Chapter 34: Back Under the Murder Holes

They went out of Valmarch's gate in the grey of the morning nine days after Throderic, and there was a good deal less ceremony about it, because a barony can only turn out for so many farewells in a fortnight before it begins to feel like something else.

Waldric sat his horse at the front in a good travelling cloak with his sword at his hip and looked, Osric thought, about fifteen years younger than he had at supper. Behind him came Osric and Argilac and Alden and Doran, and at the rear a small wooden cart of cured hide with a hired man on the box and Toman Lorgand sitting bolt upright beside him, gripping reins he had not been given with the seriousness of a boy conducting the most important business of his life.

Voss came out to the gate to see them off and did not pretend he was not sorry to be standing there.

"Bring me back something from that market."

"What?"

"I don't care. Something a man in this village hasn't got." He shifted his weight off the stick. "Mind Alden in the taverns. He gets ideas about his own size."

"I have never once had an idea about my own size," said Alden.

"You held a door in a burning tower, you great ox, and you've been unbearable since."

Heinric came down the steps to see them off, which he did not have to do.

He put a hand on Waldric's bridle and said something to his uncle that nobody else heard, and then came along the line to Osric and stood at his stirrup and looked up.

"Serjeant."

"My lord."

"Don't let him be clever." Heinric said it low. "He is very good in a room and he has not been in a room like that one in nine years, and there will be men in it who deal in nothing else. He knows it. He will forget it about an hour in."

"I'll be behind him."

"I know you will." The Baron's hand went to the horse's neck instead and stayed there a moment. "We stood in the same line once, you and I. There are three men alive who remember it and one of them is you."

"Four, my lord. Tertius was on the flank."

"Tertius was in the baggage and has been improving the story for eleven years." Heinric almost smiled, and then did not. "Come back."

"That's the plan."

Anna came out of the press at the last, ducking under a horse's head with no regard whatever for the horse, and got hold of Osric's stirrup leather.

"She says you're to look at the cathedral properly and tell her what the eastern windows are like, and not just say they were tall."

"Tell her I'll be looking at doors and rooflines and where a man could put twenty crossbows."

"She said you'd say that too." Anna grinned up at him. "She also said that if you come back with a hole in you she is going to be extremely tiresome about it, and that I'm to tell you she means it."

"Is that from her or from you?"

"Yes," said Anna, and let go of the stirrup, and stepped back.

Osric looked up once at the keep as they went under the gatehouse arch.

Third floor. The narrow window was open a hand's breadth against the cold, which meant somebody had opened it, and there was nobody standing in it.

He was glad of that on the whole. He would not have known what to do with a face at a window and he would have thought about it for four miles.

The road ran west and then south-west, and the country softened as they went, the hard scrub of the marches giving way by degrees to enclosed fields and hedges laid by somebody's grandfather and a great many more sheep.

Waldric rode well for a man of sixty-eight and did not talk for the first two hours, and Osric, who had ridden with a great many talkers, thought better of him for it.

It was on the second afternoon that the old knight brought his horse alongside.

"You were at the wall here. At the siege."

"I was."

"With the Baron's father, or with the crown's men?"

"With ours. We came up in the second summer with the Count's column." Osric watched the road. "I had nineteen men when we came up that road and eleven when we went over the ditch."

Waldric grunted. "I was fifty-six and had a very good horse shot out from under me on the second day, and I have never entirely forgiven the man who did it, on the grounds that he was a better shot than me and I have had twelve years to get over that and have not."

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Osric found himself almost laughing.

"You'd have been at the eastern gate."

"I was at the eastern gate for eleven weeks and I would not go back there for a barony." The old man shifted. "Your father was in that army."

"He was. Nineteen years a serjeant and he put in for it because the pay was good and there was a wall to be taken and he thought it would be over by harvest."

"And he was."

"Third morning. On the rampart, at the breach, about forty feet from where I was standing." Osric said it evenly. "And my brother came in on a shield a month after him, on another field entirely, in a business that had nothing to do with this city at all.

"I'm the only Lorgand who's ever walked away from Auenstadt, and I've done it twice, and I've not enjoyed either journey."

Waldric let that sit for a good half mile.

"Do you know why you are still a serjeant?"

Osric glanced across at him.

"Because I've been one for twenty-two years."

"That is how. I asked why." The old knight shifted in his saddle. "You have held a ford with thirty-one men. You held a ruin against a hundred and brought six of nine home. You have commanded in the field a dozen times and I have read the reports of about half of them, and there is not a knight in this county I would rather have on my flank, including me."

"You've made this speech before."

"I made about a third of it to a boy in a hall six weeks ago and I did not finish it, and I have been carrying the rest of it since." Waldric adjusted his gloves. "In my grandfather's day you would have been knighted for the ford alone."

