The trial's third month was made as the first two had been made: in the day's gaps, at the mortar's full turning, the standard unmoved, the hours going around it as they would.
The grinding went across two days this time, because the summer's counter was busier than the spring's had been — carters with the sun in their eyes, the salt drink by the cup at noon, the door's ordinary asks running long into the heat. The mortar took its pieces of the day where the day gave them: before the shutter, in the long afternoon, once by lamplight with the street gone quiet and the pestle's rhythm the only industry left on it. The standard did not care. The standard never cared. That was the whole of its virtue, and the whole of its cost.
Twelve sachets. The sieve's leavings were ground again, till the lot ran free as sand before a single fold was made. Every sachet was labelled as it was folded, and the box set with its rows of six, labels uppermost.
Behind the shop, the beds drank their dawn water and stood in the summer's first true heat, the strong rows over the string and climbing, the stone bed in its two thin rows, the salve dark and slow. Nothing was picked. The picking had its week written ahead of it, and the shop did not borrow from a written week.
Ren carried the box up the hill in the morning, through the gate's traffic: a beam team coming down slow, the road's dust standing in the light, a drove of pigs arguing with their keeper all the way to the river pens.
Ren found the clerk at the long table by the window. The trial's paper lay open at the third month's page — the last page of the paper, and the clerk's hand rested on it the way a hand rests on a thing that is about to be filed.
The office around them ran its summer morning: a runner drying a wet copy at the window's draught, two clerks arguing a figure in the kind voices of men who will argue it again after noon, the year's folders standing in their press along the wall. A row of shut paper, each spine lettered, each holding whatever the year had so far amounted to in that office. Ren's trial had three pages in one of those folders. He had never seen the folder. He was not meant to. A supplier read the pages that were turned toward him, and the shop's book kept the rest honest from its own side of the hill.
He counted them against the paper — twelve, aloud — and read every label on the row before he touched the scales.
Then he did the closing month's full measure. He set the office scales on the table and weighed every sachet, one by one, against the office's weights — the whole twelve, not a choosing out of them. Ren had watched the office weigh two in the spring's first month, and four in its second. Twelve was the third month's arithmetic, and it was the trial's shape completing itself in front of him: the closer a paper came to closing, the more of it the office chose to hold in its hands.
The weights agreed, twelve of twelve.
The clerk wrote the month's line, in the hand the office kept for such lines. Under it he wrote a second line, slower, and ruled the paper under it with one stroke — the stroke an office puts under a thing that is finished. He turned the paper toward Ren, so that both lines could be read.
Trial, third month. Twelve sachets of wound powder, of the shop's standard. Labels read. Weighed in full at the office scales. Accepted: twelve of twelve.
The trial stands closed: thirty-six of thirty-six standing under it, and none refused.
"The paper goes to the year's folder now," the clerk said. He said it in the clerk's way, as a remark about paper. "What the office does with a closed paper is the office's weather. It is not mine to forecast, and it would not be yours to bank on, if I did."
"It was never banked on," Ren said. "It was delivered."
"So the paper says." The clerk folded the year's folder shut over the trial's three pages — three months, three lines of twelve, and the closing stroke — and set the month's money on the table in hundreds — one thousand, four hundred and forty, the sachet's price twelve times over, and no second number anywhere in the room.
Ren counted the money into the box again, and the count came out the office's count. The receipt was folded into the lid, beside the two before it.
He went out past the preparation room, by the corridor. Its door stood open. The mortars stood clean and dry, rowed like cups on a shelf no hand was using; the stool stood flipped on the bench. The office did the weighing this year — its scales on its table, by its clerks' hands — and the bench waited for a corps name in the office's own weather, which was not Ren's to forecast either. He did not slow.
Down at the gate market, in the afternoon's heat, the season's leaf stood by the carts.
It was the summer's first big cutting off the road villages — gathered leaf, sold green-weight, dried at the stalls in other years and this year sold on the stalk for the drying to be the buyer's. The seller was a road man with the leaf stacked in its baskets, and his price stood on his board for the street to read, the way prices stood on boards: the season's fair price, neither the storm's price of the bad year nor any man's favour. It was the price Ren had written in his source's count at the flats: the fair price, or none.
He bought the whole of what the man had brought down that day, for the reserve's making — not the counter's. The leaf was weighed on the seller's scale, twice, and once on the scale Ren had carried down for the purpose, and the three weights were cousins close enough to be one weight spoken three ways. The price counted out in hundreds on the cart's tail: one thousand, nine hundred, counted by Ren, counted back by the seller — and no note asked, and no note offered, and the money ended where the counting ended, on the day it was counted.
While the counting went on, the market did its own reading of the board. A keeper from one of the gate inns took a half basket of the same leaf at the same price for his house's use, counted out beside Ren without a word of bargaining from either of them; a carter asked the price, heard it, and bought a bundle for his mother's winter chest, at the price as it stood. The board's number was the street's number that day — neither a favour to the shop nor a tax on it. That was what a fair price looked like from ground level: other men's money agreeing with it, in the open, for their own reasons.
The cart set the baskets down at the shop's door, in the shade of the shutter, and went back down the street empty and light.
That evening the yard took its second shape-change of the year.
Along the wall that held the day's sun longest, Ren raised the first frames of the drying racks: posts from the shed's stored wood, sunk and wedged, cross-pieces lashed, the first cords strung and pulled true. Two frames standing of the wall's length — the rest would follow in their days. The bought leaf went onto the strung cords and the mats in its green weight, spread thin, the way leaf is spread when the drying is the maker's and not the stall's: turned by his hands, in his yard, under his own weather.
The work took the light that was left, and the beds took their dusk water after it, at the pace of dry days, and the shop's shutter came down on a yard that had begun to look like the plan's page. Racks rising against the wall, leaf on the cords, and the count of it all still ahead of the seals.
That night he wrote the summer's counts in the same hand, on the one page, favouring neither.
The trial is closed. Thirty-six sachets under it; thirty-six accepted; none refused. The hill paid the third month at the board's price: one thousand, four hundred and forty. The box stood at five thousand, seven hundred and thirty.
Bought at the gate, at the season's fair price: leaf for the reserve's making, one thousand, nine hundred — weighed twice and once, counted twice, no note. The box stands at three thousand, eight hundred and thirty.
The racks' first frames stand along the wall. The bought leaf is on the cords. The beds stand unpicked, at their written week.
The trial had been a paper, and the paper was in a folder, and the folder was the office's. What stood in the shop's own book was plainer, and it was enough: thirty-six, and none refused.