At home, every vacancy notice asked for the same thing.
It didn't matter whether the job was teller, customer service, or the girl in a sash who stood by the door and said good morning to everyone. Somewhere between the minimum grade point average and the maximum age, in the same small print, there it was: berpenampilan menarik. Attractive appearance.
I had applied anyway. The HR officer who interviewed me had looked at my face for a long time, without any expression at all, and then written one short word on her form. I never found out what it was. I got the job, and for four years I decided the word had been "calm".
It was "calm", I thought, on the morning of Day 345. It had to be "calm". Unless it was "noted". Or "plain". Or "next". Four years later, and some nights I still wake up trying to read her handwriting upside down.
Corvin's notice went up on the door of the Corrinford Trust House at the first bell, before the bread was out of Brenna's oven. He nailed it beside the rate board himself, with four nails, as though he expected someone to try to steal it, and then stood back and admired it the way other men admire a horse.
VACANCY. Internal Control Unit. Must read, write and count. Must belong to no branch. Must be impossible to bribe, and up before dawn. Pleasant appearance not required. Unpleasant preferred. (C.D.)
"It's crooked," I said.
"It's level," said Corvin. "The door is crooked."
He's right. The door IS crooked. It has been crooked since the Brotherhood's men leaned on it. Has it been crooked the whole time? Have three seasons of customers been walking through a crooked door? Is that why the cheesemaker thinks I'm a spy? Never tell him. Never tell anyone.
By the second bell, when Arno Kell unbarred the counter exactly on time, a small crowd had gathered in front of the notice. Most of them couldn't read it. The ones who could were reading it aloud to the ones who couldn't, and arguing about the last line.
"Unpleasant preferred," said one of Hettie's washerwomen. "What's that mean, then?"
"Means they want someone like your mother-in-law," said another.
There was a pause while everyone considered the first washerwoman's mother-in-law.
"She'd be good," the first one admitted.
I went inside to my new place, three paces behind the counter, with my hands folded in front of me and nothing to do.
It was the thirty-second day since Arno Kell had begun to make the rows and Mistress Hale to release them. Mistress Hale had started with three mornings a week. She now came down the hill every morning, and Penhallow House, I was told, had hired a girl to boil the eggs. And I was still very bad at standing three paces back.
My hands kept wanting to reach for things. A passbook. The stamp. A customer's elbow, to steer them to the right window. Arno made each row in his square capitals, counting every coin twice under his breath, and slid it along to Mistress Hale, who counted again without hurrying and released it with the brass stamp. Gold. Next.
Nobody needed me at all.
Three paces back. Hands folded. Do nothing. Do NOTHING. A man is holding his passbook upside down—no, Arno has it. A coin is rolling off the counter—Mistress Hale has it. Why does nobody need me? At home this was called being promoted. Pak Haris stood three paces back for six years and I never once saw his hands move. I want to know his secret. I think it was the coffee.
"You're hovering," said Corvin, from behind his grille.
"I'm supervising."
"You're hovering in a supervisory manner." He didn't look up from his ledger. "Go and look at the door."
So I went and looked at the door.
By noon, the town had begun to write on it.
The notice was a good sheet of Corvin's ruled paper, with wide margins, because Corvin cannot bear a narrow margin. Corrinford had found them. Down the left side, in big, wobbly letters that sloped downhill, someone had written WHAT DOES IT PAY. I knew that hand. It had signed for account C1000002 the morning after Brenna's, and the signature had run off the edge of the box.
Jory. Asking what it pays. What DOES it pay? We never decided what it pays. Corvin has nailed up a vacancy with no wage on it, the whole town can see it, and I am the keeper, and I don't know. At home, that was the one question HR was never allowed to answer either. I always thought they were being mysterious. They were panicking. Like me.
Below it, in a neat, slanting hand: Rook says Hm. No signature. None was needed.
Lower down, in a small, upright hand that I saw every morning in the release box: Agreed. A.P. Mistress Hale had walked past the door on her way in, and had evidently been carrying Aldous's opinion in her pocket for exactly this purpose.
Someone had asked, in charcoal, DOES A GOAT COUNT, and someone else had answered underneath, in different charcoal, NO.
And at the very bottom, on its own, pressed into the paper so hard that it had left a dent, was a thumbprint the size of a small pear.
I looked at it for a long time.
There is only one thumb in Corrinford that size. My Head of Security has applied. Internally. Without telling me. Do I interview him? Do I have to turn him down? To his FACE? He has an axe. He has never once used it on anyone he likes. Will he still like me afterward? Is there a module for this? There is not a module for this.
