The Chamber sat on Pim’s act in the gatehouse, because the Great Hall had been used for the envoy’s dinner the night before and still smelled of barley and mutton, and because Tallow had said, quite reasonably, that a question of a boy’s guilt should not be asked in a room where the boy had been fed. So the Hands came into the gatehouse one by one, in the cold of the late morning, and they filled it up, and they sat wherever there was space, on the bench and the cask-stool and the floor by the wall, and nobody looked at Pim for very long.
He sat on the cask-stool beside the gatehouse table, with his hands folded in his lap and his feet not quite reaching the flags. Sella sat beside him. She had come down from the bone-room with her sleeves rolled and her ledger under her arm, and she had put one hand on his shoulder when she sat, very lightly, and she had not taken it away since. The hand was dry and warm and it smelled of the marsh-salt Sella used to clean the bones. Pim did not mind it. He thought it was the only thing in the room that did not want anything from him.
Across the table, the tinker lay on a pallet against the gatehouse wall. His head was bandaged in a dirty strip of linen, and his shin was splinted between two lengths of oak, and he was not sleeping. His eyes were open. They followed Pim round the room, very steady, the way a cat follows a bird it has decided not to catch yet.
“Abel Rusk is recovering,” said Sella, quietly, to the Chamber. “The shin will knit if he keeps it still. The head will knit if he stops talking. I have set both, and I have stitched the scalp, and I have counted eleven stitches, which is the number I expected. The comfort is that he will live. The diagnosis is that he will not stop talking.”
“I am not talking,” said Abel, from the pallet.
“You are talking now,” said Sella.
Tallow stood at the minute-board with his pen ready. He looked very tired. He had not slept for two nights, and his face had the sharp, careful look it wore when the Chamber had asked him for a figure that he could not give. “The Chamber will hear the boy,” he said. “The boy has said nothing, yet, to the Chamber. The tinker has said a great deal, and the stair has said nothing at all, which is the stair’s habit. The Chamber will hear the boy first.”
Pim unfolded his hands.
He had been thinking about what to say all morning. He had thought about it on the Undercroft steps, with the blood still drying on his palms and Pell’s rag wrapped round his wrists, and he had thought about it in the court, while Harrow counted the broken salt-cake back into the barrel and would not let Pim help. He had decided he would say the truth, because that was what he always did. He was not very good at lying. He had tried it once, to Pell, about a sack of barley, and she had admitted her own lie a line later and made him look a fool, and he had not tried again.
“The stair had ten steps,” said Pim.
Everyone looked at him.
“It has ten,” he said. He was looking at the table, at the grain of the wood, because it was easier than looking at the faces. “The Warden said nine. The Warden said nine when he came down the first week, and Harrow said ten, and Ysra counted nine and then ten and would not say which. And the tinker said it was a cellar, and it is not a cellar, because a cellar is where you keep the sacks, and the stair is where you go down to count them. So the stair has ten steps and one more for the landing, and I was counting it right. I was counting the way the stair asked me to. And when I got to nine, I let go.”
“Why?” said Tallow, very quietly.
“Because I had carried it,” said Pim. “All the way down. Nine steps, and then the tenth that the Warden does not count, and my shoulder hurt, and my legs hurt, and I was so tired of the weight, and I wanted to see what would happen if I stopped. A child who has carried the Hold on his back all summer does not know how to stop carrying it, once somebody sets it down. He just goes on holding it, out of habit, like a stone in his pocket that he forgot was there. I did not know how to stop. So I let the barrel go instead.”
He looked up. He had not meant to. But the room had gone so still that he could hear the candle-clock’s tick from the Hall, and the wind in the court, and the dog’s breath under the bench.
“I did not mean to hurt the man,” said Pim. “I did not. But I meant the barrel to fall. I wanted it to go down the tenth step, where nobody was supposed to be, and I wanted the stair to finally have something on it that was not me. I am sorry for the man. I am very sorry. I have been sorry all night, and I will be sorry in the morning. But I am not sorry for the stair.”
