Chapter 55: The Dead Come Home

The frost came early that year, as everybody had said it would, and it came in the third week after the Alder Fork and did not lift again.

It went into the ground on a Tuesday night and by the Thursday the ruts on the castle track had set hard enough to turn an ankle, and the masons' stone lay under its oilcloth on the north side of the wall and would lie there until the thaw. The brook narrowed and grew a rim of ice each night that the millwheel broke each morning. The last of the leaves went off the trees along the creek road in about four days and after that the country out east was grey and open and you could see a long way across it, which was the one mercy of that season and the only one anybody mentioned.

Valmarch got colder and got on with it.

The levy had gone home. The wounded had thinned out of the physician's yard: some to their own houses, some to the granary while their families were sent for, four to the chapel bank where Hesse set another row of stones and where the ground was so hard by then that it took two men a day and a half to open each one.

Osric ran the garrison for nineteen days.

He was tolerably good at it and hated most of it. He went through the roll with Rothgar and found the two errors Heinric had promised him and one more nobody had promised him. He walked the beacon chain twice. He put the fourth fire on the Vale himself with six men and a cart on a morning cold enough to crack a bucket, and stood there afterward in the wind looking east and thinking that it should have been done in September.

He got to eighteen of the twenty-two houses. The other four were out at the far farms and the road was too hard and he sent Lambert instead and did not forgive himself for it.

And in the middle of all that, the captain mended.

That was the shape of those three weeks and it was why the ending of them was what it was.

Throderic mended.

Gerfried said so first, grudgingly, on the ninth day, in the particular voice he used when a patient had done something he had not authorised. The side had closed. The fever that had come up on the fourth night had gone down on the

sixth and had not come back. The shoulder was stiff and would be stiff for good, and the eye was gone and there was nothing to be done about the eye.

But he mended.

By the twelfth day he was sitting up without the bolsters and had got the muster book off Osric and had gone through it line by line and had struck out eighteen names in his own hand, which took him two days and which he would not let anybody help with.

By the fifteenth he was on his feet in the room, holding the wall, and had shouted at an apprentice.

By the eighteenth he had got as far as the doorway of the physician's house and had stood in it in a blanket like a great grey heron with one eye, and had commented at length on the state of the yard, and men crossing the courtyard had seen him there and had gone away with something in their chests they had not had that morning.

On the nineteenth day Osric brought him the roster for the winter watches and the two of them argued about it for the better part of an hour.

It was a good argument. Throderic was wrong about two of it and right about the rest, and knew it, and made Osric prove the two, and gave way on them with an ill grace that was entirely performed.

At the end of it he sat back against the wall and looked at the fire for a while.

"You've done it well," he said. "The nineteen days."

"I've done it."

"You have done it well, and I am saying so once, and if you tell anybody I said it I shall deny it in front of the Baron." Throderic shifted his shoulder and winced. "There is something I have been meaning to say to you and I have been putting it off because I did not want to say it from a bed."

"Then say it standing up next week."

"Aye." The captain almost smiled. "I shall. Next week."

Osric went home.

He remembered afterward that they had also talked about the roof of the granary, and about whether Doran should be made a serjeant, and about a boy from Branlind who had got himself into trouble at the King Fish, and that

Throderic had eaten most of a bowl of something and had complained about the bread.

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He remembered that he had left about the ninth hour, and that the captain had told him to shut the door properly because the draught came under it, and that he had shut it properly.

He remembered that it had been an ordinary evening.

The knock came before dawn.

Osric was awake for it, which he was grateful for afterward, because it meant he opened his own door and did not have Anna open it.

It was one of Gerfried's apprentices. A boy of about seventeen with no cloak on, who had run the whole way down the hill in the dark on frozen ruts and had fallen at least once, and who stood in the doorway with his breath going and could not get the words out in order.

Osric already knew.

He knew from the fact that it was a boy and not a man, and from the hour, and from the way the boy would not look at him, and he stood there in the cold doorway of his own house and let the boy get there in his own time and did not help him.

