Bastian slept for a day and a half.
They put him on a pile of old paper-sacks at the back of Tolley’s cellar, under the vaulting, where it was warm from the brick of the bakehouse next door, and Agathe Strell — who had, it turned out, trained as an infirmarian at the Wells forty years ago before her ears were found — reset the two broken fingers properly, with whalebone and linen, while he lay with his eyes shut and didn’t make a sound. Then she cleaned his shoulders with spirit and boiled water, and that he did make a sound at, once, a long low hiss through his teeth. Then he slept.
He slept the way he did everything. Heavily. Completely. Like a stone dropped in a pond. The others moved round him and talked over him and Deverel’s graver whispered at the bench and he didn’t stir.
Oriel sat beside him for a long time the first night, with her back against the warm brick and her leg out and the first volume of the Settling Ledger on her knee, not reading it.
“He’ll mend,” said Agathe Strell, beside her. The Mother-Superior was sitting on an upturned type-case with her bare feet flat on the brick floor. “The fingers will be stiff. He’ll never hold a pen well. He won’t need to.”
“He held a chain,” said Oriel. “Twenty-two years. He’ll want to hold a chain.”
“He’ll hold it.” Agathe looked at the sleeping bulk of him on the sacks. “A man like that holds things with whatever he’s got left.”
Deverel didn’t sleep at all.
He’d stopped going to the Press. On the twenty-sixth, the morning after the cell, he’d simply not gone. Treddick’ll have someone at my bench by noon, he’d said, loudly, at the bottom of the cellar steps. Asking why Pike was cutting so slowly on Charter Eve. Asking what Pike had in his apron. He’d shrugged. Forty-four years. They can find somebody else to make the nines look like sevens.
So he engraved. All day, all night, with the water-globe and the lamp, at the long bench under the barred window, with the great copper plate on its sandbag in front of him and the jeweler’s glass screwed into his eye. Bastian woke on the second morning and lay on his sacks and watched him for an hour without speaking. Then he got up, slowly, his shoulders bandaged under his ruined shirt and his right hand in its whalebone splint, and went to the stove, and made porridge, and put a bowl of it on the bench at Deverel’s elbow.
Deverel didn’t look up. He didn’t see it. He was cutting the Esker Water.
Bastian came back an hour later and took the cold porridge away and put down a hot bowl.
Deverel didn’t see that either.
The third time, Bastian stood beside the bench with the bowl in his good hand and waited until the graver lifted off the copper at the end of a line, and then put the bowl down exactly in front of the jeweler’s glass. Deverel sat back. Looked at it. Looked up at Bastian.
“Eat,” said Bastian. Slowly, so Deverel could read it.
Deverel Pike looked at him for a long moment. Then he ate the porridge. All of it. And handed the bowl back, and went back to the copper.
After that Bastian did it every three hours. He didn’t say anything. He just put it in front of the glass.
Oriel read the Ledger.
All six volumes. She’d read the first in a day; the other five took four days more, sitting on the crate beside Deverel’s bench, writing out on slips of paper the figures he needed, holding them into the light.
It was very simple, once she had the shape of it. Every true-mark on the Orme Leaf had a line in the Ledger, every year. Its name and number. Its position by the Register — which never changed. Its position by the stars — which always did. And beside them, the correction to be cut on Charter Eve, so the Register would go on never changing.
Lusk, Church Tower, T.M. 1104. Register: unchanged. By stars: E. 11 rods. Correction: 11 rods, all Lusk marks, uniform.
That was C.380. Lanyon was dead by then. The hand was his successor’s, thin and upright. By C.385 it was Penhallow’s: small, very fine, left-handed, leaning slightly backward, and she found she could tell exactly where he’d been tired or ill or troubled by the way the long tails of his sevens dragged.
She found Coldharrow. Every year. The same figures as Imbert’s star-books, to the rod, year after year after year. Two men, a day’s ride apart, one in a dome and one in a tower, writing down the same truth in the dark, one to show the world and one to hide it.
She found Esker Bay’s reeve-hall star.
She found the Lip. They’d kept that too. Not every year — there was nobody to measure it — but every few years a Survey-General had sent someone east, quietly, under some other errand, to sight the edge from Strand’s gatepost star. The last time was C.404. Eight years ago. Edge from Esker star: 10 lg 31 ch.
