Chapter 53: The Prisoner Has Answers

They came back into Valmarch over two days, because there was no other way to do it.

The badly hurt went first, on the eight carts the levy had brought out with them, at a walking pace, with Gerfried's two apprentices riding between the carts and doing what could be done on a road. Twelve men went in those carts. Nine of them arrived.

The rest of them came the next day: the walking wounded, the levy going home to farms they had left in the middle of a working afternoon, the mounted men, and the prisoners.

Osric rode at the front of the second column because Heinric told him to and because there was no argument left in him.

His leg had been sewn again on the field by a man he never learned the name of, and it had been sewn badly and in the dark and with the wrong thread, and it would want doing again. He had a cracked something under the ribs, a cut across the brow that had glued his left eye shut twice on the ride, a slice down the outside of the shield arm, and a bite mark on his forearm that he could not account for at all.

He was, on the whole, in better condition than most of the men behind him.

The village turned out for it.

Not to cheer. Nobody cheered. They came out of their doors and stood along the lane in the cold and watched the carts go up the track, and looked into them as they passed, and some of them found what they were looking for and some of them did not.

Mette was there with her eldest, at the mouth of the lower lane, and she had come out to look for nobody at all and had come out anyway.

The physician's yard filled by the middle of that afternoon and then went on filling.

Gerfried had taken every bedroll in the castle and had them laid out under the eaves and then across the trampled grass, and when the grass ran out he had taken the granary, which Rothgar had objections to and expressed exactly once.

Osric went through the yard twice on the first evening and found it worse than the field had been.

A field is loud and dark and there is something to do. A yard full of hurt men in the daylight is quiet, and there is a great deal of waiting, and everybody in it knows precisely where they stand in the order Gerfried has put them in and what that order means.

There were four men in the corner nearest the granary wall who had been put there deliberately, and everybody knew what that corner was, and Lambert spent most of two days sitting in it.

Isolde came down on the first afternoon.

Nobody sent her and nobody had thought to. She came down out of the castle with her sleeves already pushed up and the plain ash-coloured dress on and went straight to Gerfried, and Osric happened to be standing four feet away and heard all of it.

"I can hold a man down. I can carry water. I can boil linen and I can cut it and I can sew a straight seam faster than anybody in this yard, and I can do all of it for a good many hours."

Gerfried looked at her for about two seconds.

"Can you look at a man's insides without falling over?"

"I have not tried."

"You will find out this afternoon." He turned away. "Boil the linen first. Then come and find me and do not ask me any questions while my hands are inside somebody."

She worked for two days.

Osric saw her at intervals, always in a different part of the yard, always with her arms wet to the elbow. He saw her hold a boy of nineteen down for a quarter of an hour while Gerfried took a broken shaft out of his thigh, with her knee on his shoulder and her mouth about four inches from his ear talking to him steadily and quietly about absolutely nothing at all.

He saw her, later, come out of the granary and stand in the yard with her back against the wall for about a minute with her eyes shut, and then go back in.

He did not say anything to her about any of it, then or afterward, and neither did she.

The Baron gave Osric the garrison on the second morning.

He did it in the captain's chamber with the map still on the trestle and did not make anything of it.

"Until he mends. Not instead. You will use his room because the men need to see somebody in it and you will not move his gear, and if I hear that you have moved his gear I shall be extremely unpleasant about it."

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Aye, my lord."

"There is a good deal you will not like and you will do all of it anyway." Heinric sat down. "Eighteen dead from that road and the bank between them and four more since. Twenty-two families. Rothgar has the list and you will go through it with him and you will tell him where he is wrong, because he will be wrong about two of them and he will not know it.

"The levy goes home tomorrow and I want every one of them thanked by name at the gate, and you will do that, and not me, because they went out on your horn and not on mine."

"That's not true, my lord."

"It is true enough for the gate." The Baron rubbed his eyes. "And there is the other business."

"Aye."

"He has been in that cell since yesterday noon and has said nothing to anybody. Waldric has been at him twice. I want you to go, and I want Lambert with you, because Lambert notices what men do with their hands."

They went down after supper.

The cell under the eastern tower had been a store and had a door with a grille in it and a floor that had been swept for the occasion, which was the most that could be said for it.

The Khesari sat on the bench against the far wall with his wrists tied in front of him and a bandage round his head where the pommel had gone in. Somebody had given him a blanket and he had folded it and was sitting on it.

