The Chamber came down from the Hall with its lamps. Wren heard it before she saw it: the scrape of benches pushed back, a voice saying mind the step, a dog’s claws on stone, and then the whole of the Hold’s table filing into the gatehouse one at a time, each of them carrying a light, until the small room was crowded with faces and the air smelled of tallow and river-water and wet wool. She stood at the gatehouse table with her hands flat on its wood, because she had decided that if she was going to tell her story she would do it standing, the way a marsh-woman tells a boundary dispute to a magistrate, and she waited for them to settle.
They did not settle. There was a small, loud argument about who should sit where, which the Warden ended by saying that nobody was to sit at all until the girl had finished, and then a second argument about whether the dog should be allowed in, which the dog ended by walking in and lying down under the table with a sigh. Wren watched all of this with her chin up and her wet feet cold on the flags. She had seen the marsh-men argue in the same way, over a boat or a fish or a dead man’s share, and she had learned that the argument always ended, sooner or later, with somebody saying the thing that had been wanted all along.
“Tell it,” said the Warden. “From the beginning, if you can.”
“I can,” said Wren.
She spoke to the table, not the Warden. She looked at the lamp on the table, because the flame was steady and the marsh had taught her to speak to steady things.
“The Reed-Houses are on the marsh’s far bank,” she said, “where the Sallow bends under the willows and the water goes slow and brown. There were nine houses there when I was born. They were built on piles, out of reed and driftwood, and each had its own boat-landing and its own tally-board, and the boards were kept by the women. My mother kept ours. It was a long plank of willow, pale and smooth, and she cut a notch into it for every child that was born in the house and every child that died, and she wrote the names beside the notches in the marsh’s own marks, because she could not write the Lessary way. I can count to four hundred on my fingers. After that I need a stick.”
Tallow, at the minute-board, lifted his pen. He did not write anything yet. He looked up at her with the expression of a Clerk who has heard a figure he cannot yet check.
“Four hundred,” he said.
“Four hundred and eleven,” said Wren. “That was the count on the day the Crown came. It is on the board. Nobody has counted it since, because nobody has been left on the bank to count it.”
“The Crown came,” said Idrin, very quietly, from the table’s end.
“The Crown came in the autumn,” said Wren. “In a yellow coat, with a clerk, and a list. The clerk read the list in the Crown’s voice from the top of the landing, and every name he read was a name on our board, and every name he read was struck off the Crown’s roll, one after another, and the Crown’s men wrote the strike beside it in the Crown’s ink. My mother held me up when they read ours. She was holding me so the clerk could see me, I think. He did not look. He wrote property beside the house, and then he went on to the next. That was the Quiet Census, the marsh calls it. It was not quiet. The boards went into the water after. The houses went after the boards. We went up the river to the causeway with what we could carry, and my mother gave me to the reed-cutters’ wives, and I was on the causeway, in a basket, while the boats burned.”
Nobody spoke. Somewhere behind her, beneath the table, the dog lifted its head and whined once, softly, and laid it down again.
Wren did not stop. She had decided, on the causeway in the dark, that she would tell it once without stopping, the way her mother had told the count of the boards to the marsh-women on the night they had all sat up in the reeds. She did not want to be asked to tell it twice.
“My mother’s name is on the board,” she said. “It is the last name on it, the one she wrote herself, under the notch for me. The board is in the marsh, under the water, where the Crown’s men pushed it. But the marsh keeps its own roll, Warden, in a different place. It keeps it in the back of the reed-houses, where the women used to sleep, on a sheet of reed-paper that they keep dry in a box. My mother’s name is in that roll. So are the names of all nine houses. And so is the mark of my mother’s blood, which she pressed beside the seal before the Crown came, because she said a roll that had no blood in it was only a list.”
She reached out and touched the brown paper on the table, very lightly, with two fingers, beside the dried blot.
“The roll has a line left blank under my mother’s name,” said Wren. “It has always had a blank. It is for the first child of the Reed-Houses who will come to a Hold with a wall and a Warden and a Clerk, and say her name to them, and ask to be counted. That is what the marsh’s oldest woman told me when I was small. She said the blank was not for a child who would be safe. It was for a child who would be brave enough to walk up the causeway in the dark.”