"Corvin," I said, when I came back in. "People are writing on your notice."
He came out from behind his grille at once, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, and went outside and read every line in the margins, twice, with the deep attention he gives a borrower's accounts. When he came back in, he looked happier than I had seen him since Day 344.
"Seven different hands," he said. "Before noon."
Seven hands. Seven! In one morning! At home, marketing would put that on a slide with an arrow pointing up, and then hold a meeting about the arrow. Here, it means seven people who will want an answer, in person, at my counter, tomorrow. Oh no. Oh no. I'll need a form.
"It doesn't mean seven applicants," I said.
"No," Corvin agreed. "It means seven people read it all the way to the end." He pulled his spectacles back down. "Interviews start tomorrow, after the second bell. In the back room. Bring your form."
I had not told him about the form. I had drawn it the night before, by lamplight, at Brenna's kneading table, in neat boxes, because I am who I am, and because four years of hiring rounds at the branch had left something in me that could not be cured. Name. Age. Trade. Ties to this house. Previous employment. And at the bottom, out of pure habit, the question every interviewer at home was obliged to ask, and which nobody had ever answered usefully in the history of banking.
Where do you see yourself in five seasons?
"How did you know I had a form?" I said.
Corvin clicked my pen four times. I had not noticed him take it.
"You always have a form," he said.
The back room of the Trust House had been the toll clerk's office, in the days when the customs house took a bit from every cart that crossed the bridge. It still had his high desk, his iron-bound chest, and a narrow window through which, Corvin said, the clerk had watched the river all day for smugglers and never caught a single one. It smelled of old ink and river damp. It was the least welcoming room in Corrinford.
Corvin had chosen it for exactly that reason.
He sat at the high desk with a slate and a stub of chalk. I sat beside him with my forms and my pen. And Borrik stood in the doorway with the bowl of wooden queue tokens in his enormous hands, beaming, his beard bristling with importance.
"Head of Security," he announced to the hall, "and today, Head of the Queue."
Head of the Queue. Since when? Since last night. He has been practicing the pause before "Queue". Is that on my org chart? I don't have an org chart. Should I have an org chart? Do not draw an org chart in the middle of an interview. Do not.
"Thank you, Borrik," I said. "Before we begin. The thumbprint on the notice."
"Mine," said Borrik happily.
"You're applying."
"Head of Internal Security," said Borrik. "I'd count the vault. Very hard."
"You guard the vault, Borrik."
"Best man for it, then. Knows where it is."
Corvin wrote something on his slate. I saw it later. It said No, with a small, fond line underneath.
"The man who guards the door," I said gently, "can never be the man who counts what's behind it. If the coin were ever short, people would have to wonder about the guard. We would never want anyone to wonder about you."
Borrik thought about this for a long moment, his small eyes moving slowly from side to side.
"Fair," he said at last. Then, brightening: "Head of the Queue, though."
"Head of the Queue," I agreed.
He took it. He TOOK it. At home, turning down an internal candidate meant a closed room, a box of tissues, and a script from HR that began "This is in no way a reflection on you." I had no tissues. I had no script. I had a bowl of tokens and a man with an axe, and he said "fair". I need to sit down. I am sitting down. Good. Keep sitting.
The first token went to the cheesemaker.
He came in sideways, the way he came in everywhere, stout and old and suspicious, with his magnificent grey mustache going ahead of him like a hedge in front of a house. He sat down without being asked, looked at my form, looked at me, and narrowed his eyes.
"Name?" I said.
"You know my name."
I do. I wrote it in the ledger myself. If I say it, he'll ask how a spy knows his name. If I don't say it, he'll ask why a spy is pretending not to know it. There is no correct answer. This is a trap. I am the interviewer, and it is still a trap.
I wrote it down.
"Trade?"
"Cheese."
"Do you have any ties to this house?"
"I have an account," he said. "Two marks. I check it every market day, in case you've gone east with it."
"And where do you see yourself in five seasons?" I asked.
Why did I ask that? Why did I ask him that? Nobody has answered that question usefully in the history of banking. I was asked it at my own interview and said "growing with the company", which is not an answer. It is a noise. Please let him say "growing with the company".
The cheesemaker narrowed his eyes until they nearly vanished under his eyebrows.
"Watching you, spy," he said.
...That is, technically, the job description.
Corvin wrote on his slate. I leaned over to see. Unpleasant: 5. Eligible: 0.
"You would be counting your own two marks," I said. "I'm very sorry, sir. We can't take anyone whose own coin is in the vault."
