Fourteen drums of water stood under the tarpaulin in the cleft of the rock, and Edwin tapped each one with his pencil and listened.
Full drums answered with a dead note. Empty ones rang. Eleven were dead, three rang, and he wrote it in the ledger under the week's date, which was his own date, kept by sleeps and by deliveries, because his watch had stopped in the second week and never started again. Week fourteen. Water, eleven. Tins of meat, forty. Rice, two sacks and part of a third. Candles. Lamp oil. Tablets for the stomach, which the woman from Lyon needed more than the others.
Every drum had cost something. Edwin wrote that down too, in the right-hand column, where his father had kept the cost of coal. A drum came across at the sea gate the same way the people had, in the dark, carried, and the holders of the gate did not carry anything for nothing. A cockerel for a crossing. A ewe for a heavy load. Twice now, a promise in a name Edwin did not write down, made by Ormsby on the beach on the far side while the man who drove the van waited with his back turned.
Edwin had kept the stores of three lodges before this. He had kept the dinner accounts and the charity accounts and the account nobody else was shown. His great-uncles had kept the same accounts before him, in Leeds and in Bristol, in ledgers with marbled covers, and none of them had ever been told what the third account was for. He had been told. He was the first Sallow in nine generations to see the thing the money had been saved for.
He closed the ledger on his pencil and went out to see to the tables.
His guide let him see the path from the stores to the flat rock where the tables stood, and the tables, and the lamps on their poles, and the men and the women of the Concord moving between them. Past the lamps there was only grey. In fourteen weeks Edwin had not once seen the water, though he could hear it when the wind dropped, and he had not once seen the sky.
The tables were trestles brought over in pieces, three of them end to end, laid with white cloth. On them was bread from the tins, rice in a steel pan, dates in a bowl, a whole shoulder of lamb on a board. Nobody ate from them. That was the rule, and the rule was Edwin's to keep.
"Nothing said over it," he reminded the youngest of the three brothers, who was laying out the dates. "Not grace, not a word your grandmother taught you. Nothing."
"I know, Mr Sallow."
"You knew last week, and you crossed yourself."
The young man flushed and set the bowl down without a word.
In the morning the bread would be grey and light as pumice. The lamb would be dry as a shoe. Nothing would have touched them that Edwin could see, and he would write it down: tables laid, three; tables taken, three. He did not know who took them. He knew that they were taken, and that the taking was what the tables were for.
The slaughter was at the lamp line, where the rock tipped down toward the grey.
Ormsby did it himself. He was eighty this year and his hands shook, and still he would not let the brothers hold the knife. Two sheep had come across on the last delivery, thin, terrified, smelling of the van. One of the brothers held each by the head. Ormsby said the words he always said, in a language Edwin had never asked the name of, and finished in a strong voice, "For the master." Then he cut.
The blood ran down a crack in the rock into the grey and did not pool.
The master was not watching. He never watched. He sat where he always sat, against the great boulder fifty yards along the rock, and looked out at the haze over the water as if nothing behind him concerned him. From where Edwin stood at the tables he was a dark shape against the grey, red at the face, his broad back to the lamps. The broken iron still hung from his wrists. When he moved, which was seldom, it rang.
Julian came back across on the delivery after the sheep. Edwin saw him come up the path out of the grey, swaying, with a canvas satchel held to his chest. He was thinner each time. He had the papers and the figures.
"Eleven new households in the north of England," Julian said, sitting on an upturned crate by the stores. He read in the flat voice of a man too tired to read well. "Two lodges in the Netherlands that have taken the oath. The circle in Lyon. A family in Ohio, forty people, the Wrights' cousins. Some of the others won't give a number. They say they're names, not numbers."
"Everything is a number," Edwin said, writing. "Total?"
"Two thousand four hundred and six. Who've sworn in his name. This week."
Edwin wrote it in the column he had headed Following. The figure for the first week had been two hundred and twelve. He did not underline it.
"And the briefing?"
Julian rubbed his eyes. "He asked about the lake of Tiberias. Whether there was water in it. I showed him the photographs from the news. The shore's gone back half a mile. I said they say it's going." He looked along the rock at the shape against the grey. "He didn't say anything. He looked at the photographs for a long time."
Edwin wrote that down as well, exactly, in the column for remarks.
The visitors came after the slaughter. They always came after.
Edwin's guide let him see them, or let him see what they chose to show. They stood at the edge of the lamplight in twos and threes, shapes like men in ordinary clothes, the kind of clothes you would not remember afterward. Their faces did not stay put. When Edwin looked straight at one, it was a face. When he looked at the next, the first one had become another face, or not quite a face, like a word on a page that the eye keeps reading wrong.
They knelt. They knelt toward the boulder, all together, the way the Concord had knelt on the first day, and stayed down a long time.
The master did not turn his head.
One of them got up and came to the stores, to Edwin's crate and his ledger. It moved the way a man does who has walked a long way and is not sure he will be let in. Close to, it smelled of struck matches.
"You are the one who writes," it said.
"I keep the books."
"Write us down. We came to serve him. Write that we came, and how many."
"How many are you?"
It looked back at the lamp line. Edwin could see, now, more of them out there than before, many more, a crowd at the edge of the grey like people waiting outside a theatre, their faces shifting.
"We heard there was a following," it said. "Write that we came this week."
He wrote it. Visitors, asking to serve: he wrote a number, the best count he could make by the lamps, and beside it, in the remarks column, heard there was a following. He did not know what the word meant to them. He knew that the column on the left and the crowd on the right had grown together, week by week, like two lines on one graph. Edwin trusted a graph more than he trusted most men.
When he looked up, the visitor had gone back into the grey.
The measurement was his own idea, and he had told nobody but Julian.
On the first day, when the master first sat down against the boulder, Edwin had stood on the flat rock by the stores, in the one place where his guide let him see the boulder clearly, and marked the spot with a cross in chalk. Then he had held his pencil out at arm's length and sighted along it. The crown of the master's head, sitting, had been level with a white streak in the boulder's face, a vein of some pale stone. Edwin had paced the fifty yards that afternoon and done the sum on the back page: at that distance the thickness of the pencil lead on his arm was a hand's width at the boulder.
He had sighted again every week since, from the chalk cross, with the same pencil, at the same arm's length. For thirteen weeks the head had touched the streak.
Tonight he stood on the cross with the ledger under his arm. The lamps hissed. The master sat as he always sat, looking at the haze.
Edwin held out the pencil. He sighted.
Between the crown of the head and the white streak there was a thin band of dark rock. It was as wide as the pencil lead.
He sighted again, to be certain, because he was a careful man and because his hand had begun to shake. Then he opened the ledger on his forearm and wrote the date, his own date, and the measure, in a hand that did not shake at all.
Shorter by a hand's width.