A claimant ought to know what he is claiming. That was the principle Idrin had settled on before dawn, lying on the pallet in the back room with his boots on and his notebook under his shoulder, and he saw no reason to abandon it because the principle had kept him awake. At first light he took the measuring cord from the gatehouse peg, wound it over his arm, tucked his notebook into his coat beside the pale disc, and went out to walk the wall.
Jory came with him, which was not a kindness. Jory had been awake most of the night and wanted to be somewhere that was not the hearth, and he said so before they had gone twenty paces. “I’m only coming to see you fall over,” he said. “Then I’ll have something to tell my mother.”
“Your mother is in the south of Lessary with a sheep-farm that the Chancery has taken for a debt it never counted.”
“Then she’ll be glad of the story.”
They began at the gate. Idrin paced the inner ward first, because it was the simplest, and because the inner ward was the part of the Hold that had kept its shape. He set one heel down after another along the foot of the wall, counted each stride aloud, and tied a knot in the cord at every twentieth pace. The stones of the courtyard were cracked but level. Weeds had come up between them in tufts the colour of old rope. Where the flags had broken, the broken pieces lay in neat stacks against the wall, as though someone had meant to come back for them.
“Four hundred and twelve,” said Idrin, when the cord had come round to the gate for the second time and he had knotted the last of it.
“You counted it twice?”
“I counted it twice. I counted the knots and I counted my strides, and the strides came out at four hundred and twelve and the knots at four hundred and twelve, which seems to me a satisfactory agreement.”
“The knots are only as good as the cord,” said Jory. “My father’s cord stretched in the wet. He lost a whole field in one season.”
“This cord is Chancery issue. It doesn’t stretch.”
“Everything the Chancery issues stretches, sooner or later. It’s only a matter of who’s pulling.”
Idrin wrote 412 paces, inner ward, twice in the notebook and underlined it, and felt the small pleasure of a sum set down correctly. He had been taught that a Crown measured its land to know what it could tax. He had never before measured anything that belonged to him, and he found the act oddly intimate, like taking a sleeve off a wound to see how deep it went.
The outer ward was a different matter. It lay between the inner wall and the lower gate, a broad stony yard with a gatehouse of its own, and the gatehouse had no roof. Its rafters stood against the sky like the ribs of a dead animal, and between them the light came down in long bars that lay across the floor. A well stood in the middle of the yard under a stone hood, its winch gone and its bucket gone, and a rope of old hemp still hung from the hook above the mouth.
Jory went to the well before Idrin could stop him. He dropped a pebble down, listened to it strike, and then leaned over the lip and called down a question that came back as an echo, a second voice that was not his own. Then he took off his hat, found a bucket that was lying on its side against the wall, and let it down on the rope. It came up full. He tasted the water from his cupped palm, made a face, tasted it again, and then, while Idrin watched, tasted it a third time and drank.
“It’s clean,” he said. “It’s cold. It tastes of nothing at all.”
“That is not a recommendation, Jory.”
“It’s the best recommendation I’ve had since Lessary.” He poured the rest of the bucket into his hat and held it out to Idrin. Idrin drank from it. The water was very cold and tasted, as Jory had said, of nothing, which was strange in a way he could not describe. It did not taste of stone. It tasted like a room where a great many people had waited for years and had at last been told they could go home.
They worked their way round to the Great Hall next. Its doors were shut, but the lock on the side door had rusted through, and when Idrin put his shoulder to it the door gave without protest and let them into a long dim room with a stone floor and a gallery that ran round three walls. Dust lay on the floor in neat, even drifts. There were no footprints in it. Idrin looked at the dust for a while and then made himself stop.
At the far end of the hall, in the corner beside a cold hearth, a narrow door stood set into the living rock. It was made of iron-bound oak and it had a lead seal across its hasp, pressed with a device that Idrin had seen on every letter of his childhood.
He crossed to it and looked closer. The seal showed the Crown’s arms, the gold lion of Lessary holding a key, and beneath the arms the words of a lease notice in the Chancery’s formal hand. Idrin read it aloud, because reading aloud was how he kept his mind from doing other things.
