59 - A Crew

There were three of them standing in the yard at the sixth bell and one of them was fifteen.

Kalen had said the sixth bell and had expected to be there on his own until the seventh, because that is what he would have expected of anybody. Instead there was Doss against the north shed wall with his lamp already out. There was Ferrin Ovel with his coat buttoned wrong. And there was a boy sitting on the weigh-pan post with his boots swinging, which is a thing nobody who has worked a week in that yard would do.

"Off the post," Kalen said.

The boy came off it.

"That is a weigh-pan. It runs heavy, and everybody in this house corrects for it by hand. Sit on the post and it runs heavier."

"By how much?"

"That is the wrong question."

"It is a real question, though," the boy said.

Doss made a sound that in another man would have been a word.

Ferrin Ovel came forward with his hand out, which nobody in Ashfall does, and said it standing in the middle of the yard in front of the other two.

"You would not strip my mother's band," he said. "Four years ago. It came in off the house list with my father's gear and you put it back in the tin and ate the day."

"I remember."

"That is the whole of what I came to say. I am not going to say it again." Ferrin put his hand down. "If anybody wants to make anything of it they can make it now."

Nobody made anything of it. Doss went and got the barrow.

Sabra let him run it out of the north end of her yard because he had asked her a straight question about rent and she had named a figure and he had paid it. That is how the two of them had done everything for four years and how they were going to go on doing it. A tenth of the gross, the use of the pan, and his own tins. She had written it in the left-hand column in front of him and turned the book round so that he could see the entry. She had not offered him one thing he had not asked for, and he had not asked for anything, and both halves of that were the reason it worked.

* * *

The boy's name was Wick and he was a Third Hand the way a puppy is a dog.

He was fifteen. He was quick with his hands and comprehensively wrong about everything, and he talked while he worked, which Kalen had never once been able to do. He was better at the third hour than he had been at the first, which is a thing that almost nobody is.

He put a Common Carry into a scrap tin on the first morning, because the frame it was in was broken, and he had decided the frame was the article.

"That is eleven marks," Kalen said.

"It was in bits."

"The frame was in bits. The Carry was not in bits."

"It is a broken frame."

"A Pattern does not care what shape the thing round it is in." He fished it out of the tin. "A bundling frame in four pieces with a live Common in it is worth eleven marks. A bundling frame in four pieces is worth a mark and a half for the iron."

"So the difference is nine and a half," Wick said, "and it is invisible."

"It is not invisible. You did not look." Kalen put the pieces in his hands. "Say it back."

"The frame is not the article."

"The frame is never the article."

"How do you look at one, then?"

"You put a hand on it and you go slowly and you do not decide anything in the first minute."

"That is not a method."

"It is the whole method," Kalen said. "Everything after it takes about four years and I have not got four years to give you."

"Then what is the article?"

"You have got it in your hands," Kalen said, and walked off and left him standing in the middle of the yard holding four pieces of broken frame.

By the fourth day Wick could call a Common by sight about half the time. He was wrong loudly and immediately, which is the only useful way to be wrong. By the sixth he had twice put his body between a bound frame and the aisle without thinking about it. Kalen watched him do it and said nothing both times.

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On the seventh he said it.

"Get out of the aisle."

"It is not moving."

"What has it got in it?"

"You tell me."

"I cannot read it."

"Then stand where a thing you cannot read is not able to reach you." Kalen did not raise his voice, which he had never once done in that yard. "It has a Hold Fast in it and it is halfway through an instruction, and you are standing where the instruction finishes. What is your Line?"

"Two hundred and ten."

"Then you have got about four seconds of Ward in you, and that frame is bound heavy. Say it back."

"Get out of the aisle."

"Get out of the aisle."

* * *

The shape of a working day changed inside a week, and it changed in a way Kalen had not costed and could not have. Alone, a man carries the whole of a job in his head, and the carrying is free right up until the afternoon he drops something. With four of them the job had to come out of his head and go onto the shed wall in chalk, in an order, in a hand that other people could read. It also had to survive being read by a boy of fifteen at the seventh bell.

He had thought that would be the cost. It turned out to be most of the gain.

Nobody had ever asked him to write it down.

Doss said four words on the second day and they were the four that mattered.

He had gone over the sorting order Kalen had chalked on the shed wall, top to bottom, without being asked, and had stood in front of it with his arms folded for the better part of a minute.

"Wrong end," he said. "Wire first."

He was right.

Wiring the tins first cost a quarter of an hour at the start of a day and saved an hour at the end of it. A man wiring lids at the seventh bell is doing careful work with nothing left in him. Kalen had known that for four years. He had gone on doing it the other way round because he had learned it the other way round, and because there had never been anybody standing behind him to say so.

