Ryswyck

by L D Inman

  Askill had finished vomiting. He took the water with a nod and used it to rinse out his mouth, then poured the remainder over his face and shook his head. He crushed the paper cup in his hand and with Gordon’s help staggered to his feet.

  “So, then?” they could hear Gordon say. “Can you go on?”

  “Aye,” Askill said, and they grinned at each other. Gordon clapped him on the shoulder and went to retrieve his baton; Askill tossed the crushed cup out of the combat pit and wiped his hands on his trousers before picking up his, to the encouraging shouts of the crowd.

  “Cadet Askill?” Douglas said, as Askill returned to his mark.

  “I don’t concede, sir,” Askill said.

  “Very well,” Douglas said. “Play on.”

  So then, unless Askill was able to pull out a victory, this would be a match with a long second round and not a third. Under Douglas’s steady, unruffled gaze, they returned to combat.

  Now, there was real humility in Gordon’s physical grace, and a kind of magnanimity in Askill’s force, as Gordon parried Askill’s attacks and eluded his blows. Askill was not perfectly steady on his feet, and his broken face was still bleeding and swelling up. But he kept the fight going long enough to win the noisy appreciation of his comrades before Gordon broke his guard and threw him for the second time.

  He lay panting for a moment, then lifted his hand to salute Gordon from the ground. Gordon accepted the salute with a bow, and reached to help him up as the whistle shrilled.

  “Round and match to Gordon,” Douglas said, and the crowd broke into a roar of cheers.

  Askill was clearly dizzy now; Gordon helped steer him out the door of the combat pit after their salute to Barklay.

  Douglas stood up in the judges’ perch and turned toward Barklay as the dismissal was being called. He raised his head, and their eyes met and touched.

  Barklay knew exactly whom he wanted for his successor. Oh merciful wisdom, he thought, give me five years and a good commission to put him in.

  He gave Douglas a nod, acknowledging his work well done; Douglas nodded back, accepting it. As Douglas turned away, Barklay saw that their exchange had not gone unobserved. Jarrow, still in the seat of the second marshal, was watching them. He was very pale, and his jaw was working. Barklay answered him with a little smile. Yes, real engagement at last.

  Barklay went down to the infirmary and looked in the doorway. “What’s the word on Askill?”

  “He’ll do,” Wallis said, laconic by long practice. “One night on the monitor, maybe two. He got off light.”

  Corda would certainly have said so. Barklay saluted Wallis lightly and followed the exodus of students out of the arena complex and across the quad. The rain had picked up, but the clouds still held the light, so that the windows glowed as he passed inside.

  He was unsurprised to find Jarrow waiting for him in his office, the white drapes blazing behind him. Barklay left the door open and crossed the room to face him.

  “Yes, Commander. What may I do for you?”

  “Sir,” Jarrow said, “I beg to know what you think you are doing here.”

  “Why, are you curious?” Barklay said, leaving off the finally? with an effort. Jarrow must have heard it anyway: Barklay could see him bristle, like a hawk raising his feathers and then smoothing them for the dive.

  “Does your school really subject itself to that appalling spectacle three times a week?” he demanded.

  “What about it appalls you?” Oh, this was so much better than the usual innuendo. Yet there was more to this than the arena, Barklay felt sure. Would Jarrow bring it out?

  “It’s…it’s…,” Jarrow sputtered and finally said, “It’s ridiculous. Your students should be learning proper fighting, not this—old-fashioned brutality. I’ve seen their eyes glaze over when the talk turns to their coursework in weapons systems and missile defense. And this is what they can’t wait to get back to.”

