Gawarty shrugged. “We cannot expect a helpie to have the perspicacity of his betters. Many know it to be a desire for closer cooperation.”
“Surely, if a Haphan addresses loyal Sesserans as ‘you snappies,’ he must never have cooperated with anyone.”
“It might be a different case,” said Gawarty. “It might be like the admiring endearments a Haphan officer will use to address his very own children.”
“There is also a broader avenue of interpretation,” Diggery pressed. “That it is not an endearment, but rather an insult that would be issued from a Haphan school teacher, faced with a class of unruly ‘indigenous’ boys. Surely the similarity is plain to the most meager intellect.”
Gawarty grinned. “We should certainly consider ideas from every sort of intellect.”
Sethlan dropped his mug back on the table, empty by this point, and rocked his chair forward. “Well, I see that we will get nowhere following this line. Diggery is a product of Haphan education, and I don’t doubt you could go back and forth long into the night. Yes, it is quite civil, even tedious, but maybe a punch in the face solves things quicker.”
“So I’ve found,” Gawarty said, and burst out laughing again.
Gawarty proceeded to match the Sesserans drink for drink for almost two solid hours. Along the way, he deflected at least three provocations from the other officers in the club. There seemed to be a contest as to who could get screamed at by a drunken Haphan longest, and Gawarty gave himself free reign. He’d start with a general theme and then embellish freely, finding the Sesserans uncritical even when he had to start over due to problems of enunciation. Something about being challenged to a duel made him feel like he mattered. Something about direct speech made him feel relieved and at home.
4
Sethlan
Sethlan took the Haphan boy’s explosively foul language in stride. Except for that terrifying blood-soaked laugh at the beginning, which was a miss, Gawarty had absorbed the atmosphere perfectly and there would be no killing him now.
In due course their discussion fell to artillery and matters of flash spotting, sound ranging, and trigonometry, where Sethlan found the Haphan nearly useless. The surface education was firm, but missing was the intuitive knowledge of the front and the awareness of all its interdependent factors. The deflection of wind, the Brownian effect of interdiction bullets steadily pounding artillery shells in flight, the impact of a shell on soft or hard ground and the connected circle of affect on a group of nearby men: all absent. And the more they talked, the more the Voice hissed in his head.
“You’re the most useless Haphan I’ve ever met,” Sethlan said finally, tipping his glass and standing.
“I generate laughter and good cheer.”
“You have ten hours. Report back here at midnight, we’re going to the front.”
That took the boy down a notch. “Yes, sir.”
As Sethlan shrugged into his greatcoat, he glanced around, missing something. Nana had left the club almost as soon as Gawarty entered, and she still hadn’t returned. It felt wrong to leave without saying good-bye.
~Quit mooning.~
How can I make you shut up?
~Easy. Go outside and walk around this building.~
Sethlan climbed down the stairs and pushed through the door. The enclosed alley was all heavy stone, glinting with wet, more a subterranean cave than any human construction. It was 2pm, an evil, sunlit time of day, and the arched outlet to Sell Street was forbiddingly bright.
~Look up the street,~ the Voice prompted, ~tell me what you see.~
Can’t you see for me? The light hurts my eyes. But he looked anyway.
~I see this building, an unbroken silhouette against the early afternoon sky. I see a cobblestone street laid down centuries ago.~
I see that too. So?
~So if you will kindly stroll around to the opposite corner of the building.~
You mean, walk toward my apartment?
~Then we will check the building from the other angle.~
Sethlan stopped off for cheroots at his tabak, and then at the bakery for some dried after-morning buns. The Voice clucked impatiently. Finally they reached the end of the long block.
~There. Note the building’s unbroken silhouette. Its durable architecture. Solid, predictable, ridiculously massive. There the high windows, too small to allow human entrance. There the sewage spouts that pour down the walls to the edge of the street.~
I see that. May I go home now?
~Do you see any wires? Any strung copper for a line of communication?~
“No,” said Sethlan aloud.
