A Song Everyone Knew

I did not intend to stay late.

I especially did not intend to stay late once the third table was pushed back and someone announced, with the confidence of a fool, that he knew a new song about the Jophaidian Guard.

Not the town watch. No one wastes breath on them. This was about the Border Guard. The ones who come down from the Tower in clumps, gray-cloaked and stiff-backed, smelling of wind and stone, like they had brought the heights with them.

Everyone knows what happens next.

It began with the chorus. Short. Loud. Built to be abused.

"Gray to the Tower, gray to the gate,
Get here early, still here late!"

No one bothered with pitch. It was shouted, stomped, and slammed into tables. Someone came in half a beat behind and nobody cared.

After that came the verses.

The first was a baker, already warm with drink, who sang about how the Guard could count steps in the dark between one watch post and the next, but somehow never noticed when his daughter slipped extra bread into their packs on rotation days. The rhyme dragged. The truth carried it. The chorus came back hard and satisfied.

The second was worse. A carter, just in from the west road, stood and sang something truly awful about watching the border so long they start arguing with the weather, and losing every argument. It was horrible. People laughed until they wheezed. The chorus rescued him.

By then, some Guards were already singing.

Off-duty, boots unlaced, cloaks folded on chair backs. One of them stood for a verse himself and sang about how the Guard could hold the Tower through three days of sleet and screaming wind, but still lose a fight with their own stomachs after a week of dried rations and reheated stew. He did not spare detail. Someone gagged. Someone spilled a drink. The Guards laughed the hardest.

That was how you knew it was safe.

You do not sing like that about strangers. You sing like that about people who vanish up the road toward the Tower for months at a time, who come back thinner and quieter, who warm their hands at your hearths and then head back out again because that is how the line holds.

The worst verse came late. A woman I did not know stood and sang about the Guard knowing every mile marker, every signal fire, every stone stair between here and Yadrios. Then she twisted it and sang about how none of that stopped them, fresh down from the heights and the tavern, from knocking on the wrong door at night and apologizing for a breach that turned out to be last winter's. The room howled. The Guards groaned and shouted the chorus anyway.

I left before it found another wind. Those songs never end cleanly.

Walking home, I caught myself humming the chorus, stopped, then laughed and kept humming it anyway. The Tower was still up there. The road still ran east. In the morning, the Guard would go back to being gray shapes against the sky. For one night, they were close enough to sing about.