by L D Inman
He gave a discontented grunt and started the vid again.
“Douglas has more reach than I do,” Speir said, “so I have to be faster than he is. My general strategy is to stay out of predictable patterns. Douglas knows me very well, so my margin of unpredictability is much reduced. Like…right there.”
“You were leading with your right a good deal more than usual,” Douglas remarked.
“I was trying to break your nose,” she said. “Should do more weight training on the left side for confidence.”
“Also shift your stance,” he suggested, “to accommodate your dominant eye. Move your foot over just a little and you wouldn’t even have to move it back to use the right again.”
“Good idea. Oh, look, I’m about to lose my temper.”
“Bad idea,” he said, and she grinned. “By this time my strategy is just to wear Speir down. Though in a proper match, the whistle would have been blown about now.”
“Yes, before I could make that ill-advised second rush. Ach, look at that. I’m ashamed.”
“Well, you more than make up for it with this kidney shot coming up.” Douglas winced at the image of himself crumpling to the deck; there were audible winces, too, around the table and the walls. “Beautifully placed. I was still passing blood this morning.”
“No permanent damage, I trust,” Speir said.
Douglas waved a hand. “Just a bruise. I trust your disappointment is as easily healed.”
“Oh, quite.”
“And there’s that elbow again,” Douglas murmured.
“You’ve lost your temper, too,” Speir said. “At this point we’d have been in the second round if not the third, and you’d have deployed a secondary strategy besides wearing me down.”
“That was the secondary strategy. My first strategy was to put you down proper. I had a third strategy of waiting till I outlasted you, but you put paid to that.”
“About the only smart thing I did. In a proper match I would have tried to draw you, but I was too angry to wait for you to come to me.”
“I said I had a third strategy. Not sure I would have had the patience to carry it out, if you’d put it to the test. Also, for the record, trying to outlast Speir: a very bad idea.”
“That was a good blow. Your elbow wasn’t out that time.”
“No.”
“I notice you’re waiting for her to get up,” Inslee prompted him. “Is that strategy as well?”
“More strategy in the context of courtesy,” Douglas said, thoughtfully, watching Speir struggle to rise. “There isn’t a judge, and Speir is losing at this point. If I did her mortal harm now it would make the whole exchange a waste. Whereas what I really want is for her to acknowledge me.” On the recording, Speir saluted him; Douglas, watching, face bruised, smiled sadly.
“I hadn’t got to that point,” Speir said. “I still wanted to do you damage. And then have you acknowledge me.”
“Well, you’re about to accomplish both. Watch this.”
“Is it custom, to trade blows like that at the end?” asked one of the captains further down the table.
“The sudden death round?” Speir said. “It’s available to a judge, to end a lopsided match, or in sparring if time is nearly up. Traditionally, the victor of the previous round has refusal of the first blow.”
“And you refused my refusal,” Douglas said.
“Well, I wanted the last word.”
He bent his head and laughed quietly. “I know.”
But he raised his eyes in time to watch Speir knock him down for good, falling in a cast heap to roll, face back up and unconscious. “That was perfect,” he murmured. “So well done.”
“Thank you,” Speir said. She looked very content.
The recording ended as Speir limped to kneel at Douglas’s side. “I really,” Douglas said thoughtfully, “need to work on my form.”
“You think in planes when you get tired,” Speir said. “Your elbow would stay in more if you don’t retreat from the first and the third dimension.”
Douglas nodded, gaze inward. “Even in baton work that becomes a liability eventually.”
“About the point where I rap your knuckles,” Speir said, and he grinned again. Inslee hadn’t known Douglas could even smile.
“So,” said the captain who’d spoken before, “dare one ask what all this was about?”
Inslee fixed them with a hooded gaze and waited.
“We were having a heated argument,” Speir said, and glanced at Douglas. Who took up the answer with a resigned sigh.
“About the durability of Ryswyckian principles,” he said. “I happen to think they’re only as durable as the people who keep them.”
