Chapter 32 - 31 — The Former Number One III
*POV: Haldrain Nolan*
Three days later they sent me back to where the families had been moved.
It was a borrowed house at the edge of a town nobody had bothered with yet, too small for the number of people in it.
Relatives and retainers and two of my wartime comrades were sleeping in rooms that had belonged to strangers eight weeks earlier.
I had not been able to get all of the blood out of the coat.
Christopher heard the vehicle before anybody else did.
He came out of the front door at a dead run the way he always did, and then about four metres short of me he stopped.
He had seen the coat, and the way I was holding my left side, and the state of my hands.
He stood there working out whether he was still allowed to do the thing he had run out to do, and he was young enough that the whole calculation went across his face where anyone could read it.
I put my hand on his head as I went past.
That was all. He came in after me and did not ask a single question, and by that evening he had decided the whole matter was closed.
Aurelian did not come out at all.
He was nineteen that year. He had awakened at seventeen, and everybody who had seen what he could do had said the same thing about him in the same careful voice.
He was in the side room with the broadcast on, and he stayed there.
---
I heard the argument two days after that, and nobody had to report it to me, because he was not being quiet.
"I have said four times that the murders are indefensible." Aurelian’s voice, through a half-open door. "Four times. And every time, somebody in this house repeats it back at me as though it answers the actual question."
Somebody older said something I did not catch.
"Then explain the road to me. Human infantry held that column for how long? An hour? And it broke, and the people on it died, and it stayed broken until my father crossed it alone."
The older voice again, sharper.
"No. You are answering a moral question and I am asking a practical one. Who actually decides? A government can issue any order it likes."
He was warming to it now.
"It gets carried out if Players are willing to carry it out, and it does not if they are not. That is not an opinion, it is what happened on my father’s road on Thursday."
I came through the door.
He stopped the moment he saw me, and I watched his eyes go over the strapping across my side and the state of my left forearm.
"Say it again."
He did.
He said all of it again, standing straight, and he did not soften one word of it to spare me, which I will grant him.
"Did the people in that city deserve what happened to them?"
"No." Immediately. No hesitation at all on that one. "Obviously not. Killing people who cannot fight back is disgusting, and it is also stupid, because it turns every neutral country into an enemy inside a month."
"Then we agree."
"On that."
He said it quietly, and then he said the rest of it, and the rest of it is why we are where we are.
"But that doesn’t mean he is wrong about everything."
The room went very still.
"Go on," I said.
"We are stronger. That is not arrogance, it is a measurement." He opened his hands.
"Every city still standing is standing because Players are holding it, and every battle turns on which side has more of us."
"Ordinary governments continue to exist because we permit it, and everybody in this room knows it and nobody will say it."
He pointed at my side. Not aggressively. Almost gently, which was worse.
"You came home like that. They ran, you stayed, and you saved them because they could not save themselves."
"That is what it is for."
"Then tomorrow morning you will go wherever the command staff sends you, because a man in an office signed a paper. Why should the strongest people alive take instructions from people who would already be dead without them?"
I did not answer him for a while.
Three days earlier I had knelt beside a man with a broken hip who had just watched a road full of civilians die, and he had explained to me, without any heat at all, that people who refuse their betters choose what happens to them.
Now I was standing in a borrowed room listening to my son build the same house from the ground floor up, and stop one storey short, and tell me the roof was somebody else’s doing.
"You are confusing responsibility with entitlement," I said.
"That is a phrase. It is not an answer."
"It is the only answer there is. The moment strength becomes the qualification to govern, there is nothing between a Player and the things that come out of the Gates except the shape of the body."
"And if the shape of the body is the only thing that has ever mattered?"
I looked at him.
He was nineteen, and he was brilliant, and he genuinely believed he had noticed something the rest of us were too frightened to say out loud.
"Give me your insignia," I said.
He blinked. "What?"
"You will not carry this family’s name into that argument while that argument is being used to justify what I walked out of on Thursday. Give it to me."
He almost smiled, because he thought I was doing it to frighten him.
He worked out that I was not while he was still unfastening it.
I did not raise my voice for any of what came after. I told him he was no longer my son, and no longer of this house, and that he would leave it tonight.
Nine people were standing in that room.
Not one of them said a word, and I have thought about that a great deal in the years since, because he will have counted them too.
---
He took almost nothing with him.
He did not threaten anybody and he did not tell me I would regret it, and if he had done either of those things I would have slept better for the last forty years.
He stopped once on the step and looked back at me with an expression I can only call patient.
He believed I would work it out eventually. That was the whole of it. He walked out into a war certain that his father was simply a little way behind him and would catch up.
Christopher went after him.
He got two steps before I had my hand on his shoulder, and he pulled against it once, and then he stopped pulling.
I kept my hand there while the footsteps went out of hearing.
I kept it there a long time after that.
---
I went back to the front the following week, and it kept going badly, and the reports that mattered stopped being about ground.
They were about names. Every few days another Player of consequence crossed over, and each one that went made the next one easier.
Nineteen days after I put my son out of my house, I was in a command post outside a river town, standing over a map with three officers and a very tired colonel.
A lieutenant came in with a screen in his hands.
He did not tell me what was on it. That was procedure and he was a competent officer, and instead he came around the table and put it down flat in front of me without a word.
That alone should have warned me.
Intercepted footage out of occupied territory. Poor quality, shot at distance, no audio.
The banner was the first thing I saw. His symbol, ten metres of it, hanging off the front of a requisitioned building.
Then a line of newly arrived Players standing under it while somebody out of frame addressed them.
Eleven of them. Young, most of them.
Not chained. Not kneeling. Not under guard.
Standing the way people stand when they have arrived somewhere they were not certain would take them.
My hand stopped where it was on the map.
Fourth from the left.
He had his shoulders back. He looked as though he had eaten properly for the first time in a month, and he was listening to whoever was speaking with his whole attention, the way he used to listen to me.
Nineteen days.
I had put him out believing that a cold road and a few weeks alone would do what argument had failed to do.
Instead I had found the one thing still standing between my son and that banner, and I had removed it myself.
I did not shout. I have gone back over that moment many times and I made no sound at all.
The lieutenant was watching my face, and then he was watching my chest, and I understood eventually that he was watching it because it had stopped moving.
Somewhere south of that river, my son was standing under that flag.
And the next time I stood in front of him, it was not going to be across a room in a borrowed house.
The lieutenant looked from the screen back up to me.
"Sir." His voice had gone very careful. "That’s your son."
I did not take my eyes off the fourth man from the left.
"Not anymore."