Harrow built a wall in the dark, because a wall was what the ford needed and a Mason was what the ford had.
He began at the toll-house, where the stones were loose. He had known the toll-house for two hundred years, one way or another, since it had been a Foundation shed with a roof of turf and a single slit window for counting carts. The Lessary masons had added a stone porch in the first decade of the Hold, and the porch had never been properly bonded to the old wall behind it, because the Lessary foreman had been in a hurry and the Lessary carts had been waiting. Harrow had known that since the day he first saw the porch. He had said nothing about it. Nobody had asked him.
Now he took the loose stones down, one at a time, and carried them to the causeway’s end three to a barrow, and laid them out in courses on the flat ground above the water.
He counted aloud while he worked. He always did. Counting was the only thing that kept his hands from shaking when a wall was going up in the dark, and tonight his hands were shaking anyway, a fine tremor in the wrists that had begun in the Mound’s shed and had not stopped since the captain’s face had come out of the shadows and looked at him. He let them shake. He laid the stones anyway. One course, two, three. Each stone…