~But you recognized, in the artery hallway, what you called a telephone device.~
I have seen telephones before. And telegraphs. It’s technology that we don’t bring to the front, it might fall into Southern hands. He was simply delaying, like Cephas. He already knew what the Voice meant.
~The street’s cobblestones are undisturbed and quite orderly, and there are no sewers in Ville Emsa. There are no wires leading from the building. Where does that telephone connect?~
I don’t know. Sethlan glanced around, and fought the urge to walk back to the club. I’ll check tomorrow to put your mind at rest. My mind, I suppose. No doubt the phone merely connects to another floor in the building.
~That would be a most profligate waste of your culture’s resources. A phone from one room to another!~
Why would you be surprised at our profligate waste? You’ve seen our war. And why do you call it my culture?
~There are methods of sending speech through the air, without wires. Using telephones.~
Now I know I’m insane, Sethlan thought. But then he added, Would those methods be like sending flashes with a lantern at the front?
~Very like.~
I’m no inventor. I’ve never been known to commit an innovation. Should my mind be telling me this?
~No, probably not. Your mind is breaking several rules at once.~
5
Gawarty
After Sethlan left, Gawarty lingered alone just long enough to evaluate the room. Many of the tables were near empty, and more than half of the officers dozing. That did not make the club quiet by any stretch, but it was the quietest he’d seen it on his first day.
Gawarty stood, mastered his balance, and tottered toward the fire.
“Captain Cephas, I hate to intrude.”
Cephas blinked up at him. “Do you really? You really have such a strong feeling against intruding?”
Gawarty was cagey enough already to not take offense. “I am sitting down at your table—like so. Now I ask forgiveness.”
“Asking forgiveness is a very endearing trait of the Haphans. Much better than asking permission.”
Gawarty nudged his beer to the center of a complicated pool of rings. Someone had entertained a stream of sweating steins through the night, and Gawarty hadn’t seen any visitors to Cephas’s table. It was one of the reasons he had approached; all the other tables had officers in groups, all of them with unquantified degrees of drunkenness. Cephas was stolid and alone. “When I first entered the club, I was struck by how…familiarly Captain Semelon’s aide treated you.”
“I was struck too,” Cephas said. “Perhaps more forcefully and repeatedly.”
“Since I am new to the front, I found myself wondering if this is at all common. I asked myself how discipline is kept.”
Cephas nodded and took a drink.
“Let me try again. Is Diggery a common example of Sesseran discipline in the ranks?”
“Yes,” said Cephas. “And lucky we are, too, your grace. In him, and his ilk, lies the hope of Sessera. Do you know we call ourselves the ‘chivalry?’ That’s something from ages past, when men under arms set aside their differences and served at the pleasure of their queens. The example of the chivalry is what permitted the first Tachba cities, in fact.”
“I wasn’t aware,” said Diggery. “If I could, I’d like to—”
&nbs
p; “First,” Cephas continued, “the most vicious of us sat at the fire and shared stories through the night as we passed a winesack around. It was so preferable to fighting that shortly we formed hamlets, then towns, then cities. Many Sesseran names end with ‘emsa’, so that’s how Ville Emsa got its name, common cause and all that. ‘Emsa’ means something like ‘the gathering of,’ not in Deep Tongue but the common tongue. So Ville Emsa is the city of every family. We had our own sort of Promise before the Haphans arrived and extracted theirs.” The captain took a deep drink from his stein. “Emsa, before the Haphans came, was the brightest light in the world. To have half a million of our unhappy kind, pressed up against each other, with nothing but a dozen solid doors between each family at night—it was a triumph against our nature. And it was the chivalry that led the way.”
Gawarty refused to be distracted. “It sounds as if Diggery is the hope of Sessera. I would’ve thought you disliked him.”
“I’ll answer that as if it were a question,” said Cephas, with a glint in his eye. “Your grace, I dislike the hell out of him. If disliking him were a beer, I’d’ve drunk it by now. Every sentiment we have, we Tachba, is for a reason. So rest assured I have a good reason for my dislike: he’s a useless buffoon and a poser.”
