He tried to hum it in the Great Hall, at night, because it was the one place in the Hold where nobody would hear him do something foolish.
The Hall was dark. The high windows let in a little grey light from the moon, enough to show the shapes of the long oak table and the dais and the chair with its one short leg, but not enough to show any colour. Idrin sat on the edge of the dais with his bandaged hand in his lap and his back against a pillar, and he closed his eyes, and he breathed in the cold dusty air of the room, and he began.
The first bar came easily. It was a simple tune, rising and falling by small steps, the sort a nurse hums while she is folding linen. He knew it. He had known it all his life, as he had known the shape of his own hand. He hummed it softly, the way his mother had hummed it over his cot in the nursery at Sallowmere, with the lamp turned low and the shutters closed against the wind from the sea.
The second bar came too. It went up, and then down, and then hung on a long soft note before the turn. He could feel the turn coming, the little dip where the melody dropped away and then rose again, bright and secure, like a child reassured by the sound of its mother’s footsteps on the stair. He hummed the turn.
Then there was a gap.
It was not a silence. It was the place where the tune should have gone on, and did not. He felt for the next note and found only the feeling of having reached for a stair in the dark and touched nothing but air. He stopped. He started again from the beginning, very softly, with the first bar, and got to the second, and reached for the turn, and the gap was there again, exactly in the same place, like a missing tread that his foot kept finding.
He tried a third time. He got through the first two bars and then stopped, because he could not bear to hear the silence where the rest should have been.
“That’s not the tune,” said a voice from the far end of the Hall.
Idrin opened his eyes. He had not heard anyone come in. The door at the back stood a little ajar, and a shaft of pale light from the yard fell across the flags, and in it stood Pell, with a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, and her face screwed up in a frown of concentration.
“You’re humming the nursery version,” said Pell. “I’d know it anywhere. It’s the one the lady sang in the great house, with the proper notes in it and no dirt on the vowels.” She came a few steps closer, her floury boots scuffing on the stone. “It’s not the one I know.”
“What do you know?”
“The work-song,” said Pell.
She sat down on the bottom step of the dais, without asking, and set the bowl on the stone beside her. It was barley, Idrin saw, thick and steaming, with a pinch of salt on top that she had not yet stirred in. She looked at it for a moment as though it were a letter she had been asked to read.
“I heard you through the kitchen wall,” she said. “You’ve been doing that for three nights, Highness, with your nose in the shutters like a child who’s lost its cat. And it’s not the same as the one I know. I’ll tell you the one I know, and you can tell me if it’s the same, and then we’ll both be wrong together, which is the only way a Hold ever gets anything right.”
She hummed.
It was not a lullaby. It was a plainer, harder, rougher tune, in a lower key, and it had a rhythm in it that Idrin felt in his chest before he heard it in his ears. It went in short steps, like a man setting stones one after another in a line. It rose on a count and fell on a breath, and at the end of each phrase it stopped, very abruptly, with a little hitch in the voice, as if a stone had been dropped into place and the worker had paused to check the bed. The words were not words. They were numbers, sung on the notes, in an old flat dialect that Idrin did not quite follow. He thought he heard four and nine and something that might have been ten.
Pell stopped. She picked up the spoon and stirred the barley, slowly, and blew on it.
“That’s the work-song,” she said. “We sang it at the kitchen, when I was a girl. In the bakehouse at Lessary, where I scrubbed the ovens. There was an old man there, a stonemason who’d come in from the quarries for the bread, and he sang it when he was waiting for his loaf. He never once sang the words through. He always stopped at the count.” She looked up at Idrin with her broad red face, and her eyes were bright in the dim light. “And he had a count in it. Like yours has a turn. The turn’s where the count ends, and the last number’s the one he’d always say out loud.”
“What was the last number?”
“I never asked him.” Pell shrugged. “I expect it was how many men were left on the scaffold.”
Idrin looked at her. He did not know whether she was joking. He thought she probably was not.
“Your tune,” said Pell, “is the same as mine, with the bedtime put in. It’s the same tune, Highness. Somebody took the work-song from the builders and wrapped it up in a nursery blanket and sang it to a prince, so he’d go to sleep easy with the count inside him. That’s what I think happened. I don’t know it. I’m the cook.”
Idrin felt a cold prickle run from the back of his neck to the base of his skull. He had been frightened of many things in the last month: of the gate, of the Writ, of the chain that rattled like a count in the dark. He had not been frightened of his mother’s lullaby. It had been the one thing in his life that had belonged to nobody but himself and her.
“The nursery took it,” he said slowly. “From the workmen.”
“It took a lot of things,” said Pell, “from the kitchens and the stables and the wall. It’s a great thief, a nursery. It doesn’t know it’s stealing. It thinks everything it has is its own.” She stirred the barley again. “And now it’s in you, boy, and it’s gone, and you can’t get it back by humming it wrong in an empty room.”
He did not answer. He sat with his bandaged hand in his lap and the cold of the stone seeping up through his coat, and he thought about the gap in the tune. He could feel it now. He understood what it was. It was the part of the song where the bedtime should have been, and the bedtime had been taken, along with the words and the face and the warmth of a hand on his forehead. What was left was only the tune, and a tune without a bedtime was just a count.
“Tallow will want to write this down,” said Pell.
“Tallow has written it down.”
“Has he?” She sniffed. “Let me see.”
He found the notebook in his coat. Tallow had made the entry on the day of the vote, in his small square hand, in the margin beside the tie: Memory taken by the Writ of the cellar. Lullaby. Named. The Register does not say which. And below it, in a second line, added later, in a slightly more crooked hand: Total of memories lost by the speaker to date: two. Both named in the minutes. None unnamed yet. There was a figure written beside the second line, in very small letters. One to two.
Pell read it and gave a short, hard, mirthless laugh.
“He’s a dear,” she said. “He’s the only one of you who can count to two without making a range out of it.”
“He made a figure out of two.”
“He made a range out of the Register,” said Pell, “because the Register can’t count to two. Two is all there is, and he knows it, and it frightens him to bits.” She handed the notebook back. “Ask him to stop being precise, Highness. You’ll get nowhere. He’ll only give you a number.”
Idrin found Tallow later that night, in the gatehouse, bent over the minutes with his lamp turned low and his pencil moving steadily across the page. Idrin sat down on the bench across from him and said, without preamble, “Stop being precise, Tallow. Just once.”
Tallow kept his eyes on the page. “I can’t,” he said. “Precision is the only thing the Register gives me, Highness. It gives me the number, and the range, and the clause, and the margin. It does not give me the thing that I’d want to say. So I say the number, and I give the range, and I hope somebody else will say what it means.”
Idrin said nothing. Tallow turned a page.
“Two memories,” said Tallow quietly, to the page. “Both named. I’ll write the third when it comes. I always write the third, and I always hope it won’t be needed.”
Later, when Idrin lay on his pallet with his boots on and his bandaged hand on his chest, he thought he heard the work-song again, faint and far away, from the kitchen on the other side of the yard. It had the rough steps and the sharp turns and the little breath-hitch at the end of every phrase. It did not go through the words. It stopped at the count, the way the old stonemason always had, and waited.
He heard the last number, thin and clear, from the dark of the Hold. Then the stones of the kitchen wall began, very softly, to tap out the beat that Pell had stopped on, one knock after another, like a crew setting the last block of a wall in place.