I have driven the Cliff Road eleven years and I can tell you the weight of a load with my eyes shut, off the road, through the reins. That is not a boast. Any carter who lasts learns it. The horses do the arithmetic and all you have to be is honest enough to read them back.
My name is Gergo Tass. I own four horses, a stone cart with iron tires, and a room off a yard at the low end of the Kereskedo where the gutter runs past the door. The horses are the whole of my estate. Bora is the near wheeler, twelve years old this autumn, a big grey with a wall eye and no nerves at all, and she has hauled more of that castle up that hill than any mason ever cut.
The road is seven turns from the toll post to the works gate. Watch stations at the second and the fifth, where the Red Guard sit in a stone box out of the wind and put your tally in the book and hand it back without looking at you. Going up is lungs. That is all it is. You get out and walk at the steep bits and you let the team blow at the wide places and you count the turns off, and a good team with a good load will do it in the hour and a half.
Going down is iron.
Nobody outside the trade understands that either. Loaded downhill is what kills carters. You have a ton and a half of dressed block behind you and the whole of it wants the bottom of the hill, and between it and the bottom there is you. You put the drag-shoe under the off hind wheel and you chain it so the wheel cannot turn and the shoe grinds instead, and you take the turns wide, and you feel every foot of it come up the shafts into your hands. On the Cliff Road you take them wide on the inside. Always the inside. On the outside of the fourth turn there is a low stone post and beyond the post there is nothing at all until the roofs of the Terrassian Quarter, and the men who tell you otherwise have never gone down loaded in the wet.
That was the trade when I learned it and that is still the trade. What changed was the cargo.
Since the spring it has been the tower. They are cutting the headland for the Northern Causeway and the surplus block goes up the hill instead of into the water, dressed and squared and marked on the face with a chalked number I was told never to smudge. Every day. First bell to dark, four loads if the weather is fair, and a good many more carts on the road than the road was ever built for, so that at the passing places you sit nose to nose with a man you have known twenty years and neither of you says a word about where it is all going.
Two Krone a load. It used to be eleven groats. Everybody on that road knew what the money meant and everybody took it, and if you want to think less of us for that, you have never been hungry with four horses to feed.
In the summer they began sending spoil down.
That was new. The Cliff Road had never carried anything but empty carts down in its life. Now at the works gate they would load you out of the excavation, a half load, no more, in a bed lined with old sacking, and it was not stone as I know stone. Black glass. Broken in slabs and shards, cool to the hand even at noon, and where it was freshly fractured there was a colour in the depth of it I do not have a word for. My mother would have called it a bruise colour. Hold a piece up against the sky and there is a violet in it that moves when you move.
We hauled it to Hallaset Fields and tipped it at the north end past the flower banks, where the ground is already what it is, and I never once saw anybody up there directing us and I never once found the last load where I had left it. The men said the sextons carted it off. There are no sextons at Hallaset. That is the entire point of Hallaset.
We were paid three Krone for the spoil and a half a Krone extra if you took the run after dark, and I took the dark runs, and there is no way to tell this that puts me in a better light than that.
Lask Bede went over on the eighth of the month.
I knew Lask thirty years. He drove a four-horse rig with a red axle he was vain about and he did not drink, not on the road, not ever, because his father had drunk and gone off the Cliff Road in the year of the flood and Lask had spent his whole life being the man who did not. He went over on the outside of the fourth turn with a half load of the black glass, in dry weather, at four in the afternoon, with a sound they heard at the fifth station.
The Guard wrote it as brake failure. They wrote drink under it as well, in a second hand, later. I saw the tally book because the clerk at the fifth is a nervous man and does not cover his page. Lask Bede, brake failure, drink.
His drag-shoe was still chained. They brought it up on a rope with the wheel and the wheel was flat on one side from the grinding, which is what a shoe does when it is doing its work. He had it on. He had it on the whole way down and it took him over anyway.
Then Ferko's boy in the same month, and a hired man out of the Terrassian Quarter whose name I never had. Both on the down. Both loaded. Both at the fourth.
A carter carries a plumb. It is a lump of lead on a waxed cord and you use it at the loading, hung off the corner of the bed, to see that you have your weight square over the axle and are not building yourself a rig that will steer itself into a wall. Mine came from my father. I have used it four times a day for eleven years and I have never in my life stopped to think about what a plumb line is actually doing.
I went up the road on foot on a Sunday with the plumb in my coat.
At the fourth turn, on the outside, by the low stone post, I let it down off my hand and waited for it to be still.