There was a silence. Then Gaunt, from the doorway, where he had been standing with his arms folded and his jaw set, said loudly, “I object to the word cellar.”
“Object, then,” said Pim.
“I do. It is a bad word for a stair. It makes a stair sound like a sack of potatoes.” Gaunt uncrossed his arms and pointed a thick, soot-stained finger at the tinker. “And the man who said it is a fool.”
“He is not a fool,” said Pim. “He is only from Lowgate.”
Harrow had been counting, very quietly, from the window. He turned round now and looked at Pim, and his face was perfectly calm. “The stair has ten steps,” he said. “Ysra has counted it. I have counted it, from the bottom and the top. Ten steps and a landing. The stair is right.” He paused, and then said, with great deliberateness, the way a man sets a stone he has been carrying for a long time, “And the boy is wrong. He counted nine. He counted the stair the way he wished it were, and not the way it is. That is the first time anybody in this Hold has said so to his face. He should hear it, Warden. He should hear it from a mason.”
Pim felt his cheeks go hot. He did not look away. He had been wrong about a great many things, in his life, and he had always been told so by somebody who was trying to be kind. Harrow was not trying to be kind. He was only telling the truth, and it was a relief, in a strange way, to be told a thing by somebody who did not care whether it made him feel better.
“Yes,” said Pim. “I was wrong. I counted nine.”
“You counted nine,” said Harrow, “and you let go on the ninth. That is the wrong count, and the wrong count is the reason the barrel fell, and the barrel fell on the man. You are not a fool, boy. But you have counted the wrong thing for a long time, and you have been very proud of it.”
“Yes,” said Pim again. His voice was small. “I was.”
Tallow had written it all down. He had written every word, in the minutes, without a figure. Now he lifted his pen from the page and looked at the Chamber, and then at the boy on the cask-stool, and he said quietly, “The Chamber must decide whether to keep the boy.”
“Keep the tinker first,” said Pim.
Everybody turned round. Pim had said it before he had thought about it. He did not take it back. He sat very straight on the cask-stool with Sella’s hand on his shoulder and his chin up, and he looked at Tallow with the steady, honest gaze of a child who has said the first true thing in the room, and knows it is true, and does not expect anyone to like him for it.
“Keep the tinker first,” he said again. “He has a broken leg and a cracked head, and he is not in a ledger, and he has no Writ. He came up from Lowgate with his pots and nobody asked him his name. Put him in the book before you put me in it. Write his name first. I can wait.”
Abel Rusk, on his pallet, let out a long, slow breath through his nose, and turned his face to the wall.
“The boy is too honest to be a Hand,” said Korrin, from the door. He said it flatly, without malice, the way he might have said the boy was too short to lift a block.
“He is the only honest Hand in the Hold,” said Sella, her hand still warm on Pim’s shoulder. “That is what makes him a Carrier. A carrier is the one who tells the Chamber what it has put on his back. It does not always like to hear it.”
Pim did not look at either of them. He was looking at the gatehouse window, where the light came in grey over the causeway and the marsh beyond. He had one more thing to say. It had come into his head while Harrow was speaking, and it would not go away, and he thought that if he did not say it now he would never be able to say it at all.
“The stair should be counted again,” he said, very quietly. “By somebody who is not counting it for the Hold. Somebody who only wants to know how many steps there are, because they want to get to the bottom and see what is there. That is the only count I want. I do not think anybody has ever done it.”
He stopped. He folded his hands in his lap again, and sat unmoving on the cask-stool, with the warm hand on his shoulder and the tinker’s eyes on his back. The Chamber did not know what to do with a Hand that had nothing more to say. Pim could feel them not knowing. He did not mind. He had said the true thing, and the room had heard it, and for once in his life he did not have to carry the rest.