by L D Inman
Speir sighed. “You seem to be laboring under the strange misapprehension that I’m not angry at Barklay.”
“Oh, you’ve corrected it,” he assured her, touching off a fleeting smile. “But you could go one better than fighting him by proxy.”
“I’ve tried fighting him direct already,” Speir said. “He turns to me to get away from the truth. But if I’m his second I can point him in the right direction. For Ryswyck’s sake.”
“Wasn’t that the first thing you tried?”
“Didn’t have any leverage then,” Speir said. “I do now.”
He recognized that even tone, even if the meaning escaped him. This was, he felt sure, another result of Barklay’s visit to Cardumel; but he had forfeited his right to ask.
“Also credibility,” Speir went on. “Not much, but more than he has.”
“Enough to defend Ryswyck with?” Douglas sighed. “And is it worth it?”
“It is to me,” she said quietly.
There it was again: her commitment beyond fathom. For one last moment Douglas kept the question prisoned behind his lips. And then: “He did to Berenians what Berenians did to your father. Doesn’t that bother you? Doesn’t that make you think differently of him?”
Speir’s shoulders suddenly relaxed, and he realized at once that she had been aware of his thought all along. “Yes,” she said calmly. “It makes me think differently of him. As it makes me think differently of the Berenians who tortured my father.”
He stifled an impatient sigh, which she took as answer enough to continue. “What do you do when someone does a terrible thing to you? When they hurt you so badly you can’t strike back? I know what my father did. He bore the fault of it himself. It was the only thing left to him, the only thing he could survive on. ‘I failed,’ he would say. ‘I wasn’t strong enough,’ but he didn’t, and he was. Strong enough to get home. Strong enough to keep going. I couldn’t see what he meant—not till I read that file. He was helpless, and in a place without mercy. The helplessness could break your mind, and the hate could destroy your soul. So he took up the fault. The last human thing he could do.”
Douglas sat immobile, his skin hot and cold at once, remembering the dank scent of his shower cube and the hollow sound of his own stifled sobs. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I failed you. Speir didn’t know about that, but she knew all too well about the backlash of rage that had caught him up since. He shut his swollen eyes. Speir, don’t say any more. This is too hard for me.
She went on, inexorably serene. “If you were the one who did that hurt, and the person you hurt carried the fault for you, you could forget. It would make you smaller, but you could forget. But even if you remembered, and were sorry, how could you get it back? You couldn’t. You’d have to find something else to weigh you down. You could commit more faults and hope to be held accountable for them—”
“Speir…,” Douglas couldn’t stop the tremble in his voice.
“—which, wisdom knows, is not a very good strategy but I think it gets tried a lot. Or—you could reach for something better. Try to package up fault so it could be passed back and forth, without dragging your identity along with it. It wouldn’t cripple you then. It’s just another burden. It’s just an act of courtesy.”
The arbitrary fault. Douglas’s trembling ceased.
“That’s not a perfect strategy either. But it is a step up the watercourse, isn’t it? For everyone.”
“I want to believe you,” Douglas said.
He opened his eyes and looked over to see her watching him with a small, sad smile.
“You won’t break,” she said, softly.
And then, because he had no other word to speak his heart with, he knocked it with his closed and aching hand. Her smile brightened painfully; and she thanked him in kind.
“Neither will you,” he said.
6
In the morning, Douglas was examined, pronounced out of danger, and sent to confinement in his quarters. Captain Neale told him to return in the evening to be re-examined, or any time before that if his concussion symptoms worsened. The vertigo may have passed, but Douglas looked much worse by morning light: underslept, bruised, and bloodshot, still wearing a neck brace, he half-turned on his way out the door and offered Speir a tiny sketch of a Ryswyckian salute. She saluted him back casually.
Speir was not dismissed to her quarters; Amis had sent word that as she did not have access to a private lav, there would be little point trying to isolate her there, so she was to stay in the infirmary for the time being. Captain Neale pulled the curtain to, leaving her alone to think.
