Ryswyck

by L D Inman

  Du Rau waved this away. “It can’t be helped now.” And as Wernhier looked ready to protest, “Are you expecting me to demand you put your head on the block? This is not five generations ago, and I can’t spare you. Verlac and we have succeeded in surprising one another. We are not in the situation we would prefer to be in, but I will point out that Verlac is in even worse straits than we are. For the moment. Now. Do not respond to the Consortium’s communique; we will see how the Verlakers take it. We will leave it until the general staff meeting this afternoon, barring a breakdown in the ceasefire or some other disaster. Please tell the general staff to be ready for a joint meeting with the Executive Committee after their meeting with me.”

  “You’re planning something, my lord,” Wernhier said, slowly.

  “Perhaps,” said du Rau. He was amused to see Wernhier look torn between apprehension and glee. “Anything we do next will carry risk. We must take the time to measure those risks.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Thank you, Lord Admiral.”

  Ingrid came in after Wernhier left. She paused in the doorway, regarding du Rau where he sat thinking, regally relaxed, in his chair. “Have you seen a clear path, my lord?”

  “Mm,” du Rau said, “that may be overstating it.” Ingrid came near and took her chair next to him, listening. “Admiral Douglas said that we cannot draw back our hand without something to show for it. And that Verlac cannot see their sovereignty violated without reprisal.”

  “Seems an insoluble problem,” said Ingrid quietly. “Or at least, not soluble in our favor.”

  “Quite.”

  “Have you seen a good way to draw back our hand?” she asked.

  “I don’t intend to draw it back,” du Rau said.

  ~*~

  “The situation is this,” du Rau said to the general staff. “Our current operation, as planned, will no longer serve. If we resume the invasion, Verlac will launch their missiles. If they launch their missiles, our region will be overrun with interlopers. The window of time we had without their interference is now closed. We also cannot withdraw without exposing ourselves to attack. The current ceasefire is also not sustainable, not with our troopships hanging fire in Boundary waters. One discharged rifle and our whole region will be laid waste.”

  Du Rau was feeling better; he knew he looked better, because Wernhier was breathing more easily. But no one at the conference table smiled. They knew that du Rau had sized the situation accurately.

  “It ought to be obvious to everyone here that full and immediate conquest of Verlac is not going to happen. Even if we found some way to get around their missile program, we can no longer count on the southern nations to refrain from interfering with the process of consolidating an occupation. Nor can we bide our time and undermine Verlac’s security from within, for the same reason.”

  He stopped and waited for someone to argue with this. No one did. Good: because what he was going to say next was certainly going to provoke them. “And, as events have proved, our enemy will not waste any opportunity they find to undermine our security.”

  He had not yet confronted them with their multiple failures to prevent Barklay’s mission from ever reaching Bernhelm. They had obviously been waiting for him to do so. Du Rau waited in silence for them to recover their color, and then said: “Given these unavoidable facts, our path from here requires absolute commitment, from everyone in this room outward. I am asking you first, before I ask anyone else, to understand that nothing we wish to accomplish for ourselves can be done that does not also ensure the stability of the region as a whole. Do you understand this, gentlemen?”

  Guiscard sighed. “Yes, my lord. It means we’ve lost our chance to depose Verlac’s government. We will have to make peace.”

  The last word shattered the calm of the room. There were hisses and noises of inarticulate protest. Du Rau sat quietly; he had expected this. “After all they’ve—” “Never—” And: “There’s not a peace treaty could ever be made with those lawless sons of—”

  Finally du Rau held up a hand. “We have not got as far as making peace treaties,” he said evenly. “We have not even got as far as making peace. We have only got as far as preserving a stable leverage that does not provoke an attack.”

  “But it will have to be peace after that, my lord, won’t it?” Wernhier was torn equally between anguish and outrage. “In the long term we’ll have to make an entente with them, or fight to the finish and let the vultures pick off whoever’s left.”

