Chapter 6 — Nundinae

On the morning of the market Aunia woke before the light, as she woke on every eighth day, and did the first counting on her back in the dark: what would go down the hill, and what it must come back as.

Down: two cheeses, the firm kind that traveled, wrapped in leaves and tied. Eggs, twenty and four, bedded in chaff in the narrow basket the boy could carry without swinging, if watched. The wool she had spun since the last market. The first picking of beans. Back: salt; the knife-blade set anew, which the smith had promised twice now; the miller paid, because a fee that stands begins to grow; and coin — before everything, coin — because the writing in Tarbessa fed once a year, at the Saturnalia, and fed only on coin, and a wise house began gathering in July what December would eat. She had the whole of it counted before her feet found her sandals.

Boutius was in the yard already, forking the straw while the dark still held the dust down. He would not come; threshing was done but a farm never was; and the elder did not go to market any more — the hill had grown longer in the night, he said, as hills did for old men. He sat by the fire with his hands on his knees and gave her his commission at the door, the same every market.

"Bring word, not goods," he said. "Word is lighter."

She went down through the holding in the first grey, the boy ahead with the baskets, and did what she did every market morning without meaning to, the way your tongue counts your teeth. The town had a writing about this land — she knew it the way she knew there was a sea, from other people — and the writing said forty iugera. She had heard the number all her married life and never once used it. Nothing on the land answered to it. What the land answered to was otherwise, and she went down through it now: the upper terrace her husband's grandfather had broken out of the thorn with the iron bar, three days' plowing on stone-thin soil that gave the hardest wheat; the vines below it, planted with borrowed coin before her marriage, in a year when there had been no other coin in the world, and the coin not done being paid for yet; the olives, that had seen everything and expected nothing; the fig her father-in-law had planted the year Boutius was born, shading now the third generation to be told so; the channel, and the channel's stones, which her house kept clean two lengths beyond their own turning because her house had always kept them so. And at the head of the upper terrace, the letter-stone: cut with marks none of theirs had cut, older than her marriage, which the land carried the way an ox carries a brand no one living remembers setting on. She touched it going by, flat-handed, as she touched the gate-post. You lived with stone. In thirty years it had never seemed to be anyone's business but stone's.

By the second bend of the path they were four women and a donkey; by the bridge, a market.

Cardena on the eighth day was the valley turned inside out: the vega's produce walking in at every gate, the town's coin walking out to meet it, and between them the bright noisy shore where the two tides traded. She set her cloth where she always set it, third arch from the fountain, between the cheese-wife of the shrine village and the old man with the baskets, and sold the way her mother had taught her: state the price once, then be silent. The counting came to her in her mother's tongue, always; Latin was for totals. When the potter's wife disputed the eggs — she disputed them every market, it was her form of greeting — Aunia counted the reckoning back aloud, egg by egg and as by as, at a pace no dispute could live in, and the potter's wife paid, satisfied, having had her ceremony.

Under the arcade, where the shade was, the Tarbessan's agent kept his market-day table.

He was a small, clean, patient man, and she had never once seen him hurry, for the same reason the river never hurried: everything came to him. Men stood at his table as they stood at the barber's — a thing regular, necessary, and a little shaming — and renewed what could not be paid, and made their marks, and went away lighter in the face and heavier in the wax. He greeted her by name as she passed, pleasantly, the way writing greets: the name and the sum in one breath.

"The Saturnalia is far yet," he said, meaning that it was near.

"It will find us ready," she said, meaning that she did not know.

And, as he asked every year, in the voice of a man asking after her health, he asked whether Boutius had thought again about the vines.

"The vines are bearing," she said, and moved on, and felt the exchange close behind her, small and exact, like a tablet shutting on its cords: asked; answered; unchanged; carried over into another year of a patience that was not kindness.

The market's one great cargo that day was a thing nobody weighed and everybody carried. The Emperor, they said, had won the far war, and for joy of it had burned the debt-writings at Rome. All of them, said some. The old ones only, said others. The town's too, said a boy, and was cuffed into better sense by his own grandmother. At the fountain the women handled the news the way you handle fruit out of season, wanting it and doubting it in the same grip. The potter's young wife believed it whole, and shone, and named what her house owed as if naming it aloud in the good news would dissolve it. An old woman of the lower vega said that emperors forgave what was owed to emperors, when they forgave at all, and that no man yet had burned a writing that said men owed him; fires, she said, ran the other way. Then they looked to Aunia, because she was known for her counting.

"The vine-money is not owed to the Emperor," Aunia said.

That was the end of the matter at that fountain. And walking back to her cloth she thought — she did not say — that everything her house owed had a writing, in a strong-room, in another town, and everything her house was owed had none: the days lent at harvest, the bread carried up to a sick hearth, the water shared in a dry June, her mother's wool that had walked to three weddings. All that was kept the other way, in the older register, the one behind the eyes, that burned only when the head did. The Emperor could not burn it and the fever-man could not collect it. It was the only book the vega had ever kept, and no one in a toga had ever once asked to see it.

There was smaller news under the great news, the way there is always barley under the wheat. A man from Corduba, they said, sat in the town's record-office and had sat there since April, reading. Read all day. Had the keys — both keys, said the wife of the man who swept the basilica, in the voice of a woman reporting that a guest sleeps with his boots on. Some said new tax. Some said a new assessment, which was the same word with more years in it. The oldest women said assessors were like flood-years; you got one in a generation whatever you did, and the wise built high and kept small. Aunia heard it as the vega heard all town news: at one remove, like weather standing on the sierra — watched, spoken of, nobody's business in the low fields until the water came down.

She lost the boy twice in the crowd and found him both times in the same place, at the tail of the carters' row, where the road turned down toward the port. He was not idling; that was the trouble; he was studying, the way he studied a snare. Rufus's brother had gone down to Portus Albus in the spring, and word came up — word like that could swim upstream — that he was paid in coin every eighth day, and ate wheat bread, and owed no man. The boy did not say: and I. He only stood where the road could see him, sixteen years old, all wrists, growing out of his tunic in every direction at once. She called him, and he came at the second call, which was his age too.

They went up the hill in the late glare, the baskets light and the knot at her waist heavy — a small hard shape she could read through the cloth with her thumb, and did, twice, on the climb. At the gate the elder was in the doorway with the low sun on him, waiting for his commission.

"Word?" he said.

"The Emperor has won his war. The far one. They said he burned the debt-writings for joy, and it was not true."

The elder nodded at that slowly, as at a thing that confirmed the world in its courses.

"Wars end," he said. "Taxes are the peace."

That night, lying awake the little while she allowed it, she did the day's second counting, the standing one. The market had come back as: salt; the blade; the miller quiet; coin the shape of a small stone in the cloth. Against December: the vine-crop coming, the oil after that, and the interest at one in ten, which slept in Tarbessa and grew while it slept, the only thing in the valley that needed no rain. It would balance. It balanced every year, with nothing left over; and nothing left over was, in the vega, the name of a good year.

Forty iugera, said the town's writing, in a strong-room she had never seen. Three generations, said the fig tree and the terrace and the stone. One in ten, said the wax in Tarbessa, which never slept. She held all three in her head, where the true accounts were kept, and blew out no lamp, there being none lit, and slept.