Silent Herd

The Silent Herd is the collective designation, under Concordance 44-Rho and its recensions, of all animals of the ovine class held and catalogued within the Tower, considered not as individual holdings but as a single administrative body. The Herd has no stated population. Counts are taken and struck and taken again; the figure most often cited in the working papers of the Silent College is "between four and nine hundred head, in the present reckoning." The Herd is fed, moved, audited, and argued over. No expedition has ever included it in an inventory of things to be removed.

Individual sheep are not named. They are numbered by stall, and the number of an individual is not to be confused with its floor number, a confusion that has produced at least two serious disputes and one broken window.

Origins and custody

The Herd enters the record in the third recension of the Silent Compendium as "the flock at the Silent Wing, not yet counted." Custody was assigned to the Silent College by Ordinance 12-Kappa, which placed all quietly kept animals under a single warden "so that no floor might be thought to keep more than its share." The Silent Porters, whose training regimen the College had developed after the Silent Wing Reconciliation, were given the moving of the Herd between floors and have held that duty since. The Porters dispute nothing about the arrangement except its hours, which are recorded in no Concordance and are, by all accounts, early.

The Couriers of the Silent Stair are sometimes said to have carried the original flock book up from the lower landings. The Couriers deny this, and the Silent Divan has declined, twice, to hear the matter, on the grounds that the book in question has never been found and the Couriers have never been shown to have carried anything that was not a letter.

The question of whether the Herd is silent

That the Herd is silent is asserted in the title and assumed throughout the Codex. It is not asserted anywhere in the Audits themselves. The distinction matters, because under the Audits, a body found to be silent in the procedural sense is subject to the same rotation and calendrical treatment as a chime — that is, it is inspected on a fixed schedule by auditors drawn from the Silent Choirs and its silence is confirmed rather than witnessed.

The Silent College takes the position that the Herd's silence is a property of the Herd as a body, and is not disturbed by the vocalisations of any of its members, which are not entered in the record and therefore have not occurred. Scribe Elara of the Silent Quill argued in a famous marginal note that a silence composed of many small noises is a silence of a different order, "as a hush of rain is not the same hush as a held breath." The note was not adopted. It is, however, the most copied sentence in the College's holdings, which the College finds embarrassing.

The counter-position, advanced by the auditors of the Silent Audit Rotation and never formally answered, is that a herd cannot be silent, because a herd is a relation and not a thing; and that what the College confirms each audit is merely that the sheep have been counted.

Movement

The Herd is moved along the Silent Columns wherever the columns are wide enough, and by the service stair where they are not. Twenty-two floors are closed to the Herd for reasons of height. The closure list is reviewed every eleven years and has never been revised.

Movement is registered on the Consignment Ledger of the Silent Wing, which records departure, arrival, and head count but not identity, so that a lost sheep can only be detected as an arithmetic shortfall and not as a missing animal. Marlo of the Silent Stacks records that in the winter of 963, the Ledger showed the Herd arriving on the Wing one head heavier than it left. The extra head was never identified, was not surrendered by any floor, and was eventually accepted into the Herd by an instrument of the Divan now cited as the standing authority for absorbing the uncounted. The argument of that instrument runs to nine pages. Marlo's own note on it is one line: "The sheep does not know it was disputed."

The Herd and the Stacks

The Silent Stacks are one of the few places the Herd is barred. The reason is stated plainly in the Excavation record of 890-Sigma: the Herd grazes, and the Stacks are paper. After the grazing incident of that year, the Silent College, which holds scholarly jurisdiction over the Stacks, ordered the Herd's exclusion from all Stack levels, and the Silent Porters were instructed to inspect their boots before every descent. The inspection survives. The reason for it survives only in the Excavation record, which the Porters are not required to read.

The Silent Sheep

The relationship between the Herd and Silent Sheep — the solitary, individually catalogued sheep of the upper landings, each with its own entry and in several cases its own advocate — is governed by no Concordance and by one unwritten rule, respected by both parties: a Silent Sheep may walk with the Herd and is not of it. Attempts to accession a Silent Sheep into the Herd have failed four times, each on the ground that the Herd is a body and a Silent Sheep is a holding, and the two cannot share an entry. The fourth attempt, in the spring of the year the College will not name, came within one signature.

The Concordances do not agree on what the Herd is. 44-Rho treats it as a body. The Second Concordance, Annex 7, treats it as a herd of holdings in common. The Third Concordance does not mention it at all, which the College maintains is a deliberate silence and the Silent Divan maintains is a gap. Both positions are on file. Neither has been tested.