office?” he asked.

Enoch leaned forward. “A date by which the registries must be lodged. A common form, if you insist. We already keep the names. You know we do.”

Aldric did know. For a few moments he could see the work ending. A roll arrived, another was checked against it, a name was corrected by someone who knew the person. No new clerk trying to reconstruct a burned deed from a quarrel.

“And the property voters?”

“Associate rolls. Open to them. Small dues, no apprenticeship. They don't have to pretend they mean to weave cloth.”

“Which guild?”

“Any that suits them. The coalition has agreed.”

Aldric read the provision again. It had the pleasant shape of an obstacle already removed.

His mother had sold two chairs and a copper kettle to buy his apprentice bond. He had been fourteen. A guild had given him schooling, customers, credit, men who would stand behind a contract and a place from which to answer a lord. He had spent most of his life among people who kept lists because keeping lists meant they could act together. Enoch was not asking him to despise the unorganized. He was asking him to use what worked.

“How small?” Aldric asked.

“The dues? Small enough.”

“That isn't a sum.”

Enoch smiled. “There you are.”

“There I am.”

“They will vary. Each guild has its own costs.”

“And sets its own dues.”

“Naturally.”

Aldric looked for a limit in the petition. The provision allowed associate membership; it did not set the price of continuing to belong.

“You could put a ceiling on it,” he said.

“For how long? You don't set the price of wool for the rest of time. Nor the rent of a meeting room.” Enoch touched the wool list. “These names aren't free now. People pay to have them kept. You signed for fourteen hundred crowns last time. Fourteen hundred and change, for that.”

His gesture took in the disputed freehold on the floor.

“Some of it was good work,” Aldric said.

“Then keep the people who did it. They'll have good work again. All I'm asking is that the roll should answer to people who have shown they can maintain one.”

Enoch had stopped smiling. Aldric disliked how reasonable the sentence still sounded.

“Leave it with me.”

“Of course.”

“I'll rule inside the week.”

Enoch stood. For a moment Aldric thought he would ask for the glasses after all. Instead he drew the petition's lower edge square with the desk and put a hand on the bottle.

“Keep that out of the window.”

“I know how to keep wine.”

“You know how to buy it.”

Aldric laughed, and Enoch went out with the sound still between them.

After the door closed, Aldric moved the wine out of the sun. He came back to the desk, sat down and read the associate-membership provision once more.

*   *   *

Earlier that spring, AGH 9

Prue Oatley had asked the clerk whether the public hour was today.

Aldric could hear her from his desk. The clerk said it was, and she asked whether she had come too late. When he said she had not, she apologized for the papers she had brought, as though the quantity of them might still disqualify her.

“Come in,” Aldric said.

She stopped at the doorway long enough to see who had called. Then she came across, carrying a deed and a bundle of receipts tied with string.

“Sit, please.”

“If I sit, I take a little getting up.”

“Then we won't ask you to do it twice.”

She set the bundle on his desk and lowered herself into the chair carefully, keeping one leg farther forward. Aldric waited without watching her do it. He turned the deed so that they could both read it.

“It's my name,” she said. “It wasn't on the roll.”

Her husband had died at the Verge, in the second year of the fighting. She had inherited the ropewalk near the east docks. The deed recorded the transfer; the receipts recorded six years of payments afterward. She laid them out in order, smoothing the places where the string had pressed into them.

The clerk took the particulars to find the register.

“I should have come sooner,” she said. “They told me it would be put right.”

“Who told you?”

“A man at the count. I don't know his name. He was trying to find three other people's names at the time.”

Aldric did not ask her to identify a voice in a crowded room. He looked at the tax receipts. Every one had been paid.

Prue glanced toward the door.

“Have you somewhere to be?”

“The ropewalk. There are two apprentices watching each other work.”

“Will they manage?”

“They'll produce something. Whether anyone will want it is why I ought to be there.”

He smiled. She was looking at the open doorway again.

“Why does it matter to you?” he asked. “The vote. I've men with three properties who won't come to the count.”

Prue turned back to him. It was not an angry look, which made the question feel more foolish.

“They may leave theirs alone.”

“Yes.”

“My husband died, and I got a paper about that. Then we had the paper about the Seat. I've kept that too.” She touched the nearest receipt with one finger. “It said the office speaks for the people of the city. I've a property. I pay what I'm asked. I'd like the part it says I have.”

