“I did not report it,” said Edwin Pask.
He said it from forty yards off, before anyone could possibly have asked, and the wind brought it along the causeway in the high careful voice of a man giving evidence.
He was standing in the middle of the road with his hat in both hands.
By the state of his boots he had been standing there for some time.
“We know, Edwin,” said Hesper.
“I wished it understood.
I told the boy from the Post that I did not report it.
I told Tam, who said he had not supposed that I had, and I told Pugh, who asked what there was to report, and I could not tell him, so that was a poor conversation.” Pask turned the hat a quarter turn by the brim.
His spectacles had slipped down his nose and he had not pushed them up.
“I kept it in my hat for five days, Mistress Quarrel, exactly as instructed.
A notice follows a report as night follows evening, and I should like it on the record that I did not report it.”
“It is on the record.
Wystan keeps the record.”
“Three times,” said Wystan.
“Counting the first.”
Pask looked at him as if the number had been an accusation, and then at the sky, and then fell in beside Hesper without being asked, which was how Wystan knew the man had not slept.
He had the look of a ruled line somebody had smudged with a thumb.
“I have read the Standing Orders, both volumes, since the boy left me,” he said.
“It says three days from receipt.
The boy put the notice into my hand at the second bell on the third, so by my reckoning we have until the sixth.”
“By mine we have until breakfast.”
“The notice says within three days.”
“The Registry has never said one thing when it could say three and mean the first.”
“That is a slander on a public body.”
“It is a statement.”
“It is not a source,” said Pask, with some heat, and Hesper turned her head and looked at Wystan, who gave the gravel his attention.
“That is two of you,” she said.
“Walk, Edwin.
You are blocking the only dry thing for a mile.”
The party had pitched on the Fenwick causeway, a quarter mile west of the Weir, where the road broadened into a stand of beaten cinders that the eel carters used for turning their wagons.
The meadows of the Sloe lay a fathom lower than the river in spring, so every road was raised on a bank of clay, six feet above the grass, with a ditch at the foot of each flank and nothing on top but the road, the wind, and whoever was foolish enough to camp on it.
South of the road the reeds began, past the ditch, and went on without a break to the water.
Eastward the Weir made a long white noise, the whole river falling over a sill of stone, and above it stood the church tower of Fenwick, benchmark fourteen slash one, with its stub of spire and the single weathercock that every surveyor in the Province had used for a back sight and sworn at.
There were two tents on the grass shoulder, the big one and the new one.
There was the cart under its tarpaulin, and the fat gray pony, Auditor, who had been named by Hesper for the way he looked at everything for a long time and approved of nothing.
There was a fire with the black pot on it.
By the time they reached the cart Pask had told Tam again, and Pugh again, and in a lowered voice the pony, that he had not reported it.
Tam had been sitting on the tailboard oiling chain pins.
He came off it in one movement and ran, and stopped dead at twelve feet, with a pin in each fist.
“Wys,” he said.
Then, with a glance at Hesper: “Mistress Quarrel.” Then, brightly: “You are late.”
He looked at once as if he would like it back.
It was not his line.
It had come to him secondhand, like the boots, and he had put it on at the wrong moment.
“Aye, he is,” said Hesper, and went by him toward the fire.
Hesper unslung the Alderman from her back, where she had carried it four miles without a word, and put it into Pask’s arms.
Pask held it a moment and looked a little better.
Tam fell into step beside Wystan.
He took the chain off his shoulder without asking, weighed it in one hand, and slung it over his own in the correct fashion, with the handle forward.
“I put you in the small tent,” he said.
“By the flap.
You said once that you could not sleep with your feet in, so I put you where they could go out.” He stopped.
“I do not recall you saying it.
Pugh says you did.”
“I did not say it,” said Wystan.
“But I do dislike having my feet in.”
“Oh.” Tam’s whole face unclenched.
“That’s good, then.
That is lucky.” He took three more steps and added, in a rush, “I am to say I am glad you are not mad.
Pugh told me to say it plain, and then not go on about it.
So that is said, and I shall not go on.” He went on.
“Only I thought it was madness, the first night.
And then I thought no, because Wys does not do mad.
Wys does tolerances.”
“I do not know what that means,” said Wystan.
“I do not either.
It sounded right when I was in bed.”
At the fire Pugh raised the ladle in greeting and returned to whatever he was doing to the pot, which was not, in any sense the Survey would have recognized, cooking.
A skin the color of pewter lay on the surface.
Under the skin, in no hurry, something moved.
“Eel,” said Pugh, to the pot or to the world.
“Four of them.
They would not be told.”
“Pugh,” said Wystan.
“Lad,” said Pugh, and that was the greeting.
It was the same as it had always been, and it cost nothing, and Wystan stood in the smoke and could not have said which of them had got the better of it.
Hesper wasted no time.
She took the whole party in at a glance, as she took a sheet of ground, and gave orders from her heels.