  “Yes, that’s a bit of a problem,” Barklay said calmly. “Occasionally I can get them to see the connection between the two, but it’s difficult to intuit—”

  “Because there isn’t a connection,” Jarrow insisted. “All this brawling painted over with ceremony. What has any of that to do with modern warfare? Nothing about it prepares them for real war. War isn’t an arena, it’s surgery, it’s—”

  “Blind surgery,” Barklay said. “I’ve participated in what you call ‘real war,’ Commander—”

  “Yes, I know you have, sir,” Jarrow said with lip-curling scorn. “Some people join the service because of the excuses it affords them. I’m talking about the impersonal strikes of modern weapons in trained hands. Not—”

  “And so am I,” Barklay said, angry at last. “Impersonal strikes, you say? What do you think happens at the end of those missiles, eh? Impersonal death? Impersonal destruction of someone’s home village of a hundred years? At least in Ryswyck arena people know when they’ve drawn blood. I’ll not have my students fail to imagine the result when they press that lever or fire that torpedo.”

  “Thereby disabling half of them. And the other half will see it as you do, a perversion of combat dressed up as courtesy.”

  “As opposed to a perversion of medicine dressed up as science?”

  “It is a sickness,” Jarrow said.

  “It is the lance,” Barklay said.

  They were silent a moment to slow their breath. Then Jarrow said coldly: “You are skilled at fine talk, General Barklay, but even you admit that there is a difference between this obsession with hand-to-hand combat and real warfare.”

  “Yes, Commander, there is indeed,” Barklay said. “The difference is that in actual warfare, we give ourselves permission to hurt the other without their consent.”

  “Ah,” said Jarrow. “Then in your view, all that we need to reconcile them is to obtain such consent?”

  Barklay smiled. So close, and yet so far, he thought.

  “Is that what you’ve been teaching Lieutenant Douglas?” Jarrow said, softly. His eyes glittered.

  Barklay’s smile hardened. You should know better, Commander. But he answered Jarrow with extreme gentleness.

  “In matters of courtesy,” he said, “Douglas is nearly always my teacher, and not the reverse.”

  “Then you won’t mind,” Jarrow said, still more softly, “if I apply to him for instruction myself.”

  It was clear enough what he meant by that. Well, then, so be it. “On the contrary,” he said, “I invite you to learn from Douglas whatever he is pleased to teach you.” If it’s in your grasp. Again Barklay smiled.

  “I am much obliged,” Jarrow said, smiling back thinly. “General Barklay, sir.”

  ~*~

  After the match, Douglas’s nerve held until he reached the junior officers’ corridor, where the fifth person congratulated him on his judging; then he broke and escaped to the tower with the last of Em’s nut bars. Ansley asked him for a precis of the match she’d missed, but otherwise left him alone to brood at the window. He ate his nut bar slowly; after half an hour he felt ridiculous, and by the time the sun had set he had recovered his sense of humor. Hiding in the tower? he imagined Speir saying with a grin.

  Just like hiding in the chapel, aye?

  If he wanted to be sustenance to Speir, he’d better stand forth himself. In his recovered equilibrium Douglas remembered that Ryswyck as a living organism needed its members whole. And a bruise was better than a shadow. Douglas crushed the nut-bar wrapper into a ball and pocketed it.

  He thanked Ansley for her hospitality, and rode down the lift to cross the quad in the dusk. As he reached the compound, the door opened and framed a familiar outline.

  “Good evening, sir,” Douglas said.

  “Douglas,” Barklay greeted him, his voice warm. For the moment Douglas felt as though their souls touched rightly; the conflict always crept in again soon after, but it was for these fleeting moments that his courtesy toward Barklay lifted into honor.

  Douglas re
ached him and would have passed him inside as Barklay came out, but as they drew level Barklay turned to him, his face half lit by the open door.

  “Douglas,” he said, “has Jarrow been talking to you?”

  “Talking to me when, sir?” Douglas said blankly; and then realized what Barklay meant. “He asked for my assistance with Ryswyckian customs, early this morning,” he said. “In exchange, he suggested, for his assistance with the wider military later on.”

  Barklay was silent for a moment. Then he said: “You know you needn’t hesitate to help him.”

  “All the same I do hesitate, sir,” Douglas said, calmly. “I’ve not forgotten what you asked of me. It seems to me that I should keep silent about things I don’t understand myself.”

