30.

The First Morning Without a Founder

Orbag, 122

The workroom door gave when Nessa put her hand against it. She still had the key held ready and nearly scratched the paint with its point.

The long worktable stood between the cabinet and the street windows, its middle still covered with yesterday's sheets. Abigail was at the open cabinet, looking into an empty space between two bundles. A folded sheet lay on top of the cabinet. She had brought her own paper to remind her which of the press's papers she wanted.

“The old correction sheets,” she said. “Have they moved?”

“Returned papers are now kept according to the job.”

Abigail looked round.

Nessa put away the key. “Top tray, on the right. What are you looking for?”

“My table. I corrected it here, then took home the copy with the mistake.”

“You want the one with the red corner.”

“May I take it?”

“Yes.” Nessa pulled the tray forward. It would catch on the cabinet door unless you held the door fully back, a fault she had been asking someone to mend since well before she had any share in the cabinet. “Let me put the other one in its place, so we know where it went.”

Abigail passed over her sheet. The wood elf stood aside while Nessa exchanged the papers, and Nessa had the foolish sensation that she ought to hurry. Nobody had ever timed her at this cupboard. She had simply wanted to reach it first today.

The binder came through from the finishing room with a bundle held under one arm.

“Notices or folding?” he asked.

Nessa glanced at Abigail, who was reading her correction.

“Notices. They go out before midday. I'll help you clear the table.”

He gave her half the bundle and went back through. Nessa braced hers against her hip. The boards had been tied too tightly; a corner pressed through her skirt as she followed him.

There were already things to do. She liked that. All yesterday's signatures had left her wanting to lie down.

Kazmira had died the year before. Now, with the old partnership ended, the workers owned its successor, including the agreed stock, jobs and obligations. They would buy what they had received in stages, out of what the business earned. Kaz's estate retained a claim it could enforce. Abigail had converted part of the money owed her into capital, retaining a minority share and agreeing to wait. Nessa had read those terms often enough to recognize them upside down. She had wanted them, had signed them, and had woken this morning remembering an expense she meant to check.

She untied the bundle. The board sprang a little when the cord came off.

“You can stop squeezing them like that,” she told the binder.

“I didn't tie it.”

“Then tell whoever did.”

“That would be you.”

She looked at the knot she had just undone. It was hers.

He held out his hand for the cord. She gave it to him and went to fetch the order book.

Shael arrived while Nessa was checking the delivery, carrying a cloth-wrapped packet against her chest. She called to Abigail from the doorway, then stopped to let a worker pass with the notices. The packet was too large for her to tuck tidily under an arm. She tried, shifted it back, and waited until the passage was clear.

“I brought the smaller book,” she said.

Abigail lifted one corner of the cloth. “All of it?”

“All the parts of it.”

Nessa made room on the table. She knew Shael's name on spines and title pages, and knew the elf herself well enough to say good morning without standing to attention. It was still difficult to see that packet without imagining somebody else agreeing to its contents.

Shael opened it toward Abigail. Several short manuscripts lay under drawings of streets, towers and market stalls. She spread a view across the top and put her palm on its curling edge.

“A few journeys. Something light enough to carry and cheap enough to write in. I said I'd see whether we could do it here.”

“What price did you have in mind?” Nessa asked.

Shael told her. Nessa asked how much of the packet belonged in it.

“The essays. These views. That little sketch goes at the beginning.” Shael moved the larger sheets to reveal a crumpled drawing. “I should like a cover you can put in a bag without having to apologize to it afterward.”

“A paper cover,” the binder said, coming to look.

“A good paper cover.”

“That's still a paper cover.”

Shael smiled at him. “I'm asking for one.”

Nessa took the packet's cloth off the edge of the costing book and laid it on an empty chair.

“Come and see what we've got.”

The stock shelves occupied the cooler side of the room. Nessa drew out a folded sample, rubbed a corner between finger and thumb and passed it to Shael. There was enough of that stock for a small edition without buying more. It took ordinary text well. The binder folded another sheet around it to make a rough cover.

Shael opened the little blank object and tried it in her hand.

“Yes. About this.”

Nessa liked its proportions too. She brought it back to the table, where the compositor had drawn up a stool beside the pictures.