"Serjeant. The captain."

"Aye."

"He's gone, Serjeant. In the night."

Behind Osric, in the dark of the house, Anna made a small sound.

He got up the hill in about eleven minutes, which was faster than he had gone anywhere in a month, and did not feel the leg at all and paid for that for three days afterward.

The room was warm and the fire had been built up and there were two candles lit, and Gerfried was standing at the foot of the bed with his hands hanging at his sides, which Osric had never seen.

Throderic looked asleep.

That was what struck first and it was the worst of it. He was lying on his good side with one hand under the edge of the blanket and his face entirely peaceful, and the bound eye did not show from that angle, and he looked like a man who

had gone to sleep in a warm room after a long day and would be extremely irritable when woken.

Osric stood in the doorway.

"When?"

"Between the third hour and the fifth. The boy looked in at the third and he was asleep and breathing and the fire was up, and looked in again at the fifth." Gerfried's voice had nothing in it whatever. "There was no noise. Nobody heard anything and I have asked all of them twice."

"He was mending."

"He was mending."

"He was on his feet at that door yesterday."

"I know it. I was stood next to him." Gerfried did not move. "I have been at this thirty-one years and I have seen it perhaps a dozen times. A man takes a wound like that one and he closes and he mends and he stands up and everybody says he is through it. And then something in him that has been quietly failing since the day of it stops."

"What something?"

"I do not know." He said it flatly and without any defensiveness at all, which somehow made it worse. "That is the honest answer and I will not give you a better one to be kind. Something in the chest. A vessel. A clot moving. Something that had been holding since that road and let go in the dark. He would not have known. He would have been asleep and then he would not have been."

Osric came into the room.

"He said a week."

"I heard him say it. I told him a fortnight and he laughed at me."

Osric stood by the bed for a while.

The muster book was on the stool beside it where he had left it the evening before, with the marker in it at the page Throderic had been working on, and a stub of charcoal on top of it.

"He never got out of that road," Osric said at last.

"No," said Gerfried. "He got off it. He never got out of it. It only took three weeks about the business."

The physician went out a little after that, and took the boy with him, and shut the door.

Osric had expected him to say something about it. Gerfried had a way of managing people out of rooms and had been doing it for thirty-one years, and he did not do it that morning. He simply went, and left the door shut behind him, and it was some while before Osric understood that it had been done deliberately and that the man had given him the room.

He sat down on the stool.

He had come up that hill in eleven minutes with a job in his head, because there is always a job: somebody had to tell the Baron, and somebody had to tell the yard before the village told it wrong, and there was a body to be seen to and a burial to arrange in ground that was going to fight them for it.

He sat there and could not get up to do any of it.

The fire had been built up in the night and was still going. There were two candles on the sill, and the shutter was closed, and the room was warm, and it smelled of woodsmoke and boiled linen and the sharp herbal stink of whatever Gerfried had been packing the side with.

Throderic lay on his good side with his face toward the wall.

Somebody had put his hand under the edge of the blanket. Osric looked at that for a long time and could not work out whether the man had done it himself before he slept or whether one of the apprentices had done it afterward, and found that he wanted very badly to know and that there was nobody left to ask.

After a while he reached over and straightened the blanket.

It did not need straightening. He did it anyway, and then he tucked the edge of it in along the back the way you do for a man who is going to be cold, and he had got about halfway along before he understood what he was doing and stopped with his hand still on the wool.

And then it came up out of him all at once, and there was nobody in the room, and it took him.

He had not cried in about thirty years.

He had not cried when his father went down on that rampart, because he had been in a line with eleven men left and there had not been time, and afterward

there had been the rest of the siege and then the rest of the campaign. He had not cried a month later when they brought Erik in. He had not cried at Hallenmark or at the tower or at the three empty stones on the bank.

And he had not cried at his wife's grave or his daughter's, because he had not been at either of them, and by the time he stood over that ground it was the following spring and the turf had taken and there had been two boys watching him do it.