It did not hang down. It hung a little uphill, toward the black stone of the Eastern Tower, and it stayed there, and it was not the wind because there was no wind and I stood in that road for the better part of an hour proving it to myself like a fool.
I went to the second turn. True as a church. The toll post at the bottom. True. My own yard, my own doorframe, true, true, true. The fifth station, a hair off. The sixth, more than a hair. At the works gate under the east wall I did not dare take it out of my pocket.
The fourth turn is the worst of them because of how the road lies there. It swings you around so that for the length of three carts you are running with your load's whole weight thrown out toward the post and the drop, and the tower is over your left shoulder and up. That is the geometry of it. Everywhere else on that hill whatever it is pulls you into the mountain or along it, and you feel nothing, and you thank your team for a good day. At the fourth it pulls you off.
I have never been to a school. I do not know what the philosophers in the Albion Quarter would call it. What I know is what my hands know, which is that between the spring and the summer the fourth turn stopped being a corner and started being a slope, and the slope goes toward the tower, and every week the comet climbs the slope gets worse.
I hung the plumb there once a week after that. It leaned further in the autumn than it had in the summer. It leaned further after they put the Convergence up in the squares than it had the week before.
I told the sergeant at the fifth. I want that on the record because I have very little else to put there. He heard me out with his hands behind his back and his face doing nothing, and when I finished he said they had sanded the fourth turn in the spring and cut a groove and set the post, and had I noticed the post.
I said I had.
He said, look at it next time.
I looked at it next time. That post is set in dressed stone two feet deep and it leans uphill.
They knew before I did. They had known long enough to build for it. And they went on loading carts.
Tomak Belec was nineteen and drove a hired rig, which is the whole of the story and I knew it at the time.
His brother had gone in the conscription and their mother was in the Marrow with a bad chest, and he had come onto the road in the summer because there was money on it, and he was careful in the way the young are careful, which is that he did everything he was told exactly and nothing that he was not. I taught him the shoe. I taught him to take the fourth wide on the inside and to keep the leaders' heads up so they do not drift. And I told him the thing that mattered, which was that if he ever felt the load start to run at the fourth he was to cut the traces at the wheel bar and let the cart go over without him.
He asked me what happened then.
I said, you walk home.
He said, and the cart.
I did not have an answer for him and he knew I did not, because the cart was not his and the horses were not his and the loss would come off his pay for the rest of his natural life, and he had a mother in the Marrow. He said thank you, Mr. Tass, in the way boys say it. He was on the road four months.
He went over on a Thursday with a full load of block, and they got the horses up because the traces parted on their own the way they sometimes will, and the Guard wrote brake failure, and I stood at the post and looked down at the roofs and thought: he held it. He held that brake with both hands the entire way around because a hired man cannot afford to let go, and the road knew he could not, and that is why they hire out the rigs.
I do not say the Red Guard sat in a room and worked that out. I say they did not need to. The road works it out. It takes the men who will not let go of what they are carrying and it leaves the rest of us, and every week it takes a few more, and up at the top somebody signs the tally and the stone keeps arriving.
Here is the last of it, and it is the part I have told nobody.
The climb has gone easy.
Not a little. Bora is twelve years old and she came up loaded on Tuesday with the leaders barely into their collars and she was not blowing at the top. I have walked beside her at the steep bit for eleven years to spare her and this month I have not needed to. Four loads in a day and no lather on any of them. Any carter on that hill will tell you the same if you get him drunk enough, and then he will tell you it is a mild autumn, and then he will change the subject.
Last week I came down empty and had to put the shoe on.
An empty cart. Iron tires, no load, four horses in front of it, and I had to chain the drag-shoe under the off hind wheel to hold it back through the fourth. I have never done that in my life. My father never did it. There is no reason on this earth for a cart to need a brake with nothing in it.
I have stopped taking the plumb up the hill. I do not need it now. I can feel where the road is leaning through the reins, the same as I feel a load, and it gets a little worse each week and it will not stop, because the thing at the top of that hill is not being built. It is being fed. It is pulling the mountain in toward itself a hair at a time, and the road is bending toward it, and the carts are only the first things loose enough to fall.
I keep a Krone on a horse hair over my table at home. I hung it up the night after Tomak, to see. It turns slow the way a thing on a hair will turn, and then it settles, and it settles the same way every time, and the way it settles is uphill.
The Queen is on that coin in silver, in profile, looking off to the side the way she does. On the hair she hangs face out toward the Cliff Road, and the road runs up to the works gate, and the gate is open at first bell.
I am there at first bell. I have four horses to feed and the money has never been better.