Ryswyck

by L D Inman

  “Yes,” Barklay said, thoughtfully. “Lady Bernhelm. I don’t know that we want to keep her here till the end of the mission.”

  “That thought’s occurred to me, sir. But I don’t see how to solve that problem.”

  “Well…the simplest way would be for one of us to take her back to the palace.”

  “Wouldn’t they track them right back to us, sir?”

  “We could fuddle our origin. And if our volunteer regarded it as a suicide mission, he’d at least save himself an interrogation and buy us a little more time.”

  “We’re on day six since arrival, sir,” said the team leader, and let the objection spell itself out.

  Barklay sighed. “The longer we’re here, the closer they will be to tracing us. We can make the ten-day threshold, I think. Every day after that is going to be a grace.”

  The team leader nodded slowly. “I’ll sound them out about finding a volunteer.”

  “Wait for just a little,” Barklay said. “I want to ask my men too.”

  “All right, sir.”

  Barklay went upstairs and into du Rau’s room. Du Rau was dozing in his chair, his growing beard glinting silver and the hollows of his face and throat deepened with fatigue. When he entered, du Rau opened his eyes, focused on Barklay, and settled into the expression of weary hatred that he had adopted with the passing days. Ahrens had been keeping watch; he glanced at Barklay, and the twitch of his sandy eyebrows asked if he was dismissed. Barklay shook his head.

  “Another day of diplomacy?” du Rau asked him, mockingly.

  Barklay had known that du Rau would not respond well to his descriptions of Ryswyck. It was not the approach he would have chosen at all, if he’d been able to choose his opportunity. Du Rau was a practical-minded man, far-seeing but not visionary. Still, he valued his own honor enough to see it as a sacrifice when he had to go against it.

  “I was never adept at diplomacy,” Barklay said. “And I never had much hope of securing your forgiveness.” His friends were finding that forgiveness difficult enough. “But I am curious. It can’t just be revenge you are after. What’s your long-range plan? Why spend so much blood and treasure on attacking Ilona?”

  Du Rau gave him a disparaging look, but he actually deigned to answer. “Look around you, Barklay. You had your choice of abandoned factory plants to hide in, didn’t you? Berenia has two valuable exports. Wine and medical training. We’ve been starving on our feet for years. You Verlakers extorted us for a pittance of water, and with the war dragging on, we haven’t had even that. I am not going to negotiate peace with racketeers and sell my country’s dignity for a beggar’s bowl of water. So the only way for me to end this war is to win it. Decisively. The sooner we secure the occupation, the sooner we’ll be out of the sights of any other marauding nations who want to speculate in this region for a share in the extortion prize.”

  “The effort a small sacrifice,” Barklay said dryly, “and our lives even less.”

  “The revenge is a side benefit,” said du Rau.

  “Revenge for our blocking your House Alliance’s attempts to manipulate our inheritance laws and gain control of a major hinterland? What a wrong we did you there.”

  “I thought that was a ploy of your oligarchy to consolidate their outrageous profits. Different descriptions of the same event, I suppose.”

  “We have fixed the inheritance laws since,” Barklay said. “And the rate of markup for engineering services, if that matters to you.”

  “Deposing the High Council altogether sounds much more appealing.”

  “I thought you sympathized with Lord Selkirk,” said Barklay, mocking du Rau in his turn.

  “You are a sentimental fool. But Selkirk does everything he does in cold blood,” du Rau said.

  “You don’t admire ruthless tenacity? Selkirk doesn’t upset you nearly as much as I do.”

  “Selkirk was never my friend.”

  “Ahh,” Barklay said. Du Rau looked unhappy at allowing that to slip out, but he kept his chin high. Barklay watched him for a moment, and then went on. “You’re taking a rather extravagant risk, I observe. You think you can consolidate control over two countries before your cultivated allies in the south turn on you. How do you know they won’t start funding a rebellion on the island as soon as you’ve drawn your first breath of relief? For that matter, how do you know they won’t try to pick apart your government at home?” Du Rau glowered at him but did not reply. “You may think I’m a fool for spending twenty years of my life fostering courtesy. But at least I’m not depending on competing greeds to strike a balance.”

