70 - Forty

Doss hit the bell at first light and they came in through the gate at a walk, and by the second bell Kalen had them at the tally shop end of Cinder Row, and he had not put a hand on one of them and never intended to.

"Forty," Ferrin said. "You are sure it is forty."

"It is forty."

"You counted at night at two hundred yards."

"I counted twice at night at two hundred yards. I have counted them again this morning at eleven feet." Kalen had the manifest against his knee. "Write it down before we start and write it down again at the yard gate. If the two numbers are not the same, you say so out loud on the road, and we stop where we are standing."

"And if I am the one who has miscounted?"

"Then we stop anyway and we count again."

Ferrin wrote it in the book.

There were three ways to do it and he had spent the night on all three.

You could shut the ward gate and leave them outside it, which is what a ward watch does, and which is correct. In nine days there would be forty of them at the wall going nowhere, and a ward feeding a road. You could designate them, which is forty contracts, forty bounties and a fortnight of a clerk's time, and there is no money in Ward Nine to pay for it and has not been since ninety-six.

Or you could put them somewhere with a wall round it and a gate that shuts, and work them out one at a time, properly, with their names, the way you do a thing when you have decided that the people it is being done to are people.

The last one wants a place. There is one place in Ward Nine with a wall round it, and it is the old foundry yard, and the bell is over it.

"Who pays for the third one?" Ferrin said.

"Nobody pays for the third one."

"Then say what it costs us. I have to enter it."

"Four days of the four of us, and the Row shut to carts for a morning, and whatever the office charges the ward for forty entries at a counter." Kalen let him get it down. "And the burnt end doors go back a week."

Ferrin ruled under it and read it back off the page.

"The first one costs nothing. The second costs money we have not got. The third costs four days."

"That is the whole of the ledger."

"Then why did it take you all night?"

"Because I was checking that I had not chosen the third one first and done the arithmetic afterwards," Kalen said. "I had. It came out the same anyway, and that is luck and not method, and it is going in the book as luck."

"Say it again," Doss said.

"They come to the bell. That is the whole of the steering and there is nothing else in it. There is no turning them and no pushing them." He looked at the three of them in turn. "If any part of this morning wants a hand on a shoulder, then that part is wrong, and we do not do it, and I will hear about it afterwards from whoever had to stop."

"Say what we do instead."

"We make the road the only thing that is open. Doss is in the tower. He hits it once at the top of every quarter and they come down the Row toward it."

"And that road is eleven hundred feet of other people's doorways," Ferrin said.

"It is eleven hundred feet of other people's doorways. So we shut them ahead of him and we open them again behind."

"Whose say-so?"

"Mine. And nothing gets barred with a household behind it that has not been told to its face, and nothing gets barred at all in front of a man who is closer than four masts."

Ferrin ran the pencil down his column.

"Forty masts. Nineteen alley mouths, six yard gates, the tenement stair, and the tally shop."

"And a barrier on every one of them, hauled off the head above it."

"Which is what the sheave is for," Ferrin said.

"Which is what the sheave is for. It is the only reason I know all forty of those heads by number."

He looked up the line while he said it. Three weeks of his life were hanging over that street on greased iron, turning in the wind, and he had bid two hundred and forty marks for it in front of a clerk who wrote something in the margin.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Wick works the heights," he said. "Same as the Charter. Barrier up, made off, down, next mast."

"And me?" Ferrin said.

"Ladder foot and doors. You do not leave the foot of that ladder for anything, and I mean anything, including me."

"And you?" Doss said.

"I walk in front of them and I do not touch a thing."

Wick had the ladder up on his shoulder before anybody had finished saying it.

That is the part Kalen thought about afterwards, standing in a yard in the dark with the book open in front of him. Not what he said. The fact that the boy had the ladder on his shoulder before the sentence was out, because it was his job, and he was good at it, and it had never once occurred to him that it might be anybody else's.

* * *

It worked for three hours and eleven minutes, and it is the best piece of ward work he has ever done.

Doss hit the bell at the top of every quarter. The sound came down over the roofs and the column came on down the middle of Cinder Row at a walk, four abreast where the road allowed it and in file where it did not. The ward stood in its own upstairs windows and watched forty strangers go under a gantry line toward a foundry that has not poured anything since ninety-six. Nobody threw anything. Nobody came down into the road. A ward that has lived eight years alongside them knows exactly what they are and exactly how little use it is to shout.

Ahead of them Wick went up and down the masts. Ladder, sheave, barrier, made off, down, run.

He was doing a mast in four minutes at the tally shop end and in three by mast twelve. At nineteen he called the grade of a pin down to Ferrin, unasked, and got it right.

"Twenty-one," he called down, at the alley by the cooperage. "Twenty-one and the yard gate, and there is a woman in the yard."

