On the Count

by Basil of Caesarea, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The big cauldron gave a hundred and forty ladles if you scraped it, and a hundred and thirty-six if you did not, and Julitta scraped it.

She had learned this in the first week, standing at the fire in the yard behind the church with the ladle in one hand and a stick of willow in the other, cutting a notch in the stick with her thumbnail knife for every ladle that went into a bowl. The steward Aphthonius had given her the stick and the knife and told her to count, and she had counted, and at the end of the week she had gone to him with seven sticks tied together with a thread and laid them on his table. He had looked at them a long time. Then he had told her how many measures of lentils were left in the granary under the church, and how many of bitter vetch, and how many jars of the salted meat, and what the presbyter had paid for them, and she had understood that she was not a cook any more.

There were four cauldrons in the yard. The small ones gave ninety. They were bronze, and two of them had been lent by the bath-keeper, who would want them back in the spring, if there was a spring. The fires under them were of dung, dried in cakes and stacked against the church wall under a cloth, because there was no wood on the plain round Caesarea and had not been in anyone's memory; the wood came down from the mountain on mules, and it cost more now than the lentils did. The dung burned low and steady and stank a little. Julitta no longer smelled it. She smelled the lentils, and whether they had caught on the bottom, and the meat, and whether it had been soaked long enough to draw the salt.

The line formed before light. By the time the psalms began inside the church it ran from the yard gate round the corner of the church and along the street of the potters as far as the fountain that had stopped. Old men, women with children on their hips, children with no one, men who had walked in from the villages on the road to Sebasteia and slept in the porch of the church, and some who had been somebody in the summer and stood in the line with their cloaks drawn up over their faces. They brought their own bowls. Those who had no bowl were given a potsherd from the heap by the gate, and if they were too weak to hold a potsherd level Julitta's girl, Theodote, held it for them while they drank.

Julitta did not look at their faces. She had tried that, the first days, and she had found that if she looked at their faces her hand changed on the ladle, and that the cauldron gave a hundred and twenty-eight. So she looked at the bowls. She knew some of them by now better than she knew the people who carried them: the green-glazed one with the crack mended with lead; the wooden one, black with use; the half of a gourd. She knew when one came round twice, and she sent it away. Nobody had complained of her yet, to her face.

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The hermit came in the fourth week of the winter, on the morning after the first snow.

Aphthonius brought him across the yard himself. He was a tall man and should have been a heavy one; the bones of a heavy man were all there, and nothing much on them. His hair was long and matted at the back where he slept on it, and his beard came down to his belt, which was a rope. He wore a tunic of goat's hair that had been black once, and no cloak. His feet were wrapped in strips of something. He smelled of goats, and of smoke, and under that of nothing at all, the way the very old smell, or the very hungry.

"This is Sabbatius," said Aphthonius. "He has been living in the rocks above the Melas. The presbyter sent to the solitaries on the mountain to come down for the winter and help, and this one came. He can carry. Give him the water."

"Can he?" said Julitta.

Sabbatius said nothing. He was looking at the line, the length of it, the way men look at the sea who have not seen it before.

"He walked in from the Melas yesterday," said Aphthonius. "He can carry." And he went away, because there were forty things waiting for him in the granary and a carter at the gate who wanted to be paid in coin and not in a promise.

Julitta gave the hermit the yoke and the two leather buckets and showed him the cistern behind the deacon's house, and he went and came back, and went and came back. He carried well. He did not spill. He set the buckets down by the cauldron where she showed him, not too near the fire, and went for more without being told. When the line began he stood behind her a moment and watched her ladle and cut, ladle and cut, and she felt him watching and did not like it.

"You can go on with the water," she said. "The small pot wants filling for tomorrow."

He went.

At the end of the day, when the last of the line had gone and Theodote was scouring the cauldrons with sand and snow, the staff ate. There were eleven of them: the women at the fires, the two deacons who kept order at the gate, the boys who carried, Aphthonius when he remembered. They ate from the scrapings of the big cauldron, which was what was left after the hundred and fortieth ladle, and it was always enough for eleven if they were not greedy, and they were not. Julitta held out a bowl to the hermit.

"I have eaten," he said.

"When?"

"On the Lord's day."

It was the fifth day of the week. She held the bowl out a moment longer, and then she ate it herself, because it was a sin to let food go cold in that winter, and she was hungry.

---

On the second day he gave his bowl away.

She did not see him do it. She saw the boy afterwards, a child of eight or nine from one of the villages, with a bowl in each hand and his face in one of them, sitting on the steps of the deacon's house where the line was not allowed to sit. She knew the bowl in the boy's right hand. It was the one she had given Sabbatius at the end of the day, a plain red bowl from the church's own stock, with the cross scratched on the base.

