The comedy stopped on the causeway, and Idrin did not know how to start it again.
He had been brought up to believe that a body was a kind of document. It had a name and a trade and a place in the order of things, and a man who was killed was simply a line in the Crown’s book that had been struck through by a clerk with a clean pen. He had believed that, or at least he had been taught to say it. He stood on the wet stones at the foot of the river wall in the first grey light and looked at three men lying in the reeds with their faces toward the water, and the words would not form in his mouth at all. The men were nothing like a document. They looked like men who had fallen asleep in the wrong place and would be cold when they woke.
Harrow did the lifting. He came down the causeway steps with a stone-sled made of two planks and a length of rope, and he did not say a word as he went. He knelt by the first man, put his hands under the shoulders, and lifted him onto the sled with the same slow patient motion he used for the flags, and he counted aloud as he did it. “One.” He laid the man straight. He did not close the eyes. He came back for the second and said, “Two.” The third was heavier, and he sat back on his heels for a moment before he lifted, and said, very quietly, “Three,” and it was not a number that was meant for the sled.
“Who were they?” Idrin asked. He was surprised to hear how thick his voice was.
Tallow had come down behind them with the minutes. He knelt on the stones beside the first body and began, very methodically, to go through the man’s clothes. He did not seem to find it distasteful. He turned the cloak back, looked at the belt, lifted a leather pouch from the hip and weighed it on his palm, then tipped out a few coins and a sprig of dried reed-stem. He studied the reed-stem for a while, then smelled it, then put it back in the pouch with a neat tidy movement.
“A ferryman,” said Tallow. “I’d say a ferryman by the hands. The palms are split from the rope, and the thumb has been broken and set badly. He worked a crossing for a living. He was a fair ferryman, I’d guess, for the marsh.” He moved to the second body, a thin man with a bundle of cut reed still tied to his back with twine. “A reed-cutter. He’s got the marsh-green on his nails, and he’s been cutting since before he could hold a knife. Cutters always carry their own twine.”
He came to the third and stopped. The man was younger than either of the others. He was small for a man, and his face in the grey light was smooth and very pale, with no beard on the chin at all. His cloak was too large for him. He had a rope wound twice round his waist, the end still knotted to the raft’s cleat. Tallow looked at the rope for a while.
“This one wasn’t on the raft to work,” he said, at last. “This one was on the raft because he was told to hold the rope. Someone wanted him out of the reeds, and sent him where the men were, and then forgot he was there.” He looked up at Idrin, and his face was not gentle, but it was not hard either. “He’s a boy, Highness. He wasn’t supposed to be here.”
Tallow wrote it down. He wrote three lines in his small square script, one for each man, with the trade in the margin and a figure beside it, because he could not help giving a range. Ferryman, marsh, about forty. Reed-cutter, marsh, about thirty-five to forty. Boy, marsh, age eleven to thirteen, on the raft as a rope-holder. Dead at the causeway, the first night of the second attack. Then he drew a line under the three lines and sat back, and did not say anything else at all.
The living boy had been sitting against the gate-post all this while, with his splinted arm held to his chest and his face white and set, watching the men being lifted. He was perhaps fourteen. Perhaps fifteen. He had the lean, sharp, wary look of a boy who has been beaten often and has learned to watch the hands that are coming toward him. Pell had found him on the stones after the fight, and she had not asked his permission. She had knelt beside him with a bread-knife and a strip of oak from the kitchen store, which she had shaved into a splint with three strokes of the blade, and she had set the bone in his forearm without any warning at all. The boy had screamed once. Then he had sat motionless and let her bind it, and Pell had said nothing whatever about lying, which Idrin thought was remarkable.
“What’s your name?” Idrin asked him.
The boy looked at the prince for a moment. He had a thin face and grey-green eyes and a scab on his lower lip. “Corran,” he said. “Corran Kell.”
“Kell.”
“My cousin’s Bardo Kell.” The boy’s voice was rough and quick, as though he were used to being interrupted. “He’s the reeve. You’ll have met him, I suppose. He does the trading. My mam says he’ll come for the dead.”
“He’ll come for them,” said Idrin.