The cheesemaker stood up, perfectly satisfied, as though I had confirmed everything he had ever suspected.
"Spies never hire honest men," he told the hall on his way out, loudly, and the hall nodded, because it had heard him say this many times before and found it comforting.
Master Corley came in on the third token.
He was exactly as long and sallow as I remembered him from the day he had stood in Brenna's doorway and given her until Restday to find twenty crowns. His grey moustache drooped. His mouth was still pursed, as though he were tasting a coin he did not trust. The greasy rent book was gone, of course; he had no rent to collect any more. Without it, he looked like a man who has lost an arm and keeps reaching for it.
He sat down. Before I could say a word, he reached across the desk, took a mark out of the dish of test coins Corvin keeps for counting trials, bit it, looked at it, and put it back.
"Clipped," he said.
Corvin looked at the coin. Then he looked at Master Corley, with an expression I had seen on his face only once before, on the day he first saw my ballpoint pen.
"It is," said Corvin softly.
Oh no. Oh no. He BIT it, and he was right, and Corvin is looking at him like a man who has found his long-lost brother. Do not hire the landlord. Do not hire the landlord who nearly put Brenna in the street. Think of a reason. Think of a reason now.
"Name, sir?" I said.
He gave it. Trade: "Property." Ties to this house:
"I sold my building," said Master Corley, "to a borrower of this house, on a loan this house made her." His mouth pursed tighter. "And she pays on time. Worse luck."
A tie! There it is! Thank you, Brenna. Thank you, thirteen-crown loan. Thank you, building. I have never in my life been so grateful for a conflict of interest.
He was perfect. He was everything the notice asked for. He could read, write and count; he could find a clipped mark with his teeth; he was up before dawn, because he had spent forty years catching tenants before they left for work; and he was, without question, the most unpleasant man I had met in Lorvane, counting a baron who had sent his steward to rob me.
I had never wanted to hire anyone less. I had never been sorrier to turn anyone down.
"I'm afraid that tie disqualifies you, Master Corley," I said. "If Mistress Holt ever fell behind, people would wonder whose side you were counting for."
He looked at me with his sour, pursed mouth for a long moment.
"She won't fall behind," he said. "That's the worst of it." And he went out.
Corvin wrote: Unpleasant: 5. Eligible: 0. Teeth: excellent.
The rest of the day went the same way, only faster. The turnip seller wanted to know whether the job could be done sitting down, and kept an account. Widow Marsh wanted to know whether the job could be done sitting down, and kept an account. One of Hettie's washerwomen applied on behalf of her entire crew, all eleven of them, and all eleven of them kept accounts. A cooper's apprentice scowled at me so magnificently through his whole interview that Corvin gave him a five, before I discovered that he had a toothache.
"Temporary," said Corvin, and rubbed out the five with his sleeve.
Temporarily unpleasant. Is that a category? It isn't on my form. I have a box for trade, a box for ties and a box for five seasons, and no box for teeth. Four years of hiring rounds. Nobody ever told me to check the teeth.
The pleasant man came on the second morning, Day 347, with token number nine.
I knew he was wrong the moment he walked in, and I could not have told you why. He was about thirty-five, slim and of middle height, with a round, kind face, soft fair hair parted precisely in the middle, and dimples. He wore a dove-grey coat of very good, very quiet cloth, and he smelled faintly of lavender. His nails were perfectly clean. He said "Good morning" to Borrik so warmly that, in the hall behind him, Hettie Brook sighed.
He bowed to me, and to Corvin, and laid a folded letter on the desk.
It was a reference. It was beautifully written, in neat, gentle handwriting I had seen once before, on a small cream card that lived in the back of my notebook. It praised his honesty, his arithmetic and his discretion, and it was signed with two initials.
H.G.
"No," said Corvin.
The pleasant man paused with one hand on the back of the chair. "I haven't sat down."
"That's why it's quick," said Corvin.
I expected him to argue. At home, everyone with a reference argued. Instead he smiled, and his dimples deepened, and he took his hand off the chair.
"Master Grane said you would refuse me," he said. "He asked me to tell you that he admires your caution. And that he so looks forward to meeting your new unit." He set something small and round on the desk beside the letter. "With his compliments."
It was a plum.
Then he bowed again, said "Good morning" to Borrik on his way out, quite as warmly as before, and was gone.
Nobody in the back room said anything for a while. Outside, the river went on being loud.
"How does he know about the unit?" I said at last.
"Everybody hears everything in time," said Corvin, in a passable imitation of a gentle schoolmaster's voice. "That is the trouble with paper. It does get about."
