The rain came over the marsh in the middle of the morning, in a long grey curtain that walked across the reeds with the patience of a crowd coming up a road. Idrin watched it from the gatehouse door. He saw it reach the causeway, and the river wall, and the first row of Lowgate roofs, and then it reached the Hold, and he heard the first drops strike the slates above his head with a sound like a handful of gravel thrown on a tin pan.
He had time to think that the rain was merely rain. Then the first drip came through.
It fell on the back wall of the gatehouse, just beside the Register board, and it ran down the stone in a thin dark line and gathered on the ledge where the board hung from its nails. It gathered there for perhaps a breath. Then it dropped, neatly and with precision, onto the first line of ink.
Idrin ran.
He did not decide to run. He simply found himself going, across the flags and round the hearth and past the bench where Tallow had been sitting over the minutes, and in the same moment he heard Tallow say something sharp and urgent and turn with the notebook clutched to his chest, and the two of them collided in the middle of the room. Tallow’s elbow caught Idrin in the ribs. Idrin’s hand caught Tallow’s wrist. The notebook went up in the air, spinning, and a bucket that had been set out by the door for the purpose went over, and the two of them stood in a spreading pool of cold water with their arms round each other, staring at the board.
“The minutes,” gasped Tallow.
“The board.”
“The minutes are the Hold’s memory. The board is only a line.”
“The board,” said Idrin, with a dignity that did not survive his soaked boots, “is the Register.”
They separated. Tallow had the notebook. It was sodden at one corner, the pages cockled and the charcoal running in grey smudges across the margins. He clutched it to his chest as though it were a live animal and looked down at it with horror. Idrin had the board. He lifted it from its nails, which required both hands and a certain amount of swearing, and held it up in the light from the door, and looked.
The first line was still there. Citizen One: the Mantle, resident, non-departing. The ink had gone a shade darker along the edge where the water had touched it, a deep rich colour like strong tea left to stand. But the letters were clean and sharp, and the cut number 0001 beneath them had not moved. The drip had struck the wood a finger’s width to the left of the first letter, and where it had landed, the ink had drawn itself back, very slightly, as though it had been startled.
“It’s not run,” said Tallow, peering over Idrin’s shoulder. He sounded almost offended. “It should have run. It’s been wet all morning and it’s not run at all.”
“It has darkened.”
“It’s darkened where the water touched it,” Tallow admitted. “Only there. As if the words had been waiting for weather.”
Harrow came in at that moment, from the yard, with the rain running off his patched coat and his hair plastered to his forehead. He stopped in the doorway and looked at the flooded floor, the scattered minutes, the bucket on its side, and the two men standing dripping in the middle of it with the Register board held up between them like a shield. He did not comment. He went to the corner where the drip was falling and stood under it with his head on one side.
“One,” he said, as a drop struck the flags. Then, “Two.” A third. A fourth. He counted them steadily, one after another, in the flat unhurried voice of a man counting the courses of a wall, and the others watched him do it, dripping and silent.
“Have you noticed,” said Harrow, without turning round, “that it’s rained every day since you came?”
“Yes,” said Idrin.
“I thought you’d have noticed.” He counted another drop. “Will it stop, do you think?”
Idrin opened his mouth to answer and then shut it again. He had been caught out by the same question before, in the yard, on the morning of the first roll-call, and he had been caught out by Pell on the day of the granary, and he had learned, in the weeks since, that it was the only question in the Hold that never received a straight reply. He looked at the mason’s back, at the water running from his grey hair and the patch on his coat, and he did the thing Harrow had been doing to him all along, which was to ask the question back.
“Will it stop, Harrow?”
Harrow turned round slowly and looked at him, and for a moment something moved in his weathered face that was very nearly amusement.
“I never answer questions about rain,” he said. “I’ve been asked four hundred and nine times, and that’s the number I’ll keep.”
“You’ve counted them.”
“I’ve counted everything since I woke,” said Harrow. “The rain’s no different. It’s a stone that falls on your head. You count it, and it stops.”
He went to the gatehouse roof.
Idrin did not follow him up. He watched through the open door as the mason climbed the ladder that leaned against the back wall of the gatehouse, slowly, one rung at a time, counting, with his hands flat on the wet wood. At the top he stood on the eaves with the rain pouring over him and bent down and began to lift the broken slates.
They came up one at a time. Harrow held each one in both hands, turned it over, looked at its edges, and then laid it back against the rafters at an angle that seemed to Idrin, watching from below, precisely right. He did not hurry. He counted each slate aloud as he set it, and each count was flung down through the rain to the yard in the same deep flat voice, Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three, until the whole of the roof seemed to be keeping time with him.
At the sixtieth slate he stopped. He stood on the eaves for a moment with the water running off him in sheets. Then he lifted the seventieth, the last broken one, and set it into place, and tapped it twice with his palm.
“Seventy-one,” said Harrow.
The drip stopped.
It did not stop gradually. It simply ceased, mid-fall, the last drop hanging from the lip of the gutter for a moment and then dropping in silence onto the wet flags without any sound at all. The board in Idrin’s hands was dry. The stone wall was dry. Above him the rain went on drumming on the new slates, steady and innocent, as though it had never been anything else.
Harrow came down the ladder slowly. At the bottom he stood a moment, breathing hard, and then reached up and wrung the water out of his beard with both hands.
“Seventy-one,” he said, to nobody in particular, with the air of a man who has done a sum correctly and does not expect to be thanked for it.
Afterward, in the sitting that evening, when the Hold’s minutes had been dried over the hearth and read back, the Chamber argued for hours about whose matter the roof had been. Tallow said it was the Pretender’s, since the Pretender held the Hold’s property by Writ. Idrin said that a Pretender held one site and no more, that a roof was not a site but a covering, and that the roof was therefore the Hold’s, and the Hold was the Chamber, and the Chamber had not voted. Harrow said the roof was a matter for the mason. Then he said that the mason had done it and the matter was therefore closed, and that the rain could argue with the Chamber about it if it liked. Nobody could find an answer to that, and the minutes recorded it so.
The bucket stayed under the drip, all the same. Nobody moved it. The board stayed under the bucket, on its nails, with its darkened line and its clean sharp letters.
It was Tallow who saw the mark. He had been sitting by the hearth with the minutes spread out to dry, and he looked up at the board with his pencil behind his ear, and frowned. He got to his feet and went over and stood beneath it, with his head tilted back, very close, reading the first line in the uncertain grey light of the lamp.
“There’s a stroke,” he said.
“Where?”
“Under the word Citizen.” Tallow’s finger came up and hovered an inch from the wood, not touching. “It’s a fine stroke. Thin. A line drawn under the word, as a clerk underlines a name he has been told to remember. It was not there this morning. I read that line at dawn. I’ve read it every morning for a week, and I’d swear to within one on it, and there was no stroke.” He turned to look at Idrin, and his face was very pale, and very serious. “Somebody has underscored the first line of the Register, Highness.”
“Who?”
Tallow lowered his finger. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke it was in the flat precise tone of a clerk who has been asked to quote the original clause before an argument can begin.
“The Register’s first line is the Register’s own word,” he said. “The Ink does not sign it. It does not underscore. Nobody has written in it since it was cut, not in two hundred years, and I’m the only clerk in the Hold.” He paused. “So I’ll say what I’m bound to say, and then I’ll wait for someone to argue with me.”
Nobody argued. The rain went on falling on the new slates, very softly, and the stroke beneath the word Citizen stayed exactly where it was.