Pask was to bring the Muster, and the registers, and every book in the camp, from every tent, to the cart, and to lay them out in one place.
Not hidden, she said.
Not arranged.
In one place.
Pask opened his mouth, and shut it, and went to do it with the air of a man carrying out his own furniture.
“And the rest of you will chain the baseline,” said Hesper.
“We have chained it,” said Pask, over his shoulder.
“Twice.”
“Then it is a thing we know how to do.”
The baseline was a line of eight chains and sixty links along the crown of the road, from the cart’s near wheel to a milestone with the Weir’s name worn off it, and it had been chained so often that the cinders at each pin had a little dent.
Wystan took the follower’s end, which was the end that stood still, and Tam took the leader’s, with the pins on a ring at his belt.
The chain went out between them along the road in a long gray line, sixty-six feet of iron, and the brass tags every ten links winked in the sun.
“Chain,” said Tam, from the far end, and pulled.
“Hold,” said Wystan.
“I have not done anything.”
“You are sagging at the middle.
Take it up.”
“It is not a hammock, Wys, it is a road.”
“Take it up.”
Tam took it up.
The links came off the cinders one by one and straightened, and the chain sang for a moment, a low flat note, and was still.
Wystan checked the pin against the end handle, and the handle against the pin, and the line against the milestone, and only then said, “Stick.”
“There,” said Tam, driving the pin.
“I do not remember Ashmere, Wys.
I have tried three times with my eyes shut and got nothing.
But I remember you chaining too slow.
Every single time, and the sun goes down, and the Mistress says if you want to be done before Leaffall, and you say we shall be done when it is done.” He said it fondly, in a voice rather unlike his own.
“That is not nothing.
I thought it might have stopped, now you have this other business.
I thought you would be quick.”
“I am not quick.”
“No,” said Tam, with relief.
“Good.”
They chained eight chains.
At the fifth Pask came along the road with his book open on his forearm, to take the pin count, and fell in at Wystan’s elbow, and did not speak for the length of a chain.
Tam was at the far end, sixty-six feet off and into the wind.
The Weir covered the rest.
“Pell,” said Pask, barely above a whisper.
“Yes.”
“The Muster has you down as Fenwick Weir.
The Sisters of Saint Aubrin.
I wrote that.
It is in my hand.” He did not look up from the page.
“I recall the Sisters.
I recall them perfectly well.
I recall a cheese.
And I have been going over it for two days, and I find that I recall the cheese better than I recall you.”
“I am sorry,” said Wystan.
“I did not say it to be pitied.
I said it as a datum.” Pask’s pencil moved over a figure and did not set it down.
“There is a second datum.
The sheet that I gave you, the one with the writing on the back.
I do not write on the back of a sheet.
It is a defacement of an issued document under Standing Order eleven.
I have reproved Tam for it.
Twice.” The pencil stopped.
“And yet it is in my hand, with the downstrokes too heavy, as they are when I am cross.
I must have been cross when I wrote it.
I find that I can nearly recall being cross.”
It was the strangest thing anyone had said to him all week.
Wystan stood at the near end of a chain with a milestone ahead and the man’s fear in his ear, and thought about what a true thing would be.
“I folded it in eight,” he said.
“You said that was ruinous.
You said a sheet is folded in four, and that I would cut it through at the Ferry, and I said I would be careful.”
Pask was silent for the length of a pin.
“I should have said that,” he said at last.
“It is exactly what I should have said.” He took a breath that shook slightly at the top.
“What will they do to the books, do you suppose?”
“I do not know.”
“Thank you,” said Pask, with real feeling.
“That is the most comforting thing that anyone has said to me this week.” He shut the book on his finger.
“I shall surrender mine.
All of them, in order, with a list.
It is the only thing I know how to do correctly, and I would not like to do it badly in front of them.”
“Chain,” called Tam.
“Are you two courting?”
“Stick,” said Wystan.
They closed it, at last, going back, with the line pegged at the cart wheel and the tally in Pask’s book.
It came out one and nine tenths centimeters over, which was a finger’s breadth, near enough, and when Hesper had walked down the road and read the figure over Pask’s shoulder she stood for a time with her hands in her pockets and looked at the milestone.
“That is better than I do,” she said.
She said it quietly, and her face went soft.
It did it all at once, like bread when you press it, and was hard again before anyone could be sure.
“Told you,” Tam whispered.
“Soft in the face.”
“I did not see it.”
“You were looking at the pin.”
Evening came on over the reeds in long bars of copper.
Hesper had them sit, all five, on the cart’s tailboard and the ends of the logs, with Pugh’s pot still unforgivably on the fire, and told them what would happen.
It took five minutes.
A detachment of the Rubric would come in the morning, early, along the road from the Weir.
They would be polite.
They would be thorough.
They would ask for every book in the camp, and they would be given every book in the camp.
“Not hidden,” said Pask, wonderingly.
“I had thought you would tell us to hide them.”
