Joss brought the lodgers’ carts to the stake one after another, as a steward brings in a harvest, and he did it without once raising his voice, because a man who counts aloud on a road has no need to shout at it.
He counted the carts first. There were eleven, and he had planned the loads himself on the Lowgate green the night before, with a stick in the dust and a heap of pebbles at each corner, so that every cart would carry its share of timber and its share of stone and its share of people, without any cart being asked to carry the whole Hold on its back. The lead cart had the first of the piles. The second had the stone-pins, which were the old men’s work, and the third had the chalk and the buckets. Joss had decided, at the green, that the children should carry the chalk, because they could be trusted with it, and because a child with a stub of chalk will always find something to draw on, and a house that has been drawn on by children is a house that has been looked at.
The lodgers unloaded at the ridge’s shoulder and set their loads in the wet. They did it in a line, the way the Hold’s Hands did things when there was a Chamber watching, and then Joss saw that the line was not for the Chamber, because nobody on the ridge had ever once had to…
