Chapter 6 · Chapter 6

The brass weight held the page down by one corner, and the pale line it had printed there was the only mark on it. Nine men in the hall, and not one of them would look at either the paper or the weight. They looked at the carpet, at their cups, at the far shut doors, at anything that was not the small blank place at the bottom where a name would go.

“It is preliminary,” the eldest said, from the head of the carpet, where the window light made his thobe the whitest thing in the room.

“It is a page,” I said, “with three lines on it and a place for me.”

“Danah.”

“I am listening. I have been listening since the coffee came in.”

He turned his cup a little on its saucer, which in this house means a man is choosing his words, and I waited, because I had been raised to wait, and because waiting costs nothing and I had already decided what I would not do.

“The talk has followed this house since your father’s time,” he said. “It has cost us.