  It was a mark of how far he’d worn du Rau down that he replied: “I have a small window of time to make the best of a bad situation.”

  “You could include our sovereignty in that best,” Barklay said.

  “Not reasonably,” du Rau countered at once.

  Barklay nodded. “Still, I think you see my point.”

  He left du Rau to chew on that, and took Ahrens with him out of the room, sending in their relief guard waiting in the corridor. With the door shut, he turned to Ahrens, only to find him already speaking. “Sir,” he said, “can courtesy win a war?”

  Barklay could not stop a long sigh. Douglas had asked him that once, and he had answered blithely. Now, he had no blithe answer to give. “It’s deadly force that wins wars,” he said, heavily. “But only courtesy can end them.”

  Ahrens nodded, his eyes gazing inward.

  “I need to talk to you,” Barklay said. “Lough and I were talking about how to get Lady Bernhelm out of this before the end of the mission. I think the only way we’re going to get her out safely is have someone drive her back to the palace.”

  With the beginnings of a grin, Ahrens pantomimed pushing Ingrid out of a car door, waving cheerfully, and driving on. Barklay chuckled.

  “Something like that. But it’d be even more of a dead-end operation than this one. We can’t tap anyone for this; we’ll have to sound the men out for a volunteer.”

  Ahrens shook his head. “No,” he said, suddenly very serious. “Send me.”

  Barklay stared into his face, unable to answer for the sudden hollow in his gut. “Ahrens…are you sure?”

  Ahrens’s expression was transparent: he was thinking it through and growing more decisive by the second. “Yes,” he said. “I will take her back.”

  Barklay lowered his voice. “You know you can’t let them take you alive.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ahrens said evenly. “I know. When do you want to do it?”

  “In the morning, I think,” Barklay said. “We’ll want to plan your route back to the city, and make sure we have the fuel for it.”

  Ahrens nodded. “It’s settled then.” He clapped Barklay gently on the shoulder and went down the stairs, leaving Barklay where he stood, stranded by a tide of emotion.

  ~*~

  In the dim dawnlight, Barklay watched Ahrens where he squatted by Lady Ingrid’s chair to fasten her wrists together. Ever since they had invaded her windowless little room to tell her she would be taken home, she had reserved her glare for Barklay alone; but now, seated regally in the chair they had brought, she looked down at Ahrens and shuddered restively at his touch. He looked up.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. I know how to respect my mothers,” Ahrens said.

  “I am not a mother,” said Lady Ingrid coldly, though she was probably familiar with the Ilonian axiom.

  Ahrens gave her a frank look. “Seems to me as if you have a whole country’s worth,” he said. She didn’t respond, nor did she say anything when he fastened a blindfold around her head.

  They escorted her down the stairs and saw her seated in the van’s cab where it was parked in the main bay of the ground floor. Originally it had been proposed that she would ride in the freight compartment, but Ahrens said that he might want to talk to her, and didn’t want to have to stop in order to do so.

  Before Ahrens got into the cab himself, Barklay took him by the should
ers. “Are you afraid?” he asked, very quietly.

  Ahrens’s answer was simple. “Yes, sir.”

  “Reasonable of you.” Barklay smiled. “If you don’t get a chance to escape capture—”

  “Sir—”

  “—if you don’t get a chance, don’t hold it against yourself. Just hold out for as long as you can and then give the rest over. You could not possibly fail to justify my faith in you.”

  Ahrens swallowed. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “No,” Barklay said. “It’s I who am obliged to you.”

  He leaned forward and pressed a dry, formal kiss to Ahrens’s brow. Ahrens drew in a strengthening breath, gave Barklay a single sharp nod, then turned and swung into the cab without another word.

  “Don’t let on to du Rau that we’ve taken Lady Ingrid home,” Barklay murmured to Lough, as they watched the van back out of the bay and pull away through the dust out of sight.

