Running Close to the Ground

Chapter Five: Of Honor and Courage

Drinking man listens to the voice he hears,

In a crowded room full of covered-up mirrors,

Looking into the lost forgotten years

For dignity.

- Bob Dylan, "Dignity"

"So then I said, just kill her quickly, you fool, five minutes before the Aurors get here is no time for your insane little cat and mouse games. But does he listen to me? No." Jephthah Nott swears eloquently and takes a large swig from his pint of ale. He looks a shade pale, and no wonder. He's been partnered with Walden Macnair on a mission, and we all know about Macnair. Most of us do our job, no more and no less, but that one can't resist adding personal touches. If you've worked with him once, you never want to see it again.

Before Nott can describe the gory details, Lewis Travers walks up to our table in the Hanged Man and announces in a conversational tone that he's been having visions.

"So have I," I tell him. "I have a vision of a bunch of middle-aged losers getting drunk right now. And I foresee another round of drinks in our future. Sit down and join us."

"No," Travers insists. "I mean I can call spirits. From beyond the veil."

"So can I, so can all of us." Rabastan waves his hand around the table. "But do they come when you call them?"

"No, but they call back," says Travers seriously, staring at us through his owlish eyeglasses. "They've been calling for me ... and you ... and for the Dark Lord too. Their voices are getting clearer."

A small shiver runs up the back of my neck. I don't know if anybody else gets that feeling around Travers. Nott, for one, doesn't. "You're hearing things, mate. Too much time on the island."

He's probably right. They all come out of Azkaban with the same look Sirius had, hollow cheeks and eyes like lead. No wonder Travers thinks he can talk to the dead. He's halfway there already.

"The trouble with you people," he says, "is that you don't believe in anything."

"'S not true. I b'lieve I'll have another whiskey." Avery blinks and looks around the pub. "Where's Roo?"

"I believe in brotherhood," says Rabastan vaguely. "Loyalty. All those Hufflepuff things."

I remember him at Hogwarts, a stolid little boy who worshiped his older brother. Rodolphus moved up the organization - no doubt riding on his wife's skirts - but Rabastan hasn't. "Not that being a bloody Hufflepuff gets you anywhere in this organization," he grumbles. "Always favors the ones who were in his own House, the Dark Lord does. You'd think he'd like having one man at his right hand whose ambitions don't extend beyond a warm blanket and dreamless sleep."

So Rabastan's another one with nightmares. No surprises there. He spent fourteen years on the island.

"And I believe in family," says Jephthah Nott. "Why d'you think I joined up?"

"What's your story, mate?" asks Avery. "Don't believe I've ever heard it."

Jephthah bows his head, his face flushed. "The Aurors raided our house back in 1980 for no good reason, just because they thought my oldest daughter Medea had some dodgy friends. Maybe she did and maybe she didn't, but I'd like to know where there's a law against having friends. They said they were enforcing law and order, but they shot my wife down with our baby in her arms. I reckon they left me and Medea with no choice but to join up. How else is a man s'posed to defend his home and family, when the Ministry doesn't shrink from cold-blooded murder?"

I expect the daughter had a lot to do with it as well. He adored her, and rumor has it that she was a bit unstable, even before her first stretch in Azkaban, and dead keen to join and avenge her mum. I think he had an idea he might be able to look after her and make sure she didn't go too far. It didn't work, if all I've heard about her is true.

Nott gulps down the rest of his pint and goes into one of his rare talkative moods. "Family. Look where mine ended up. My wife and my other girl dead, Medea raving mad in St. Mungo's, and my son Theo won't even speak to me since the last time I was arrested. And now the Dark Lord's after me to take him out of Hogwarts, like Crabbe and Goyle did with their boys. Told him Theo would come around, I did, he just needs a few more years to get that rot Dumbledore's been feeding our children out of his head. Can't see what he wants with kids who haven't taken their N.E.W.T.s anyway. What good are they to the organization if they can't do advanced magic?"

