by L D Inman
“What would I say if I heard what?”
They all turned to see Barklay leaning casually through the doorway. He raised an eyebrow at Cameron, who directed his gaze at Turnbull. Turnbull changed color twice, but answered readily enough.
“I told an offensive joke, sir,” he said.
“Oh? Which one?”
Turnbull, not squirming by visible effort, said: “Well, sir, it involves a Northern farmer, a Southern businessman, and a Berenian…. Do you want me to tell it?” He didn’t look like he fancied the prospect.
“No, never mind,” Barklay said calmly, “I think I’ve heard it. Or one like it. How would you characterize the result?”
“Sir?”
“Of telling the joke.”
“Unexpected conflict, sir,” Turnbull said with a sigh.
“Unexpected by you,” Barklay clarified.
Turnbull looked increasingly chagrined. “Yes, sir.”
“And what do you conclude from that result?” Barklay said.
“That I should have expected it?” Turnbull said, dryly.
“Well, that will do for a beginning.” But Barklay clearly was waiting for Turnbull to improve his answer.
Finally Turnbull sighed. “Cameron suggests I come up with a sex joke that is funny without insulting anyone’s heritage,” he said, by way of confession.
“A very creative solution,” Barklay said. “You’ll have to tell it to me when you’ve worked it out. And,” he added as Turnbull looked at him in faint horror, “I’m sure it will make a nice diverting little item in next month’s junior officer meeting agenda.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Cameron said, with a very straight face. “I’m sure the rota captains can make room for a good clean sex joke.”
“Would that all meetings boasted such pleasant agendas,” Barklay said. With a brief grin he saluted them lightly and continued on his way.
“Thank you, Cameron,” Turnbull said sweetly, as soon as he was out of earshot.
“My pleasure, Turnbull,” Cameron replied in the same tone.
The carillon in the tower began to chime its call to classes, and the heavy passage of student feet echoed in the corridor outside. “My exam,” Speir said, and then to Cameron, “Have we finished with the briefing?”
“Yes, yes, everyone’s dismissed,” Cameron said. “You’re going to Dury, aren’t you? I’ll walk with you, if you don’t mind. I need to ask him a question about this week’s lessons.”
Everyone gathered up their tablets and scrips and scorebooks and exited, chatting with one another, on their way to their various duties. Several chaffed Turnbull and Ahrens on their way out, which they took with good grace. Speir and Cameron made their way against the current of human traffic and came out into the cloister corridor to the next wing where they could walk abreast.
“So have you got all the troublemakers in your rota?” Speir said, teasing her gently.
“Just about,” Cameron sighed. “Stevens took over C Rota when we divided duties into five, so at least I don’t have him. But at least Stevens never gets into fights with people. I can’t believe Turnbull told that joke. I’d have called him out myself if Barklay hadn’t happened by.”
“It wasn’t in very good taste,” Speir agreed. “Luckily for him Ahrens drew off Douglas’s fire.”
Cameron shrugged. “I’m sure Douglas has heard that joke a hundred times; no doubt he’s used to it. But comparing his mother to a farm animal is probably just a bit beyond the pale.”
Speir snorted at the understatement. “Well, I look forward to hearing what Turnbull comes up with for the meeting.”
“So do I,” said Cameron, with a wicked grin. “Let’s see what use he can make of his experience.”
Speir said slyly: “So is he any good in bed, then?”
“Surprisingly, yes,” Cameron said. “But not better than I am.”
She glanced sidelong at Speir, with the faintest hint of a wink, and they both grinned.
~*~
“Since you ask me,” Douglas said— “I think it’s a bad idea, sir.”
They were in Barklay’s office with the door shut, ostensibly going over cadet training scoresheets. Barklay had suspected by Douglas’s absence from the scene that Turnbull’s “unexpected conflict” had involved him; he had found him helping Beathas to administer a tactics-and-strategy exam to a class of second-years, and carried him off. It had not been difficult to get the full story from Douglas; his anger had already subsided into a morose dispassion, and since Ahrens had owned his fault, Douglas spoke of the incident as closed.
