The grave-tender had been asked three times in a fortnight why she would not go into the Roll, and each time she had answered in a different way, because a grave does not repeat itself any more than a river does.
Harrow asked it the fourth time at the foot of the stone, a week after the captain’s burial, with a squared block of Lowgate limestone on a handcart behind him and a chisel in his belt. He had come up the Mound’s path alone. He had told Tallow he would be back for the minutes by noon, and he had not told anyone why he was going, because he had not yet worked out how to put the question into a sentence that did not ask for a wall.
“What is the stone for?” he said.
It was the question he always asked. It was not the question he had come to ask.
Mourner sat with her hands on her knees and looked at the block on the cart, and then at Harrow’s stone-dust sleeves, and then at the place on the rise where the turf had been opened and closed again, long before the captain’s men had come up the path. “The stone is for the tenth name,” she said. “It is the one you have not cut, and the one you cannot cut until somebody tells you what it says.”