"Wand fodder," I say.

Jephthah nods. "That's my thought exactly. And - " he glances around the room and lowers his voice - "I tell you, even if Theo turns out the biggest blood traitor since Dumbledore himself, I'm damned if I'm taking my boy out of school to put him on the front lines. What else have I got left? I haven't noticed the Dark Lord calling on him to hand over the heir to the manor," he adds with a contemptuous glance at Lucius Malfoy, who has been conferring with Severus Snape in a dark corner. The two men get up to leave.

"Come an' have a drink with us, Severus," calls Avery companionably. "Don't be a stranger."

The Potions Master looks us over contemptuously. "If I felt like addling my brains, I am quite capable of brewing a potion that would do the job far more effectively than that disgusting Muggle liquor you keep swilling." He turns on his heel and walks out of the Hanged Man.

"Something shady about that one," says Rabastan under his breath. "Never trust a man who doesn't mix. I'd like to know where he's going in such a hurry."

He's right, of course. There's a reason why the Dark Lord allows us to sit around in the pub and gripe all day; he knows it'll be all talk and no action. And if one of us does get to the point where he decides to turn on the organization, he'll sound out the others likely as not, and one of them is bound to inform You-Know-Who. The men who keep their own counsel are the ones you have to watch out for. And I've already said that I think our master would do well to watch Snivellus very closely indeed.

"Maybe he went out to talk to the spirits," says Travers matter-of-factly. "They've been calling his name too."

Rabastan, still scowling, ignores this suggestion.

"Severus is all right," says Avery. "Just doesn't care for Wormtail, that's all. Our crowds didn't get along when we were at school."

"What's his story?" asks Nott.

"Same as mine." Avery shrugs. "We all joined up at the same time. Evan Rosier - you remember him - and Bellatrix were the ones who were really dead set on it, but Severus had no love for the other side either. And me ... I reckon you go where your friends go. Snakes of a feather, slitherin' together. Get it? Slytherin!" He laughs raucously.

"If you think snakes have feathers, mate, you don't need any more of that whiskey," says Rabastan, helping himself to the rest of Avery's drink.

"Snakes might have feathers," Travers reproves him. "You need to have faith."

I quietly slide my own drink in Rabastan's direction as well, because he looks like he's about to start throwing furniture at Travers.

"I believe in my ancestors," Travers continues, although nobody asked him. "They spoke to me on All Hallow's Eve, when the veil is at its thinnest, and told me it was my destiny to take up arms and save their lineage from being polluted by intermarriage with mudbloods. They command, and I obey. That's what faith means."

At least Travers seems to know what he's fighting for, which is more than I can say for the rest of us. You need something to keep you going in the organization. For one or two of the higher-ups, like Lucius Malfoy, it's ambition; the Dark Lord would be well advised to watch his back around him. For others, like Bellatrix, it's fanaticism. But for us, the rank and file, it's mostly a sort of numbness that settles into your bones and your brain. You keep stumbling forward like a lost hiker stumbling through a snowdrift, because you know you can't stop without dying.

I never tell my own story because it makes the others uncomfortable. They don't want to think about the fact that one of their drinking buddies already sold out his friends once. I don't like thinking about it myself. But it comes back to me in dreams...

King's Cross Station, 1972

I've asked Remus to write Professor Binns' "Witch Burning in the Fourteenth Century was Completely Pointless: Discuss" essay for me - which is practically doing him a favor, the way I look at it. He's ill in bed a lot of the time anyway, so I may as well give him something to keep him from getting bored. Besides, he says he likes writing essays, although the results are sometimes a bit weird.

"I'd better explain that I found out a few things that weren't in the textbook," he says when he gives me a copy of the finished essay. My mum and his parents are having a coffee in the station café, while we go wandering along the platforms and watch the Muggle trains come in. "First of all, my mum's Muggle-born and she says Binns doesn't know his subject. Nobody burned witches in the fourteenth century - it was mostly a sixteenth and seventeenth century thing."