  He hadn’t meant it as a hit, but Barklay flinched. After a beat Barklay recovered, and said very gently: “Douglas, there is nothing you can tell Jarrow that will offend Lord Selkirk more than the things he already knows.”

  This didn’t tally at all with Douglas’s assessment. “Then why did Selkirk send him?” he asked.

  Barklay let out a deep sigh. “To remind me,” he said, “of the position I hold in his regard. Good night, Lieutenant.”

  Douglas watched him disappear beyond the light cast from the door, moving as a shadow among shadows toward the shaded lights of the tower.

  That may be why Selkirk sent him, he thought. But I’m not so sure that’s why he came.

  5

  The day before Marag returned from the Amity council, Ahrens and Cameron had a toe-to-toe shouting match in the training room. Speir and Douglas had both come to sparring court, to assist with the weekly transition of sections, and were among Cameron’s rota directing the opening exercises when it happened.

  Speir saw Ahrens come into the training hall, spot Cameron, and make toward her like a heavy arrow straight to its target. Speir didn’t stop her sequence of baton thrusts, but hers wasn’t the only attention drawn toward the two of them; and soon many had stopped even pretending to train as the level of their voices escalated.

  Cameron was taller; Ahrens, broader; and their voices rang out like the high and low impacts of a dragon missile mine. “Well, if you’re not grateful for the kindness,” Cameron said, not troubling to keep her voice low, “you could at least consider my convenience. It was much easier to do my work once I’d done yours.”

  “You’d no call to be doing work that wasn’t yours to do!” Ahrens roared back.

  “What, and wait for you to forget like you’ve done before?”

  “That was a whole bloody year ago, Cameron. You’ve such a long memory for other people’s failings—”

  “I was trying to be helpful—”

  “No, you weren’t. You were trying to exercise your shining virtue at everyone else’s expense. Well, I thank you very much, but no thank you.” He gave her the mockery of a bow and arrowed back the way he came. At the door he turned and shouted, for good measure: “No one else’s broken courtesy enough to tell you to stop being such an insufferable busybody, but they’d all say the same!”

  The silence lengthened behind the thunder of his departure. Cameron’s face was very red. She snapped around to look at them, and they all jumped to avoid her gaze.

  “Time for sparring court,” Cameron said, holding her voice quiet and level. “Get your partner and make your queue. Douglas—”

  “Yes.” Speir could tell when Douglas was being consciously calm.

  “If you would take the whistle for this end, I would be grateful.”

  “Certainly.”

  Sparring practice never did quite get up to its usual energy that day.

  The rumor turbine turned on practically nothing else at dinnertime; Stevens held gleeful court in the corridor (“Saw that coming. But why do I always miss the fun?”), and a number of the cadets, some of whom were unfortunately partisan, looked forward to witnessing a possible rematch in the mess hall. Speir deprecated this kind of talk as a widening of the original breach of courtesy, but she was secretly glad to be listening to gossip that had nothing to do with Jarrow for a change. Possibly Douglas felt the same, because he said little and merely looked rueful whenever the subject was brought up at table, which was often. Douglas had worked with Cameron as a colleague for longer than anyone except Ellis, and they were known to get along, primarily (Speir thought) because Douglas was naturally pacific. That, and he had plenty of practice fending off prying instruction from his elder siblings without losing his temper.

  Those who wished to see Ahrens and Cameron meet at dinner were disappointed. Ahrens was there, laughing and talking over his stew as if all were well; but Cameron was notably absent. By the end of the meal Speir saw Ahrens glance around once or twice, his look not so much hunted as worried; to his credit, he shrugged off any sympathetic sallies impatiently and changed the subject.

  Speir finished her stew quickly and excused herself; she had two sets of cartography scoresheets to update before she briefed Jarrow in the morning. On the way back to her quarters she was waylaid twice by cadets in their section asking for her on-the-spot view of the afternoon’s conflagration, to which Speir gave as brief an answer as possible. But she couldn’t help noticing that despite the obvious breach of courtesy Ahrens had committed, most Ryswyckians’ sympathies seemed to lie with him.

