A Stranger to Command

by Sherwood Smith

  Already seated shoulder to shoulder was a group of seniors in the rear, some of them glowering. At the far end of the first row, a slate and chalk on her lap, was Senelac.

  At that moment she looked up, and her brows lifted slightly when their gazes met. Heat prickled all over his body as he dropped down onto the third bench between Marec and Stad.

  Senelac whipped around and faced front. She took a deep breath to fight the blush scorching her skin. Then she let her chalk fall off the slate so she could bend, pick it up, and glance back.

  There he was between Marec and Stad, looking down at the slate, his expression remote. She mocked herself for the silly subterfuge, at least for about a heartbeat. She really wanted to laugh. He wasn’t paying her the least bit of attention, and here she was, acting like the sort of girl she utterly despised.

  “We’re all here,” Commander Keriam said, gathering their attention with his gaze. As expected, some of the seniors glared covertly at Fenis Senelac as if a tree had suddenly grown in the office. No, a tree would not be nearly so offensive as a female in these hitherto male precincts of power. He said in his most bland voice, “You are all here by invitation of the king. More might be added. Some might be subtracted. Any questions about selection for this class, the king requires you to go directly to him.”

  Pause, silence. Senelac had been red-faced, now she was pale, sitting unnaturally straight. Aware—and Keriam knew she was aware—of the resentment of the seniors in the back row, whose shifting feet and rumbling mutters made their feelings clear.

  The second-year colts reacted as expected: Stad, until today the youngest, seemed glad to have his three classmates with him. Of those three, the foreigner regarded Keriam with a steady, wary gaze.

  “The second question in your minds is probably where some of your fellows are, like the Valdlavs, and yes, there is a senior command class. Some of you might end up attending class over with the King’s Guard for a time. Or not.”

  The shuffling halted.

  “So let us begin.”

  He paused, letting the silence snuff the last distracted rustles and whispers.

  “The first thing you must remember is that an army is the opposite of a crowd. Many of our civilian kingdoms do not understand that distinction. They conceive themselves as peaceful people, morally superior to military concerns—and thus when they find themselves driven to protect themselves they are either slaughtered or they slaughter, because they have no organization as opposed to discipline, they have no command but shared mood. They do not understand that uncontrolled groups of people are nothing more than crowds, which can become as lethal, at lightning speed, as any Norsundrian military unit. They trample as many as they kill. Your history class will have furnished you with corroborative details.”

  The Marloven boys waited for the point, because that was old ground for them. But the foreigner sat up straight, his gaze narrowed, the wariness gone. Score one to the king—not that I had any doubts.

  Keriam continued. “There are two things we will focus on in this class. One, how to command, and two, how to be a commander. You will learn that the commander who by whatever means makes himself the enemy of his own force creates a war within his ranks as well as the one outside, and thus does the opponents’ work for them. Example, our own recent history.”

  Shuffling, looks, one muffled snicker. Keriam waited for absolute silence again.

  “You will learn that a commander must not only know what is going on, but what to do about it, and to that end we will be studying battles of the past from both sides, and I will set you a problem at the end of each session. You may work it out on your slates or not as you choose, but when you come in your slate must be empty, ready for the lesson, and your answer must be in your head. A commander will not go to the field with a handy book of tactics to riffle through as both sides wait for him to decide what to do.”

  A minor chuckle.

  “So, yes, you can work with others if you wish. You present your solutions with both or all names.” He paused, and said, “Through our history you will have gathered by now that the purpose of an army has changed many times. Today, we say that its purpose is to deliver victory by the fastest and most economical method possible. By ‘economy’ I mean preservation of life as well as land and property.” He looked up, scanned his students, then said, “Questions?”

  Shevraeth pressed his lips tight, at first unwilling to speak. But Keriam’s gaze stayed on him as if he were waiting, and once again he wondered what he was betraying.

  Stad elbowed Shevraeth, and so he said, “Is the victory a defensive one or offensive?”