She went across and took it out of the boy's hand. He let it go; he had finished it. He looked at her as if she were going to beat him, and she found that she wanted to, a little, and was ashamed, and gave him back the empty bowl to hold and went to find the hermit.

He was at the cistern, letting down the bucket.

"That boy had his," she said. "He came through the line at the third hour. I gave it him myself. He had his."

"He was hungry."

"They are all hungry. That is why they are in the line." She heard her own voice, which was the voice of her old mistress speaking to a kitchen girl, and she lowered it. "The line is counted. Every bowl in that line is counted against what is in the granary, and what is in the granary is counted against the days until the barley comes in, if it comes in. If you give your bowl to the boy, the boy has two and you have none."

"Then I have none," said Sabbatius. "I am used to that."

He drew the bucket up, hand over hand. His wrists were like the handles of the ladles. She watched him set the bucket down and lift the second one, and she saw that his hands shook, a little, when he had to hold the weight still, and that he knew it, and turned his back to her so that she should not see.

She went back to the fire. She told herself that he was a grown man and a holy one, by his own account, and that it was not her business what he put in his mouth. She believed this for as long as it took to walk back across the yard, and then she stopped thinking about it, because the light was going and the small cauldron had to be set to soak for the morning.

---

The third day was colder. The snow had not melted; it lay in the corners of the yard and on the roof of the church, and over the roofs of the city the mountain stood up white from its foot to its head, which it did not do every winter. The line was longer. There were people in it Julitta had not seen before, from further out, with frost in their eyebrows. One old woman died at the corner of the street of the potters in the second hour, standing up, held up by the people in front and behind her; they did not notice for some time. The deacons carried her into the porch.

The presbyter was in the yard that morning. He came most mornings, for an hour or two, before he went to whatever else he did in the day: the bishop's business, which was mostly his business now, the old bishop being what he was; letters; the rich. Julitta had stopped being frightened of him in the second week. He was a thin man with a cough, a few years short of forty, with a beard that was greying before it should, and when he was in the yard he wore a linen towel tied round his waist over his tunic, as a slave does who waits at table, and he served at the far cauldron with Aphthonius beside him holding the bowls. He did not preach in the yard. He asked people their names and the names of their villages, and Aphthonius wrote the villages on a wax tablet, and Julitta did not know what for. Sometimes he took a man's feet in his hands, a man who had walked in on bad feet, and looked at them, and sent him to the house by the west gate where the physician was. Once he had sent a woman there who had nothing wrong with her feet, and Julitta had heard afterwards that she was with child and that the presbyter had seen it before her husband had.

The hermit came with the yoke at the fourth hour. He came across the yard slowly, more slowly than the day before, with the buckets full. Then he set them down by the big cauldron, carefully, and straightened up, and Julitta, with the ladle in her hand and the knife ready to cut, saw that he was going to take hold of the cauldron.

It needed moving. It was more than half empty and the fire had burned down under the near side, so that the lentils were going cold on that side and catching on the other. It wanted pulling round a quarter-turn on its tripod. Two of the boys usually did it, with rags round their hands.

"Leave that," said Julitta.

He took hold of the rim with both hands, through the sleeves of his tunic, and pulled. The cauldron came round. Then his knees went out from under him, quite slowly, as if he had decided to kneel, and his hands did not let go of the rim, and the cauldron came over with him.

It did not fall far. It tipped on the tripod and stuck, half off, and what was in it went out over the lip in one long brown tongue into the snow at the foot of the fire. The steam went up. The line made a noise, all together, not loud.

Sabbatius lay on his side beside it with his eyes open. His sleeves were smoking where they had touched the bronze. Julitta put down the ladle and the stick, very carefully, side by side on the stool, and then she bent and took him by the shoulders and pulled him back from the fire. He was so light that she nearly went over backwards. Theodote ran for water. Someone in the line began to cry, a child; someone else said, quite clearly, That was ours, and nobody answered him.

Julitta looked at the stick on the stool. Seventy-two notches since she had started the big cauldron that morning. Seventy-two from a hundred and forty. The lentils lay steaming in the snow, and the snow was going grey round the edges of them.

The presbyter came across the yard. He did not hurry. He came round the cauldron and looked at the hermit, and crouched, and put two fingers on the side of the hermit's neck below the beard and held them there, and then he looked at the lentils.

"The snow was clean," he said. "It fell in the night."

He stood up and took a bowl from the stack by the stool, one of the red ones from the church, and crouched again at the edge of the spill, and with the side of the bowl he began to skim the lentils off the top of the snow, the way a man skims cream. He did it carefully. He took the top and left the bottom, where the snow had melted into the brown and gone to slush. When the bowl was full he held it out, without looking round, and Aphthonius took it and gave him another.

Julitta stood for a moment. Then she took a bowl herself and knelt down on the other side of the spill.

