Chapter 68: The Longest Night

It was a great deal of food and it was gone extremely fast and Lera watched it go with the particular satisfaction of a woman who has been cooking since the fourth hour.

The talk went where it went. Beren had a complaint about the reeve and the price of oak bark and had been saving it. Lambert had a story about a christening in the autumn that had gone wrong in four separate ways and told it badly and was shouted at. Marella got under the table and stayed there for a while and was removed. Toman asked Argilac something about horses and Argilac answered it properly, at length, and Toman listened to every word.

Osric sat at the end with his back to the wall and said very little and was entirely content.

Ten of us. And it was eleven at this table when I was fourteen, and then it wassix inside a year, and then it was five for a long while.

And now it is ten, and two of them are mine that I did not expect to be sat atany table of mine again, and one of them is a girl I found on a road.

He did not say any of that. He would not have known how to start.

Twice in that meal, Theo spoke across the table to somebody and Osric answered a different question from somebody else at the same moment, and both times it was accidental and both times everybody in that room noticed, and Lera got up and dealt with the pot.

At noon Beren stood up.

"Fire's out."

That is how it is said and it is said in every house in the barony within about ten minutes of the same moment, and there is no ceremony in it whatever. The pots come off. The good ash gets carried out and kept for the lye. The stones get swept.

Beren looked round the room.

"Osric. Theo. You two do the yard fire."

Nobody said anything.

It was not subtle. Beren had never in his life been subtle and had not attempted it now, and Lera put her hand flat on the table and looked at her husband in a manner that suggested a conversation would be occurring later.

Theo got up.

So Osric got up.

The yard fire was the one under the rendering shed at the far end, where the fats and the oils are worked, and it was the biggest and the dirtiest in the yard and it took two men and about a quarter of an hour, and it had been chosen for exactly those reasons.

They went down through the pits with the frost cracking under them.

Neither of them said anything for the first four minutes. Theo raked the front of it out and Osric shovelled and the ash went into the barrow, and they worked round each other the way two people do who have never worked together and are both good at working.

"He did that on purpose," Theo said.

"He did."

"He's got about as much subtlety as that barrow."

"He never had any." Osric put the shovel in. "He was the same at nine. If two of us were fighting he'd put us on the beam together and go away, and it never once worked, and he never once stopped doing it."

Theo made a noise that was very nearly a laugh.

They worked on.

The fire came apart slowly the way a working fire does, and the heat came off it into their faces and their hands, and the ash went grey.

"I've the shop," Theo said, at about the tenth minute.

Osric did not stop shovelling.

"Warin told you?"

"Warin told the reeve and the reeve's wife told Berta, and Berta told Anna, and Anna told me at the eighth hour this morning while she was dragging me out of the door." Theo leaned on the rake. "So no. Warin did not tell me. Warin is going to tell me in the spring and be extremely pleased with himself, and I am going to be surprised, and I have been practising."

Osric found he had stopped shovelling after all.

"That's good," he said.

"Aye."

"That's a good shop and he's a good smith and it's the only forge for four miles, and you'll have every horse in this barony through that yard inside two years." Osric heard himself and stopped. "That's not what you wanted me to say."

"I didn't want you to say anything." Theo went back to the rake. "I told you because you were the only person left who didn't know, and everybody else in that house has known since Berta, and I'd not have you find out at the fire tonight in front of forty people."

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They finished it in silence, mostly, and it was not a bad silence.

Right at the end, with the barrow full and the stones swept and the shed gone cold, Theo straightened up and looked out east over the frames at the country lying white.

"He'd have liked this," he said.

Osric looked at him.

"The captain," said Theo. "He came to the forge in the autumn. About a fortnight before. Stood in the yard about ten minutes asking Warin questions about the chest and the coughing, and he never once asked me anything, and then on the way out he stopped at the door and said, you're Osric's."

"What'd you say?"

"I said aye." Theo picked up the barrow handles. "And he said, right, and he went. That was all of it. And I've thought about it a good deal since, and I still cannot work out whether he came about Warin's chest at all."

He took the barrow up the yard.

Osric stood by a cold shed at the end of a tannery for about a minute and then followed him.

They came in with the light going and the whole family put their coats on, and the ten of them walked in along the track to the village together, in the last of the afternoon, on the shortest day.

