Hesper had a third sock.
Wystan had known about the first, which held the verdigris glass, and the second, which had held the compass until it changed hands, and he had assumed, as one assumes that a person has two feet, that the supply stopped there.
It did not.
She was wearing two.
The third came out of the lining of her coat, gray and darned at the heel, and from its toe she shook a flat packet in oiled silk onto the lid of an instrument case.
“Tissue,” she said.
“Tracing.
Twenty sheets, and I will thank you not to ask how long I have had them.”
“How long have you had them?”
“Since before the Registry changed its paper.” She unfolded the silk.
The tissue stirred in the lantern’s slit of light, a stack so thin that the grain of the case lid showed through it.
“Sit.
Keep your voice down.
The Weir will cover a pencil.
It will not cover a boy with opinions.”
They had rigged the cart’s tarpaulin as a lean-to against its south wheel, and under it the dark lantern burned with its shutter closed to a slit and laid one bar of yellow across the work.
It was the tenth bell.
The camp was down.
Pask’s breathing came from the big tent, a small tidy whistle like a kettle being reasonable.
Pugh lay under the cart like a drowned ox.
Tam had said good night to Wystan, and to Pugh, and, after a pause for thought, to the pony, and had then talked in his sleep for some time in the small tent, in the voice of a boy giving orders to a chain.
On the case lid beside the tissue lay a reed.
It was a dead cane from last year’s stand, pale as an old bone and the thickness of Wystan’s thumb, a foot and a half long, and someone had burned out its joints.
The whole thing smelled faintly of Pugh’s kitchen.
“That is his best skewer,” said Hesper.
“He has not been consulted.”
“What is it for?”
“You will see.
Listen first.” She sat down on a crate and pointed the fennel at him.
“Tonight you make a fair copy of the control.
All of it.
Forty-one loops, every leg, the ties to the Third Bend and the alder and the chapel, the benchmarks, the Stone.
When you have done that you make a copy of the lines you saw in the grass.
After that we shall see how much of the night is left.”
“I have a fair copy,” said Wystan.
“It is the second book.
It is in my pocket.”
“It is in a binding, with your name on the flyleaf, in a pocket that a lieutenant of the Rubric can reach with one arm.
By breakfast it will be in a pile with Pask’s, being struck, politely.” She turned the fennel over.
“Do you know what a fair copy is?”
“It is the clean version, made from the field book.”
“It is the version with the sneezes taken out.
The field book has everything.
The figure you crossed out and the figure you crossed out over it, the hour, the weather, who held the rod and who sulked.
A fair copy has none of that.
It is what you are prepared to sign.
The Registry reads fair copies, kid.
It has never in its life read a field book, and I would not let it.
It would faint.”
“Then a fair copy is a worse record.”
“It is a cleaner one, which is not the same thing.” She said it flatly.
“A clean record is the easiest thing in the world to lose.
There is nothing in it to catch on.
A messy one sticks in the throat.” She tapped the tissue.
“So this one will not be clean.
It keeps the remarks column, and the hours, and every sneeze you can bear to part with.
It is your own hand on your own sums, a second observation.
A number seen twice by the same eye is a measurement.”
“It must be my hand?”
“A copy in mine would be a copy of a copy.
Hearsay.” She took the left-hand pencil out of her bun, where it had stood beside its twin for as long as he had known her, and held it out.
“Harder lead than yours.
It will not smear when it gets wet.”
He took it.
It was warm from her hair.
“Rules.
Pencil only; ink runs.
Numbers, stations and plain remarks, and no persons.”
“No persons?”
“Anybody who opens a reed and finds a name has somebody to go and ask.
Write the Third Bend, not who stood at it.
A number has nobody to hurt.”
“The people are the point,” said Wystan.
“The numbers are the proof.
The people are the reason.
Keep the reason in your head and nowhere else.” She sat back.
“Every loop, when you finish it, comes to me, and I run it again from the tissue and not from the book.
The copy has to close on its own.
