Ryswyck

by L D Inman

  She opened her eyes; he was glaring at her over the rim of his cup. Speir smiled. “Thank you. It’s very good. And your hospitality is fine. You haven’t lived here long, I think; it will be even better once you’ve unpacked a bit.”

  “I don’t actually want to talk to you,” he said.

  “I didn’t suppose you did,” Speir said. “But I wanted to see you all the same. I’m sorry it took this long to pay a visit.”

  His scarred brow twisted upward: an involuntary query, she suspected.

  “I was a long time coming back to myself,” she explained, with another sip. “And longer still putting together what I remembered with what really happened. I was sure I had hallucinated your visits to me in the hospital.”

  “And so you did,” Jarrow said.

  “Nice try.” Speir smiled sideways. “I mentioned my hallucinations to one of the doctors, and she—reluctantly, I think—admitted you really had been there. When they found out, they forbade you to come back.”

  “It was just as well,” he said. “I had no use at your bedside.”

  “I don’t remember much of your visits,” Speir said. “Only a few things. I offered you friendship. You offered me help.”

  “I had no help to offer you, Captain Speir.” Jarrow’s tea was forgotten in his hands, and he stared savagely away out the window. “You may as well have dreamed it.”

  She watched him, pressing her lips together. This was perverse, she told herself, brutalizing herself and him just so she could speak her thanks. But she plowed on. “I mentioned you to my nurse, as I was leaving the hospital. She said you had already been released, long before.” After a recovery delayed by several early suicide attempts, Speir forbore to report. “And she said that after they forbade you to visit, you stayed out of trouble by spending every day in the hospital chapel. Some days for hours at a time, she said.”

  In the silence, the furnace turned over and hummed gently through the vents.

  Finally Jarrow spoke. “That was no use either,” he said, the curve of his voice as bowed as the permanent defeat of his shoulders. “Nothing came of it.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Speir said softly.

  He turned his head, and one shoulder with it, to look at her, mute.

  She gestured with her tea, a small sketch of apology. “I thought it was something I did for myself,” she said. “Dreaming myself someone who might stand in the gap for me. I drowned in pain over and over, and all I could tell myself was that I had you to give it over for me, to do what I couldn’t do. Then when I came through the other side I thought my mind had found a way to put part of itself outside the pain, to make that prayer. Imagine my shock,” Speir said, swallowing the ache in her throat, “when I found that it was nothing I had done for myself at all. You were there. You did pray. So I had to come.”

  He looked at her, across the table, his gaze intent. Speir braced inwardly: in the next moment, she thought, he would burst up and chivvy her out of his house. Or worse, break into tears.

  He did neither. Instead he hid his glance in a sip of tea, and then put down the cup to pour himself some more. He looked up again, and held up the pot in query. Biting the inside of her lips, Speir put her cup down in his shortened reach. He filled it and she received it back again, both their movements slow and careful, their eyes together on the cup as he gave it into her hands.

  They drank their tea, and the silence evened out. The wind turned; the rain began to tick against the windows, and it grew darker outside. The light yield from the treated panes was clouded as Speir expected, but not unpleasantly so; they could sit like this another hour (or until their mortal frames protested, which would probably be significantly sooner) without saying a word.

  “I’m not a good man, Speir,” Jarrow said, after a while. “I don’t have an attractive soul. I’m not wise or generous.” He shot her a glance of enormous resentment. “Or even nice.”

  “You are working up to some kind of point, Jarrow, aren’t you?” she said, and was gratified to see him respond to that with a quirk of the lips. Yes; her officer’s instinct had hit on the right approach.

  “I’m no sort of friend for you, is my point. Not someone you should take such pains over.”

  “If I were here to take pains over you,” Speir said, “that would be a disappointing thing to hear. Fortunately I didn’t come here to do that. I came here to honor my friend for a feat of wisdom I’ve never accomplished myself. Oh—but you said I don’t have a friend living here. So maybe I should try one door over—”

  “Oh, shut up,” Jarrow said.

