Chapter 37: Four Minutes of Attention

They sat a while. Bacchus did not drink much and did not talk about the coin again, and Osric noticed that and thought better of him for it.

"Your council sits the day after tomorrow," the merchant said eventually.

"So I'm told."

"You will have four minutes of their genuine attention and about three hours of the other kind."

"That's about what I've been promised."

"Then you have been promised honestly, which in this city is a novelty." Bacchus turned his cup without lifting it. "Do you know, I have been trying since the market to work out what you are for. You are not the envoy. You are not a servant. You do not carry the seal and you did not speak for your barony at any point while I had you in front of me."

"I'm a serjeant."

"Yes. And a barony sending a serjeant into a chamber of merchants is either a mistake or a message, and your old knight does not strike me as a man who makes the first kind."

Osric drank and did not answer.

Bacchus rose after a while and looked round the room with idle disdain at the gamblers and the drunk masons and the mercenaries too weary to care.

"This city is a cracked jewel," he said. "It gleams still. But look close and you see where the fractures run."

"I remember the siege." Osric said it without meaning to. "I stood on the hill above the east wall and watched men starve behind it. My father died there. Bolt through the chest."

Bacchus's expression shifted, and the smugness went out of it, and what was underneath was not pity, which Osric would not have tolerated.

"I forget sometimes how young your wars are," he said. "The Empire has been bleeding for four hundred years. Here, you still remember the names of your dead."

"We've not the luxury of forgetting."

"No." He inclined his head. "I shall let you brood in peace."

He went out into the crowd, and Osric drained his cup and was reaching for the coin to pay when his eye went across the room and stopped.

By the far hearth, half in shadow and half in amber light, a woman sat with an older woman, the two of them with their heads bent close over mugs of warm cider.

She sat straight without being stiff. Composed. Dark hair over one shoulder in a thick braid laced with a slender blue ribbon. A charcoal-grey dress, well made and modest, trimmed in cobalt thread, neat and tidy and not remotely fine: the sort of dress a woman makes for herself when she is good at making dresses and has no interest in being looked at.

Osric knew her.

He could not for the life of him think from where, and he sat there with the coin in his hand and went through it the way he went through everything, methodically, discarding.

Not the castle. Not the household. Not anybody's wife he had ever been introduced to.

Village.

She's out of the village.

It came in a piece a moment later, the way such recollections do. The lane under the castle rise, coming down from the beacon store on a cold morning about a month ago. A woman with a basket going up toward the market, who had said something ordinary to a neighbour about ice at the well.

He had walked past her and had not looked twice, because there had been nothing whatever about her to look at.

He got up and went over.

She saw him coming when he was about six feet away, and there was a moment, no longer than a blink, in which something happened behind her face and was put away again.

Then she was simply a woman looking up at a large man who had crossed a tavern floor toward her.

"Mistress."

"Ser."

"Forgive me." He stayed standing, and kept his hands where she could see them, because he had learned a long time ago exactly how much space a man his size takes up in a room. "You'll not know me. Osric. I'm serjeant of the garrison at Valmarch."

"I know who you are." She said it easily. "Everybody in that village knows who you are."

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The older woman snorted into her cider.

"Venessa," she said. "I keep a room in Coyne's lane, under the rise."

"You do sewing."

"I do sewing. Well, mostly. I do a great deal of mending, and once or twice a year I do something for somebody's wedding and get to remember that I know how." She indicated the older woman. "Mistress Ylva. She is showing me where in this city one may buy linen without being robbed, and has so far shown me four places where one may be robbed and one where one may not."

"It's the one behind the guildhall," said Ylva, comfortably. "It's always been the one behind the guildhall. Sit down, ser, you're blocking the fire."

Osric sat.

It was, he thought afterward, one of the more pleasant hours he had spent in a year, and he had gone into it expecting nothing at all.

She was good company. Not clever at him, which he had no patience for, and not deferential either, which he had less. She talked about cloth for a while with the specificity of somebody who genuinely cared about it, and about the difference between the linen woven in the river towns and the stuff that came up from the south, and about a merchant that afternoon who had tried to sell her tow as line and had been sent away with an education.

She asked him nothing about the war.

That was what he noticed.

Everybody asked. In a tavern in a strange city a serjeant with a scar and thirty years of soldiering on him gets asked inside four minutes, every time, and he had spent his whole adult life fending it off with a flat sentence.

She asked him instead whether Valmarch's chapel bell had always been cracked, because she had been there seven weeks and it had bothered her from the first morning.