“And you shall.”

“I don't need it to be a blessing,” she said. “I need it to be a bargain kept.”

The clerk returned with the register and set it beside the deed. He had found the old property entry. The change of holder had been noted in one place and not carried into the electoral list. Prue looked from his finger to the document she had brought.

“So that does say what I thought.”

“Yes,” Aldric said.

“Then will it be there next time?”

He asked the clerk to make the correction while she was present. She watched the name being entered. When the clerk turned the book for her, she bent over it and read the line twice.

“That's right.”

She tied up her receipts. Aldric held the deed clear of the string while she made the knot; she took it from him and put it on top.

Getting out of the chair took longer than sitting down. She declined the clerk's hand, thanked him for finding the entry and went back to her apprentices.

*   *   *

The petition lay open on Aldric's desk. He pulled Enoch's empty chair back into place.

Prue could join a guild. That was true. She could pay it every year, on top of the costs of keeping the ropewalk, to remain entitled to something her deed already established. The price could be modest this year. The guild could need more next year, for reasons every member considered sound.

He took a spare sheet and began listing the work his own office would have to do instead.

*   *   *

The fourth evening

Rain had worked through the seam at Aldric's shoulder by the time he reached the palace. He gave up his coat outside the small study and went in carrying the petition under his costing, where the water could do it less harm.

Clavadin was standing at the fire with a page in one hand and the other held close to the warmth. He put the page down when Aldric entered.

“You've walked.”

“Only since leaving the office.”

“Sit nearer the fire.”

“Have you mended that chair?”

The king looked at it. “No.”

Aldric drew up a stool instead. The study had been furnished for conversations no one expected to have in public. There was a great desk, perpetually buried, and seats old friends knew how to avoid. Before the Charter had been finished, Clavadin had made a rule for this room: if he was about to do something foolish, they were to tell him. Aldric had occasionally wondered whether better chairs might have encouraged candor.

The king took the petition and read it standing. He was still a young man; displeasure moved across his face before he had decided how much of it to show. Aldric watched it settle as he reached the provision for associate membership.

“They've answered the obvious objection.”

“They've given it a subscription.”

Clavadin looked up. “And they do keep better rolls.”

“Yes.”

“You agree with that?”

“I've brought you the price of keeping ours properly.”

He passed over the second sheet. The king read it more slowly.

“Four thousand?”

“About that, each year. The first work will be the worst. But the names won't stay right because we get them right once.”

“Can you find the people?”

“Not all this week. I can pay the ones we have to do the work they're meant to be doing. I can stop putting it on the corner of somebody else's desk.”

“Then do it.”

“And lose the people who put me in the chair.”

Clavadin set both sheets down. He knew Enoch. He knew enough of the other seals to see what Aldric had brought him.

“They cannot reverse your writ.”

“They can put up a man to replace me. Someone they'll have reason to trust.”

The king went to the window. Rain struck the glass hard enough to blur the reflection of the fire.

Aldric rubbed the wet seam of his sleeve. He had rehearsed the figures on the walk. He had not rehearsed Enoch's voice saying You had forty crowns.

“I came to ask whether there was a cheaper way,” he said.

Clavadin turned from the window.

“Yes. Give it to me.”

Aldric did not move.

“A Crown decree protecting the property qualification,” the king said. “The ruling comes from here. You administer the roll. Your coalition has no decision of yours to take revenge on.”

“They'll say you had no business issuing it.”

“Some of them will. I'll defend it.”

“Under what power?”

“Near enough to the Charter that the argument will take them a while.” Clavadin came back to the desk. “You asked for a way to remain useful. This is one. The qualification survives. So do you.”

Aldric looked at the costing. The names on it were roles, not people yet: registrars for the quarters, clerks with time to check the lists, work to be done where a property stood instead of guessed at from this office. The king's proposal would leave that work possible. It would also let Aldric meet Enoch somewhere other than across a ruling.

He could almost hear the conversation. Regret about the royal interference. Agreement that neither of them had wanted it done this way. A bottle opened while they complained about a third man.

“You'd put your seal on the qualification,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And who could take it off?”

Clavadin was silent.

“Not me,” Aldric said. “Not the next Consul.”

“The Charter would still be there.”

“Which clause would you have used to reach past it?”

