The Ratio the Divan Does Not Have

When two men’s cargo shares a hold and the sea takes part of it — a case not tried this month or last, but a dozen times before I was born, and always the same — no factor on this coast asks which sack of Kael Dorn grain the water reached first. We take the whole loss, weigh it against what each man loaded, and split the cost by the ratio. Halven’s four hundredweight against Roos’s two hundred, the loss falls two to one, and both men sign the same afternoon. It has a name in the old contracts: general apportionment. Nobody needs an order. Everybody needs a ratio.

I have been turning this over since I read what the Divan wants at the top of Ulev Street, where a childless house burned with a man in one room and his wife in another, and no one alive can say which of them the fire found first. The law there does not want a ratio. It wants an order — this one first, that one after — because an estate, unlike a lost cargo, will not divide clean. Someone inherits the whole of it, or the presumption decides for them, and the presumption in this case has nothing to stand on: the Register never held either one’s age, so it cannot even guess which of them was younger.

Zara dyed two lengths of cerulean for that same house nineteen years back, one vat, folded together, so that neither sash could be called truer than the other. She tells it better than I will repeat it here, but the shape of it is my shape too. Two things entered the same water at the same hour and came out with no before between them. I know exactly what a factor does with a loss like that. I split it. The Divan cannot split a house. It can only choose, or pretend the choosing was already made by an age nobody wrote down.

Serevan cerulean holds at eleven marks two the length, unchanged all week — the one column that behaved.