Ryswyck

by L D Inman

  “I’m going to want to interview Lieutenant Speir,” he said.

  “No,” Barklay said.

  “What?” Quiet and dangerous.

  “I said no. She’s Jamis Leam’s daughter, man! She’s the last person Jarrow should have thought of exposing that file to, and he did it anyway. She did her job, and she did it well. I’ll not have her interrogated or threatened for it.”

  “And what about this favorite of yours. Douglas. Did she expose the file to him?”

  “He’s not my—No. She secured it and asked him to escort her to me to report the breach.”

  Selkirk glowered at him silently. Then said: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I trust you. It’s just that you are so consistent. It’s nice to know your style hasn’t changed.”

  “And what exactly do you mean by that?” Though he knew.

  “I saw John yesterday,” Selkirk said after a moment.

  This wasn’t a change of subject. Barklay said warily, “How is he?”

  “The same.” Selkirk’s tone was cool. “He appeared to be in funds. But he refused to say how he came by them. Are you responsible?”

  Barklay relinquished the urge to lie with a small sigh. “He asked for money. I had some to spare.”

  “Ah,” Selkirk said. “So then, you are the sponsor of his most recent court summons for public intoxication.”

  “He promised me he’d spend it wisely.” Barklay rubbed his temple wearily.

  Selkirk’s tone became even more distant. “And you believed him?”

  Of course Barklay hadn’t believed him, not for an instant. But any answer was a trap. Unable to keep the note of pleading out of his voice, Barklay said: “It’s not in my power to refuse him.”

  “But it is, apparently, within your power not to obey my express wishes in the matter.”

  “He came to me,” Barklay said. “Tell me how I am to refuse him.”

  “It ought to be simple enough,” Selkirk said, his eyes grown hard. “I told you to stay out of my brother’s affairs. It’s neither your business nor your right.”

  “I make no claim to any right,” Barklay said quietly, “but my concern can’t be done away with so easily.”

  “Too little,” Selkirk said crisply, “too late.”

  “That’s not fair.” Barklay glared back at him. “We made those decisions together.”

  “After you destroyed him.”

  “Alban—”

  “No,” Selkirk amended himself, “I suppose you had help. Including from him.”

  “Very generous of you,” Barklay said bitterly.

  Selkirk’s brows went up. “Wouldn’t you prefer to own the whole fault yourself?”

  His mockery of the Ryswyckian phrase reached the quick as nothing else could. Barklay flinched, involuntarily. “Would it do John any good if I did?” he said, after a moment.

  “No,” Selkirk said, his gaze pitiless.

  “Would it do the army any good if I fell on my sword for Solham Fray?”

  Selkirk was silent, his lips a thin line.

  “I have more to spend,” Barklay said, “before disgrace overtakes me.”

  An unreadable change came into Selkirk’s face, but he said only: “Yes. Till then, keep your money and your conscience to yourself. If you love me.”

  “Yes, my lord,” Barklay said.

  ~*~

  Barklay returned slowly across the tower quad. It had not been necessary to exchange many words with Douglas when he returned, and Barklay didn’t want to. Douglas had said almost nothing, only followed him with grave, watchful eyes. Almost without having to articulate the thought, Barklay knew they would never discuss Solham Fray again; and it would never again be out of Douglas’s mind. Douglas was not the sort of man who would fold under strain: he bent, pliant, and then snapped back straight. But he could be hurt. Had been hurt; would be hurt. He tried to imagine Douglas in John’s place, cut off from his friends and relations, ill and bent on self-destruction. It wouldn’t happen, but just the image of it brought a wounded cry to his throat. I won’t repeat my mistakes, he told himself.

  By the time he reached the officers’ block, the miasma of grief had passed along with the rage. He knocked on Marag’s door; Marag answered at once. “Sir.”

  “Lord Commander Selkirk is recalling Commander Jarrow to the capital,” Barklay told him, bluntly. “I expect the shuttle to pick him up will arrive in an hour or so. You can give over watching his door, and tell anyone who asks that he’s been called back to the capital for consultation, and you don’t know more than that.”