A copy that does not is a rumor of a copy.
We do the loops first and the descriptions last, because if dawn comes early I want the arithmetic in the reed and the poetry after.
And when it is made you will put it somewhere, and I will look at something else.
I shall not be told where.”
“You could say you do not know.”
“I could say it.
I say a great many things.” She put the fennel back.
“There is a kind of questioner, kid, who can tell a woman who does not know from a woman who is saying so.
I should like to be the first sort.
Begin.”
He began at the beginning, with Loop One, from the Third Bend.
He ruled the tissue with the edge of the field book, five columns, station and back sight and fore sight and distance and remarks, and he wrote the first leg in a hand so small that Hesper, holding the lantern a hand’s breadth from the paper, said she had seen larger print in the footnotes of the Regulations.
The pencil made a sound on the tissue like a mouse in dry leaves.
Forty-one chains and eighty links, from the Third Bend to the Stone.
He had written it ten times before, and the pencil did not hesitate.
Loop One closed at two centimeters.
She ran it from the tissue with her eyes half shut and her lips shaping the numbers, and said “Aye,” and gave it back.
Loop Two.
Loop Three.
Somewhere in the fourth, a thin dry whisper began in the left pocket of his coat, and went on for some time before he understood that it was words.
“Obelus,” he said, under his breath.
“Hush.”
“I am obliged to note,” said the pocket, in a voice that did not hush, “that you have written perpindicular.”
“I have not.”
“On the offset to the alder, in the remarks.
P, e, r, p, i, n.
There is a pin in it.
Nothing has ever hung from a pin.” The whisper had a martyred quality.
“Perpendicular.
From the Latin.
To hang.
It has an e.”
Hesper had stopped with the lantern in the air and was looking at the pocket.
“Is that the dagger?”
“I am a proofreader’s mark in the first instance,” said the pocket, with dignity.
“I have been surveying this river for forty years,” said Hesper, “and I have never once had a clerk who did not charge.” She looked at Wystan.
“Let it out.
It is making a noise like a mouse with a grievance.”
“You said not for anyone in a red cuff.”
“There is nobody here in a red cuff.
I should like to hear its objections to my sums in person.”
He undid the button.
The dagger came out in a single scuttling movement, stood on the crate between the tissue and the lantern with its crossbar tilted, and regarded the stack of sheets with open alarm.
It put a foot on the paper.
It took the foot back.
“I do not step on margins,” it said.
“I have said so.”
“There is nothing on the tissue yet but margin.”
“Then I shall stand on what you have written.
It is something like a stile.” It climbed onto the first line of Loop One, between two figures, and stood there.
“Thank you.
It was stuffy.
The lint has opinions.”
After that it was a long night, and Wystan remembered it afterward as a succession of small sounds.
The mouse in the leaves.
The Weir, which never changed.
The click of his tongue against his teeth, which he had not known he was doing until Hesper said, without looking up, “Stop that, you will wake Pask.” And the whisper of the dagger, who walked along each finished page with its hands behind its back, like a shepherd walking a ditch.
“Fenwik,” it said, at the church tower.
“I did not write Fenwik.”
“In the remarks.
It has a c.
The c is silent, which is no reason to leave it out.”
“Seperate,” it said, at Loop Eleven.
“There is a rat in it.
I find that it helps to remember the rat.”
At half past two he was grateful to a mark that walked, and was not going to say so, because it would have gone to its head.
Under the tarp the lantern burned down a notch.
Out in the dark Tam called “Stick!” in a high clear voice, and subsided, and Pugh turned over like a ship.
Loop Twenty-nine did not close.
Hesper ran it twice, from the tissue, with her eyes shut, and the second time her lips stopped on the fourth leg.
“Eighteen links over,” she said.
“You do not make mistakes of eighteen links.”
“I do not transpose.”
“It is the fourth hour.
Everyone transposes at the fourth hour.
I once transposed a river.” She put the sheet down.
“Find it.”
He ran his pencil down the column.
It was a plain sum, and he could not see the fault in it.