I'm sure his mother is right, because Mr. and Mrs. Lupin - René and Celia, as they like to be called - are clever. Dinner-table conversation at their house means disentangling complicated questions about ethics and science and history, and Remus' parents ask our opinions as if we were adults. It's flattering, but also a bit intimidating.

"And then Dad said the Renaissance was a whole lot darker than the Dark Ages in some ways, it's just that nobody talks about it because it's hard to pretend history is about progress when we keep sliding backwards as often as not."

I think about Martin Lovegood, the columnist in the Daily Prophet who wrote that there might be another war. My mum stopped taking the paper for a while because she said it was stuff and nonsense, there simply couldn't be another war after Grindlewald. Then Lovegood got sacked and everything went back to normal.

"So I did some more reading, and it turns out Binns was also wrong about how we were always two steps ahead of the Muggles. Real witches and wizards did get captured and killed, because the inquisitors usually had other wizards working for them - informants, and people to cast anti-Disapparation jinxes on the prisons, and so forth."

I frown. "There were wizards who turned against their own people?"

"Yeah. For protection, or because the Muggles offered them more power than they had in our own world." He kicks the edge of a bench. "But anyway, I read a whole book about torture, and I think torturing witches was pointless for another reason. It's because pain is a blunt instrument."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means when people are being tortured, they'll pretty much say anything they think will make the torturers stop. They'll confess to all sorts of stuff, and there's no way to tell if it's true or false. Sometimes they don't even know if it's true or false themselves, because when you're in that much pain, you go a bit stupid and it's really hard to think about anything except the pain and how much you want it to stop." Remus, who is not usually much of a talker, speaks rapidly, passionately, as if the subject were close to his heart. "But sometimes people were really determined to conceal things under torture, and they did. Partly through sheer strength of mind, and partly by lying to the torturers, giving them what they wanted to hear." He takes the essay out of his book bag and reads the last line aloud. "In conclusion, pain is a blunt instrument, and you need subtle instruments to get to the truth."

"You mean like Veritaserum?" I ask, trying to get this conversation back to the concrete and understandable.

"Yeah. Although I found out you can even beat Veritaserum, did you know? What you have to do is concentrate really hard on stuff that's true but isn't important, like the times tables, and tune out the questions they're actually asking you. Just keep telling them seven times eight is fifty-six. And here's another interesting thing I learned from the book about torture..."

I shudder. "Do you really think torture is interesting?"

"Don't look at me like that, Peter, it is. You should read it for yourself if you don't believe me."

"I'm not about to read a book on torture! Just tell me about the important bits ... if you have to."

"They didn't even have to torture about half the suspects in those days. Lots of people just started screaming and spilling all their secrets as soon as they saw the instruments of torture, before anybody laid a hand on them. And then, like I said, there were the ones who kept their mouth shut even when they were being burnt at the stake. And there's no way to tell which sort of person you are just by the way you act in everyday life. Sometimes the ones who seemed bravest and strongest were the fastest to crack. Even Gryffindors, sometimes."

"Did you put all that in the essay?"

"Oh sure. It ended up about six feet long, which is twice as much as he wanted."

"Remus," I say with my best effort at diplomacy, "you're really smart, but you're barmy. Binnsy isn't looking for your philosophy of torture, he wants to hear about Wendelin the Weird and how wizards are always smarter than Muggles."

He frowns. "Well, you can do your own homework next time if you don't like it."

"Did you put any of that pain-is-a-blunt-instrument business in your own essay?"

"No," he admits, "I wrote about Wendelin the Weird."

I shake my head, wondering for the hundredth time what to make of my best friend. He's obviously put a lot more effort into my homework than his own, so I don't want to act ungrateful, but sometimes I'm not sure he's right in the head. "He'll never believe I wrote that."

"Oh, I don't know. You've been known to turn in some pretty weird schoolwork yourself." He smirks, and I know right away what's coming. "What about that time you Transfigured your exam paper into a chicken?"