  ~*~

  Speir heaved on the pulley cord, resting her voice for the moment while the others sang. Two days, or five days, or twenty since, she had tried to amuse herself while hauling provisions up the ladder for the gunners she was about to debrief by singing a raucous song from the country dance songbook, and her soldiers had teased her. “Better sing louder, Captain, we can’t hear you!” And someone else had started singing the same song while working the pulleys later that day; when the team at the bottom had answered hollowly up the shaft with the next verse, someone had yelled, only half-joking: “Hey, watch your pitch! Too much in tune and you’ll have this tunnel shivered to ruins!”

  They were all singing now. Anything and everything—polyphonies from all four seasonal songbooks, bawdy parodies of back-district airs, chants both solemn and ordinary. Speir sang the arena chant from Ryswyck enough times that the others had picked it up, and she’d caught her sourest sergeant singing it as he hoisted a case of small ordnance up the ladder. The songs were like an invisible pulley system, drawing them along from shift to shift and day to day, heave by heave. She wished she’d thought of it on purpose, but resolved to file it away in case she lived to command another outfit.

  Even so, she had all but lost track of the days as they worked without ceasing. Hadley and Deadheight were the only emplacements left now, and they had their hands full holding off an increasingly frustrated Berenian scudder corps. Speir kept expecting them to regroup, but they did not: the rain came down and the scudder fire came down, and the unvarying rhythm of it kept them going even as it wore them to exhaustion. The rain was growing thicker and colder, but it still did not freeze; Speir muttered imprecations over her maps on the watch deck that only she could hear.

  Major Ennis’s briefs to her had less substance than her own to him; she had never yet heard directly from Colonel Marshall, and had come to dread the moment she did—if he was too busy to communicate with her, he was at least not calling a retreat from the position. Speir missed Inslee and his calm elevation of thought: if anyone could throw light on the Berenians’ wider strategy, he could have. But Inslee was dead and Speir had no vantage. She could only keep slogging from one hour to the next. Eight days, said her tally marks. Nine. Ten.

  She was on duty the next morning when, as she had been long expecting, a rumble shuddered the watch deck in the predawn hour, followed by a flashing alarm. Ansett bolted up from the bedroll where she’d coiled for a snatch of sleep. Speir scrambled up the ladder before anyone could come down to report.

  “Dragon mine, ma’am,” the sergeant confirmed, as Ansett scrambled up after her. “Got inside our range and stuck in the cliff.” Under cover of the sergeant’s rifle, Speir and Ansett climbed the muddy slope, took hold of the railing, and looked over.

  Sure enough, Speir saw the detonation chain swinging from the cliff face about twenty meters down from the main gun. Neither charge had detonated: the hanging one had missed its hold on the rock, and the other, invisibly burrowed in the cliff below their feet, was either dormant or waiting to be triggered. If that one went off, the gun would be destabilized, and possibly fall down to the sea with a good chunk of the cliff. Any one of the concussions from the main gun might set it off.

  “We can’t stop firing, ma’am,” bawled the sergeant. “They’re still coming.”

  “Then we’ll have to defuse it on the run,” Speir said. “Get a rig up here.”

  ~*~

  With Ahrens gone, Barklay felt as though the mission had been abruptly reset. It was only a matter of time before the results arrived on their doorstep: his original idea of giving over his life for an act of mere disruption had reasserted itself. He hadn’t thought it changed, but it occurred to him that he had been trying to demonstrate to Ahrens, as much as du Rau, the value of courtesy. But he was not going to convince du Rau of anything, and Ahrens would give over his life sooner than Barklay did. Barklay rarely prayed, except to beg for things he knew he had no right to, but he found himself closing his eyes from time to time as the hours passed. Please, please, bear witness to my child. Don’t let him die for nothing. Let his soul be sustained till he gives it over. Please.

  Long past the time when he thought Ahrens must be dead, he still prayed. A day passed in stillness; and then another; and the sun rose on a third.

  “You’re very quiet lately, Barklay,” du Rau said, his dry voice wary.

