by L D Inman
“I am hoping it will be possible to use this rendezvous to return our Berenian wounded to Bernhelm’s care, but have not yet received confirmation one way or the other,” Douglas added. Then he paused, hands on the lectern, gathering himself for what he needed to say next.
“For the next two days I’m restoring full meal rations, starting this evening, and I’m asking the duty rotas to confer and stagger the duty schedule so that each person can get one full sleep shift in the next cycle. This operation is a lot of work, and will need all our strength.” He shut his eyes briefly and took a breath. “I intend to keep the morning fast before the dirge. I won’t make it a requirement for anyone else, but I will welcome anyone who wants to join me.”
At this, there was a stirring among the students. Then a junior officer called out: “In that case, Admiral Douglas, sir, we had better let the kitchen team know not to make any breakfast.” Heads all over were nodding firmly.
Douglas’s eyes were dry, but his throat was choked silent. He pressed his closed hand to his heart for a moment; he saw several others instinctively return the gesture. After a moment, Douglas swallowed and went on. “We’ll serve tea, then, and have farina available for those whose health or work prohibits a fast. We’ll serve lunch in the usual schedule after the dirge is over. It will be a solemn dirge with full military rites; senior officers will wear dress blue and black, and junior officers and cadets will wear formal Ryswyck gray. All others will wear clean pressed fatigues. I trust our musical corps is ready to rise to the occasion.”
“On it, Admiral,” shouted the largest of the drummers, and there was a brief flicker of grinning.
“Thank you. As for the rest, I think I hardly need to say that if ever there was an hour to make courtesy your sacred gift, it is this one. We will be opening our home to a head of state and the chief of all our enemies. A great deal of power, on both sides of the strait, has been reposed in our hands. I trust we will use it graciously and set an example for one another.”
“Yes, sir,” came a smattering of replies from across the room. The rest were nodding, sitting up straighter on their benches.
“I am much obliged to you all,” Douglas said. “Now. I’ve just multiplied everyone’s work fourfold; so we’d better get started. This assembly is dismissed.”
He watched them, his soul washed in a warm satisfaction, as they rose talking animatedly to one another, stealing amazed glances at the dais, and setting off on their duty paths with quick steps.
That’s how you get Ryswyckians to come alive, he thought. Give them something impossible and nothing left to lose.
~*~
It wasn’t until Speir was standing in her place belowdecks, propped firmly against a bulkhead and bolstered by Corporal Beaton’s young shoulder, that the enormity of her task finally caught up with her.
She had chosen an escort of thirteen from among the survivors of Company 6A, who, as she had hoped, had clamored for a place on the mission. She had briefed them from the field hospital commissary tent, sitting in a push-chair while one of the medics fretted over the bandage padding for her brace. “Be advised,” she said to them as they stood at proud attention, “this is a military operation but not a combat operation. Any insult they offer us will get no response from you. If they want to insult me, you will let them. If they want to mistreat me, you will let them. Lord Bernhelm’s safety and security is being entrusted to you, and if you cannot give him that cheerfully and completely, regardless of how I am treated, I do not blame you—but I will ask you to give your place to someone who can encompass it. Do you understand, comrades?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they had said firmly. Speir hoped the firmness held.
Two-thirds of her escort were from her original Cardumel unit, including Lieutenant Ell, who was taking his role as point for the escort very seriously, and Beaton, who was serving as her aide; but there were a few from Hadley as well, underslept but determined. It was they who had been the most solicitous of her comfort, helping her to move from the field hospital to the shuttle and from the shuttle to the ship, as if she were their last piece of ordnance and not to be wasted.
It was more comfortable to stand than to sit, though the medics had warned her that the longer she stood the more dangerous the swelling would be. But she wanted to be on her feet as the ship carried her to the rendezvous.
