Jory had packed the bay before breakfast. He had folded his blanket into a square and strapped it behind the cantle, tied his spare shirt in a roll with the good twine, and hung his canteen from the saddle-horn where he could reach it without looking. Then he had stood by the animal’s shoulder with his hand on its neck and waited, in the grey first light, until Idrin came down from the gatehouse. He had not said anything. He did not need to. The bay had been waiting too, and had shifted its weight from one hind foot to the other, as though it had an opinion about the delay.
“Good morning,” said Idrin.
“Morning.”
“You’re going, then.”
“I’m going,” said Jory. “I’ve been going since the first day, if you want the truth. I just didn’t have a horse under me until yesterday.”
He had kept a count. Idrin knew it, because he had seen the squire’s book, a cheap pocket-ledger bound in brown paper, which Jory kept in the lining of his coat and wrote in each evening by the hearth. Idrin had never asked to look at it. He had been afraid, on some level, of what it might say. Jory had not offered, and now he took the little book out of his coat and held it up in the morning light, not handing it over, only showing it.
“Nine days,” he said. “From the Lessary Road to the arch. Twenty-six miles, by my reckoning, and the reckoning’s sound, because I walked the last three of them behind your horse. I’ve done three days’ labour for you that I can put a number on, which is the carrying of the gate-stones and the hauling for the granary and the rails off the Lessary cart. Those are three days. I’ve been paid for none of them.” He closed the book. “I’ve been paid seven times in the whole of the nine days, and every one of them was a coin the Crown had already stamped, and not one of them was yours.”
“I have nothing that is mine to pay you with.”
“You’ve got the box.”
“The box is empty.”
“You’ve got the disc,” said Jory. He did not raise his voice. He was never loud when it mattered. “The one that was in the box. The one you’ve been carrying in your coat for a week like a tooth that won’t come out.”
Idrin put his hand on his coat. He had not meant to. The disc was there, warm against his ribs, as it always was. He had felt it there every hour since the first afternoon, and he had never once thought of taking it out, except to look at it, and he had not known until that moment how often he had been looking at it when no one was watching.
“It isn’t money,” he said.
“No. It’s a coin with no mark on it, which is a button, or a lie.” Jory did not smile. “But you don’t carry a button for a week, and you don’t carry a lie in your coat. You carry a thing you’re waiting to spend.”
They stood for a while in the cold grey light under the arch. The chain was still. It hung over the gate-foot, not swinging, not stirring, and beyond the arch the Lessary Road ran away down the hill toward the marsh in two pale ruts, and somewhere on it, very far off, a bird was calling in the reeds.
Idrin took his hand out of his coat. The disc lay on his palm.
It was not much to see. It was a pale tin disc about the width of his thumbnail, rough at the edge, uneven in its curve, with no stamp and no face and no lettering on either side. In the morning light it was the colour of old pewter. It looked, Idrin thought, like something a child might have found at the bottom of a river and kept for the shine of it. He held it out on his flat palm, as a man holds out a coin to a beggar, and the disc sat there, quite still.
“That’s the Hold’s first coin,” said Idrin. He heard his own voice as if it belonged to a stranger, the Chancery voice, dry and formal and certain. “I’m paying it as the Hold’s wage. For three days’ carrying, and for the rails, and for your work on the granary door. It is the Hold’s own money, and I am the Hold’s Warden, or I shall be. It is good.”
Jory laughed.
It was not a cruel laugh. It was short and startled, the laugh a man gives when someone has said a thing so stiff and absurd that it has got through his guard before he could stop it. Then he stopped laughing, because he had seen Idrin’s face, and because he had put out his hand without meaning to, and his fingers had come within an inch of the disc and had stopped there, trembling a little, as if the air above it were hot.
“It’s warm,” Jory said.
“Yes.”
“It’s warm as a stone is warm, when the sun’s been on it all day.” He drew his hand back and looked at it. “I don’t want it.”
“I know.”
“I’m trying to say no. I’m trying to say it properly. I’ve got the words for it, Idrin, I learned them from my father, who said no to every clerk who ever came to the farm. You say no to the wage you’re offered. You say you don’t need it. You say the Hold’s got its own troubles.” He looked up, and his face had changed. It was not tearful. It was only very young, and very tired, and very clear. “But I can’t find the words. I’ve been trying since I put the saddle on. I’ve gone looking for them and they’re not in my mouth.”
“Then take it without them,” said Idrin quietly.
Jory took the disc.
He took it between finger and thumb, lightly, as he would have lifted a warm egg from a nest. He did not glance at it. He looked at Idrin. Then he slipped it into the pouch at his belt, a small leather bag with a drawstring and a tin clasp, and pulled the string tight, and tied the pouch to the chain of a cheap brass medal he had worn round his neck since he was a child. He did not say thank you. He did not say anything at all for a moment, and when he did speak his voice was rough.
“Seven and one,” he said. “That’s eight. I’ll count it.”
“You don’t have to count it.”
“I count everything. It’s what I’m for.” He looked at the bay and then back at the arch. “I’m sorry about the gate.”
“Don’t be. It isn’t your gate.”
“It’s the only gate we’ve got,” said Jory, and swung up into the saddle.
Harrow had come up from the courtyard with a stone on his shoulder, and he set it down on the path and watched the whole thing, his hands at his sides. He had seen the disc on Idrin’s palm, and he had seen Jory take it. He did not comment. He counted, under his breath, the seconds from the moment the disc left Idrin’s hand to the moment the pouch was tied, and then he said one word, clearly, in his flat deep voice: “One.”
Tallow had come down the steps behind him. He had the minutes in his hand, the notebook on its cord, and the charcoal stub pushed through the cord beside it. He opened the notebook on his forearm and wrote, in his small square letters, in the margin of the first leaf beside the blank square marked Cost: ?, the figure one. Then, after a moment’s thought, he added a question mark.
“It’s not a sum,” said Tallow, to no one in particular. “I know it’s a sum. But I haven’t been told what it’s for.”
Jory rode out under the arch at noon. The bay went through the gap in the chain at a walk, and the chain lifted a fraction as it passed and settled again behind it, and Idrin felt the movement go into the stone under his feet and out again into the air, like a breath let out after a long pause. He stood at the gate-foot with his hands at his sides and watched the bay and its rider and the empty road until the road bent round the shoulder of the hill and the marsh took them.
He was alone. The box under the gatehouse window was empty of everything but the ledger. His coat was lighter by one small weight, and the place against his ribs where the disc had lain for a week had gone cold, and he felt the cold as a lightness, quick and sharp, that he could not name. It was not relief. It was closer to the sensation of setting down a load one has carried so long that one has forgotten it is a load. A debt had been paid. He was almost sure of it. Paid by someone who had never agreed to be the creditor, and who had gone off down the road with the receipt round his neck.
He went back inside and sat on the bench, and took out the notebook, and wrote the date and the word Jory, and then could think of nothing else to add.
At the foot of the causeway, a mile down the road, where the ruts ran out over the first low bridge across the Sallow, Jory pulled up the bay. He turned in the saddle and looked back at the Hold. He was too far off to see the arch, or the gatehouse, or the figure of a man standing at the gate-foot with his hands at his sides. He could see only the grey wall on its rise above the marsh, and the keep with its open roof, and the dark line of the Lowgate houses sloping down toward the water.
He did not turn to the wall. He looked down at his own hand, at the pouch hung from his neck, where his fingers had found the drawstring and were holding it, tight, as though it had begun to weigh something.