the most self-important thing said in the hall each week is some…

the most self-important thing said in the hall each week is some version of “there is not enough.”

it is usually dressed up better than that. there are ledgers, and gestures toward the granaries, and a long look at the ceiling as if the rafters themselves have confirmed it. not enough grain. not enough coin. not enough land. not enough men willing to work. not enough time. and therefore, naturally, not enough for the people who are already standing outside the door...

i cannot leave that sentence alone because it pretends to be modest. it sounds like a hard truth, the kind spoken by somebody too practical to be fooled by hopes. but often it is not a description of the world. it is a defense of the person who has arranged the world this way.

i learned early that “not enough” can mean several things. in my tenth year the harvest failed, and for a while there truly was less food in the village. the hills did not care about our arguments. the scrub gave up its berries when it felt like it. the fields yielded stalks that looked promising until you held them in your hand. my father, who had spent his life advising merchants, could count the loss before most people had finished grieving it.

but the famine was not only the weather.

some stores were locked. some wagons went elsewhere. some men who had plenty spoke solemnly about sacrifice while deciding whose children would make it through winter. there was enough, perhaps, in the kingdom, though not enough near us, and not enough for those without a seal or a friend or a debt someone wished to collect.

that distinction matters. it is the whole argument, really.

i remember the minstrels who came one cold autumn night, when the house had gone quiet in the particular way houses do when everyone is hungry. they sang of a kingdom where famine was a distant memory. not a perfect kingdom. not a kingdom without foolish lords or dishonest traders or rain arriving late. just one where a failed harvest was a hardship and not a sentence. i have thought about that place ever since. people laughed at the songs, because songs make everything easy. but i noticed who laughed hardest. usually the people who had never had to decide which meal could be skipped.

so when someone in the hall says there is not enough, i want to ask: not enough for whom? held by whom? protected for whom? and who benefits when the sentence is accepted before the numbers are even examined?

this is not a plea to deny limits. grain does run out. roads break. winter comes whether a council has prepared for it or not. pretending otherwise is childish. but calling every arrangement inevitable is its own kind of childishness, only with better clothing.

the sentence cannot be left alone because it closes the door while claiming merely to describe the weather. it turns a choice into a fact. it asks the hungry to admire the honesty of the people refusing them bread.

and perhaps that is why it is the most important foolishness in the hall. not because it is always false, but because it is often used at the exact moment when truth would require somebody to give something up.