She felt within herself a contradiction that ought to have been familiar, by now. As ever after a good match, she felt buoyant, as if still carried on the breath of exhilaration. She had kept nothing back, and she had won.
And yet also there was a scythe-curve of anguish within her, that could neither touch nor be touched by her pleasure in a well-fought match. Cardumel was not Ryswyck; it never would be; and Ryswyck itself was changed in the landscape of her memory. It was as if she had been cut off, by successive sweeps, from all that had affirmed her. Grappling with Douglas, both for pleasure and for pain, had brought her grief near the surface. But not near enough.
Lieutenant Darnel brought her a tray from the mess. “The weather corps is laying one another odds on whether we’ll have to move the storage boxes out of the brig for you,” he reported. “I doubt it’ll happen, but if you’d like I can make sure we sweep the dead bugs out, too.”
Speir smiled; her face ached stiffly. “I would be obliged,” she said.
Darnel couldn’t stay, which was a private relief: much as Speir appreciated his mordant humor, she did not want her anxiety roused by hearing others’ speculations about her immediate future. Resolving to put it out of her mind, Speir drew in the trolley table where Darnel had set the tray and picked up her spoon.
That was when General Inslee arrived. Speir’s appetite fled, and she put the spoon down. He drew up a chair by the foot of her bed and sat down, before she could move to get up and salute.
Inslee didn’t say anything at first; he simply crossed his arms over his chest and pinned her, eye to eye. He wasn’t happy with her, that much was clear: but the steadiness of his gaze was a weight of respect between them. Speir felt the shadow of an urge to break down weeping, an urge that passed again but promised to return, as if she had been traveling in the blank high atmosphere of a shuttle flight and now was catching sight of breaks in the clouds below. Inslee wasn’t going to put her in the brig. She almost wished he would.
After a long moment Inslee spoke. “Have you finished with trying to make peace between Douglas and General Barklay?”
His insight, it seemed, never failed to shock her. “You’ve talked with Douglas, then, sir,” she said, clearing her throat.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t spoken to Douglas yet. But I’ve had some time to think. Do you have an answer for me, Field-Commander?”
“Yes, sir,” Speir said. “Yes, I have finished with it.”
A slow blink measured Inslee’s approval. “I gather, from what General Barklay has told me, that he hoped you and Douglas would be safe here from—something, he didn’t specify what, and I wouldn’t care what except that it is obviously not working, and it’s now my problem as well. I’m not going to get a straight answer from Barklay, and I suspect Douglas can outwait my questions till the ice melts next spring. So I’m asking you.”
“Yes, sir,” Speir sighed. “General Barklay told me that the Lord High Commander wants retribution against him and Ryswyck for a wrong that was done to his family. Barklay hopes the council will separate him from Ryswyck so that the school will survive, and he wants me, and especially Douglas, to contribute.”
“So much for the last three days,” Inslee said. “What was he protecting you from?”
“Douglas and I…,” Speir stopped, trying to find a straightforward way of saying it. “Douglas and I had both been exp
osed to a security breach, of classified material about Barklay’s service across the strait.”
Inslee grunted, a knowing sound. “Go on.”
Speir started to chew her lip, found that it hurt, and swallowed instead. “Douglas had a very high regard for General Barklay. And….” But there was nothing more to add without betraying Douglas’s confidence. Speir let the sentence tail off without finishing.
“And Barklay has a high regard for Douglas,” Inslee said, quietly.
It was no more than the obvious. Speir nodded.
“Do you want to sit on Barklay’s council?” Inslee asked her. “Or do you want to stay here?”
When was the last time someone had asked her what she wanted? When was the last time it had mattered? Speir braced against the sudden rise of tears in her eyes. Inslee waited; after a moment, the tears subsided without falling, and she recovered.
“With your permission, sir,” she said, “I wish to go down to Ryswyck. And do what I can.”
