The quarrel began over the hinges and was never really about them, which Idrin understood by the end of the first quarter-hour and by the end of the second had stopped trying to change.
It was held in the Mason’s Yard, between the Forge and the wall, in the thin afternoon sun. Gaunt stood with his back to the Forge door and his arms folded over his scorched apron. Harrow stood by the gate-post with his palm laid flat on the stone and his cap pushed back on his grey head. Between them, on a trestle that the mason had dragged out of the stores, lay the two new gate-hinges, one finished and one half-forged, and the finished one was black and heavy and plainly the work of a smith who had been insulted at every stroke.
“Iron,” said Gaunt, “wants iron. A gate hangs on iron, because iron can take the weight of a door and the weight of a man leaning on it. Stone can’t do that. Stone’s brittle, and it cracks where the pins go in, and then you’ve got a gate on a split post and a prince with his hand in a sling wondering why it’s falling down.”
“Stone needs no hinges at all,” said Harrow, quite calmly. “It needs a count. You set the post right, and count the bed, and the gate hangs itself. A door doesn’t need a hinge when the stone holds it. It needs a stone that knows where it’s going.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“That’s a mason’s sense, which is a different thing.”
“A mason’s sense is what you have when you’ve never tried a hinge in your life, and you’re too proud to admit you’d rather not.”
“A smith’s sense,” said Harrow, “is what you have when every problem looks like a bar of iron that wants beating into the shape you’ve already decided on.”
Gaunt went red. It spread up his neck and into his grey hair, and his fists tightened on his folded arms. “I have never,” he said, very distinctly, “in my life, decided on the shape before the iron.”
“You decided on the hinge before you’d seen the post.”
“I decided on the hinge before I’d seen the gate, Harrow, which is a different thing entirely, and the gate is mine to hang, since I’m the one who knows what a hinge is for.”
They went on like that for some time. They argued in full sentences, both of them, with the precision of men who had been arguing with each other for weeks and had long since learned exactly where the other’s weakest joints were. Idrin stood by the trestle with his bandaged hand in its sling and watched them with a kind of helpless fascination. He had heard Gaunt object to everything in the Hold, and he had heard Harrow count everything in the Hold, and he had never once heard the two of them agree on anything at all. It occurred to him that this was why they were so good at it.
Pell came out of the kitchen with a tray of bread in her arms. She stopped at the edge of the yard and looked at the two men, and at the hinge on the trestle, and at the prince, and sniffed.
“You’re both standing in my light,” she said.
“We’re not standing in your light,” said Gaunt.
“You are,” said Pell. “You’re standing in the one bit of sun that comes over the wall at this hour, and I’ve got bread to dry in it. Move, the pair of you. Or choose which of you is the sun and which is the shadow, and I’ll not interfere.”
“I’ll not be a shadow,” said Gaunt, hotly.
“Then he’s the shadow,” said Pell cheerfully, and then, when Harrow turned his head to glare at her, “No, I’m not choosing. I’ve said I’ll not choose, and I’ll not, and you can both stand there and argue till the bread’s cold. It’s your own fault if the hinges are late.”
Pim had come up behind her. He had been sitting on the edge of the cellar steps with his bandaged shin stretched out in front of him and his carrier’s pole across his knees, watching the quarrel with the solemn, absorbed interest of a child at a fair. Now he got up. He went to the stone pile at the side of the yard, where the mason had stacked the footings, and he bent and got his arms round a block that was bigger than himself, nearly as tall as his chest, and lifted it.
It was too heavy for him. Anyone could see it. But he lifted it all the same, grunting, and staggered across the yard with it held against his thin body like a child carrying a sack of flour, his bare feet slapping on the flags. He stopped in front of the trestle and set it down with a bump. Then he straightened up, wiped his hands on his shirt, and looked at the two men with his grey eyes very serious and very clear.
“The stone wants to be iron,” said Pim.
Everyone stopped.
It was not a loud remark. It was made in the flat, matter-of-fact tone of a child stating the obvious, and it fell into the Mason’s Yard like a dropped coin, and the whole yard went still around it. Harrow had turned his head. Gaunt had unfolded his arms. Korrin, who had been leaning against the wall with his cuffed hands in his lap, sat up straight. Tallow, at the far end of the trestle, had his pencil lifted over the minutes and did not write.
