Chapter 54: I Was Paid for a Woman

He shifted on the bench and got himself more upright.

"I was paid for a woman. I did not get the woman. I spent sixty men over the water and at that tower and I got nothing at all, and I went back east with a warband that had been promised silver and had buried its friends for a wall it did not take."

"So you came back."

"I came back because sixty men who are not paid will find another chief in a season, and because I could not go home with nothing." He said it entirely evenly. "We came over the water in the second week and we sat in that wood and we were going to take a village. There are four of them along that road and we had looked at two."

"And instead you took a captain."

"Instead a man rode past our wood with six other men." The Khesari spread his hands as far as the rope allowed. "Six. On a road. With good horses and good mail and a banner. Do you understand what that is, to a chief with nothing? That is a season's honour and a hundred marks of harness and a story to take home, and it came past our trees at a walk in the middle of a morning.

"So I took it, and it went wrong, because there were more of them behind the first six and because your old man got them onto that bank inside four minutes, which I did not expect and which I still do not understand."

"You'd not know him from any other man on a road."

"I did not know him at all. I did not know he was a captain until the second hour, when it became obvious from how they were being handled." He looked at Osric. "And I would say the same to you if I had known, because there is nothing in it worth lying about. I would have taken him either way."

Osric sat there and turned it over and could not find the edge of it anywhere.

It fits. Every part of it fits.

A man loses a contract, comes back for plunder, finds a small party on a road, takes it. That is not a plot. That is what raiders do and have always done and there is nothing in it I could stand up in a hall and call strange.

And I do not like it, and I cannot say why, and disliking it is not evidence.

"Now," said the Khesari, comfortably, watching him work. "You wanted a plot and I have given you a bad season and a hungry chief. It is a disappointment. I am sorry for it.

"And when you come back tomorrow, because you will come back tomorrow, bring something to drink. Your priest can watch my hands all he likes. I have been watching his."

Out in the passage Osric stood for a while with his hand flat on the cold stone.

"Well?"

Lambert had gone somewhere behind his own face.

"He is telling the truth about the hood and the night and the two meetings," he said. "All of it. He did not decorate any of it and he did not repeat himself and he answered before he thought, which liars do not."

"And the road?"

"That is where I am less use to you." Lambert frowned slightly. "He told it well. He told it in order and he did not embellish it and he gave you the unflattering parts before you asked for them, which is what an honest man does.

"It is also what a very good liar does, and I have met about four of those in eleven years, and I could not tell you which of the two I have just been listening to."

"That's no help at all."

"No," Lambert agreed. "It is not. I would rather say so than invent something."

They stood a moment.

"There's one part," Osric said.

"Go on."

"He says he came back to take a village, and there are four on that road, and he'd looked at two." He rubbed at his brow where the cut was. "And instead he sat in a wood four miles past the alder fork, which is the one stretch of that road where a wood comes down on both sides, and it is nine miles from the nearest of those villages."

Lambert considered it.

"A man waiting to raid a village would sit near the village."

"He would. Or he'd sit where the road is bad, if he thought a merchant train was worth more than a village, and men do think that." Osric let out a breath. "I've turned it four ways and every way I turn it there's an ordinary answer. He sat in the best ambush ground on that road because it is the best ambush ground on that road. Any raider would."

"So there is nothing in it."

"There's nothing in it," said Osric, "that I could take to the Baron without being laughed at."

And he let it go, because there was a yard full of wounded men and a garrison to run and eighteen families and no time whatever, and because he could not have said what he was reaching for even if somebody had held the door for him.

Stolen novel; please report.

Throderic had been given the small room off the physician's house, which had a door and a window and a fire, and which Gerfried gave to nobody.

Osric came in on the third evening and found him awake.

He was propped up on a great many bolsters, which he plainly loathed. The eye was gone and had been bound. The shoulder had come out and been packed. The side had been opened and cleaned and sewn and would be opened again in four days.

He was the colour of a wet sheet, and his one eye tracked Osric all the way across the room.

"They've given you my chamber," he said.

"Until you're up."

"You've moved my gear."

"I've moved nothing. The Baron threatened me about it."

"Good." Throderic settled back a fraction. "There's a box under the window with the muster rolls back to the year I came. If you move that I'll get out of this bed."

"Nobody's touching your box."

Osric pulled the stool over and sat down, and the two of them said nothing for a while, which was comfortable.

"Sixteen," said Throderic, eventually.

"Eighteen. Two went in the carts."

"Which two?"

Osric told him.

