by L D Inman
“Well,” Speir said, “I think that turned out to be worth while.” She stepped back and gave him a crisp Ryswyckian salute.
Douglas couldn’t stop his wince; reluctantly, he saluted her back in kind. “Weights now?” he said.
They passed across to the weight room, where Douglas let Speir take the lead; she started her regime, familiar to him after all the times he had watched her do it. More and more comfortable in her company, he followed her from exercise to exercise, and they took turns spotting one another where needed.
Too soon their scheduled time was up; when they finished with the weights, Speir toweled the damp edges of her short hair and wiped her sweaty hands. “Want help putting away the equipment?” she asked him.
“I would be obliged,” Douglas said.
Speir helped him stack the pads and headguards in their places in the closets; though she made no comment, he saw her mouth twist as she examined a tattered shoulder rig. “I’ve put in reqs for new pads, but wisdom knows when they’ll actually arrive,” he said.
She nodded, and hit the latches of the other closet doors, curiously; one revealed a rack of foils, most of them taped over multiple times, rattly and unbalanced. Her mouth twisted again. “Pity. You’re good with a foil.”
He knew she was thinking about Barklay—he couldn’t help it himself. “I didn’t know you favored the format,” he said, attempting to be light.
Speir shrugged. “It’s the format I’ve known the longest.” She let her hand fall from where she had fingered the tape of one weapon, and turned to him a speculative look. But she said only, “I’ve a set back home, in storage; come annual leave perhaps I’ll retrieve them.”
For the moment, the residual smile was back in her eyes and in the corners of her mouth. Seeing it, Douglas felt revived almost to the pitch of fury. This was a mistake, he thought; he was never going to be able to sustain both friendship with her and distance from Ryswyck.
“I would like that,” he heard himself saying.
She cocked him a wry grin. “Till then, we’ll have to make do. Open-hand exercises next time?”
Speir wasn’t going to ask him why he’d changed his mind. She was clearly aware that to trespass for his confidence would be to jeopardize their contact. She had missed this as much as he had.
“I look forward to it,” Douglas said.
~*~
As they began, so they went on. They sparred once a week at first; then they took levers to their schedules and won a few more spaces to meet, mostly odd times at ends of shifts when nobody else was using the training room. Speir took care never to mention Ryswyck directly. She offered him a simple bow instead of a Ryswyckian salute at the end of every bout; and when he consulted her about the curriculum Cardumel was using, she offered cogent suggestions but did not urge him to replicate their Ryswyckian training.
And the difference, he thought, was not all for his sake. Speir was soberer, more guarded; sometimes even eclipsed, Douglas observed when he listened to her give reports in staff meetings. The new weight that rested on her natural poise did not disturb her balance, but he remembered how she had used to energize rota meetings, remembered the authority inherent in her gathered intent. Keep your head down, he had told her, and she had evidently taken it to heart: her vitality broke forth only when they were alone together in sparring sessions, a brief taste of life in their flavorless days. Did it tantalize her as much as it did him?
“You should offer them,” she said late one evening, between lifts on the bench, “something fun. Like—a winter tournament. With a prize.”
“You don’t think it would overbalance the winter festivities?” Douglas said.
“What winter festivities?” Speir puffed toward the second half of her set. “Besides the concert, I mean. Sergeant Marles is—already practicing. You can hear him down our corridor.”
“Well….”
“If people can accommodate that,” Speir said, “surely a challenge—wouldn’t be so disruptive.”
She was right. Douglas looked down, his hands poised over the bar ready to assist, at Speir’s inverted face. Their eyes touched briefly as he helped her finish the last lift, and the weights rattled home. She lay still and let her breathing and color subside; Douglas handed her a towel.
“I’ll think about it,” Douglas said; and she greeted this with a good-natured snort.
But what Douglas found himself thinking the next morning was: This was a mistake. Speir’s voice, clear, commanding, and warm, drew him out of a muddle of dreams to find himself alone in his bed and urgently keen. This, he told himself, is why you don’t spar too often with one person. Even General Inslee had known that: Don’t get distracted, he had said. Don’t get consumed.
At least, he thought ruefully, he had answered his own question about whether he could ever be keen for someone else again, enough to offer Speir a child when she wanted one.
She still wasn’t thinking about that yet, he knew. She had scarcely even got as far as thinking about making a home out of Colm’s Island for the time being. And she was still mourning. Being importuned by her sparring partner, even if that sparring partner was her closest friend, would surely be thoroughly unwelcome. Douglas was painfully sensitive to hypocrisy: it would add contradiction to contradiction, not only to invite her to spar after telling her to back off and stay low, but to pride himself on his own austerity and then give in to an urge to approach his friend for solace.
What he ought to do, he thought as he got up and stepped into his shower, was call off his sparring appointments with Speir. But even as he thought it, he knew he wasn’t going to do it. He wasn’t going to annihilate his, and Speir’s, only spark of joy for austerity’s sake. He would just have to ignore the wave of desire until it passed.
He opened the taps and shuddered as the cold water needled his skin.