Barklay liked to keep his finger on the pulse of student conflicts and intrigues; even when Douglas wasn’t involved, Barklay sometimes asked him for information on a matter, which Douglas gave him without cavil. Douglas had a good evaluative sense of a situation as a whole, and an equally valuable sense of reticence and discretion. It was therefore natural for Barklay to lay before him the situation that would be the subject of today’s lunch meeting of the senior officer teaching staff. Douglas’s reactions were bound to be a good barometer.
“Well, I have to get my staff from somewhere,” Barklay pointed out. “Dury goes back to Amity Base at the summer recess, and Forba isn’t available to replace him in the rotation this year. I’m not ready to make waves with Lord Selkirk so soon after his installation. Better to accept his candidate now and find someone else later.”
Douglas frowned. “But if what you say is true, sir, it creates an excellent opportunity for the Council to stab you in the back.”
“I’m not going to be exposing my back,” Barklay said, looking up at Douglas mildly. Douglas looked back, perfectly impassive. It was impossible to rattle Douglas, but Barklay tried it every once in a while, for the data points.
“Back or front,” Douglas replied dryly, “it matters little. Wherever you’ve let down your defenses is where the strike will come.”
“There are worse things than being undefended,” Barklay said, reaching for the printed lists of cadets and dividing them into sections.
“I understand that very well, sir—” Barklay looked up again, but Douglas’s expression remained serene and closed. “But it’s best to be undefended to some good purpose.”
Barklay sat back in his chair and regarded Douglas thoughtfully. “You think undefendedness should have a purpose?” he said, knowing Douglas would not fail to hear the overtones of that question.
“I think it should have a point,” Douglas said steadily. “It’s a strategy like any other.”
“And sometimes,” Barklay said, with a musing glare at the rosters, “it is simply the best in a bad set of options.”
I understand that too, Douglas did not say. Nor did he look it. But Barklay could feel the thought, as palpably as if Douglas had said it aloud. Barklay sighed.
“As it happens,” he said, “I agree with you. Undefendedness is a rewarding strategy but a desperate tactic. If I had a better option I’d use it without hesitation.” He did not suggest, nor did Douglas mention, the option of promoting someone from the junior officer ranks; Douglas knew as surely as he did that no junior officer had got close enough to finishing his or her course of study to accept a teaching commission.
Douglas hesitated and then said: “Sir…is Lord Selkirk’s opposition to you, personally, or to Ryswyck as an institution?”
Yes. This was the question he would have to answer very carefully, and it was sure to be asked at lunch by one of his senior officers. Barklay hated lying, but if he told the whole truth it would be sure to get back to Selkirk somehow and tip his hand. Barklay hated tipping his hand, too.
He said slowly: “Insofar as Ryswyck is an extension of my personality and interests, I believe Selkirk distrusts it.”
“Why doesn’t he like you, sir?” Douglas asked it gently, like a mother probing a hurt. Barklay didn’t look up. At times he was visited with a terrible temptation to reach, to cling, to bury himself in all that Douglas had to offer, but he
was not going to do that. Never again. There was one sense in which Douglas was his for the asking, and another sense in which Douglas was unshakably his own: and it was this self-possession upon which Barklay depended so dearly.
“I believe…,” credibly, because Selkirk had once said as much, “that he thinks my courtesy goes no further than skin deep.”
Douglas made a little noise and waited for more.
“We have known each other long,” Barklay said, still feeling his way. “He’s a good commander. The military’s safe under his leadership, and I don’t think he’d sabotage an entire military academy just to hurt me.”
“But he wouldn’t mind getting the whip hand of you in the running of it,” Douglas said, astutely.
“No,” Barklay said with another sigh. “He wouldn’t.”
