Harrow counted the silver the way he counted stones, aloud and in order, from the first course to the last. He had found over the years that a man who counted aloud could not lie to himself about the number, and that a man who could not lie to himself about the number was a man that boatmen respected. Bardo’s boatmen had stopped unloading to listen. They had never heard a Mason do anything for money except hold out his hand for it, and they stood on the landing with their poles on their shoulders and their mouths a little open, watching his lips move.
“One,” said Harrow, and laid the first bar on the cloth. “Two.”
The second delivery had come off the barge in a wooden box lined with sacking. The bars were marsh-minted, each the length of a hand, and each one stamped with a reed and a bell. Tallow had decided that these were two separate marks. Bardo had insisted, with a reeve’s indignation, that they were one. Harrow laid the bars in courses on the red cloth at the head of the landing, where the light came through the gate in a low slant, three to a course. At every fifth course he stopped and tapped the cloth with one finger, to show that he had not lost his place.
“Forty-eight,” he said. “Forty-nine. Fifty.”
The count came to a hundred and eighty. He ran the cloth a second time from the far corner, and it came to a hundred and eighty again. On the third run it came to a hundred and eighty and a little more, which the Mason did not like at all.
“What is the extra?” asked Tallow, who had come down from the gatehouse with his board and his pencil and an expression of tremendous concentration.
“Sand,” said Harrow. “There is sand in the bottom of the box. It came off the barge with the bars. It is not silver and it is not ours, so I shall leave it in the box, and the box can go back to Bardo.”
“Then the extra is nothing at all.”
“It is a range of sand,” said Harrow, without humour, and went on counting.
Bardo, who had been watching from the top of the steps with his hands folded over his belt like a man at a wedding, came down at last and stood beside the cloth. He looked at the courses of bars. Then he looked at Harrow’s face, as a seller looks at a customer who has just named a fair price and might be about to name a better one.
“How’s the weather going to be, Mason?” he asked. “For the boats going back. I’d like to be off the Sallow before the ice comes down in the night.”
Harrow raised his eyes to the sky. It was grey and low and full of the bruised colour the marsh took on at the end of winter. He answered the question with another question. “Do you think the marsh is wetter than the sky, Reeve?”
Bardo laughed, a short hard bark that made the boatmen grin at one another. “A Mason is a Mason. Never a straight answer out of one of you, is there?”
“I answer what I am asked,” said Harrow. “You asked about the weather on the marsh. I am asking whether the marsh is wetter than the sky. It is an honest question, and a Mason cannot answer it without measuring.”
“Then measure it.”
“I have measured the walls,” said Harrow. “I have not measured the marsh, and I would not thank anyone who did it for me.”
He took out his cord. It was a length of hemp as thick as a finger, and it hung from his belt in a loop that dragged on the cobbles when he walked. For each bar he tied a knot, drew it tight, and said the number under his breath. The knots went down the cord one after another, each one a little different from the last. He had been tying them since the Hold’s first winter, and he meant to go on tying them until the cord reached the south wall, where he would count the knots against the courses of stone. Then the two would come out equal, and he would be able to stop worrying about it.
Gaunt came down from the forge yard at a run, wiping his hands on his apron, and planted himself at the foot of the landing with the look of a man who has been robbed of an afternoon’s shouting. He stared at the bars on the cloth. He stared at the box.
“That is not iron,” he said.
“No,” said Harrow.
“A bar of silver cannot be hammered into a hinge. It does not hold an edge. You cannot heat it and draw it out into a nail. It is no use to me at all.” Gaunt’s voice was loud and rough and full of feeling, the feeling of a man who had spent his life making useful things and did not know what to make of a useless one that gleamed. “The body cannot eat it. This Hold will be ruined by a thing that shines.”
“The body does not eat silver,” said Harrow, “but a wall eats stone. The stone comes from the marsh. The marsh eats silver, and the reeve of the marsh-towns is the only man in Lessary who will sell us stone at a fair price. So the silver is for the wall. You see the sense of that, or you do not. Either way, I am still at a hundred and eighty.”
“That argument is unfinished, and I dislike it.”
“You always do, Smith,” said Harrow, “and I always finish.”
Bardo came down the landing again while the Smith was still muttering. He had the box in his arms, and he set it on the planks at Harrow’s feet with the care of a man returning something he has been asked to hold for a stranger. He looked into it, and then he looked at the Mason, and then he took the sack of sand out of the bottom with two fingers and let it run back out onto the wood in a thin grey stream.
“Keep the sand, Mason,” he said.
“It is not the Hold’s.”
“No, it’s not, and nor is my silver, if you go by the Crown’s books, so there we are.” Bardo grinned, showing a gap in his teeth that Harrow had never seen before. “I shan’t carry sand back up the Sallow for a man who counts it. It would be a bad joke on the boatmen. They’d have to tell the story at every landing between here and the sea.”
“Then I shall count it,” said Harrow, “and enter it as a gift.”
“Enter it as sand,” said Bardo, “and I’ll go home happy.”
Harrow took the sand. He did not put it into the Hold’s ledger, because it was not in the Hold’s count. He put it into the pocket of his coat, where it made a faint dry sound against the lining each time he moved, like grit under a door. He would not have been able to say why he kept it. He only knew that a count which had come out with a little more in it than it started with was a count that had been made by somebody who cared about the difference, and he had never once in his life been willing to throw away a thing that someone had cared about.
He finished. He tied the last knot with his teeth, drew it tight, and said the number. Tallow wrote the total on his board in a square, neat hand. Then, because he could not help himself, he wrote his doubt beside it in smaller figures, which came to nothing, since the box had been counted twice and the Mason was never wrong about a bar.
Three hundred marks, the board said. Second delivery. Counted by the Mason, aloud.
“Three hundred,” said Tallow, to nobody in particular. He sounded like a man who had been given a present he had not expected and did not yet know where to put. “We have never held three hundred marks in the Hold at one time. Not since the first winter, when we had nothing at all to hold.”
“Then it’s a good day for the Register,” said Pell. She had come down from the bread-hall with a loaf in a cloth under one arm and a face that did not approve of silver. “Now get that box off my landing before somebody sits on it.”
Harrow tied the cord back on his belt. He was not thinking about the silver. He was thinking about the box, and the sand in its bottom, and how a Mason always knew when something had got into a count that did not belong to it. A thing like that did not go away because nobody mentioned it. It went into the wall and waited to be found, and a wall that had been built by a careful man was always found out in the end.
He turned to say as much to Tallow, and saw that the clerk had stopped writing.
Tallow was looking up the bank, past the landing and the ford and the grey reeds, toward the Lessary Road. Harrow followed his gaze. Walking down the bank from the ford, where a horse stood tethered to a post with its head low and its flanks steaming, came a woman in a grey riding cloak. She had a satchel over one shoulder, and she walked carefully, with the stiffness of someone who has ridden a long way on a bad road and has decided not to show it. She did not hurry. She reached the foot of the landing and looked up once at the gate and the new stone and the wall, with a glance that took in every course of it. Then she looked at the Mason, who was the nearest person and the one she had plainly chosen.
“Pardon me,” she said, in a very even voice. “Is this the place that keeps the Register?”
Harrow looked at her for a while. Then, slowly, he began to count the buttons on her cloak.