“That price will pay for a book like this,” Nessa said. “Setting, printing, finishing. Your fee. It won't pay for all these as well.”

The compositor lifted a wash drawing of an awning. “This won't come out on that sheet as it stands.”

“The dark part?” Shael asked.

“The light part. You'll keep the shade and lose the market underneath it.”

They held the drawing beside the blank page. Shael tilted them toward the window. Nessa could see where the original's narrow pale gaps separated figures from cloth, and could also see how much work there was in making those gaps survive at the size Shael wanted.

“Use a better sheet for the pictures,” Shael said.

“Then prepare them, print them separately and put them into the book,” the binder said. “I'd sooner sew another whole book.”

Nessa turned her costing sheet toward Shael and showed her where that work would go. She left the author line where it was, and the paid hours. The money they had agreed to reserve for the next estate payment was not an allowance for a new book. Nor could she spend Abigail's decision to wait a second time.

“We can raise the price,” she said.

Shael shook her head before Nessa finished.

“Then we need fewer pictures.”

“None,” the binder said. “That makes the job possible now.”

The compositor had pulled the little crumpled sketch out from under the others. “This is only lines.”

“Those lines are the trouble,” Shael said. She put the first manuscript beside it. “The prose is being very pleased with itself here. If you take the sketch away, nobody catches it until it admits what happened.”

The binder looked at the drawing. “Can't you put that into the prose?”

“I can tell you what to notice. That's different.”

“Show us,” Nessa said.

Shael began to bring the sheets together, then hesitated. “Are you saying we can do one?”

“I'm saying I haven't priced one. I've priced this.” Nessa put her hand on the full pile. “And we can't do it at the price you want.”

For a moment Shael kept hold of the wash drawing. Nessa liked it: the sagging awning, the deep interval of shade, a small pale arm disappearing behind a basket. She wished the choice had concerned a bad picture. Shael laid it down very carefully.

“Abigail, could I speak to you?”

Abigail had been sitting at the end of the table, her corrected paper folded again beside her. She rose, and Shael went ahead into the adjoining room.

Nessa looked toward the notices. She could get them out while the two old friends talked, then bring in the figures when someone wanted them.

“Take the costing,” the compositor said.

Nessa wanted to hear what Shael asked before it came back as an instruction. She picked up the book and followed.

The adjoining room was just wide enough for a desk, the agreement shelves and three people who did not all want to sit. Shael had put her hand on the back of the chair. Nessa turned sideways past it, her broad shoulder brushing the shelves, and stayed there with the costing book against her stomach.

“One thing before we alter everything,” Shael said. “The permission for the first essay. Did that stay with you?”

“The limited reprint permission?” Abigail asked.

“Yes.”

“No. It went with the business. Nessa, is the list here?”

Nessa knew where it was. She had made the copy herself. She drew it from the shelf and found the entry; the agreement it referred to was folded behind it.

Abigail checked the heading and pointed to the line. Shael read it. The permission covered that essay. It did not cover everything she might write, and it had never contained a promise about these pictures.

“You still need my agreement to the new book,” Shael said to Nessa.

“Yes. And a fee for what you give us.”

Shael took her hand off the chair and sat. “Then we're starting again.” She looked at Abigail. “I thought we might find a way to keep the views. You remember what happened to the light in that one.”

“I remember you making me turn it toward the window.”

“Because you were looking at it in the dark.”

“It was evening.” Abigail rested a hand on the desk. “I'd like to see it printed well.”

Nessa waited for the rest. She could almost hear it: a sum offered, a call to a supplier, an instruction to make the edition and settle the difference afterward. She had carried out variations of that sentence before. Sometimes she had been delighted to do it.

Abigail looked toward her costing book.

“What can this edition hold?”

It was irritating, how much Nessa had wanted to answer that question and how relieved she would have been to let someone else answer it now.

“A small sewn text book, on the stock we showed you,” she told Shael. “Plain cover. We can look at one line drawing. We can't add the separate picture sheets.”

Shael still watched Abigail. “And you're content with that?”

“I don't have to choose the job. That's part of the arrangement I made.”

“You do still have money in it.”

“A minority share. I didn't keep the production desk.” Abigail moved her hand off it. “If they want my opinion on the awning, they can have it.”