"Since the year before I came. It took a bolt of lightning."

"I thought it might be the founding. A bad pour rings flat like that."

"You know about bells?"

"I know about pours." She turned her cup. "My father was a foundry man. Not bells. Fittings, mostly, and a great deal of church work he was never paid properly for." A pause, no longer than any other pause. "That is a long way back."

Ylva went off to talk to somebody she knew and did not come back for a while, and the two of them sat with the fire going down.

"You've a daughter," Venessa said. "The one who paints."

"You've heard about the paintings."

"Everybody has heard about the paintings. There is a wolf, apparently, and it is the wrong size, and Berta in the dairy has strong opinions." Her mouth moved. "I should like to see it, honestly. Everybody describes it as though it were an affliction and nobody says it is bad."

"It isn't bad." Osric found he had said it with some force. "It isn't bad at all. That's the trouble with it."

"There. That is the first useful sentence anybody has said about that painting."

He laughed. It surprised him considerably.

Later, when the fire had gone right down and Ylva had come back and settled her cloak over her knees, Venessa asked, in the way a person asks about the weather:

"How long does your business keep you here?"

"Four days. Five if the council's slow, and the council's always slow."

"And then home."

"And then home."

"Straight back to Valmarch, or do you go round by the villages?" She was looking at her cup. "Only I've a bolt of the good linen to carry and I'd rather not pay a carrier's price for it if there's a barony cart going the same road."

And there it is. A cart. She's sat here half an hour being pleasant to an old soldier over a bolt of cloth.

Well. It's a fair ask, and she's better company than the last three people who've asked me for something.

"We go straight back," he said. "Waldric's an old man and he'll want his own bed. Speak to Toman at the western square, the boy with the hide cart. Tell him I said to make room."

"That's kind."

"It's a cart. There's room in it."

She thanked him properly and not too much, which he also noticed, and he took his leave a little after that and went out into the cold.

He walked back through the dark lanes toward the inn with his hands in his belt, and thought, without any particular weight on it, that a person could live half a mile from you for seven weeks and be entirely invisible until a tavern in another city put you at the same fire.

He slept badly.

It came the way it always came in that city, which was without warning and with all of itself at once.

Rain. Rain coming down in sheets on the twelfth day, and smoke curling through the sky like black snakes and choking out the sun, and the stink of burning pitch and charred flesh over everything.

He was at the wall. Stone dust in the air. A siege tower going over under ballista fire with men still in it. Mud sucking at his boots to the ankle and gone red with what had been standing in it.

And on the broken rampart above him, his father.

Orunhard Lorgand, nineteen years a serjeant, broad in the shoulder and iron in the will, working with a spear because his messer had gone somewhere on the fourth day and he had never bothered to complain about it. His mail dark with sweat and streaked. His voice torn to pieces from shouting.

"Hold the flank!"

And then he turned, and found Osric in the press below him, and looked at him.

That was all. One glance and no more than a second of it, and everything a man has to say to his son passed through it, and none of it was in words.

Then the crossbowman on the rubble above put a bolt through his chest.

Osric's voice tore out of him and did precisely nothing, as it had done for twelve years, as it would go on doing.

His father went back a step. Then another. And then he came down off the rampart into the breach among the corpses and the shattered stone, and he was already gone before he landed.

Osric ran to him in the dream, blade forgotten, shield dropped, a serjeant of thirty-one with eleven men left. But the ground shifted and pulled away and the bodies round him twisted into faceless shapes with their mouths open and nothing coming out, and the wall crumbled beneath his feet.

And he fell.

He came awake sitting bolt upright in a rented bed with the sweat cold on him and his heart going like a hammer, and he did not know for a moment which city he was in.

Grey light through the shutter slats. Somewhere below, a cock crowed.

He pressed a hand over his face and found that his fingers were shaking, and held them out and looked at them until they stopped.

Then he got up and crossed to the basin and put cold water on his face and looked at the poor bronze mirror nailed to the wall: an old man, lined, hollow about the eyes, in a strange room in the city where he had left the two of them.

Twelve years.

And it has never once come for me in Valmarch. The house, yes, and the hooves at the door, and that one comes anywhere.

But the wall waits here. It has always waited here, and it knows the address, and it will be waiting the next time as well.

Two floors down, the inn was beginning to stir. Somewhere out beyond the roofs a bell rang the hour, flat and cracked, and nothing whatever like the one at home.