The Eastern Gate

Orla Tallis came under the eastern gate at first light and found a stranger with his hands on her mule.

He had his back to her. He was doing something to the near-side girth, and he did it the way her father had, from the shoulder, without hurry, and Bishop, who bit clerks, stood for it with his ears at half-mast and let him.

She counted before she spoke. It was what she did instead of shouting.

The chain was on top, where she had put it. The tent was not; it was rolled tighter than she had rolled it and lashed under the chain. The level was where the tent had been. The food was on the off side, split in two, low, so the weight sat under the mule’s spine and not beside it. And her father’s case, which she had strapped on the outside so she could reach it, was on the inside now, against the ribs, brass corners turned in, the lid toward the wall.

Everything was in a different place. She went through it twice. Everything was in a better one.

“Don’t touch the case,” she said.

“Already have.” He did not turn round. He tightened the girth a hole, put his palm flat on the mule’s belly, waited for the breath to go out, and tightened another. “It rides on the inside. Wall side on a road, hill side on a track. If he goes down he goes down on the outside, and the case is on top of him, not under.”

“It’s my case.”

“It’s your case.” Now he turned. “It’s my mule, for six months, and I’m the one who has to get him out of a bog.”

He was not tall. She had expected tall, from the word escort. He was broad through the shoulder and narrow everywhere else, and his coat was the colour of every road she had ever walked, and he had the kind of face that would be no use to a portrait painter because nothing in it moved unless he let it. His hands were the only part of him that looked as though they had been anywhere. He held them where she could see them. She noticed that, and noticed that she had noticed, and put it away to look at later.

“You’re the escort,” she said.

“Stroud.”

“Orla Tallis.”

“I know.” He went back to the girth. “You’re an hour later than the gate sergeant said, and he said you’d be early.”

She had been at the guild hall since the third bell, taking the field sheets out of their oilcloth and putting them back. That was not his business.

“I didn’t ask for an escort.”

“No. The Chancellery did.” A last pull, and a knot she did not know. “You can argue with them. They’re that way.” He tipped his head west, into the city, without looking at it. “I’ll wait.”

· · ·Scene break

The gate sergeant had a ledger, and the ledger had two lines waiting in it, and he was not going to let anyone through his arch until they were filled.

He was a heavy man with an inked thumb, and he read papers aloud whether or not anyone wanted them read, because that was how he knew he had read them. Orla gave him the commission. It was her copy: the guild’s seal in green wax at the foot, the compass and the chain, and round the rim of the wax, small enough that you had to know it was there, her name and her years, pressed there by the Master’s own hand the day she was admitted. Thirty years since the guild had put a number that low on a master’s seal. She had not asked for it to be mentioned. It was mentioned anyway, by people who wanted something.

The sergeant tilted it to the light.

“Tallis, Orla. Master surveyor, Ostmere Guild of Cartographers. Twenty-nine years.” He wrote it. “Crown’s survey of the western Ashfall, six months, for the Stannock talks. Under escort.” He looked up. “Escort?”

Stroud put a folded paper on the ledger without being asked.

The sergeant unfolded it. It was Chancellery paper, thick, the crest at the head, a clerk’s hand under it, and she saw before he read it that the name had been written in a different ink from the rest, by someone who had come back to fill a space left for it.

“Stroud, Corin. Thirty-four years. Late captain, the eastern garrisons.” The sergeant’s voice did not change, but his eyes came up off the page for the length of a breath. “Escort to the Crown’s surveyor, at the Chancellery’s charge. Named.” He wrote that too. “You’re named, Captain.”

“I’m not a captain.”

“Paper says late.”

“Paper’s right.” Stroud took the warrant back, folded it along the folds it had, and put it inside his coat, on the left. “Are we through?”

The sergeant looked at Orla. She understood that he was giving her a moment, and that it was a kindness, and that she did not want it.

“We’re through,” she said.

· · ·Scene break

Master Quennell’s letter was in the lid of the case, under the field sheets, where it had been for nine days.

She did not need to take it out. She knew what it said. The Crown’s survey of the western Ashfall, from the Sallow to the pass: cairned stations, chained baselines, fair copies on vellum to be delivered at Stannock on the day before the talks. Six months. The Brack last, for reasons of season. The escort provided by the Chancellery, and mandatory, and not a matter on which the guild had been consulted.

He had put that last part in his own hand, under the clerk’s. It was the only thing in the letter that was his. It was as near as he would ever come to telling her he was sorry, and it was not near.

She had gone to him the same afternoon and said she would go alone. She had gone alone before. She had gone alone to the lower Sallow at twenty-four and come back with the best sheet the guild had of that water, and he had hung it in the long room himself. He had let her finish. Then he had said that the survey was the Crown’s, and the Crown had conditions, and a surveyor who did not care for the conditions would find the Crown had other surveyors, and would Mistress Tallis like him to write to them.