  Senelac could peek now because everybody else was staring at the foreigner. At first glance he was so very much like them all—and yet not. He was already as tall as a senior, though he didn’t seem to know it yet, or how beautifully proportioned he was getting to be. His posture was so straight, with a perfect line to his shoulders, his features were refined in the subtle way the king’s were, though they didn’t resemble one another in any obvious way. Stad on the one side was considered by most of the girls as next year’s Handsomest Senior, Marec had his own engaging charm, with his lopsided smile and flyaway red curls, and Evrec’s deceptively casual lounge and lazy way of speaking made him attractive as well. But her insides didn’t heat up at the mere sight of them, or the sound of their voices. Why this foreigner? Argh.

  She faced front again, determined to get a grip on herself.

  “Both,” Keriam replied, after a pause for thought. “Your underlying question seems to be whether or not we are training future conquerors, and to that I will say no. Or you would not be here.”

  He paused again to gauge their reactions. The students stirred, and a few seniors muffled snorts of laughter.

  “We have no intention of attacking our neighbors, but it is conceivable that... someone... might soon attack us.”

  Another murmur, this time with the whispered word Norsunder.

  “If some force rides across the border to lay siege to Choreid Dhelerei, we might mount an attack before they get their siege organized. Still technically defense, but we initiate the encounter, so the tactics might be offensive. Is that clear?”

  Shevraeth began to nod, then signified assent with the open-handed gesture used by the Marlovens. And as the commander Keriam looked down at the papers on his desk, Shevraeth could not resist sneaking another peak at Senelac. All he could see was her back, for her attention was quite properly on the commander.

  Keriam said, “Now. One of the reasons we began the history classes is to clear away some of the fog of emotion that accretes around famous events of the past, especially when records are sparse. The songs are exciting, some stirring, and they are important to us as a people, but they don’t always tell the truth. Take our most famous Marlovan, Indevan Harskialdna Sigun. What is his most lasting accomplishment and when?”

  No one spoke.

  “Come along,” Keriam said, palm-heel striking lightly on the table. “If you’re wrong you won’t be taken out and shot.”

  A muffled laugh, and Senelac said, “The Battle of Andahi Pass in 3914.”

  Shevraeth, who had no historical reference for whoever-this-was, sustained another flare of warmth at the sound of Senelac’s voice. The sight of her slender neck, the smooth curve of her shoulders inward to her waist and then outward again at her hips—an entrancing curve, unlike the broad, angular backs of the fellows in the rest of the front row—kindled a brighter flare of that internal heat. The urge to laugh at himself forced him to look away, but the mental image stubbornly remained, and he was thrown back to his mother’s talks on what she’d called the book of life. He wondered when the mysterious page his parents had so patiently explained to his squirmingly bored younger self had turned inside him. On this new page, though Stad next to him had exactly the same dark, curly head as Senelac—if they weren’t closly related, they probably had to be back in their families somewhere—on this new page he h
ad no interest whatever in Stad’s dark curly head, but her curls he wanted to touch, to see if they were as soft as they looked—

  Pay attention!

  Keriam was speaking. “. . . are still some who claim the Battle for Andahi Pass his most lasting achievement, yet the Battle for the Strait in 3921 accomplished more for the world, though you will see almost no reference to it in our records. There are ballads that claim as his victories battles he never fought; outside the kingdom there are ballads that claim his land of birth was Khanerenth, Tser Mearsies, Bren, and others. In Ymar he figures as a pirate and a villain. The ballads reflect more on those who wrote them and perpetuated them than they do on Indevan himself, who remains a somewhat mysterious figure as apparently he left no written records. And whatever the king at the time wrote about him never survived the end of that family’s reign.”

  The seniors’ minds wandered. They all knew what was coming next, as they’d been forced to read it. He’s talking to the foreigner, one semaphored to another, who rolled his eyes in disgust.

  “The single record we have from his time is the one written by our king’s own ancestor, which, difficult as it is nowadays to read, we require our seniors to study.”