The king put a hand flat on the desk, beside the petition. Aldric had seen that gesture before a decision. He waited for it.

“You want me to leave you to them.”

“I want you to dislike doing it.”

“I already dislike it.”

“Good.” Aldric heard how sharp that sounded. He eased his grip on the stool. “So do I.”

Clavadin looked down at the paper again.

“The guilds won't be gentler for knowing you refused my help.”

“They won't know.”

He was glad of that. He had not come to buy himself an additional piece of virtue to read out in the hall. He had come because he wanted the help.

“A crown passes to someone else,” Aldric said. “You know that better than I do. We don't get to choose that every time we choose a Consul. One day the person wearing it will want something you don't want. I'd rather not leave him your way into this office.”

The rain grew louder for a moment, then slackened. Clavadin took his hand off the desk.

“I thought I could keep you in it.”

“For a while.”

The king lifted the petition and held it out. Aldric stood to take it.

“You could have taken the comfortable chair,” Clavadin said.

Aldric glanced at it.

“Which one is that?”

Clavadin laughed, briefly. Then he picked up the costing from the desk and checked the total once more.

“You will have to read this aloud.”

“I intend to.”

The king returned that sheet too. There was no note for the hall, no royal instruction to put beneath it.

On the way out, Aldric took his damp coat from the attendant and put it back on. The shoulder was cold again before he reached the stairs.

*   *   *

The seventh day

The front benches of the Charter Hall were full of people Aldric knew.

A woman whose daughter's naming he had attended was sitting beside a man who had once fallen asleep at his table with a spoon in his hand. Two men he had apprenticed with had made room between them for another guild representative. Enoch sat at the end of the first bench, the blue coat brushed clean of its journey through the city. He was speaking to the man beside him until Aldric put the costing on the reading desk.

Then he stopped.

Aldric set his fingers against the edge of the page. He had thought that looking at Enoch first might make the beginning easier. It did not.

“The coalition's petition is denied.”

Somebody farther back shifted a bench. There was no immediate shout.

“The guild registries will be received as evidence for the electoral roll. They will not become its sole authority. Property qualification will remain a separate route.”

He heard a clerk's pen catch up with him and waited before going on.

The replacement work was set out below the decision. Sworn registrars in each quarter would take responsibility for the entries. Surviving deeds and existing records would be brought into usable lists; disputed and omitted entries would have time assigned to their examination. Guild clerks would not be asked to discard their good books. Those books would cease to be the proposed answer to every other person's claim.

He read the cost of the work line by line. When he reached the total, he said it again.

“Approximately four thousand crowns a year.”

Now there was a noise in the room.

“We spent fourteen hundred,” a man in the second row said.

“And change.”

The familiar qualification had escaped before Aldric considered it. Enoch's gaze stayed on the reading desk.

“Fourteen hundred was already too much,” the man said. “The lists we offer you are being kept now. You mean to pay people to keep them again.”

“I mean to pay people to keep the other entries too.”

“Our dues pay our clerks. Then our taxes pay yours.”

Several people answered that with murmurs of agreement. Aldric knew the man who had spoken. He was exact about payment and a poor listener when he thought he had been charged twice.

“Your clerks' work will be used,” Aldric said. “I'm not sending a second clerk round to ask whether every wool-factor belongs to the wool guild. Someone must do the work for a proprietor whose qualification isn't in your book.”

“Put it in the book.”

“On condition that she pays to join you.”

“On condition that somebody pays for the work. You're making precisely the same condition.”

Aldric let that stand long enough to hear it properly. The money did have to come from somewhere. There was no honest version of his ruling in which keeping a right cost nothing.

“Yes,” he said. “The office has an obligation to keep the electoral roll. I am charging its administration to the office. I will not charge a new membership to someone as the condition of retaining an existing qualification.”

The clerk's pen went quickly over that sentence. Aldric had not intended it to be the one anyone copied.

A woman near the aisle raised the edge of a paper.

“And where the deed is burned? What does your registrar put down?”

“The result of checking the claim against what survives.”

“Neighbors swear both ways.”

“They do now.”

“Four thousand won't make them tell the truth.”

“No. It will give somebody the paid time to hear them, compare the records and answer for the entry. At present we borrow whoever can be spared and act surprised when they cannot finish it.”

“You'll still have disputes.”

“Yes.”