  Speir smiled. And then grinned, when he glared at her.

  “Shouldn’t you take offense at discourtesy?” he accused.

  “Should I take offense at a bated blow?” Speir said.

  He eyed her speculatively for a moment. “You’ve grown,” he observed. “You talk like a senior officer, and your smile’s got more years on it than you have. But your eyes haven’t changed.” He looked down, turned his cup around, swirling it gently in his scarred hands. “‘Outlive your bitterness.’ Do you remember saying that to me?”

  “Vaguely,” she said. “I can’t remember the context, though.”

  His next words were long in coming; she waited. “Could you still be my friend,” he said to his tea, “if I failed to do it?”

  Heart-wrung, Speir answered quietly. “More to the point: could you be my friend if you failed to do it? Could you fail and get up the next day and fail and get up again?”

  “Sounds tiring,” he said. But the corner of his lips tugged again, and Speir breathed easier.

  “You are already doing it, after all,” she pointed out. “And I notice you haven’t thrown me out yet.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Jarrow said, hiding a real smile over his cup.

  Speir stayed long enough to drink another cup of tea; they talked little, and of unimportant things. Then her twinges joined in too strong a chorus to ignore, and she said: “I must get home. Medicine regimen, you know.” He got up, not easily, but much faster than she; his hand gestured hesitantly toward helping her, but in the end he watched her lever herself slowly upright.

  “Let me walk you to the tram stop,” he said. His frown was back in place.

  Speir was about to demur, but warned by a spike of pain along her hip, she said, “Thank you,” instead.

  He shrugged into a large windbreaker, cinched it into shape, and ushered her out with his rainshade. Their progress up the street was slow; Speir used the time to remark on the architecture and ask Jarrow if he had met any of his neighbors yet. He hadn’t, so she said, “Then you can tell me about someone you’ve met the next time I come to tea.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Do you want it to be?”

  He responded with a loud snort.

  The lighted panel at the tram platform announced the arrival of the next tram in ten minutes. Jarrow lingered in indecision for a little, and then said, “You’ll be all right from here, I think. If not, then send for me.” His dagger glance dared her to thank him: she did, smiling. Speir wanted to reach up and salute the corners of his lips to drive home the point, but she sensed that his fragility was still too great for that, so she settled for a small bow, open hand over heart.

  He surprised her then: with a look of feline mischief he took a smart step backward and swept her a perfect Ryswyckian salute, bad shoulder and all. Speir burst into a great laugh, delighted. “I am well defeated,” she said, closing her hand to return to her heart.

  “I doubt that very much,” Jarrow said, with a faint return of his old supercilious manner. But she thought he was pleased. With a last nod he stepped down from the platform and out of view beyond the rain-beaded glass.

  She was still smiling when the tram blew in.

  ~*~

  Douglas knocked gently on Lieutenant Rose’s door. There was an unhappy silence before he heard him say: “Who is it?”

  “Admiral Douglas. May I ente
r?”

  Another hesitation. “Yes, sir.”

  Douglas turned the latch and went in, taking care not to invade too quickly. Rose was sitting on his bunk in robe and training knits, his arms unconsciously holding himself, his expression truculent.

  “So then,” he said, “you’ve come to soothe me down and smooth everything over?”

  “Do you want me to?” Douglas said with a shrug.

  Rose stared up at him from under his brows. “Why else would you be here, sir?”

  Douglas gestured a query at Rose’s bench nearby; Rose nodded reluctantly, and Douglas sat down. “I admit,” he said, “I came because several people told me they were witness to a shouting match between you and Lieutenant Corda.”

  Rose looked away. “I think I broke courtesy several times over,” he said miserably.

  Douglas waved this away. “That’s a problem easily solved. Unlike the one underlying it.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Rose said. “He was so much more gracious when it was me taking care of him.”

