The Mason’s Yard had been short of hands since the frost, and the Mason’s copy had hands. Harrow had not needed a clerk to tell him so. He had watched the grey Form come up from the Gatehouse on its sling, broad in the shoulder and square at the wrist, and he had seen the long fingers close on the hide strap without any instruction, and he had thought, with a satisfaction he did not show, that the Yard had been waiting all winter for something that knew how to hold a rope.
On the second morning he took the Form to the stone-lift.
The lift was a plain thing. It was a pair of oak wheel-blocks set on the Yard’s east side, with a hide sling run over a drum and down to a cradle of iron hoops, and it had been built by the first masons of the Hold to lift the Foundation’s stones out of the marsh-cart and onto the curtain-course without the Hands having to bend their backs. It creaked. It always had. Harrow had never once in his life oiled it, because he had come to believe that a lift which creaked told the masons when it was overloaded.