The deacons kept the line back. It took the four of them, the presbyter and Aphthonius and Julitta and the girl, as long as it takes to say the morning psalms, and when it was done there were nineteen bowls on the ground in a row, and the lentils in them were cooler than they should have been, and there was grit in some. The presbyter stood up and dried his hands on the towel at his waist. His knees were wet through.

"Warm them through in a kettle over the fire," he said, "and then they can go out."

"There will be grit."

"There is grit in the bread at the bishop's table." He coughed. "Nineteen. How many does that leave short?"

Julitta looked at the stick. She had thought she would have to count, but she did not have to; she had done it on her knees without meaning to. "Forty-nine," she said. "From this pot. If we start the small pot now, we can make it up by the ninth hour. But the small pot is tomorrow's."

"Then tomorrow will be short by forty-nine," said the presbyter, "unless the carter comes, and he may. Tell Aphthonius in the evening. He will want it on the tablet." He looked down at the hermit, who had shut his eyes now and was breathing through his mouth, with Theodote holding a cup to his lips that he was not drinking from. "What does he eat?"

"Nothing. He gives it away."

"Since when?"

"Since the Lord's day. He says. Before that, I don't know. Before that he was on the mountain."

The presbyter was quiet for a moment, with his hand pressed to his side, which was where he coughed from.

"Is he on your count?"

"He's staff. He eats from the scrapings, after."

"Then he isn't on your count," said the presbyter. "Put him on it." And he went back to the far cauldron, where the line had bunched up without him, and took a bowl from the stack, and served.

---

They put Sabbatius in the porch for the rest of the day, on straw, away from the corner where the old woman was lying under a cloak, and Theodote sat by him when she was not wanted. He drank water. Toward evening he drank a little wine with water in it, because Aphthonius came and stood over him and said that he had not come down off the mountain to die in a church porch and make work for the deacons, and that it was a sin of pride, and some other things in a low voice that Julitta did not hear.

She went in when the yard was cleared, with a bowl from the scrapings. He was sitting up against the wall. In the lamplight he looked worse than he had in the day. The burns on his forearms where the sleeves had smoked were raised and shining.

"I'm not hungry," he said.

"I didn't ask you."

She put the bowl down by his knee, on the straw, and he looked at it and did not touch it.

"I spilled it," he said. "I know how much. I heard you tell him."

"You did."

"I came down to help. I am no help. I am one more mouth. On the mountain at least I was not taking it out of anybody's bowl. A man who eats nothing takes nothing."

Julitta sat down on her heels. Her back hurt, and her knees, from the snow. She did not know how to say what she meant, and she was not sure she knew what she meant, and so she said instead what she knew.

"The big pot gives a hundred and forty," she said. "If I scrape it. Every morning I know where it will run out. I know the place in the street where the line will be when it runs out. Some mornings I know the people. There is a man with a green bowl mended with lead, who stands near the fountain, and if the carter is late I can tell you to the hour which day he will not get his. That is the count." She picked up the bowl and put it in his hands, and closed his fingers on it, because they were too stiff to close themselves. "You are not taking it out of his bowl. You are carrying his water. If you fall down, the water doesn't come, and the pot isn't filled, and he doesn't get his. That is the count too."

He held the bowl. He did not drink from it.

"I have kept the fast nine years," he said.

"Then you can keep it again in the spring."

She stood up and went to the door of the porch. She did not wait to see whether he would eat; she thought that if she waited he would not, and she had the small pot to set for the morning and forty-nine to find somewhere. But at the door she looked back, and he was sitting with the bowl in both hands and his head bent over it, and she could not see whether he was praying over it or eating it, and she supposed that it was very likely both.

---

The carter came in the night with twelve sacks of barley from somewhere to the north, where the drought had been less, and was paid in coin, and in the morning Aphthonius wrote it on the tablet and rubbed out the forty-nine.

The line formed before light. It was colder again. The fountain at the end of the street of the potters had a beard of ice on its lip where it had not run since the summer. Julitta built up the fire under the big cauldron and stirred, and smelled for the bottom catching, and cut a fresh stick from the willow bundle and laid it on the stool beside the knife.

The first bowl was the green one, mended with lead. She filled it, and cut.

The second was a red one from the church's stack, with a cross scratched on its base, and two hands holding it that were bandaged at the wrists with strips of linen. Julitta looked at the hands, and then, because she could not help it, at the face over them, and the hermit looked back at her without saying anything. His beard had been cut, roughly, with a knife, to the width of a hand below his chin. He had someone's old cloak round him. He was standing in the line between an old man from Sebasteia and a girl with a baby, and the yoke and the two leather buckets were set down beside him on the stones, where he could pick them up again.

She filled the bowl. She scraped the ladle on the lip so that none of it should be lost. Then she took up the stick, and the knife, and cut the second notch.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Basiliō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Basil of Caesarea, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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