Corvin did an impression. Corvin did an IMPRESSION. Of Grane. It was good. Why was it good? How long has he been practicing? Does he practice the rest of us? Does he do me?
Borrik came in from the doorway, picked up the plum, examined it from every side with great seriousness, and ate it in two bites.
"Safe," he reported.
On Restday the Trust House was shut, and I laid the forms out on Brenna's kneading table and looked at them until the honey buns went cold.
Fourteen forms. Fourteen names, fourteen trades, and fourteen answers to the question about five seasons, of which the most useful had been "Alive, I hope," from Widow Marsh.
And in the box marked Ties to this house, fourteen times, something.
Brenna stood at the oven with her arms folded, watching me the way she watches a loaf she has decided not to trust. Fenn sat on the end of the table, swinging his bare feet and eating a bun he had been told was for later. Borrik had come for the buns, and stayed for the buns. He took up most of the bench by the door, like a piece of furniture everyone had grown too fond of to move.
"There's a clerk from the mill," I said, holding up a form. "He can read and write. He counts. He has never opened an account. He was polite, but not very. Corvin gave him a three."
"Coll's nephew," said Fenn, through his bun.
"He didn't say—"
"Coll's sister's boy. And Coll's daughter is Wenna, in Aubrelle, married to Osk the cooper, and Wenna banks at your other door." Fenn held up one finger, then another, then a third. "So he'd be counting his cousin's money. And his uncle's. Coll's got a savings account he told you not to tell Brenna about."
Brenna turned round from the oven.
"Coll," she said, "has what?"
Fenn. FENN. My informant. My eyes in the town. Has just disclosed one customer's account to another customer, who buys her flour from him, in a kitchen, on Restday, in front of the keeper, with honey on his chin. At home that is a warning letter, a meeting in a room with no windows, and a compliance module I would have to take twice. Say something. Say something professional.
"Customer information is confidential," I said, without expression.
"He's been selling me my flour with a face like a funeral for five months," said Brenna. "Saving."
"I can neither confirm nor deny—"
"Huh," said Brenna, and turned back to the oven with an air of deep and private satisfaction, which I suspected Master Coll would be feeling the effects of for some time.
Mohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanannya, I thought, to Master Coll, wherever he was. I will apologize to you properly at the counter. At length. With the Service Smile.
I held up the next form.
"The Reeve's second cousin," said Fenn. "Married to the turnip seller's sister."
The next.
"Owes Hob Marrin for a boat."
The next.
"Her husband's on the Watch." Fenn frowned. "The Watch don't bank with you. They keep getting robbed instead. But her brother's one of Hettie's, so."
He had run out of fingers some time ago. Without looking, he reached over, took Borrik's left hand, which was the size of a dinner plate, and began counting on that instead. Borrik let him. Borrik went on eating.
By the fourteenth form, Fenn had used every finger in the kitchen except Brenna's, because hers were in the dough.
I looked down at the table. Fourteen forms, and fourteen ties. Some were as thick as rope and some were as thin as thread, but every one of them ran back across the bridge and in through the door of the Trust House.
"Fenn," I said slowly. "How many lines are on the doorframe now?"
"Two hundred and thirty-eight," said Fenn at once. "Real ones." He licked honey off his thumb. "That's half the town. And the other half's married to them."
Two hundred and thirty-eight names. I know every one. I wrote most of them myself. And every single one of them is somebody's cousin, and every cousin is somebody's landlord, and every landlord owes Hob Marrin for a boat. There is nobody. There is nobody in this whole town who could count us. We need an auditor, and the entire town is related.
And when the auditors came, they came from Jakarta. In a car with a number plate nobody recognized.
"It has to be a stranger," I said.
Brenna turned round. She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly.
"Nobody trusts a stranger," she said. "Not here."
"That's the job," I said. "Nobody is supposed to trust them. They're supposed to trust nobody. They count, and they write down what they find, and they don't care whose cousin is short."
Brenna looked at me for a long moment, with her tired, square face and the lines at the corners of her eyes.
"I trusted a stranger once," she said. "Walked into my bakery with nothing but a funny jacket and a little stamp, and a face like a shut shop."
Oh, I thought.
My face did nothing. It was very busy doing nothing. Behind it, something had come loose all at once and was rolling around in my chest like a dropped coin under a counter.
Customer service officers do not cry in bakeries, I told it. There is no staff toilet in a bakery. There is no staff toilet anywhere in this world. I have checked.
"That worked out," said Brenna gruffly, and turned back to her dough, and began to knead it very hard.