“We've had it,” Nessa said, then heard how brisk she sounded. “I like it too.”

Shael leaned back. Through the wall came the scrape of a stool and the binder asking someone to leave a clear space for the notices. Nessa wanted to go and clear it. She also wanted Shael to take the offer, and knew those two wants could make her accept something she had just refused.

“The price matters,” Shael said at last. “I won't solve this by selling it to fewer people for more money.”

“Then we'll see what the smaller one can do.”

Shael looked down at the agreement, folded it along its old creases and gave it back to Nessa.

“Let me try the market passage with you. Without the pictures. After you've sent the notices out.”

Nessa shifted the costing book under her arm. “Yes.”

“And don't decide about the little sketch before I've read the beginning.”

“We haven't.”

Abigail picked up her own correction sheet from where she had carried it into the room. She had another appointment. Nessa walked with her as far as the door, then went to help the binder finish the notices. Shael gathered her pictures into the cloth and kept the first manuscript out.

By the time they returned to it after their meal, the long table was clear. The compositor had set a clean scrap at each end to keep the drawing from curling, and the binder had brought the blank little book.

“Read it as you mean it to be read,” he said. “Don't stop to tell us where to laugh.”

“I wasn't going to.” Shael sat down. “I might stop if you do.”

She placed the drawing between them and covered the lower part of the manuscript with another sheet.

“I saw the town in a morning, having planned a route that required me to cross the market only once.”

Nessa looked from the sentence to the drawing. A line left the edge of the page, travelled past a square, curved around a mass of little roofs and returned to the square. There were more lines inside it. Some had been rubbed out and put back almost in the same place.

“Where's the tower?” the binder asked.

Shael pointed to the top corner.

He leaned forward. “That?”

The tower barely cleared the roofs. It had a careful little row of openings near its top, as though Shael had remembered an obligation to distinguish it from a chimney.

“Is it really that small?” he asked.

“No. It stands above the market roofs,” Shael said.

“You'd have to climb this bread stall to see it.”

The compositor's finger had reached the square. “You went back.”

Shael said nothing.

“Wait.” The woman started at the edge again, following one line across another without lifting her finger. “Here. And this is you coming from the other end. Then around these roofs.”

Nessa turned the drawing a little. A line that she had taken for the edge of a roof continued out into a third loop and returned to the same small mark. The mark had a loaf drawn beside it. The loaf was almost as long as the tower was high.

She laughed. Shael pulled her manuscript farther out of the compositor's reach.

“Does that say you went back three times?” Nessa asked.

“It may be safer not to count the rubbing out,” said the compositor.

The binder opened the blank book and held the sketch against it. “We could get this tidied. Make the tower a reasonable size.”

“Why?” Nessa asked.

“Because it's going to look like that on a page.”

“Yes,” Shael said.

He regarded her, then the drawing. With his free hand he took one of the clean scraps and marked a larger tower in a corner.

“There. Put the stall here. Your line could still go round it.”

The compositor looked from one to the other. “Now it's a tower with a market underneath.”

“That's what it is.”

“But it wasn't what she was looking at.”

Nessa brought the original nearer. The little tower did look put out. She knew that was her doing, that Shael had given it no face, but its careful windows and its miserable allowance of sky had become very funny to her.

“Keep this,” she said. “We don't need the other one made.”

The binder set his scrap aside. “Then call it a sketch. Someone will try to find their way with it.”

“A traveler's sketch,” Shael said.

“And don't put a scale on it,” said the compositor.

“I hadn't intended to.”

Nessa took the blank book. The drawing would need work to reproduce, but its lines could use their ordinary paper. She could see a place for it opposite the opening, one image in the small edition, giving the reader time to find those repeated approaches before Shael confessed them. She wanted to open that book.

“Now let us hear what you covered up,” she said.

Shael uncovered the manuscript and read farther. The traveler attended to the tower's masonry, the view from its foot, an unusually shaped drain. Only afterward did she concede that the first loaf had been too hot to eat comfortably, and she had bought another later to make a fair comparison.

The binder snorted. “The fair comparison.”

“It was cooler.”

“You must have been terribly disappointed.”

