The boy was at the gate when Aldric came up.
He was — by the small count Aldric had been keeping for two years which he was no longer aware of keeping — two years and three months and eleven days old, and he stood at the base of the great gate-tower of Fornost-Erain with his small hand flat against the stone of the lower course and his face turned up to look at the height. He was wearing the small travelling-coat Tauriel had had cut for him in the spring, in the same dark grey of Aldric's own, with the small Dúnedain star embroidered at the throat by the keep seamstress and the sleeves that had been let out twice already at the elbow because Cael was, by the keep's careful observation, growing in the small steady fits that he had been growing in since the year-mark.
He turned at the sound of Aldric's boots on the stone.
"Big."
"It is."
"Was bigger."
A small flat surprise.
"Who told you that."
"Mama."
Aldric crossed the last few paces. He had walked up from the inner camp on his own, leaving Tauriel and the master mason at the long table with the survey-tablet, and he had not — until the boy spoke — thought about what Tauriel had been telling Cael on the ride up the eastern road from the last camp. He set his hand on the back of Cael's small one against the stone. The hand under his hand was warm. Cael did not, at the touch, take his hand away.
"It was bigger, Cael."
"How big."
"Three times the height that is here now. The upper courses came down a long time ago. The men who lived here then could not, by themselves, hold the city against the winters that came. They went south. The walls fell. The country forgot the name of the place. We have, in the last three years, built it back up — to the height you see — and we will, before you are old enough to ride your own horse, build it higher."
"Up."
"Up."
He bent. He hooked one arm under Cael's small ribs and lifted, and Cael — who had been lifted by his father every morning of his life for the last year and who had not, in any of those mornings, registered the lifting as anything other than the proper morning order of things — set his small bare hand against the back of Aldric's neck and let himself be carried.
They went up onto the outer wall.
The outer wall had been finished in the third week of the previous autumn.
The work had taken — by the master mason's careful count, which Aldric had been keeping his own count alongside — twenty-six months from the laying of the first new course on the south curve to the closing of the last gap at the north postern. The crews had been at three shifts in the summer and two in the winter. They had quarried from the long ridge to the east, which had cost the dwarven trade-counsel a half-season's argument over the rate of the stone-tithes. They had brought up the working-iron from the Blue Mountain in three trade-cycles. They had, in the long second summer, used the small slow drying of the long ridge's particular pale-grey stone to set the courses without mortar at the high-line, in the old Arnor practice that the master mason had been the only living craftsman able to teach. The wall, in the morning's clear spring light, ran the long circuit of the original Arnor city in unbroken stone for the first time in eight hundred years.
It was, by Aldric's reading of the master mason's certification that morning, sound.
He walked the circuit with Cael on his shoulders.
He did not, in the walking, set any particular pace. He had set out, three years ago when the work had begun, that on the day he walked the outer wall the day would be the day the wall held in his own count, not in the count of any document the mason could lay on the table. He had been waiting for the day. He had been telling himself for three years that the day would come when it came. It had come this morning. He had not, until he had set his foot on the first stone of the south curve, known whether the day was going to feel as the day was supposed to feel.
It felt that way.
It felt — Aldric registered, on the second curve of the south wall — like the small private moment in the orchard the year the apple had borne its first fruit. The wall had taken longer. The investment had been larger. The country had been at it together. Cael, on his shoulders, was looking at the long line of the western wall as it ran out toward the distant pale lines of the Weather Hills, and the boy was making the small steady inarticulate hum he made when he was, by Tauriel's reading, taking a thing in.
Aldric let him take it in.
He did not, on the long west wall, narrate. He had been told by Tauriel, on the ride up, that Cael did not need narration; he needed quiet beside the thing he was looking at, and the narration could come later in pieces as the boy asked for it. Aldric walked. Cael watched. The watch-fires of the new garrison were lit at the towers, two at the south and two at the north, and the small grey wisps of the morning's first cooking-smoke were rising from the inner barracks where the first proper garrison had moved in three weeks ago.
The first proper garrison.
He had not, until this morning, said the phrase to himself.
