Fine line script quote on the mid back

The lamps in the cistern hall have gone to amber, so I am writing this by the last of the good light, with the tide pumps knocking below me like an old man's cough. You asked why I kept the cracked slate from the Ferrow sinking. Here is the reason, and it is not the one the schoolmasters gave.

When the flood took Lower Fenhaven, my uncle Tobiah carried a sack of seed grain up the stairs of the drowned chapel and wrote four lines on the plaster with a burnt stick. The words were but the fighter still remains, and he wrote them so small and fast that the letters ran into each other like wet thread. The council wanted the wall scrubbed for the new mosaic. Nobody could agree on the word in the middle. Some men swore it said still, others swore it said skill, and they argued in the rain until the pumps were restarted and the water was finally pushed back out to sea.

The argument saved it. The men with brushes kept stopping to squint, and by the time the mosaic crew came round, the plaster had been coated in lime and nobody had the heart to take it off. Tobiah did not live to see the seed store reopen. He went under in the second winter, trying to pull a boat off the silt bar, and his grain sack went to feed the children of the upper terraces.

I had the words cut into a strip of tin last spring and nailed above the door of the seed store. Every morning the crew passes beneath it, and someone reads it aloud, usually wrong, and laughs, and goes to work. I think that is what he wanted, if he wanted anything beyond a dry floor and a full store.

Come home before the spring tide. Bring your awl and the good black ink from the apothecary. The tin is starting to rust at the corners, and I would rather you fixed it than the council.