"In Sigismund's day."

"In Sigismund's day. Yes." He said the name the way old men say names. "Four hundred of them he raised, or near it. Smiths' sons. A miller's boy who ended up holding the northern march for eleven years and did it better than anybody who came after him.

"And then he died, and the men he had made died in their turn, and their sons had no land to speak of and no cousins at court and nobody to speak for them, and inside two generations the law had been quietly unmade."

"Never repealed."

"Never repealed. Nobody repeals a good law." Waldric's mouth thinned. "It simply stopped being done, and then it stopped being remembered, and now if I stood up in the Count's hall and proposed knighting a tanner's son who had held a ford, they would look at me as though I had asked them to make a horse a bishop."

Osric rode a while.

"I've made my peace with it."

"Have you."

"Mostly."

"That is an honest answer and I'll not pick at it." Waldric shrugged. "I am telling you because you are about to walk into a chamber full of men who will size you up in four seconds and put you in a box, and I want you to know that the box is nine years of politics and about two hundred of drift, and that it is not a judgement of you."

"That's a good deal of speech, Sir Waldric."

"I have been rehearsing it since Tuesday," the old man said. "Don't make me do it twice."

They came into Lindebrae on the third day.

It was near a town rather than a village: trade wagons on the muddy lanes drawn by broad-backed oxen and guarded by weathered men with cudgels, a

smell of warm bread and livestock and tanner's lime blowing off it a half mile out. Toman sat up very straight on the cart as they went through and looked at absolutely everything.

They did not stop except to water the horses. Osric kept the pace slow through the square and watched the upper windows out of habit, and nothing came of it, and they were out the other side before noon.

"Something?" Alden asked, drawing up.

"No. Just a noise."

"You said that in the same voice last autumn and a week later we were burying somebody."

"Then keep your eyes up and stop talking to me."

The country opened after Lindebrae. On the fourth afternoon the ground began to rise, and then they came over the last low ridge and Auenstadt was there.

It rose out of the plain like an old pride, its outer walls cut of mottled grey stone streaked with darker veins, timeworn and rain-slicked and enormous. The eastern gatehouse stood ahead flanked by two squat towers with conical caps, their narrow arrow loops staring down like blind eyes. Above the arch a worn coat of arms still clung to the stone: a faded red and white checkerboard, chipped pale, flanked by sculpted griffons that the weather had taken the noses off a century ago.

Osric brought the column to a walk and did not know he had done it.

He knew the ground under the horses. He knew the slope of it, and the way the road bent in toward the gate on the last two hundred yards, and that the bend was deliberate and had been laid out by somebody who wanted men coming up it to have their right sides toward the wall.

He had stood out past that rise in the rain with his hands frozen to the shaft of a ruined spear. The walls had not been still and passive then. They had screamed, with arrows and boiling pitch and the noise men make when they are winning behind stone. The rebel lord's banners had flown from those towers and had gone on flying for eleven weeks.

And on the third morning, his father had been dragged back off the palisade with a crossbow bolt through the chest and his helm split.

And a month after that, on a different field entirely, Erik had turned round when Osric shouted his name.

The wind changed and brought him tallow and smoke and dung.

He put all of it back where it lived and rode on.

The outer market bustled in the lee of the city's shadow: canvas tents and lean-tos flapping in the autumn breeze, wagons piled with sacks and barrels standing in crooked rows, hawkers selling onions and eels and horsemeat pies. Merchants in good cloaks and their guards in boiled leather watched the baronial column go past with the mild interest of people who have seen a great many.

Six watchmen at the gate in mail hauberks and white-and-red tabards, helms slung at their hips. Not soldiers. Watchmen. Osric marked the difference in about a second and marked also that their boots were good and their kit maintained, which was more than he could say for his own armoury.

One stepped forward with a hand raised.

"Name and business."

Waldric eased his horse ahead.

"Sir Waldric von Aelrich, on the business of Heinric von Aelrich, Baron of Valmarch. We are expected by the council."

The man's expression shifted and his hand came down.

"Of course, ser. Forgive the formality. There's been some unrest along the eastern tracts." He turned and barked an order, and the heavy timber doors groaned open on hinges the size of a man's forearm. "You're welcome in Auenstadt."

They went in two abreast, hooves echoing under the arch.

Osric looked up as he passed beneath.

The murder holes were still black. Twelve years of rain and lime-wash and city upkeep, and the stone round the openings was still stained dark where the fire oil had gone down through them, and would be for another hundred years, because that kind of burning goes into stone and stays.

He had watched men come out from under that arch with their hair alight. He had been thirty feet away and there had been nothing whatever he could do about it.

He clenched his jaw and rode through and said nothing.