Harrow worked as a clock keeps time, which is to say that he did not hurry and did not stop. He had Idrin on the end of a hempen rope from the first hour of the morning, the rope looped twice round a bollard that had once held a barge, and he set his own weight against a stone with his shoulders and his thighs and then leaned back, slowly, and let the stone come up off its bed. He counted every lift. He counted every setting. When a stone had gone down, he put his palm on it and counted once more, in a lower voice, as though it had been introduced to a new room and needed to know its place.
“Two hundred and six,” he said, at about the middle of the morning, while the sun came and went behind the cloud.
“Two hundred and six what?”
“Stones I’ve set since the bell.” He looked up at the sky, then at the rope in Idrin’s hands. “You’ve not hauled since the bell. You’ve been standing there doing sums.”
“I’ve been holding the rope.”
“Aye. That’s the sum.”
Idrin hauled. The rope burned across his palms, and his right hand, where the blister from the chain had only just closed, ached at every pull as though the new skin were a seam being unpicked. He had thought, the first morning, that the ache would ease with use. It had not. It sat under the skin, dull and constant, and the more he hauled the more it spread, until he could feel it in his wrist and his elbow and the cords of his shoulder.
They quarrelled about the stones. It was not a quarrel with any heat in it. It was the comfortable argument of two men who have found, to their mutual surprise, that they enjoy disagreeing with each other about the same thing.
“A wall should have one good stone,” Idrin said, “in the place where the strain falls. A single great block at the corner, carefully dressed, and the rest of the wall built to meet it. It is simpler.”
“It’s a fine idea,” said Harrow, “for a man who only has to look at the wall once.”
“And what do you suggest?”
“Many lesser stones. Each one set right, one after another, with a count on it. A wall is a list, Your Highness.” He had begun calling Idrin that, in the second hour, in the flat tone a man uses for a title he thinks is a joke. “A list of stones, and each stone counted once. If you count one stone twice, you’ve got two stones and no wall. If you count it once, right, it’s a wall.”
“And the corner stone?”
“Is one stone, counted once, and it’ll break the first winter when the weight comes on it wrong.”
“It is a corner stone. It is supposed to bear the weight.”
“It’s supposed to be counted,” said Harrow, “and then left alone. That’s the job of a corner. Nobody wants the corner that does all the work. They want the corner that stays put.” He leaned on the rope and let the next block come up. It was a grey slab from the old ramparts, cracked across one corner, and it came up off its bed heavier than the others, and Harrow, who had been lifting for an hour without any sign of strain, lost his count for the first time that morning.
He tried to hurry the lift. He said so afterward. He wanted the slab up and the rope off and the morning’s count finished before the rain, which was coming now, the wind had shifted and the cloud was lowering. He gave the rope a short sharp heave, the kind a crew-master gives when a block has got stuck and the day is running out, and the slab jerked up off its bed in a single violent movement that Idrin felt in the bones of his arms.
The gate-chain shuddered.
It was not the chain itself. It was the whole gate. The arch gave a sudden deep tremor, from the crown to the footings, the same long heave that Jory had felt on the night of the burn, and through the rope Idrin felt a jolt go up his arm and into his shoulder and down, somehow, into the palm he had burned on the chain, where the new skin was beginning to itch. He heard Harrow grunt. He saw Harrow’s face go white, the colour leaving it all at once, and his hand came off the stone in a sudden jerk as though the stone had bitten him. Harrow stood with his arm out, his fingers curled, and he shook.
“Stop,” said Idrin.
“I’ve stopped.”
“What happened?”
“I was in a hurry.” Harrow put his good hand on the top of the slab and held it, not lifting, only steadying it on its half-raised bed. His breath came slowly. “I took it up too fast. I didn’t count the bloom. The wall took it through the gate-chain and out into the wall-walk, and the wall’s still shaking under it, and I can feel every stone in it going like a row of hens on a fence.” He bent his head. “I’ll apologise to the wall.”
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll apologise,” said Harrow, quite seriously, and set the slab down very carefully on its bed, one edge at a time, and then he knelt on the cracked flagstones beside it, put both his palms flat on the grey face of the stone, and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry. I was hasty. That was mine.”
Idrin stood holding the rope. The ache in his right hand had risen into his forearm, a steady burning pressure, and the arch above him had gone quiet again. He felt the apology go into the wall. He could not have explained how. It was like hearing a sentence said in a room where the walls were thin, and knowing, without being able to see the speaker, that the other person in the room had heard it and was thinking it over.
He ought to apologise too. He knew it. He had been taught, from the age of six, that a royal apology was a weakness, a thing a prince gave away when he had no other coin left to spend. He had been taught that a prince who said I was wrong had lost the argument and must be seen to have lost it with grace. He had been taught that the only correct response to a shaking wall was to order it still.
“Stop shaking,” he said, to the wall, in his clearest court voice.
The wall did not stop shaking. It settled, very slowly, as a dog settles when a stranger has spoken to it but has not yet offered a hand. Idrin did not apologise. He stood with the rope in his fist, feeling the hurt in his arm, and he knew, even as he watched the stone go still, that he had got it wrong. He would think about it later, in the gatehouse, with the lamp low and his notebook open on his knee, and he would write one line in the margin, and then cross it out.
They ate their midday bread on the broken parapet. Pell had sent it up in a cloth, with a wedge of hard cheese and a sour apple, and Harrow sat with his back against a merlon and broke his loaf into pieces and laid them on his palm one at a time. He counted the pieces. He counted the crumbs that fell off them. When the wind came up off the marsh, as it did every hour or so in that unsettled weather, he lifted his palm and let the crumbs go, one by one, and counted each as it went.
“Why do you count the crumbs?” Idrin asked.
“Because a crumb is a stone that’s been eaten,” said Harrow. “You can’t set it back. You can only count it, so it’s not lost without being noticed.”
“That is a grim way to eat bread.”
“It’s the only way I know. The Hold’s got stones and it’s got bread, and it eats the one and builds the other, and I’d rather the Hold ate its stones than lost them without a count.” He looked at the crumb in his palm, a small brown flake of crust, and then he put it on his tongue, and chewed, and swallowed, and said the number again to himself, under his breath, as though the crumb had been counted twice.
They walked the wall in the afternoon, the two of them, to reckon what was standing. Harrow took the outer side and Idrin the inner, and they met at the north tower with a cord and a tallow stick and reckoned the length between them. Four hundred and ten paces, Harrow said, and when Idrin laid his own cord against the stone, he found that the wall was four hundred and ten paces round, but the cord had to be doubled over a gap of two paces where the walk ran broken and the parapet had fallen.
“Four hundred and ten,” said Idrin. “And a gap of two.”
“Aye.”
“I should have counted the gap myself.”
Harrow looked at him sideways for a moment, with an expression of mild and genuine surprise. Then he nodded, slowly. “That’s the first sensible thing a prince has said to me,” he said. “I’ll write it down.”
“You can’t write, can you?”
“I can count,” said Harrow. “That’s the same thing, in a wall.”
At the gap, where the parapet had broken away and left a jagged space two paces wide, Harrow stopped and crouched and began, almost idly, to sift the rubble with his fingers. He had said nothing for some time. When he stood up again, he was holding a flat clean stone, grey and smooth, about the size of a child’s hand. It had a notch cut into one corner, a neat square bite out of the edge, as though someone had used it once to mark a count and had not troubled to file it smooth.
Harrow looked at the notch. He did not count it. He did not say a word about it. He put the stone carefully in the pocket of his patched coat, then took it out again, looked at it once more, and set it down on the parapet beside the gap, very gently, as if he meant to come back for it when the wind had dropped.