Brannoc had been the gate’s hand since the gate was rebuilt, and in all that time he had never once been asked what it felt like to hold a bar in the dark. He had been asked about the bell. He had been asked about the water and the tides and the weight of the leaf in a wet spring, and he had answered all those questions in the same calm voice, because the answers were true. The bar was a different matter. Nobody had ever thought to ask what it was like to be the hand that could not lift it.
Today the gate had not moved for thirty-one days.
He heard the drains under the arch the way other Hands heard a cough in the next room, not as a sound but as a pressure in the bones. The water went on running under the paving. It had been running all morning, through the cold, sliding on its way to the river like a man who has forgotten where he left his coat and is too proud to stop and look. Harrow’s chalk strokes had been counted into Brannoc one by one, each day a little stiffer than the last, like a pulse that goes on beating after the heart has been told to stop.
