They told him to rest, which was wise; and because it was wise, it sat upon him like a poorly tailored coat—neither to his taste nor his making. The order had come not as reprimand but as care, and from a quarter Rynathil could not bring himself to resent. Captain Kel'astor had that talent which is rarer among commanders than courage: he knew when to remove a man from danger without stripping him of his dignity.
“One week,” the captain had said, laying a warm hand—too steady, too human—upon Rynathil’s uninjured shoulder. “You’ll do no one any service by tearing yourself anew. Let the others make the noise awhile.”
The word “idle” had always sounded to him like a sin whispered behind a fan. He was not built to be idle. He had been tailored to fit a grip. He had sweated himself into usefulness, and now usefulness had been pulled from him like a rug.
Rynathil bowed, which was his habit when he could not trust his voice, and had found himself summarily dismissed from the neat economy of violence by which his days were measured.
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the first day, he walked to the fence at the edge of the training grounds and watched the drills. The morning air had that cold brightness that makes even poor sword-work look meaningful. He found his fingers tapping the rhythm of the calls—advance, brace, break—as one might tap the scansion of a familiar verse. A young recruit dropped his shield at the wrong moment and earned a rebuke; Rynathil’s left shoulder twitched with the phantom of a movement he had made a thousand times. He stood very still, as if stillness could absolve him of restlessness.
His wound had the courtesy to be honest. The axe that found his shoulder had been practical rather than poetic, had gone in where arm meets back. The healer had said the word “clean” several times, which in a city that prized its ornaments meant more than one thing. “It will close,” the healer had assured him, “so long as you don’t tear it open again.” To Rynathil, that sounded very much like being asked not to breathe too deeply.
He tried, too often and against instruction, to lift his arm. The pain was an unremarkable sort: industrious, not grand. He had known the theatrical agony that screams and the quiet one that grinds into your bones. This was a clerk of pain, stamping forms from dawn till dusk, reminding him with tireless bureaucracy that he was, for the moment, a file set aside.
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the second night, he took his whetstone in hand—because work is religion and the hand remembers its prayers—and the sword he had been forbidden to drill with, and wiped it down in neat, conscientious strokes. He understood, running the oiled cloth along the blade, that his hatred of disuse had been hindered by a misunderstanding: he had imagined himself a weapon and therefore thought indolence a kind of rust. He set his sword upon his knees and passed the stone along the edge as a monk passes beads through fingers. Each stroke promised a measurable improvement: dull to keen, keen to keener. He bent close, and his breath ghosted the steel surface until the reflected room went fog-soft and benign.
The infirmary nurse, who had the steely magnificence of those women who lived among hurt men, observed him at his quiet worship over the blade and scolded him gently for over-exertion. “You’ll be fit twice as soon if you leave it alone,” she said.
He thought, but could not explain, that leaving things alone had never yet made him fit for anything. He promised, because he was obedient to good sense even when he disliked it. She left him an orange—a winter marvel—and he peeled it with a concentration usually reserved for arcane scrolls. The fruit parted into crescent moons, tidy, fragrant. He placed the peels in a circle on the table and stared at them as if the arrangement might disclose his next instructions. It did not.
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the third day, his friend came with a book.
“It is about a miller who distrusts his own sleep,” Taldris announced, with the air of a man who comes bearing an apple and calls it medicine. “He fears he will dream himself into ruin, so he stays awake, and you may guess where that leads him.”
“To ruin, I suppose,” Rynathil said, dry.
“Of the small, domestic kind. There is a cow,” Taldris said gravely. “You may relish it.”
Outside, the drills went on. He did not go to watch that afternoon. He read two pages. The miller stared at his ceiling and mistrusted clouds. Rynathil closed the book on the third page and stared at the seam of his bandage until the linen blurred into a paleness he associated with the pallor of blood loss.
The truth was simple and unbecoming: he missed it. The roar, the timing, the proof—not that he lived, but that he had been correct in living the way he had chosen. War, in its blunt stupidity, offered that rarest of mercies: a problem one could meet head-on and be applauded—by survival if by nothing else—for one’s straightforwardness. There were no compliments in convalescence, only suggestions. Heal. Be prudent. Consider yourself.
