Chapter 57: His Son Saw Him Break

Osric came back and found his son's hand on his arm and the yard carrying on round them because Argilac had put himself in a position that hid most of it.

"How long," he said.

"Not long. Twenty. Nobody saw."

"You saw."

"Aye. I'll go on seeing." Argilac took his hand off the arm. "Ranks of six, you'd got to."

"Ranks of six."

"Right." The boy nodded and stepped back. "I'll tell them."

He did not mention it again then or afterward, and Osric never found out whether he had told his sister, and had a fair idea that he had not, and thought better of him for it and could not think of a way to say so.

It got him at about the fourth hour of the afternoon of the second day, in the armoury, alone, over nothing at all.

He had gone in to count spears, because somebody had to and because it was a job with numbers in it. He got to the pegs at the back where the garrison hangs what a man does not carry on patrol.

Throderic's cloak was on the third peg.

It had been there since the morning he rode out for Branlind, because he had taken the good one and left the old one, and nobody had touched it in five weeks, and there was no reason on earth for anybody to have touched it.

Osric stood in front of that peg for a good while.

Then he put his hand flat against the wall beside it and put his forehead against his own forearm, and stayed like that in the cold and the dark and the smell of oil for about a quarter of an hour, and made no noise whatever.

Nobody came in. He found out afterward that Voss had been sitting outside the door on a barrel with his stick across his knees for all of it, telling anybody who came that the armoury was shut.

They buried him on the third day, because the ground was hard and it took that long to open.

The chapel bank was white with frost that morning and the sky was the flat grey that comes before snow, and there was no wind at all, which everybody remarked on afterward because there is always wind on that bank.

The whole barony came.

Not the whole barony. But the village came, all of it, and the garrison came in ranks and under arms because the Baron ordered it and because they would have anyway, and men came in from the near farms who had been at the Fork, and a party came down from Branlind with old Marek at the head of it, who had ridden two days in that cold at sixty-six years of age and who stood at the back and did not speak to anybody.

Heinric von Aelrich carried the front left corner of the bier himself, in front of everybody, which is not done.

Waldric was at the front right. Osric had the back left, and Aldric the back right, and the four of them brought Throderic up that bank on their shoulders with the frost cracking under their boots.

The coffin had been covered with the standard.

Not a new one. Tertius had gone to the Baron on the first evening and had asked for the old one, the one that had come off the pole at the Alder Fork in ribbons, and Heinric had given it to him without a word, and the old man had spent two days with a needle he could barely hold repairing it.

He had not made it good. He had made it whole. The tears were drawn together and stitched with whatever thread came to hand, and there were about forty of them, and the gold wyvern on the purple was in six pieces and had been put back into one, and it was still stained dark down one side where it had lain against something on that bank.

It was, Osric thought, the finest object he had ever seen in his life.

Lambert said the rite.

He said the proper one, the old one, the one that assumes a body, because there was a body and because for once in that terrible autumn there was nothing to work around. He said it in the old tongue and then in the common one, and he did not hurry any part of it, and Osric stood four feet from the grave and heard about a third of it.

He heard the part about the road, which is in the middle. He heard the part near the end that asks the ground to be gentle with what has been given to it

and reminds the ground, in language that is about four hundred years old and faintly rude, that it will have everybody eventually and can afford to wait.

And he heard Lambert say the name.

Throderic of Valmarch. Captain of the garrison nineteen years. Serjeant eleven years before that.

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That was all. He had no second name that anybody had ever needed, and no house, and no land, and nothing to put after it.

Afterward the garrison went down and the village went down and there were about forty people left on the bank, and then twenty, and then it was only Osric and Tertius and a hole in the ground with two men filling it.

Tertius leaned on his stick and looked at it.

"Forty years," he said.

"I know."

"He was a serjeant when I came here. He put me on the gate my first week because he did not trust me and he was correct not to." The old man's face did not move at all. "I have outlived him by three weeks and I do not know what to do about that."

"Nor do I."

"No." Tertius nodded slowly. "No, I suppose you do not."

They stood a while.

"You'll take it," he said.

"That's the Baron's to say."

"It is the Baron's to say and he said it to me yesterday afternoon, because he wanted somebody to tell him he was right, and I am the only man left in that castle old enough to tell him he is not." Tertius turned his head. "He is right, and I told him so, and he will send for you within the week."