She sat with that one for a long time.
Then she wrote it on a slip and held it in the light, and Deverel cut it, a fine bright line in the east of the copper, eight years ago, between the old black edge and the new red one.
There was a second plate.
Agathe had suggested it, on the second night, watching Deverel cut. The back of the sheet, she’d said. You’re putting how to check it on the back. Plain words. Put the proof there too.
So Deverel set the back in type, on the old iron hand-press, while the copper plate for the front was still being cut. He’d been a compositor before he was ever an engraver, at nineteen, at this same bench, for Abel Tolley. His hands remembered. They flew over the type-cases picking out the little grey lead letters, upside down and backward, and set them in the stick, line after line, faster than Oriel could read them.
At the top of the back, in the biggest type Abel Tolley had owned — a heavy black face that had last been used for a bill advertising a fair in C.396 — it said:
CHECK IT YOURSELF
Then, in plain smaller type, Oriel’s words. She’d written them seven times on the back of slips of Ledger paper before she got them plain enough.
Every deed on the Orme Leaf names a Survey true-mark — a brass star on a church tower, a gatepost, a bridge — and gives the distance and bearing from it to your boundary. Borrow a chain. Any chain proved at Orme will do. Walk it from the star to your boundary along the bearing in your deed. If you come out where the deed says, the Register is right about your land. If you don’t, it isn’t.
Then: find where your star is by the sky. And Imbert’s method, simplified, step by step, the way he’d taught her in a season. A star-glass — any good spyglass on a stand. A clock — any good clock, set once by the sun at noon at the nearest Shield-rock, or by the bells of Orme, which are set to the Shield. The stars to watch, by name. How to read their height. How to time their crossing. A table, printed small, that turned the readings into a position. You do not need to be a surveyor. You need a clear night and patience. A farmer can do this. A carter can do this. You can do this.
And under that, in a box with a heavy black rule round it, the proof.
From the Settling Ledger of the Crown Survey, Volume I, page 1, in the hand of Survey-General Osbert Lanyon:
”The Settling. Commenced Charter Eve, C.352, by order of O. Lanyon, S.-G. In the presence of A. Aske. God forgive us. It is for the best.”
From the sealed Groan Registers of the Wells of Orme, east face, C.352 to C.410, every year, in the hands of one hundred and twelve different Listeners:
”Rate quickening. Recommend comparison with earlier registers.”
They have been compared.
Agathe had written that last line herself. In her small careful hand, on a slip, and given it to Deverel without a word, and he’d set it.
The front plate was finished on the morning of the twenty-ninth.
Deverel sat back from the bench. He took the jeweler’s glass out of his eye. He put the graver down, very carefully, beside the plate, the way you’d lay down something that had been part of your hand for a long time. Then he sat with his hands flat on the bench on either side of the copper and didn’t move.
They came and looked.
It was beautiful. Oriel hadn’t expected that. She’d expected it to be correct — it was Deverel, it would be correct to the hair — but she hadn’t expected it to be beautiful. The Orme Leaf filled the copper, edge to edge, its long rivers and its scattered towns and its roads, every line as fine and clean and bright as if it had been drawn in light. The Esker Water in the east, its shore a hundred tiny curving strokes. The Shield in the west, a deep hatched border. And at the far eastern edge, the Lip: not one line but many, a whole sequence of them, the old black edge from C.352 and then, closer, and closer, and closer, the years.
And every town was there twice.
Lusk, here. And Lusk again, a little east. A tiny ring, and another tiny ring, with a thread between.
Orme, in the middle. And Orme again, two leagues east, with a thread between.
“It’s right,” said Oriel. Her voice came out strange. “It’s all right. Every one.”
“Of course it’s right,” said Deverel. Too loud. Then, quieter: “It’s the only right map in the realm.”
They pulled the first proof that afternoon.
The copperplate press was in the back of the cellar, a smaller thing than the iron hand-press, with two great rollers and a long flat bed and a spoked wheel. Deverel inked the plate himself, black first — daubed the thick ink into every line with a pad, then wiped the face of the copper clean with a stiff cloth and the heel of his hand, over and over, until the bright metal shone and the ink lay only in the cuts. He laid a damp sheet on it. Blankets over the sheet. And then he looked round for someone to turn the wheel.