  “Leverage first,” du Rau said, enunciating clearly. “Then armistice, if it is possible. Then entente.” Then he sighed. “The point Wernhier is driving home, gentlemen, is the point I called this meeting to make. Whatever Berenia chooses to do in this hour is something we will have to hold to. We are not going to vacillate between entente and conquest. That will only weaken us, not them.”

  “Could we not decoy them as far as disarmament before taking them, my lord?” asked Siebert.

  “Consider how long that would take, Lord Admiral,” du Rau said. “And what actions they would require of us first. And whether we might want Verlac’s possession of those missiles as a deterrent to any outside threats against us.”

  “The way it used to be,” muttered Guiscard.

  “We’re certainly going to want to replace the water we lost with the Vardray Reservoir,” said Wernhier. “Exactly what leverage are you hoping to establish, my lord?”

  “I have an idea,” du Rau said.

  ~*~

  “You look better, Douglas,” said Selkirk, who didn’t. “I assume you finally got a proper rest?”

  “Yes, my lord. Thanks to Captain Stevens.”

  “Did he take a watch for you, or did he also lay you out with a fist?”

  Douglas smiled. “He did manage to avoid having to do the latter,” he said. “Barely. I must thank you also for maintaining the ceasefire for us.”

  Selkirk answered this with a growl and mutter, with a motion as of drumming his fingertips discontentedly on his desk, out of frame. Then he said: “I have had two communications today, promising or ominous depending how you look at it. The first is a clear-copy communique from the Southern Consortium, ingenuously offering their assistance brokering a peace deal.”

  Was this another strategy lesson? Douglas frowned at Selkirk and reached for his teacup. “Is the High Council leaning toward accepting the offer?”

  “There’s been some discussion, but no one trusts the Consortium, especially after their earlier threat against our weapons program. But the Council all now clearly understand that the only alternative to inviting in a third party, is to broker a peace with Berenia ourselves.”

  Ah. “I’m afraid I cannot report any conclusive conversation with Lord Bernhelm, my lord,” Douglas said.

  “Evidently not,” Selkirk said. “My second communication is from him. He wants you to call him.”

  Douglas blinked silently for a moment. “Did he say why?”

  “Not exactly,” Selkirk said. “It was a brief written communication, addressed to Central Command. In it, he says he would like to speak with Admiral Douglas with his superiors’ permission. And that he is contemplating asking you for a favor.”

  Douglas felt his eyes go round. Then he caught his breath on a slow, wry smile. “He’s figured out an offensive move,” he said.

  “I was afraid that was the correct interpretation,” Selkirk sighed. “I am not inclined to give him any such opening. But maintaining our current situation from hour to hour is not a sustainable strategy. Do you have any idea what favor he intends to ask?”

  “No, my lord,” Douglas said. “I can’t guess.”

  “Then I give you leave to find out,” Selkirk said, heavily. “Just—don’t make any commitments if you can at all avoid it, Douglas, please.”

  “Very well, my lord.”

  “I’ll transfer the line.”

  Selkirk dropped from the visual feed, leaving the projection blank; but Douglas
knew that Selkirk would be watching and listening to everything they said. After some blips marking the changes in signal relay, du Rau’s visual appeared. “Lord Bernhelm,” Douglas greeted him.

  “Ah. Admiral Douglas.” Du Rau looked—oddly convalescent. But not vulnerable enough to take Douglas off his guard. He had breathed the same air with the man now, and did not need to imagine the reserved danger of his physical presence, like a catamount patient on a rock. “Lord Commander Selkirk has gated you through to me, I presume.”

  “As you see, sir,” Douglas said. He waited.

  “May I inquire after Captain Speir?” It sounded like mere politeness, but Douglas did not think it was. “How does she fare?”

  “Very ill,” Douglas said. “I am told they only just managed to save her leg. The surgery released a great deal of toxin into her bloodstream. They are keeping her sedated through the recovery.”