“It’s not that I disagree,” Speir said. “It’s not even that I’m more sanguine about our chances, though I am. It’s that it’s worth doing even if many people fail.” She means Barklay, Inslee thought, and wondered how many others here could guess the same. “Retreating behind a plane,” she said, “isn’t a strategy, and it isn’t a principle either. There’s no point having an argument if the other person is not there in your mind to be acknowledged. You said it yourself.”
“What if your enemy doesn’t acknowledge you back?” said Amis. The whole room seemed to sit a little straighter, intent on Speir for her answer.
Speir did not miss Amis’s drift. “Then they’ve just shown their weakness,” she said levelly. “You have more of reality than they have. After that, all you need is an opportunity.”
“Undefendedness,” Douglas said suddenly, “is an offensive strategy.” His gaze returned from a long way, deep inward, and he looked over at Inslee. “Not a defensive one.”
“But it does require some confidence,” Inslee said. “And that can still be shaken.”
He had said it gently enough that for a split second he saw the flicker of grief in Douglas’s eyes as they met his.
“Till there’s nothing left to shake,” Speir said.
~*~
Inslee dismissed the meeting, but asked the senior staff to stay behind, along with Speir and Douglas. As the room cleared of juniors and lower-level seniors, Inslee listened, finger over chin, his gaze abstracted, to the murmurs among them. Inslee’s going to fry them alive, someone said; and, You weren’t joking, that was incredible, and All of that for a philosophical argument? and Not so philosophical; I heard they were closing Ryswyck down. When asked what for, the speaker shrugged. Something to do with money, probably. Or sex. It’s usually one of those. There was a chuckle at that; They obviously don’t hold anything back down there, someone said, letting it remain ambiguous whether down there meant in the coastal hills, or something else.
When they were all gone, “Speir, Douglas,” Inslee said, “go and wait in my office.” He waited until Douglas had shut the connecting door with a quiet snap. Then he opened discussion with a brief gesture.
“Well,” said Captain Emrie; and then left it at that.
Major Ghislain said, “I can see why you called the meeting, sir. Shame to waste an instructional opportunity like that.”
“They are impressive fighters,” admitted Emrie. “And they seem to be able to articulate their approach, on all levels. I’ll remember that line of Speir’s about fighting in three dimensions.”
“Ach, it’s a bunch of claptrap,” Captain Morland grunted. “There’s no place for respecting your enemy in modern warfare.”
“Speir didn’t talk of respecting the enemy,” Amis pointed out. “It was respect for reality she was describing.”
“And it’s not as though Douglas would have hesitated to kill her if he’d chosen to,” Emrie said. “He could have, but even in his anger he knew what his goal was. That’s a matter of discipline, not timidity.”
Morland sighed. “I see that. But they’re children. They haven’t fought across the strait. They haven’t watched soldiers writhing in pain from toxic shrapnel. None of this philosophy has been put to the test. I think Douglas knows this.”
<
br /> “You’ve been across the strait, General,” Ghislain said to Inslee. “What do you think?”
Inslee removed his finger from his lips where he had propped his chin, took his elbow from the table, and sat up. “Morland is right,” he said slowly; “Ryswyckian methods have only been put to the test soldier by soldier. I wouldn’t say those results are very conclusive. And it troubles me how selectively they apply discipline. But Speir is not wrong. We fought better when we were not trying to protect our gains. And we had better morale when we weren’t trying to humiliate our enemy. It’s awareness that’s needed.”
“You sound like one of the old fighting monks, General,” Morland said, with a discontented scowl. “Practical philosophers with swords on their backs, running pilgrimage up and down the Ridge. You keep that, and I’ll take a quiet prayer house and two flights of self-navigating missiles.”
“You still need three dimensions for that,” Amis remarked.
“What are you going to do with Speir and Douglas, then, sir?” asked Emrie.
Inslee sighed. “There’s not much to do with them. It’d be, as Douglas said just now, a waste to punish them too severely. My thought is to give them a heap of shit-work between now and the time they go down to attend council at Ryswyck.”