He had been trained not to consider himself. If he considered himself, he remembered the boy he had been, who decided early that worth would not be gifted to him by birth and so must be forged by labor until the metal of him rang true. The trouble with metal is that it believes in the hammer. It comes to imagine itself only as sound, and what is sound when the forge is quiet?
He sat at his table with the miller and his cow, and the next time when Taldris came, he returned the book and said, “The man’s trouble is not that he cannot sleep, but that he suspects rest might prove he is dispensable.”
Taldris’s eyes warmed. “So you liked it.”
“Are you sure?” Taldris pressed.
He knew what his friend meant. The part of him that could not be praised openly—this unhandsome craving for the proof of being necessary. He considered the nobility of a silence and judged this one required breaking. “I think,” he said slowly, because feelings are rude guests and must be introduced properly, “I am not at my best when not needed.”
“I question whether any man is,” Taldris conceded. “But be content, for a moment, to be quiet and useful nowhere in particular. Learn to rest. It is a discipline, and you like those.”
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the fourth day, a healer whose name he never retained—the fault his, not hers—brought antibiotic broth in a jar stoppered with wax. He thanked her. She chastised him without malice for standing too long in the doorway. “You’ll never knit like that,” she said. “The body’s a stubborn servant. It will do all your work and then none of your bidding.”
He stood aside and let her set the jar upon his table. The room, a modest square with modest furniture, had the look of an inn corner kept for a regular who never unpacks. He felt obscurely embarrassed, as if she had caught him in a state of undress which, in its way, she had. He was half-stripped of function.
“Do you have people to sit with you?” she asked, still nothing in her voice but habit and curiosity, “Idle time is dangerous.”
“I am not idle,” he said too quickly. “I am… waiting.”
“For the Amani to notice your absence and come calling for you,” she said, nodding with private satisfaction, as if she had solved a riddle another might have missed. “They won’t. Wars don’t notice what isn’t in front of them. I shall have your jar back when you’re done.”
He poured the broth into a cup and drank it with the severity of a penitent taking communion. He did not like it and finished it nonetheless. There are rites one observes because one respects the faith of those who offered them.
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the fifth day, a storm rolled in from the hills. He woke before the bugle and lay still, unsure whom he meant to obey by doing so. The habit of readiness had a pulse of its own; it beat in him like a small, officious heart.
He had always suspected softness to be a sort of theft. The ceiling offered him no verdict. A spider worked a seam between beam and plaster and made its unambitious crossings without fanfare. When at last he rose, he did so with the formality of a man calling upon a stranger.
He avoided the fence. He told himself it was not avoidance; it was, perhaps, a courtesy to his own patience, which had not many courtesies offered it. He walked instead toward the quartermaster’s awning where lists were written and rewritten. The quartermaster, a woman with a clerk’s narrow pen and a widow’s wide attention, grunted at him.
“Can you carry?” she asked.
“Some things,” he admitted. There is dignity in lifting what must be lifted.
He shouldered sacks without remark. He measured his pace against the ache in him and, for once, did not take pleasure in stepping past it. He did what he was asked and then stood near enough to be asked again. No one applauded him.
A child—of some industrious age which runs errands for attention as much as for pay—brought messages to the far edge of the tents and came back laden with a coil of wet string and a philosophy. “You look like a tower,” the child declared, squinting up at him through wet lashes. “But you’re not. Towers don’t move.”
“I move when told,” he said.
“But you’re moving when you’re not told,” the child argued, pleased with the paradox they had found, as children are pleased with a coin discovered in the road.
He was not certain whether to deny it. “I am practicing,” he said.
“To be quiet while still being myself.”
The child nodded as if this were the most military of accomplishments. “My aunt says the best chickens are the ones that don’t brag when they lay. You should be a chicken.”
“I shall aspire to it,” he answered seriously.
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the sixth day, the rain forgot how to fall properly and came in fits, as if the sky were a soldier with a bad cough. The camp took to it with its usual grim practicality. Rynathil’s bandage had the tact to remain mostly dry. He presented himself to no fences and no awnings, but to the small square of camp kitchens.
