The marsh boats came up the Sallow on the third day of the autumn’s third week, long and low and black with tar, and Idrin heard them before he saw them. It was a soft sound, a hush of paddles through still water, with a knock of wood against wood when one boat touched another. He stood on the river gate’s wall-walk with his hand on the cold parapet and listened to it come closer through the mist, and he thought it was the sound a body would make if it were trying very hard not to be heard.
Bardo Kell was in the first boat.
He was nothing like the man who had come to the gate in the summer with a rag over his face and forty raiders behind him on the Lessary Road. He was thinner. The cut-down toll-coat he had worn then was still on his back, but it had a new patch at the shoulder, grey wool sewn onto dark brown with stitches as thick as a finger, and the coat hung off him as if he had been wearing a larger man’s coat before he had been wearing his own. He sat in the stern with a paddle across his knees. He did not use the paddle. He let the boat drift in toward the causeway stones, and when the prow touched, he stood, a little stiffly, and looked up at the wall as if he were counting it.
“Warden,” he said. “You have a new wall.”
“We have a wall with a north side,” said Idrin.
“That is what I heard.” Bardo climbed out onto the stones and stood there for a moment with his hand on the causeway’s rail. He was not out of breath. He seemed simply to be taking his time about something he had decided to do slowly. “The marsh says the Hold has counted itself. The marsh says the Warden has a book he will not show, and a Clerk who will not stop talking, and a stone-mason who says rain is not a question.”
“The stone-mason would not agree that he is a stone-mason,” said Idrin.
“No,” said Bardo. “I did not think he would.”
Harrow had come along the wall-walk from the north tower, counting his paces. He stopped above the causeway steps and looked down at the marsh-man with his hands behind his back, and he said, before Bardo could speak again, “Forty-one stones on the causeway. Nine of them new since the last time you came. And your boat has eleven notches on its prow, Bardo Kell, and not one of them is for a salt-cake.”
Bardo grinned, not very widely. “Eleven notches,” he said, “for eleven men of the reeds who did not come back from the winter. I cut them myself. It is how the marsh remembers. You would say it is a tally.”
“It is a tally,” said Harrow.
“Then you will understand it,” said Bardo, and turned back to the water.
He did not come up the steps at once. He stood on the causeway’s last stone with the mist curling around his boots, and he looked out over the Sallow at the marsh beyond, the reeds flat and grey in the morning light, the channels running silver between them. Idrin, who had come down the stair to meet him, saw his face in profile and thought for the first time that the man was afraid. It was not the fear of a raider who expects a gallows. It was the careful, weary fear of a man who has come to a shop where he knows he will be asked to pay.
“The marsh is short of salt,” Bardo said at last, without looking round.
“We know,” said Idrin.
“You know because the Hold has been buying it. The Hold has been buying it from me in marks, and from my cousin in salt, and from the Lessary carts in whatever the carters would sell. I do not blame you. It was the best bargain on the road.” Bardo turned round. “But the Lessary toll on salt has tripled since the Crown’s last survey. Three times the duty at the Lantern toll-house, and the toll-clerk takes it in silver and writes the silver down under a name he will not say. The salt goes up the road, and the marsh-towns get nothing back but their labour and their stone. The stone is the last thing we have that the Crown does not count.”
“We have stone,” said Harrow, from above.
“You have more than enough,” said Bardo. “I can see it from here. Your wall has grown a course since the spring. I can tell by the shadows.”
Idrin had come to the foot of the steps. He looked up at the wall, at the grey new courses on the north face, at the place where the old stone met the new under the seventh course. He could not see the bell-shaped mark from here. He could only see the wall. It seemed to him that it had grown taller since the morning, though that was impossible, and that Harrow’s count, which he could hear faintly from above, was coming a little faster than it had.
“What would the Hold take for stone?” asked Bardo, quite lightly, as if he were asking the price of a sheep. “Two sacks for a block? Three? The marsh has silver to spare, if the Hold will take silver. I am told the Hold has none.”
“I do not know what a fair price is,” said Idrin, and then, because it was true and because he was tired of pretending otherwise to men who would see through him, “I will ask the Clerk.”
He turned, and Tallow was already on the causeway stair behind him, with the Register under his arm and his pen out and his face set in the expression of a man who had heard the question coming down the steps for some time and had been looking forward to answering it.
“The fair price is an estimate,” said Tallow. He said it to Idrin, not to Bardo, as if the Warden were a child who had not been told the rule. “A range has a floor and a ceiling. The ceiling is whatever the marsh will pay, which I do not know, and which Bardo will not tell me. The floor is the marsh’s own salt, bought at the Lessary toll, carried to the stone-cutters’ yard, and weighed on the Hold’s scales. That is the floor, Warden. It is the cost to the marsh of the salt it needs to live, with the Lessary duty added. I will state the floor in the minutes.”
“State it,” said Idrin.
“One sack of salt for one measured load of cut stone, at the Lessary duty,” said Tallow, writing. “Less the carrying, which the Hold will bear. Plus a share for the marsh’s dead, to be set aside for their graves. And a Clerk’s note that the Hold has not yet agreed to any of it.”
Bardo laughed. It was a short, real laugh, rusty with the reeds. “That is the most honest offer I have had from a Lessary in twenty years,” he said. “It is also the most tedious.”
“I am not a Lessary,” said Tallow. “I am a Clerk.”
“That is what I heard,” said Bardo, and came up the steps at last.
He reached the top of the causeway with his breath shorter than he wanted, and Idrin saw him stop there and lean for a moment on the parapet with both hands, as a man leans on a boat’s rail after too long at sea. Then he straightened, and reached into the breast of his new-patched coat, and took out a salt-cake. It was small and pale and pressed hard, and he held it in his palm and looked at it a moment before he offered it to the Warden.
He did it slowly, as though the cake were heavier than it looked. Idrin took it. It was. It was heavier than the marsh’s salt had any right to be.
“Corran is in the reeds,” Bardo said. “My cousin. He has the second boat. He will come to the causeway when the Hold has a reason to call him, and not before. He says the reeds are his, and the Hold has no paper for them. He is right, but he is also a fool, and I told him so.”
“Tell him the Hold has a reason,” said Idrin.
“I will tell him when I have sold you the stone,” said Bardo, and he sat down, at last, on the nearest bollard, with the air of a man who had been on his feet since dawn and did not intend to be asked to stand again.
He did not sit long. He took a small object from his coat as he got up. It was a reed token, flat and cut from a piece of dry marsh-stalk, with a notch on one edge and a thumb-worn face. He set it on the parapet between himself and the Warden, with a tap of his finger.
“Does the Hold recognise it?” he asked.
Idrin looked at the token. He did not know what it was. But Tallow, who had come to stand at his shoulder, leaned over and looked at it closely, and then he took his pen from his ear and wrote something on the page in the Register, very small.
“It is a Foundation counter,” Tallow said quietly. “It is the same as the tokens in the Chest, except that it is made of reed and not of tin. The Hold owes you two of them, Bardo Kell.”
“Two?” said Bardo.
“Two, for the salt you have already carried,” said Tallow. “I have checked the book. I have a range of one.”