The figures looked back at him, round and equal.
He read the book again.
He read the tissue.
He began to feel the old cold turn that came when a number he trusted showed him its back, and then the dagger, which had been standing at the foot of the page with its point down, walked up three lines and stopped.
“This one,” it said.
“I am obliged to note that this figure is doubtful.”
It was leg six.
Fourteen chains and twenty links.
In the field book, in his own hand, with the dew still on it: fourteen chains and two links.
He sat looking at the two.
It was not a large error.
It was exactly the kind of error that was not supposed to happen to him, and had.
“I was wrong,” said Wystan.
“Aye.” She did not sound displeased.
“A copy that has had one error found in it is a copy that someone has looked at.” She took the sheet from him.
“That is what the dagger is for.
It is a debt mark.
You see it, you go and pay it.” She glanced at the small black shape, and for an instant the lines in her face went slack with a feeling he could not read.
“Good dagger.”
“I do not require praise,” said Obelus, and stood slightly taller.
By the thirty-fifth loop he had stopped feeling his hand.
By the fortieth the sky had begun to go from black to the color of slate.
At the forty-first, which was the long one, from the Weir to Fenn’s Cut and back, with the crooked leg in the middle of it that Hesper had once called lovely, he wrote the last figure and sat for a moment with the pencil held away from the paper, in case it wished to continue without him.
“One and eight tenths,” said Hesper.
She put the sheet on the pile, and rubbed her eyes with the heels of both hands.
“Now the descriptions.”
These were the stations, one by one.
The Third Bend, a cut cross on a rock.
The church at Fenwick.
The bolt in the old toll bridge.
The alder, and its lean.
Each had its page in the front of the field book, with a small sketch and the date it had been fixed and the name of the party chief who approved it, because a station is a promise and a promise wants a name behind it.
He copied them in order.
At the last he stopped.
It was the first page in the book.
It was headed, in a younger hand that was also his own: Station A.
Ferry Stone.
Brass cap, three inches, stamped ASHMERE FERRY.
CONTROL.
Set by chain, Highsun the fourteenth, 3057.
At the foot, in black ink, in a hand that sloped and flourished and went on a little too long, someone had written: Approved.
Countersigned.
H.
Quarrel, Chief of Party.
The Q had a tail.
It ran out beneath the whole of the name, fully a hand’s breadth, and curled back along the underside like the tail of a ferret.
He put the pencil down.
“Is it a problem?” said Hesper.
“It is the Stone.
It says that you were there.”
She was silent.
She had moved a little, so that the lantern’s bar fell across the page and across her own face.
He watched her read it.
She did it slowly, as she read everything she distrusted, and she read her name to the end, and then the tail of the Q.
“That is not how I sign,” she said.
“It is how you signed that day.”
“I sign like a fence falling over.”
“You were in a good mood,” said Wystan.
“You said that a surveyor who signs well has nothing to hide.”
Hesper was silent.
“You said it,” said Wystan.
“I only wrote it down.”
“It is a hideous thing to say,” said Hesper, at last, in a voice he had not heard before, high and careful, like something taken out of a drawer.
“It is exactly what I would say.” She put one square finger on the page beside the flourish, and did not quite touch it.
“That is a pretentious Q.”
“Yes.”
“Write it.
Countersigned, H.
Quarrel, in her own hand, folio one of the field book.”
“That is a person,” said Wystan.
“It is a signature.
Write it.” She drew a breath.
“And write that the original is in the field book, which will be blank by breakfast.
I would like that on the record.
Somebody ought to have to read it.”
He wrote it, exactly, in the smallest hand he had.
When he reached the end of it she had looked away and found, with great care, a new stalk of fennel in some pocket, and put it into her mouth.
The plan went on the last sheet.
He ruled it at one to five hundred from the Ferry Stone and put it down as he had drawn it in the field book, the lane and the bars across it, the school and the bakery step and Jory Dace’s extra shed, the square for the shrine and the ring of dots in front of it for the cairn.