  It was late when she emerged again to log her scoresheets with the archives and check her post. The corridors had cleared and most of her comrades were studying in their rooms or over at the arena complex. She passed into the cloister, savoring the quiet evening air; the lamps were pleasantly dim, and the cricket song mixed with a light patter of rain on leaves.

  She was not the only one in the cloister. Halfway along, Speir recognized Cameron, sitting very upright on one of the benches between lamps. Her head was up, her uniform was smartly brushed, and her hands were folded together in her lap. It needed only a pair of gloves in her grip and her dress blues to complete the image of waiting to be called.

  As she drew level Speir slowed and paused to greet her. But then she saw the glint of tear tracks on Cameron’s face, and drew back with her hand to her heart. “Excuse me,” she said softly, “I intrude.”

  “No, you don’t.” Cameron’s voice was as upright as her posture. She had not stopped crying: as Speir watched, she closed her eyes briefly and the glimmer on her face freshened. Speir would rather have gone on, but she could not ignore the request behind the courtesy. She waited; the silence filled with the sough of the crickets.

  “You’re one who tells the truth, Speir,” Cameron said after a moment. “Was he right? About me.”

  The truth she wanted, Speir didn’t want to give her. “He was unkind,” Speir said.

  “But not wrong.” Cameron’s voice was still calm and self-possessed; Speir never sounded like that when she was crying, but she had in this moment ceased to envy Cameron, and in the sudden shock of envy’s absence she realized how close she had come to despising her, and was ashamed.

  “Unkindness is wrongness,” Speir said. “No offense could have given him the right to throw courtesy to the winds and shame you in front of the whole school.”

  “May be,” Cameron replied. “But would I have listened to him if he hadn’t?” She looked away briefly, and then back. “I’ve heard what people are saying about it.”

  “Forget them,” Speir said. “Cameron…have you spoken with him since?”

  She saw Cameron’s chin lift. “Not yet. But I will. I just needed a moment to regroup.”

  Speir gave a half-breath of a laugh, in recognition. “The truth is,” she said, “that you have nothing to prove.”

  “I think I do, though,” Cameron said, musing. “I got into Ryswyck by my own skill, and I mean to get a commission by my own skill, too. I don’t want anything handed to me. If I’m not going to live the life my family planned for me, I want to make a good show of it.” She sighed. “Their plan was for me to take a plummy assignment in the capital for my national
service and then choose from among a handful of dynastically approved boys to write down my name with. Instead I did my national service at Kinstock shipyard and studied my brains out to clear Ryswyck’s entrance exam.” She spoke slowly, as if turning over the facts in the present light of the cloister and observing the difference. “It’s not that that other career would have been so horrible,” she said finally. “It’s just that I loved the Navy more.”

  “And wouldn’t it be a great discourtesy to court your love too importunately?” Speir said, gently.

  To her great relief, Cameron broke into a little smile. She swept to her feet and went to Speir where she stood at the railing, took her by the shoulders and kissed her on both corners of the mouth: the salute of a friend. Speir returned the courtesy without reserve. Without another word Cameron released her and went back the way Speir had come, toward the junior officer block. Speir watched her go, striding comfortably and buoyantly to her task of reconciliation. A moment to regroup, Speir thought.

  Instead of continuing on her way to the archive room, Speir sank down on the bench herself, her tablets on her lap. The stone was cool to her seat but for the place where Cameron had warmed it. A moment to regroup. Speir gave herself till the stone was a uniform warmth beneath her; then she would go on.

  But presently the door at the other end of the cloister clacked open, and Barklay emerged into the night. He was moving without hurry, as Speir had done herself, and when he reached her he slowed to greet her. “Lieutenant.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  He glanced out at the deep dark, filled with the sounds of the rain and the nightcreepers. “It’s a fine one,” he said. His shadowed gaze returned to her, touched with the same mild humor she felt herself: it seemed she was always meeting Barklay in in-between places, and she wanted to laugh.