He rechalked the wall.

"Say the rest," Kalen said.

"There is no rest," said Doss, and went back to the barrow.

Ferrin worked the way a man works who has been running a shop counter since he was fourteen. He counted out loud. He put things down where they could be found by somebody who was not him, and he asked twice a morning what a thing was for, and by the second week he had stopped asking, and Kalen noticed that he had not needed to be told anything twice.

"Where did you learn to stack?" Kalen said.

"My mother's back room. Twenty-one years of stock in a room the size of this bench."

"It shows."

"It is the only thing I have got," Ferrin said. "I cannot read a Pattern and I am not going to be able to. I know what I am on this yard for."

"You are on this yard because I can only look at one rack at a time."

"That will do," said Ferrin.

* * *

The arithmetic was the part he had not let himself do until the end of the first week. He did it on the shed wall in chalk with three of them watching, which is not a thing he would have done a year ago.

Alone, in his best week under the foundry, Kalen had cleared nine articles in a day and twelve on the day he had been showing off. Most of those hours were stripping, which is hands and time and a back. The rest of it was reading, which was the only thing he had ever been for. Stripping had eaten about two thirds of every working day of his life.

That is the sum every hand in the trade knows and none of them can do anything about, because the two thirds is the part that pays and the other third is the part nobody buys. A house sells hours. It does not sell reading. There has never been a line on a house invoice for a man standing still in front of a rack with his hands at his sides. Sabra Quill had been quietly eating the cost of Kalen doing exactly that for four years. She never mentioned it to him or to anybody else.

"Twenty-nine," Ferrin said, from the rack. "That is this morning and nine off the second row."

"Say it again."

"Twenty-nine."

Ferrin stripped. Doss stripped faster than Ferrin and did not stop. Wick sorted and wired and carried and got in the way in a manner that was already costing less than it returned. And Kalen went along the rack and read, and called the grade, and marked the ones that had to come off with a hook and the ones anybody could take off with a bar, and did not touch a bar all day.

"That is three of you," Ferrin said.

"It is not three of me. It is one of me doing the only thing I am any good at, and three of you doing the part I was doing badly."

"You were not doing it badly."

"I was doing it at a third of the speed of that man." Kalen pointed the chalk at Doss, who did not look up. "Ask him."

"He will not answer."

"No," said Doss.

"How long were you on that ramp?" Ferrin said.

"Thirty years."

"And the pace never changed. Loaded or empty."

"Loaded and empty," said Doss, and went back to the rack, and that was the whole of the conversation, and both of them appeared to be satisfied with it.

* * *

The wages came out of a Freehand's margin on rates the Sedge Counting House had set.

He had them written on the back of the contract sheet where he had put Doss's name in the spring. Six a week to Doss. Five to Ferrin. Three to Wick, and Wick had asked for two and been told three and had argued about it, which was the only argument Kalen won that week.

"Two is what a Third Hand gets."

"Two is what a Third Hand gets from a house that is paying for his lamp and his tin and his apron," Kalen said. "You are buying all three yourself. Three."

"My mother said not to take more than the going rate off you."

"Tell your mother it is not more. Tell her I have written it on the sheet."

"She said you would say that."

"Your mother is going to be right about most things for the next ten years," Kalen said. "Start getting used to it now and it will hurt less."

"She said that as well."

Fourteen a week, out of a margin that had been carrying one man and a cough.

The crew book was a ledger off Ovel's with a cloth spine and eighty leaves in it and it cost him a mark and a half. He ruled the first page with the edge of a knife, because a knife gives a straighter line than a rule when the paper is bad. He had got that off a twelve year old and had stopped pretending otherwise. Names down the left. Days across the top. What each man did and what each man was owed. Then a fourth column at the right hand edge, ruled in and left empty, because he did not know yet what was going into it and was fairly certain that something was.

He sat on the strip bench that night and did the whole of it twice and got the same answer twice. It worked, provided that nobody was ill and the office did not move the rate before the quarter. A fifteen year old on his yard was a thing he had not costed and could not cost. He had put a boy in a place where a bound frame could reach him. He had done it on purpose, because he needed the hands.

The Accord settled the day at the fourth bell on the Friday, and it settled it the way it settles everything.

NOTICE OF SERVICE

Ashgrove, Kalen. Ward Nine. Freehand.

Service entered for 4 hands, 1 day, ward contract.

Credited to the holder of the contract.

Four men had worked. One of them had been paid in Line.

He wrote all four names in the crew book anyway.