It was no measurement.
It was a ground plan seen under grass by a boy tired enough to look.
But it had matched the shed, so he put it down in the same pencil, exactly, and sat looking at a small gray crowd of squares on a sheet as thin as a moth.
“Persons,” said Wystan.
“No.”
“A number.
Not a name.
The count.” He heard how steady he sounded, and was not proud of it.
“You said a number has nobody to hurt.”
She looked at him for a long time over the lantern.
“A number,” said Hesper.
“One.”
He wrote at the foot of the sheet, small and square: Persons, 191.
It was the only figure in the copy that he had not measured.
It sat on the tissue in his own hand, and it could not be rubbed out.
They rolled it together in the first gray of the light.
She cut the tissue to the length of the bore with her knife.
He wound it tight round a pencil stub, ten turns, eleven, and slid it into the reed, and drew the stub out, and the roll sprang a little and stayed.
At each end she pressed a plug of beeswax from the toe of yet another sock.
Wystan looked at that sock.
Hesper looked back, daring him, and the corner of her mouth moved.
She rubbed the reed with a handful of wet cinders until it was the color of every other dead cane on the river.
It looked like a stick.
“The ditch,” she said.
“There is a plank.
Pugh uses it for the eel traps.”
They went out under the tarpaulin’s edge and down the south bank in the cold, with the grass wet to the knee.
A plank lay across the ditch, two boards wide.
On the far side the reeds began, first the dead brown canes of last year and then, thick among them, the pale green shoots of this, shoulder high and rattling in the dawn air.
Hesper stopped at the end of the plank with her back to the reeds and her face to the road.
“Take your bearings by the compass,” she said, without turning.
“Add your nine minutes.
Then check it against the Peg, because a compass can be taken from you and the Peg, so far as I know, cannot.
I am going to look at the road.
Do not tell me where.”
“What if you need it?”
“I will not need it.” She chewed.
“If I am asked, I do not know.
If I am struck, I do not know.
If I am anywhere, kid, I shall have nothing to give them but a back and a bad temper.
It is a restful position.”
He went in alone.
The mud took his boots to the ankle, and the cold came up through the leather.
The Peg hung low in the north, a nail head going pale.
He took the bearing, and took it again against the star, and crossed fourteen paces of the bed on a hundred and ninety-four degrees, and at the fourteenth he stopped, and found a dead cane on his left hand with a lean to it, and set the new reed into the mud beside its brothers with the foot cut slant, as the eel fishers did to mark a trap.
He cut a notch on the north face with his thumbnail, at the height of his hand.
It was invisible.
It was a stick in a reed bed.
He stood for a moment with his palm flat against it.
‘Fourteen paces from the plank’s end.
Bearing one hundred and ninety-four degrees, plus nine minutes.
Dead cane, on the left.
The notch to the north.’ He said it a second time, and a third, in the sing-song of the eel tables, until it stopped being words and became a tune.
“Done,” he said, at the plank.
“Do not tell me,” said Hesper.
“I have not.”
“Good.” She turned.
Her face was gray with the night and her eyes were bright.
“Now you may sleep an hour, and I may kick you out of it, and we may both look at a man with a pen as if we had never had an idea in our lives.”
He opened his mouth to answer, and shut it.
Over her shoulder, a long way off, something along the road had changed color.
The sky had gone from slate to the pale bare color of a sheet before anything is written on it.
From the bank, where he now stood, he could see east down the whole length of the causeway to the Weir, white and noisy under its tower, and the weathercock had caught a little gold.
The road was empty.
Then it was not.
A line was coming along it from the Weir end, a long gray line with a fringe of color at the edges, like a seam that has begun to bleed.
He counted them.
Red at the wrist, each one.
Red turned back at the cuffs of every gray coat, swinging with the step, and the step was perfectly even.
Twelve, with one in front who walked a little apart.
The singing came along the road ahead of them, thin over the water, cheerful, and exactly in time.
Red for the error, white for the mend.