"Whose yard?"

"Ames," the boy said.

Kalen stopped in the road and put his hand up.

"Get her out of it and shut it behind her," he said. "If she will not come out, leave it open and call it open."

"It is open."

"Then it is open," Kalen said.

Ferrin wrote that down as well, and the woman came out at mast twenty-two, and the gate was shut at mast twenty-three, and none of that mattered afterwards in the slightest, and all of it is in the book.

Kalen walked eleven feet in front of the first rank the whole way with his hands empty.

He could not draw.

Nothing in the hands. That is the job now.

That is the whole of the arithmetic of that morning and it takes one line. His Balance was at minus two hundred and thirty, everything he spent was Overdraw, and a Ward held on a road with forty people on it is not a First.

So there was a man of nineteen walking backwards down his own ward with nothing in his hands at all, and a boy of fifteen thirty feet up a mast, and everybody on that road knew which of the two of them was doing the work.

At mast twenty-nine there was a foundry hand at the back of the column with a beam on his shoulder.

Kalen had read him at the gate and entered him. An eight foot ash beam, unbound, carried on the right shoulder with the left hand up on it, which is how you carry a beam. He had walked eight hundred feet of Cinder Row with it. He was going to walk however far he was told to walk with it.

The bell went at the quarter, over the roofs, from the north.

The man turned toward the sound the way they all did, and the beam came round with him.

The beam was eight feet long.

Wick was on the ladder at twenty-nine with the barrier up at the head and his right hand on the ring, making it off.

There was no shout. There was a flat sound like a door.

Kalen was forty feet up the road with his back to it.

He got there and Ferrin was already there. The boy was on the flags on his side with the ladder across him and his right arm out in front of him. The barrier was swinging on one made-off end nine feet over Ferrin's back, and the head above it was turning.

"Off him. Ferrin, off him. Back up the road."

The barrier came out of the sheave and the plank came with it.

It did not land.

Wick put a Ward up from the flags with one hand pressed into his own coat, and eleven feet of planking stood on nothing about five feet over Ferrin's shoulders. Ferrin got his boots under him and went backwards up the road on his heels and took the ladder with him.

Eleven of Ward gets you six seconds. Maybe seven, if you are angry.

It was nine. Kalen counted them.

Then the plank came down on the flags and broke in two places, and the boy went over on his back, and Doss was coming down the tower stair four at a time and was still four hundred feet away.

They got his coat off and got the belt round the forearm and Ferrin held it.

It was not a wound that a man argues with. The hand was gone at the wrist and it was gone cleanly, and the cleanness of it is the only part of that morning anybody has ever been able to call luck.

"Look at me," Kalen said. "Tal. Look at me."

The boy looked at him.

"You took it off the two of them. Do you hear me? It came out of the sheave and you took it off the two of them, and I watched the whole of it from the road."

"I did not make it off."

"You made it off."

"I did not make it off," Wick said.

Then a paper came up in front of him. He could not lift his hand to it, so he looked at Kalen instead.

"Read it."

NOTICE OF OVERDRAW

Wick, Tal. Ward Nine. Bonded.

Overdraw of 185 marks assessed against

service rendered on this day.

Collection will be assessed at the Second grade.

Settlement due within 7 days.

Doss took him up the road on the barrow with Ferrin holding the belt.

"Go with him," Kalen said. "Both of you. Ovel's first and then his mother, in that order, and you do not let anybody at that shop tell you to wait."

"There are eleven masts left."

"There are eleven masts left."

"Then who has the ladder foot?"

"Nobody has the ladder foot," Kalen said. "Go on."

There were forty people standing in the middle of Cinder Row waiting for a bell, and there was nobody in the tower to hit it.

So Kalen went up ninety-one treads and hit it himself, and came down.

He walked the last three hundred feet in front of them on his own, opening what wanted opening and standing in front of what did not. With no ladder and no barriers and no second pair of hands, that meant standing in six doorways one after another and being a door himself. It took an hour and forty minutes.

Forty went in through the old foundry yard gate. He counted them through it out loud, and Ferrin came back down the road at the thirty-first and counted the last nine with him, and the two numbers were the same.

NOTICE OF LODGEMENT

Forty bound bodies lodged, old foundry yard,

Ward Nine, by Ashgrove, Kalen. Freehand.

No designation held. No bounty payable.

No ward of origin entered.

Entered against the ward.

He had his hand on the bar of the gate when the man in the foreman's coat came past him, four feet away on the other side of it, and turned his head at a sound the way they do.

The iron at his throat was a collar seal with the ward mark filed flat off it.

Kalen read it. He got one line and he got nothing else at all.

The ladders in this trade do not move. Common, Sound, Fine, Sealed, Crown.

There is one word above that.