The cart was the Hold’s oldest, and it had two wheels and a bad axle and a board seat that had been worn smooth by generations of backsides that were not Pim’s. He did not sit on the seat. He had been told by Harrow that the seat was for the driver, and by Pell that the driver was a boy who would break his spine if he sat in a cart that was carrying four blocks of Hold stone down a causeway in the wet. Pim had said the stone did not need a driver, the goats did, and that he was the one the goats listened to. So he walked at the head of the cart, between the two grey goats that Tamsin had yoked to the shafts, and he held the leading rope in both fists, and he did not get in.
The goats did not like the harness. Tamsin had told him they would not like it, and had told them, in full sentences, that they were very handsome goats and that the harness was only a rope with ambitions. The taller goat, whose name was Bell because Gaunt had said it had the voice for one, put her ears back and looked at Pim with a sort of sour patience. Pim looked back. Neither of them would give way.
“Walk,” said Pim.
Bell walked.
Harrow walked beside the cart, with one hand on its side-rail to steady the load and the other hand behind his back, where it could count without being seen. He had been counting since the quarry gate. Pim could hear him doing it, under his breath, every time the cart’s wheels struck a stone in the causeway’s paving. “One,” said Harrow, as the first block was lifted from the quarry’s tip. “Two.” The blocks were grey limestone, cut square and dressed smooth on their faces, each as long as Pim’s arm and as heavy as a sack of barley and a half. The Hold had cut them in the quarry all summer for the south gate, and then the Chamber had voted the south gate would not be finished until the marsh had been paid, and so the stone had waited, and now it was going.
“Three,” said Harrow. “Four.”
They came out from the Hold onto the causeway with the sun on their backs, and the marsh opened in front of them, flat and shining. Pim could see the reeds all the way to the sky. He could see the silver channels between the reeds, and the dark patches of open water that were not channels at all but places where the marsh had simply forgotten to be land, and the low grey line of the far mud where the boats would be waiting.
He began to count too.
He counted under his breath, as he had counted the stone at the quarry, but he did not count the blocks. He counted Harrow’s counting. Harrow’s voice was low and steady. Pim’s voice was quick and sharp. They ran along the causeway together, the two counts, one behind the other, like a boy running after a man who has forgotten his hat. At each stone the man said a number and the boy said it back, a half-beat later, so that the causeway seemed to ring with a double sound, a deep one and a thin one, each saying the same thing.
“Four,” said Harrow. “Four,” said Pim.
It was the second count that Pim was supposed to keep, Tallow had said. The second count was the marsh’s, because the marsh would count the stone when it came out of the boat, and Harrow’s count would be checked against it, and the two would be written in the Register together, one under the other, so that nobody could say the Hold had cheated. Pim did not think Harrow would cheat. He thought Harrow would never think to. But he liked being the second count. It made him feel the stone was real.
The causeway ended in a bank of hard mud, with a row of old willow-stumps standing in the shallows like a crowd that had been told to wait. The marsh-boats were there. There were three of them, long and low and black, their prows carved with notches, and in the first of them stood a man whom Pim knew from the causeway as Bardo’s clerk, with his wooden tablet under his arm. Behind him, in the bow of the boat, a girl was standing.
She was about twelve. She had a reed-cutter’s knife at her belt, long and curved, in a leather sheath that had been stitched and restitched until it looked like a second belt. Her hair was tied back with a strip of grey cloth. Her face was thin and brown, and her eyes were the colour of the marsh water, and she was looking straight at Harrow’s mouth.
She was counting.
Pim heard her before he saw her. She was counting under her breath, in a flat, low voice that did not know how to hurry. She counted each block as Harrow lifted it from the cart. “One,” she said, and then, a half-beat later, “Two.” She counted in the same rhythm Harrow used. She counted with the same pauses, the same small nod of the head at the end of each stone, as if she had learned the rhythm from the same teacher, or had never been taught at all and had simply grown up hearing it, the way the reeds grew up hearing the wind.
Harrow stopped.
He stood at the cart’s side with his hand on the third block. He did not lift it. He looked at the girl across the mud and the shallows, and his mouth had gone tight.
The girl stopped too. She looked back at him, with her hand on the knife at her belt.
“Three,” said Pim, in the silence, because somebody had to.
“Three,” said the girl.
“Four,” said Harrow, and lifted the last block.
“Four,” said the girl, and the two counts, Pim thought, agreed to the last stone, which had never happened to him on any road he had walked, and which he would have bet his double share had never happened to Harrow either.
The girl came down out of the boat into the shallows. She waded to the mud’s edge in her bare legs and stood with the water to her shins, looking at the grey blocks on the cart. She did not touch them. She crossed her arms. “They are the wrong colour for the marsh,” she said.
Harrow looked at the blocks. He did not answer. He began, very quietly, to count them again, and the girl began to count with him, and Pim heard the two of them go through the same four stones once more, aloud, with the same pauses, until they had reached the same number and stopped.
“They are the right colour for the wall,” said Pim. He could not help it. He was a carrier, and a carrier knew the difference between a stone for a wall and a stone for water. “They are the wrong colour for the water. They will sink. Look at them. They are too heavy and too square and they do not have any reeds in them.”
“Then they will sink,” said the girl.
“Yes,” said Pim.
“Good,” said Harrow, unexpectedly, and everybody turned to him. He had put his hand back behind his back, and his face had gone calm again, the way it did when a wall was going up right. “A stone that sinks has been counted into the marsh. It has gone where it was meant to go, and it has been paid for. The marsh will have its share, and the Hold will have its count, and the water will have the rest. That is the terms, as the Clerk read them. A load measured at the quarry and counted at the causeway, and what the marsh does with it after is the marsh’s business.”
“It is a stupid thing to say,” said the girl, but she was smiling a little, at one corner of her mouth.
“It is a true thing,” said Harrow, “which is a different sort of stupid.”
The marsh-boat took all four blocks. It took them without a word from the man in the bow, and without a sound from the girl in the shallows. Her boatmen lifted each block out of the cart with long poles and laid it in the hull, very carefully, one beside the other, so that the boat settled a finger’s width lower in the water with every stone. Pim watched them do it. He did not count. He had decided that the count was finished, and that the marsh had it now, and that a count which was handed over was not the same as one that was kept.
When the last block was in the boat, the girl came back to the cart. She stood at the goats’ heads, very close to Bell, who lowered her muzzle and sniffed the girl’s hand. The girl let her. She stroked the goat’s nose with two fingers, the way Tamsin did, and then she looked up at Pim.
“My name is Wren,” she said. “Of the Reed-Houses. You can tell your Clerk, if he is writing anything down.”
“He always is,” said Pim.
“Then tell him. I am going to be counted.”
Pim frowned at her. “By whom?”
Wren did not answer straight away. She let go of the goat’s nose and turned, and looked back up the causeway, toward the Hold’s wall. It stood above the reeds in the late sun, grey and square, with its new courses shining pale on the north face. At its foot, on the first causeway stone where the cart had been, a tall figure was standing with one hand resting flat on the stone, watching the boats go out.
She pointed at him with her chin.
“By him,” said Wren. “He pays the marsh in stone, and in salt, and in a wall that nobody asked him to build. A man who pays is a man who counts. I have walked the reach and I have come to be counted by the man who counts.”
The Warden had not moved. His hand was still on the stone. But Pim, looking up from the cart at the wall, saw that the Warden’s head had turned very slightly toward the causeway, as if he had heard his name said across the water, though nobody had said it.