10 The Second Hand
10: Ch.
10 The Second Hand
The country north of the Sorrel did not ask questions, which was its whole recommendation.
It was fell country, stone and bracken and sheep tracks, with the river Marle cutting it into terraces, and in the terraces sat the town of Harl: one street, one ferry, one kiln yard that sold lime instead of charcoal, which close enough, and a market square that the recount’s own map would one day call the second bead on the string and that the people of Harl called, simply, the square.
They took the lime yard in April, the pair of them, on the same terms they had taken every yard since the valley: work for the man who wanted no questions about where the last burner went.
Greg was nine and had stopped counting the yards in his head, because the counting was no longer information.
A number that only ever moved one way is not information; it is a sentence.
The first-light lessons came with them.
Samuel poured in the hour before the kilns breathed, when the frost was still on the yard stones and the cough was at its morning worst and the teaching was therefore at its fastest, because pain spends a man’s patience faster than it spends his voice, and Samuel had decided, somewhere in the second Bremm winter, to spend the patience on the lessons and hoard the voice.
Greg came with the slate and the stub of chalk and received what was poured: how to read a road by the wear on its stones, so you know what walks it before you meet what walks it.
How to stand in a market so that three men remember you and one of them wrongly.
How to eat in an inn as a man who is expected, because men who are expected are never described.
He took it all at the speed it came, the way a dry field takes rain, and he did not ask what the lessons were for, because he had understood the shape of the syllabus the night the count came out of him at Bremm: this was not teaching.
This was a man emptying.
Some mornings he arrived early and stood outside in the frost before the door, making himself go in, because the pouring had started to hurt to watch, and the only thing worse than watching it was wasting any of it.
The mark kept itself alongside.
That was the other reason Harl.
The unreached list ran south to north, and Harl sat north of everything on it, one valley back from the string’s walking order, close enough to hear the string move and far enough that hearing it cost nothing.
The drovers came up from the Sorrel every second week, and every second week Greg stood at the edge of the square and gathered news the way he had learned to gather everything, sideways, with a copper and a silence.
The recount had walked the fells region first, as the list said.
The wagon had sat at the timber camps for nine days.
The beads were being strung, town by town, papers shown, names written, coppers paid.
And the region after the fells, second on the walking order, the region the list called the burn country, was not on any drover’s tongue at all, because the recount had passed it by, closed without walking, the way a roll passes a thing that is copied and closed.
The stroke held.
Greg kept the count of it in the place where he kept what was true, under a heading he ruled in the first week, small and even, the way the school man had taught him to rule a page: Days bought.
One for every week the burn country stayed unstrung.
He had spent the mark at the Ford for a season, perhaps two, and the season was running, and every seven days was a line in a column his method understood completely.
He filed the weeks without unease.
The reckoning was a year or two out, known and carried, and a debt with a date is not a debt; it is an appointment.
The tally-man came to Harl on a Tuesday, and the appointment nearly moved.
He arrived the way the recount’s men arrived everywhere, which was officially: a light cart, a clerk’s tent, a post set up at the square’s edge with a hand-inked board, COPIERS WANTED, DISTRICT WORK, PIECE RATES.
The string had a practice that Greg had not known, and learned now by standing still: the recount did not only walk a region and copy it.
It seeded the copy.
A season ahead of the wagon, a tally-man rode the roads offering district piece work to any town hand with a steady arm, and the town’s own papers were put into the district’s fair hand by the town’s own men, so that when the wagon came, the copying was half done and the walker’s questions were asked of paper that already spoke the recount’s language.
The tent did steady trade all morning.
Field hands with Sunday letters, the ferry clerk, a stonecutter who could draw a straight line.
Each sat at the plank table and wrote the sample line off the board while the tally-man watched the arm and not the words, and each was paid or passed in under a minute.
Greg understood the danger before he understood his own movement toward it.
The danger was simple: a tally-man whose trade is hands, sitting thirty feet from a boy whose hand is made of stolen hands, one of which is the recount’s own.
But the movement was also simple, and it was worse, because the movement was his own method working without him: a post that pays for writing is a door, and doors in his world had only ever been one thing, which was information, and he wanted to stand at the plank table and see the sample line and the piece rates and the shape of the tally-man’s day-roll, because the day-roll would carry the string’s walking order for the whole district, and a walking order was a season of days bought, read free.
He was nine steps from the table before Samuel’s cough stopped him. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Not loudly.
It did not need to be loud anymore; it only needed to start, and Greg had spent a winter training himself to hear it over market noise, and the training answered before he did.
The tally-man saw the boy stop and beckoned, because a boy at a copying post is a curiosity and curiosities get paid coppers.
“You write, lad?”
The answer that was true was: better than any man in this square, in a hand trained by a school man for two winters and corrected against the district’s own fair hand by a forger for one night.
The answer that was safe was nothing.
The answer Greg gave was neither.
“Some,” he said, and sat, and took the offered pen, and wrote the sample line.
He wrote it badly.
He wrote it in the hand of the ferry clerk’s apprentice, a boy of about twelve whose copy book had been shown around the Ford camp for a laugh two springs ago, a hand Greg had read once, at a distance of six feet, for the length of a man reading over someone’s shoulder.
A round, slow, over-inked hand.
He wrote it at the speed of a boy who does this on feast days, and he let the over-inking blot, and he sat back from the plank the way a boy sits back who has done a thing and wants it over.
The tally-man looked at the line for the length of two breaths, and pushed a copper across the table.
