There, when the trading is done, the girl hands back a strip of holy vellum, thin as onion skin, longer than my arm, all covered in numbers and marks I cannot read. She does not smile when she gives it. She hands it over the way a priest hands back a penance.
I have watched. Every man who takes food from that great cold hall receives one. A record of his sins, I reckon, or his debts. What he took, and what it cost him, writ down small and precise so that when the reckoning comes he cannot claim he did not know.
I keep mine folded in my jerkin. It weighs nothing. A whole winter's grain named upon it, bread and salt meat and white powder and drink, and not one drop of sweat spent to earn it, no ox lamed, no field broken, no knuckle split on the frozen ground. A man walks in empty and walks out fed for a month, and the only proof he suffered is this little scroll.
That troubles me more than the food.
The good Lord did not shape us to be fed for nothing. He set the sweat on Adam's brow and He meant it to stay there. Where there is no toil in the getting, there is a debt uncounted, and this thin paper is where they keep the count.
I will pray tonight. A man does not get a feast without a bill. And the ones on this scroll are always, always cheaper than they ought to be.