Fenn looked from her to me, and decided, wisely, to eat another bun.
On Day 351 the town ran out of applicants, and on Day 352 the Watch very nearly ran out of wages.
Sergeant Dorran came in at the fourth bell, which was strange, because Sergeant Dorran never came in at all. He stood at the back of the queue with his dented iron cap under his arm and his spear leaning against his shoulder, his long, weathered face drooping even further than usual, and waited his turn behind a carter and a girl with a basket of eggs.
He had been the first person in this world to call me Sekka. I was fond of him in a way I had never told anyone.
When Borrik handed him a token, he looked at it for some time, as though it might be evidence.
"Not here about the notice," he said, when he reached me. "Before you ask."
"How can I help you, Sergeant?"
"Wage day," said Sergeant Dorran heavily. "Every eight days, the Reeve's man walks the Watch's pay across the bridge in a bag. Everybody knows which day. Everybody knows which bag." He turned his cap slowly round in his long hands. "Third time this season somebody's tried for it. Didn't get it. Next time they might."
Everybody knows which day, I thought. Everybody knows which bag.
At home there was a word for this. There was a whole DEPARTMENT for this. There was a target for this, with my name beside it, in red.
Something very small and very bright came on behind my face, like a lamp being lit in the back room of a shop after closing.
"I see," I said.
"Reeve says, could you keep the bag in your vault overnight," said Sergeant Dorran. "Just the night before. Safe."
"We could do something better than that, Sergeant," I said. "If the Reeve would see me."
He looked at me with his weathered horse's face for a long moment, and I watched him decide, the way a watchman decides about a dark alley, that he did not want to know what I was thinking.
"I'll ask him," he said, and put his cap on, and went.
Payroll. PAYROLL. Every funding officer at home would have sold a kidney for a payroll deal. One signature from one employer, a hundred accounts on the same morning, every one of them real. Don't smile. Do not smile. Is my face doing something? Something is happening near my mouth. Arno is looking. Stop it. Stop it at once.
Nineteen days to the end of the season. Sixty-two short.
I did nothing with my face at all. Arno Kell, making a row at the counter, glanced at me once anyway, with his own flat face, and then looked away again, as though he had seen something in mine that he recognized and did not wish to embarrass me by mentioning.
Mistress Hale came back down the hill after the noon bell, as she did every day, with her basket over her arm and a folded note in her small, upright hand.
"From Master Penhallow," she said. "On the subject of your unit."
I unfolded it.
None of them? Good. I should have disliked them for the wrong reasons. A.P.
He's enjoying this, I thought. He is sitting at the top of the only real hill in Corrinford, with his foot on a stool, enjoying every bit of it.
That evening, after closing, Corvin went out to the door with a pot of ink. I watched him through the grille. He read the margins again, every one of them, the way he reads a borrower's accounts, and then, very carefully, beneath his own last line, he wrote one more.
Strangers only.
He came back in and handed me my pen.
"Nobody will read that," I said. "Strangers don't come to our door. That's what makes them strangers."
"Then we go to theirs," said Corvin, and went back behind his grille.
I sat at the counter, with the bar across the door and the lamp lit, and wrote my closing.
Day 352. ICU applicants: 14. Unpleasant: 9. Temporarily unpleasant: 1. Eligible: 0. Real depositors: 238. Days to the end of the season: 19. Short of 300: 62.
Corvin came out, read it over my shoulder, held out his hand for my pen, and clicked it four times. Underneath, in his cramped, ink-stained hand, he added a line.
Payroll? (C.D.)
I stared at it.
"You were listening," I said.
"Dorran has a carrying voice," said Corvin. "And you lit up like a lamp."
"My face didn't move."
"No," Corvin agreed. "Your pen did. You've written the word bag in the margin six times."
I looked down. I had.
He's right. I'm panicking. I'm panicking SO much. But it's the good kind. The last-week-of-the-month kind, where you can't sleep, and you rewrite the target sheet in your head at three in the morning, because there might still be a way.
Later, walking back across the bridge to the building Brenna owned, with the lanterns coming on one by one and the river loud underneath, I found myself thinking about the last line on Corvin's notice.
Strangers only.
Somewhere out there, past the farmland and the frontier and the long brown road to the capital, there was a person nobody in Corrinford had ever met. Someone who belonged to no one. Someone who might be trusted, perhaps, precisely because nobody had ever trusted them with anything.
I had no idea who they were, or where.
For no reason I could have written in a ledger, I hoped that, wherever they were, they had eaten today.