Bastian was already there.
He put his left hand on the spoke. His right, in its splint, he held against his chest. He looked at Deverel.
Deverel nodded.
Bastian turned the wheel.
The bed went through the rollers slowly, with a long deep creak, under all his weight. Out the other side. Deverel lifted the blankets. Peeled back the sheet. Held it up in the lamplight.
The Orme Leaf. In black. Every line. Every town where the Register put it.
“Now the red,” said Deverel.
That was harder. That was a second plate, a smaller one, cut to lie exactly over the first: just the red rings for the true towns, and the threads, and the red lines of the Lip by year. It had to sit on the black to the width of a hair or the whole map was nonsense, Orme’s red ring sliding off into a field, the threads pointing nowhere. Deverel had cut two little crosses in the corners of both plates, and pricked holes in the sheet through the black crosses, and now he laid the damp sheet down on the red plate with a needle through each hole into each red cross, and Bastian turned the wheel again.
Deverel peeled it up.
He held it to the light.
Black and red. Every town twice. The Lip coming west.
And the red was wrong.
Not much. A hair. Less. Oriel couldn’t see it. She was looking at Orme and Orme’s red ring sat two leagues east of it exactly where it should and she said it’s perfect and Deverel said, flatly, too loud, “No,” and put his finger on the north-west corner. Where the red cross was a hair’s width off the black one.
“Paper’s stretched,” he said. “Damp. Between the passes. A hair. Over the whole sheet it’s a hair. At the Lip —“ He put his finger on the eastern edge. On the red line for C.414, which was supposed to run along the near shore of the Esker Water. It ran a hair out into the water instead. “— it puts the Bay’s line in the lake. Somebody in the Bay’ll look at that and say, the edge comes in the lake, not the town, we’re all right.”
They stood and looked at it.
“Can you fix it?” said Oriel.
“Dry the sheets between passes,” said Deverel. “Slower. Weight them. And move the red plate’s crosses.” He was already reaching for a burnisher. “Half a hair. Tonight.”
He did it that night. He burnished out the red plate’s four crosses and recut them half a hair nearer the middle. Then they pulled another proof, and dried it between the passes under a board weighted with type-cases, and the red came down on the black like a key into a lock.
C.414 ran along the near shore of the Esker Water. Exactly. Through the salt-pans. Through the reeve’s hall.
Deverel looked at it for a long time under the glass.
“Now,” he said.
They printed for three nights.
Oriel would remember those three nights afterward as the strangest and best of her life, and would never be able to say why. They weren’t happy. Nobody was happy. They were frightened and exhausted and filthy with ink, and outside, in Orme, the Chainguard were going from street to street with Oriel’s name, and Treddick had been to the Wells and found the undercroft empty and the Mother-Superior gone, and to Orrel’s house, and to the Press, and the Ropewalk was the last street left in the old city they hadn’t searched yet. They knew it. Sarn heard the boots every night, three streets away, two streets. She told them, flatly, and they kept working.
But they worked.
Deverel inked. All night. Black plate, then red plate, then black. The pad, the cloth, the heel of his hand, over and over, until his palm was black to the wrist and the skin was cracking. He wiped every plate himself. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch it. Wrong wipe and the lines fill. Wrong wipe and the Lip’s a smudge.
Bastian turned the wheel. All night. Left-handed. His right held against his chest in its splint. He didn’t stop. He didn’t ask to stop. He leaned his weight on the spoke and the bed went through the rollers and came out the other side, and he waited, and Deverel inked, and he leaned on the spoke again. Sometimes, toward dawn, Oriel would see him close his eyes, standing up, between pulls. But when Deverel nodded, the wheel turned.
Agathe Strell took the sheets off.
The Mother-Superior of the Wells of Orme, who had not done manual work in forty years, stood at the end of the press in an ink-stained apron over her grey robe with her bare feet on the brick, and peeled each damp sheet off the plate as it came through, by the corners, the way Deverel showed her once, and laid it on a drying-board, and laid another board on top, and reached for the next. She didn’t speak. She didn’t make mistakes. Around the fourth hour of the first night Oriel saw her smiling, very slightly, to herself.