“Yet you called him the chivalry of the future.”
“I understand now. You’re not asking about Diggery, you’re asking about Diggery and me. About what I think of him and call him aloud.”
“I am. I am?”
“Do you have commission to ask about me?”
“I have my curiosity. Will that suffice?” Gawarty had started feeling balanced again after his fairly lucid conversation with Semelon. Perhaps he had been deluding himself, or perhaps Semelon was better than most Sesserans at speaking to Haphans. The man across from Gawarty looked like a regular, dissolute middle-aged officer. Sandy-haired, with deep wrinkles, gone to fat from a prolonged bender in the club. If Cephas looked normal, why was it so difficult to get any sense out of him? Gawarty let himself become annoyed. “I think you are trying to be frustrating.”
“Not in life, your grace.” Again the innocent expression. “It’s merely that I have no curiosity about myself, so it is confusing to find a Haphan officer interested in me. Do you know what happens when a Haphan takes interest in a Sesseran? The same thing that always happens.”
“Now, sir…”
“It’s plainly written, your grace. I am seeing ever more machine-stitched clothing on the street. There are ever more clean-cut Haphan merchants, but these speak Tagwa to each other, your Haphan fighting language. They react like trained killers when you jostle them on the street. Moreover, I have heard stories of good men not reporting for duty—their rooms cleaned out, luggage gone, the walls whitewashed. Most un-Sesseran. We like to be naughty with clean things. We would sooner take a knife to the mattress than leave a prim and proper room.” Cephas gave him a penetrating look. “And now, in front of me, is a new Haphan face, liaising from Haphan intelligence. This Haphan is asking me whether Diggery is actually useful to the eternal struggle against the South.”
“You have poured ten pounds of wheat into a two-pound wallet.”
“How native! Yes, I remember wheat from my rural youth.” Cephas leaned forward. “You clearly enjoyed Sethlan’s company; would you wish a pain upon him? His load would not be lightened should Diggery be disappeared. The boy is a son to us all. It’s like I shat him out myself, in one long creative squeeze.”
“It is not my role to ‘disappear’ Sesserans. Were you eavesdropping on our conversation?”
Cephas shook his head. “I sit. Sounds arrive at me, carried through the air by our ancestors. That table —” he nodded to a threesome of huddled lieutenants “— is dissecting a smuggling ring. And over there, they are wondering how the Tacchies have regularized their repeating rifles. At your table, Sethlan merely rehashed his obsession with those large shells, which everybody believes will ruin the war. Sethlan’s information went through Colonel Trappia to the Planners, and thence-wise to Haphan intelligence, I suspect. There is no logic in pairing a promising young Haphan lieutenant such as yourself with a flunky like Semelon. So here is what I deduce: you have an assignment, and you also have a task. You have your written orders, and your whispered orders. How wrong am I?”
Gawarty strained to answer without undue pause. “If you say I have my assignment and my ambition, you are not wrong.”
The captain watched him closely, then shrugged. “To answer your question, Diggery and I have our natural differences. If I met him at night in a forest I might brain him. If I met him at a pub, I might love him. There is nothing to read into that. Hate and friendship is common, as natural as death. However, here in magical, peaceful Ville Emsa, Diggery and I are brothers in arms. We do not throw more than fists in our friendly brawls. We—”
“I rode the train with a Sesseran regiment for three days,” Gawarty broke in. “Three soldiers died at the hands of their friends.”
“We are not all the same, your grace. Remember, the officers are chivalry. I am an officer and Diggery will be an officer. Do not lump us with the peasants. When we give a challenge in the club, we are only playing, usually. Diggery becomes ever more a proper Tachba, the more I treat him as a Tachba would be treated.”
“You mean it’s all friendly ribbing? Because tonight I heard an astounding history of Diggery and Captain Cry-face.”
Cephas snorted. “I will never escape that nickname. Anyway, I do not nurture others, even those like Diggery who have a longer road than most of us. Diggery is a perversion. Do you know the perversion?”
