Chapter 59: Winter Stops Everything

The snow had come down out of the north on the last night of the old month and had not stopped for three days, and after it the cold came, and after the cold nothing came at all.

That was the winter. It arrived the way winter arrives on the marches, which is not as weather but as a stopping of everything, and by the middle of the month there was nothing left moving in the barony that did not have to move.

The creek road was shut. The Alderwint road had been shut for eleven days and would be shut until March, because the drifts against the wood on the long stretch stood higher than a man on a horse and there was nobody in the county with the labour to cut them. The eastern road was passable to a man on foot who knew the ground and to nobody else. Riders had got out twice in nine weeks and both times had come back.

The brook froze from the mill down to the ford and the miller broke the wheel out of it every morning with a maul, and by the third week he had stopped bothering and the wheel had set solid.

The scaffolding along the top of the unfinished wall carried a foot of snow on every board and looked, from the village, like a row of white ribs.

Nine weeks since the frost had come. Nine weeks since they had put Throderic in the chapel bank in ground so hard it had taken two men a day and a half to open.

Osric had been captain of the garrison for every one of them.

The room had not changed and that was most of the trouble with it.

It was cold and small and had one window and a low fire, and there was a trestle in the middle with the campaign map weighted flat on it, and a shelf with the barony's rolls, and two stools. There was a peg on the back of the door where a cloak went. There was a box under the window with the muster books in it going back to the year Throderic came to Valmarch, and Osric had not opened the box and did not intend to.

The Baron had told him to use the room and to move nothing.

He had obeyed both instructions to the letter and had discovered, somewhere in the second week, that he had been given an order he could not keep. A man cannot work in a room and leave it as he found it. The stools had moved. The map had been rolled and unrolled a hundred times. There were four of Osric's

own tally sticks on the shelf now and a cup that was his, and one morning he had come in to find that somebody had swept the floor.

He minded the cup most. He could not have said why.

Rothgar came at the fifth hour with the figures, as he had come every fourth morning for eleven years, and sat down on the second stool without being asked and put the sheet on his knee.

"Shall I?"

"Aye."

And he read them out.

He did it well. He had been doing it a long while and had worked out a long while ago that a man who is being read to needs the number after the item and not before it, and a pause where the eye would have had one, and no comment.

"Barley. Two hundred and six quarters in the castle store, of which forty are seed and are not to be touched. So a hundred and sixty-six."

"A hundred and sixty-six."

"Rye, sixty-one. Oats, a hundred and thirty, and a third of that is horse feed and I would not count on much of the rest, because it is the poor cut from the east field and it is going over."

"Call it eighty."

"Call it eighty." Rothgar did not look up. "Salt beef, eight barrels. Salt pork, four. Beans, thirty-one quarters and they are good. Cheese I will not give you a number for, because half of it is in the village and not mine to count."

Osric turned it over.

"That's five weeks off the barley since Rhumnacht was a month out."

"It is five weeks off the barley in nine, which is a little better than I feared and a good deal worse than I would like." The steward turned the sheet. "The mill has three hundred and forty quarters of other people's grain in it, which is not ours, and I mention it because if there is a bad month it is the first place anybody will look."

"Say it all back to me."

Rothgar did, and Osric listened with his eyes on the map and did not stop him at any point, and when the steward had finished he said the figures back himself,

in order, with the seed grain taken out and the poor oats discounted and the mill set aside.

He got all of it. He always got all of it.

Rothgar sat back and looked at him a moment.

"You have not once asked me to say a column twice. In nine weeks."

"I've a head for numbers."

"You have a head like a strongbox and it is the only reason this is working." The steward folded the sheet. "He was the same. He could read a little at the end, badly, and it took him about four times as long as being told, and he went on doing it out of stubbornness. But he never wanted telling twice either."

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Osric did not answer that.

"Are you frightened?" he said instead.

Rothgar blinked. "Of what?"

"Of the barley."

"Ah." He thought about it properly, which was one of the two things Osric liked about him. "No. Not yet. I am frightened of February, because February is when a man who has been careful since October finds out he was not careful enough, and there is nothing whatever a steward can do about February in January.

"But no. If nothing else goes wrong we come out the far side of it thin and alive."

"And if the raids come?"

"Then something else has gone wrong," said Rothgar, "and you will hear about it from me on the fourth morning like everything else."

