Chapter 56: The Man Who Finally Cried

He went down off the stool onto his knees on the floorboards beside that bed and put his forehead against the edge of the mattress and wept like a boy, and it went on for a good while, and it did not get quieter as it went.

He was forty-three years old and had a bad leg and a cracked rib and had commanded men for twenty-two years of it, and he knelt on a physician's floor in the dark before dawn and could not stop.

What came up with it was not the road and not the bank and not the three weeks.

It was 1401, and a house past the palisade, and being fourteen.

His father had begun drinking about a year after they came back from the northern campaign, and had done it the way a serjeant does, which is quietly and in company and without ever missing a muster. It took four years for it to become the sort of business a household organises itself around. Orunhard Lorgand was never once drunk on duty in his life. He was simply not there in the evenings, and then he was not there at the table, and then he was a man who came in late and sat by the fire and did not talk to anybody and got up in the morning and went and did his work extremely well.

Their mother had been dead two years by then. Erik was seventeen and had taken all of it onto himself and had begun to go hard round the edges with it. Aldric was twelve and had learned to be somewhere else. Beren was eleven and had already started spending his afternoons at the tanning yard, and had never afterward been got out of it. Lambert was eight and had been sent to the Order within the year and had probably been saved by it.

And Osric had been fourteen and had begun getting into fights in the lower lane, and had been quite good at them, and had been on a road that was extremely easy to see the end of.

Throderic had been serjeant of the garrison then. He had been about thirty-two.

He had come down to that house in the spring of that year, in the evening, and had sat at the table with Orunhard for about an hour, and Osric had listened at the door and had not been able to hear any of it.

And the next morning Throderic had come back and put Osric on the gate.

Not as a soldier. He was fourteen. He was put on the gate as a runner, at three days a week, for a wage of nothing whatever, and he had been made to stand

there in the cold for six hours at a time and be shouted at about his posture by a man who had no obligation to shout at him about anything.

That had gone on for four years.

Throderic had taught him to hold a spear and then taken it off him and taught him to hold it properly. He had taught him to read a road and to count a column and to tell what a man was going to do from what his feet were doing. He had fed him, three or four evenings a week, without ever once making anything of it. He had thrashed him twice, both times deservedly, and had told him afterward why, which was the part that had done the work.

And he had never, in twenty-nine years, said one word against Orunhard Lorgand in Osric's hearing.

Not one. Not when Osric was fourteen and would have taken it as permission. Not when he was nineteen and angry. Not when he was twenty-eight and had begun to understand it, and had said something bitter about his father across a fire, and Throderic had let it go past and then said, mildly, that Orunhard had been the best serjeant he ever served under and that he had learned about half of what he knew from him.

He had held the man's name up for twenty-nine years for the sake of a boy who was not his.

And I never said it to him.

Not once. Not in all that time. I said thank you for the roster and thank you for the horse and I never once said the other, because there was never an hour for it, and because he'd have made a joke and gone red and left the room.

My father died in my arms in the mud at that wall with everything unsaid between us, and I have spent twelve years telling myself that was the war's doing and not mine.

And this one died four hundred yards from my own house in a warm room with a fire going, in the night, while I slept, and there is nothing to blame for it at all.

At some point the candles guttered and he did not notice.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

When he came back to himself the light had changed at the edges of the shutter and he was still on the floor and his leg had locked entirely and he could not get up off it.

He had to take hold of the bed frame with both hands and haul himself up, and he did it slowly and badly and had to stop halfway, and it took him about two minutes.

He stood there afterward with his hand on the frame and his breath going, and looked down.

"Right," he said.

He straightened the blanket the rest of the way. He put the stub of charcoal into the muster book to mark the page and closed it and put it under his arm, because there was nobody else who was going to want it and because Throderic had struck out eighteen names in that book with his own hand and Osric was not going to let a clerk finish it.

At the door he stopped and turned round.

He stood in the doorway of that warm room for a moment with the book under his arm.

You'd have said something dry. You'd have said get out of my sickroom, Osric, and go and change the watch.

Well.

"Aye," he said, to the room. "I'm going."

Then he shut the door properly, because the draught came under it, and went up to tell the Baron.

The word went round the castle before the light and round the village with the light, and it went badly.

That was the part nobody had prepared for, including Osric.

The eighteen from the road had been mourned as men are mourned when everybody has been expecting it since the horn went. This was different. Every soul in that barony had spent three weeks being told the captain was mending, and a good many of them had seen him standing in the physician's doorway on the eighteenth day giving out opinions in a blanket, and so the news that came down the hill on the twentieth morning did not arrive as grief.

It arrived as an insult.

Men stood about in the yard with their hands hanging. Two of the younger ones argued with the man who told them and had to be spoken to. Wenna, in the lane, said out loud that it could not be right because she had seen him at the door herself, and had to be told twice, and then sat down on her own step and stayed there.

Tertius took it worst of anybody.

He had been walking with a stick since the Fork and had got as far as the outer yard most days, and he was in the yard when they told him. Osric was thirty feet away and saw it happen.

The old man did not say anything. He stood there for about four seconds and then turned round and walked back the way he had come, past the smithy and out through the gate and down the track, and did not come back until the middle of the afternoon, and nobody asked him where he had been and he never said.

Osric worked.

He did it because the alternative was standing still: he went and told the Baron himself rather than let a boy do it, and then he went and told the garrison in the yard in about nine words, and then he did every piece of business that day contained and several that belonged to the following week.

He was extremely calm and entirely useless, and Aldric watched him do it for four hours and then quietly took the roster off him and did the rest of it himself.

The three days between the death and the burial went past him in a manner he could not afterward assemble into an order.

He knew that he had not slept on the first night, and had slept badly on the second, and had woken on the third at some hour with the absolute conviction that he had forgotten to send a rider somewhere and had got as far as the door with his boots in his hand before he worked out that there was nowhere to send one.

He knew that he ate almost nothing and that Anna put food in front of him five or six times and that he had no memory whatever of any of it going anywhere.

He knew that he was polite to everybody, which was the part that frightened his daughter most, because Osric was not polite. He was direct and he was often gruff and about once a fortnight he was extremely funny, and for three days he was courteous to every soul who spoke to him and thanked people for things and asked after their families, and Anna watched him do it and said nothing to anybody and went and found Argilac on the second evening and told him to keep his father in his sight.

He knew that he did not go near the third floor of the keep, and did not know why, and did not examine it.

And he knew about the armoury.

He went away twice in those three days.

The first was in the hall, in front of nobody, while Rothgar was reading out a list of provisions for the burial party. Osric was standing at the end of the table and Rothgar got to the item about the ale and Osric was suddenly not in the hall at all.

He was on a bank in the dark with an arm across a man's throat and the noise going on all round him, and he could feel the mud through his knees and hear Theo's grunt somewhere behind him, and it went on for what felt like a long while.

Then Rothgar said his name for the third time, and he came back, and the whole room was looking at him.

"Ale," he said. "Aye. Whatever's in the store. It'll not matter."

Nobody said anything about it. Waldric looked at him for slightly too long and then went back to the list, and that was the end of it, and afterward Osric found that his hands had a fine tremor in them for about an hour.

The second time was worse and only Argilac saw it.

They were in the yard on the second afternoon and Osric was giving out the order for the burial ranks, and he stopped in the middle of a sentence and stood there.

Argilac had crossed to him inside four seconds, which is the whole difference a season makes, and got a hand on his arm and said his name once, quietly, at his shoulder, without any alarm in it whatever, and stood there and did not let go and did not ask him anything.

It took about a count of twenty.