Beneath her, she thought, there was a vast depth of water, dark and heaving, all the way from here to Berenia. Somewhere beneath her feet, her mother lay where she had fallen, along with her comrades and Berenia’s comrades, a generation of dead in a bridgeless chasm. Lord Bernhelm was bringing Barklay to her across these depths: there was nothing firm beneath them. There was nothing to make this clasp of enemy hands successful. There was only her.
She gasped as a qualm stole her balance. Corporal Beaton looked at her sharply. “Are you all right, ma’am?”
“Fine,” Speir said, catching her breath and firming her good knee. “Just haven’t got my sea legs.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Beaton, and then half to himself: “I wonder if anybody has.”
“I hear you,” Speir said.
12
Du Rau stood calmly before the cargo door of his destroyer. Behind his left shoulder Alsburg carried his overcoat; behind Alsburg his unit of twenty Estuary Guardsmen stood at marble attention in full dress uniform; and behind that waited the naval unit belonging to the ship, guarding the bier and its white-swathed cargo.
Outside the ship, he was aware, an equal representation from both their fleets were drawn up to face one another in the dark waters, prepared, with restrained hostility, for the invasion of one unarmed man.
A series of signal-whistles, followed by the careful exchange of voices, sounded outside the hull. Then clanks as the Verlaker ship was slowly made fast to his. The ships breathed slowly in tandem, rising and falling with the sea. A slow, rolling slam. Then the cargo door began to rise, with cautious deliberation, and the Verlakers crossed over.
They were not a prepossessing lot. The men were in clean, newly-pressed fatigues; the stiff formality of their gait did not hide but emphasized the biting fatigue in their faces. Their double column separated and filed aside to face du Rau at stolid attention, and the last two figures, in mid-formal army greens, came forward: a young corporal, barely of an age to shave, escorted his captain as she approached with halting dignity, one leg braced stiff and supporting herself with a cane. When she reached the deck before him she came to a stop, cane planted.
There was a parade silence, as of the stilling of drums.
Du Rau had carried an unconscious expectation that the so-called Hero of Colmhaven would be tall and loose-gaited, a hard-bitten, unfeminine captain with an insolent glance. But what stood before him instead was a woman of no very great height, compact and foursquare to the earth even with one bad leg, pale and broad of cheekbone like most Verlakers: no older than Captain Ahrens or Admiral Douglas, except for her grave, pain-aged eyes.
She snapped du Rau an army salute, palm outward against her brow. “Captain Stephanie Leam Speir, First Ilona Army, East Heights Division, at your service, sir.” Another pre-illusion fell: she spoke not with a strident, self-consciously prophetic burr, but a clipped urbane courtesy, her voice, like broad-wale fabric, soft downward and rough upward. Her corporal hung behind her shoulder, his own narrow shoulders curved protectively toward her, wary eyes fixed on du Rau’s face. Captain Speir herself showed no wariness at all: if she had been offering du Rau tea in her own home, she could hardly have looked more expectant and secure.
East Heights Division, she had said, but du Rau was not fooled. He was becoming very practiced at recognizing Ryswyckians when he met them.
He acknowledged her greeting with a short nod. Then stepped back, a tacit signal to his men. They brought the bier forward with unadorned dignity, set it down on its chocks in the space between du Rau and Speir, and filed around to reform their ranks at each side.
As Capt
ain Speir approached, du Rau could see more clearly that she had tucked back the corners of her lips in a continual suppressed wince; more clearly still, her corporal followed her closely as if expecting every moment that she might collapse. But she did not collapse or even falter. Instead, she turned over her stick to the corporal with an almost prayerful grace and turned back the cloth that covered General Barklay’s head. She contemplated the dead man’s face for a moment and then reached out two fingers to touch his skin above the collarbone. She looked up swiftly. “He’s been embalmed,” she said.
“It was necessary,” du Rau answered.
He had anticipated this as the first point of possible friction, but Captain Speir received his answer with grave acceptance. “With your pardon, sir,” she said, “I am ordered to make examination of the body before we receive it.”