"That was James' fault," I say defensively. "My wand's never worked right since he borrowed it without asking."

"But my point is, that sort of thing happens so often that the professors expect it from you. Besides -" Remus shrugs - "it's Binns. Everybody knows he grades by the inch."

Manchester, 1973

René Lupin spends most of his days in the makeshift Potions laboratory behind his house. Remus' father is an honest-to-Merlin mad scientist, or at least most of the other people who study potions think he's mad. It would be pretty cool if it didn't make him unemployable. He used to be a professor, years ago, but he gave it up to spend his life experimenting with aconite in what used to be a garden shed.

He pays Remus and me a few Sickles to help him out over the Easter holidays, but neither of us has ever been any good at Potions, and René's temper runs short.

"Sacre Merlin!" he shouts as the cauldron Remus is supposed to be watching boils over. "Sometimes I believe you were born to be a plague to me in my old age. You are the carelessest child in seven continents; that is your worst fault."

According to his father, Remus has a different worst fault every five minutes, so he isn't inclined to take any of them very seriously. "Speaking of carelessness," he says casually, "did you know your beard's on fire?"

René dunks his head in the rain barrel. "What was I saying?" he asks with as much dignity as he can muster, after he comes up for breath.

"As far as I can remember, Dad, you were discussing the effects of heredity."

"You are also too sarcastic. That is your other worst fault." René gives his son a light cuff on the shoulder and turns to me. "And you -- I think you are more interested in making pretty colors than in whether the potion actually works. That is no way to be a scientist! Have you left your brains at school for the holidays?"

"But I'm not a scientist," I say sullenly. "I'm not even fourteen." Remus seems able to take his father's tirades with equanimity, but criticism from adults always puts me on the defensive.

René runs his fingers through his singed and dripping beard and sighs. "You are right. I expect too much from the both of you, and I make you help me in the laboratory when you would rather be out amusing yourselves. I am an insufferable tyrant. Allow me to redeem myself." He gives both of us a generous handful of the Chocolate Frogs he keeps in his battered briefcase.

Remus unwraps a frog and neatly decapitates it with one bite. Ugh. I've never liked those things.

"You can have mine," I say, after checking to make sure the trading cards are ones I already have in my collection.

"Thanks," says Remus gratefully. It's three days after the full moon and he's still looking a little pale and shaky after several hours in the lab.

"Go back in the house and help your mother with dinner," says René, although we all know there is no chance Celia Lupin will want her son's help today. It is an order whose sole purpose is to spare his son's pride - for one of the unspoken rules of this household is that being a Lupin is about pride. If you have nothing to wear but rags, you wear them with the dignity of a king. It's also about courage and honor, and above all cheerfulness. If you're condemned to death, you face your executioner with a smile.

Being a Pettigrew is easier. It's about being scared out of your wits most of the time. You do try to be a good person if there's anything left over.

When he has gone, René says to me, "That was kind of you, letting my son have your chocolate, but you did not need to do it. He gets enough, do not worry yourself."

"I've never been all that keen on Chocolate Frogs," I admit.

"No? What is your favorite sweet, Peter?"

"Toothflossing Stringmints," I say, expecting him to laugh at my tastes. Everybody does.

"Yes? Next time I go to the sweet shop, I shall remember to ask for some ... some Flooftossing ... How do you say it?"

"Tooth ... flossing String ... mints."

"That is not a reasonable name for a thing," says René, with the air of the Minister for Magic making an official pronouncement. "Only the English could come up with a name like that, and I do not understand why they would want to. Nevertheless, you have been a patient helper to me and I will get some of these ... Truthfrothing Thinguments, even if I have to use sign language." He laughs, at himself rather than at me, and resumes his professional manner, which is gruff but not unkind. "I shall try this experiment one more time, with a bit more mallowroot. Hand me the packet of dried aconite in the right-hand drawer. No, the one at the top of the cabinet."