  Shevraeth wondered if the record was in the library.

  “As useful, though fewer in number, are the letters written by both the king’s and Indevan’s wives to the queen over the mountains, and archived by the Elsarions. We are given to understand that those letters are largely personal and not military, even though the queen and the princess were in fact well trained in military defense, as were all women of rank of that time.”

  Another murmur—and both Senelac and Shevraeth firmly determined to keep their minds on the lesson.

  Keriam lifted a hand. “Those letters exist, I say, unless those, too, have been destroyed in the course of Enaeran’s current problems.”

  No one said anything—they’d heard about the civil war over the mountains—so he continued. “Some ballads call Indevan Harskialdna a great cavalry commander, when most of his battles were actually fought at sea.”

  A quiet chuckle met this.

  “Then, the academy had traditionally boasted of him as one of its best products when he was actually only here two years. And not as a senior, but as a scrub. Some of the king’s ancestors trumpeted him as their progenitor, though in fact he was not a Montredavan-An, as the name was pronounced in those days. There are claims he was a pirate, when he fought pirates, that he was not educated except in war, which again we are assured was not true, he apparently had an excellent education, young as he was—supposedly he and the king, when boys right here at the academy, used to pitch hay to the cadences of Old Sartoran narrative ballads.”

  Another chuckle as Keriam turned a paper over. “So, to resume, we will break down types of battles: those on ground that permits retreat, and ground that cannot be relinquished. Plains battles, mountain, and even sea, because though at present we have no coastline, as Indevan himself is reported to have said, sea fighting can sometimes be seen as a metaphor for land battles, and the opposite also holds true. We will discuss types of commanders, and styles of command, and how that aspect influenced wins and losses.”

  Keriam paused and surveyed his charges. This time the foreigner and young Senelac did not sneak peeks at one another. Their attention was wholly on him. He made a dumb-show of consulting his papers until the impulse to smile was thoroughly squelched, and said, “So we will begin with what you do know, and proceed from there. Now, what are the traditional cavalry strategies, Marec?”

  “Outflank, break the line, or both.”

  “Good. So let’s look at some specifics...”

  At the end of the session Shevraeth used his sleeve to erase the chalk from his slate then rose to stash it in the pile, dropping the chunk of chalk into the wide, flat bowl next to the slates. There were plenty of slates and chalks at the barracks, mostly used for practice by the scrubs whose reading and writing had been neglected.

  As they filed out the others chatted. Shevraeth’s mind was pulling him in three directions. First, the assignment to work on, second, Senelac—he could feel her presence somewhere behind him—third, somewhat surprising, Commander Keriam had issued no orders about the level of secrecy of the class.

  Catching sight of Stad just ahead, he remembered Stad had actually been in command class as a colt. But no one had known.

  Interesting. What would you get if you blabbed? Maybe a moment of envy, gratifying if you craved envy, and then a long, cold slime-patch of resentment from those who wanted, or thought they wanted, a future in commanding wars.

  Shevraeth’s mood was sober, his unseeing gaze on the toes of his boots as he shuffled down the worn stone steps behind the others. I do not want to command a war. But my father did not want to be attacked by pirates when he was young. And I’m sure Savona’s parents did not want to be killed in a mysterious accident—along with far too many people in court.

  o0o

  Ndand Maddar covertly watched her best friend through dinner. Fen acted business-like, as usual—too much, Ndand thought. Something was wrong. Probably with that stupid command class that Senelac had confided, in strict secrecy, she’d been invited to. Though the girls had been rigidly forbidden to interact with the boys (and vice versa) in the mess hall, she had gotten good at scanning the senior tables while getting another rye bun or refreshing the water pitcher. Experience decreed that if there had been some sort of disaster the boys would be yakking it up and slewing round to stare at the girls and make loud comments until one of their stone-headed rads would finally notice and give them a (long overdue, in her opinion) breeze.

