94 - The Yard

They came in through the open gate at a walk, the way they always do, and the first thing they did was go to the rows.

There were nineteen of them.

Kalen had the count before he decided to have it, off one look down the yard. That is what Tally does to you.

Six or seven were in green wool with brass at the collar, kept so well that his body went slack for half a second, the way it had in a doorway on the first day of all this. Two were in carters' coats.

The rest were in whatever they had been wearing on the day, which is what the rest are always in.

They spread down the yard without looking at one another and put their hands on the stock.

"Out of the yard," Kalen said. "Go on. Out."

The nearest one turned his head toward the sound and picked up a drum.

* * *

Wick came out of the strip shed with a lamp already lit. Ferrin came over the wall from Tallow Street with his coat inside out, and Doss was in the yard before either of them.

Brem and Quist came out of the north shed with a tray between them and stood there holding it.

"Put it down," Kalen said. "In the row. Then get behind the pan post."

"There are nineteen of them."

"There are nineteen of them and they are not here for us."

"You cannot know that."

"I have known it for a minute," Kalen said. "Put the tray down."

The reason was the rows. They were not searching, and a thing looking for something moves differently from a thing that has found it.

These went to the nearest stack, took the top item off it, squared it under the arm the way you square a load you mean to carry a distance, turned, and started up the yard toward the gate.

Nineteen porters, in a yard laid out in rows with everything squared and labelled, at the tenth bell at night.

They were loading it out.

"Where are they taking it?" Ferrin said.

Kalen watched the first one go through the gate and turn left up the gate road, with a drum under his arm and eleven hundred feet of empty street in front of him.

Left is the length of Cinder Row, and then the yard wall, and then a Sedge dock that has been bricked up for eleven years.

"Nowhere," he said.

* * *

He did the only piece of thinking he had time for.

You do not turn them. It is the first thing anybody tells a boy on his first morning in a house, and it is the last thing he forgets. You do not turn them, and you do not argue with them, and you do not stand in the aisle.

You change what is in the aisle.

There were four hundred and ten entered items in that yard in rows, in the order he had put them, and he had put a hand on every one of them in the last day and a half.

Twenty-two of them would do something to a man who moved them wrong.

"Book," he said.

Wick had it open before the word was out of him.

"Row four, row nine, row eleven, and the whole of the foundry rack." Kalen was already moving. "Four is brakes. Nine is the press and the bundling frame. Eleven is collars off the sealed floors. All four into the strip shed, and the door gets shut."

"What about the rest?" Ferrin said.

"The rest goes where they can reach it."

Ferrin stopped with a drum in his arms.

"You are giving it to them."

"I am giving them four hundred items of dead iron that this house cannot lawfully sell to anybody." Kalen took the drum off him and put it down in the aisle. "They can carry every one of them to a wall."

"And when they run out?"

"Then they will have finished the shift."

"And if they do not run out?"

"There are four hundred items in this yard and nineteen of them," Kalen said. "They will run out."

* * *

They worked the next four hours the way you work a night shift, which is badly at first and then in a rhythm.

Doss and Brem took the weight. Ferrin ran the count at the gate, because there is nobody in Ward Nine who counts like Ferrin Ovel. Wick stood in the strip shed doorway with the book and the lamp and called the rows.

Kalen went up and down the aisles doing the one thing he is for.

Live. Dead. Live, and turn it over, and dead.

"Row six," Wick said.

"Row six is dead all the way along. Leave it where it is."

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"Row seven?"

"Seven is dead except the third and the ninth. Those two come to me."

"Row eight is barrows."

"Let them have the barrows."

"There are eleven of them."

"There is no Pattern in any of them," Kalen said, "and a man carrying a barrow is a man not carrying something else."

"Ninety-one," Ferrin said, up the yard, on the hour.

"Say the rows."

"Two, five, six, ten, and the far end of twelve."

"Nothing out of eleven?"

"Nothing out of eleven."

Sabra came out at some point and stood in the office door with the lamp behind her.

"How many?"

"Nineteen."

"Whose?"

"I am not going to say that in a yard," Kalen said.

The carts made it possible.

There are four handcarts in that yard and two of them are bound, and Kalen had entered both the previous afternoon with his hand flat on the shaft.

PATTERN: Carry (Sound)

Held in: handcart, elm and iron, house stock

Draw: Force, minor

The loaded thing goes the way it was set going.

Load it square and it will not fight you. J. Ferrow

You do not push a bound cart. You point it, and you take your hands off, and it goes, and it goes until something stops it.

They loaded the live rows onto both carts and ran them down to the strip shed four times in the first hour. It is the only reason the four hours were four hours.

The trouble started when one of the nineteen picked a cart up by the shaft.

He did what a carter does, which is take the shaft in both hands and start walking. The cart was loaded square with collar iron out of the sealed floors, four of it live, and it went the way it was set going.

It went at the gate.

"Kalen."

"I have got it."

He did not try to stop it, because eleven of Force against a loaded cart is a joke.

He put his good hand flat on the near corner of the shaft and walked with it and gave it about a foot of arc.

The cart turned, because a turned cart goes the way it is set going. The carter walked on with the shaft in his hands and did not appear to notice that he was going down the yard instead of up it.

Wick had the four live collars off it in under a minute with one hand and a knee.

"That worked."

"Do not say anything about it yet."