“And you have come,” said Idrin.
“I have come,” said Wren.
Tallow had put down his pen. He was reading the charter, very slowly, with his nose a finger’s width from the paper and his lips moving without a sound. He turned the sheet over, then back again, and held it up to the lamp so that the light came through the reed-fibres. Then he laid it flat on the table and looked at the seal a long while, and finally he spoke, in his precise and careful voice.
“Do you know the Crown’s clause about the marsh?” he asked.
“There is none,” said Wren.
“There is one,” said Tallow. “It is in the Crown’s roll. It is under the heading of unentered ground, and it reads that the marsh is ground that is not entered, and may therefore be taken by any entered party. It is a very short clause. It takes less than a line. I can give you a list of its meanings, if you wish. There are three that are plausible and two that are merely cruel. The plausible ones all favour the Crown.”
“That is a lie,” said Wren.
Tallow looked at her. He seemed, for a moment, almost pleased. “It is a range,” he said. “I did not say it was a lie. I said that the Crown has three readings that are plausible. Each one makes the marsh a thing the Crown can take. I have not been able to find a fourth reading. I have looked. I did not think you would be able to find one either, but you have been on the marsh all your life and I have been in a Register for a season and a half, so I am willing to be corrected.”
“There is one,” said Wren. “The marsh is not ground. The marsh is the water that the ground is in. You cannot take water by entering it. You can only drink it, or drown in it, or pay for the boat.”
Tallow was silent for a moment. Then he wrote something very small in the margin, and drew a line under it, and did not look up again for some time.
Harrow had been counting her words. Wren had seen him do it, from the corner of her eye, his lips moving steadily as she spoke, and his hands behind his back. He did not stop when she finished. He began again, quietly, from the first sentence, the way a man recounts a stone he is not sure he has laid right. When he got to the end, he said, in his flat, careful voice, “Two hundred and forty words in all, from the start of the house to the blank. The count is right. I am sorry for every one of them.”
“You do not need to be sorry,” said Wren.
“I am a mason,” said Harrow. “We are always sorry for the count. It is how we know the wall is honest.”
Then the boy began to cry.
It was the small, round-faced boy with the bright eyes, the one they called Pim, and he had been sitting on the bench by the gatehouse wall with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped round them, listening to every word. He did not sob. He only wept, quietly, with tears running down his face and dripping off his chin, the way a child weeps when he has been holding something back for a very long time and has just been told it is allowed to come out. He did not say why. He did not wipe his face. He only sat there with his small hands clenched on his knees, and every now and then his shoulders gave a shake, and he made a sound like a bird that has been caught in a net and does not want the net to see it cry.
Wren had not expected that. She had heard the marsh voice in the Hold before, in the carrier’s accent that the Hold’s Kitchen boys had picked up from the causeway, but nobody had ever wept at it.
“Why is he crying?” she asked the Warden.
“I do not know,” said Idrin. He was looking at the boy with an expression she did not understand, half pain and half something older, the look of a man who has heard a child cry in a language he once knew. “I think he has heard the marsh speak in a Hold for the first time since he woke. I think it has reminded him of something he did not know he had lost.”
Wren looked at the boy for a long moment. She did not go to him. She did not know him, and in the marsh you did not go to a crying stranger unless he asked. But she stood by the table with her wet hands on the charter and her feet bare on the cold flags, and she let him cry, and when he was done, when his breath had steadied and he had wiped his face at last on the back of his wrist, she said, quietly, in the marsh voice, “The blank is still there. It has room for a second name. You can have it, if you want.”
The boy looked up at her. His eyes were red and wet and very bright. He opened his mouth. Then he shut it again, and looked at the Warden, and said nothing at all.
Wren turned back to the table. She laid her palm flat on the paper, over the blood. She did not say her mother’s name aloud. She had said it once, at the gate, and it had been enough. She only said, very low, in the voice of a child who has walked up a causeway in the dark and does not intend to be sent away for a lack of manners, “The blank is for the first one who comes to be counted. I came. So now it is my turn to write.”