The engine threw its stones at the south wall in the third week of the siege, and Harrow counted every one of them, because counting was the only part of a fall that a Mason could control.
The first stone came down at the sixth bell of the afternoon. He heard the release from the yard, a deep, wooden knock, and then the swing of the arm, and then the long hiss of the sling, and he had time to lift his head and see the grey shape of the stone against the cloud before it struck the wall’s outer face a little west of the old breach. It struck with a flat report like a barrel dropped on a stone floor. A puff of white dust came up over the parapet. The wall shivered. He felt it under his palm as he knelt on the mortar-bed, a long tremor that went down through the courses into the footings and came back up again, and he said, “One.”
The second stone came in before the dust had settled.
He counted it. He counted the third and the fourth, and he counted the splinters that flew off the coping at each strike, and he counted the courses that cracked, and he got to forty by the time the fifth stone had landed. Then he lost the count. He lost it because the sixth stone came down on the coping itself, a foot to the left of his hand, and the coping…
