Harrow cut stones for the garrison in the Mason’s Yard, in the grey light before the bell, with a point and a mallet and a block of pale Mason’s stone that had come up from the quarry at Lantern Ford on the last treaty cart.
He had been cutting them since the cough began, because a man who has dug one grave in a week needs a stone at the head of it, and the garrison had been digging. He had not been asked to cut them. Nobody had asked him anything. He had simply come down to the yard one morning with his mallet and found the block already on the bench, and the men of the barracks standing about the gate with their caps in their hands, not quite looking at him, and he had understood that the stone was his to cut, because nobody else in the Hold had the patience for the letters.
He cut slowly. He had always cut slowly. The point went in at an angle and the mallet came down in a flat clean note, and a little grey chip flew off the face and fell on the flags at his feet, and he counted it as it fell, the way he counted everything. He counted the strokes too. He counted the letters. He had a rule for the stone, which he had made in the first winter and never broken: each letter he cut was a letter the stone would have to…