Selkirk wasn’t the only person who found the ideal of courtesy too good to be true. It had taken all the twenty years of his labor to show the Ilonian military what Ryswyckians could do, and though they honored the prestige of his entrance standards and recognized the excellence of his graduates, the best-disposed of his colleagues still were skeptical of both the method and the principle. Barklay had set himself to patience and discipline, and vowed to outlast the skepticism.
But he had a feeling that the newly-created Lord High Commander Alban Selkirk was going to put that patience and discipline to the test.
“So if not sabotage,” Douglas said, “then surveillance.”
That was the trouble with confiding in Douglas, of course. One couldn’t expect him to grasp some implications and leave others alone.
“I have nothing to hide,” Barklay said archly, and didn’t register that it was a lie till it was out of his mouth.
“Then of course surveillance won’t trouble you, sir,” Douglas said.
Again Barklay leaned back in his chair. “You think me reckless,” he said, after a long silence.
“I would never say that, sir,” Douglas said calmly.
Not in so many words. Barklay found himself smiling up at him. “Point taken,” he said.
“Is it so, sir?” But he’d gotten Douglas to smile back, if reluctantly.
“I always value your counsel, Lieutenant. Now, if you will oblige me…no.” Barklay looked with regret at the clock. “I haven’t time for any more of this; I’ve got to pay a visit to the foreman of the turbine crew before I meet with the senior officers. We’ll see if they agree with you. Perhaps they can offer me the option of a less desperate tactic. But I doubt it. You may go.”
“Yes, sir.” Douglas bowed—courtesy in him was natural, and Ryswyck had honed it to a delicate but deadly point—and let himself out, shutting the door behind him quietly.
The argument was not over by any means. Barklay shook his head in rueful admiration, turned his chair, and stretched up to return to the halls of his school.
~*~
The exam was every bit as grueling as Speir had anticipated, but she scored well on it, and got a commendation from Dury on her essay linking the spring weather statistics to the supply management problem that had been set for the cadets the week before. “The best defense may be a good offense,” Speir had written, “but the reverse is often just as true.” “Defense isn’t often glorious,” Dury had agreed, “but it is essential.”
Afterwards, released from the burden of concentrated care, she was ravenous, but she had only time to pass through the mess hall and snag a greenhouse plum and a roll before heading back to her quarters to change into training clothes. She arrived at the arena complex sucking the last scraps of flesh from the plum stone, and dropped the remainder in the waste bin as she entered the large training room, brushed the rain from the surface of her piled-up hair with her other hand, and made use of the moisture to get her plum hand unsticky. The cadet section of which A Rota had charge, plus cadets of the other sections whose schedules would permit attending training when their section wasn’t in session, were already gathering at the warm-up stations, and she went the rounds and checked that all the stations were in working order and being used properly.
When enough of the cadets had arrived, she and her fellow officers helped them form into organized units to practice moves, some with padded batons rehearsing thrusts and parries, some at the bag-bar practicing punches; Speir undertook to supervise these.
Ellis arrived during this stage, looking a bit harried. He sought out Douglas where he was moving alongside a set of first-year cadets learning a new baton thrust, waited politely till Douglas had finished getting them started, and then pulled a scorebook out of his scrip. Speir left her cadets to continue their practice, and went to hear his brief.
“I’ve got the sparring calendar loaded on a tablet here,” Ellis was saying. “You may have to redouble a few pairings, just because of the way the schedule fell out, or else substitute one of your rota. I think Grant and Nala shouldn’t be paired together for a while; they’ve been reinforcing one another’s bad habits.”
“Any of your rota coming to the sparring court today?” Douglas asked.
“I haven’t got a definite from any of them, but I think a few; at least me,” Ellis replied, and Douglas nodded. “Two of my cadets have matches next week, so they’ll be sure to be there training with your section. If you don’t mind, will you keep me up on how they’re doing?”
“Certainly,” Douglas said.
“And I’ve taken two long-distance runs to the inlet and back. The times should be on the tablet with the shooting-range scores.”