Du Rau had anticipated this too. He gave a nod, and Speir reached for the small satchel she wore cross-shoulder. She took out a compact scanner and passed it over the body from the head downward; her lips crimped tighter when she edged a few steps sideways. Finally she straightened, gave the scanner’s reading a last glance, and put it away. Du Rau had the distinct impression that nothing the scanner might tell her could give her distress, that she would have figured out something to do even if she discovered a mine or a contaminant. One of his staff had, in fact, raised the possibility of making a trap of the body; du Rau had given him a cold glance and the suggestion died even as it left his lips.
A quick glance from the captain sent her corporal back to the line of her men. He exchanged her cane for a large wooden box from one of them, and brought it back to open before Speir. Du Rau’s men tensed without moving, but du Rau could see that the box contained nothing more than army dress of the highest formality, garments laid on top of one another in the order they would be put on. Speir gave the contents an approving glance and then reached to uncover the rest of the body, with a natural briskness checked by pain. The white sheet fell away on both sides to expose the bare corpse, washed of dirt and human significance.
Speir stood for a long moment, surveying Barklay’s length; outside her notice, one of the seamen in his rank gave way to a smirk as her impassive gaze passed over his nakedness. Du Rau glared at him: he hastily recovered his gravity, but as du Rau continued to glare, finally saluted and slunk out of the bay altogether.
He looked back at Speir. She had not noticed the byplay, but her corporal had; he had his eyes fixed stonily on the empty middle distance, and the muscles in his jaw flexed. Captain Speir’s attention was on the bloodless mouth of the wound at the body’s solar plexus. As before, she reached out gently to touch the place, and looked briefly up at du Rau.
“I’m told you struck this blow,” she said.
“Yes,” du Rau said, briefly.
“What did you use?” Her voice was soft.
“A combat knife.”
She looked up again. “His?”
“Yes.”
A faint smile touched her face, insolent only because it held no fear of him. “He would have appreciated that.”
“I think he did.” Against his own resistance, du Rau added, “He smiled at me as he died.”
Captain Speir’s men had schooled themselves against anger, successfully, du Rau thought, because of the example she was setting. He suspected she was being quite as deliberate about it as he was himself, but his own austerity seemed stilted in the face of the child’s smiling dignity. This child who had foiled his entire northern operation with her defense of the enemy artillery. An urge rose in him to put her to the test.
“He made a strange gesture, at the end,” he went on. “Not, I think, like the salute you gave me just now.”
She considered him for a moment. Then took a step back, out of the way of the corporal, and brought her hand up to her brow edge-on; then her hand slashed downward, sharp as the cut of a saber. Barklay hadn’t managed anything near her precision, but, “Yes,” du Rau said, “that was it. What is it?”
“It is the honor salute of Ryswyck Academy, sir,” Speir told him. “In a combat match, it is given by the loser to the winner of a round.”
In the silence that followed, their eyes met for the first time. “I see,” du Rau said finally.
She inclined her head in a nod. “Sir.” After a hesitation, she returned to Barklay’s side and considered the box of his dress with a small frown. Du Rau watched as she lifted out the undergarments on top, singlet and pants, and moved with careful, small steps toward Barklay’s feet. Du Rau narrowed his eyes; the next of his men who broke countenance would suffer more than being sent from the room. The warning had been taken; no man did.
But his patience began to be tried watching her work against the awkwardness of putting the dead man’s legs into his pants and drawing them upward, pausing at each step to breathe down her own pain. Her temples were growing damp. At this rate it would take forever and both their dignities would fall in a farcical heap. Du Rau stirred himself and stepped close to his side of the bier. When his hands joined hers at the task, she stopped with a jerk, visibly refusing to look up, possibly even resisting an urge to refuse his help. Then she breathed in and continued on.