  Barklay was a moment turning away from the small louvered window. The sun was fully up, and even in winter its radiant warmth made the ambient light of the horizon hum.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. He felt suddenly as though all his defenses were an unnecessary weight; he put them off, and his soul opened in relief. “Selkirk told me that I wanted to be punished and vindicated at the same time. He was right. I did want both those things.”

  “That doesn’t sound reasonable,” du Rau said, still wary.

  “And I wanted more still. I wanted to decide how my punishment would come to me, and in what manner I would be vindicated. That was the unreasonable part.” He looked du Rau in the eye. “I am very sorry I insulted the humanity of your countrymen, du Rau. I would undo it if I could.”

  Du Rau’s eyes were dark and hard. He made no response.

  “I don’t ask for your forgiveness, unless you happen to want to give it,” Barklay said. “It doesn’t look like you do, so I’ll let that be as it is.”

  Du Rau was silent a moment longer and then said, “So much for the punishment. What about the vindication?”

  Barklay took one breath and then the passion overtook him. “I know I am right,” he said. “I know people can be taught to fight in courtesy, even in modern war. I have seen it. The men and women I’ve taught have shown it, at a level far beyond I had any right to expect.” He bent and took hold of du Rau’s hands where they rested bound on the arms of his chair. Face to face and eye to eye, he said softly: “Let me show you what I have done. Innocence without naivety. Honor without contumely. Force without cruelty.”

  There was a long, suspended silence. Then du Rau said again: “Unbind me and say that.”

  Barklay would have answered, but at that moment a proliferation of rumblings grew outside, followed by shouts of warning from below. Barklay let go of du Rau and straightened to peer carefully through the louvres of the window, at the array of military vehicles pulling in to surround the building.

  “I would love to make that experiment with you, du Rau,” he said, “but it looks like my punishment has arrived. Right on schedule.”

  6

  “I think this is as light as it’s going to get,” Douglas said.

  It was a forlorn little rendezvous that met in the dripping cloister in the early morning hours: Douglas, Marag, Beathas, and Stevens, all in damp and soiled fatigues. The men were stubbled; Beathas had kept neat, but her deep-set eyes were shadowed deeper. “Commodore,” Douglas said, “report. Are the comms up?”

  “Yes, sir,” Beathas said. “The auxiliary transmitter has strengthened the signal from the jury-rig on the tower. I’
ve heard from D and H Companies; they’re holding the line south of the farm site. P Company’s report is still outstanding; at last report they were reforming at the farm site and preparing a party to recover more wounded.”

  “Air support?”

  “Amity can’t spare any more—they’re still dealing with the enemy assault from offshore. The gun at Sentinel Point has guarded our western flank, but they’re going to run out of ordnance eventually. Captain Tallis has requested another trawler as well as reinforcements; I’ve passed that on to Central with as many flags as I can hang on it.”

  “Thank you,” Douglas said, and looked at Marag. “Captain?”

  “Captain Wallis has got the training floor cleared for more wounded, sir,” Marag said steadily. “Every cot’s been brought out, and B Rota is commandeering bunks from empty junior officers’ quarters. Medical supplies are holding up so far; I’ve started rationing meals as a precaution.”

  The com handset at Beathas’s belt squawked; she walked away several paces to key it up and listen.

  “Admiral,” Marag said quietly, “if the enemy is not making a real effort to bombard us….”

  “It means they still hope to stage troops here,” Douglas said. “It’s still too soon to blow up the airfield—but we’re coming up on it. Unless Amity can get those scudders off our reinforcements in the next eight hours.”

  Beathas returned to them. “P Company has got the farm site secure. They’re requesting any support we can give them to defuse mines and recover wounded.”

  “Captain Stevens, put together a unit and escort them down there,” Douglas said. “Before the storm moves in. Thank you all.” Dismissed, Marag and Beathas went together out the cloister toward the main block. Douglas turned to Stevens. He had been unusually silent, and now Douglas saw that he was pale and strained.