“I was able to eat it.” Shael turned a page, smiling. “Here is the part that needs the pictures.”

The market opened into a string of handsome views: the striped cloths at the entrance, baskets beneath a low awning, the pale stone behind a stall, a narrow space through which another row of awnings could be seen. Shael read a description of sunlight caught along their seams. Nessa could imagine it. Then another stall appeared.

“Wait. I've lost you,” Nessa said.

Shael stopped.

“You want the pictures,” she said.

“I want to know which way you're going,” Nessa said.

“Toward the pottery.”

“From the bread?”

“Yes.”

The compositor laid the view sheets down in their intended order. “I thought you were still on this side.”

“That was before the tray.”

“What tray?” asked the binder.

Shael turned to a page farther on, found a sentence, and made a small sound of displeasure. She read it silently, then went back to the views.

“I've put that afterward.”

“After what?” Nessa asked.

“After telling you how pleasantly one could pass through.”

The binder rested his elbow on the table. “Could one?”

“If one wasn't me.”

Shael reached for a clean sheet. Nessa pushed the ink nearer, then left her alone. She had a delivery to check and the compositor had type waiting. The binder went back to his bench with the blank book, returning it a little later with the folds trimmed and a thread through them. He laid it near Shael without speaking.

From the other side of the table, Nessa watched Shael write a line, cross out half of it and begin again underneath. The pictures stayed where the compositor had put them. Once Shael lifted the view of the low awning, studied it and put it back. She wrote for longer that time.

When Nessa returned with the delivery sheet, Shael put her pen down.

“Listen to this part.”

The compositor came back to the stool. The binder leaned in the doorway.

“The loaf was warm through its paper. I carried it in my left hand, tore off a corner with my right and ate it while I looked for the pottery stall.

“I heard ‘Here, please’ from beyond the baskets. A hand waved above them. I was already looking for somewhere to spend money. I went toward it.

“The hand moved sharply. I took that to mean the invitation was urgent. Then its owner emerged at the end of a long tray loaded with stacked bowls. Another worker carried the far end. The tray filled the passage I had just entered.

“‘Room here, please,’ said the first worker. ‘Back.’

“He wanted the place where I was standing.

“I obliged. Behind me stood a basket I had passed without difficulty going forward. I found it immediately with my heel. I caught its rim with my free hand and stepped round it, keeping the loaf above the wicker. The tray waited. I backed under the low awning, had to duck, and brought the bread down against my chest so the canvas would not brush it. Then I was between the two stacks of empty baskets again. By the time there was room for the workers to pass, I could have reached out and bought another.

“The bread seller recognized me. I had not been away long enough to hope otherwise.”

The binder laughed before Shael finished lowering the sheet. Nessa had drawn her hand against her chest with the imagined loaf. She put it down on the delivery sheet.

“I know where you are now,” she said.

“So did everybody in the market.”

The compositor asked her to read the end again. Shael did, more slowly at the basket. This time the binder looked toward the actual baskets under their table, and Nessa laughed too.

“I'm going to keep the awning,” Shael said, turning her sheet. “But the basket comes too soon.”

“You go back into it,” Nessa said.

“I mean I've told you it's there. Let my heel find it first.”

She bent over her own sentence. The compositor left her to it and took up the little dummy. Nessa followed her to the shelves, where they could compare it with the available stock.

The one sketch could be prepared within a paid allowance they could afford. It would need its own proof. The other plates would stay out. With the manuscript reset for the small pages, the binder could keep the sewn form he preferred. He checked the folds again and made Nessa leave space in the schedule for finishing; the notices were not their last other job.

When Shael joined them, Nessa had written a fresh offer. The author fee had its own line. Shael read it, then asked when they would pay it.

“Half when we accept the revised copy,” Nessa said. “The rest before it goes on sale.”

“And I see the proof of the sketch as well as the text.”

“Yes.”

Shael pointed to a phrase in the description. “Don't call it the unillustrated edition. There's an illustration.”

The compositor reached for the pencil. “With one frontispiece?”

“With a traveler's sketch.”

They changed it. The binder read the production part and agreed it. The compositor put her figure beside the image work. Nessa checked the total once more, wanting it to come out as it had before and unwilling to trust that want.

