Bardo Kell counted his men before dawn, the way he had counted every man who had ever stood under his banner, which was on his fingers, one at a time, with his lips moving so that nobody could say he had skipped the thin ones.
Forty. They were crouched in the mud behind the salt-barrels with their spears laid across the rims and their salt-cakes buttoned into their coats, the cakes as hard and grey as river stones and worth a great deal more to the men who owned the salt-pans than to the men who ate it. Some of them had their caps pulled down over their ears against the frost. Some had tied strips of sacking over their boots, because the sluice-house stood on a raised bank of wet stone and the stone was slick with ice in the mornings. He knew every one of them by his father’s name, and most of them by the name of the boat their father had poled. Forty.
He had been reeve of the marsh-towns for thirty years. He had traded salt for stone with the Hold since the first winter, when a Hold clerk with a slate and a bad cough had come floundering along the causeway, asking in an accent like a bell whether the marsh had any salt to sell, and Bardo had said yes, and had sold him a sack for twice what it was worth. The clerk had paid it. Bardo had been pleased. He had…
