A Woman's Estate

The sound of their laughter never reached Gath for he was content, content to be walking the Hearth and the Estate with Oda again. It was a Hearth, an Estate, peopled with those who had departed – his redheaded Captain, the first of all his Captains, who had given his life for him and Xenosi who, like the Captain, had died protecting him. He stood again in his Defenders’ Hall gazing through tear-filled eyes at the names chiselled into the wall, feeling the drops overflow to wet his cheeks as he smiled on those who, as he named them, came to him to kneel and kiss his hand and to gaze at him through dead, but loving, eyes. Oda, too, was there with eyes that still had the spark of life but he could see that it was fading, and he gripped the hands that were held out to him, swearing never to leave this place if only he would stay with him. And he stayed, uncaring of those who waited for him elsewhere, for he was with his friend and surrounded by his Defenders, and if he waited long enough, his other friends would come and then nothing else would matter, nothing at all! If time passed he did not notice it as he revisited, with Oda at his side, the places he had known and everywhere there were his Defenders, anxious to kiss his hands, to talk of times past, to remember the good times, to remember the battles – though never where they fell. There were scars of old wounds that they showed, remembering, but there was no sign of those particular wounds that took their blood and their lives from them. He and Oda talked endlessly, sitting by the stream up in the woods at the back of the Hearth, about all that had happened to them from the time they had first met, and were interrupted only by the Defenders and servants who came and went. Sij came, too, but he was the Sij who had first come to the Hearth, blonde, upright, handsome, and not what he had become, and Gath had been very kind to him for he had not deserved what had been done to him. A flogging – yes, he could have understood that for a servant must be taught obedience – a flogging and then the market after he had healed would have been enough, and she had known it, and suffered for it later, as Mari had warned her she would – so he had heard!