When he saw the house, huddled among those bare trees, lamplight showing around the shutters, he had this strange urge to walk on. This strange thought he didn’t belong there any more. Not with what he’d seen. Not with what he’d done. What if he trod it in with him?
But the path leading past was a coward’s path. He clenched his aching fists. Gunnar Broad was no coward. Ask anyone.
Took all the courage he had to knock on that door, though. More than it had to climb the ladders at Borletta, or lead the charge into those pikes at Musselia, or even carry those men dying of the grip in the long winter after. But he knocked.
‘Who is it?’ Her voice, beyond the door, and it made him wince worse than the points of those pikes had. Till that moment, he’d been afraid she wouldn’t be there. That she’d have moved on. Forgotten him. Or maybe he’d been hoping she would’ve.
He could hardly find any voice at all. ‘It’s me, Liddy. It’s Gunnar.’
The door rattled open, and there she stood. She’d changed. Not near as much as he had, but she’d changed. Leaner, maybe. Harder, maybe. But when she smiled, it still lit the gloomy world, the way it always had.
‘What are you doing knocking at your own door, you big fool?’
And he just started crying. A jolting sob first that came all the way from his stomach. Then there was no stopping it. He fumbled his eye-lenses off with a trembling hand and all the tears he hadn’t shed in Styria, on account of Gunnar Broad being no coward, came burning down his crushed-up face.
Liddy stepped forward and he shrank away, hunched and hurting, arms up as if to fend her off. Like she was made of glass and might shatter in his hands. She caught him even so. Thin arms, but a hold he couldn’t break, and though she was a head shorter than him, she held his face against her chest, and kissed his head, and whispered, ‘Shhhh, now. Shhhhh.’
After a while, when his sobs started to calm, she put her hands on his cheeks and lifted his head so she was looking straight up at him, calm and serious.
‘It was bad, then, was it?’ she asked him.
‘Aye,’ he croaked out. ‘It was bad.’
She smiled. That smile that lit up the world. Close enough that even without his lenses he could actually see it. ‘But you’re home now.’
‘Aye. I’m home now.’ And he set to crying again.
The thunk of the axe made Broad flinch. He told himself it was the sound of honest work done well. He told himself he was home, safe, far from the battlefield. But maybe he’d brought the battlefield home with him. Maybe the battlefield was whatever dirt he stood on now. He tried to hide it under a joke.
‘I still say chopping wood is man’s work.’
May set another log on the block and hefted the axe. ‘When the men sod off to Styria, it all becomes women’s work.’
When he left, she’d been boyish, quiet, awkward. As if her skin didn’t fit her. She was bony still, but there was a quick strength in the way she moved. She’d grown up fast. She’d had to. Another thunk and two more neat pieces of wood went tumbling.
‘I should’ve stayed here and sent you off to fight,’ said Broad. ‘Maybe we’d have won.’
May smiled at him, and he smiled that he could make her smile, and wondered that someone who’d done all the bad he’d done could’ve had a hand in making something as good as she was.
‘Where’d you get the lenses?’ she asked.
Broad touched a finger to them. Sometimes forgot they were even on his face, till he took ’em off and everything beyond arm’s reach became a smudge. ‘I saved a man. Lord Marshal Mitterick.’
‘Sounds fancy.’
‘Commander o’ the army, no less. There was an ambush, and I happened to be there, and, well …’ He realised he’d bunched his fists trembling tight again and forced them open. ‘He thought I’d saved him. But I had to admit I’d no clue who he was till after the business was done, since I couldn’t see further than five strides. So he got me these as a gift.’ He took the lenses off, and breathed on them, and wiped them carefully with the hem of his shirt. ‘Probably cost six months of a soldier’s pay. Miracle o’ the modern age.’ And he hooked them back over his ears, and into the familiar groove across the bridge of his nose. ‘But I’m grateful, ’cause now I can appreciate my daughter’s beauty even halfway across the yard.’
‘Beauty.’ And she gave a scornful snort but looked just a bit pleased at the same time. The sun broke through and was warm on Broad’s smile, and for a moment it was like it had been before. As if he never went.
‘So you fought, then?’
Broad’s mouth felt dry of a sudden. ‘I fought.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Well …’ All that time spent dreaming of her face and now she was looking right at him, it was hard to meet her eye. ‘It was bad.’
‘I tell everyone my father’s a hero.’
Broad winced. The clouds shifted and cast the yard into shadow, and the dread was at his shoulder again. ‘Don’t tell ’em that.’
‘What should I tell ’em?’
He frowned down at his aching hands, rubbed at one with the other. ‘Not that.’
‘What do the marks mean?’
Broad tried to twitch his shirt cuff down over the Ladderman’s tattoo, but the blue stars on his knuckles still showed. ‘Just something the boys I was with did.’ And he slipped his hand behind him. Where May couldn’t see it. Where he didn’t have to.
‘But—’
‘Enough questions,’ said Liddy, stepping out onto the porch. ‘Your father just got back.’
‘And I’ve got plenty to do,’ he said, standing. They must’ve been working hard to keep the house presentable, but it was too much for three, let alone two, looked like it was crumbling back into the land. ‘Must be half a dozen leaks to mend.’
‘Be careful. Put your weight on the roof, I’ve a feeling the whole house might fall down.’
‘Wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll check on our flock first, though. I hear the price for wool’s never better, what with all these new mills. They up the valley?’
May blinked over at her mother, and Liddy gave an odd kind of grimace, and Broad felt that dread pressing on him all the heavier. ‘What is it?’
‘We don’t have a flock no more, Gunnar.’
‘What?’
‘I wanted to give you a proper night’s sleep without having to worry.’ Liddy heaved up a sigh seemed to come right from her worn shoes. ‘Lord Isher fenced the valley in. Said we couldn’t graze there any more.’
Broad hardly understood what she was saying. ‘The valley’s common land. Always has been.’
‘Not any more. King’s edict. It’s happening all over. Next valley, too. We had to sell the flock to him.’
‘We had to sell him our sheep so he could graze ’em on our land?’
‘He gave us a good price. Some lords didn’t give their tenants that much.’
‘So I get fucked when I go to war and I get fucked when I come back?’ he snarled. The voice hardly sounded like his. ‘You didn’t … do anything?’
Liddy’s eyes were hard. ‘I couldn’t think of anything to do. Maybe you could’ve, but you weren’t here.’
‘None o’ this works without a flock!’ His father had raised sheep, and his grandfather, and his grandfather’s grandfather. Felt like the whole world had come unravelled. ‘What’ll we do?’ He found he’d clenched his fists again. He was shouting but he couldn’t stop. ‘What’ll we do?’
And he saw May’s lip trembling like she was about to cry, and Liddy put an arm around her, and all the anger drained out of him and left him cold and desperate.