“The Crown of Lessary gives notice that the Hold of Ormhold is leased under the Crown’s Seal, for the term of two hundred years, to the tenant named below.” He stopped. “The line for the tenant is blank.”
Jory came over and looked. “There’s nothing written there at all.”
“There is a space. The clerk has ruled a line and left it empty.”
“Did somebody forget?”
“Clerks don’t forget a line,” said Idrin, who had been one, briefly, for a Chancery term that his father had thought would teach him patience. “They leave it empty for a reason. Either the tenant has not yet been decided, or the tenant is known and the Crown would rather not say.”
“Which is it?”
“I don’t know yet.” He touched the lead, which was cold and faintly greasy, and felt the Hold move under his fingers, very slightly, like the skin of a horse when a fly lands on it. He took his hand away.
Jory had folded his arms. He looked at the seal and then at the empty line, and his face had the stubborn, measuring look of a farmer who has been told that a crop is ready and has not yet seen it. “It’s a lease that’s not finished,” he said. “A lease with the tenant left out is a sheep without the ewe. My father would have sent it back to the clerk.”
“Your father was a sensible man.”
“My father was a sheep-farmer who lost his sheep to a clerk. He was sensible about everything except clerks.”
Idrin wrote the words down and then sat on the stone step beside the door, because his legs had begun to ache and because he needed to think. The Hold was leased. The Crown had leased it to someone it would not name, for two hundred years, and had left the lease sealed in the one room where a prince would be sure to find it. It was not a courtesy. It was a warning, or a bait, or a piece of bookkeeping so old that the people who had made it had forgotten what it was for.
They finished the circuit in the long slant light of the afternoon. Halfway round the north wall, where the stone ran straight and high above the marsh, Idrin stopped beside a joint in the masonry and looked at it. It was an ordinary joint. The mortar was grey and cracked and the stones on either side of it were rough, as old stone always is where it has met the weather. He studied it, and the joint, very slowly, opened.
It was no more than a finger’s width, the dark line between two blocks, and it did not so much open as lift. The stone on the upper edge rose a fraction, then the stone below it rose to meet it, and between them the dark gap moved in a way that Idrin could only describe to himself, afterward, as jointed. It was like a finger bending. It lifted and held, and then it settled back into its place with a soft grinding sound, as though something behind the wall had been pressing on it from inside and had decided, for now, to stop.
He reached out to touch it. The stone was cold. It was only stone again.
“What is it?” Jory said from the foot of the wall.
“Nothing,” said Idrin. “I think. Something moved in the joint.”
“It’s a wall, it moves. The frost works it.”
“It was not frost.”
Jory came up and looked. He put his thumb on the joint and pressed. Nothing happened. He pressed harder and said that it was a good wall, a sound wall, and that a prince should not be frightened of masonry, and Idrin said he was not frightened, and Jory said he could see that he was not frightened at all, and went on looking at the joint with his thumb still on it.
Idrin walked away from the north wall. He walked along the wall-foot toward the west, counting his strides without a cord, and he did not stop walking until his left boot had worn through at the heel and his foot was damp against the stone. Then he sat down on a fallen merlon at the edge of the path, took out his notebook, and tried to imagine the men who had built the wall.
He could not do it. He could imagine the bricks, the carts, the mortar and the hoists. He could not picture a single face. The men were a blank, a sum with the figures left out, and when he tried to fill in the blank with a face, the face came out as his own.
He wrote that down too, in the notebook, under the measurement. It was the first honest entry he had ever made in a book that belonged to him. I cannot picture the people who built this wall. I do not know if they were paid.
Jory had come up behind him. He read over Idrin’s shoulder, which he was not supposed to do, and was silent for a while. Then he pointed, quite calmly, with the end of his stick, at the masonry of the north wall in the last of the sun. There was a scratch on the joint Idrin had been watching, a thin bright line in the grey mortar. It was the colour of brass, and the shape of it was not random. It had the upright stroke and the four short bars of a tally, the mark a wage-clerk cuts on the wall beside a door when he has paid someone and wants the payment remembered.