The only thing Wystan had ever run from was a goose.
It had belonged to the Oaksey twins, and he had been six, and Orla, who had watched the whole business from the ferry with a pipe in her teeth, had told him afterward that a surveyor does not run.
A surveyor withdraws, she said, on a measured line.
He had asked her what the line was, and she had said that he would know it when he was on it.
He did not know it now.
He was held by the cuff of his sleeve and a large man’s good manners, and no line in the world ran anywhere that he could see.
He pulled.
The cuff stayed in the sergeant’s hand, and the sergeant’s hand, which had been gentle, became less so.
“Now, lad,” said Garrow.
“Now.”
“Chain!” shouted Tam.
It was the leader’s call, high and cracked and perfectly pitched, the call he had given eight times the afternoon before down a baseline in the sun, and it came with the iron.
Tam had worn Wystan’s chain over his shoulder since the baseline, and had declined, with some dignity, to give it back until it was oiled.
Now he unslung it with the speed of a boy who has been shouted at for sagging.
It came across the road low and flat, sixty-six feet of it, and the end of it went round the sergeant’s boots at the ankle and took them as neatly as a hobble takes a pony.
Garrow went over like a felled tree.
He did it slowly, and with a good deal of dignity, and the pie came out of his coat and rolled away down the cinders.
His grip let go.
Tam snapped the chain clear of the sergeant’s boots, the way you clear a kink, and it flew back to his hand.
Wystan did not wait to be told.
He turned and went, nine paces across the road to the south shoulder, with his coat banging against his thighs and the long back pocket knocking against his spine, and as he went a voice behind him said in a roar that cut through the Weir and the ten pens and the whole bright morning:
“Off the gravel, kid!
Off the gravel!”
He went off the gravel.
He took the verge in a stride, and the grass came up around his boots, and he turned.
Hesper had drawn the pencil from her bun.
It was the right-hand one, the one that was left.
She stood with one boot on the cinders and the other on the grass, at the lip of the road, with the pencil held out in front of her at the level of her hip, and she drew.
It was a long loose curve, the line of a contour on a hill sheet, from the near wheel of the cart toward the milestone, and across the middle of it she set two short bars, one above the other.
It was an equals sign, laid down on a river.
It hung in the air a moment, a gray graphite thread, plain to see.
Then it lay down along the crown of the road and went in.
“Eel,” said Hesper, as if to herself.
Wystan stared at her.
Eight chains and sixty links, from the cart’s near wheel to the milestone with the Weir’s name worn off it.
They had chained it the afternoon before, twice, forward and back, to a finger’s breadth, with Pask holding the book and Tam at the far end complaining about sag.
She had said that it was a thing they knew how to do.
She had not been chaining for arithmetic.
A caster can work only on ground she has truly held, and ground that has been chained twice in an afternoon, with the Chief’s own eye on the closing figure, is held as truly as ground can be.
Hesper had spent the afternoon before the Rubric came holding one stretch of road.
He understood it all in one breath, and understood, in the next, that she had known.
The first Redpen to feel it was Lark.
He had been running, with his hand on his pen, a boy’s flat-footed run, and he took three steps on the cinders and found that they were the same cinders as before and that they were not.
His legs went on ahead.
The rest of him did not.
He went down full length on his belly, with his arms out in front of him, and began to travel north across the crown of the road in a straight line, at a steady walking pace, with a long surprised “Oh” coming out of him that lasted the whole way.
Then the stools went.
Ten stools shot out from under ten Redpens like peas from a pod, and ten Redpens sat down on the cinders all at once with a single flat smack, and began to slide.
They slid with great evenness.
They slid in a row, with their pens still in their hands, and the trestle slid with them, upright, with its red baize and sixteen blank books on top, which came off one by one in a stately line and followed.
Sergeant Garrow went by on his back with his boots in the air, wearing an expression of mild scholarly interest.
The road ran downhill to the north, by a hand’s breadth, as every causeway in the Sloe country did where the carters’ wheels had been, and it was not a slope that you noticed when you stood on it.
You noticed it when your boots stopped believing in the road.
Hesper had made them stop.
She had equalized the grip of eight chains of gravel with the grip of the slipperiest thing in the Lowmarch, and she had even named it.