Shael looked at the wash drawings lying on the table.

“I may still do these someday.”

“It would need its own money,” Nessa said.

“I know. Don't put a promise of it in this one.”

They agreed the date for the revised copy. Shael took the original sketch and her other pictures home in the cloth, leaving the manuscript they would use for planning the setting. Her new market sheet went with her. At the door she took the little blank book out once more and opened it against her palm.

“This is a good size,” she said.

The binder, back at his bench, lifted a hand without looking up.

*   *   *

Shael returned the revised essays on the agreed day. Nessa read them at the end of the table, with the images still wrapped beside her, and did not open the cloth until she had finished.

The market passage was longer now. It took time to get the loaf out of its wrapping, and a flake of crust on the traveler's sleeve kept distracting her as she tried to decide which way to go. Shael had kept the warm stone and the low awning, and had cut a description Nessa remembered liking. Nessa did not miss it until she looked at the old manuscript.

The heel found the basket before the traveler saw it. Nessa liked that especially. She knew exactly how it felt to discover something you had gone past easily when you were carrying less.

She read to the end, wrote the acceptance on the job sheet and took the agreed first payment through with the other accounts. Then she opened the cloth.

The original sketch looked even more untidy after the manuscript's clean new pages. Shael had not redrawn it.

“Good,” Nessa said aloud.

The compositor glanced up. “What is?”

Nessa held it up by the edges.

“Oh. Yes. Give me that before you spill something on it.”

The first proof made the tower almost disappear. The drawing had been reduced to sit neatly above its caption, with a large white space around it. Nessa could follow the outer loop but lost one of the returning lines near the stall.

“There's your room,” said the binder, pointing to the white space.

“If I make it bigger, it comes close to the fold,” the compositor said.

He opened the dummy with both thumbs. “It'll open this far. Put it here.”

Nessa held the dummy open while the binder laid the proof against it and marked how far a larger image could come. She had approved the earlier position, and for a moment wanted the problem to be in the reproduction instead. But there was space for the bigger drawing, with the caption underneath and its inner edge clear of the fold.

“That,” she said. “Keep the caption clear underneath.”

“I could give the tower another stroke,” said the compositor.

“Only if it's lost a stroke. Don't build it an extra floor.”

The woman grinned and took the proof back.

They prepared the image at the larger size while Nessa and the compositor worked through the remaining text. When the next proof came from the press, Nessa could pick out the tower's windows. The drawing faced the first claim, and the admission about a fair comparison between loaves stayed over the page.

A later paragraph ended with a single broken word stranded at the foot. Nessa marked it, then stood while the compositor tried the setting again. It was tempting to crowd the line above. They tried it. The word fitted. Nessa looked away, then back at the page; her eye went straight to the crowded line. She stayed beside the compositor while they tried again.

Shael came to look at the proofs. She sat at the window end of the table and angled the image out of her own shadow. Then she asked for her original sketch and compared the two.

“This line used to cross here.”

The compositor bent over it. “It still does. The ink's joined them.”

“Can you separate it?”

“Yes.”

Shael opened the full spread next. She held it at reading distance, turned the page and turned back.

“You moved it.”

“He did,” Nessa said, indicating the binder.

“Now you see it while you're reading the first sentence.” Shael looked across at him. “Keep it there.”

He was threading a needle and answered without lifting his eyes. “That's where we put it.”

She laughed and left him to finish. The compositor marked the joined line for correction, and Shael returned to her text. When the corrected image proof was ready, Shael checked the crossing before approving it.

Abigail arrived later that week at the time Nessa had asked her to come. There was an old annotated job sheet on the desk. Nessa had read an arrow three different ways and had finally put a question beside it instead of giving the uncertainty to the next worker.

“Did you mean to move the caption, or the whole picture?” she asked.

Abigail pulled the sheet nearer. “The caption. I started the arrow in the wrong place.”

“We thought so.”

“Then you thought better than I drew.” She followed the line with her finger and marked its proper beginning. “May I see the new book?”

The center chair was occupied by a worker checking sheets. Abigail pulled a stool up beside Nessa. They looked through the proof together. When Abigail reached the returning route she asked for the earlier drawing, and Nessa gave her the scrap on which the binder had enlarged the tower.