He had wanted a stronger word than that. He could feel the room waiting for one.

“The petition would leave us fewer,” he said. “By removing the qualification most of them concern. That is an advantage. I won't deny it to you.”

Enoch moved then, only enough to sit straighter.

Aldric looked at him. “I won't purchase it.”

He had reached the end of his prepared pages. The public part would have been easier if the people opposite had been strangers who thought all merchants contemptible. He could have put the schooling, the warehouse and his mother's emptied room before them and demanded that they understand what the guilds had made possible.

These people knew. Some had helped.

“My bond was bought with my mother's kettle,” he said. “And two chairs. I have never regretted belonging to a guild.”

No one interrupted.

“I don't regret it today. But the office isn't ours because we helped to establish it. A property holder outside these benches can bring a claim it already owes her. She mustn't have to join us before we will keep it.”

He drew the writ toward him. Beneath the decision there was space for his name.

“The Seat belongs to everyone, or to no one.”

The words came out more loudly than he had intended. He had not changed the qualifications on the roll; plenty of people outside the hall still met neither of them. But he would not let the guilds turn the qualification they held into ownership of the office.

He signed.

The clerks needed a moment with the document. A man rose from the front bench, then waited because two others had not stood. The woman beside Enoch was studying the papers in her lap. Enoch looked at Aldric for a long time and nodded once.

Aldric could have borne anger more easily. He knew the look his friend wore when somebody had paid much too much for a thing. He had seen it across a dozen purchases, usually just before Enoch found him a cheaper one.

This time Enoch turned to collect his gloves.

*   *   *

By evening the office had filled with copies of the decision.

Aldric was checking one when Enoch came to the outer door. The clerk rose, thinking he meant to enter. Enoch kept his gloves on.

Aldric stood too. There were things they had said after worse days than this. Complaints about the room, the dinner, the quality of a man's arithmetic. He opened his mouth to ask whether Enoch had eaten.

“The coalition acknowledges the ruling, Consul.”

The clerk remained between them, holding the copy he had just finished.

“Thank you, Guildmaster.”

Enoch inclined his head and went away.

Aldric listened until he could no longer hear him on the stairs. Then the clerk asked whether the word on the second line was received, and Aldric bent over the page.

“Yes. Received.”

The bottle stood on the shelf out of the light. He left it there when he went home.

His youngest daughter had kept herself awake on a bench near the door. She was wrapped in something meant for a bed, with one foot sticking out. At the sound of his arrival she sat up so quickly that he understood she had been asleep.

“What did you do?”

He sat beside her. It was an ordinary question. He had often given her an answer about counting, or signing his name so many times that it began to look misspelled.

“Spent more money than people wanted me to.”

She drew her foot under the covering.

“On what?”

“People to do some work we already owed.”

“Did you have it?”

“The office does.”

She considered this. Aldric could feel the day's prepared explanations gathering behind his answer, all of them too large for the tired person beside him.

“Some of my friends are angry about it,” he said. “Enoch is.”

“Will he come tomorrow?”

“I don't think so.”

“Can't you give it back?”

He looked down at the little foot she had failed to keep covered.

“The work still needs paying for,” he said.

She leaned against him. He had not made it plain enough. Perhaps there was no plain account that would make the absent visit sensible to her. It was not sensible to him in all the ways he wanted it to be.

“I'd spend it again, mouse. I just wish he'd come tomorrow.”

Her foot had come out of the covering. He tucked it back in, and she pushed it out again.

“I'm hot.”

“Then take that thing off.”

She held it round her. After a while she asked him to carry her upstairs.

He took her up.

*   *   *

The following spring — AGH 10

Prue Oatley was first through the door at the east-dock count. She brought her receipts, tied in the same string, and the deed beneath them.

The registrar asked her name and found it on the rebuilt roll. She put the bundle on the table anyway.

“Do you want these?”

He checked the entry against the papers, then gave them back.

“You're here.”

Prue bent to look. Her name was there, correctly entered. She gathered the receipts back into order, tied them up again and went farther into the room.

Behind her, the registrar asked the next person for their name.

In 12 Aldric's tenure would end. He and Enoch would never speak alone again. The wine remained corked through the rest of those years, and the ruling continued after Aldric had left the Seat.

That spring morning, Prue cast her vote. It was entered beside her name. She checked that too, took up her papers and went back to the ropewalk.