The storekeeper's morning

This is fiction. Marrow Harbour, its people, records and events are invented; this chapter is not a recovered account of Atlantis.

When the storehouse door stopped fitting its frame, Iven blamed the carpenter. He had a list of things to blame the carpenter for, beginning with the roof above the barley. Then the floor moved under his heel, a jar cracked beside the scales, and he understood that the door had been the first sensible object in the room.

He went outside carrying the grain ledger. Down at the harbour, the water lifted a fishing boat against its mooring until the rope sang. Beyond it, people stood on the quay looking at one another instead of the sea.

His daughter Sera came running from the public cistern. A fresh split crossed its plaster. The keeper had stopped the queue and put a cup under the leak, as if the whole town's water could be saved one cup at a time.

Credit in a changing town

By noon the market square held carts, goats, bedding and an argument about grain. The merchants wanted their sealed sacks left together. Each seal represented a loan against the next harvest. Breaking them, their spokesman said, would destroy confidence.

Sera asked whether confidence could pull a cart. Nobody thanked her.

Before the first harvest, the porters usually held a supper on the quay. Council members could attend if they brought a dish and made no speeches. Sera had been looking forward to it. Now she was helping load the same benches onto a cart.

The council had ordered families to the upper terraces, away from the harbour wall. A few boat crews could leave by sea, but the boats could not take everybody. People inland had grain of their own; they also had mouths of their own. Iven counted the sacks in the storehouse and then the carts. There were fewer carts than he had hoped.

He knew exactly which households owed the merchants. He had pressed their marks into the clay himself. He also knew that the public reserve had been sold three months earlier to pay for repairs to the quay. Those repairs were now under water.

The second column

Iven laid the ledger on an empty fish crate. Instead of scratching out the debts, he made another column. Every sack carried uphill would be recorded against its owner. Every household drawing from it would be recorded too. Two witnesses would keep copies on separate tablets. They could argue about repayment when there was a harvest worth arguing over.

The merchant spokesman read the marks twice. Then he took off his fine outer cloth and helped lift a sack. It was a poor lift. He tried to carry it with his arms, and Sera showed him how to settle the weight against his back.

They left the copper balance behind. They took the small standard weights, seed barley from the dry upper room and every sound water jar they could find. Iven wanted the ledger chest. Sera wanted him to walk before the next tremor. They compromised on the tablets he could carry.

Above the harbour

At the terrace gate, a farmer refused the first cart until somebody explained whose goats were eating his seedlings. That was the first discussion in hours that sounded like ordinary life.

Below them, a dark patch spread across the water. The old quay was still visible. Iven could not tell whether it would be there in the morning. Sera took the ledger from him and counted the households entering the gate. When she reached the merchant spokesman, she gave him a place beside the people who owed him.

They had not saved their town. For that evening, they had saved enough of it to make supper.