He found a place near the woodpile, and, because wood is honest work, he took up a splitting maul. He shifted his grip. He set the billet. He brought the maul down with a fraction less pride than was his habit, and the log parted with that respectable crack wood gives when it has been asked in the proper way.
He was content to go on thus when a corporal paused to observe him. The man did not question the wisdom of the work, only its direction. “We are short on hands to serve,” the corporal said, “The line grows ill-tempered when it grows long. Can you ladle?”
So he ladled. The stew was thick with whatever the chef’s ingenuity had spared for the day, and the line seemed endless. Yet there was something in the steady rhythm of the work—the scrape of the ladle, the clatter of bowls, the murmured thanks of the men—that soothed a part of him he had not realized needed soothing.
In the pauses, he stood under the rim of the tent, where the rain stamped its feet and asked to be let in. The kitchen officer passed and flicked her glance across him.
“What are you doing?” She had a gift for questions that sounded like accusations.
“Waiting,” he said, and then, because the truth had become fractionally easier to speak when disguised as a joke, added, “and practicing being a chicken.”
A pause. “Good. The best men are chickens when it keeps a unit together.”
· ─────── · 𖥸 · ─────── ·
On the seventh afternoon his superior found him in the yard, not lifting anything heavier than a broom nor doing anything more glorious than pushing dust from one honest corner to another. Kel'astor watched for a while and then—without any ceremony at all—took a second broom from its hook and began to sweep.
“You do not need to do this,” Rynathil said at last, because some courtesies are stitched in too deep.
“I know,” said the other. “But you seem determined to mistake rest for dereliction. I hoped to confuse the issue.”
Rynathil made an unhelpful noise. His broom continued its work.
“You were not fashioned for killing,” Kel'astor went on, “though you have done it with distinction. You were fashioned for fidelity. You have simply misassigned its object.”
Rynathil looked at him then, because he could not not. “To whom would you have me faithful, if not to duty?”
“To the one who sweeps when it pains him to be idle,” came the answer. “Duty is a coat one wears for weather. Fidelity is the skin beneath it.”
There are words that must pass through a gauntlet before they can be admitted. These were such words. Rynathil, diligent as ever, presented them to the gate and waited while each was searched. The searching took time. “I thought,” he said slowly, “that I was not at my best when not needed.”
“And now?” Kel'astor asked, not gently, but not unkindly.
“That I am not at my best when not needed,” he said again. Kel’astor did not smile, for he rarely did, but Rynathil knew him well enough to know the twitch of his lips passed for one. Rynathil let the confession sit between them like a sensible piece of bread. “But I do not take it for an insult anymore.” He tasted the bread as if it might bite. “It is only a season, and I have weathered worse.”
Kel'astor did not congratulate him. He nodded, which is what men do when they cannot say more without trespassing. “That is the beginning of wisdom,” the captain said, “or of temperance. I never remember which is more fashionable.”
“The end is that you will be put to use again soon enough, and I prefer you in one piece. Learn what you can from this business of not being required every minute. It will lengthen you.”
“Lengthen,” Rynathil repeated, amused by the verb. “Like a shadow.”
“Like a road,” Kel'astor corrected, and left him to it.
There are men who believe worth is a campaign, and men who suspect it is a climate. Rynathil, who had campaigned in all weathers, had learned neither lesson. He knew only the balance sheet of effort and its tidy sums. The world, in its kindly arrogance, had now offered him a week in which to consider other definitions, and he resented them all for their presumption. It is no small thing to be told to rest and to find that it is a form of examination one has not prepared for.
When a man’s usefulness has been weighed daily, he comes to fear the day the weights go missing. It is a stubborn thing, the habit of necessary men. Rynathil was not a fool. He could enumerate, with a fair bit of logic, the reasons a body must heal. He could recite, if asked, the virtue of prudence. He could even explain the fatal consequences of arrogance disguised as stoicism. And yet he could not rid himself of the superstition that it was love, and not tendon and skin, that would fail him if he ceased to earn it by the hour.
He was practicing. He was, perhaps, lengthening. He could not yet say if he would grow to like some other version of himself, but he could, like a soldier learning a new drill, stand in the right place and wait for the command to become habit.
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