The herald came up the Lessary Road at noon with a white flag on his lance and a horse that had been ridden too hard, and Harrow watched him from the wall before he went down to meet him. He counted the horse’s hooves on the chalk-track. Four to the stride, and a stumble on the third stride, which meant the horse had been favouring its near fore since the ridge. He counted the herald’s men, who were six, and the lance-pennants, which were three, and the flat leather satchel slung across the herald’s chest, which was the only object in the whole party that looked as though it had been polished that morning.
Then he went down the causeway steps with his hands behind his back and his cap pushed low, and he walked out onto the Lantern Ford stones to the reach-stone, and he stood beside it, and waited.
He counted the paces as he went. Thirty-one from the gate-foot to the stone. He had counted them every morning since the summer, and every morning they came out the same, and he never tired of getting them right.
The herald rode up to the stone and drew rein. He was a thin, sour-faced man in a dark blue coat with a silver badge, and he looked down at Harrow from his saddle as if the mason were a milestone that had been left in the wrong place. “I am the herald of the Crown’s envoy,” he said. “I have a letter for the Warden of the Hold. Where is he?”
“Counting,” said Harrow.
“Counting what?”
“Citizens and lodgers,” said Harrow, “in a new book he has named after nobody. He has been at it since the morning, and he will not stop until the book is full. He has asked me to tell any herald who comes up the causeway that the Warden is busy.”
“Then tell him I am here,” said the herald, and then he looked down at the ground under his horse’s feet, and at the stone at the causeway’s edge, and at the grass beyond it, and his mouth tightened.
“You are standing one pace inside the reach,” said Harrow.
The herald looked at him. He looked at the stone, and at his horse’s hooves, which were planted on the wet grey mud of the causeway’s foot a single long stride from the marker’s shadow. He did not move the horse.
“I do not care for the reach,” said the herald.
“The reach does not care for you,” said Harrow, quite pleasantly. “It is three leagues from the Keystone. You are about two-thirds of a pace into it. You have walked your horse inside it since the ridge, which is why the near fore is lame. I counted the stumble. It was on the third stride, after the stone.”
The herald’s face changed very slightly. He did not look at his horse. He looked at Harrow with an expression that was almost curiosity, and then he said, “You are a strange sort of man to be guarding a causeway.”
“I am not guarding it,” said Harrow. “I am counting it. There is a difference, and the Warden has been trying to teach me the words for it.”
The herald took the satchel from his chest. He broke the seal on it with his thumb, without ceremony, and drew out a single sheet of heavy cream paper, folded once and sealed in red. He held it down toward Harrow, but he did not dismount, and he did not offer it into the mason’s hand.
“The Crown has heard,” said the herald, in a voice that had clearly been rehearsed on the road, “that the Hold of Ormhold intends to take a person into its lodging. The Crown wishes the Warden to know that a lodger is not a subject of any crown, and that the Crown does not recognise a lodger’s claim to be anything more than what the lodger is. The Crown regards the Hold’s lodging of a living person as a matter of property, in the Crown’s roll, until the Crown has been told otherwise by its own clerks. The Crown reminds the Warden of the Writ of Vermin, which is in the Assembly’s hands, and which may be served on the Hold at any time.” He paused. “That is the letter’s sense. The rest is the Chancellor’s compliments.”
Harrow took the paper. He held it by its edges, the way he would have held a stone that might crack, and he read it through, once, slowly. His lips moved. Then he read it again.
“It has forty-two words in it,” he said, “not counting the seal. Twelve of them are Crown. Four are property, and one is lodger, and that one is spelled with a double d, which the Chancellor’s clerk has always done, and which the Warden’s Clerk says is a mistake and not a Lessary custom. I count the words twice. It is the same count both times.”
“I am very glad your count is so accurate,” said the herald, a little stiffly.
“It is not my count,” said Harrow. “It is the Crown’s. The Crown has counted the words. I have only checked them.”
The herald looked at him for a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, the sour mouth twitched, and the man laughed, a short, dry, startled sound, as if he had forgotten how to do it on the road and had only just remembered. “Do you have a reply, mason?” he said. “The Warden may want to send one.”