“That's his improvement.”

Abigail studied it, then the one they were printing. “I'm glad you resisted.”

“Mine is still a better tower,” the binder said from the other table.

Abigail returned the proof and went to keep the rest of her day. Nessa stayed beside the checking table. A set of outer sheets had been folded slightly off the mark, and they needed opening and folding again before they could be sewn. She took a stool and helped. Most could be saved. A few kept the wrong crease, and those she put aside and counted.

The work took the time it took. She entered it on the job sheet before going home.

When the first finished copy was ready, the binder brought it over with one of its threads still caught on his cuff. He freed it before handing the book to her.

Nessa weighed it in one hand. It settled well, neither stiff nor loose. The plain cover had a little tooth under her thumb. Inside, the page opened to the absurdly small tower, the extravagant road and Shael's confidently economical morning. Nessa turned a leaf. The sewing yielded without a crack.

“Do that again,” the binder said.

She did.

He watched the fold, nodded, and let her keep it.

She took it to the street door for the better light. A gray crescent marked the cover. It brushed off, but when she shifted her grip another appeared beneath her thumb. She turned her hand over. The same gray lay in the creases of her light-brown skin. She wiped the cover, cleaned her hand on a rag and held the book differently.

The compositor came to see. Nessa moved over so they could stand shoulder to shoulder. Neither said much. The tower's windows had survived.

*   *   *

On the morning the book went on sale, Nessa paid the balance of Shael's fee and put copies out at the ordinary counter. There was a delivery to take in at the back, and the binder had objected to a stack of empty boxes being left where he needed to carry finished work. She shifted them before coming to see whether anybody had bought one.

Shael was already talking to a customer. She had a copy open in her hand, and another reader stood beside her, looking over without quite joining them.

“It stays open,” the customer said. “The small ones usually try to shut.”

“Ask him about that.” Shael pointed toward the finishing room. “He kept opening the blank one until I wanted to put words in it.”

The binder was within hearing. He came over, took an unsold copy and opened it at the middle.

“Sewn. And room for the fold. If you crowd everything against it, you have to break the book to see what you've bought.”

He showed the customer how the pages sat, then let her try. She changed hands, keeping it open with a finger.

“That's what I want,” she said, and asked the price again.

Nessa told her. The customer paid, took her change and remained at the counter reading. The binder returned to his work. Shael turned to the second reader, who asked whether the tower really was so small.

“On that page,” Shael said.

“But in the town?”

“You could see it from most of the market.”

He looked back at the drawing. Then his finger began to follow the route.

Abigail came in while he was tracing the second loop. She let him finish, bought a copy and asked Shael to write in it.

“Here?” Shael asked, opening to the front.

“Anywhere you aren't going to make me wish I could erase it.”

Shael considered the blank space, wrote, and handed it back. Abigail read what was there and smiled. Nessa did not lean over to see.

The first customer had reached the market passage.

“‘I had not been away long enough to hope otherwise,’” she read aloud. “Was the bread seller pleased?”

“She asked whether I'd found the pottery,” Shael said.

“Had you?”

“I had seen a great deal more of the baskets.”

The customer laughed and turned back. She laid the book on the counter, took a pencil from her pocket and put a line beneath only once.

Nessa's hand moved before she stopped it. The page was new. They had taken such trouble to keep it clean that the soft scrape of the pencil went straight through her.

The customer looked between the marked sentence and the sketch. She traced the route again, this time without losing the line where it crossed itself, and wrote something short in the margin.

“There,” she said, and closed the book around her pencil.

Nessa drew back her hand. The customer's thumb was on the cover, in nearly the place where Nessa's own dirty thumb had made her doubt it. She could see the book already beginning to be carried, opened in other places, kept beside something the reader wanted to remember.

Abigail tucked her copy away and said goodbye. She had plans for the afternoon. Shael asked her something quietly at the door; Abigail answered, and both smiled before Abigail went out.

From the workroom the compositor called, “Nessa? This next title won't sit where they want it.”

Nessa looked once more at the customer, who was making room for her book in a bag. Her feet ached. There was dried paste near one cuff, and she had forgotten the expense she had woken remembering until just this instant.

“Show me,” she said, and went through to the table.