  He was staring at du Rau through the projection and realized that his flat tone made it sound like an accusation. The insight penetrated further: because it was one. The anger that had yanked Corda up against a wall was still there, in all its understated power.

  “I am sorry to hear that,” du Rau said, as if sorrow were academic. “Wisdom grant we both live to cross swords again.”

  Intentional detachment, Douglas thought suddenly. Not intrinsic. This was a high-risk gambit; du Rau was not unaware of the perilous depths within and beneath them. The thought calmed him. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  Du Rau answered him slowly. “I am sure you are acutely aware of our present situation. We are maintaining an unofficial ceasefire at close quarters, neither with a clear advantage. And we are…entertaining…third-party offers of negotiation that double as threats. Or threats that double as offers, as the case may be.”

  “Yes,” Douglas said, simply. “It has turned out exactly according to your description.”

  “And yours,” said du Rau. “I have not forgotten what you said. Consider with me a hypothetical, Admiral. Supposing the approval of Central Command and Verlac’s willingness to negotiate independently toward a cessation of hostilities: if I stipulated that a representative cadre of officers and trainees be stationed at Ryswyck Academy, would you be willing to educate them alongside your own?”

  Douglas sat thunderstruck for a long moment. Then the reactions rushed in, unevenly, like the recovering shock of supercharged air. He thought: Selkirk is going to hate this. Douglas imagined him muting his channel so that he could throw things across his office and scream useless warnings.

  He thought: Wouldn’t that make for interesting times in the arena? Had Barklay envisioned such a thing? Of course he had, but he would never have been able to speak of it, dragging the great weight of his sins and his inventions to the margin of fruition.

  He thought: What will Ryswyck be after the war? The bubble of experiment that had worked against them in the past could work in their favor here. But it would be precarious. Almost as precarious as the ceasefire itself. And not just because of the Berenians’ presence.

  Finally he took a breath. “That,” he said carefully, “is an arresting proposal, Lord Bernhelm.”

  Du Rau quirked an eyebrow, and waited.

  “I have no doubt you have taken great care in thinking it over. May I offer some further food for thought, sir?”

  “By all means,” said du Rau.

  “I know you know that Ryswyck’s status as an educational institution has been under disciplinary review. I know you found General Barklay’s scandal very useful as a distraction. You are surely aware that this active phase of war has not made those questions moot. In fact, our interactions have only emphasized them. To educate Berenian soldiers at Ryswyck Academy,” Douglas sighed, “is to assume that Ryswyck Academy will still exist in a recognizable and useful form.”

  “I was under the impression that you have been planning for that.” Du Rau’s glance was keen and bright, ready for the pounce.

  He had. Oh, he had. Du Rau was an acute observer: and a long-range planner. And his very presence in the conversation was already opening ranges before Douglas’s mind’s eye.

  “What you are proposing seems to run along the lines of our recent hostage agreement,” Douglas said. He wished du Rau were in the room so that he could read him better. A comms projection made a poor arena after all. “A good hostage arrangement does not run all one way, sir. If there were a similar such institution across the strait, to which we could send able representatives from our forces, the arrangement would be more stable.”

  “I also have given that aspect thought,” du Rau said calmly. “Such a thing does not yet exist; and the steps we take must be taken very carefully and in order.”

  Yes. In that way, working with du Rau would be infinitely easier than working with Barklay. But while du Rau had a great presence of command, and Douglas had the power of his own stubbornness, neither of them had Barklay’s charismatic ebullience. It would take that, or something very like it, to lift his Ryswyckians above their own exhaustion. Douglas pressed his lips together, thinking.

  “Lord Bernhelm,” he said finally, “I will be frank. I think I understand what you are proposing. And I think I know what you hope to gain from it.” On several levels; Douglas had a fanciful image of Berenian officers holding up buckets to the Ryswyckian rumor turbine. Selkirk was probably weeping enough tears of fury to turn a turbine all by himself at the thought. “It is not a thing I can agree to without the consent and commitment, not only of Central Command and the High Council, but of my Ryswyckians as well. I can make you no guarantees whatsoever, sir.”

