Lune measured the causeway on the ninth morning, from the toll-house steps to the ford’s inland stake, and the Assembly’s clerks came out in a row to watch her do it, as a town comes out to watch a bridge being tested. There were four of them. They stood in a line at the edge of the stone with their ledgers under their arms and their pens behind their ears, and they had clearly never before seen a surveyor who was also a Hand, and they did not know what to make of it.
“Is a rod a legal instrument?” asked the youngest of them, after a while.
“It is a rod,” said Lune.
“Yes, but is it legal?”
“A rod is a measure of paces,” said Lune, not looking up from the stone. “A measure is only as good as the walk that makes it. The Assembly’s law has no opinion on a walk. It has an opinion on a ledger. I have never once been able to argue with a ledger that was written by someone who had walked the ground it describes, and I have never once been able to win an argument with one that had not.”
