Gaunt woke on the Caul road and objected to the stones.
He objected to them at once, as a man sneezes on a cold morning. They were too cold. They were too grey. They had been set by builders who had clearly never once stood on them in a frost, and they were lumpy under the boot, and one of them had a heave on its left side that was going to take someone’s ankle off by the next switchback if nobody saw to it. He opened his mouth to say so, and then he was halfway through the sentence before he noticed that he was saying it aloud, to a road, with the wind in his face and the flakes settling on his beard.
He was objecting to the road.
“It is too long,” he said, to make the point clear. “It is too long and too high and too cold, and the cold has got into my knees, and I did not give my consent to be walked up a mountain by a Clerk with a slate.”
Nobody answered him. He did not expect them to. He looked up the slope, and saw Tallow’s back a few paces ahead, very upright, with the slate under one arm and the census roll under the other. Tallow did not turn round. He was writing. Gaunt could see the pencil moving on the slate at his side, a small grey flicker against the white.