  “No more I do,” Marag pointed out.

  “Let’s keep it that way. Thank you, Marag.”

  “Sir,” said Marag, with a bow of the head.

  Barklay went on to Jarrow’s quarters. He knocked and then turned the latch without pausing.

  To his mixed relief, Jarrow had not disobeyed Selkirk’s injunction to do nothing. He sat in his desk chair, stiffly, as if obeying Selkirk as literally as possible. He fixed Barklay with a look of smoldering hatred and said nothing.

  “You might have told me the truth,” Barklay said quietly. Jarrow’s lip and nostril sketched a scoff, and Barklay answered, “Yes, I know. You were hungry for revenge. But you ought to have taken the trouble to realize: I would not—will not—gainsay any accusation you could level my way. What happened was a miscarriage of justice in every possible way, and Lieutenant Charlock—”

  “Don’t speak his name,” Jarrow said, his voice light and even.

  “—was your cousin.” Barklay let his voice shade up into a question. “I remember reading about the accident, a few years ago. Is that when you formed your resolve to avenge him?”

  “You don’t understand anything,” Jarrow cried suddenly, and added, “It wouldn’t benefit you to understand. He was a good man, a decent one. He stood in mother’s place to me, and you broke him.”

  Barklay remembered the bitter things Charlock had said in sealed testimony. He said nothing.

  “He didn’t recognize your gift for deception till it was too late. Oh, you’re so very good at weaving a spell. You made sure that Douglas loves you blindly—”

  “I think you don’t do Douglas enough credit,” Barklay said quietly. “Douglas is more clear-sighted than you think. Perhaps you are confusing love and approval. Douglas freely gives me the one, and I have rarely earned the other.”

  “Perhaps he likes the treatment he receives from you,” Jarrow sneered. “He said to me that he knew of nothing that disgraced you.”

  “And so you put such a thing within his grasp. Yes, I did work that bit out. And you were astute. Douglas would make me a formidable enemy. Tell me, were you also aiming for Speir to be my enemy?”

  Jarrow shut his mouth and glared at Barklay warily.

  “Or did you think of her as anything but a means to an end?” Barklay pressed. “Did you at all anticipate what effect seeing those filthy images would have on her?”

  “It’s nothing she wouldn’t know about already,” Jarrow said.

  Barklay went hot and cold, paralyzed with fury. When he recovered his breath, he said: “On the contrary. She is the last person who would ever have been shown such things. She is the last person who ever should be. You’re very sensitive to the suffering of your close family. If you wanted to harm me by inflicting such knowledge upon her, that’s one thing. But you’re telling me,” he said, his guts quivering, “that you did it casually. Just to bar Douglas’s escape from your trap. You knew I’d draw him in even if she didn’t, so she wouldn’t have to face Selkirk alone. You took the risk that Selkirk might cashier her for it, on top of everything else, to preserve military security.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.” Jarrow’s glare was shaken again. “He wouldn’t. She’s the daughter of a war hero. She’s respectable—”

  “And even so it’s going to take all I have to shield her from the blowback of what you’ve done. Is this what you meant by surgical war? For a m
an who professes to love the precision of missile strikes, you’ve spread a wide path of collateral damage. This is exactly why I teach my students to look a person in the eye when they hurt them. If any of us is casually expendable, then all of us are.”

  “You!” Jarrow cried. “You are a contradiction in terms. You sit safe among your worshipers and no one can touch you. What do you know of exposure, of isolation? Have you ever set foot in places of suffering you didn’t create yourself? If you had you would know that courtesy is a luxury. Take away this smug safety—” his hand sketched a wide, furious gesture— “and it would blow away like dust. It means nothing.”

  I’ve set foot in the crater that used to be my home village, Barklay was about to say, but something in Jarrow’s posture stopped him. Forlorn bitterness, desperation: Jarrow had never acted as though he could be touched. As though anyone would want to touch him. His lifted chin, his assistant tugged on a string, his mistrust and hostility even to commanders he respected. He stood in mother’s place to me. Suddenly it clicked into place.

