The Bounds

A keeper walks the bounds on the first Sunday. Nettie said so, and when Grizel asked where it was written, Nettie said it was not written, it was known, and the two of them looked at each other across the whole of the argument that runs underneath the Anunder, and Kit said she would walk them, to save time.

The ledger, consulted, found that the old keeper had walked the bounds once, in her first year, "as far as the shed," and had come back and recorded that the shed was where she had left it. This was not the whole bounds. The whole bounds of the hollow, as Nettie described them, with her beard clicking off the stations like beads, ran from the gate along the foot of the hedge to the old wall, up the wall to the coping, along the top of the wall past the bins to the corner, along the corner to the poles, from the poles across the open green to the line where Gnomesby's ground began, and back. Nobody had walked them in living memory. Nettie could see them. That was what mattered.

"I'll want Mungo," said Kit.

There was a silence of the kind the hollow specialises in.

Mungo does not leave the gate. He crossed the path once, on the night of the slugs, to hold the far side of it, and the hollow is still talking about that. He has never gone out. It is the central fact of the hollow, the thing the theology is built round, the reason the sign says what it says. He was at the gate when the old keeper came and he was at the gate when she went to the heap, and the ledger's first page, in the old keeper's hand, says "Mungo unchanged," and every page since has been able to say it. A keeper walking the bounds with the sentry meant the sentry walking, and the sentry walking meant the gate unheld, and the gate unheld was a thing nobody in the hollow had a picture of in their head, in the way you do not have a picture of what is under the floor.

"Somebody holds the gate," said Kit.

Everybody looked at everybody. Nettie would not leave the patch. Grizel would not leave the ledger. Wick was in the shed with a table leg and had not heard. Pettigrew was an envoy and did not hold things, she had them held. Sorrel was over the wall. Tansy was on the fox. And there was a large soft shape beside the gatepost that had been there all morning, because the lantern was there, and it looked up, slowly, at the silence, in the way of someone who has just realised that the room has turned to look at them and has not yet worked out why.

Mungo handed Mothy the lantern.

He did it the way he had handed it to Kit on the sixth night, without a word and without looking, and Mothy took it and held it against his chest and looked down into it with an expression the ledger has been trying to describe for a season and has settled on "arrived." And Mungo stepped off the spot where he stands, which had a Mungo-shaped depression in it that nobody had noticed because nobody had ever seen it empty, and stood on the path, and looked at his boots on the flat stones, and said, to nobody, "Nobody goes out," and went.

He walks like a wall being moved by committee. Each boot is planted with the full weight of a decision, and there is a pause after each in which the decision is reviewed, and then the next boot. The bounds took most of the day. It was, Grizel afterwards recorded, "the slowest anything has gone round the hollow since the slug, and the slug had further to come."

Kit talked, for the first stretch. It is what people do beside a silence: they put things in it. She said the hedge looked different from underneath. She said she had not known a bean could be a border. She asked whether he minded the rain, and then answered that herself, on the evidence. By the old wall she had run out. She walked, and found that walking beside Mungo without talking was not at all the same as walking alone, and was in fact a good deal more like being talked to.

The foot of the hedge was familiar; it is the gate's own country. The old wall was less so. Mungo stood at the last tree and looked up at the coping where the fox was, and the fox, Mine, looked down at Mungo, and the two of them regarded each other for a while in the manner of two institutions that have heard of one another. Then Kit climbed the wall, because the bounds ran along the top of it, and after a moment of the deepest consideration Mungo climbed it too, a boot at a time, the way a wall would.

The collection was on the far side, at the den's mouth, laid out in the low sun. The shoe. The spoon. The glove, the ball, the pegs in their row, the bell. And at the end of the row, propped against the root, a hat. A red felt hat, faded to the colour of old brick, that came to a point, and had been folded, long ago and very carefully, the right way.

Mungo looked at it for a long time.

Kit did not ask. Grizel, told later, did not write down what it was, and has said she will not, and there are things a ledger can decline to know. But Mungo stood on the coping of the old wall with the fox beside him and looked down at a hat that somebody, once, had folded the right way, and the ledger is permitted to record that the fox did not offer it, and that Mungo did not take it, because a grumlin does not take, and a fox holds, and that after a while Mungo said, in the voice he uses for the weather:

"It's been relocated."

Grizel, when it was reported to her, wrote it down, and looked at what she had written, and then had to go and lie down, and the ledger for the rest of the day is in Pettigrew's hand, which is why the bins are described as "insufficiently presented."

The bins are along the wall past the corner, and the bounds go past them, and the theology does not like it. They stand in a row, tall as the Stair is tall to a grumlin, and every seventh day the Above puts things in them that it does not want seen, and lines them up as if for inspection, and then takes them away before anyone can inspect them, and the hollow has never known whether this is an offering or an insult or a filing system. Mungo walked past them without turning his head. Kit looked. There is a gap under the lid of the nearest, and something inside it caught the light, and she noted it, and said nothing, and it will keep.

At the poles she looked up. The Stair stands over the green like a cliff over a beach, six floors of it, window on window, and from the ground of the hollow you never see it whole because the hedge is in the way, and from the top of the wall by the poles you do. Kit stood and looked at it in the still bright air with her hands in the coat, and counted the windows, and stopped at one on the third floor where the glass was smudged low down, at the height of a small hand, and looked at it for a while, and went on. The ledger does not know what she was thinking. The ledger has noticed that she looked, and is keeping a page.

Then the open green, which is the sea, and which Mungo crossed the way he does everything, by planting each boot as though the boot were the whole of the argument, and then the line.

The line where Gnomesby's ground begins is not marked. Nettie can see it. Kit could not, until she saw the Provost, who was standing at the edge of his own hedge exactly as he had stood on the day of the Shortening, with his clipboard, and had plainly been standing there since somebody in Gnomesby had looked across the green that morning and seen a wall walking. He and Mungo looked at each other across the line. They have known each other forty years, and in all of it have stood this close exactly once, a week ago, with a treaty and a beetle between them. Now there was only the width of a path, and neither of them said anything, because grumlins do not, and it went on long enough that Kit began to understand it was not silence but conversation.

Then Mungo said, across the line, in the voice he uses at the gate: "Nobody comes in."

He was outside. He was as far from the gate as he had been in his life, standing on the edge of another hollow's ground with the whole green behind him, and he said it about home, and the Provost heard it that way, and raised the clipboard, an inch, which from the Provost is a bow, and they turned and went back.

Mothy was at the gate. He had not moved. He was holding the lantern against his chest and looking into it, and when Mungo's boots came up the path he looked up, and his face did the thing it does, slowly, from the inside, and he held the lantern out.

"Hello," he said.

Mungo took it. He stepped back onto the spot, which took him the way water takes a stone, and planted his boots, and the depression in the path was full again, and the gate was held, and the hollow, which had been holding its breath since morning without being aware of it, let it out.

Grizel, restored, wrote the day up at dusk. The entry is short, for a Sunday, and it is here in full, because she asked.

"The keeper walked the bounds. The sentry accompanied her. The gate was held by Mothy, who reports that nothing came in, and that one thing went out and came back, and that he is not certain it is the same thing. The ledger has examined it and is not certain either. It has recorded it as unchanged, for the form of the thing, and has put a mark in the margin."