“Pays the same whether it’s fair or foul, lad.
But that’s foul.
Come back when it’s legible.” And he turned to the stonecutter, and Greg walked away with the copper and the whole of the day-roll unseen, and his heart was behaving like a struck bell somewhere behind his sternum, and he did not file it anywhere.
It stayed.
All the way home, past the ferry, up the lime yard track, the bell kept ringing, and it took him until the gate to name what it was: he had liked it.
Sitting at the plank, pen in hand, being paid for writing.
For one line, in a stolen hand, he had been an ordinary boy doing ordinary work, and he had liked it, and that was the part of the day that would not stop ringing.
Samuel said nothing on the walk home.
He said nothing through the afternoon, which was how Greg knew the lesson was being drafted.
It came at first light, in the hour of the pour, sideways, through the numbers, as everything came.
“A tally-man who pays for hands sat at the mouth of that square yesterday,” Samuel said to the frost.
“And a boy who owns four hands walked up and put on a fifth.”
“Sixth,” Greg said.
“The school man’s, the recount’s, the apprentice’s, the ferry clerk’s daughter’s, my own, and now the Ford apprentice’s again, refined.”
“And how long to make the fifth?”
“Four seconds.”
“Mm.” Samuel worked the fire with the poker, and the wet thing at the bottom of his breathing turned over once and settled.
“Four seconds to put on a hand.
Now the sum I actually want, boy.
Four seconds to put it on.
How long to take it off?”
Greg went down the day in his head, and understood, going down it, that he had been caught in the exact shape the man had built him to be caught in.
“Not four seconds,” he said.
“The apprentice’s hand is on the tally-man’s table now.
A line of it, paid, in the tent of a man whose trade is remembering hands.
If the wagon walks Harl next season and a school-trained hand surfaces within a day’s walk of a sample that reads like a bad copy of something the tally-man has seen before, the asking will have a place to start, and the place will be a boy who took a copper at a copying post in April.”
“That’s the risk you know,” Samuel said.
“Again.
Not the rest.” Find the original chapter at g.com.
The sum turned.
It turned slower than it had at the Ford, and it came up wrong in a new place.
At the Ford, the flaw had been the stranger’s back, a debt traveling up a chain to a man he had never met.
Here the flaw was nearer.
It was that he had spent a stolen hand to hide a stolen hand, and every hand he owned had been taken from a person, and every person whose hand he wore was a stranger he had treated as if they were nothing when he took from them, because strangers were the cheapest ones to spend, and the rule had a reason, and the reason had been given to him on the north bank of the Sorrel, and he had said the word attached, and here was the attachment arriving, four seconds of work with a two-year tail.
“It makes hands into debts,” he said at last.
“All of them.
Every hand I’ve taken has an owner, and an owner means a chain, and a chain means an asking, someday, that walks up it to me.
I’ve been collecting tools.
They’re not tools.
They’re signatures.”
“And that’s the lesson,” Samuel said.
“Not the one you thought.
Not use a worse hand.
A worse hand is still a hand, and it still belongs to somebody.
The lesson is the one the school man started and I’m ending: you can borrow a hand, but you can’t borrow the arm.
The tally-man’s trade is arms, boy.
Men who own their hand outright, the way a man owns his walk.
They can’t be traced because there’s nothing behind them to trace to.
You’ll never be safe in a fair hand or a foul one until the hand is yours, only yours, worn where no one can copy it from, and no hand becomes yours by taking.” He set the poker down, and the cough came, the long tearing one, and he rode it out with his eyes shut and the stillness Greg knew, and when it released he finished it, quietly, the way a man finishes a thing he has already agreed to.
“Build one.
From nothing.
Slow, on your own slate, where no one reads.
It’ll be ugly for a year and it will be the only writing in this district that belongs to you, and one day, when you’re writing papers that are true, that’s the hand they’ll be written in.
A man’s own hand is the one paper that can never testify against him, because there is no other copy of it in the world to compare against.
You’ve been a forger since the valley.
Time you became an author.”
The build began that evening, on the back of the slate, in the last light.
It was ugly, exactly as promised.
He started from the shapes that had no training in them at all, the way his own seven-year-old hand had been before the school man took it and bent it into fair, and he let them be crooked and slow and private, and every letter he made he made once and did not copy again, because a copy is a hand and a hand is a chain, and this was to be the one writing in the world with nothing behind it.
It went slowly.
It would take the year, Samuel had said, and Samuel had not said the other thing, which Greg worked out for himself while the kilns breathed and the fell went dark: a year to build the hand.
Two winters, outside, for the cough.
The hand would be finished around the time the pouring stopped, and he set that next to the days-of-first-light count in the place where he kept what was true, and did not name it, and carried the not-naming.
In the square, the tally-man’s tent stayed up a week and then folded, and the cart went south, toward the string, toward the beads, toward the burn country it would pass without walking.
Under Days bought, the count read: eighteen weeks.
He ruled one more line under it, small and even, a column he did not explain to anyone because there was no one to explain it to, and at the head of it he wrote: Hands owned.
And under the heading, the first entry: One.
The counting went on.
The country north of the Sorrel kept its own records, and Greg kept his, and the third traveler went with them everywhere, wet and patient, on its own schedule, spending the winter it had been given at the rate it had always spent, and the only count that moved against him was the one he had built in hope, and he fed it every morning at first light, and it was, he understood without filing it anywhere, the only thing he was not prepared to lose.