The road ran out at the foot of the hill.
Aldric had been walking it for two hours. The survey officer — Brennan, second-class, the boy who had finished sixth in the field exercises of the last academy intake and had asked, in his commissioning interview, for posting to the survey corps rather than the patrol rotation — was walking three paces ahead with the small clay tablet they used for marking the survey-poles, and the boy from the survey party who carried the spare tablets was walking three paces ahead of him. The road had been a road for the first hour out of the gate. It had become a track for the second hour. The track had been narrowing for the last quarter of a mile. At the foot of the hill, the track stopped being even a track and became a path through grass that had been crossed by feet but not by wheels for some time.
The fourteenth region was on the right.
It was a small holding — perhaps thirty souls, scattered across the long shallow valley that opened from the foot of the hill toward the east. Aldric had walked through it the previous afternoon. He had eaten the evening meal at the table of the small family that was the eldest in the holding. He had spent the night in the loft of their barn, on the woven mat the wife had set out for him, with the small woollen blanket she had insisted he take and the small piece of fresh bread she had insisted he eat at first light, and the small fact of being there in person had — by his reading of the elder of the holding — closed the matter of the incorporation before the documents had been brought out of the saddlebag.
The fifteenth region was on the left.
That was where the hill was, and the watchtower.
He stopped at the foot of the hill.
He looked up.
The watchtower was about a hundred paces up the slope. It was three storeys of unmortared stone, set on a wider base of mortared stone, and the upper storey had no roof. The roof had not been there for a hundred years. The watchtower had been built in the late years of Arnor, when the line of the kings of the North had still been holding the country and had set the watchtowers on the long northern road at intervals of a half-day's ride, and most of the watchtowers had not survived the years. This one had survived because it had been built better than the others and because, for the last fifty years, someone had lived in it.
A man was coming down the path.
He was perhaps sixty years old. He was the height of a Dúnedain man but he carried himself like a man who had spent his life carrying things, and his shoulders had the heavy forward set of a labourer rather than the straight back of a watchman. He had a long bow over his shoulder — old, well-kept, with the small mark on the upper limb that the local bowyers used and the careful waxing of a man who had been keeping the bow alive past its proper retirement — and a small axe at his belt. He came down the path at a steady pace. He stopped twenty paces above where Aldric was standing.
"My lord."
"You are Beron."
"I am Beron, my lord."
He came the rest of the way down.
He stopped three paces from Aldric. He did not bow. He did not, this far out, stand straighter than he stood at his work. He stood the way a man stood at his own door when an unfamiliar party of riders came up the path, which was a posture Aldric had learned to read in the early years.
Aldric held out his hand.
Beron looked at the hand.
He did not, in the small beat that followed, move to take it.
He looked at the hand the way a man looked at a thing he had not expected and was making sure he was reading correctly. Then he wiped his right hand on the side of his tunic, and reached out, and took Aldric's hand the way he would have taken a neighbour's hand at the gate of his own holding, and held it for the count of two and let it go.
"You came up on foot."
"I came up on foot."
"I had been told a lord rode."
"I have been a lord nine years. I have been a man longer than that. My boots are still made for the second use."
Beron registered this. He inclined his head a fraction, the small careful inclination of a Dúnedain countryman who had not, in his life, met a lord of his own people but had been told stories of what one was supposed to be, and had been told most of those stories by his father, who had been told them by his father.
He turned and looked up at the watchtower.
"The papers."
"The papers, yes."
"You will want to come up first."
"I came to come up."
"Then come up."
He turned and led the way.
[THE WATCHTOWER]
The wife and the two daughters were at the small door of the lower stone.
They had been told the lord was coming up. The wife — a woman younger than Beron, perhaps fifty, with the practical squareness of a woman who had carried buckets up that slope every day for thirty years — had not, by Beron's instruction, set out any kind of welcome that would slow the matter. There was a clay jug of water on the stone bench by the door, and a wooden cup beside it, and a small basket of plums from the tree at the lower side of the tower.
Aldric drank a cup of water.
He took a plum.
He ate it standing, leaning against the wall of the lower stone, looking at the watchtower from up close for the first time. The stone was good. The corners were sound. The two old arrow-slits on the eastern side had been kept clear, in the long careful way of a man who had cleaned them every spring for fifty years. The third storey, which had no roof, was open to the sky; the floor of the third storey was, by Beron's later showing, planked over to keep the rain out of the second.
He spat the stone of the plum into his palm.
"You have kept it."
"I have kept it, my lord. My father kept it. My father's father kept it. We have been on this hill since the king's road went out of use. My father said his grandfather had built the third storey by hand, after the original third storey fell."
"It is good work."
"It was good work. It is not new work. The third-storey roof — it has been off for as long as I have been alive. I have, by my own count, sixty-two more winters in my body if the gods are kind and I do not break a foot, and the roof will not, in my time, go back up by my hand."
"By whose hand."
"My lord — I am old. My daughters are grown. My son is at Bree, learning the trade of a smith from my wife's brother. He will not come back to this hill to put up a roof. We have been at this for fifty years and we are at the end of being at it."
A pause.