“The Warden will write it,” said Harrow. “He will write it in the Royal Forms, I think, and then he will cross out the Forms, and then he will write it again in plain words, and it will be shorter than the Crown’s, and it will say the same thing, which is that the girl is counted. That is all the Hold has to say. The rest is weather.”
“Weather?”
Harrow looked up at the sky.
It was a high, pale, washed-out blue, with a few thin cloud-streaks lying across it from the marsh side toward the ridge. The air was still. There was no smell of rain in it, and no sound from the reeds, and the Sallow ran brown and quiet under the causeway’s arches. But there was a faint, cold movement against the back of Harrow’s neck, and he turned his face into it, the way a man turns to feel the edge of a door-draught, and he felt the air move, very slightly, from the north-west.
“The wind will turn west by morning,” he said.
“Will it rain?” asked the herald, half mocking.
Harrow did not answer. He had not answered a question about rain since the north wall, and he did not intend to begin now, to a Crown’s man on a lame horse, with forty-two words in his hand. He only looked at the herald for a moment with his calm, grey, patient gaze, and then he looked back at the stone, and counted the paces from it to the causeway’s edge.
The wind turned in the night. Harrow knew it would. It turned from the north-west to the west before the first bell of the morning, and it blew the reeds flat in one long silver sweep toward the Hold, and by dawn the air was colder and wetter and smelled of the marsh. He did not tell anybody that he had known. He had told the herald the truth, and that was enough for a mason.
The herald did not get his reply that day. He was given a cup of water from the Kitchen, and a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth, and the ten sacks that Pell had sent down the causeway in the cart, out of courtesy, as she said, and not because the Crown had asked for them. Harrow counted the sacks onto the cart himself. He counted each one aloud, and when he came to the last he said ten, and the herald’s men, who had been watching him with expressions of mild, pained disbelief, looked at one another and then at the stone.
“Ten sacks,” said Harrow, to the cart’s driver. “Out of the Hold’s three hundred and twenty. That is the Crown’s count, and it is correct, and it has been correct since the envoy’s supper. You may tell the Chancellor so. He will want to know it, when he reads the Hold’s ledger, and finds the bread.”
“I shall tell him,” said the herald, who had got down from his horse at last and stood at the cart’s wheel, rubbing the flank of the lame animal with one gloved hand, and looking up at the mason as though he had not yet decided whether to be amused or insulted.
Then the herald turned back to Harrow, and held out his hand, quite formally, for the Hold’s count.
“Give it to me, mason,” he said. “The Hold’s count. The Chancery keeps its own, you know. It has been keeping it since before the Hold was counted at all. I should like to see whether your number agrees with theirs.”
Harrow gave it to him. He said it out loud, all of it, the stones of the Hold’s wall and its gate and its causeway, the courses of its north face and the stones beneath the seventh course, the nine rounds of the south gate and the eleven blocks that had gone down to the marsh. He said the count of the Chamber and the count of the granary, and the count of the bells in the chapel tower, which was one, and the count of the Hold’s people, which had been named that week at nine, and then at ten, and then at eleven, because the girl and the tinker were both to be entered in the book.
He said the last count last, very quietly, as he always did.
“And the Crown’s own count, which I have been checking since the summer,” said Harrow, “is correct, lady, in every stone. The Hold’s wall has one stone that the Crown has always counted twice. I have counted it three times myself, since the spring, and it is still there, under the seventh course, with a bell cut into it. The Crown is welcome to count it again.”
The herald looked at him for a long time, with his hand still held out. Then he slowly let it fall, and shook his head, and said, in a voice that was strangely subdued, “That is the same count the Chancery’s ledger uses, mason. Down to the single stone.”
“Yes,” said Harrow. “I know. I have read the ledger too. It was in the Lessary paper the envoy left in the gatehouse, and the Clerk checked it against ours. It has been right all along.”
He turned, and went back up the causeway toward the gate, counting his paces as he went, and he did not look back at the herald, or the stone, or the lame horse on the Lantern Ford mud. He had counted the reach-road a thousand times. He would never be asked to repeat any of it. But he counted it anyway, step by step, all the way to the gate, because that was what a mason did when he had told the truth to a stranger and did not yet know whether the stranger had believed him.