Chernon sat beside Casimur to serve him. He had to wait by Casimur’s bed, ready to receive the last words or the spirit or the instructions or whatever it was Casimur might want to give him. There was always a boy set beside a dying man, a boy to carry on the honor. Fifty days he had been there, changing bandages and cleaning up when Casimur dirtied himself and trying to spoon soup down his throat.
When Casimur was not screaming, Chernon tried to sleep. In the deep of night, Chernon struggled with his pillow, searching for a way out, away from wherever he was in the dream country. Where he was was bloody. He walked in gore, lifting clotted hands, gagging at the smell of it. He waded through the swamps of the sleep country, bellowing into the very mouth of the black cave he had tracked his dream guide into. “Is the way out through there?” No matter how sweetly he had called, it was never sweetly enough to evoke an answer. Sometimes in the dream he was horned and mighty. Sometimes in the dream, no walls or chains could hold him, and yet he could not find the way out. No maps were drawn in his dark dreaming, or, if they were, they were not written on his pillow when he awoke.
He turned in sleep, sweating, peering behind the pillars of the cave, hoping to see a road, a signpost, a pointing finger, but everywhere was only Casimur’s agonized face, Casimur’s voice screaming about honor.
Chernon believed in honor, as he understood it, as Michael and the others had explained it to him. It was honorable to protect women because warriors needed them to breed sons and—so dogma had it—they were incapable of protecting themselves, though there might be some doubt about that now, with this rumored weapon or power of theirs. Michael said women weren’t strong enough to trust with power or weapons and that if it turned out they had any such thing, it would be perfectly honorable to conquer them and take the power away from them. Women didn’t have the right kind of minds to use such things properly, so it would be most honorable to remove the danger from them. Michael had explained about Besset, too. How sometimes it was necessary to do unpleasant things for the greater good. Like turning Besset loose to join a bandit pack so he could bring back information. Even though the bandits sometimes killed people, the information was more important than worrying about their lives.
Everyone agreed that it was dishonorable to return through the Gate to Women’s Country. Only cowards did it. Cowards and physical weaklings, though even they could be put to work in the garrison kitchens or doing maintenance of some kind if they confessed their weakness to the Commander. Beyond being the butt of a bit of rough teasing or donkey play, they got on well enough.
It was dishonorable to make a Gypsy of a young girl as it unfitted her for breeding, or to make a whore of a boy as it unfitted him for a warrior’s life. Everyone agreed it was dishonorable, but sometimes the men did it anyhow. It was dishonorable, but it wasn’t hateful. Going back through the gate, that was hateful. Getting some girl out to the camps—well, nobody would hiss you for that.
It was dishonorable to drink so much during carnival that you couldn’t remember what women you’d been with, though most of the men had been guilty of that. More than one man had received a printed card from the assignation mistress after carnival, signed by some woman the warrior couldn’t really remember. The cards always said the same thing. “If it is a boy, I will bring him to his warrior father when he is five.” The cards went into the men’s files at headquarters. A man might not exactly remember, but no man with a card filed for the proper date would care to say the son wasn’t his when it showed up almost six years later. It would be the same as admitting lack of manhood! Of course, some warriors had grown too old for sex and some simply preferred the Gypsies as less trouble, and said so, and there was nothing held against them for that.
The conventional wisdom in the garrison was that it didn’t matter if a man remembered clearly or not. Even though everybody knew that women cheated about other things, it was generally agreed that they were honest and sensible about warriors’ sons because it was in their own best interest to do so. Women knew the warriors protected them only because women bore them sons, so it was in the women’s interest to see that sons were produced and brought to the appropriate father. Though Chernon had serious doubts about this, it was true that almost every warrior had at least one son. Very few warriors got slighted during carnival. Very few of the men who wanted sex did without, even though some of them didn’t remember much about it afterward. Sons were the single most important thing in life to a warrior, and the women knew that. “In bearing a son for a warrior, a woman earns her life.” That’s the way the indoctrination for boys