Gawarty thought he knew the perversion. Or was it pollution? He settled on merely shaking his head.
“Diggery is milk-fed and quite bloodless. We say he’s a ‘sharp knife’…clever. He is Sesseran Tachba to the bone regardless how small he is, but he is Haphan raised, in one of your tremendous institutions of learning up north. He’s a mixture of Sesseran nature and Haphan nurture, an unholy product of our two outlooks, pure in nothing, unpredictable in action, witless no matter where you put him. If you Haphans have your way and we Sesserans are fully civilized, Diggery is what you will get.”
Cephas took a long drink, and Gawarty remained silent.
“I will not nurture that boy and I cannot teach him, your grace. I can only make it burn less when he wonders what he is. He can be brilliant—his skill with numbers would impress a Haphan tax collector—but he will never be steady, and that rankles on someone like me who has made it through the flightiness of youth. When he talks, it is adolescence speaking, but it sounds like Haphan bemusement.” He gave a sour laugh. “How I hate you Haphans.”
“You sound cheerful when you say that.”
“I like a good hate. You Haphans observe, change, adapt—but you never settle in and push. You never see things through. When you came down on Landing Day, you found a race of diligent workers and immediately forgot how to work. We do that for you, don’t we? We hold the line against the South. We supply our blood and meat to the great beast of the front. We lay the roads and plant the wheat you chided me with.
“And every year, the Haphans have fewer machines. Every year, fewer products from the industrial north. More broken and useless factories, irreplaceable, because the Haphans have lost the spirit of maintenance. We Tacchies can’t fix that for you. We can’t put your flying machines back in the air, so it simply never happens. It’s one more lapse in the long slow descent of your civilization.”
Cephas took a drink as Gawarty sat stunned. The talk bordered on sedition, even if it was drunk talk, which meant Gawarty had found his first suspect. He didn’t believe it. It wouldn’t be this straightforward, and Cephas was certainly not so simple. He treated it like distraction for now, and pivoted back to his point. “Diggery—”
Cephas continued immediately. “Diggery’s Tachba blood tells him to do something, but his Haphan mind tells him to consider doing something. He will go mad. E
very orphan you educate will likewise go mad. We go mad quite easily, and you Happies don’t have our knack for controlling the Pollution.” Cephas pointed his finger at the ceiling. “Yod witness: that mad young turd will sink his future somehow. He will kill an officer, he will betray a cause, and all because he is not one thing. With all his Haphan improvement, he’s not even useful as one of your regular Tachba slaves. Not even the Haphan Empire wants what it is creating.”
“The Haphan Empire is not the problem,” Gawarty said. Cephas’s torrent of half-truths made him feel rushed and defensive. Perhaps that was the plan, because Gawarty stumbled and accidentally got to the point. “We know Sessera will go into rebellion, and soon.”
Cephas stared at him, to all visible evidence surprised. The captain felt around the table for his beer, and when he found it, he seemed to shrink a little. “Which is worse: speaking it, or hearing it?”
“I’m sorry to be so offensive,” said Gawarty quickly, “but you were not being direct enough, and I say that as a Haphan. Anyway, you must be seeing the signs. You know I am not merely being rude.”
“That was no mere rudeness,” agreed Cephas. “Was I to find some sign that a Sesseran rebellion could ever be true—though it beggars the imagination—I would put my foot down. Any true Sesseran would do the same. It is scandalous to even think…an affront to the right way of things.”
He began in surprise, but recovered by the finish, Gawarty thought. Are Tachba supposed to be this quick? He said, “I could hardly believe it myself when I was first warned. I was told to recommend against rebellion, if ever I was asked.”
Cephas snorted. “You’re being diplomatical. If ever someone asks you about rebellion, simply tell me and I will slit their throat.”
“See? That’s what I don’t understand,” Gawarty said. “One moment, you’re calling the Haphans a perversion on Sesseran youth. The next, you promise murder at the merest whisper of rebellion.”
The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Page 19
