Floor 447 (The Scriptorium Pastures)

Floor 447 (The Scriptorium Pastures) is a managed grazing district occupying the whole of Floor 447, one of the few floors of The Tower given over entirely to pastoral use. It is the primary breeding station of the Silent Sheep, the archival herds whose fleece and vellum underwrite the work of the Scriptorium Annex and, by extension, of the Scribes of the Upper Scriptorium. Approximately nine hundred and forty head are currently at pasture, a figure the pastoral office revises downward whenever it is challenged.

The floor is administered jointly by the Scriptorium Annex and the Azure Guild, an arrangement the Fourth Concordance describes as "workable," a term of art in that document meaning that neither party has appealed to a higher matter in eleven spirals. The pastoral seal has been held since the 44th Spiral by Ovin Halloway, who does not reside on 447 and has visited it four times.

Physical Description

Floor 447 is an oval of close-grazed turf some two and a half leagues in circuit, lit from the ceiling vault by an aperture array maintained on a rotating schedule: bright for eleven hours, dim for nine, and entirely dark for the fourth day of each spiral, during which the flocks are counted by touch. A stone wall, the Bounds Wall of 447, runs the full circumference. It has no gate. Access is by stair from Floor 446 and by a service descent from the pens above.

Water is supplied by the Gutter of Small Rains, a channel along the north arc that collects seepage from the floors above and is strained twice daily. The water is not potable and is posted as such in six places; pilgrims drink it anyway, in the belief, unsupported by any Concordance, that it confers quiet.

Three structures stand on the floor: the Shearing Shed (447), the Wool Loft of 447, and the Pastoral Office of Scriptorium Annex, a low building of undressed stone whose door has been repainted so often that it no longer closes.

The Silent Sheep

The Silent Sheep breed is distinguished chiefly by its silence, which is total and hereditary. The mechanism is not understood. The Azure Guild maintains that the trait is a property of the pasture rather than the animal, pointing to the auxiliary flocks at Azure Pastures on Floor 899, which are quieter than ordinary sheep and considerably quieter than the guild's own accounts of them. The Pastoral Office of Scriptorium Annex rejects this on the ground that sheep removed to Floor 506: The Liminal Scriptorium for study remain silent for the rest of their lives, though the office has never produced the ledger.

Vellum intended for the Upper Scriptorium must be cut from archival stock of Floor 447; material from any other herd is accepted only with a dispensation from the Scriptorium of Lost Causes, of which three have ever been granted. The fleece is worked into cord and, latterly, into the pale felt used to line the reading desks of The Echoing Scriptorium (22.J).

Herding Practice

The flocks are moved in four rotations about the oval, a scheme set out in Pastoral Ordinance 12 and unchanged since the Third Concordance, though the third rotation was reversed in the 51st Spiral after a boundary dispute and never reversed back. Herders are drawn from the Order of the Crook, a body of eleven whose members are permitted to speak on the floor and are required not to. The prohibition is enforced by fine. It is the most frequently breached rule on 447, chiefly by herders counting aloud.

Animals are sheared at the Shearing Shed (447) between the second and third rotations and are not washed beforehand. A note posted inside the shed, unsigned and undated, reads: "Do not shear the bell-wether before the ninth hour; he has been through enough."

Disputed Boundaries and the Regulation of Passage

The floor's extent has been contested twice. In the 38th Spiral the Azure Guild claimed the eastern arc as a dependency of Azure Pastures and installed a gate, which the Bounds Wall of 447 does not have and has never had. The gate was removed by parties unknown in the winter of that year and the wall repaired by parties equally unknown; the episode is recorded in the Second Concordance, Annex 6, which assigns responsibility to "the ordinary course of maintenance." Halloway, then newly sealed, wrote a dissent of fourteen pages. It is filed with the gate.

The second dispute is live. The Scriptorium of Jurisprudential Inquiry holds, on the authority of the Seventh Scriptorium, that a floor comprising nothing but pasturage cannot be a floor, since floors are catalogued by their contents and Floor 447's contents are Floor 447. The Annex answers that the sheep are the contents, the turf is the catalogue, and the inquiry may take the matter up with the bell-wether. No hearing has been scheduled. The Iconoclastic Scriptorium has offered to mediate and has been declined by both parties.

Access and Observances

Visitors reach the floor by the stair from Floor 446 and must leave by it before the dark day. No visitor may bring a dog, a bell, or a written question for the herders. Produce may be carried down; nothing may be carried up, including the felt, which the Azure Guild conveys by a route it declines to describe.

The fourth-day count is the floor's principal observance. Attendance is by invitation of the pastoral office, extended to the Azure Guild each spiral and accepted in four spirals out of five. The count is performed by touch in total darkness and must produce a figure divisible by seven; when it does not, the discrepancy is entered in the Register of the Dark Count and resolved the following spiral, a process that has never yet failed to produce a number divisible by seven.