“Even if you can’t do much?” Inslee’s dry expression was a commiseration; he was a fellow sufferer, Speir thought. But Inslee was not going to commit any trespass on the strength of that affinity: in that moment Speir suddenly understood why he had crafted his installation’s policy to restrict intimacy. In his own way, Inslee could also raise one’s consciousness over the level of the immediate stream.
“If I worried about that, I would never do anything, sir,” Speir said.
Inslee grunted. “True.” He paused and then said, “When you return, Field-Commander, I’m going to have more responsibilities waiting for you. You obviously need to be busy, or I’ll constantly be losing time and work to distractions like this.”
“Yes, sir,” Speir said, contritely.
“It may run to working with the training corps alongside Douglas during icefall. This doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about your fraternizing with him. Take note.”
“Yes, sir,” Speir said. “That’s all right, sir. It isn’t essential to our friendship.” Though having Douglas for a bedfellow on occasion would certainly have been nice. Speir kept this thought to herself; she was in no position to bargain.
“Mm,” was all Inslee said, his eyes narrowed. Speir had no doubt that Inslee could make an accurate analysis of the molecule of herself and Douglas and Barklay. Possibly he already had. I wanted a number of things, Barklay had said: one of them, evidently, had been to protect her and Douglas from the fallout of Jarrow’s malice. But Inslee could only absorb so much; and she and Douglas had rewarded him poorly for it. Speir took a breath.
“I’m sorry I caused a second disturbance, sir. And I’m prepared for however you may deal with it.”
“I’m very glad to hear that, Field-Commander.” Inslee uncrossed his arms and put his hands on his knees, preparatory to rising. “Are you prepared to justify my forbearance?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. I am depending on that.” He pushed wearily to his feet and went away; the curtain undulated in his passing.
Shaking, Speir caught her breath.
~*~
Inslee decided not to bother trying to get Douglas to corroborate Speir’s answers. He sent Douglas a message telling him to come to Inslee’s office before he returned to the infirmary; then he put the matter out of his mind and took up a batch of reports, ignoring the murmurs in the outer office. The Boundary dispatches were late, he discovered with annoyance. He had wanted those numbers for his escort timetable.
Douglas arrived while Inslee was sending a message to Amis asking him to try to shake the tardy dispatches from the Gyrfalcon. He waved Douglas to a seat across his desk, keyed in the code for the message, and shut down the projection. The distorting light dropped, revealing Douglas’s bruised, pale face. He had discarded the neck brace Inslee had seen him in yesterday, and was not only calm but relaxed.
“Do you intend to sit on General Barklay’s council?” Inslee asked.
The question did not appear to surprise Douglas. “Yes, sir,” he answered. “With your permission.”
“You think I’m not going to give my permission?” Inslee said dryly, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t want this island to be the theatre for Barklay’s battles. You’ll go to Ryswyck, you’ll finish the thing properly, and you’ll come back ready to settle down and work. Yes?”
“Yes, sir.” Inslee could see now, clearly, the vulnerability in Douglas’s eyes; Douglas was no longer attempting to camouflage it. It made him seem paradoxically steadier. Speir had done that, Inslee thought: and she had paid a high price for it, too. Inslee met Douglas’s look levelly.
“Do you still hold Field-Commander Speir’s peacemaking attempts against her?” he asked.
Douglas blinked, chastened. “No, sir,” he said quietly.
“That’s good, since I have her assurance that she’s given it up. So then, I won’t be hearing about any more disturbances between you, will I.”
“No, sir.” Douglas swallowed thickly. “We…I—set a very bad example yesterday, sir. I’m sorry.”
“You did,” Inslee agreed. “And you’re going to make it up to me.”
Douglas looked up.
“It so happens that we were able to retrieve the training room vid recording of your altercation,” Inslee said. Douglas did not answer, but his cracked lips twisted briefly. “You and Speir are going to give a review of your fighting technique, just as soon as I can call a staff meeting.”
