The Turn fell at midsummer, when the candle-clock in the Great Hall had burned down to its third brass ring, and Tallow had his minutes open before anybody else had found a stool. He liked to be early for the Turn. The Chamber of Hands could argue about the roof, the bread, and whose boots were resting on the Hearth’s rail, but the candle-clock was a thing nobody could bargain with, and a clerk who arrived first could read the day’s notes in peace.
The note from the barracks had come up the Chamber stair at dawn, written in a corporal’s cramped hand. It said that Captain Ansel Brume had stopped eating three days ago, had asked for his window to be left open, and had then asked whether the Mound had been sung for him yet. The corporal wanted the captain’s men to have a grave, and wanted the captain to have a seat from which the grave could be sung. Tallow read the note twice, once for its sense and once for its spelling, and wrote beneath it in the Ink: The Mound has been singing since the spring. It has no seat. That was the whole difficulty in one line.