~*~
The summer days passed slowly for Speir. She began on the collation of what would have been the last map, except that that same week, a sergeant pulled an old lantern off a high shelf and was suddenly barraged by several more maps rolling out of their tattered waxboard box. When Ghislain heard about it, he consulted Amis, who suggested that a few others in the weather corps might take a hand putting in data—the most accurate workers, he emphasized, to Speir’s private amusement—and let Speir get on with constructing her tactical schematics. Speir made sure to look over the new maps herself, to get the lie of the project, and finally agreed.
Her eyes had paused over one of the maps, a nautical chart without its fellows: the great tracts of sea between Ilona and the coast of the continent across the strait filled with bars and numbers, the land blank and empty. This had been the state of the sea somewhere near the time her mother and all her crew had been lost in it. And she on the shore, suspended between fear and life, now stood marking time tally by tally.
Speir rolled the map up and put it aside.
That evening she went to meet Douglas for their sparring appointment, ready and hungry for the contact and the company. She was pleased to discover him in a mischievous mood; he offered her three passes of open-hand exercises in exchange for a full-length bated baton match at the end. Speir agreed: “If you’ll play target first,” she said. He grinned and went to don the target mitt.
They sweated a satisfying half hour punching targets; warmed up and bouncing on her toes, Speir caught the headguard Douglas tossed her, and swiped one-handed the baton that followed.
The first pass was academic, but far superior to their rusty work weeks ago; Douglas just missed throwing her outright, but they agreed he should get the point, and started the second. She didn’t give him time to think, but attacked with gusto, driving him all around the ring before he could surge back, and then he missed her feint—she struck his shoulder and knocked him down sideways. Speir almost whooped in triumph, but contained herself and settled for bouncing back to the mark and giving her baton a twirl before coming to guard.
Douglas, risin
g to his feet, laughed out loud. Then he set himself on guard, ready to pounce.
His attack was ferocious, as she expected: the clacks of their weapons followed hard one on the next, their feet shifted fiercely; he drove her back, and then drove her back again, and then he was chuckling, and so was she, and his baton tripped her from behind and she fell, laughing.
She pulled off her headguard where she lay and laughed, breathlessly and for a long time, because everything was all wrong, and everything was all right, and over her head Douglas’s face was breaking the light to look down at her, half smiling and half concerned.
Speir caught her breath and smiled back at him; he reached down a hand to help her up.
Something of their hilarity still hung about them like a perfume as they gripped one another wrist to wrist and hauled Speir to her feet. That, and Douglas’s closeness, the pink prints of the headguard on his temples, the familiar scent of his sweat-damp skin, dragged her attention to a feeling that puzzled her.
“You almost beat me,” he teased her as he let go. “Maybe next time.”
It wasn’t till he was bending to pick up their gear and carrying it away to the closet that she understood.
Oh.
Her guts seemed to melt and reform themselves inside her, watching him hang up pads and headguards, closing the door with an efficient shove. He turned around, blotting at his sweaty brow with his forearm, and saw her staring.
“All right, Speir?” He picked up his boots and jacket, keeping his eyes on her.
She shook herself. “Sorry,” she said. “I got lost in thought for a moment.”
“Ah,” he said. “Didn’t realize it was unfamiliar territory,” and laughed when she shoved him in the shoulder. “See you in two nights?”
“Aye.”
“Till then,” he said, saluting her lightly. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Speir answered, from where she still stood in the sparring circle.
~*~
Well. Speir spent the next whole day in a state of consternation. It was only to be expected, she told herself. Private sparring practice had a tendency to raise tensions of all sorts, as she ruefully knew. But this was something else again. This wasn’t taking a mild fancy to someone, or responding with gusto to another’s approach, both of which she’d experienced before. No, the instant she’d recognized her appetite for what it was, she’d been almost alarmed by the swiftness with which it generated a fire in every fiber of her body. Some fibers, of course, more than others.
Now that she’d thought about it, it amazed her that she hadn’t considered it before: hadn’t contemplated the promise of Douglas’s mouth, the elegance of his shoulders, the shape of his backside crying out for her to take a good grip. The prospect made her feel—awake, hungry, exhilarated.
If they had been at Ryswyck, this would have been a simple enough matter, at least in theory. She could have simply gone to Douglas’s quarters and asked him if he might be keen, and invited him to bed if the answer was yes. The ramifications would have been relatively small, no matter his answer; they’d have enjoyed themselves and suffered only slight teasing at the breakfast table. In theory.
But this was Cardumel, where rules were narrow, where every soldier did his or her work chary of intimacy, where a vigorous bout of pleasure might excite rather more comment by their comrades. And Douglas was still Douglas: his heart still tangled over itself, missing Barklay, missing Ryswyck too, by the evidence of his avoidant manner; he probably would be even less interested now than he had been then.
In any case, it would be a clear trespass to initiate with him.
It took the afternoon for Speir to reason this out, walking the line of data posts with her rain-cape and equipment bag: she came in dripping and resolved. Douglas would never know she had been keen for him, if she could help it. Speir hung up her wet rain-cape and went to supper. It was a good decision; even a satisfying one.