"I would not, my lord — if you will hear this — sign your papers if your papers asked me to keep being at it. I will sign your papers if your papers free my family from being the only hands on this stone. The stone is not ours. The stone was ours to hold while there was no one else to hold it. There is, now, someone else to hold it."
Aldric ate the last of the plum.
He took out the papers.
He took out, with the papers, the small wooden ink-stand and the small short pen that fit into it, and the small folded note from the survey officer that listed, in eight lines, what the incorporation would entail on the keep's side. He set all of it on the stone bench by the jug.
He read the eight lines aloud.
Beron's wife had come to the door of the lower stone. She listened. The two daughters listened from inside the door. The survey officer had come up the path behind Aldric and stood three paces below them, with his hands folded behind his back, in the small steady posture he had been taught at the academy for survey-work.
The eight lines were:
1. The hill and the watchtower and the strip of land described in the survey, herein incorporated as the fifteenth region of Northwatch.
2. The watchtower itself recorded in the keep archive as a future Arnor restoration site, with restoration to be undertaken at the realm's cost and to the realm's schedule.
3. A garrison of four men to be posted to the watchtower from the first week of the winter season, rising to eight in the spring season, on a permanent basis from the restoration onwards.
4. The family of Beron son of Beran, as resident on the site at the time of incorporation, to retain the lower stone and the long house, with the long house being the residence and the lower stone being the family's by recognised custom.
5. The provisioning of the family during the period of restoration, in grain and in the customary wages of a holder providing service, to be drawn from the realm's stores by the senior steward of the realm.
6. The hand of the family on the work of the restoration to be voluntary and not required, with such work as is performed by the family to be compensated at the customary rate.
7. The son of the family at Bree to be offered, at the family's request, return-passage and a placement at the keep smithy, if his apprenticeship permits.
8. The signing of this writ to bind the realm to all the above, in the lord's hand, witnessed by the survey officer of the day and by the head of the family.
Aldric finished reading.
He did not look up.
He looked at Beron.
Beron's wife had set her hand on the door-frame. The two daughters had come the rest of the way out of the door. The younger of the two was perhaps eighteen; she was crying in the small private way of a girl who had not expected to cry and was holding the crying inside her face because she had been brought up to.
Beron cleared his throat once.
"My lord."
"Beron."
"My son. The son at Bree."
"He will be offered return-passage if his apprenticeship permits. The keep smithy has need of him. Grimgar has been short of a junior smith for two years."
"He will come."
"He will come if his hand is willing."
"He will come. He has been at Bree six years. He has been writing to his mother for the last three asking whether there was a place for him at home. He will come."
The wife at the door-frame had her hand over her mouth.
Beron looked at the papers on the bench.
"My lord. The pen."
Aldric handed him the pen.
The survey officer, three paces below, took out his own small tablet and made the small mark that was the formal record of the moment.
Beron signed.
He signed with the steady hand of a man who had spent his life writing nothing more than the marks of a careful householder on a year's seed-tally, and the signature came out in a slow, careful script that had the particular dignity of a hand that did not, often, set itself to a thing that mattered.
He gave the pen back to Aldric.
Aldric signed.
Aldric signed under Beron's name, not above it, in the form that had been the form of the realm since the southern Greenway compact — the lord's hand under the freeholder's, by the writ. He had not, until that moment, decided whether to do it. He had been thinking it as he walked up the hill, and he had been thinking it as he ate the plum, and he had decided it when the wife had set her hand on the door-frame.
He stamped the writ.
The survey officer wrote his own line.
The fourteenth region had been signed the previous evening in the long valley at the table of the eldest family. The fifteenth was signed now.
Aldric set his hand briefly on Beron's shoulder before he turned away.
He went down the path with the survey officer.
At the foot of the hill he paused. He looked back. The wife and the two daughters had not gone inside; they were standing on the path in front of the lower stone, and Beron was standing in the doorway with the signed writ in his hand, holding it under his palm against the stone of the wall the way a man held a paper he had not yet decided where to keep.
He turned to the survey officer.
"Brennan."
"My lord."
"When we are back at the keep, the restoration goes into the standing list. I want the schedule on my desk within the month. The first masons to walk this hill no later than the first thaw of next year."
"My lord."
"And send word to the keep smithy. Tell Grimgar I will be by his forge tomorrow afternoon. He has a junior smith coming from Bree."
"My lord."
They went on down the road.
Behind them, on the hill, the woman lowered her hand from her mouth, and the younger daughter wiped her face on the back of her sleeve, and Beron took his hand off the stone, and looked at the signed writ, and looked up at the third storey of the watchtower that would, by the realm's writ in his hand, have a roof again in his lifetime.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
Read more chapters for free in the public library:
unwrittenrealm.com
⚜ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ⚜
By order of the Crown.
The royal vault holds chapters the public throne room has yet to receive. Those who pledge fealty on Patreon may read ahead of the realm:
Noble — $7 — Twelve chapters ahead.
Royal — $11 — Nineteen chapters ahead.
Emperor — $17 — Twenty-six chapters ahead.
New chapters added weekly. Full schedule posted in the war room.
patreon.com/Kingdom1Building
Long live the Kingdom.