THE WORST JOB IN THE REALM

A Tale of Sogmarsh — Mr. Sallow, the Tithe-Man.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am the most hated man in three counties, and I have never once raised my voice.

My name is Sallow. I am the Tithe-Man of Drudgeford — the routine collector, the polite one, the mortal one, which I mention because people forget. I am not the faceless thing the Exchequer sends when a debt is total and a place is to be struck from the maps. I am the man it sends first, in a black ledger-cart with two silent clerks, to take what is owed from people who own, as a rule, nothing whatsoever.

That is the job. That is the whole of it. I wade through mud that swallows the cart to its axles, to cottages that lean together for warmth, and I collect from the kind of poor that has stopped pretending otherwise. And here is the cruelty they have built into me, the regulation I carry like a stone in the boot: I may not accept potatoes.

You will understand what that does. Inside the castle and out across the fen, the potato is the only money these people have — the Lord himself declared it legal tender, and the whole sodden economy now runs, reluctantly, on a currency you can also boil. So a family will offer me a sack of King Edwards, their entire liquid wealth, with both hands and real hope — and I must, by the rule, refuse it, and take instead the kettle. Or the good chair. Or, where there is nothing else, a deed to a single damp room of a house they will go on living in, now as my employer's tenants.

I am, I should say, as kind as a man holding a cruel ledger can be, which is to say: not nearly enough. I look away at the right moments. I let a form go astray. I have been known to value a heifer at the price of a goat and dare the clerks to correct me. I once spent a full hour failing, with great sincerity, to find a widow's cottage that was directly in front of me. But the Order of the Silent Gavel walks the road a day behind, with their two-handed stone gavels and their shields engraved in tax-code, and they are not kind, and they do not fail to find things. So the ledger wins. The ledger always wins. I am simply the face it wears while it does.

My worst days are at the castle.

Everywhere else the arithmetic at least behaves. But the moment the cart crosses into the castle's shadow, my figures begin to misbehave. Sums I have done a thousand times will not come out twice the same. The ink develops stains shaped, I swear it, like potatoes. The wing I have come to repossess turns out to be on fire, or behind a door that was a wall yesterday, or — once — measurably larger on the inside than the outside, which is not a thing a ledger has a column for. The Lord lounges and offers me three sacks of spuds and a fine for the noise of my own cart, and laughs, and somewhere under the flags there is a hum I can feel in my back teeth, and I leave, every time, with a deed to a single wing I am no longer certain exists. I am the only one who seems to notice that the castle simply cannot be collected from. I have tried to say so, in my reports. The words will not arrange themselves. The question will not quite form.

I should hate that place. Instead it is the one stop on my round where I am not, for a few hours, the worst man in the room.

It was on the castle road, in fact, that the thing happened which I do not put in the ledger.

A child — a turnip-cutter's girl, no shoes, the cold already in her — watched me climb down into the muck with my satchel, and instead of running, or spitting, or fetching her father, she looked at me for a long moment and said, "You look that tired, mister. Sit down a minute. We've a dry stool by the door."

No one gives the Tithe-Man anything. It is the one fixed law of my existence: I take, they lose, the cart rolls on. And here was a barefoot child in a flooding cottage offering me a seat, freely, for nothing, because I looked tired — giving to the man who had come to take. I sat on the dry stool. I drank the nettle tea they could not spare. And when I climbed back up to the cart I had, by the strangest accident, entirely failed to notice the sack of potatoes by their hearth, and valued their entire holding at one chipped button, and signed it, and dared the clerks with my eyes to say a single word.

The Gavel will likely catch it. They usually do. There will be a form, and a correction, and the button will not save them for long.

But it bought them a winter. And the girl will remember, perhaps, that the worst man in three counties sat on her stool and could not, for the life of him, find her potatoes.

I wiped the green damp off the ledger, and I got back on the road, because that is the job, and the job does not end.

A kind man with a cruel ledger is, at the day's end, still holding the ledger.