65 - The Gantries

Wick came down off the fortieth mast at four minutes past the eighth bell with the last head in the cradle and both hands on the ladder, and Ferrin called the time and wrote it, and that was the Charter.

Nobody cheered. There was nobody to cheer. It was a Monday, and the street had been walking round the shear legs for twenty days and had stopped finding it interesting on about the fourth.

Doss took the cradle off him at the bottom and set the head down on its side on the flags. Ferrin ruled a line under a column he had been keeping for twenty days.

Kalen sat down on the kerb outside the tally shop with his back against the wall and let his hands shake where nobody had to watch them.

The twentieth day of twenty-two.

It had been eleven live and it had been thirteen.

He had read forty heads from the ground across three evenings and had called thirty-eight of them right. That is a thing nobody else in Ward Nine could have done at all.

He had also been wrong twice. Being wrong twice had eaten two days out of the margin that was supposed to be the margin.

The two he missed were both in the same hand.

Thirty-one of those heads went up in the year his grandmother was born, laid in by a man whose mark he could read the way you read a friend's writing. Nine were rebound forty years later by somebody else. The second man wrote a hand Kalen could hear and could not spell, the way you can follow a language in a shop and not in a book.

That was not luck. It was not carelessness either.

It was a hole in what he knew, in a place where he had not known there was one, and it has a figure on it now, and the figure is two days and two Patterns.

"Say the four again," Sabra said.

She had come down at the seventh bell with the pipe going and had stood off the work the way she stands off work. She had not weighed anything, because there was nothing here to weigh.

"Head four, a Bearing. Head seventeen, a Hold Fast. Head twenty-two, an Even Load. Head thirty-six, a Bank." Kalen had his eyes shut. "All Sound. All out clean. All entered and sold into the Charter at schedule."

"And the rest of the thirteen."

"Two Commons entered at scrap. Five that came out dead because they were dead before I put a hook on them, and I said so at the counter on the first day and the clerk wrote it in the margin." He opened his eyes. "And two I killed."

"Say those two."

"Head fifteen and head thirty-two."

Sabra smoked and waited.

Head fifteen had gone at eleven in the morning on the fourth day.

They had the shear legs up at fourteen, which was live and had taken all morning, and fifteen is nine feet along the pavement from it. You do not strike shear legs to walk nine feet.

Wick had a drift on the pin. Kalen was on the flags below him with the manifest against his knee and his eyes on the next mast along. The boy called down asking. Kalen said scrap. The boy put the hammer on it.

There is no sound when a Pattern goes. There never is.

It had been a Fine grade Even Load, sixty years old, three quarters of the way through a sentence. Then it was a lump of iron in a rope cradle.

Wick came down the ladder faster than he should have and stood there with the drift in his hand.

"That was live."

"That was live."

"You said scrap."

"I said scrap."

"You have never once been wrong about one of those. Not since I have been here."

"Get the cradle off," Kalen had said. "We are two behind and it is eleven in the morning."

That was the whole of what he said to the boy about it, then or since.

He went back at the end of that day, alone, after the crew had gone up the road. He stood under mast fifteen for about a quarter of an hour with a lamp, looking at a plain iron head lying on the flags with a Fine grade gone out of it.

There was one useful thing available to him and he did it. He worked out how he had got it wrong.

Thirty-two went the same way on the eleventh day. He did that one himself, with a hook, on purpose, because by then he knew he could not read the second hand and had gone in anyway to find out how bad it was.

It was bad. He entered that as well.

"You told the counter five were dead," Sabra said. "Did you tell the counter about the two?"

"I told the counter about the two on the day."

"On the day."

"It is entered in the clerk's hand with the time on it, and it comes off my figure at schedule, and it is the worst forty marks I have ever spent."

"You could have entered them with the five."

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"I could have entered them with the five and nobody in Kentra would ever have known the difference," Kalen said. "I have got a boy up a mast on my paper. He is going to write what I write."

"Hm," said Sabra.

The Accord settled it at the ninth bell, under the line, with the whole of Cinder Row hanging quiet overhead. Forty heads, greased, turning on iron for the first time in sixty years.

DISCHARGE OF CHARTER

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Forty gantry heads, Cinder Row. Delivered on

the twentieth day of a term of twenty-two.

Materials, labour and service credited.

Recoveries entered at schedule.

Settled.

SCHEDULE OF RECOVERIES

Cinder Row gantry line, Ward Nine.

Head 4 ..... Bearing ....... Sound

Head 17 .... Hold Fast ..... Sound

Head 22 .... Even Load ..... Sound

Head 36 .... Bank .......... Sound

Entered to the Charter. Not to the holder.

NOTICE OF SERVICE

Service entered for 4 hands, 20 days,

ward Charter, Ward Nine.

Credited to the holder of the Charter.

NOTICE OF DEDUCTION

Two recoveries lost in the course of the work.

Assessed at schedule against the holder.

Settled.

Forty marks, and the word at the bottom of it was the same word they print on a Collection, in the same place, in the same flat little hand.

Kalen read it once and put it away and did not say anything about it to the three of them, and it is on the third page of the crew book in his own writing, with the date, where anybody who ever wants it can find it.

Not to the holder. He had read that shape on a lodgement notice in a pump gallery at half past the ninth bell, standing next to a man who was feeding his own scavenge into a housing for nothing at all, and it had not been about him then either.