Oswin and Hesper damped the paper and stacked the boards. They’d come from the Wells the second day, with the last of the Groan Registers in a handcart under a load of turnips, and stayed. They worked barefoot, silently, like people who were used to working in silence in the dark, which they were.
And Sarn slept.
That was the strangest thing. Oriel noticed it on the first night. Sarn had been sitting on the brick floor by the drying-boards, sorting sheets, and at some point in the small hours she’d lain down on her side among them with her palm flat on the brick, and closed her eyes, and her breathing had gone long and slow. She slept for four hours. Through the creak of the press and the slap of the boards and Bastian’s boots and everything.
When she woke she sat up and looked round her as if she didn’t know where she was.
“I slept,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I haven’t slept four hours since —“ She stopped. She put her palm on the brick again. “It’s the press,” she said slowly. “It’s so loud in the stone. The rollers. Every pull. It’s the loudest thing for a hundred rods.” She looked at the press, and at Bastian leaning on the wheel. “I can’t hear the groan under it.”
She slept again the second night. And the third.
The last sheet came off the press in the grey before dawn on the first of Eleventhmonth. Settlement Day.
Five thousand and forty. Agathe had counted. Stacked on drying-boards along the whole length of the cellar wall, five boards high, black and red, every one of them the Orme Leaf as it was.
Deverel wiped the plate one last time and laid down the cloth and stood looking at his hands. They were black to the elbow. His palms were cracked and bleeding at the creases. He held them out in front of him in the lamplight and turned them over, slowly, and Oriel didn’t know what he was thinking.
Bastian took his hand off the spoke of the wheel.
He didn’t sit down. He stood beside the press with his good hand hanging and his splinted one against his chest and his head bowed, for a long time, like a horse at the end of a day. Then he looked round at the boards along the wall.
“Five thousand,” he said.
“Five thousand and forty,” said Agathe Strell.
“Is it enough?”
Nobody answered.
Oriel took one sheet off the top of the last stack. Still faintly damp. She held it in the lamplight.
THE ORME LEAF, AS IT IS.
Every town, twice. The threads between. The red lines in the east, coming west, year by year, crowding closer: the near shore of the Esker Water, the salt-pans, Lusk, the eastern quarter of Orme itself. And at the bottom, in Deverel’s fine small capitals: Engraved from the Crown Survey’s own Settling Ledger, Vols. I–VI, and the star-books of Imbert Vale, Surveyor, C.364–403. Check it yourself.
She turned it over.
CHECK IT YOURSELF, in Abel Tolley’s heavy fair-bill type. The plain words. The method. The table. And at the bottom, in the black-ruled box: Lanyon’s line. The Listeners’ line. Agathe’s line.
They have been compared.
“It’s enough to start,” said Oriel.
She folded the sheet in four and put it in the inside pocket of her coat, against the little brass star-glass. For Orrel’s wall.
Then she looked at the others. At Deverel with his black hands. At Bastian with his bowed head. At Agathe in her apron. At Oswin and Hesper sitting together on the turnip cart, asleep. At Sarn on the floor with her palm on the brick.
“Ropewalk at the third bell,” she said. “Every ropemaker’s still got a handcart. Pike knows half of them. The Wells’ carriage at the old fish-market. Hesper and Oswin know the Listeners who’ll walk — they say forty. Orrel’s clerks, he says a dozen. The eel-man on the Chain Bridge takes a crown a bundle and asks nothing.” She took a breath. “By the eighth bell, when they open the Survey House steps for the deeds, I want one on every wall in Orme.”
“And then?” said Sarn.
Oriel looked at her.
“Then we find out,” she said, “if anybody looks.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
TOLLEY’S, 26th Tenthmonth – 1st Eleventhmonth C.412
FRONT: COPPER, 2 PLATES (BLACK/RED), D. PIKE. REGISTER FIXED 1/2 HAIR (C.414 WAS IN THE LAKE).
BACK: TYPE. “CHECK IT YOURSELF.” METHOD. LANYON’S LINE. THE LISTENERS’ LINE. A.S.: “THEY HAVE BEEN COMPARED.”
LEDGER: LIP SIGHTED C.404 (SECRET): 10 LG 31 CH.
PRINTED: 5,040.
B. COYLE: TURNED THE WHEEL 3 NIGHTS, ONE HAND.
S. IVO: SLEPT.
SETTLEMENT DAY.