Then the sun goes, and it goes early, and everybody comes up the bank.

Osric got there in the last of the light and stood at the back with about four hundred people in front of him.

The whole village had come out. The whole village always came out, and this year the garrison had come as well, most of them, because Osric had given the

watch to the ones with no families in it and had told them they would have the fires lit for them when they came off.

The bank was black with people. Somebody had cleared the snow off the flat ground below the stones and it had gone to mud and then frozen, and there were children on it sliding, and being shouted at, and going on sliding.

Lambert lit it at the exact moment he judged the sun to be gone, which is a judgement and not a science and which he had been getting wrong by a few minutes annually for eleven years.

It went up fast because it had been built by people who had been building it every year of their lives, and the noise it made when it caught went over the whole bank and there was a sound out of four hundred people that was not a cheer and was older than one.

And then the light came up off it onto all those faces.

Osric stood at the back and looked at them because he could not help it.

Mette was near the front with her two girls and the elder was holding the little one up to see. Berta was beside her. Gerfried was down on the flat with his enormous hands behind his back, having a conversation with somebody about something, entirely uninterested in the fire. Voss was propped on his stick with about six of the garrison round him telling them something that was making them laugh.

Erryk had come up the bank.

That had taken him about half an hour and Osric had watched every step of it from a distance and had not gone to help, because he had known better, and Erryk was now standing at the edge of the crowd with his weight on the stick and his bad leg out and his face doing something in the firelight that Osric did not look at directly.

And Theo was there.

He was on the far side of the fire with Warin beside him, and he was easy to find because he was a head above everybody near him, and he had a girl from the dairy on one side of him saying something and was laughing at it.

Anna appeared at Osric's elbow.

"You've been stood at the back for a quarter of an hour."

"I like the back."

"You like the back because from the back you can see everybody and nobody has to see you, and that has been true since I was nine." She put her arm through his without asking. "Come down."

"Anna."

"Come down. Not to him. Just down. There's four hundred people between you and him and I am not going to walk you across that bank like a girl bringing her father to be looked at."

So he went down.

They stood on the flat with the heat coming off the fire and the frozen mud under them, and Anna talked at him about nothing whatever for a while, and after about ten minutes Warin came past on his way to somewhere else with a cup in his hand and stopped.

"Captain."

"Warin."

"He's good." The old smith said it without any preamble at all and coughed afterward, and it took him a moment. "I'll not say it to him for a year. But he's good, and he was good when he came, and somebody in that city knew what he was doing with him."

"Harbren."

"Aye. Well. I'd shake Harbren's hand if he were here and then I'd tell him he let a good one go, and he knows both those things already." Warin drank. "He'll have the shop when I'm done. I've told the reeve and it's in the roll. I'm telling you because you'd hear it in the spring otherwise and I'd rather you heard it now and in my own voice."

Osric found he had nothing at all to say.

"He does not know," Warin added. "And you'll not tell him, because I want the pleasure of it."

He went off toward the fire.

Anna's hand tightened on Osric's arm and she did not say anything either, and the two of them stood there in the firelight for a while.

At the turn of the night, they lit the tapers.

That is the other half of it and it is the part that matters. Every household comes to the bank with a lantern or a covered taper, and takes its fire from the one fire, and carries it home, and relights its own hearth from it.

Four hundred people going down a hill in the dark, each of them carrying a small flame in cupped hands or behind horn, strung out along the path and down the lane and out to the crofts, so that from the castle wall the whole valley fills slowly with little lights that stop moving one at a time as each one arrives where it is going.

Osric had watched it from that wall for eleven years and had never once got used to it.

This year he watched it from the bank, standing beside his daughter, and Anna took their light herself and carried it down and would not let him near it.

The hall took its fire last, which is the courtesy, and it came up the castle track behind everybody else.

The feast started late because of it and went on a great deal later.

There were perhaps sixty in that hall. The household, the garrison's officers, Corwin's twenty at the low end making a considerable amount of noise in about four languages, Rothgar with a cup he did not drink from, Waldric standing near the fire as always.

It was the best food anybody had eaten since October and would be the best food anybody would eat until Spearrise, and Rothgar had signed for all of it in November with his mouth in a line and had not said one word about it since, because a barony that will not feast on the longest night is a barony that has already lost.

Corwin was extremely good at it.