“Yes, sir.” There was an equal mixture of chagrin and humor in Douglas’s eyes.
“And since I’m well aware that this sort of thing is catnip to a Ryswyckian, you need not count it as the discipline I will dispense between now and your departure. But I’ll be damned if I lose an opportunity to make an example where I find one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now go get yourself checked over and go back to your quarters. I will see you and Field-Commander Speir tomorrow, dressed and smart.”
“Yes, sir,” Douglas said. At Inslee’s gesture he got up to go.
“And Douglas.”
“Sir?” Douglas went still, waiting.
“I don’t envy you the position you’re in,” Inslee said, looking him in the eye. “My advice, if you care for it: just stand up straight and tell the truth. It’ll probably hurt like hell, but you could do worse.”
Douglas would have given a wry smile if not for his bruises. “Thank you, sir. I’ve come to much the same conclusion myself.”
“Now be gone with you.”
“Yes, sir.”
~*~
True to his word, Inslee called a staff meeting the next day and made sure that not only the junior cadre but as many unit leaders as possible were in the room. When they saw that Speir and Douglas were sitting in chairs near the head of the table where the projection controls were, a frisson of anticipation rose in the room, and mounted as soldiers found their places and came to silence.
“Thank you all for coming,” Inslee said, relaxed in his chair. “I’ve called this meeting to give as many people as possible some direct instruction. As you may be aware, Cardumel Base has been recently treated to a…spontaneous example of open-hand combat.” At his touch on the pad, the projection sprang up to show the recording of the altercation, Douglas’s hand frozen in place pushing the bag-bar away from Speir’s reach. “Captain Douglas and Field-Commander Speir have graciously consented to parse for us the anatomy of a Ryswyckian duel.” There was a whisper of muffled snickers among the junior cadre; most of the seniors looked either nettled or amused.
“Well, sir,” Speir said, diffidently, “it wasn’t really a Ryswyckian duel.”
At Inslee’s quirked eyebrow Douglas added: “If we’d been at Ryswyck we’d have been dragged apart at once. And likely would have been denied permission to change the match schedule to allow for a formal challenge.”
“Not to mention disciplined for breaking courtesy,” Speir concluded. Douglas’s calm had brought her back to poise; a return,
Inslee reflected, for whatever Speir had done to restore his comfort in speaking of Ryswyck Academy.
“Then,” Inslee said, “I presume you don’t take amiss being disciplined for unbecoming conduct here?”
“Certainly not, sir,” Speir said, and Douglas said, “Not at all, sir.”
“Good,” Inslee said pleasantly; “I hope you don’t like what I have in mind,” and got his expected reward of seeing them both look perversely cheerful. A low laugh ran the length of the room.
“And so,” Inslee went on, opening a hand to them, “I am now going to ask you to review this not-a-proper-duel for our collective educational benefit.” He pushed over the control pad.
Speir took it. “We never did use vid recordings much,” she remarked. “This should be interesting.”
“What did you do instead?”Amis asked, boldly for him.
“Memorized the sequence as it happened,” Douglas said. Inslee saw a lot of eyebrows go up. “Wouldn’t go amiss to check our own form, though.”
The vid recording unfroze. Inslee, having reviewed it four times already, watched Speir and Douglas’s faces instead.
“Took me a while to get upright and forward, there,” Speir said. “Still not getting set, though.”
“Really shouldn’t fight when we’re angry,” Douglas agreed. “So, you can see neither of us has started with a plan.”
“No, I won’t come up with one till you retire to strip off. Unfortunately it won’t be a good one—ah. That was well-placed.”
But Douglas reached for the pad and stopped the frame to move it back. “My elbow’s out,” he said, frowning deeply, “for the second time. Have I been doing that?”
“Last month you looked to be working out of it,” Speir told him. “I missed my opportunity to point it out. Sorry.”