He looked up when the door opened and looked at Osric and something moved across his face that Osric did not care for at all.

He was pleased.

"Ah," he said. "Stone-Sitter."

"I've a name."

"Yes." The man settled himself against the wall. "I do not have it."

Osric pulled the stool over and sat down on it, because standing had become a considerable project.

Lambert stayed by the door with his hands folded and did not speak at any point in what followed, which had been agreed beforehand.

"You'll be hanged," Osric said.

"Probably."

"There's no probably in it. You came over the water with a hundred men and you killed eighteen of ours on that road and eleven at that tower and five at a croft in October, and this county has a rope for that."

"Then I am hanged, and here we sit." The man shrugged with his tied hands. "So. What do you want, Stone-Sitter? Ask, and I will tell you what I do not tell you."

"That's honest."

"I am always honest. I said this to you at the tower and you did not believe me and you were wrong."

Osric let it go by.

"Who told you which road he'd be on."

"A man."

"Which man."

"A man who told me which road he would be on."

"His name."

"He did not give me one, and I did not ask, and if I had asked I would not have believed it." The Khesari tilted his head. "You know this. You have done this work, or a man near you has. Nobody gives a name."

"Then describe him."

"He was a man of middle size."

Osric waited.

"That is all," said the Khesari.

"That's nothing."

"It is what a man of middle size looks like." He spread his hands as far as the rope allowed. "I am sorry. I would give you more if I had more. I met him twice and both times it was at night and both times he had his hood up, and I did not look at his face because I did not want him looking at mine."

"You met him."

"I met somebody. Twice." Something like amusement went across the flat face. "This is a great deal, is it not? You are pleased. I can see you being pleased and trying not to be, and it is the first entertainment I have had in two days."

Osric put that down and picked up something else.

"How were you paid."

"In silver."

"Whose."

"Silver has nobody's name on it," said the Khesari. "That is the point of silver. It is the most agreeable metal in the world and it has no opinions."

"Where were you paid?"

"East of the water."

"Where east of the water?"

"Further east than you have ever been, Stone-Sitter, and if I named the place you would put it on a map and go there in the spring with four hundred men and find a village of my wife's cousins and burn it, and I have made my peace with hanging but not with that."

Osric sat back.

He's enjoying this.

He's been in a cell two days waiting for somebody to come and give him something to do and I'm it.

"You said at the tower you'd no quarrel with my Baron."

"I did. It was true then."

"And now?"

"Now I have killed eighteen of his men and he has killed sixty of mine, so we have a quarrel, and it is a good honest one and I do not object to it in the slightest." The man shifted on the bench. "That is not the same as being paid, you understand. The quarrel is ours. The paying was somebody else's, and I have taken his coin and done the work and I will not now go about giving him away, because a man who does that is worth nothing to anybody and I have a son."

That landed.

"You've a son."

"I have three. Two who are men and one who is not." He said it entirely evenly. "And if I sit in this room and give you the name of the man who paid me, then somebody a long way from here will hear that I did, and it will not be me who pays for it, because I will already have been hanged."

He let that sit.

"So you may take the rope out and show it to me, if you like. It is a poor argument and I will laugh at it, and then we will both feel foolish and I shall still be here."

Osric was quiet for a while.

"Why the woman," he said.

"Ah."

"You spent a hundred men on her. You crossed a river you'd no business crossing. You sat down in front of a tower for a day and offered eight lives for her." Osric leaned forward. "Why."

And for the first time in the conversation, the Khesari's face changed.

It was not much. It was a small stillness that had not been there before.

"I do not know," he said.

"You'll have to do better."

"I am doing better. I am giving you the only truth you will get out of me tonight and you will not like it." He looked at Osric squarely. "I was told to take a woman off a road alive and undamaged. I was told what she looked like and which road and which day. I was not told why and I did not ask, because a man who asks why is a man who has to be told something, and then he is a man who knows something."

"And you never asked. In all of it."

"Once." He shrugged with his tied hands. "At the second meeting I said, this woman, what is she. And he said, she is a woman on a road. And he said it in a way that ended the conversation, and I have been doing this a long while and I know that voice, and I did not ask again."

Osric sat with that a moment.

"Then the road," he said. "The captain."

"Ah. That." Something almost like distaste went across the flat face. "That was not paid."

"Say that again."

"It was not paid, Stone-Sitter, and I have been waiting two days for somebody to ask me about it, because it is the one part of this that is entirely mine and I am not ashamed of it and I would like it understood."