  “When did your cousin adopt you?” he asked, gauging Jarrow with a speculative eye.

  For an instant Jarrow braced, as if to lunge from his chair and attack Barklay. But instead he gripped the arms of his desk chair and answered, eyes glittering. “I was seven.”

  And he gave you his own second name. Barklay refrained from saying it out loud. Seven was old enough to have the stigma of being unsponsored burned into the memory. Especially if he’d lived in foster care. It needed more than one bad break, Barklay knew, for a mother to be unable to find the merest friend to stand sponsor to her child. Even the poorest communities were tight-knit and took care of one another; it took a lot to sunder any one of them. Jarrow was from such a sundered community. Where courtesy was a luxury. Where a hundred casual insults made the bitterness bite deep.

  “You have no stature to pity me with,” Jarrow said, in a low edged voice.

  “I don’t pity you,” Barklay said. “You did well for yourself. And then you threw it all away. I don’t blame you for the malice. I do blame you for the stupidity. You owe me no apology; your family was under my care and I failed him. But like it or not, Jarrow, I still have soldiers under my care and you have sabotaged my ability to protect them from the same horror and disgrace. If you get a chance to apologize to Lieutenant Speir, I recommend you take it.”

  Barklay went out, leaving Jarrow to his misery. Full morning had broken, and the cool scent of the wet quad was tinged with the aromas of breakfast cooking in the mess. Barklay’s appetite curled over and rejected the suggestion. But even in disaster, one had to eat.

  He hitched up his face in a conscious expression of ease, and pointed his steps for the main hall.

  7

  “The fact remains,” said Barklay, “we’ll have to cover Jarrow’s teaching load ourselves for the remainder of term. And probably for the next term as well.”

  “Small price to pay,” Ahrens murmured.

  “And will we even notice the difference?” agreed Cameron, in an undervoice.

  “Speir will, I expect,” Stevens said.

  “Did you have something for us, Lieutenant Stevens?” Stevens hadn’t lowered his voice enough: Barklay was looking at him expectantly.

  “No, sir. We’re ready to do whatever’s necessary, sir,” Stevens assured him, and the other rota captains nodded.

  They had been included in this senior staff council meeting because of their high-responsibility workload, and had clustered together along the wall, along with the senior officers who had not arrived in time to claim seats at the conference table. Douglas had taken his place with them quietly; so far, he had evaded direct attention.

  “Is there anyone we can promote out of the junior cadre?” someone at the table asked.

  “Well,” Marag said, “there’s Ellis, but—” before Ellis himself could object, “although he’s largely finished his course of study, he has a commission waiting for him at the requisitions office at Central.”

  “That doesn’t start until winter’s end, though, does it?”

  “Ellis?” Barklay threw it to him.

  “I only have a few papers left to write,” Ellis said slowly. “I could help carry a teaching load if needed. But I’m not a cartographer. I’m supply management.”

  “We could shift someone from my department who has experience in the field,” Marag suggested. “Oisel, you did that stint in the weather corps at Amity.”

  From his stance behind Beathas’s chair, Oisel spread his hands. “I could make shift to supervise the standard curriculum. I wouldn’t call it a permanent solution, but it could be done.”

  “But that still leaves a gap once Ellis leaves for his commission,” another of Marag’s subordinates pointed out. “We can’t cover that without some additional support.”

  “No,” Barklay mused, “we’d need to promote or rotate in someone to replace Oisel, either in supply management or cartography.” He looked up, his gaze seeking; Douglas submerged a flinch, but Barklay’s eyes lit on Stevens instead. “Stevens…your major study is in supply management, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Stevens flushed a little.

  “And you’re already helping to administrate the training modules. Not to mention your skills as a liaison at Ryswyck farm.”

  “That’s so, sir,” Stevens said.

  Barklay looked at Stevens thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, it’s early to say,” he said finally. “You might like to have your first commission at Ryswyck as teaching staff, or you might wind up with something more appropriate still. But I’m sure it will be resolved satisfactorily by winter’s end.” Everyone including Stevens relaxed; no one, Douglas thought, would like being asked to consider a commission on the spot in front of a roomful of interested parties. “In any case, I think we can safely promote Ellis to the staff temporarily, if he is willing.”