Ferrin worked the coin out on the kerb with the book on his knees. He did it twice, and then read it out, because that was in the terms now.

Wick came and sat down on the kerb next to him to watch the pencil.

"Two hundred and forty in. Seventy-seven out on the winch and the smith. Wages, three weeks, four of us at six, which is seventy-two."

"Say the deduction."

"Forty."

Ferrin ran the pencil down and stopped it at the bottom.

"Fifty-one left, less the two we owe Sabra for the month."

"Say it as a week."

"Sixteen a week of margin."

"Say what it was in the spring."

Ferrin turned back four pages to find it, which was itself an answer.

"Eleven a week with a materials hole in it," he said. "And one man."

"Sixteen," Wick said. "Three weeks of that for sixteen a week."

"Sixteen a week and no hole in it."

"It is not much."

"It is not much," Kalen said. "Say the other book."

Ferrin turned to the back of it, where the second set of columns is, in a hand that is not his.

"Balance. Minus four hundred and seventy on the fifth. Minus a hundred and twenty tonight."

"Three hundred and fifty," Wick said.

"Three hundred and fifty, which is not coin and will not buy you a loaf, and it is the only reason nobody is coming for me this winter." Kalen put his head back against the wall. "There are two books because there are two kinds of money. Learn which one you are looking at before you decide how you feel."

* * *

Sabra came over to the kerb with a flat box in her hand.

Kalen had last seen it on the middle shelf of a press with a card wired to it in her writing, and he had not asked about it, and she had not mentioned it, and that had been eleven weeks ago.

"Sit up," she said.

He sat up.

"Three of these came to me in ninety-six with an instrument on them. The instrument says releasable to a Freehand." She put the box on the kerb between them. "And it says three separate things about when. One when the Standing lands. One when a Charter is completed to term. One when the man is Warranted."

Kalen looked at the box and did not touch it.

"He wrote that."

"His hand is on the back of it. Read it yourself, you read better than I do."

"He set it out in three."

"He set it out in three because he had three." Sabra took the pipe out of her mouth. "Three things at once is a windfall," she said. "One at a time is a reason to get up."

"He was in arrears the whole eleven years."

"He was in arrears the whole eleven years," Sabra said, "and he went to a warrant office on an afternoon off and paid a fee to put three Patterns beyond the people coming for them. Eleven months before the floor took him. He never said a word to anybody, including me."

"Did he say what the third one was for?"

"He said what all three were for. He said they were for his boy." She put the pipe back. "He did not know he had a girl yet. That is the only part of it I would take out if anybody let me."

Kalen opened the box.

It cost him nothing to bind, which is the part nobody tells you about a trust. The fee was paid in 1196 by a foundry hand out of a wage, and the Accord had held the shape for eight years and had not charged anybody rent on it.

PATTERN: Quench (Sound)

Held in: Ashgrove, Kalen

Draw: Ward, measured

Heat taken from a bound thing is taken slight.

You take it off the iron before you take it off the fire. C. Ashgrove

He read the last line six times.

It was a working instruction. It was the sort of thing a man says over his shoulder to a boy of eleven on a floor, in the middle of doing something else, without turning round to see whether it landed.

It had gone into an Accord instrument in 1196 and come out again in 1204 in the same words, unsoftened, with the mark at the end of it, the way it had put R. Odder's mark on a quarry hammer and his own on three draw-hooks.

The Accord had never in nine hundred years been kind. It had also never once edited anybody.

"Seven of nine," Kalen said.

"Seven of nine."

Sabra got up off the kerb and knocked the pipe out against the wall.

"Do not spend the last two on anything you could have bought."

She went up Cinder Row without looking at the line she had walked under twice a day for nineteen years and had never once had to think about. That is what a gantry is supposed to be. It is supposed to be a thing nobody thinks about.

Kalen sat on the kerb with a box on his knees for a while after she had gone.

* * *

He opened the sheet where he was sitting, under the line, with the ward going home around him and the crew fifty feet off arguing about beer.

ASSESSMENT: Kalen Ashgrove

Ward Nine (Ashfall), Kentra

Line ..................... 1,900

Balance .................. -120 IN ARREARS, day 95

Standing ................. Freehand

Craft .................... Reclamation, First Hand

Charter .................. Cinder Row gantry line, completed

FACULTY draw yield

Force ............... 10 1.0

Quicken .............. 9 1.0

Ward ................ 12 1.2

Read ................. 2 1.8

Bind ................ 19 0.8

Patterns ................. 7 / 9

Next collection .......... none assessed

Force ten.

It had been ten on the night he came up out of the foundry with a roll under his arm. It had been ten on the House steps in the worst week of his life. It was ten now and it would be ten in the spring.

A man who wants that row to move should have been born with a different one.

Read two, at one point eight.

That was the row that had moved. It moved because he stood in a street on three evenings and read iron at thirty feet in bad light, and because he went back and did it twice more after he found out he had two of them wrong.

It was worth two hundred and forty marks, a completed Charter and two dead Patterns, and he could not have told anybody which way round that came out.

The Charter row had been on his sheet for six weeks with nothing after the dots.

He looked at it for a while with the line turning quietly over his head and did not say anything about it out loud, because there was a crew fifty feet away and some things are yours.

Then the last of it printed.

NOTICE OF STANDING

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Charters completed to term ......... 1

A Freehand holding a completed Charter may

petition for Warranted.