Pike was last.
He had a Chainer’s training, and he used it.
He flung up his left hand, fingers spread, in the first stroke of something that Wystan thought might have been a Line.
The second stroke went into the ditch with the rest of him.
They heard them go in, one after another, a sound like sacks of meal being thrown from a wagon, and the lieutenant’s tin of horehound skated out after him along the crown, spinning, and went over the edge with a small clap.
For a moment there was only the Weir.
“Dearer than it was,” said Hesper.
She had not fallen.
She put the pencil back in her bun, with some care, and a thin bright thread of blood ran out of her left nostril and down to her lip.
She looked at it on the back of her hand with an expression of faint accountancy.
“The road holds for a minute,” she said.
“It is not the road that will cost them, kid.
It is the ditch.
Six feet of wet clay and twelve men in wool.
Go on.”
“I did not do that!”
It was Pask.
He had come out of somewhere, with the two receipts in one hand and his hat in the other, and he stood on the grass with his spectacles half down and his mouth open, looking at the road.
“I wish it recorded,” said Pask, in a high strained voice, “that I did not do that.”
“Say that I ran,” said Hesper.
“Say exactly that, Edwin.
Say that I ran, and that you did not know where.”
“That I did not know where.
Yes.
That is true.” He swallowed.
“I will say that you ran.”
“And keep the Alderman.
It is Provincial property.”
“I know what it is, Mistress Quarrel,” said Pask, with sudden dignity.
“I am the one who signed for it.” And then, in a different voice, lower, to Wystan: “Water under you, Pell.”
He had never said it to Wystan before.
Wystan had no reply.
At the fire Pugh had not moved.
He stood there with the ladle and the black pot, and the old gray face above the whiskers was perfectly calm.
As Wystan passed he put out his other hand.
In it was a flour sack, tied at the neck, heavy and lumpy and a little warm.
“Biscuit,” said Pugh.
“Cheese.
There is the end of a loaf in it, for luck.
I do not know why.”
“Pugh.”
“Lad,” said Pugh.
Wystan took it.
Then there was a sound of boots on the cinders behind him, and a call that made his heart turn over in his chest like a hooked eel, and he looked round and found Tam coming at the run with one bare foot and the chain in a coil in both hands.
“Wys!
Your chain!”
He threw it.
It came across the grass in a long gray arc, and the weight of it hit Wystan’s chest like a drunk man falling, and he caught it.
He heard Hesper’s voice in the back of his head, from a long time ago, in a lane, in the first week of his first season: “Do not drop that, kid, it costs more than you do.” He slung it over his shoulder.
It was as if he had been given back an arm.
“Go,” said Hesper.
“The bank.”
They went down it together, on their heels, the cinders running with them.
At the foot lay the ditch and the plank, and she was across before he was.
Beyond the plank stood the whole gold-green wall of the reeds, shoulder high and taller, rattling in the morning breeze.
It looked exactly like a place that nothing could find.
It looked like a door.
She stopped at the plank’s end.
“Go and fetch it,” she said.
“A hiding place is no use if it is under a camp the Rubric will sit on for a week.
Do not tell me which way.”
“I was not going to.”
“Good boy.” She turned her back to the reeds and her face to the sky, and put her hands behind her, and drew a loud breath.
“I am going to look at the Plough.”
“It is morning.”
“I am looking at where it will be.” She chewed.
“Go and do what you came to do.
I shall say the eel tables, and I shall say them loudly, and if anyone should come and ask me what I heard I shall tell him the tables.”
“Four elvers to the ounce,” said Hesper, to the heavens, in a voice that could have been heard at Harl’s Cross.
“Sixteen ounces to the pound.
Fourteen pounds to the stone.
And you need not stand there with your mouth open.”
He went in.
It was fourteen paces on a bearing of a hundred and ninety-four degrees, plus nine minutes.
The mud took his boots to the ankle and the cold ran up his legs.
He did not look at the compass.
He did not need to.
He had said it so many times in the night that his feet knew it, and at the fourteenth he stopped and put out his left hand and found a dead cane with a lean to it, and beside it, standing among its brothers, the reed, with a notch on its north face at the height of his palm.