But I have already opened the wrong drawer, which holds only an old medal coated with a thick layer of dust. R. J. Lupin, Legion d'Honneur des Sorciers, 1945.

I take the medal out of the drawer and twine the ribbon around my fingers. "You were a hero?"

"So they tell me," says René after a moment's silence, his voice detached and faintly ironic. "I fought in the Resistance against the Dark Lord Grindlewald, and I was captured and sent to prison."

"And you got out?" I say, and immediately want to slap myself in the forehead, because this is clearly a stupid question. He wouldn't be my friend's dad if he hadn't got out.

"Yes and no. One never truly left Grindlewald's camps, and there were no heroes there. If you had to choose between your last brother and half a slice of bread, you would take the bread. That is what the people who give medals will never understand."

He puts aside the roots he has been dicing and pushes back his chair. "I will tell you how we lived in that place. One listened to their orders and nodded and smiled. And then one asked questions that made it clear one had not understood a word. And one listened as they explained again more slowly. And then, when one could delay no longer, one did the job as slowly and badly as possible. We were not heroes, that you must understand. We were not even really rebels. When we acted dull and stupid, it was because we had come to feel that way.

"One time they intercepted a load of healing potions bound for the British front line, and because I had been Potions Master at Beauxbatons before the war, they put me in charge of adulterating the potions before we Memory Charmed the people transporting them and sent them on their way. It was the most insidious of weapons: a poison disguised as a medicine. It worked slowly, so that Grindlewald's opponents might not know for a long time why their fighters were becoming ill."

René does not see me start; his mind seems far away. "And so I became Grindlewald's poisoner, and what is perhaps the more bitter thing to look back on now, his slave. But I made an error with perhaps one in five, leaving out an ingredient, or damaging the seal so the Healers who opened it might notice something was wrong, or dropping the whole thing on the floor. The thugs who were guarding us never thought it was deliberate. I should not be alive today if they had suspected anything. They talked only of how stupid we French were, how even our professors could hardly do anything right. And so, perhaps one man in five who might have died lives today. Is that enough? I do not know."

He paces to the opposite end of the shed and draws a finger across the dusty window. He stands there a long time, thinking, and then turns back. Something of the horror I am feeling must show on my face, because he snaps out of his reverie and places a gentle hand on my shoulder.

"I am sorry, Peter. This is no story for the young. I should not have made you listen to it. And I must ask you not to tell my son that I have done this thing. For him, courage is an obligation, not a choice."

I don't let on that I already know something about those poisoned healing potions. Nasty bit of work, Grindlewald was, and those were one of his nastiest inventions. They incapacitated you for fighting and in the end they killed you, but it was a miserable, slow, lingering way of killing. People took ten or twelve years to die, sometimes longer.

Matthew Pettigrew took eighteen. They didn't give him any medals. He was never anything more than a foot soldier in the war against Grindlewald, and by the time he died nobody had thought of him for years.

Birmingham, 1963

Other people's daddies go to work and play with their children, but mine doesn't. He is a grey-haired, grey-faced man who never walks farther than from the bed to the bathroom to the living room sofa. I think he used to read me stories sometimes - there was one about a rabbit with my name, Peter - but lately he just lies there.

Today he's lying in some sort of wooden box with his eyes closed, and there are lots of flowers about, pink and white ones with a heavy smell that makes my nose stuff up.

The house is full of strangers. They bring food and talk in whispers. I guess they are trying not to wake my daddy, but I want him to wake up and read the rabbit book again. He doesn't. Some old lady picks me up whenever I try to go near his box. She makes me sit in her lap and pats me on the head, like I'm still a baby. I don't like her.

Mummy's crying again. She cries all the time, but today it actually seems to mean something. Today she walks around with her makeup smeared and leaves crumpled wads of tissue all over the house, even though we have company and she's usually very particular about cleaning up for company. I don't really know why, but I start crying too and can't stop.