Osric said nothing.

"You will not want it," Tertius said. "That is the whole reason you should have it and I shall not be saying it twice."

He went down the hill.

The Baron sent for him on the fifth day.

It was done in the hall, in front of the household, because Heinric had decided that it should be, and Osric had known since the bank that it was coming and had still not worked out anything to say about it.

There was no ceremony to speak of. There is none for a serjeant made captain; it is not a knighting and there is no oath in it that a man has not already sworn.

Heinric said it out loud in the hall so that everybody heard it, and Rothgar wrote it in the book, and it took about ninety seconds.

Then the Baron took the cloak off the back of the chair and held it out.

It was the captain's cloak, the good one, the one that had gone to Branlind and come back on a cart. Somebody had cleaned it. There was a dark patch low on the right side that had not come out and was not going to.

Osric looked at it and did not put his hand out.

The hall waited.

He told me once. Two months ago, by the fig tree, and I thought he was jesting and told him not to jest.

"If I don't come back one of these days, you'll wear the cloak next."

And I said I'd make a poor captain, and he said there are knots only a blunt axe will split, and I said let's pray you don't become one.

And then I let him go out of that gate with six men because his argument was better than mine.

"Osric," said Heinric quietly.

He took the cloak.

He put it on there in the hall in front of all of them, and it was too long in the body because Throderic had been the taller man by about two inches, and every soul in that room noticed and not one of them said anything about it, then or ever.

The wake was at the King Fish that night, because Harvin would not have it anywhere else and had shut the doors to everybody but the garrison and the village and had then let in the whole village, and it went on until about the fourth hour of the morning.

It was loud.

That was what surprised Osric, and he said so to Baldewin at one point, and Baldewin, who had been at a great many of these in nine years as a reeve, said that the loud ones are for the men everybody liked and the quiet ones are for the men everybody respected, and that it is a rare and fortunate creature who gets a loud one.

Voss told the story of the Vale, which Throderic had ruined the ending of eleven years ago by walking into the room at the wrong moment, and told it very badly and got shouted at, and told it again.

Alden was sick in the brook at about the second hour and came back and had more.

Erryk, who could walk now with a stick and would walk with one for the rest of his life, stood up on a bench with his bad leg braced and gave a speech that had exactly three sentences in it and that made about nine people cry, and then sat down and did not speak again all night.

Tertius told four separate stories about campaigns he had not been at, and put Throderic into all four of them, and everybody knew he was inventing it and nobody cared in the slightest because it was the only way the old man had left of putting him in a room.

And near the end of it, Anna came and sat down beside her father on the bench with a cup of something and did not say anything for a long while.

"He came to the house," she said, eventually. "In the summer. In July, when you were out at Orswood for the four days."

"Did he."

"He'd a basket. He said it was from the kitchens and that they had over-baked and it would go to waste, which was a lie, because there was cheese in it and cheese does not over-bake." She turned the cup. "He sat down in that chair and drank a cup of small beer and asked me about the wolf and told me it was too tall, and I told him it was meant to be, and he said, aye, that is what your father says, which is how I knew you had been talking about it to somebody."

Osric looked at his cup.

"He came three times that summer," Anna said. "Always when you were out. Never stayed above half an hour. Never once said why."

"I never knew."

"No. You were meant not to." She leaned her shoulder against his arm, briefly. "I think he was checking. I think that is what it was and I think he did it for a good many people in this village and I do not think one of us knew."

Osric came out of the King Fish at about the fourth hour with the cold hitting him like a wall.

The frost had come down hard and the whole square was white and the sky had cleared and the stars were out over the roofs, and behind him the noise of the wake went on and would go on for another hour.

He stood in the middle of the square for a while.

Up on the rise the castle stood black against the stars with the half-built wall unfinished along the top of it, and the scaffolding standing empty, and nothing due to be done to any of it until the thaw. There was one light burning on the third floor and another in the room over the gate, and the rest of it was dark.

Out east, past the village and the palisade and the creek roads and the burnt tower, the country lay flat and hard and open under the frost for forty miles, and there was nothing whatever moving on it that anybody could see.

It was cold. It was going to get a great deal colder before it got better.

Osric pulled the captain's cloak round his shoulders, which was too long in the body and always would be, and went up the hill to see whether the watch had been changed properly.