Lowgate was the village of the Hold, and it had been built by people who expected to be asked about it. The houses stood in two straight rows down the slope below the wall, with a lane between them that had once been paved and was now mostly mud and moss. Forty-one doors. Idrin had counted them from the wall the evening before, and he counted them again now, going house to house with Jory at his shoulder and a cold wind coming up off the river to make them both hunch.
“Forty-one,” said Jory, before they had reached the third. “You’ll want to write that down.”
“I have written it down.”
“Write it again. Make it look as though it matters.”
The doors were gone from most of the houses. Their hinges had been taken off clean, the iron pins drawn and the iron itself taken away, and the empty frames stood open to the lane like mouths. Inside the rooms the light lay in long stripes across the floors. The rooms were small and square and hollow, with plastered walls that the damp had blown into blisters, and hearths set in their corners with the ash still in them, grey and dry. Idrin stood in the first room for a while. He could not have said what he expected to find. There was nothing in it but air.
The lintels were different. They were the only things in Lowgate that had kept their shape. Each door had a heavy oak lintel above it, cut from one piece of wood and smoothed on the underside, and on every one of them someone had scratched a row of tallies with a knife. The tallies were in tens. Each row ran in five pairs of short uprights and a long cross-stroke, and at the end of each row the cutting stopped, short, as though the knife had been called away in the middle of a stroke and had not come back.
Jory went along the lane reading them aloud. He had a farm-boy’s voice for counting, flat and steady, a voice made to be heard across a field. “Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Thirty-one, and that’s the end of the row. Thirty-one and then the cut stops. Forty and a part. Eleven. Ten and a half.” He stopped in front of a lintel and squinted. “Ten and a half. There’s a half on this one.”
“Perhaps the wood cracked.”
“Perhaps.” Jory put his finger on the half-stroke. “I’ve counted the houses. Forty-one doors. I’ve counted the tallies. Two hundred and eighty-six, if I’m counting the halves, and I’m counting the halves, so that’s two hundred and eighty-six strokes on forty-one lintels. It doesn’t match. Nothing matches. Somebody counted something here and didn’t get the same answer twice.”
“Or they counted something different each time.”
“Or that,” said Jory, and went on reading.
Idrin remembered, suddenly, a page of the Crown’s old survey books that his tutor had made him copy out in a bad hand on a cold morning. The survey had called the houses of Ormhold by their names, and one of the names was Lowgate, and the survey had given the village a second name, in brackets, in the clerk’s tidy hand. The Pay Yard. He had not understood the joke at the time. He had thought it was an old Lessary word for a market.
“The old survey called this the Pay Yard,” he said.
Jory stopped reading. He turned round slowly, looking at the rows of houses with their open doors and their tallied lintels, and his face changed as he took the thought in. It did not go pale. It went still, as a farmer’s face goes when he sees weather coming in over a hill he has already lost a crop on.
“That’s a pay yard, all right,” he said. “That’s where you pay the men who work for the Crown. Not the ones who work for the lord. The Crown’s own men.” He looked up at the wall, which rose above the lane like a cliff. “But this is where they lived. You don’t pay men in a yard, you pay them in a street. The yard was for the living, and the street was for the men who got paid.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You don’t need to follow. You need to look at the hoop.”
It was lying in the mud under the window of the last house on the left-hand row. A child’s hoop, the kind a boy rolls down a lane with a stick, made of split ash and bound with a strip of tin gone green. The tin had been nailed at the join, and the nail had been bent flat by somebody’s heel. Jory bent and picked it up. He turned it over. The hoop had been carved on its inside edge with a pattern of short notches, one after another, all the way round.
“A child’s hoop,” he said, “and a child who counted it. That’s my guess. They left the hoop. A village that leaves its hoops behind hasn’t been starved out. It’s been paid off.”
Idrin wanted to argue. He could feel the argument in his mouth, a sentence with the right shape and the wrong meaning, something about wartime leaving and the Crown’s taxes and the thin ground of the marshes, and he went looking for it and could not find it. There was no one in Lowgate to argue with. There was only the hoop, and the notches, and the lintels, and the ash in the grates.
“Put it down,” he said. “Please.”
Jory looked at him, then put the hoop carefully against the wall of the house, under the window, where a child might find it if the child were ever to come back. He did not say anything. He did not need to.
They went down the lane to the bottom of the slope, where the houses gave way to a low bank of reeds and then to the flat grey stretch of the river’s edge. The Sallow was loud there. Its water ran fast over stones, and the wind carried the noise up the bank in gusts. Idrin walked along the last row of houses with his hand on the wall for balance, and at the final doorway, the one nearest the water, he stopped.
An arrow was stuck in the door-post.
It had been driven in at an angle, a little below the height of a man’s shoulder. The shaft was ash, and the head was a plain iron barb, rusted at the edges, and the fletching at the back of the shaft was made from grey feathers that had been bound with waxed thread. The thread was new. Idrin could see the shine on it. The feathers were grey and not yet brown with rot, and when Idrin touched one with his finger it sprang back into shape.
“Someone’s been here,” said Jory quietly.
“Since the survey.”
“Since the last time anyone measured this place. The arrow’s from the marsh. Those are marsh feathers, from a heron or a bittern. Nobody in the Hold has a bow.” He looked along the lane and then back at the reeds, where a movement might have been a bird or a man. “And it wasn’t a lodger who shot it. Lodgers don’t keep arrows in their door-posts. They keep them in their hands.”
“Then it was a visitor.”
“Or a neighbour,” said Jory, and pulled the arrow out of the wood with two fingers. It came free easily, as if it had not been pushed very hard. He turned it over, looked at the barb, and tucked it through his belt. “We’ll ask him for it back.”
They walked up the lane again, and this time Jory read the tallies aloud as they went, one lintel after another, and Idrin found that he was counting along with him under his breath without meaning to. He caught himself at thirty-nine. He made himself stop. At forty-one, when the last door had been passed and the wall was looming overhead again, Jory went quiet, and Idrin realised he had been counting all the way up the lane without once looking at the number.
Jory stopped in the middle of the lane. He turned to the last house on the right, which had no door at all, only a frame and a sill, and reached up to the lintel above it. The lintel was the same oak as the rest. The tallies were the same. But below them, at the height of a man’s hand, somebody had cut a second mark into the wood with a different knife, a knife with a notch on its handle, because the cut had a little hook at the end of each stroke where the blade had caught and turned.
Jory said nothing for a while. Then he tipped his head back and looked up toward the wall, where the bell-frame of the chapel stood above the gatehouse with its bell hanging silent in the wind. He had been reading the bell’s rim for two days, idly, while they worked. He had told Idrin it was marked with a count.
“That’s the same count,” said Jory. “That’s the same as the bell.”