  Ellis said promptly, “Certainly I will, General Barklay, sir.”

  “We’ll want to fill his spot among the rota captains, then,” said Marag.

  “Yes,” Barklay mused. “Any suggestions?”

  There was a short silence, and then Beathas cleared her throat. “Lieutenant Speir had been helping Commander Jarrow administer the cartography curriculum, hadn’t she?”

  Barklay looked extremely gratified, but before he could speak, Oisel said: “In that case, why not promote her instead?”

  “Because she’s only halfway through her course of study,” Marag said. “Speaking of which, we’ll need to set up independent study plans for Speir and the cartography students coming up immediately behind her. Commodore, could you assist me with that?”

  “Certainly, Captain,” Beathas said.

  “Thank you. I would gladly recommend Speir for the position, General Barklay. She’s a diligent worker and a natural leader.”

  “It would be nice to have another woman on the team,” Cameron said wistfully; several heard her and looked in their direction, drawing Barklay’s notice.

  “What do you think, Lieutenants?” he said.

  “Yes, absolutely,” Stevens, Ahrens, and Ellis were all nodding. Cameron looked askance at Douglas’s unexpected silence, just as Barklay said: “She serves in your rota, Lieutenant Douglas. What is your assessment?”

  His reluctance to speak was starting to look churlish. Douglas exerted himself to respond. “She does, sir. And I would be very sorry to lose her from A Rota. Which is its own recommendation, and only the beginning. Speir would make an excellent rota captain, sir.”

  “Well,” Barklay said briskly, “unless I hear any objections or additions, it sounds as though we’ve got the situation squared for now. I’ll file the changes with Central and speak with Lieutenant Speir. Thank you all.”

  Dismissed, the senior officers rose from their chairs, and there was a general exodus. Douglas submersed himself in the largest shoal of leavers, and made it as far as the door before Barklay said, “Lieutenant Douglas—a word, please.
”

  “Yes, sir.” Douglas resigned himself and returned to the room to wait for Barklay to finish giving his last instructions to Marag.

  Jarrow was gone, of course: there were no more obstacles to Barklay calling for a private interlude between them. Douglas felt little indulgence, and even less appetite, for it. He thought he could probably make shift to oblige Barklay, but he did not want to be obliged himself. Nor did he want to talk to Barklay about it, even to answer the questions that still troubled him.

  When they were alone, Barklay gave Douglas a narrow look and relaxed back against the table. “How do you fare?” he asked, quietly.

  Douglas shrugged. “I’m all right, sir.”

  “Do you need anything?” Barklay’s glance was keen.

  No, Douglas thought, but you do. “Thank you, sir. I have what I need.”

  Barklay was obviously struggling to be content with that answer. It felt unkind, cruel even, to deny Barklay any portion in his thoughts, but Douglas couldn’t help it. Barklay wanted to reassure himself by gaining the chance to comfort him, and even though it was playing right into Jarrow’s hands, Douglas simply couldn’t do it. Couldn’t acquiesce in the story Barklay wanted to tell. He stood and let Barklay meet his eyes, and did not even brace himself in intransigence.

  Presently Barklay took in a long breath and let it out again. “All right,” he said, and straightened to his feet. “Thank you, Douglas. That’s all, then.” He passed Douglas on his way out of the room, briefly clasping his arm as he went. The touch was not unwelcome to Douglas, but in its wake grief rose from deep within him, and instead of lingering Douglas turned and went out himself.

  The bells had not yet rung for the change of classes, which was why, when Douglas entered the cloister, he found Cameron and Ahrens lingering there, talking in low voices. They saw him before he even registered the impulse to duck back out; so he continued toward them, unhurried.

  Ahrens came right to the point. “So what did happen with Jarrow?” he asked Douglas.

  Douglas shrugged. “Lord Commander Selkirk recalled him. I don’t know more than that.”