Ezra walked toward the open field for the classes the next morning, Galwell, Caspian, and Hearth flanking him. The outer ring was unusually loud for an early Helio morning.
Passing the market stalls, Ezra spotted a group of men sitting on wooden crates, sharing hot meat skewers and clay cups of ale. Even scrubbed clean, the deep, persistent soot on their hands and forearms gave them away—the blast furnace workers.
Galwell, being from a merchant house, waved at them. He had become fast friends with a few.
"They are spendin' th' day well, ain't they, M'lord?" Galwell said.
"Yes, they look happy." Ezra nodded as he saw them munching skewers and chugging on their drink.
"Y'know, I figured I'd tell m' dad that we sh'ld get somethin' like this in our fief."
Ezra looked up at him as he was walking.
"I reckon it looks like it makes more coin in Bren, an' it looks like they're spiked for work th' next day," Galwell sighed. "Dunno if me father would agree, tho." Even though Galwell was technically the Lord of his domain, in truth, his father managed everything and he could only give suggestions.
"Figure th' ledgers won't allow it, tho. Lord Blackfyre's grandsire had thought right by doin' that."
Ezra nodded and kept walking when they reached the field that the classes was supposed to happen. Ezra saw hundreds of children from the inner and outer ring screaming and generally having fun much to their instructors dismay. But upon seeing Ezra's retinue arrive they came to an almost abrupt stop.
Ezra had his retinue and some other Knights of the castle accompany him. The procession had stolen the spotlight. As soon as this happened the scribes had capitalized on this.
"Lines of ten! Settle down!" Hugo's voice carried over the crowd. He stood at the head of a massive block of students, his posture straight and authoritative. He didn't look like the terrified scribe Ezra had drafted months ago.
After a while the children had settled down. Ezra had notice that there had been little kiosks that had also start to form. Small time merchants had also settled in. Some of the children had their own coin to spend and others, when their parents visited, had their parents spend some for them. Especially the Kanzlei children.
Nearby, Louis was managing another large cohort. A boy near the front stepped out of line and started shouting a question about his slate board, but Louis simply pointed at him and tapped the air. The boy immediately clamped his mouth shut, stepped back into line, and raised his right hand high.
"Yes, Tomas, you may ask," Louis said calmly.
Ezra watched, genuinely impressed. He had given the three scribes a few written guidelines on crowd control—basic concepts like hand-raising and how to generally maintain a class but Hugo, Delmon, and Louis had found how to apply the techniques with their own flavor. They had completely handed over the original pilot batch and moved up to manage the massive influx of new students.
Seeing Ezra approach, the three scribes handed their tallies to their assistants and jogged over to greet him.
"Milord," Hugo bowed, breathless but smiling. Delmon and Louis followed suit.
"You have them well in hand, Hugo," Ezra said, gesturing to the orderly rows of children sitting on the grass.
"They learn the rules quickly, milord," Louis chimed in. "The hand-raising alone saves us half an hour of shouting. The new instructors are settling in well, too."
Behind the three junior scribes, a staggering force of fifty junior scribes under them from the Press Office were fanning out across the field, taking charge of their specific sub-groups. Ezra finally had a standardized, scalable workforce capable of teaching basic literacy and base-ten arithmetic.
"Good work. Keep the rotation steady," Ezra told them. "Class one is already in seated?"
"Yes M'lord they were the most behave as always." Delmon replied.
Ezra met with class one. Galwell beside him, being a merchant's son he had quickly understood the base ten concept and saying it was a great insight. He had even sent a few books of Fundamentals of Accounting and Fundamentals of Arithmetic back to his father who found them useful.
Ezra had insisted that class one should refrain from calling him "Lord" during the class. What he did instead was call him something else. He didn't choose the word teacher or tutor but something he made up which came from the root word "instruct" in the Imperial tongue. He did this so that it wouldn't have been too awkward for the Kanzlei children to call him teacher, in their social context that meant something deeper and would always imply seniority.
"Instructor Ezra," everyone bowed as he stepped into the center, a slate board big enough for everyone to see was carted into place the night before.
Some contraptions were laid out on to the table
Ezra had something in his hand. It was a flat, rectangular wooden frame, roughly the size of a ledger book.
He set it down flat on the demonstration table. The class leaned in.
A horizontal wooden beam divided the inside of the frame, creating a narrow upper row and a wider lower row. Running vertically through this center beam were thin, polished wooden dowels. Strung along these dowels were dozens of small, diamond-shaped wooden beads.
Every column had exactly one bead in the top section, and four beads in the bottom section.
Ezra ran the side of his index finger along the center beam, smoothly sweeping all the beads away from the middle. The sharp, satisfying clack of polished wood echoed in the quiet room.
"This," Ezra said, "is a calculation frame. It is how you will do arithmetic without needing chalk or slate. It's called an abacus."
A hand in the air raised, he was small for his age. Ezra remembered that he was quite timid when he had arrive but over the course of the three months that he had with them, he had become much more cheerful over the months that had come. Ezra couldn't gauge what the boy thought as he was from a Kanzlei family.
"Is that like the ones my dad uses?" the boy said,"he doesn't let me touch those. He says I am too young for it and that I might break it. His calculi is made from bronze with brass fittings."
"It is similar in concept but we will be using the base ten arithmetic we have all been learning."
"It will help us calculate numbers faster."