  “That is, as you have said, expected and right,” said du Rau. “It is too soon to ask for that. Yet the proposal would be dead at its inception if you yourself were not willing to sustain it. That is what I am asking you for. If I have any favor with you.”

  The brief panic he had felt at Marag’s bedside was nothing to this terror. Marag, who had broken his heart to give one nod of courtesy, who still lay spent in the infirmary. Rose, tortured by proxy, and Speir too. Orla, afraid for her dignity as a prisoner of war. Ahrens, bearing the most grievous of arbitrary faults. “Lord Bernhelm—” his voice cracked— “I cannot speak a word that will burden my people without their consent.”

  “I understand that.” Du Rau’s voice was very quiet, his eyes very bright. He spoke with gingerly poise, as if through this tenuous connection he and Douglas were disarming a bomb together. “If it does not work, it does not work. We will have to try something else.” We, Douglas noted through his distress; we will have to try. Calculated for effect; and, he thought, sincere. The bomb was real, after all. “I am only asking you. Do you consent?”

  Douglas, in Barklay’s ancient swivel chair, the cracked office windows ranked behind him, hovered unbreathing at the brink. Seated knees shaking. Ghosts plucking at his epaulets. Selkirk—for a man who could not be seen or heard—buffeting him with distant dismay. From what he said next there would be no going back. There was no other arena than this.

  He licked his dry lips and inhaled.

  “I do,” Douglas said.

  ~*~

  “It is a very good way to keep a foothold on the island,” Wernhier agreed, “provided the Verlakers can be persuaded to accept it. And it would save us trying to place an agent there.”

  “That is only a secondary consideration, Wernhier,” du Rau said, swirling a glass of dark wine from his seat at his desk.

  Wernhier looked startled. “You don’t surely take a primary interest in this fanciful curriculum of theirs.”

  “Not the curriculum,” du Rau said, “but the culture. It is the culture that interests me.”

  “You did know just how to press that sincere young man,” Wernhier observed.

  “I understood something when I visited Ryswyck,” said du Rau. “It is a place apart, even among Verlakers. Not only because of Barklay and his schemes. Because it is an experiment. It draws soldiers of talent and great will. But i
t also insulates those soldiers from the rest of their countrymen. The Verlakers will treat our presence there as the experiment that it is. And we, perhaps, may be kindled to make some similar experiment at home.” Du Rau looked up. “There are good men in the rising generation, Wernhier. They need to be trained. They need to be inoculated against faction and short-sightedness. The best way to do that is to let them think they are doing something new. Ryswyck Academy would be a good shock to their systems. The best of them will think of all sorts of ways they can do it better than Verlac.”

  “Would that be enough to maintain a peace?”

  “Not by itself. No. But we can’t build an entente that rests only on a handful of prudent leaders and falls apart before the next generation is well established. And we certainly can’t build an entente without someone to do the hard work of engagement and contact. Alsburg’s generation has never met any Verlakers at all. Nor they us.”

  “You are taking this peace-building project very seriously,” Wernhier observed.

  “Is there any other way to take it?” Du Rau looked at him levelly.

  Wernhier looked back at him for a moment. Then said, very quietly: “How long do you have, my lord?”

  There could be no doubt what he meant by that. “Long enough,” said du Rau.

  Wernhier was not abashed by his cool tone. “For one project. But not two.”

  It was no more than the truth. “You are one of the people I will need, Wernhier.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Wernhier’s gaze was steady, his square hands quiet on his knees. The other chairs had been emptied after the round of meetings, and Wernhier did not need to look round for the reminder that du Rau had asked him to stay alone.

  “Do I have you?” du Rau pressed.