Together they got Barklay’s pants on, lifting him awkwardly by turns to tug the garment into place. The singlet was easier; the only real difficulty was bending his arms through the gaps; the embalming had left them still a little stiff. By the time Speir took out his linen shirt, they had begun to establish a cooperative rhythm: he lifted the head and shoulders so that she could slide the open shirt underneath him; they each took an arm to dress, and then he gave way to her so she could fasten the buttons from top to bottom. Likewise with the cravat, he helped only by lifting Barklay’s head for her; she slipped the black tie around his collar and tied it. A grin flitted over her face as she repositioned the ends from the way she would have tied it on her own neck, to the reverse. She was absorbed in the work now, absently blotting at the sweat on her brow with her sleeve.
She took out socks, and offered one as a matter of course to du Rau, who took it and dressed the foot on his side without cavil. The trousers were another battle, and when that was done Captain Speir rested a moment with her hands braced on the bier, panting lightly. The corporal twitched, as if ready to abandon his role and take her place, but his discipline held. She gathered herself, sickly pale now, and took out the heavy black outer jacket.
Shoes, then, and the remaining accessories; Speir laid a cufflink in du Rau’s hand, and he helped her cross both Barklay’s hands over his breast. The final item was a Verlaker red banner, folded beforehand to show the defiant crest of the black cock; Speir wound it over and under Barklay’s crossed hands, and tucked the ends beneath his arms.
Then she stepped back to view the transformation from anonymous corpse to honored soldier. Her hand reached out to smooth Barklay’s collar. “He looks nice, doesn’t he?” she said softly, as if to a comrade. Her little smile betrayed more grief than her tears would have done. “Almost as nice as when he led parades on the quad.” Lightly she brushed the thin hair at Barklay’s crown into better order; laid her palm over his brow as if in benediction, and after lingering a moment, stepped away. The corporal returned the box to the other soldier and came back with Speir’s cane, positioning himself behind her shoulder as before—only this time, standing closer so she could lean against him surreptitiously.
“Alsburg,” du Rau said quietly, with his eye on the captain’s wavering paleness, “are we cleared to cross over?”
“Not yet, my lord,” Alsburg reported. “The relay is slow, and they haven’t yet asked for Captain Speir’s report.”
“Then while we wait,” du Rau said, “bring a stool each for the captain and for me.”
She glanced at him; their eyes met again for a moment, and the corner of her mouth twitched, not in pain but humor. She saw that he had guessed she would not take a seat on her own account, but would be forced to do so if he took one. When the sto
ol was brought, she arranged herself on it obligingly, and took the opportunity to slip a tab from her satchel and put it under her tongue. She winced at the taste and chased it with a drink from the flask the corporal handed her. Presently a little color came back into her face, and she sat calmly across from du Rau, her eyes on Barklay’s face in profile between them.
The bay was quiet, with men all around standing at attention; the only noise the sound of the heaving sea outside the hull and the distant voices of men working the comms.
Du Rau said: “I understand you took your injuries at Colmhaven.”
Speir’s gaze refocused and moved to his face. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Took a bit of shrapnel pulling a dragon mine out of the cliffside.”
Du Rau couldn’t keep from quirking an eyebrow. Dragon mine shrapnel? He stopped attributing her malaise to feminine sensitivity and started wondering how the hell she was upright and coherent. “Not many so wounded would, or could, take on this mission,” he commented.
“Yes, sir. I practically had to do hand-to-hand combat with five different doctors to get here,” Captain Speir said dryly.
“A testament to your devotion,” said du Rau, with equal dryness. “You also were educated at Ryswyck Academy.”
“I was, sir.” And not ashamed of it, evidently.
“You were General Barklay’s student.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what was he to you?” Now he would see what her dignity would sustain.
She was quiet a moment, and her eyes shifted back to Barklay, lying in state on his bier.
Then: “He was my friend,” she said simply.
Du Rau absorbed this. A Verlaker could mean anything by that word, from “longterm lover” to “ally” to “favored acquaintance,” but the way Captain Speir said the word made him suspect that she meant simply that and nothing else. Barklay was to her a member of the family of the soul, as the sages put it. Du Rau hadn’t thought Barklay fit to be anyone’s family, chosen or otherwise; that Speir thought he was, was both provoking and appalling.