Dunnock Tor

Stroud went up the stair first, and called every tread down to her as he found it.

“Two. Three. Four’s gone. Five’s soft, keep to the wall. Six.”

The tower at Dunnock Tor was square and stone and older than either crown, and whoever had built it had put a timber stair up the inside of it and gone away, and the rain had been coming in at the top ever since. Orla stood in the doorway with the case at her feet and the mule’s breath on her neck and counted with him. Fifty-two treads to the platform, if the plan she carried was right. The plan was Chancellery paper and she had stopped trusting Chancellery paper at the Sallow, when she had held the Crown’s sheet up against the river and found the ferry drawn on the wrong bank.

“Eleven’s gone. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen’s gone, and fifteen, step long. Sixteen.”

He was not hurrying. She could hear him testing each one with his weight before he gave it a number, heel first, then the whole foot, then the other foot beside it. When he went quiet she found she had stopped breathing to listen and made herself begin again.

Fifty-two treads. Eleven gone. He called the last one and then said, “Ladder,” and she heard him go up something that creaked differently from the stair.

“Well?”

“The top flight’s fallen. There’s a ladder in its place.” A pause, and the creak again, twice, as he went up and came down. “Ash. Cut this year. Somebody lashed it at the top with new cord, and the somebody wasn’t tall.”

Orla looked at the mule, who looked at the heather.

“Bring the case up,” Stroud said. “I’ll take it at the ladder. You’ll want both hands.”

· · ·Scene break

The stair was worse than it had sounded. She went up it with her right shoulder to the wall and the case in her left hand, and counted, and stepped long where he had said, and at thirty-one, which he had not mentioned, the tread moved under her and she stopped with her whole weight on the wall and her heart going like the chain being reeled in.

“Tallis.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not, it’s thirty-one, I felt it go and I didn’t say. Left foot on the stringer, not the tread. Then thirty-two’s good.”

She did as he said. Thirty-two was good. She did not thank him and he did not wait for it.

He was on the ladder when she reached the top, three rungs up, and he came down and took the case from her without a word and went up with it one-handed, and she heard him set it on the platform and come back to the ladder-head, and then his hands came down to the rails on either side, holding them steady from above.

She looked at his hands, and at the ladder, and at the drop behind her, and went up. The rails did not move. Neither did he, until her head came level with the platform, and then he stepped back the width of it, and she came out into the wind.

Dunnock Tor stood one thousand four hundred and sixty feet above the Sallow, by her level at the bottom; the platform put her thirty-eight feet above that. From it she could see the river, and the ferry crossing as a break in the far trees, and the long grey back of the ridge to the east with its line of cairns, and the whole of the country she had come to draw, laid out under a sky that was clear from one edge to the other and had a wind in it like a hand.

She set the legs. The circle sat in its cradle and she lifted it out, and the wind took her sleeve, and the bubble in the level went to the end of its tube and stayed there.

She levelled it again. The wind moved her, and it moved.

“Stand behind me,” she said.

He came. Not close.

“Closer. I need something that doesn’t move. When I bend to the glass the wind gets under me and I can’t hold the reading. If you’re there it can’t.”

“Where do you want my hands?”

She thought about it, because he had asked, and because he had asked it as a question with an answer, not as a courtesy.

“On the rail. Either side. Don’t hold me. Just be there.”

“Say if it changes.”

He stood in. She felt him arrive before he touched her, the wind going off her back like a door closing, and then his chest against her shoulder blades and his forearms past her on the rail, not touching, and she bent to the glass.

The bubble held.

She took the ridge cairn. She read it aloud, in her father’s way, the number and then the number again, and wrote it in the book against her hip. She took the ferry gap. She took the near cairn on the shoulder below. Each time she straightened to write, her back came up against him and stopped there, and each time she bent again, the wind came at her and did not get through.

He was warm. That was all it was; he was a warm thing in a cold wind and she was a surveyor who needed a fixed point. She could feel him breathing. She could feel, if she attended to it, the beat under the breathing, slow, slower than hers, and she did not attend to it, and counted eleven of them before she caught herself and took the next bearing.

“Done,” she said.

He stepped back at once. The wind came in where he had been.

· · ·Scene break

The river bend was wrong.

She saw it before she had the circle on it. The Dunnock Water came down out of the moss to the north and ran past the foot of the tor and then, three-quarters of a mile south, it should have gone west round the shoulder of the near ridge to meet the Sallow. That was what the Crown’s sheet said. It was what she had drawn herself, at the city, from the guild’s notes. It was how everybody drew it.

It went east.