The captain shut his eye and did not open it for some time.

"Right," he said.

They left that where it was.

"Tell me about the bank," Osric said instead. "How'd you get onto it."

And Throderic told him, slowly, in about ten minutes, with a great many stops, and it was the only pleasure Osric had in that entire fortnight.

The captain had known inside four seconds that the road was lost. He had put the horses' bodies where he wanted them by driving the animals at the gap and killing them there, which had cost him three good horses and had saved him a day. He had sent Hoyt out on the fourth hour, deliberately late, because a man sent out in the first minutes gets run down and a man sent out once they have committed to the bank does not.

He had rationed the water by the spoonful from the first afternoon and had made every man drink in front of him so nobody could give theirs away.

And he had made them dig with their helmets.

"They hated that," he said. "Two of them told me it was beneath them. Sixty-one years old and I am on my knees in shale with a helmet in my hands and a boy from Branlind is telling me it is beneath him."

"What'd you say?"

"I said it would be a good deal less beneath him at midnight." Throderic almost smiled. "It was."

Osric was quiet a moment.

"The one that gets me," he said, "is that you gave me till dawn."

"You'd have come at dawn."

"I came at dusk."

"Aye, and you were early, and I have been thinking about that as well." The captain turned his head slightly. "It was Hoyt. I gave him the fourth hour and a hard horse and I told him not to spare it, and he did not spare it, and he brought you a day sooner than any sensible man would have got there."

"He killed the horse in the courtyard."

"Then I shall pay for the horse," said Throderic, "and I shall enjoy paying for it."

The fire moved. Somewhere out in the yard a man was being carried somewhere and was not enjoying it.

"They've a prisoner," Osric said.

"I've heard. The one who talks."

"Aye."

"And?"

Osric told him. All of it, and Throderic listened without moving and did not interrupt once.

At the end of it he lay there a while looking at the ceiling with his one eye.

"A hungry chief on a bad season," he said.

"That's his account."

"It is also the likeliest account, and you know it is, and I can hear that you do not like it." Throderic shifted a fraction and stopped shifting. "Osric. I have been thirty years on this border. Do you know how many raids I have investigated afterward and found a reason for?"

"Some."

"None. Not one. Every one of them, when you get to the bottom of it, is hunger and horses and a chief who needed a season. The reason is that there is never a reason." He let his head go back. "We want there to be. A man wants his friends to have died for something he can name and go and burn. And they die because sixty men on the far side of a river had a poor autumn."

"He was in the one stretch of that road where a wood comes down on both sides."

"So would you be. So would I be." The captain's mouth moved very slightly. "If you put me over that water with sixty hungry men and told me to bring back a season, I should sit in that same wood, and I should sit in it for a week, and I should take whatever came down it."

Osric was quiet.

"You'd have me let it alone."

"I'd have you sleep, and run my garrison, and go and see those eighteen houses before the week's out, because that is real and this is not." Throderic said it gently, which from him was rare enough to land. "And if you want to go on turning it over in the small hours, then turn it over. I have never once been able to stop you doing anything.

"But do not take it to Waldric. He will ask you what you have got, and you will say a man sat in a wood, and he will say yes, that is where a man sits, and you will have spent something you may want later."

Osric sat with that.

"Aye," he said.

They left it there.

The fire moved. Somewhere out in the yard a man was being carried somewhere and was not enjoying it.

"Hoyt," said Throderic, after a while.

"He's up and about. Gerfried's got him carrying water."

"Good. Put him on something proper by the week's end and do not make a fuss of him, because he will not know what to do with it and it will spoil him." The captain shut his eye. "And Osric. That horse."

"What about it?"

"I shall pay for the horse," he said, "and I shall enjoy paying for it. See that Rothgar puts it against my name and not the barony's, and see that he tells me the sum, because I want to hear it said aloud."

"You're meant to be resting."

"I am sixty-one years old with a hole in my side and one eye, and I am lying in a warm room with nothing whatever to do." Throderic did not open the eye. "Bring me the muster book tomorrow. There are eighteen names to come off it and I have been putting men on that roll for nineteen years and I am not having a clerk do it."

"It'll keep till you're up."

"It will not keep. It is the only work I have got left this month and I should like it."

Osric got up and stood there a moment.

"You'll be up by Rhumnacht," he said.

"I shall be up a good deal before Rhumnacht, and I shall be insufferable about it, and Gerfried will tell you I have gone against his advice, and he will be correct." The captain's one eye opened a fraction. "Go home. You are standing on that leg and I can hear you doing it from here."