“Thank you.”
More cadets arrived and began to warm up. Ellis and Douglas drew some apart to divide them into sparring pairs, and assigned them to the four drawn circles on the training floor. Of the cadets that remained, Grant was left over, so Speir volunteered to take her. She strapped on a headguard and a set of pads, and changed into the pair of grip-soled training slippers she’d brought in her scrip. “Baton?” she asked Grant, who was holding a padded one; “Please,” Grant said.
Speir had fresh memory of what it was like to attend training as a cadet, of the heavy current of custom bearing her along down the schedule: as a junior officer, she was also responsible for tending the stream, and so was no longer submerged over the head. It was perhaps the most difficult adjustment one had to make after promotion, and Speir watched the cadets as they worked, theorizing who of them might be able to develop that consciousness quickly.
The sparring court began; a large number of cadets had gathered in the training hall, along with a number of junior officers who had come to practice or just to observe. The officers of A Rota took turns judging the four circles, switching periodically to allow them all a chance to observe and comment on technique. At last Grant came to the front of the queue, and Speir handed over her whistle to one of her rota-mates, picked up a padded baton, and stepped into the circle.
This was the moment that always charged her blood with lightning joy: even in sparring practice, the act of facing another prepared for deadly contact and the buoyant humility with which she and the other exchanged bows, together lifted up Speir’s soul to exultant awareness. The whistle blew, and the sparring match began.
Grant came at her with speed, but still Speir could read her intent easily; she parried the thrust two-handed, forcing Grant off course, and twisted to jab her from behind with the end of her baton. Grant put up a block just in time, and spun away quickly to return to the attack.
Speir preferred the open-hand format as a rule, but the virtue of working with batons was the forced awareness of a whole plane and not just the line-trajectory of a single blow. She feinted, as if to hook Grant’s ankle, and at the last moment slammed the other end of the baton across the cadet’s chest. Grant went down, rolled to block Speir’s following stroke with the broad side of her baton, sprang to her feet under cover of the block, and again came at Speir, leading with her left.
To test the habit, Speir eluded her blow and then drew her out again: yes, there was the thing Ellis was t
alking about. Speir got clear of Grant’s blow a second time, and waited to see if that would alert her to the habit. It didn’t, so the third time Grant came at her from the left, Speir met her with a full-power thrust with the end of the baton into her shoulder, just where her lead was gaining momentum. Grant was thrown back hard, reeled a few steps, and crashed to the deck with a grunt of pain.
The whistle peeped.
“I told you, Grant. Stop getting used to only one lead,” Ellis said, from where he stood observing. “Last week it was your right. Now it’s your left. Don’t just get ready for what’s coming; get your awareness above that.” Grant nodded as she scrambled slowly to her feet. “And don’t wait for Speir to refrain from eating you alive before you get your bearings,” Ellis added, dryly.
Speir grinned involuntarily. Seeing it, Grant broke into half a grin herself. She bowed to Ellis in acknowledgement of his advice, came back to the mark, and saluted Speir.
“We’ve not time for another whole round,” Douglas told them. Speir glanced his way: he had taken over the whistle and held his watch in his hand. Awareness above what’s coming, Speir thought, in admiring chagrin. Douglas was scheduled against her in next week’s junior officer match; he wouldn’t miss this opportunity to observe her technique. Speir made a mental note to observe him closely in return during the course of the week.
“You’d have time for a sudden death round,” Douglas went on. “First throw ends the match.”
“Sounds good,” Speir said, and Grant gave an agreeing nod.
Douglas started the round with a peep of his whistle. Instead of going straight for the attack, Grant hung back and waited, eyes glittering, for Speir to make a move. Good, the cadet was learning. This would save Speir a decision on how quickly to end it. She advanced, testing Grant’s attention with a few quick blows; Grant blocked them all neatly without losing more than a few steps. Before Grant could control their placement by backing up, Speir backed off herself and waited for her opening.