* * *

The bundling frame came off the rope-walk in the winter and had stood in row nine since the summer.

PATTERN: Take Up (Fine)

Held in: bundling frame, iron, double-jawed

Draw: Force, heavy

What the jaws are set around is drawn down until it stops moving.

Set it once and let it alone. It knows the work. D. Ames

Row nine went into the strip shed inside the first hour and the frame went in on Doss's back, and that was the correct decision and Kalen would make it again.

The north shed was the one he got wrong.

The north shed is stock: part-stripped gear, the trays, eleven weeks of recoveries not yet entered, four barrels of gantry grease and a hundredweight of stripped cord.

It also had the last of the foundry iron in it, because he had been carrying the four hundred and eleventh item when he looked up the yard and saw the gate.

The crucible ring was in that tray.

It came off the third sub-level in the spring: a ring of iron the size of a barrel head with a Fine grade in it, made to keep a pour hot between the furnace and the mould. It had been keeping nothing hot for two hundred and seventeen years and did not know it, because a Pattern is never told to stop.

One of the nineteen went into the north shed and came out with the tray.

He put the ring down around a coil of stripped cord, the way you stack a ring so that it does not roll.

Then he picked the tray up again and went for the gate.

Behind him the ring did the thing it was made to do.

* * *

The cord went first and it went without any noise at all.

Then the grease, and the grease is what took the shed, because four barrels of it in a wooden building is not a fire anybody argues with. It is a decision that has already been made about a building.

"Brem," Kalen said. "Where is Brem?"

"He went in for the trays."

"When?"

"Twenty minutes."

Brem was inside it.

Kalen knew that before he heard anything, because he had put Brem in there twenty minutes earlier, in a level voice, with his mind on a cart.

Doss went through the door.

He went through it the way he goes up anything, which is without any evident thought about the ground.

"Doss."

"I have him."

"Both hands on him. Do not let go."

He came back to the doorway inside forty seconds with Brem in front of him and his hand in the boy's collar.

Then the rack inside the door came off the wall.

There is no sound when a rack goes. There is a great deal of sound afterward.

Kalen was four feet inside the door with the heat on the whole front of him. He had his good hand on a bar he should not have been able to hold, and he was holding it because Quench takes the heat off a bound thing slight, and because his father paid a fee at a warrant office for it eleven months before the floor took him.

He got Brem through the door with the bar.

He did not get out behind him, because the rack was already going, and he could see where it was going.

There was one breath between him and the rest of it.

He spent the breath.

An instruction already in motion against the holder is held over for the length of one breath. One breath is the distance from a man's shoulder to his boot, and Kalen went sideways in it with his left hand shut in the front of Doss's coat.

His left hand does not close. It has not closed since a smelt yard in the summer and it will not close again.

Hold Fast holds whether or not the hand does.

They came out of the north shed together and went down on the flags in the aisle, and the rack came down where the two of them had been. Doss made a sound Kalen had not heard out of him in a year of standing next to him.

* * *

The shed burned for two hours and they let it.

"What do we do?" Wick said.

"Nothing. It is a shed and it is going to go."

"There is stock in it."

"There is stock in it," Kalen said.

There was no water worth the name, and nothing in it four men could have carried out.

Sabra stood at the office door in the light of it with her pipe out and did not say one word to anybody.

Eleven weeks of recoveries, the trays, and the north shed down to the footings.

Ferrin kept the gate count the whole time, because he had been told to keep it and had not been told to stop.

"Three hundred and forty," Ferrin said, at some point after the second bell.

"Say it again."

"Three hundred and forty items out of that gate since the tenth bell. I have got the rows against every one."

Then they stopped coming, because there was nothing left in the rows that a man could lift.

They went up the gate road toward Cinder Row in ones and twos, unhurried, carrying a reclamation yard toward a dock that has been bricked up for eleven years.

"Is that all of them?" Wick said.

"Eighteen."

"You said nineteen."

"I said nineteen."

The nineteenth had gone into the north shed after a tray and had not come out, and there had not been one moment in the whole four hours when anybody could have gone in after him.

The Accord printed it in the yard while the roof was still going.

NOTICE OF LOSS

One item of plant lost in the course of works,

Ward Nine.

Entered against the holder of record.

One item of plant.

Kalen read it twice, sitting on the flags with his back against the pan post. He did not say what it meant to anybody, because Wick was eleven feet away and fifteen years old and had been holding a lamp all night.

One item of plant. A green coat, brass at the collar, and a livery kept well enough that for one whole second a man in a doorway relaxes.

Somewhere there is a book with a figure in it, and the figure has come down by one, and a clerk will strike it in the morning and be correct.

* * *

Doss's collarbone went in the doorway and it went properly. Ferrin strapped the shoulder at the fourth bell with a shirt and a length of the same cord that had started the fire, and Doss sat on the mounting block and looked up the yard.

"Gate was not forced."

"No."

"Been shut every night eleven years."

"It has."

Kalen took the lamp up the yard at first light. He crouched at the gate post, took the lock off the keep, and turned it over twice.

He had strapped that lock on himself in the spring. It has one Pattern in it, and the Pattern has one instruction, and it had been executing it faithfully all night.

Nothing was cut and nothing was sprung. The keep was not marked and the bar was not bent, and the shape inside it was whole all the way through, the way you would want it if you were buying it.

The lock was not broken. It had been opened.