But the evening’s stew was tasteless in her mouth.
~*~
The late summer sun angled its way down through the banks of cloud over Ryswyck’s blocks and cloisters, streaming in bright rays that shifted and broke and reformed as the evening rain moved in. A cadet hummed his way down the corridor past Barklay’s office; further away, through the doors open to the fresh breeze, a chorus of distant voices could be heard, marking the sets of exercises: juniors and cadets preparing for the autumn service course. Drawn by the pleasant sounds, Barklay got up slowly from his chair and went out of his office.
In the outer office, three second-year cadets were poring over the protocols for the Red Mark drill being held tomorrow, stopping in their comparison of maps and duty stations to ask Lieutenant Niel about emergency com codes for the outlying posts in the sector. Lieutenant Niel was sorting post into boxes as he answered; yes, Barklay had heard the depot shuttle come and go. He greeted Niel and the cadets and retrieved his post, which was never voluminous; he had no family to send him things, so most of his correspondence came by dispatch.
But today there was a letter: a simple note-card in a plain envelope. Barklay’s heart sank: he knew the hand. Reluctantly, he opened the envelope with a finger worked under the edge, and slid out the card. It held only two lines.
Call me, Thaddeys.
If you hear from me again, it will already have been too late.
3
“You ever spent a winter north of the Pass?” asked Darnel, settling himself in to take over the weather-tower watch.
“I hear it’s pretty fierce,” Speir said.
“Aye, it is. The rain comes one way and the cold comes the other way, and everything glazes hard over. That’s why we’ve got four extra storage rooms under the surface by the GT plant—nothing big enough can land on the airstrip to supply us if the cutters can’t steer in.”
Speir had seen the extra ships unloading earlier in the week. “We won’t see icefall till another two months,” she mused. “But I suppose one had better keep ahead of it.”
“It’s the choppy seas they’re trying to stay ahead of,” Darnel said. “End of the summer it gets hard to predict.” Speir knew the data, had listened to naval shop being talked her whole childhood, but the white caps wrinkling the surface of the grey sea outside had an immediacy, had a taste and a scent, that gave amplitude to her knowledge. Wisdom be in the twinkling frost; wisdom be in the curling sea….
“Will you take an autumn visit home, then?” Speir asked.
Darnel shook his head. “Too much going on at Killness right now. It’ll have to wait till spring.”
Despite the native reticence of Cardumel, Speir had nevertheless picked up a few things about her right-hand lieutenant. Darnel had done his national service at the Pass maintenance works before joining the army, and had formed a household with his closest friends there in the usual way. They had joined the army together, and still kept close touch with one another after their careers had diverged; Darnel had a snap tucked into the corner of his console of one of his chosen brothers, with his pretty spouse (both in army fatigues) and two young children. Above that was a more well-worn image, a card-portrait of a bright-haired man in dress blacks. Darnel’s lover was the only man of their group to stay in Killness, and Darnel intended to work a few more years at Cardumel in hopes of earning a promotion back there so they could finally establish their own household together. Darnel’s attitude toward the separation was as laconic as his attitude to everything else, so Speir always kept her inquiries light.
“Makes the summer seem all too short,” was her only comment.
“Too true. Off to dinner, then?”
“Eventually,” Speir said. She had a sparring appointment with Douglas first; then if she had off-duty time to spare, a check of her surveying equipment before she slept. Wisdom be in the sunlit dale; wisdom be in the spreading tree…. “Good evening to you, Darnel.” They exchanged easy salutes, and she rattled down the curving stair.
Uncharacteristically, Douglas was late
to their sparring appointment. He hadn’t sent her word to cancel, so Speir gave him some time by taking her warmup in the weight room. He arrived at last bearing two bulging sacks of padded gear, which threatened to escape when he set them down. He hadn’t changed from his on-duty fatigues.
“I apologize,” he said. “I was pulled in to consult on plans for a base-wide defense drill. Inslee wants to work in as many full-unit training modules as possible before icefall. And presumably after icefall, too,” he added, with a half-grin. “Since we’ll be glazed in with less to do. Though it sounds pretty tame compared to what we get at home.”
“That’s what you said to Inslee, of course,” Speir said.
“Hah. Anyway, I figured I’d better come straight here instead of detouring past my quarters to dump this stuff. I’m sorry; there’s not much left of our time.”
“That’s all right,” Speir said. “Why don’t I help you stow that gear, and then we can hit the mess together. I’m assuming you haven’t eaten yet.”
Douglas fixed her with a briefly feline look and then said: “I would be obliged.”
Speir hit the changing room to get back into her fatigues, then she and Douglas divided up the awkward burden of pads and greaves and batons and carried them together to his quarters in the officers’ block. She knew where Douglas’s quarters were, but had never been inside, and watched with curiosity as he shifted the balance of gear in his arms to punch in his key-code. The door swung open on darkness; Douglas hit the over-door light with an elbow and stepped aside to hold the door open for Speir with one foot before heading for an empty corner to drop his burden at last.