Without Jory to argue with him, Idrin found that the mornings had become very quiet, and that quiet, in a ruin, is a thing that presses on the ear until it begins to sound like speech. He lay on his pallet for hours on the tenth day, listening to the wind go over the broken bell-frame and the far-off knock of the river against the causeway stones, and it occurred to him that he had been talking to himself for a week and that the Hold had been listening to every word. He sat up. He put on his coat. He decided, as a matter of discipline, that a prince who could not command his own household had no business commanding anything at all, and that the first thing to do was to find out who his household was.
He went out into the courtyard at first light and stood in the middle of the flags with his notebook under his arm.
It was cold. The sun had not yet cleared the marsh, and the sky above the wall was a flat pale grey, the colour of pewter that has been left out in the rain. The flags were wet. There was a smell of wet stone and old smoke coming from the kitchen block, which had not been lit since the first morning, and under that the faint, sharp, clean smell of the river. Idrin straightened his shoulders, took out the pencil, and cleared his throat.
“A roll-call,” he said.
His voice went out across the yard and came back to him off the far wall, a little thinner than he had expected, and then the echo faded and there was nothing but the wind.
He tried again, louder. “The Hold of Ormhold will be counted. Those who are of the Hold will answer to their names.”
A rook lifted off the top of the wall, black and heavy, and went away over the marsh with a sound like a laugh. The wind moved in the broken bell-frame above the gate. Somewhere down the slope a dog barked once, a long way off, and then was quiet.
Idrin looked at his notebook. He had written the names down in the night, in the margin, under the list of sacks and the measurement of the wall. He had not written them as a list of people. He had written them as a list of things the Hold had. Stones: four hundred and nine. Sacks: four hundred. Bell: one. Gate: one. Register: one. Citizen: one. He had been drawn up, half-asleep, into an ugly sort of bookkeeping, and he could feel the shape of it now in the cold air, like a draught under a door.
“Harrow,” he said, a little more gently.
From the far side of the yard, where the wall came round in a half-circle and the flags were heaved up in their careful new levels, a voice answered him at once, flat and deep and unhurried.
“One.”
Idrin’s head came up. Harrow was standing by the gate-post with his hands at his sides, his patched coat buttoned to the chin. He had not moved. But at the word one he lifted his right hand, slowly, and laid it flat on the nearest stone, and Idrin heard him begin to count under his breath. Two. Three. Four. The counting went on across the yard, one stone after another, each stone answered with a faint dull knock as the mason’s palm touched its face, and the sound went round the courtyard like a clock ticking. It did not stop until the last flag by the granary door. Harrow stood with his hand on that stone and his eyes shut and said, quite clearly, “Four hundred and nine.”
“Thank you,” said Idrin.
“It’s a count,” said Harrow, and opened his eyes.
“Tallow,” said Idrin.
“I’m in the gatehouse,” said a voice from inside the open door. Tallow came out with his coat on and his notebook in his hand. He had clearly been awake for some time, and was not in a good temper about it. He looked at the board on the wall of the gatehouse as he came, as if to check that it had not changed while he was not looking, and then he looked at Idrin with the air of a man who has been asked to read out the menu of a dinner he has already eaten.
“The Register lists one citizen,” said Tallow. “The Mantle. It lists one Pretender and one Writ. It lists two Hands, that is Harrow and myself, who are awake. It says nothing at all about any Hands who are not, and I can give you no range for them, which is the first time in my life a register has declined to give me a figure. It lists the gate, which is standing, and the gatehouse, which is roofed. It lists sheep.”
“Sheep?”
“The old survey mentions sheep on the north slope,” said Tallow. “I can give you a range for them. The range is between nought and three hundred. I can’t give you a single number, because I have not seen a single sheep, and I’m not inclined to believe in one.”
“There are no sheep.”
“That’s the lower end of my range,” said Tallow, and made a small neat mark in his book. “Nought.”
Idrin turned away from him for a moment and looked up at the wall, where the sky was getting lighter. He felt something rise in his chest that he could not place at first, and then recognised as the ghost of a laugh. He pushed it down. A prince did not laugh at his own household’s roll-call. A prince took a breath and did what a prince was for, which was to give an order.
“Every voice that is awake,” he said, “will answer for its trade. That is a decree. It is to be entered in the minutes. Each Hand, when called, will say the name of its work, so that the Hold knows what it has in its keeping.”
“That’s a decree for a Chancery,” said Tallow, writing. “It’s not for a wall.”
“It’s for the Hold.”
“The Hold has a wall,” said Harrow. He had not taken his hand off the stone, but his head had turned, and he was looking at Idrin with mild, professional interest. “The trade of a stone is to answer when it is lifted. That’s the whole of its work. It doesn’t answer when it’s asked. It answers when it’s set.”
“And the trade of a clerk,” said Tallow, “is to answer when the Register is quoted, and not before. A clerk who volunteers is a clerk who has made a mistake in the figures. I shall answer, Your Highness, when someone has read me my own first line.”
Idrin looked from one of them to the other. Harrow’s face was entirely blank. Tallow’s face was entirely serious. Neither of them said another word. They stood in the cold yard with their hands at their sides, the stone-mason and the clerk, in the flat grey light, and the wind went over the wall, and the broken bell-frame creaked, and the silence went on, and went on, and it was perfectly clear that neither man had any intention of answering to anything at all.
The decree had failed. It had failed comically and quietly, without any dispute, as a dropped cup fails on a stone floor, and Idrin stood there looking at the two of them and felt something strange happen in his face. He was smiling. He could feel it. He had not meant to smile at all, and he turned toward the north wall so that they would not see, and found that he was smiling at the stones instead.
“Harrow,” he said, when he could trust his voice.
“Aye.”
“You are the Hold’s mason.”
“I’m the Hold’s mason,” said Harrow. He took his hand off the stone at last. “I’m the wall’s, too. That’s what the count’s for.”
“And Tallow is the Hold’s clerk.”
“I’m the Hold’s clerk,” said Tallow, “for as long as the Hold can spell its own name.”
There was a pause. Then Harrow said, in his slow flat voice, not looking at either of them: “This household’s a cook short of a breakfast, and a squire short of a gate, and a prince short of a sheep.”
Tallow took out his pencil, looked at the sky, and wrote the line in the minutes. Then he put the pencil behind his ear and said, to the air over the wall, with a faint note of distaste, “The number is two, if you insist on a number. Two, in the sense that there are two men standing here who can count, and one, in the sense that there is only one of you who can give an order. I’d put the range at one to two. I wouldn’t put it higher.”
“Two,” said Harrow. “That’s more than the sheep.”
Idrin let them talk. He was not listening to the words anymore. He was looking at the gatehouse, where the door stood open on the dim room, and at the kitchen block beyond the yard, its chimney cold and its windows dark. The roll-call had ended. The Hold was counted, after a fashion, and it had come to two men and a prince and a count of nought sheep, and it was not enough, and it was the first count in his life he had not been ashamed to make.
The wind shifted. It came down off the wall and across the yard, bringing with it a thin, unexpected smell, warm and yeasty and sweet, the smell of bread that has been baked in a good oven and has been left on a cloth to cool.
Tallow lifted his head from the minutes. He sniffed, once, carefully, as a clerk checks a figure that seems too good to be true.
“The kitchen’s cold,” he said. “I’ve seen it. The hearth is grey and the oven has no fire in it. I have looked at it twice this morning and I’d swear to that, to within one.” He turned, slowly, toward the dark windows of the block. “The bread,” said Tallow, “is warm.”