  But the boys’ tables behaved exactly like usual: loud, boisterous, and full of their typical braying laughter. Like there had been no command class. Which would argue that things went fine, because one thing she knew about boys was, they were definitely not subtle.

  Well, maybe that strange one from the other side of the continent—

  Oh.

  Maddar said nothing immediately. After dinner there were the horses to bed down for the night, and their own evening chores. Once or twice she glimpsed Senelac’s dark hair in the midst of a mob of yellow heads, and then, quite suddenly, she was gone.

  Maddar made her way through the others and leaped up the stairs to their rooms over the big stable. And there she found a strip of light glowing under Senelac’s door.

  She tapped softly, the triple knock they privately used.

  Then waited, counting heartbeats, until she heard a reluctant, “That you, Mad?”

  She slipped inside and leaned her shoulders against the inside of the door as she surveyed her friend. Fenis lay on the narrow bunk, arms crossed behind her head, two books and a scroll lying on the floor below her, and a slate board on her upraised knees. “Headache,” Senelac began.

  “Shovel that in someone else’s stall,” Maddar said rudely. “Unless you mean a two-footed headache. Fath again?”

  Senelac impatiently brushed a curl off her forehead. “She’s busy with the foals. For once actually doing her job.”

  “I’m going to faint.”

  Senelac gave a brief smile.

  “The command class—”

  “It was fine. Except I still don’t know why I’m there. Maybe as an object lesson in King’s Will to the others. Not sure how I feel about that—”

  “—but it doesn’t matter, because everything we do clears the way for our daughters. I know the chant. So, give me specifics.”

  “Oh, the class was fine. The seniors were divided between trying not to glare at the foreigner, and trying not to glare at me. Even if I committed the treasonous crime of being born female, at least I’m Marloven.”

  “So the class is full of dire secrets, I take it.”

  Senelac snorted. “History and battle plans, exactly like the king told me. I’ll ride this obstacle course because he asked me to. And it is interesting, even if I’ll never in my life command
anything but snot-nosed boys and girls in the riding ring. But my daughter might.” She paused, frowning, then smiled, her voice lifting a little. “I think I like that. Not any real battles, but her at the head of a riding—a wing—on patrol. Yes, I like that, because any daughter of mine is bound to have twice the sense that a son of someone like Sindan will ever have. Just to name one.”

  “So...?”

  Senelac glanced up, her dark eyes narrowed with ironic humor. “You’re going to worry at it, aren’t you?”

  “Like a dog with a knotted rope.”

  Senelac sighed. “But we’ve been over it. The foreigner—why is it he walks into a room, and I turn into...” She groped, then dropped her hand onto her middle.

  “Ndand Fath?”

  Senelac grimaced. “No. I’m not malicious. Just, well, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Maddar looked out the window, taking time before she spoke. Yes, she knew. All last year Senelac had talked about that wooden-faced foreigner, who was a skinny weed of fifteen, while Retren Forthan, easily the most romantic figure in the entire academy—and about the most shy of all the seniors—had looked after Senelac hopelessly.

  Maddar had to admit that Fen Senelac never gave anyone the least sign of flirtation. She hadn’t noticed Ret, except in the way the boys did—unstinting admiration for his skills, his courage, his flair in leadership. While Maddar herself would have stood on her head and hooted like an owl if she’d thought it would catch his attention for a single heartbeat.

  She sighed. Life was not fair. “So why don’t you talk to him? It looked to me at the bakery like he’s finally woken up and noticed there are girls in the world. And he was most definitely interested in you.”

  “But what does that mean, in his culture? That’s the thing that slays me. Here, we all know what words and signs mean. What do they mean to outsiders? Especially ones that, when they finish, will go home again and never think twice about us?”

  “How can you know that?” Maddar exclaimed, exasperated. “He might speak a different language, but I will wager the Nelkereth Plains he comes equipped with the same emotions we have. Why, he looks exactly like one of us now, moves like us, except when he’s doing his wood fence imitation, or doing that weird fluttering thing with his hands, like a cymbal dancer—”