The minutes continued in the lake valley, written on a slate that Tallow held against his knee, because the Great Hall was eight leagues behind him and there was no table in the whole of the descent. He had a wet cloth tied round the slate to keep the Ink from running, and he had a pencil behind one ear for the ranges, and he had discovered that a clerk could write very well on a slope if he planted his heel against a stone and did not glance down. He had not been a clerk on a slope before. He was finding it a steep education.
He began the page in the Chamber’s form. The form had nine lines for the Hands, one for each seat, and it had been drawn that way in the Hold’s first winter so that a clerk could see at a glance which seat was empty. Tallow wrote the nine lines. Then he crossed out two of them and wrote beside them Pell, Quiet by reach and Ysra’s count, eight, agreed, and then he looked at the page and saw that the form had become untidy, and he made a second copy beside the first, in neater script, because the minutes must always be legible to the next clerk who read them.
