The caravan master had driven salt on the Lessary road for twelve years. He knew the price of it at every ford from the Caul to the coast, and he knew which toll-keepers took their dues in coin and which took them in cheese, and he knew how many bushels a mule would carry before it began to lie down in the traces. He did not know what to do with a thing that was alive and not his own.
The sprig lay on the folded sack in the gate’s shadow, and it weighed no more than a dry reed bundle. He had lifted it once, at the end of the afternoon, when the Mason had turned his back for a moment. It had been warm. Its fingers had tightened on the edge of his palm, not hard, as a child holds a finger it has just learned to trust. He had put it down again quickly, as a man puts down a coal, and then he had been ashamed of himself and had picked it up again, and this time he had kept it.
Now the light was going. The sky over the Caul had turned the colour of an old bruise, and the lantern on the gatehouse step made a small yellow circle that did not reach the sack. The caravan master knelt beside it with his hat on his knee. His boy was asleep under the lead wagon, with his fists against his chest. He had stopped…