It went east round the shoulder and ran down a whole side valley she had no sheet for, a valley with a floor and a bottom and a wall on the far side, and joined the Sallow two miles further down than any map she had ever seen said it did.

She took the bearing three times. It was the same three times.

“Stroud.”

“I see it.”

“You see it.” She did not turn round. “You’ve seen it before.”

“It’s always done that.”

“The Crown’s sheet has it going west. My sheet has it going west. The guild’s had that river going west for sixty years.”

“The river hasn’t heard.”

“You knew.” She turned round then. He was standing with his back to the parapet and the wind flattening his coat and he was looking at her, not the river, which was unlike him. “You’ve been through this country twice a year for fifteen years. You crossed that river. You knew it went east.”

“I knew the river.” He said it without any weight on it at all. “I never looked at the map.”

She looked at him for the length of a bearing. Then she wrote it down. Dunnock Water bends E, not W, at three-quarters mile S of tor; joins Sallow approx two miles below charted confluence. Bearing taken thrice. Light good.

She stopped, with the pen on good.

“I log the light,” she said. “At every station. Date, wind, light. My father taught me. He said a bearing without the light was a number without a witness.”

Stroud said nothing. He had gone still against the parapet, the particular stillness he had, that was not rest.

“The report on my father says the patrol took his instrument case for a weapon in poor light.” She wrote the time in the book. “It was half past three in the afternoon in June. He logged it himself, at the station before. Light good, from the west, clear to the ridge. And then someone wrote poor light, and it was signed, and that was the end of it.”

The wind went over the platform. Down below, the mule shifted, and a stone went down the slope.

“I don’t use the phrase,” she said. “I don’t use any phrase like it. If I can’t see, I write that I can’t see. I don’t write that the light was poor.”

He did not say he was sorry. She had been braced for it, the way you brace for a step you have been told is soft, and it did not come, and she found the not-coming harder to stand on.

He had a thing to say. She could see it in him, the way you could see a reading before the bubble settled. He looked at her for a long moment with the wind between them, and did not say it, and then he turned his head east.

“Smoke,” he said.

· · ·Scene break

Two fires, on the far ridge, five miles off by her circle and a little south of the line of cairns. Small. Grey going to white as she watched. Not together and not far apart.

“Shepherds,” she said.

“Shepherds burn one fire. Two fires is two lots of people who don’t want to share one.” He watched it the way she had watched the river. “Or a patrol that’s been told to look bigger than it is.”

“Whose?”

“Can’t tell from here. Can’t tell from there, half the time.” He picked up the case. “We’re going down.”

She took the circle out of its cradle and wrapped it and put it in, and closed the lid on the brass corners, and he was on the ladder with it before she had stood up. On the stair he went first again, and called the treads again, and at thirty-one he said “Stringer,” and she stepped on it.

There was a drover on the road at the foot of the tor, where the drove road passed under the shoulder, with forty sheep and a dog and the walk of a man who had another ten miles in him. He raised a hand. Stroud raised one back, and stopped the mule, and passed the time of day with him, and she stood a little behind and listened to him lie.

He did not say anything false. She listened for it. He said they had come over the Sallow at Hob’s, which was true, and were going down to Hatch by the lower path, which was true, and that the surveyor was taking her stations along the road, which was true of every station but one. He asked about the ridge and the drover said there were folk on it, he didn’t know whose, they’d not come down. He said the weather was on the turn. He wished the drover a good road.

He did not say the tower.

They walked on. The tor went behind the shoulder of the hill and she looked back at it once, at the square black top of it against the sky, where she had stood for an hour with a man at her back who had not moved.

“You left it out,” she said.

“Whoever’s on that ridge will ask him what he’s seen. He’ll tell them. He’s a drover; it’s the only thing he has to sell that isn’t wool.” Stroud walked. “He’s seen a surveyor on the road. That’s what she is. He’s not seen her on a tower with a view of every fire for eight miles, because nobody told him.”

“You’d already decided that before he waved.”

“Before we came down.”

“Before I’d finished the station.”

“About then.” He did not look back. “You’ll have thoughts about it. I’ll hear them. After.”

She had thoughts about it. She had them for the next mile, and the mile after, in order, the way she did everything, and by the third mile they had stopped being about the drover.

He had known the river. He had known which tread was gone before it went. He had known, when she said poor light, a thing he had chosen not to say; she had watched him choose. And he had taken the tower off the map of the day without asking her, and told her after, and it had been right, and she had not been able to find the instrument that would have told her so in advance.

Behind them, on the far ridge, the two fires would be going out about now. She did not turn round to see. She counted the paces to the next fixed point instead, and lost count at forty, and knew why, and did not begin again.