“What did you say?” said Gaunt, slowly.
“The stone wants to be iron,” said Pim again. He looked at the block he had carried, and then at the hinges on the trestle, and his face was puzzled and earnest. “It’s been stone for so long it’s forgotten what it was before. That’s why it doesn’t hold the gate right. It wants to be the hinge. It wants to be the thing that goes through the gate and keeps it on, the way the iron does. And the iron wants to be stone, so it doesn’t rust, so it can sit in the wall and stay still.” He shrugged, as though the matter were quite simple. “You’re both wrong, but you’ve got the same wrong thing. Each of you wants the other one’s bit.”
There was a long silence in the yard.
Gaunt opened his mouth. He shut it again. He stood with his thick arms hanging at his sides, and his face worked through a long slow series of expressions, one after another, until at last it settled into an odd, rueful, unwilling look.
“I was wrong,” said Gaunt.
It came out of him in a grunt, as though someone had pulled it out with a pair of tongs. Harrow turned his head and stared at him.
“I was wrong,” said Gaunt again, more loudly, and then, with a sort of dreadful deliberation, “in the first line, I’ll grant you, I was right. But in the second I was wrong. I’ll admit the second.”
Harrow began to count. He did it under his breath, looking at the smith with a face of enormous and astonished concentration, and when he had reached what must have been some private total he nodded slowly.
“That’s the first thing I’ve heard in this Hold,” said Harrow quietly, “that adds up to something new.”
“It’s not new,” said Gaunt. “It’s a correction.”
“It’s the first correction anybody’s ever made in the Hold’s arithmetic,” said Harrow. “I’ll count it.”
They agreed to split the bridge rails. It was Harrow who said it, in the end, in the same flat deliberate voice he used to set the stones: half of the rails the Hold had dragged back from the bog to go to the hinges, and half to the mason’s cramps, for the wall-footings and the new gate-post, where the iron would be needed to hold the mortar. Gaunt said that was his idea. Harrow said it was the wall’s idea. Gaunt said it was too clever by half, and Korrin, from the wall, said it was too clever altogether and that he would not be party to it, and then said that he would take his share of the rails all the same, since somebody would have to carry them.
Pell did not adjudicate. She had come down from the kitchen steps with her tray and was standing in the sun, and she set the tray down on the corner of the anvil with a sharp little click, and tore a piece of warm bread from the top loaf, and held it out to the nearest person, who was Pim.
“Eat,” said Pell. “Everybody. The argument’s over, and the bread’s getting cold, and a hungry man makes a bad hinge.”
“A hungry Hand makes a bad hinge,” said Gaunt, through a mouthful of crust.
“A Hand who’s been eating stone makes a worse one,” said Harrow, and took his bread.
Pim ate his bread and stood looking at the hinges. He had eaten two loaves already that morning, and he was still hungry, and he was not interested in the argument anymore. He had no opinion on hinges. He went and sat down in the warmest corner of the Forge, by the banked fire, with his bandaged shin stretched out in front of him and his eyes half closed, and he began to doze.
The first hinge was fitted to the gate that evening. Harrow set the pin, and Gaunt drove it home with a single careful stroke, and the new iron went into the stone of the post with a short hard ring. Then the gate moved. It swung on its hinge, very slowly, as a door moves in a house where somebody has just come home and is glad of it, and as it swung the iron sang.
It was a single note, low and clear and perfectly steady, like a bell rung once in the bottom of a well. It rang out over the yard and the wall and the marsh, and then it faded, slowly, into the evening air.
Pim had woken in the Forge corner. He came out to the gate on his bare feet and stood beside the mason and the smith, and he listened to the last of the note die away. Then he nodded, very seriously, with the air of a child whose question has at last been answered.
“That’s the note the stone wanted,” said Pim.
Gaunt, who was standing by the gate with his black hammer still in his hand and his face streaked with soot and sweat, opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it again. He looked at the hinge, and at the boy, and at the gate swinging slowly to a stop in the dusk.
For once in his life, he had nothing whatever to object to.