Tam's Salvage Tally

aka the auger-tally, Tam Woolmark's book

The pocket tally-book Tam Woolmark kept of the auger-heads he stripped from the Sunk Granary — a week and a half of good coin counted in a plain hand, until the last pages go short, wet, and wrong.

Day one. Six heads off the upper mounts, easy as picking apples, and Harvald pays fair for temple-bronze. Sella can stop counting the seed twice. Day three. Uppers are stripped clean. The good ones — the big siege-augers — are bolted deep, past where the floor drops to the old grain-vault. Water down there. Not deep. A wade. Day five. It IS deep. The vault's flooded to the second gallery and the bronze that's left is under it. Went in to the waist and my lamp showed nothing but black water and the tops of the augers like drowned wheels. Something moved. A fish, I told myself. There are no fish four hundred years under a hill. Day eight. The grain's still down here. That's the thing I can't put right in my head. Four centuries sealed and the stores never rotted all the way to nothing — something's been eating, and eating means living, and living this long means big. I found a moult-shell the size of a shield. I am not writing what I think it means. Day ten. One more good head and the croft is safe for a year. One more. The rope's still tied at the mouth. I keep telling myself the rope is the important thing and the bronze is only bronze. I don't believe me. — T.W.

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