“What exactly is going on down there, sir?” Morland asked.
“I’m doing my best not to know,” Inslee said dryly. “My impression is that General Barklay’s finally in over his head.”
“Took long enough,” Morland grunted. “What’s going to happen to the school?”
“Don’t know.” Inslee shrugged. “I suppose the council will make a recommendation to the Lord High Commander and Barklay will retire.”
“Be a shame to close it,” Amis sighed, “to speak of waste. We used to send two units down there for a service course every spring, and they always came back well-trained. You remember, we still have Lieutenant Darnel—he was in that group that went down there and then did officer training at Killness.”
“And I wouldn’t give up Lieutenant Angus for anything,” Emrie said.
“Are we going to get Speir and Douglas back?” Ghislain wondered, looking worried.
It was a concern Inslee had not wanted to voice aloud. But there was nothing for it. “You mean before icefall? Or ever?” he said.
Ghislain primmed up his lips and did not answer.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Ryswyck takes back its own,” Morland commented. “But in that case it’s poor service to us.”
“At the very least they’d owe us some training for a unit or two,” said Amis.
Emrie caught Amis’s glance. “You think we could get a few juniors and a unit down there and back before icefall? How much time do we have, Ghislain?”
Ghislain considered. “Four weeks at the outside? I wouldn’t want to try and land a shuttle here much after that. Unless we turn on the GT lines early.”
“Send good soldiers down into a political maelstrom? I’d be more worried about that than landing a shuttle on this island,” Morland said. “Not to mention running the risk of turning their heads with courtesy, or worse, turning their heads and then disillusioning them.”
“And there is,” Emrie said slowly, “the risk of appearing to side with General Barklay against Central Command.”
Amis nodded, agreeing, “But,” he said, “we run the risk of that merely by permitting Speir and Douglas to attend council down there.” Emrie and Ghislain looked confused; Morland’s mouth twisted. Of course Amis had had his ear pricked up, Inslee thought: he had caught on that Barklay’s council wasn’t officially mandated.
“You’re right, Amis,” he said. “I don’t see any way to—”
He was interrupted by a tentative knock at the door. “Excuse me, sir,” Corporal Beaton said from the doorway. “I wouldn’t disturb you, except the comm tower wants you to know that Central One is requesting you on an open line.”
There was a brief silence. “Well,” Inslee said, “I’m sure this will be entirely innocuous,” and the others started to laugh. “Thank you all for the discussion. Please be dismissed now. Beaton, I’ll take the call in here.”
He sat alone at the long table and waited. When the projection came up to show Lord Selkirk himself, Inslee settled comfortably into his own sense of doom.
“My lord,” he said, with a crisp salute.
“General Inslee.” Selkirk saluted him back and got right to the point. “Why did General Barklay visit Colm’s Island?”
“He said he wished to obtain permission to invite two of my officers to sit in council at Ryswyck Academy, my lord.” Inslee answered, his voice even.
This did not appear to surprise Selkirk. “And which two officers would that be, General?”
Selkirk already knew the answer to this question, Inslee was sure. “Captain Douglas and Field-Commander Speir, my lord.”
“Yes….” Selkirk’s gaze was drawn aside, no doubt to look at the files for both of them. “I’ve had your initial report on each of them. They’ve done well in their commissions at Cardumel, then?”
“Yes, my lord, very well,” Inslee said.
“And did you give General Barklay leave to invite them to council?”
“I did, my lord.”
“Mm,” Selkirk said. “Did General Barklay give you an explanation why he was calling a council?”
“He mentioned a wish to retire, my lord,” Inslee said. “I did not inquire into the details.”
“It didn’t pique your curiosity, why Barklay should travel nearly all the way across the country to solicit a couple of council members?”