It was where he had left it.
It had not been a dream.
He drew it out of the mud with a long wet sucking sound that he thought might be heard in Tarnby, and slid it into the long back pocket of the coat, the one that ran across the small of his back and had been cut for a rolled plan.
It lay along his spine as if the coat had been made for it.
It was cold from the mud, and then, slowly, it was not.
“Eight stone to the hundredweight,” said the voice from the plank, rather hoarsely.
“Twenty hundredweight to the ton.
Which is not, I will point out, a measure of eel.”
“Done,” he said, as he came out.
“I heard nothing,” said Hesper.
“I was occupied with eel.” She turned.
Her nose had stopped bleeding.
There was a smear of it on her lip and another on her sleeve, and her face under it was gray and set.
“Now.”
“Mistress,” called a voice from above them.
They both looked up.
Tam stood at the head of the bank against the sky.
He had come as far as the top and had stopped there, with his one bare foot in the grass and his red hair on end and his hands loose at his sides.
He did not have the chain.
He did not have anything.
Beyond him, over the lip of the road, they could hear it: a slow wet sound of men climbing out of a ditch, and a voice that Wystan knew calling for a sergeant, in an accent that had begun to lose its manners.
“I am staying,” said Tam.
“You are not,” said Hesper.
“I am.
I have thought it out.” His voice was high and cracked, and steady.
“If I run, they will be after all of us.
Pask and Pugh and all, for hiding a chainboy.
If I stay, I have tripped a sergeant.
That is one thing.
It is a chainboy’s mischief.
They will believe a chainboy would do a chainboy’s mischief, and they will not believe I did the rest.
I do not know how you did the rest.
I could not tell them where you went.” He wet his lips.
“I shall say I tripped him.
And that you shouted at me for it.”
“They will charge you.”
“They will charge me with a sergeant.
It is not a hanging.” He swallowed.
“Mistress.
I am sorry to ask.
It is not the moment.
But will I be paid?”
It was dreadfully small.
He said it as a boy says it who has a father at the Weir who is waiting on two links a day, and who knows that it is the worst possible time, and says it because he does not know when he will next have anyone to say it to.
Wystan opened his mouth.
Hesper put out one hand without looking, and it stopped him.
She was silent for a time.
Behind Tam the sound of the ditch went on.
A reed bird started up, and quieted.
She looked up the bank at the red-haired boy with the single boot and the thin brave neck, and the fennel moved once in her mouth, and she took it out.
“Paid,” said Hesper.
“To the day, by me, whatever the Registry writes.
And fed.”
“Fed?” said Tam.
“By somebody who can cook.
I give you my word.
A surveyor’s.”
He stood on the bank with his mouth a little open.
It had not been what he expected, and it showed.
Wystan had heard her give her word once before, the morning before, beside a dead fire, and had not expected to hear it twice.
He saw that Tam understood this, and that the boy’s eyes were bright.
“I should rather have it in writing,” said Tam.
“Ask Edwin for a receipt.”
“He will give me two,” said Tam, and laughed, a short high gulp of a laugh that cracked in the middle, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
“Water under you, Mistress.
Wys.” He lifted one hand, and held it there, stiffly, as he had at the bend in the lane on the day the party left.
Then Hesper turned and went into the reeds, and Wystan went after her.
They closed behind them like a door.
The canes rose over his head and met, and the light turned green and moving, and the Weir became a distant breath.
Hesper went ahead, light and short and quick, along a line of firm ground that he could not see and that she seemed to know in her feet, brushwood laid under the mud by some eel fisher in some other generation, and he put his boots in her prints.
The sack banged against his hip.
The reed lay against his spine.
His chain slid on his shoulder, and said its small iron thing, link on link.
At the third bend he looked back.
There was a gap in the canes, no wider than a hand, and through it he saw a long way up the bank.
A red-haired boy had turned his back on the reeds and was walking toward the road with both hands held away from his sides, as you walk toward a dog you do not know.
Beyond him a gray head came up over the lip of the causeway, wet to the neck and streaming duckweed, and another behind it.
In the left pocket of his coat, for the first time since the wax, something moved: a single small scratch, like a quill being picked up.
Tam began to explain.