The child nodded.
"We also saw one when there was the scribe who wanted to do the job for Master Orlund," Raydall said out loud.
"Yes something like that. It's sort of a status symbol for them." Ezra said.
A lot of the children tilted their head. They didn't know what exactly that meant. Ezra noticed this but went on anyway.
"An abacus can be built in many different ways. We are going to use this shape, which is called a soroban," Ezra said. He reached under the table and pulled out a standard-issue bronze calculi he had borrowed from Corvin's office, holding it up so the whole class could see.
"Your father's bronze board has special grooves over here on the far right," Ezra explained, pointing to the slots. "Those are only for ounces and twelfths. It is built specifically to count Imperial coins. But what happens when your dad has to do harder math? Like multiplying a huge pile of coins by a lot of different merchants?"
The boy frowned, thinking about it. "He gets out his wax board. He writes the numbers in two columns. He halves the numbers on the left and doubles the ones on the right, all the way down the page. Then he crosses out the rows where the left number is even, and adds up whatever is left on the bronze board."
The boy shook his head. "He doesn't like being interrupted when he does it. He says if he loses his place in his head or forgets which row he is adding, he has to throw the everything away and start the whole ledger over."
"Yep," Ezra nodded. "The bronze board has trouble actually calculating anything. It is just a tally counter. Think about how your father adds those final numbers. If he needs to add seven and six, he slides the pebbles to represent a five and two ones, then adds another five and a one. Now the board has two 'five' pebbles and three 'one' pebbles sitting together in the ones column."
Ezra pointed to his own head. "The board doesn't fix this for him. His brain has to step in, recognize that two fives make a ten, pull those two pebbles away, and manually carry a new pebble over to the tens groove. He has to do that visual translation for every single column, over and over."
The Kanzlei children who had understood more nodded while the outer ring children just stared.
"And the fractions?" Ezra asked. "If a tax rate leaves a remainder of a fifth, his board has no groove for fifths. It only has grooves for twelfths and twenty-fourths. So he has to pause his calculation, mentally convert a fifth into an approximate number of twenty-fourths, and then go back to the board. It requires years of training because he is holding all those conversions in his memory while managing the bronze beads."
Ezra tapped the wooden frame on the table. "This frame is different. Because we use the base-ten numbers you've already learned, every single rod works the exact same way. Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, shifting infinitely to the left." Ezra slid his finger to the right. "And if we move past the ones? Tenths. Hundredths. Thousandths. All just in base ten."
The class remained quiet. Some tilted their heads trying to absorb the information.
"More importantly," Ezra continued, "I am not just giving you a board to hold numbers. I am going to teach you a set of rules for your fingers. We use complementary numbers. If a column is full and you need to add eight, you do not count out eight beads. The rule for eight is simply: subtract two, add one to the left. Your fingers do it blindly. The board carries the ten automatically. If you memorize the physical movements, you do not need to do the multiplication or division in your head. The frame will do the math for you."
Ezra picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the slate board and then walked on top of make-shift stair platform so he could be at a height where everyone could see. He wrote two base-ten numbers: 345 and 12.
"If an Imperial scribe wants to multiply three hundred and forty-five by twelve, they have to write down a massive grid, halve and double the numbers, and carefully manage the manual carries on their bronze board."
Ezra set the chalk down and placed both hands over the wooden frame. "Watch."
He showed them the workflow first before explaining the algorithm. "First, I set the number three hundred and forty-five on the far left side of the board." His fingers flicked on the abacus careful to show it to everyone. Clack-clack-clack. "Then, I set the multiplier, twelve, on the right." Clack-clack.
"Now," Ezra said, looking up at the students, completely ignoring the board. "My brain stops doing math. My fingers take over. They just follow the rules of base-ten."
His index fingers and thumbs moved in a rapid, practiced blur. The wood snapped against the center beam with sharp, rhythmic clicks, cascading from left to right as the product built itself in the center of the frame.
Clack-clack. Clack. Clack-clack-clack.
Three seconds later, his hands stopped.
"You should understand that this is me slowing down it so that you can see.
He looked down at the center of the frame and read the final position of the beads from left to right. "Four, one, four, zero," Ezra said. He picked up the chalk and wrote the total on the slate: 4,140.
The Kanzlei boy stared at the wooden beads, his mouth slightly open. He knew enough from watching his father to know that what Ezra had just done should have taken a grown man several minutes of intense concentration and a page full of charcoal scratches.
Galwell stood dead still. As a merchant's son, his mind immediately grasped the implications of this. Now it if he applied the base ten techniques to the abacus it would be faster for him to calculate more things than just coin.
A Senior Kanzlei scribe cost a fortune to hire, precisely because the mental load of Imperial math was so punishing. A single ledger could take days to balance. But this wooden frame didn't require a master's education. It required muscle memory. Ezra was turning the children into human calculators.
Ezra turned back to the children. "We will start with addition and subtraction today. But by the end of the year, all of you will be able to do what I just did."
"I am doing this so you can be acquainted with this device early on."
He motioned to some clerks. They distributed a wooden abacus to each child.
"You will have to learn the motions as we learn the multiplication tables as well."
"Also if you learn more arithmetic. I promise you we can play much more fun games."
Ezra smiled as he saw the children. Class one was shaping up to be the backbone of the next phase that Ezra was planning for bren.