“Certainly it did, my lord,” Inslee said, “but then I was unfortunately distracted by my duties.” While Selkirk was deciding whether to find that funny or insubordinate, Inslee continued, “I’m trying to prepare Cardumel for icefall, my lord. Barklay is deeply obliged to me for my consent to borrow valuable officers at short notice. He knows he can repay me best by not involving me further than that in Ryswyck’s concerns.”
Inslee didn’t need to feign exasperation; he was spending too many damned hours on this problem, even without being debriefed about it to the Lord High Commander.
“I’m sure Barklay knows it,” Selkirk said coolly. “But what Barklay knows he should do, and what he does, are two different things.”
Inslee snorted, but made no other answer.
Selkirk went on, with a briskness that only increased Inslee’s disquiet. “So then, your intention is merely to give Captain Douglas and Field-Commander Speir over to Ryswyck for Barklay’s council, and not to participate in its deliberations by brief or advice. Yes?”
“I would say so,” Inslee answered, warily.
“Even if it means you might have to do without them at icefall?”
Inslee knew what trap awaited him: if he admitted he could do without them for icefall, he would not be able to mount a strong protest if Selkirk took them away permanently, to be ground between the mill-wheels of his struggle with Barklay. In which case, what he was about to do might backfire spectacularly.
“I dislike both the timing and the risk very much,” he said. “Nevertheless, I was just discussing with my staff the possibility of Ryswyck giving Cardumel some compensation, by providing some of my soldiers with preliminary officer training while my officers are sitting in council.”
Selkirk was ominously quiet for a moment. Then: “You seem very confident in Ryswyck Academy as a legitimate source of officer education.”
Inslee had had enough of this debate. “My lord,” he said, point-blank, “I’ve no need or desire to defend General Barklay or his methods to Central Command. That’s up to him. What I want is trained officers, and when I get them, I want them left alone to do their work. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner this council meets and finishes its business, the sooner I get Speir and Douglas back and functioning as the assets to this installation that they are.”
“Well,” said Selkirk after a neutral pa
use, “that seems very clear, General.”
Inslee took a breath. “This has been a very frustrating week, my lord. I apologize for my bluntness.”
The wave of Selkirk’s hand came briefly into view. “Understood. I have just one more question. What, to your view, about Speir and Douglas recommends them to Barklay for this council?”
They know more than rumors about Barklay being mixed up in war crimes, may be? That was the last thing Inslee would say, of course. “The scope of their understanding is extremely broad for their age,” Inslee said carefully. “Any council would want them. I suspect they do as much credit to Ryswyck as they do to Cardumel.”
“Thank you, General,” said Selkirk. “I appreciate the time you’ve taken to speak to me.”
Inslee silently wished Barklay burnt, drowned, and damned, and answered in the same neutral tone. “Of course, my lord. I am always at your service.”
“Of that I have no doubt.” Selkirk’s brief smile was no reassurance. “Selkirk out.”
The projection died. He was left alone once again, the gloss of the table stretching away from him.
“Well. Shit,” Inslee said.
~*~
It would have amused Douglas how similarly the rumor turbine at Cardumel turned to Ryswyck’s, except he could spare no margin of calm to find it amusing. In the days that followed, Douglas and Speir fulfilled their discipline without complaint, standing dead-hour watches, scrubbing communal lavs, organizing backed-up dispatches, and anything else Inslee thought up. None of it was unbearably strenuous—Inslee was more interested in inflicting mild humiliation than in hampering their physical recovery—and the effect was salutary to everyone’s morale. The bruises on Speir’s face faded slowly; the reflection in his mirror, too, gradually cleared, until the only noticeable bruise was a wide dark mark under one eye, nearly matched by the shadow under the other from lack of sleep.
Douglas tried once to snatch an hour for personal training, but found himself among several other soldiers who cajoled him for more tidbits of instruction. It was hard to be churlish about this sudden interest in combat discipline, so Douglas had organized two sparring courts on the fly, and then with Inslee’s resigned permission recruited Speir to demonstrate drill. “You’ll not risk any more blows to the head,” Inslee warned him sternly, and, “Yes, sir,” Douglas said.
