Pim did not like the bone-room. It was too quiet for carrying. In the Hold, every room had a sound to it, the Kitchen’s bang and sizzle, the forge’s ring, the goats’ complaining in the pens, the stair’s creak under Ysra’s careful feet. Even the Chest had a hum when the lid was up. But the bone-room had nothing, not even an echo, and when Pim put his hand on the shelf of pale stone he could not feel anybody carrying anything at all.
He went along the rows anyway. He had been told to stay out of the bone-room until Sella had finished with it, and Sella had not finished, and she had gone upstairs with her ledger hugged to her chest and a face like a shut gate. So Pim had come down alone, with his own lamp, because he was a carrier and carriers did not wait to be told where the load was.
The skeletons were long and quiet and very neat. He liked that about them. He had carried a great many loads in his life, or what he thought of as his life, and most of them had been untidy: sacks that split, barrels that rolled, stones that somebody had chipped on the wrong side. These were laid straight. Their hands were at their sides. Their feet were together. Each had a wooden tag on its left wrist, and each tag said a trade and a number, and Pim could read the trades because he had learned them from the Chest in the same week that Tallow had learned them from the minutes. He did not read the numbers. He did not need to. He knew what the numbers were for.
At the far end of the fourth row, on a shelf that was lower than the others, there was a skeleton that was not the size of the others.
He stopped walking. He stood at the foot of the shelf with the lamp held up, and he looked at it closely, and then he went round to the side, where the light fell better, and looked again.
It was small. It was a child’s size. It lay on its back with its arms straight and its heels together, and its skull was turned a little toward the lamp, as if it had heard him come in and was waiting to see who it was. The skull was the size of his own hand with the fingers closed, and it was no bigger than a loaf of bread, and its teeth were milk-teeth, two of them still in the jaw, very small and white. Beside its ribs, bound to them with a strip of old leather, lay a carrier’s pole. It was cut down to the length of a child’s arm, and worn smooth at both ends, and it had been used. Pim could see the wear. He could see the place on the wood where a small pair of hands had gripped it for years.
He knew before he read the tag that it was a child. He had known it from the door. But he went to the tag anyway, and read it, because he was a carrier and he read what was on the load.
The tag said Carry, and a number.
Pim did not say the number. He did not say it even in his head. He sat down on the floor beside the lowest shelf, with his back against the nearest row of stone and his knees drawn up and the lamp in his lap, and he looked at the small skull for a while without speaking.
Then, because he could not think of anything else to do, he told it that the stair was the wrong size.
He told it in his ordinary voice, the child’s direct voice that Sella said was honest to the point of danger. He told it the stair had ten steps, and that the Warden said nine, and that Harrow said ten, and that Ysra counted nine and then ten and then refused to say which. He told it he had counted the stair in his sleep and that the stair had eleven steps then, and that he had not been sure which number was the dream. He told it he had carried the Hold’s sacks up nine steps and down nine steps all summer and had been proud of every one, and that a load you are proud of is still a load. He told it that he had been carrying the Hold on his back for years and nobody had ever asked him to put it down.
“I counted it for you,” he told the skull. “The stair. I did. I did not count it for the Hold. I counted it for me, and I am the only one who ever did.”
He did not hear Harrow come down the stair. He heard the stone. It was a block of grey limestone, fresh from the quarry, and it made a dull knock as it was set down on the step outside the bone-room door. Then there was a long pause, and then Harrow’s shadow came through the low doorway with the stone held in front of him in both hands, and stopped.
Harrow looked at the child’s skeleton. He did not count anything. Pim saw his lips shut tight, the way they did when he had lost his place and did not want anyone to know it.
Behind Harrow, at the top of the stair, Tamsin’s voice came down, very soft. She was singing. It was a single line, a tune with no words in it, rising and falling over three notes. The goats in the pens above the Hall answered her at once. Pim heard them through the stone, a low uncertain chorus of bleats, as if the whole herd had lifted its head at the same moment and was trying to hear better.
“Who is it?” said Harrow.
“Nobody’s,” said Pim. “The child is nobody’s. The tag is wrong. The child was never counted by the Chest, because the Chest only has the grown ones. Its trade is Carry, and its pole is here, and its teeth are still in its head. That is not a tag. That is a mistake.”
Sella had come down the stair behind Tamsin. Pim heard her step, which was short and neat and always a little too quick, and then she was in the doorway beside Harrow, looking past him at the lowest shelf. Her face did not change. She had her ledger in one hand, and the hand was perfectly steady.
“The tag is in a hand like mine,” she said. “That is why I dislike it. I did not write it. I have looked at every tag in this room, and none of them is in my hand, and yet they are all in a hand I could have written, if I had ever been taught to write like a clerk. I do not know who did this one. I think somebody wanted it to look like my work.”
“Did you set the child’s bones?” asked Pim.
“No,” said Sella. “I have not set anything in here. There was nothing in here to set.”
Harrow stood in the doorway a little longer. Then he did something Pim had never seen him do, in all the months since the gate. He took off his cap. It was an old felt thing, grey with the dust of the quarry, and he held it against his chest with his big mason’s hand flat across it. He did not bow. He did not say a prayer. He only stood there, very straight, with the cap over his heart, and he looked at the small skeleton with the pole beside it until the look had gone all the way through him and come out the other side.
Then he bent, and lifted the stone from the step outside, and carried it away down the stair without a word. Pim heard it knock, very softly, on each step as Harrow went down. He did not count them. He did not need to.
Tamsin’s singing had stopped. The goats had gone quiet too. In the silence, Pim looked at the small skull again, and he found that his cheeks were wet, and that he did not mind, and that the child had not minded either, because the child had been waiting so long to hear somebody say something to it that was not an order.
“Is it a Hand?” he asked Sella.
She did not answer straight away. She came into the room, and crouched down beside him, so that her face was level with his. She set the ledger on her knee and did not open it.
“A Hand is a builder with a seat,” said Sella. “A Hand sits at the table and is counted in the Chamber, and when it speaks, the Chamber hears the word. This child has no seat. It has a pole and a tag and a pair of milk-teeth. So no. It is not a Hand.”
Pim sat with that for a while. Then he looked at her sideways, the way he looked at Harrow when Harrow had miscounted a stone and did not know it yet. “That is the first unfair thing you have ever said to me,” he said.
“I know,” said Sella. “I am sorry for it.”
“You are not sorry.”
“No,” said Sella, and for the first time since she had come down the stair she almost smiled. “But I shall be, when it is written down.”