He went, and left the sheet on the trestle, which he did every time and which Osric had stopped remarking on.

Osric looked at it a while after the door shut.

He could read numbers. He had learned that at fourteen on the gate out of necessity, because a runner who cannot count a column of men is no use to anybody, and he could take a tally and add it and carry it and would back himself against most clerks for speed.

He could read his own name. He knew Throderic's, and the Baron's, and about nine others by their shape.

Everything else on that sheet was fencing.

He had never in his life been ashamed of it and it had never once come up. A serjeant does not read. A serjeant is told, and remembers, and reports, and there is not a man in the yard who thinks less of him for it because there is not a man in the yard who can do it either.

But a captain sits in a room and things come to him on paper, and in nine weeks Osric had learned exactly how much of the job arrives that way, and exactly how many other people have to be standing in the room while it is read to him.

He put the sheet on the shelf beside the muster book.

The muster book was open, because it had been open since November and nobody had closed it.

He could not read one word on the page. He could see the shape of it: the ruled columns, the hand, and eighteen lines struck out in a row down the left side with a single stroke through each.

He knew every one of them. He could have said them in order with his eyes shut, and had done, twice, standing in that room on his own.

Two days it took him. Eighteen names and two days and he would not let a soulhelp.

I sat on that stool and watched him do it and I thought, there is an old manbeing stubborn about a job a clerk could do in an hour.

He could barely write. Nineteen years at it and he could barely do it, and hewas not going to let anybody see how slow he was, and I sat there and thoughthe was being stubborn.

He shut the book.

The mess in the lower yard was two men and a shovel.

It had been going about ten minutes and had drawn a ring of perhaps thirty people, which in a garrison in the dead of winter is what happens to anything at all, and the two men at the centre of it were a levy-man out of the near farms called Hessek and a stranger.

Hessek was about twenty-five and built like something got out of a bog: short, broad, red about the face, with hands that had been doing outdoor work since

he was seven and had gone the colour and texture of harness leather. He had a shovel and he was holding it the way another man holds an argument.

Sir Corwin had not arrived yet. He was five days out, or six if the north road was as bad as the last rider said, and the man in the yard was one of four who had come ahead with the baggage to see about quarters.

Osric got that fact about two seconds after he came under the arch and did not much like where it put him.

"What's the trouble?"

The ring opened for him, and both men started talking at once, and he let them do it for four seconds and then held up a hand and they stopped, which was the only part of the job that had come easily so far.

It was the snow.

The lower yard had been dug out four times since the first fall and the spoil had gone against the north wall in a bank the height of a man, and Hessek had been told to move it because it was against the wall, and the man from the baggage party had told him to move it somewhere else, because where he was moving it was where the horses of a household that had not yet arrived were going to be tied.

Neither of them was wrong. That was the difficulty.

Osric stood in the cold with thirty men watching and understood, quite clearly and for the first time, what the job actually was.

It was not that the question was hard. The question was easy and he had the answer before either man had finished. It was that whatever he said next would be repeated in the barracks that evening and would be about something other than snow.

Back the levy-man and he was a captain who would not have a lord's brother's people telling his men where to stand.

Back the stranger and he was a captain who had put a Valmarch man second to a household that had not even arrived.

And Throderic would have done this in eleven words and made a joke andwalked off, and every man in this yard would have gone away thinking he hadwon.

I watched him do it four hundred times and I do not know how it was done.

"Whose horses?"

The baggage man blinked. "Ser?"

"Whose horses are going against that wall. Name them."

"Sir Corwin's own, and his serjeant's, and"

"How many?"

"Six, ser. Perhaps eight."

"Right." Osric turned. "Hessek. Move it to the far end by the cartwright's, and take two men off the gate to help you and tell them I said so, and it'll take you an hour instead of the quarter you were counting on, and I'm sorry for it."

"Aye, Serjeant. Captain."

"And you." He looked at the baggage man. "Eight horses is not the north wall. Eight horses is the near half of the north wall, and the far half is going to have snow against it until March, because that is where the snow in this yard goes and has gone since before either of us was born.

"Tell your serjeant when he comes that the near half is his and the far half is not. Tell him I said it. And if he wants the far half he can come and ask me for it, and I will very likely give it to him."

The man opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Go on."

The ring came apart. Somebody laughed at something. Hessek went off toward the gate looking about equally pleased and put upon, which was correct.