So she had not said the thing she had come to say, which was that the last surveyor the guild had sent into the Ashfall under the Crown’s protection was her father, and she had his case to show for it.

She had gone home and packed the case instead.

· · ·Scene break

The road east from the gate ran straight for a mile and then gave up. Stroud walked in front of the mule. She walked behind it. That had not been discussed.

“Terms,” she said, to his back.

“Go on.”

“I go where the survey needs. Every station. If the station’s on a ridge, I go up the ridge. If it’s across a river, I cross the river. You don’t take me round things because they look hard.”

“Fine.”

“I stop where I stop. A station takes what it takes. I’m not going to be hurried off a reading because you’re bored.”

“I don’t get bored.” He said it to the road. “Mine. If I say down, you go down. Not why, not in a moment. Down. Then you can ask.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Then you’ve lain in the heather for nothing and I’ll say so.” He stepped round a stone she would not have seen and Bishop stepped round it after him. “Second. The case rides on the inside. Always. You don’t move it to reach it. If you need it, we stop, and I take it off.”

“That’s mine to decide.”

“It was. Third. I walk in front. I pick the ground.” He glanced back for the first time since the gate, and it was at her boots, not her face. “You’ll have thoughts about the ground. I’ll hear them. After.”

“Those aren’t terms. That’s a list.”

“I’ve never been offered terms before,” he said. “I’m doing my best with it.”

She let the mule put ten paces between them and used them to count what she knew.

A former captain. Named, in a different ink, by a clerk who had left the space until he had a name to put in it. The Chancellery’s charge, which meant the Chancellery’s man, whatever he said about the guild’s mule. Thirty-four. He walked like a man who had walked a great deal and had no opinion about it. He had said fine twice, and neither time had it sounded like comfort.

“I need the case,” she said.

He stopped. He did not ask what for. He brought Bishop’s head round so the mule stood across the road with the case toward her, unlashed it with four movements she would have to see again to learn, lifted it clear and set it on the verge with the lid toward her and the brass corners on the grass. Then he stood back, three paces, and looked at the road behind them.

She opened it. The circle sat in its cradle, the levels true, the lens capped. The field sheets in their oilcloth. Quennell’s letter. She had no reason to open it and he knew she had no reason, and he had opened it anyway, and had not said so.

She closed it. He lashed it back. Inside.

“Why you?” she said, when they were walking.

“I’m cheap.”

“That isn’t a reason. It’s a price.”

“It’s the one the clerk gave me.” Half a step, and then, because she was still there: “I know the ground. I’m cheap. And if it goes wrong out there, nobody has to explain why a serving officer was anywhere near it. Three reasons. You can have them all.”

“That’s why they chose you. It isn’t why they asked for you.”

He did not answer that. She had asked it well, she thought; she had asked it the way you laid a chain, straight, with the end pinned, so that the thing you were measuring could not move while you looked at it. He walked. The road went down toward the first of the water-meadows and the mist lay on them in a sheet you could have taken a level from, and Bishop said something bitter about the wet.

“I’ve used your first map,” Stroud said.

She kept walking. It was the only thing to do with her feet.

“You’ve used the Sallow sheet. Everybody has.”

“Not that one. Your first one.” He had not slowed. “Western Ashfall, from the guild’s notes, drawn at the city. Ten years back. It had a ford on it.”

No, eleven, her father said, in her head. Not twelve. Eleven miles.

The ford was at the bottom of the case, under the field sheets, under Quennell’s letter, rolled with the other one. She had drawn it at nineteen from three surveyors’ notes and a guild clerk’s word, and she had put Wyre Ford eleven miles north of where the Wyre could be forded by anything that wanted to come out the other side. It had gone to the garrisons with the guild’s seal on it. It had been out four years before anyone came back to say.

“I was on it,” he said.

She stopped. The mule went on for four paces and then stopped too, because the man in front had, and stood between them, and waited.

Stroud did not turn round. He stood with his back to her and his hands loose at his sides and looked at the mist on the meadows, the way she had seen him look at the road, at the sergeant, at the gate: sightlines first, and then whatever else there was.

“Which crossing,” she said. She meant it to be a question. It came out flat.

“The one you drew.”

Six months. The Sallow, the tower at Dunnock, the long ridge, the Brack last for reasons of season, and every station of it walked in step with a man who had stood on her worst mistake in his own boots and had never once, in ten years, written to the guild to tell her.

“Then you’ll know the way,” she said, and started walking, and did not count the paces, and had to begin again.