Chernon ignored the hand. He didn’t want to be seen shaking hands with Habby. Still, Habby was Stavia’s brother and he didn’t want tales carried back to Women’s Country, either. Michael said they might still need Stavia. That’s why Chernon had given the book back, because he might still need her. Better leave Habby with something Stavia would appreciate.
“Wills and that lot may try to beat you to a bloody mess,” he said with calculated candor. This wasn’t really taking sides. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t do that.
“I know. But there’s five of us, and we’re going to stick together. Do you have any message for Stavia?”
Chernon shook his head, keeping his voice neutral. Any message he might have for Stavia, he could not send by Stavia’s brother. “I told her why I was staying.”
“The war’s over, Chernon.”
“It would seem cowardly to go back now.” This was rote. This was what he had said before. It was what warriors said, and no one could fault him for saying it.
“They’ll always find a way to make it seem cowardly. No matter when you do it.” Habby was looking at him oddly, rubbing his forehead as though it hurt.
“It’s a matter of honor,” he said stiffly. “Doing what’s honorable.” Though he had fantasized leaving the garrison a thousand times, he had never seen himself going through the Gate to Women’s Country. His departure had always been different from that. A stroke of fate. Some occurrence that was totally unavoidable. Something that just happened, like storm, like winter. Something he couldn’t be blamed for. “A matter of honor,” he repeated.
Habby shrugged. “That’s only what the garrison calls it, Chernon. I don’t call it that, so I can’t argue with you.”
Chernon turned away, trying to hide his anger. Stavia had said the same thing. And Beneda.
And his mother. “Honor is only a label they use for what they want you to do, Chernon. They want you to stay, so they call staying honorable.”
“You want me to come back?! You call that honorable?”
“No,” his mother, Sylvia, had said. “We try very hard not to call it anything, Chernon. We just tell you that we love you and would be glad of your return.”
And Stavia had been the same. No books. “You have to make your own choices, Chernon. I can’t go on breaking the rules and expect you to make proper choices. I must choose now to confess and be punished for what I did. You have to choose one way of life or the other. Not both.”
He had cried then, mostly out of anger. He had regretted those tears since. When you cried, you gave them power over you. You couldn’t ever cry. He had tried to see Stavia again, tried to tell her the tears hadn’t meant anything, but she had gone. Gone away. For a long time. Years.
He got up and started to dress himself, not speaking to Habby again. There was no point in complicating his own life. Wills didn’t care who he beat on, and if Wills couldn’t get Habby, he’d be happy to settle for Chernon. Wills was a little like Barten had been. A trumpet-mouthed bully. Always blaring “Attack,” even when there was no reason for it. Always calling someone a servitor-lover, or a tit-sucker, or a weird. Now, Corrig was really a weird, a wild man. Corrig was going to go back through the gate, too, and nobody would care. Him and his strange eyes that saw things no one else saw; him and his knowing things you didn’t want him to know. Everyone would be more comfortable without Corrig.
It was a cold morning, a wet, mawky morning, with the wind blowing from the sea. Chernon put on his long cloak and drew on his thigh-length wool socks before stamping his feet into his boots. The socks tied to his cincture, and he struggled with the laces. Around him everyone else was doing the same except for Habby, and Corrig and the other three. They’d clumped themselves together at the end of the room, waiting for assembly to blow, barefooted, nothing on but their tunics. Habby was smart. Habby must have planned that. A tunic came off fast. Nothing to untie or unbutton. No excuse to knock a man down to take his boots if he was already barefooted. The closer to naked you were when you made the choice, the quicker you could strip. The less excuse for somebody to beat on you while they ripped off your clothes.
“Naked you came from your mother’s womb, and naked you shall return to Women’s Country!” The officers would say that when they got them into the ceremonial room under the wall. “Bloody you came, and bloody you shall go!” some others might say, enforcing the saying with flung stones.
Then the hissing from the century.
Chernon considered the hissing. In a way, it was what Vinsas had tried to do to Sylvia, a kind of hissing. To hurt. To wound. Something in the thought was teasingly distasteful, like a food one couldn’t decide if one liked or not, and he set it aside, pulling his cloak tight against the wind. Habby and the others didn’t seem to notice the cold. They stood quietly, ready for anything. Outside in the hall Wills was trying to agitate some of his cronies, getting no commitment from them. Habby was a very good fighter, and of course Corrig was insane. Corrig could damn near kill you. Even Wills, stupid as he was, knew that.
Assembly! The time in which Wills might have done his worst was lost. Outside the barracks door they formed up the square, ten by ten. The fifteen century. All of them in it were fifteen years old, more or less. A full century of one hundred boys. Not to be full for long. An hour from now they’d be five short.
“There was a time,” Casimur had cried in one of his lucid intervals, “there was a time when a
