Teodor Quill watched the Mason’s copy finish its Hosting term. He had been told that it would finish on the thirty-seventh day, because the Hosting clerk had read the term out to him from a paper in the Lowgate ledger, very slowly, with his finger on the line, and had made him repeat the date three times so that he would not forget it. Teodor had not forgotten it. He was nine, and he had decided some time ago that the things grown people made him repeat were the things they most wanted him to remember, and that the things they did not want him to remember were the ones he would have to find out for himself.
The copy laid the last course of the south wall at the morning’s first bell.
It was a low course, along the top of the reed-bank, where the stones had been set into the wet ground on a bed of rubble and sand. It took the copy most of an hour. Teodor sat on his barrel at the wall-foot with his slate across his knees and counted the stones aloud in a whisper, because Harrow had told him that a count said quietly was still a count, and that a quiet count was the one a mason trusted. He did not write the figures down. He had written them all week. He had a slate covered with them, a whole column of numbers in his uneven hand, and he had decided that…
