Nine Marks Two, for a Boat He Has Never Watched Come In

Fayyad,

Cassia is at its thirty-fifth market day climbing and I have stopped writing you the figure, since by the time this clears the strait it will be wrong in either direction. Indigo I will give you once more, because it is the last time I can: nineteen marks three the measure, the southern lot sold out, the roll closed until past Yearend. Write that down before I write something that matters less to the strait and more to me.

A tow-boat I have watched dock at the Chandler’s Wharf for nineteen years — Aksel Vann at the tiller, his brother Petya at the oar, a workaday hull, nothing Serevan would bid on — lost its owner the flood night the Karvel came over. The estate went by presumption, the younger spouse deemed to survive the elder, and from her kin the fifth-share fell to a cooper’s apprentice of seventeen named Denis Tomner, who has, by the Divan’s own account, met the boat perhaps never. I priced the fifth whole: a working harbor boat of her age and class clears perhaps forty-six marks sold outright — call the fifth nine marks two. Petya filed nothing. Three clerks checked the roll for his name and found it blank each time. Nineteen years at an oar, and he let a stranger’s hand take a fifth of it rather than ask a bench that has never once, in his memory, found for a brother over a paper.

I have a column for every voyage I have ever priced, departed and arrived, and no column at all for a man who watched his own fifth drift to a boy who will sell it at the first offer and never once stand at the rail to see what it does when the tide takes it out.

Zara gave something away this week too, though nobody asked her to and nobody will ever know to ask. A measure of true indigo, nineteen marks three, sold at the price of woad — under two marks — to a bride dyeing a veil early so the waiting would have a task inside it. The difference, near seventeen marks five, she is carrying herself, in a vat she now owes and does not yet know she owes. Corvus looked for a category to hold it and found none, rightly: nobody failed to catch this. She caught it herself and chose to keep it.

Seventeen marks five, freely given, against nine marks two, silently lost. The larger sum bought a girl thirty years of believing a lie that costs her nothing. The smaller one bought a man nothing at all, not even the asking. I find I would rather be the one who gave than the one who simply didn’t ask, and I have no ledger column for why that should matter, only that it does.

— M.