  “I don’t think the situations compare well, Lieutenant,” Douglas said quietly. “And the war has changed you both. Are you wanting to break things off with him?”

  “No!” he cried. And then: “I don’t know.”

  Douglas waited. Finally Rose brought it out in a low, aching voice, his hands gripping the bedclothes. “I don’t think I belong here anymore, sir.”

  A hospital of souls, Douglas thought. He had been right. He thought Rose was exactly where he needed to be, but it would not serve him merely to say so. So he waited some more. In the silence Rose chewed his lip. There was a lancing pattern of scars where shrapnel had grazed his cheek and temple; he was going to look a very formidable soldier when he’d fully recovered. Finally he turned to look at Douglas.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s going to be all right?” he said accusingly.

  “No,” Douglas said. “I can’t be certain that it will be.”

  “Or tell me not to throw away my lover and my home before I’m better?”

  “It’d be a stupid thing to do for the man you used to be. As to whether it’d be right for the man you are now, you know better than I.”

  “No, I don’t,” Rose snapped. Then fought off a rictus of grief. “I don’t know if I’m anything at all. I can’t feel things properly. Then suddenly I find myself in a blind rage. I don’t want to be alone and I can’t bear having anyone near. I don’t feel like a person that’s whole. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be whole, anymore.”

  “Mm,” Douglas said, considering Rose carefully as he blinked back tears. “The fact that you’re fighting so much is a good sign, though.”

  “But I can’t keep hurting Corda like this.” Rose wiped his eyes.

  “He hasn’t bowed out of the arena, that I’ve noticed,” Douglas said, dryly.

  “But what if he does?” Rose’s voice went small on the words.

  “You could give him a rest and fight someone else for a spell,” Douglas said. “I for one would be happy to volunteer. Except,” he amended, “for the bed part. There you’re on your own.”

  Rose resisted a smile. Douglas judged the moment right to pin him with his gaze.

  “You will always have a home here, Rose. In season and out of season. When you want it and when you don’t. This place is going to be home to a lot of souls mending a lot of damage, for a long time. You won’t be all that conspicuous.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rose cast him a shamefaced look.

  “In fact, in time to come, I can see where I could use your help. You took a course in medical counsel while you were doing national service, didn’t you? And your perspective would be an added strength.” Rose blinked, absorbing the new thought. “Turn it over in your mind and see if it would suit you, while you’re getting to know yourself new.”

  “A wounded healer?” Rose said skeptically, as Douglas rose to his feet.

  “Most healers are,” Douglas answered from the open doorway. “Goodnight, Lieutenant.”

  He went back to his office, which since the armistice had settled back to a pool of quiet. The conference table lamps shed a golden, limpid light through the room, and though the window glass had been replaced, Douglas still did most of his reading at the table instead of the desk. He made himself a cup of tea and, yawning, draped his tunic over the back of a chair and rolled up his sleeves before sitting down. When he put off his fatigues, he had gone back not to army blacks or greens, but informal Ryswyckian grays; and everyone had seemed to accept the significance of this as natural and right.

  The evening deepened, as Douglas worked on. Presently there came a tentative knock at his doorframe; he looked up and was not at all surprised to see Lieutenant Corda standing there. “Come in, Lieutenant. There’s tea if you want it.”

  Corda obediently got himself a cup and took a seat around the corner of the table from Douglas. “Some have been asking me, sir,” he said, “when the match schedule is going to start up again.”

  “You think we’re ready for that?” Douglas asked, turning a page of the report he was reading.

  “Getting there,” was Corda’s opinion. “I think the morning silences have helped. And the sparring court.”