“In a Province where every page has a number?
They would find the hiding place by the hole it left in the index.” She turned the fennel in her teeth.
“We will be the most correct party the Rubric has ever met.
We will answer what we are asked, and no more.
If you do not know a thing, say that you do not know.
It is true, and it is the most useful sentence in the Lowmarch.
I shall ask for a warrant.
A notice is not a warrant.
Beyond that, let me do the arguing.”
“I do not know anything,” said Tam.
“Excellent.”
“And Wys?” said Tam.
“If they ask where he is from?”
“Then they may ask Wys,” said Hesper.
“He will say nothing, which is what he says best.”
“He says I do not know best.”
“I say it easily,” said Wystan.
“That is different from best.”
There was a pause.
Pugh made a noise in his beard that might, in a smaller man, have been a laugh.
And Hesper looked at Wystan across the fire for a moment longer than the remark required, and tilted her head a quarter inch toward the dark, and he nodded.
Not yet.
Later.
At the going down of the sun Tam came and sat beside him with his field book.
He did not say anything.
He opened it at the back, after the chain tallies, and put it on Wystan’s knee, and looked at the fire with the great interest of a boy who has handed over a thing he is afraid will be laughed at.
The hand was round and careful, a row of beans.
It said: FERRY, flat, on a rope.
ORLA, ferrywoman, 9 min, loaded cart.
MAUDIE RUD, baker, voice like a bred knife.
SHRINE, bell like a cracked cup.
WILLOW (leans).
BREA, 9, gap in teeth, boots.
He read it twice.
Down in the reeds a bittern started up, and gave its long hollow note, and stopped.
“I still do not recall them,” said Tam, to the fire.
“But I thought, if I have it written down, in a place where I will find it, then it is a thing that I have.
Even if I have not got the rest.”
“Rudd,” said Wystan.
His voice was not what he would have liked.
“Two d’s.”
“Is it two?”
“It has always been two.
And bread.
There is an a in bread.”
“I had the knife right, though.”
“You had the knife right.”
Tam took the pencil from behind his ear and put his tongue between his teeth, and corrected it, with great labor, to Maudie Rudd, baker, voice like a bread knife.
He looked at it for a while with his head on one side.
Then he nodded, once, short, and shut the book.
Supper was the stew.
It must be said for it that it did not pretend.
It was gray, with a lid of gold fat, and in it, like the survivors of a small shipwreck, lay four eels cut in rounds the thickness of a thumb, each round with its spine standing up like the teeth of a comb.
There was sorrel in it, and hedge garlic, and a quantity of something that Pugh called greens and Pask called weeds.
It tasted of river bottom and of onions that had lost hope.
Wystan took a bowl, and sat on the log, and ate it with the spoon and the whole of his attention.
He had thought it would taste of home, the way eel did.
It did not.
Orla’s eel pie was the best thing in the Lowmarch, and this was the worst thing in it, and the distance between the two was so exact and so large that he could eat the one without a single memory of the other.
For six days every smell had been a door.
This was a wall.
A wall was what he had wanted.
He was grateful for it past reason, and would have said so aloud if there had been a way to say it that did not sound like a complaint.
“I am obliged to note,” said a thin dry voice from the left pocket, “that I can smell it from here, and I have no nose.”
He coughed into his sleeve.
Across the fire Hesper looked at his pocket, and at him, and drank her tea.
Pugh was ladling out second bowls.
He broke the heel off the black loaf, the hard end, the part that nobody wanted, and dropped it in the pot without looking, as one drops a coin into a beggar’s cap one has passed every morning for thirty years.
It sank.
The broth closed over it and went a little thicker.
Then he stopped, with the ladle raised.
“It thickens it,” he said, to no one.
No one had asked.
He looked at his hand, and then at the pot, with the slow puzzled stare of a man the size of a door who has found a stranger walking about in his boots.
“I never held with it.
Bread in a stew.
It is a sin.”
Nobody spoke.
Tam, who had a mouthful, stopped chewing.
Hesper’s eyes came across the fire to Wystan, small and flat and entirely clear, and stayed on him, and he did the one thing he could.
“Caraway,” he said.
“In the seed loaf.”
“What is that, lad?”
“A kind of bread.”
“Hm,” said Pugh.
He stirred the pot, slowly, in the direction in which the broth was already going.
“I do not recall it.” He was silent for a time, with the steam on his whiskers.
“But it would go well in this.”
Wystan held out his bowl, and was given a second helping, and ate it.
It was worse than the first.
He ate all of it, and sat with the empty bowl warm against his knees, and the Weir fell over its sill a quarter mile off, and the first star came out over the reeds.
At the fire’s edge Pugh scraped the pot with a thoroughness that belonged to a man who meant to do it again, and set the last of the heel in a pan of water to soak.
“Tomorrow I shall do it with potatoes,” he said.
No one told him that there might not be a tomorrow with potatoes.
They let him have it.