The first proper garrison of Fornost-Erain in eight hundred years.
He registered the phrase, internally, and let it settle the way he had let the eleven recognitions of the Gondorian letter settle in his head five years ago. The phrase did not need to be said out loud. It would, in the long account of these stones, be said by other men in other voices, and his having registered it on a spring morning with his two-year-old son on his shoulders was the only registering it had needed from him.
They reached the eastern tower.
The master mason was there.
He was on the small inner platform that ran along the inside of the wall at the foot of the tower, with his apprentice and the small folded survey-tablet, and he had been waiting for them. He inclined his head to Aldric. He did not, by any movement, register Cael; the master mason was a man of his own kind and the small things he registered openly did not include children. The not-registering was, in his vocabulary, the proper courtesy.
"My lord."
"Master."
"The eastern tower foundation."
"Speak."
"My lord, I have been over the eastern tower foundation three times. The foundation as laid is sound for the present garrison and for the present wall-load. The foundation as laid is not — by my best count of the long stress of the wall-line under the eastern tower's full upper-course load — sufficient for the upper courses if we build the tower to the height of the original Arnor design. The original was twenty-three courses above the present line. If we build to twenty-three, the foundation will hold for thirty years. Forty if the country has no major earth-shake. Sixty, my lord — and I will give you no promise on sixty. The east side of the foundation sits over what was, by the soil-readings my apprentice has taken, a watercourse at one time. The water is long gone. The hollow is — patchily — gone with it. The hollow is not, by my reading, going to come back. But it has — softened the floor under the east face. It is the floor I would, if I were laying the tower for the first time, lay a deeper footing on."
A pause.
"How much."
"For the reinforcement. To pin the east face into the bedrock proper, with the iron-rod work the dwarves of the Blue Mountain use for the deep-mine portals — about eighteen hundred gold in materials, my lord, and six months of work by a crew of twenty. I have priced the materials at the autumn's dwarven-trade rate. The dwarven trade-rate will hold for the year, by Nálin's last courier."
Aldric set his hand against the stone of the tower.
It was cold under his hand. The tower had been finished in the autumn and the stone had not, yet, in the spring, taken the day's warmth. Cael on his shoulders had put his small hand on the stone above Aldric's, in the small imitating gesture that the boy had been doing since the early winter, and Cael's hand and Aldric's were on the same patch of cold stone with the eastern tower's full eight-hundred-year history under them.
Aldric thought about eighteen hundred gold.
He thought about it for the count of perhaps ten breaths.
It was not, by the treasury's working balance for the spring, an impossible number. It was not, by the working balance, a small number. It would set back two minor projects he had been intending to bring up at the spring council — a section of the southern road that needed widening, and a small extension of the dwarven-quarter's forge that Grimgar had asked for two months ago. Both could wait.
Eighteen hundred gold could not, in the long account of this tower, wait.
"Fund it."
"My lord."
"Today. Set it in the master register before sundown. Materials ordered with Nálin by tomorrow's courier. Crew of twenty drawn by the second steward from the seasonal labour roll within the week. Work begins the moment the materials are on the site."
"My lord."
"And master."
"My lord."
"Thank you. The east face is your own work. I will not, by any record I write, allow that the reinforcement was a thing you missed. The east face was sound for the present load. You have looked at the future load and asked the right question. The asking is the work."
The master mason inclined his head, the small dry inclination of a craftsman who had been about to take a small interior blow at his own account and had been told, by his lord's hand, that the blow was not coming.
"My lord."
He went to give the order to his apprentice.
Aldric stood at the eastern tower with Cael on his shoulders. He looked east along the long line of the wall to where the curve closed at the north postern. He thought about the boy's eighteen hundred gold's worth of future, and about the thirty-year and sixty-year horizons the master mason had drawn for him, and about how the small short Mannish horizons of the men he had spent a decade managing had, since Cael's first hand had closed on his finger in the birth chamber, begun to extend by themselves.
He let the thought sit.
He turned and walked the rest of the circuit.
Cael, on his shoulders, hummed.
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