Rewrite That Witch
CH068 · Rewrite
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Chapter 68: Funeral

Van’er had heard of funerals.

Merchants who came through described them — the kind held for lords and bishops, elaborate affairs with music and priests and attendants in black. Stone tombs with carved faces and dates. He had filed this information under things that existed without imagining it would ever be relevant to him.

He was looking at a funeral now. A real one. For a man called Ali.

The burial ground was south of the town, at the edge of the wasteland where nobody used the land for much, surrounded by a low stone wall that someone had built at some point and that had since accumulated a layer of snow the same grey-white as the wall itself. It wasn’t impressive. But someone had taken the trouble to wall it, which meant someone had decided that the space between the wall and the non-wall mattered, and Van’er found that he kept thinking about that when he looked at it.

Next to Ali’s grave stood a second stone, already placed — marked with the militia’s designation and a name Van’er couldn’t read, but recognized the shape of from the context. Not Ali’s. Someone from before Ali.

His Highness was speaking.

Van’er wasn’t in a position to hear everything, because he was in the middle of the formation and sound carried badly in the cold air. But he caught the shape of it, and he caught the phrase that stuck — while protecting his loved ones and the innocent, we will always remember him — and something in his chest did something unexpected.

He hadn’t known Ali well. He knew the name, the face, the particular way he’d hoisted his pack on his left shoulder first because the right was stiff from an old injury. He knew Ali had two children, because Ali had mentioned them the way men mention children, as a fact that required no elaboration because everyone already understood what it implied.

He also knew what generally happened to children whose father died during winter.

His Highness had said — during recruitment, and again in the contract documents that Carter had read aloud to the assembled group because most of them couldn’t read — that a soldier’s family would receive his full pay plus a pension if he fell. Five gold royals. Monthly provisions: food and charcoal, enough for the widow and both children, supplied through the town hall.

Van’er had heard this during recruitment and categorized it as the kind of thing that was said during recruitment. It was a good thing to say. It sounded good. Lords said things during recruitment.

Then he had watched Carter walk to Ali’s widow with an envelope, and watched her open it, and watched her face when she saw what was inside, and updated his categorization.

The burial began.

Carter formed the militia into four columns — the first unit and the new recruits both, which was two hundred people, which was more people than Van’er had ever seen standing in the same direction for the same purpose. The coffin went down. Then Carter walked to the head of the line and handed the first soldier a shovel.

The soldier took it. He walked to the grave and threw in his shovel of earth and walked back and handed the shovel to the next person.

Simple enough. Van’er watched seven people do it before he understood what he was watching.

The seventh soldier, when she took the shovel and walked to the grave, hesitated at the edge. Just for a moment. She could feel the people behind her watching, and the people beside the grave watching, and she straightened slightly before she threw her shovel of earth. Her face was controlled in the specific way faces are controlled when something is being kept in rather than kept out.

Van’er moved forward in the line.

The shovel came to him. He took it.

He walked to the edge of Ali’s grave, and the earth at the bottom of it was dark and cold, and the stone face of the wall was visible past the edge of the grave, and the grey sky was above, and two hundred people were watching him.

The shovel was heavy.

He knew, rationally, that shovels were not heavy. He had worked in the mine for three years, and the equipment there was heavy, and a small shovel of earth was not what made his arms feel like this. He understood what was happening, which was that the two hundred people watching had given him something to carry that wasn’t in the shovel, and the carrying was the point, and throwing the earth was how you set it down.

He threw the earth.

He walked back and handed the shovel to the next man.

Standing to the side, watching the line continue, he felt that something had changed in the weight of his body — not lighter, precisely, but differently distributed. He thought about Ali’s children and decided that he would stop near the widow on the way back and say something, though he did not yet know what.

He thought about the stone wall around this place and who had built it, and decided that whoever had built it had understood something important about the difference between inside and outside.

On the way back, Carter moved up beside Roland.

Van’er was close enough to hear it without meaning to.

“Your Highness,” Carter said. He stopped there for a moment, as though the sentence had a second part that he was deciding whether to attach. “What you did today.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t—” Another pause, longer. Carter was a man who said exactly what he meant and no more, in Van’er’s experience, and the pauses were him checking. “No one’s done this before. Not for people like this. Not for men with no title, no family name.”

“I know,” Roland said.

“I don’t know how to say whether it was appropriate.”

“Do you think it was right?”

Carter was quiet for a long time — long enough that Van’er thought the conversation was over, that Carter had decided the question was unanswerable and would walk the rest of the way in silence.

“Yes,” Carter said finally. Just the one word.

Roland didn’t say anything in response, which Van’er thought was the correct choice.

He filed this alongside the other things he was filing today.

When they got back to the castle, Nightingale appeared from nowhere — she did this, Van’er had learned, and the trick was not to flinch — and went straight to Wendy, who was standing near the workshop shed and who opened her arms for the hug with the ease of someone who had been expecting it.

Lightning was walking a slow orbit around the steam engine, looking at it the way she looked at everything, with the specific attention of someone taking inventory rather than simply looking.

When she saw Roland, she said, “When do we assemble the autonomous boring machine?”

Van’er saw Roland look at all of this — the women by the shed, the steam engine with its white breath rising in the cold, the backyard with its scorch marks and its test stands — and the expression on his face was not legible in the way of ordinary expressions. It was the expression of someone doing a private accounting and finding the numbers in order.

“Soon,” he said, the way he said it to Lightning every time she asked, which Van’er had determined was his way of saying yes, you have my attention, I haven’t forgotten.

Lightning went back to her orbit.

The cold came in off the mountains, and the afternoon light was already going grey, and somewhere in the cemetery south of town the stone wall held its two graves and its accumulating snow, and a widow would be opening her envelope again when she got home, and Van’er thought that he would not mind, when his time came, ending up inside that wall.

He went to find his dinner.

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