Margaret Weis - Dragons of the Fallen Sun

He might have, too, had not one day a child, one of ,the refugee children, happened across Caramon in his dismal roamings. The child placed his small body squarely in front of the old man and held out a hunk of bread.

“Here, sir,” said the child. “My mother says that if you don’t eat you will die, and then what will become of us?”

Caramon gazed down at the child in wonder. Then he knelt down, gathered the child into his arms, and began to sob uncontrollably. Caramon ate the bread, every crumb, and that night he slept in the bed he had shared with Tika. He placed flowers on her grave the next morning and ate a breakfast that would have fed three men. He smiled again and laughed, but there was something in his smile and in his laughter that had not been there before. Not sorrow, but a wistful impatience.

Sometimes, when the door to the Inn opened, he would look out into the sunlit blue sky beyond and he would say, very softly,

“I’m coming, my dear. Don’t fret. I won’t be long.”

Gerard uth Mondar ate his porridge with dispatch, not really tasting it. He ate his porridge plain, refusing to flavor it with brown sugar or cinnamon, did not even add salt. Food fueled his body, and that was all it was good for. He ate his porridge, washing down the congealed mass with a mug of tarbean tea, and listened to Caramon talk about the awful wonders of the storm.

The other Knights paid their bill and left, bidding Caramon a polite good-day as they passed, but saying nothing to his companion. Gerard appeared not to notice, but steadfastly spooned porridge from bowl to mouth.

Caramon watched the Knights depart and interrupted his story in mid-lightning bolt. “I appreciate the fact that you share your time with an old geezer like me, Gerard, but if you want to have breakfast with your friends—”

“They are not my friends,” said Gerard without bitterness or rancor, simply making a statement of fact. “I much prefer dining with a man of wisdom and good, common sense.” He raised his mug to Caramon in salute.

“It’s just that you seem. . .” Caramon paused, chewed steak vigorously. “Lonely,” he finished in a mumble, his mouth full. He swallowed, forked another piece. “You should have a girl friend or . . . or a wife or something.”

Gerard snorted. “What woman would look twice at a man with a face like this?” He eyed with dissatisfaction his own reflection in the highly polished pewter mug.

Gerard was ugly; there was no denying that fact. A childhood illness had left his face cragged and scarred. His nose had been broken in a fight with a neighbor when he was ten and had healed slightly askew. He had yellow hair—not blond, not fair, just plain, straw yellow. It was the consistency of straw, too, and would not lie flat, but stuck up at all sorts of odd angles if allowed. To avoid looking like a scarecrow, which had been his nickname when he was young, Gerard kept his hair cut as short as possible.

His only good feature were his eyes, which were of a startling, one might almost say, alarming blue. Because there was rarely any warmth behind these eyes and because these eyes always focused upon their objective with unblinking intensity, Gerard’s blue eyes tended to repel more people than they attracted.

“Bah!” Caramon dismissed beauty and comeliness with a Wave of his fork. “Women don’t care about a man’s looks. They want a man of honor, of courage. A young Knight your age... How old are you?”

“I have seen twenty-eight years, sir,” Gerard replied. Finishing his porridge, he shoved the bowl to one side. “Twenty-eight boring and thoroughly wasted years.”

“Boring?” Caramon was skeptical. “And you a Knight? I was in quite a few wars myself. Battles were lots of things, as I recall, but boring wasn’t one of them—”

“I have never been in battle, sir,” said Gerard and now his tone was bitter. He rose to his feet, placed a coin upon the table.

“If you will excuse me, I am on duty at the tomb this morning. This being Midyear Day, and consequently a holiday, we expect an influx of rowdy and destructive kender. I have been ordered to report to my post an hour early. I wish you joy of the day, sir, and I thank you for your company.”

He bowed stiffly, turned on his heel as if he were already performing the slow and stately march before the tomb, and walked out the door of the Inn. Caramon could hear his booted feet ringing on the long staircase that led down from the Inn, perched high in the branches of Solace’s largest vallenwood.

Caramon leaned back comfortably in the booth. The sunshine streamed in through the red and green windows, warming him.

His belly full, he was content. Outside, people were cleaning up after the storm, gathering up the branches that had fallen from the vallenwoods, airing out their damp houses, spreading straw over the muddy streets. In the afternoon, the people would dress in their best clothes, adorn their hair with flowers, and celebrate the longest day of the year with dancing and feasting. Caramon could see Gerard stalking stiff-backed and stiff-necked through the mud, paying no heed to anything going on around him, making his way to the Tomb of the Last Heroes. Caramon watched as long as he could see the Knight, before finally losing sight of him in the crowd.

“He’s a strange one,” said Laura, whipping away the empty bowl and pocketing the coin. “I wonder how you can eat alongside him, Father. His face curdles the milk.”

“He cannot help his face, Daughter,” Caramon returned sternly. “Are there any more eggs?”

“I’ll bring you some. You’ve no idea what a pleasure it is to see you eating again.” Laura paused in her work to kiss her father tenderly on his forehead. “As for that young man, it’s not his face that makes him ugly. I’ve loved far uglier in looks in my time. It’s his arrogance, his pride that drives people away. Thinks he’s better than all the rest of us, so he does. Did you know that he comes from one of the wealthiest families in all of Palanthas? His father practically funds the Knighthood, they say. And he pays well for his son to be posted here in Solace, away from the fighting in Sanction and other places. It’s small wonder the other Knights have no respect for him.”

Laura flounced off to the kitchen to refill her father’s plate.

Caramon stared after his daughter in astonishment. He’d been eating breakfast with this young man every day for the past two months, and he had no notion of any of this. They’d developed what he considered a close relationship, and here was Laura, who’d never said anything to the young Knight beyond,

“Sugar for your tea?” knowing his life’s history.

“Women,” Caramon said to himself, basking in the sunlight.

“Eighty years old and I might as well be sixteen again. I didn’t understand them then, and I don’t understand them now.”

Laura returned with a plate of eggs piled high with spiced potatoes on the side. She gave her father another kiss and went about her day.

“She’s so much like her mother, though,” Caramon said fondly and ate his second plate of eggs with relish.

Gerard uth Mondar was thinking about women, as well, as he waded through the ankle-deep mud. Gerard would have agreed with Caramon that women were creatures not to be understood by men. Caramon liked women, however. Gerard neither liked them nor trusted them. Once when he had been fourteen and newly recovered from the illness that had destroyed his looks, a neighbor girl had laughed at him and called him “pock face.”

Discovered in gulping tears by his mother, he was comforted by his mother, who said, “Pay no attention to the stupid chit, my son. Women will love you one day.” And then she had added, in a vague afterthought, “You are very rich, after all.”