Harrow let Jory climb the scaffold because a man who had carried a cart up the causeway for four winters could carry a count-cord up a wall.
The boy went up the ladder slowly, with a coil of line over one shoulder and his hat tucked into his coat, and he did not glance down until he reached the first board. Then he looked, and Harrow saw him see the whole south face at once: the scaffolding on its poles, the courses of new stone rising pale against the older grey, the thousand shallow cuts running up the inner face like the marks of a long argument, and the peg by the top board where the count-cord hung. Jory’s breath went out of him in a short hard puff. Harrow had seen the same look on masons’ apprentices, when a wall they had been told was finished turned out to be only beginning.
“It is taller than it was,” said Jory.
“It is exactly as tall as it was,” said Harrow. “You were not standing on it before.”
They worked the south stones together through the morning. Harrow set the blocks, because a block had to be set by the one who had counted its bed, and Jory passed them up, and they did it in the old way, one hand on the stone and one on the count. Harrow counted aloud. The Mason’s trade had counted aloud since the Foundation, and a stone that was counted out loud went…