  A few weeks ago, Douglas had instituted a half hour silence each mid-morning before break: all of Ryswyck who could be spared from essential duties gathered in the arena, where they sat together in silence without formality, not to study but just to sit. Some used the time to meditate, as if in chapel; some brought out knitting needles or beading strings and worked them unobtrusively; some sat still and did nothing. Often, someone would be shaken into tears and comforted wordlessly by his or her neighbors on the bench. The senior cadre had not been immune to these sudden outbreaks of grief; the vulnerability had only strengthened their authority, and the cohesion had done much to restore Ryswyck’s sense of itself.

  But this wasn’t why Corda was here. He sipped his tea, distrait, and finally brought it out.

  “Rose says you told him he should get to know who he is now.”

  “I didn’t tell him to do it,” Douglas said. “I just named what he’s already doing.”

  “He says,” Corda went on, “that he hopes the new Rose loves me, but he doesn’t really know.”

  Well, that was certainly the problem in a nutshell. “Are you sorry I put my oar in?” Douglas said, acutely.

  “No,” he said with a wince, “but—couldn’t you tell a nice lie once in a while, Admiral?”

  Douglas tamped down a smile; there were tears hidden behind Corda’s complaint. “Is that what you would have preferred?”

  Corda sighed and looked away. “I want the truth to be something different.”

  At his mulish tone, Douglas allowed his smile to show itself. “Yes,” he said ruefully.

  A long silence. Douglas read his report; Corda sipped his tea. Then: “Sir?” he said tentatively. Douglas looked up, and Corda’s courage failed him. “Nothing, sir. Never mind.”

  “You were going to ask me something about General Barklay,” Douglas guessed.

  Corda grimaced, but after biting his lip a moment he asked the question. “He told us that day that he had mistreated you.”

  A long sigh drew Douglas’s shoulders down, and he relaxed his stylus hand. “Yes,” he said. “He did.”

  “You didn’t accuse him,” Corda said.

  “No. I reproached him in private, more than once. And I could have accused him in public any time I wanted. But I didn’t.” He sighed again. “I wanted the truth to be something different.”

  “Yes, sir,” Corda said quietly.

  Douglas looked at him. “So did he.”

  “And that’s why you won’t lie,” Corda concluded.

  “It’s one of the reasons.” Douglas picked up his stylus again. “Another reason is that I’m really terrible at it. If I’d attempted to lie to Rose, I would only have annoyed him.”

  “I suppos
e so, sir.” Corda sat pensive over the remains of his tea; but Douglas felt sure that he had fully delivered himself of his concerns.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You might sound out the junior cadre about the match schedule at the meeting this week, and let me know what comes of it,” Douglas said.

  “I’ll do that, sir.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Douglas sat for a little while after Corda had gone, toying with his teacup but not drinking the few cold swallows that were left. The morning silences had indeed helped, had made the task ahead of Ryswyck seem less impossible, though they were all still a bit daunted. Somehow in this process Douglas had acquired this reputation for unvarnished truthfulness, which had puzzled him until he’d overheard one cadet say to another, We might as well die in the presence of the truth, in the same tone he and his comrades had used to quote one of Barklay’s slogans—and to his mortification worked out that they were now quoting him. Douglas told this story to Stevens, knowing full well he would crow over it for a week; he didn’t begrudge Stevens the pleasure. “I hope my future quotables are a bit less fey,” was Douglas’s only comment.

  Presently Commodore Beathas appeared in his doorway. “I’ve come to relieve you, Admiral,” she said. Technically speaking, there was now even less reason to keep someone at all times at the executive post than there had been before the invasion began. But none of them was quite ready to let their guard down that far. Douglas got up, took his and Corda’s teacups to the sideboard, to wash later, and retrieved his tunic. “Goodnight, Commodore,” he said.

  Sitting down with her scorebooks, Beathas smiled in answer.

  Douglas cracked another yawn, and went to bed.

  ~*~

  Du Rau was briefing his senior delegation to Ryswyck.

  “I anticipate you will meet surprises I can’t prepare you for,” he said. “You will want to stay alert on your feet, not to guard against attack but against reaction. We will be counting on you to see hostilities before they arise and quell them.”