“He’ll come for them,” said Corran, with a sort of dreadful certainty, “because the marsh doesn’t leave its own on a causeway. Not even if they’re fools. Not even if they were told to hold a rope.” He looked over at the three bodies, at the small one with the rope knotted to the cleat, and his mouth worked for a moment before it steadied. “That was Tomas. He’s my cousin’s son, the little one. He’s eleven. He was only holding the rope.”
Idrin felt the words go into him like a splinter. He did not know what to say. He knelt down on the wet stones beside the boy, carefully, so as not to jar the splint, and he asked the question he had been trying not to ask since the fight had begun.
“How old are you, Corran?”
The boy frowned. “Fourteen.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’m fourteen.” He thought about it. Then he said, slowly, “Fifteen, maybe. Harrow says fifteen. He came and asked me while the bone was being set, and I said fourteen, and he said that was an estimate, and that an estimate is a fair answer for a boy. I don’t know. Nobody counts their children in the marsh before they’re dead.”
Harrow had stopped with his hands on the sled-rope. He turned his head and looked at the boy, and then at the prince, and his face had something in it that was almost like grief, though it was quiet and dry and did not show much.
“I’ll count you,” said Harrow, “if you let me. I’ll count you as fifteen.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the number I’d want, if it were mine to say,” said Harrow, and went back to the rope.
Korrin had been brought up to the gatehouse in the early hours, in the grip of the weft, and he had been put in the cellar. Idrin had not decided it. He had come back from the causeway to find that the cellar door was open and that Korrin was already inside, standing against the pillar in the middle of the floor, with his hands held out from his sides. The iron cuffs had grown out of the stone of the pillar. They were thick and grey and rough as bark, and they had closed round both of his wrists without any sign of a hinge or a lock, and when Idrin came down the steps he turned his head and looked at him with the same calm, flat, appraising stare.
“Your stone did that,” he said.
“It isn’t my stone.”
“It did it on your order, Highness. I heard you. His blow is entered. Then it let go of the one arm and took the other.” He shook the cuffs, once, and they did not move. “The men were enemies of the gate. That’s what I was for. I’m not sorry for it.”
“They were men,” said Idrin.
“They were in the way of the gate. That’s a different thing.”
“It’s not a different thing. They were men, Korrin, and one of them was a boy.”
“Men are a difference a gate can’t use,” said Korrin. He looked down at the cuffs, and then at Idrin, with the first flicker of something in his face that was almost interest. “I’ll tell you what a gate can use. It can use a count. It can use a man on the wall who doesn’t have to be told where to stand. It can’t use a man who stops to wonder whether the one with the knife had a mother.”
“And did he?”
“Probably,” said Korrin, with a shrug that set the cuffs rattling. “That’s not my trade.”
Idrin went back up the steps. He did not glance back. He had the taste of marsh-smoke in his mouth still, and the sound of the boy’s voice saying my mam says in his ears, and when he came up into the grey yard he stopped and stood by the gatehouse wall with his palm flat against the cold stone, where he could feel the faint steady pulse of the weft beneath it like a heartbeat under a sheet.
He heard the boy’s footsteps behind him before he saw him. Corran had got up from the gate-post, one arm held close, and had come slowly across the flags with his good hand trailing along the wall for balance. He stopped beside Idrin and looked at the wall too.
“Do you have a name for them?” Corran asked. “The men on the causeway. Have you got one for them, your Highness, the way the marsh has?”
Idrin thought about it. He thought about the three lines in Tallow’s minutes, and the trades, and the range for the boy’s age, and the cuffs on Korrin’s wrists. He thought about the men lying in the reeds with their faces to the water. He said, honestly, “No.”
Corran nodded slowly, as though he had expected the answer and was not surprised by it. He did not seem angry. He looked, if anything, a little sorry for the prince.
“The marsh has a name for every drowned man,” he said quietly. “Every one. You say it over them on the water, so the water knows whose they are.” He drew a breath, and his grey-green eyes went to the causeway, where the reeds were stirring in the first wind of the morning. Then he began to speak, in a low, steady, unhurried voice, reciting three names without a pause, one after another, as a child says a prayer it has been taught since before it could read.