Thursday, June 25, 2708, continued

(Fine linen.  Silverware from Earth.  Gamekeeper’s pheasant for brunch, in an excellent sauce.  Cherone Peshawr serves as splendid a table as his Aunt Soskia, even way out here, in his father’s mountain retreat.  Nice things for a lady about to turn herself in for a court-marshal.)

I enter the Big Tent just as Shermio leaves.  The little boy looks up at me with those dark, elfin eyes of his; he gives me the most burning gaze, and I get the uneasy feeling that he knows more about what I’ll have to report than I want to know, myself.  Then he vanishes into the camp so fast I can’t even tell which direction he went.

(Time to pull my vanishing act.  “Excuse me, dear boy; I must powder my nose.”

“The bathroom’s down the hall, last door to your right.”  He looks a bit uncomfortable with the reminder that ladies also have coarse bodily functions.  I smile with just the right hint of embarrassed apology as I leave the table.

Ah, men!  They can be so trusting when dealing with what they consider “the weaker sex.”)

Cyran looks pale under the head bandage, and hir eyes stare a little out of focus, as e stabs a delicate finger there! and there! at points on a map marked with pictographs next to the written names, barking orders at subordinates who come and go so fast it makes me dizzy even without hir concussion.  But then e had better medical care than poor Lucinda did, or maybe none at all, which amounts to the same thing.  Even so, the grimace etched into hir face betrays a chronic headache big enough to fill the entire HQ tent.

E doesn't look up from the map when I arrive, but tells everyone else to leave.  E stays leaned against the makeshift plank-and-barrel table, hir eyes fixed on the topography as I stare at a blank patch of canvas in front of me and make my report, arms gripping each other behind me, nails digging into my own skin.

(I saunter down the hall, but I do not take the last door to the right.  Instead, I slip through the door just before it.  As expected, it leads to the kitchen, which also needs to tap into the same plumbing network.  Using the stealth-training so graciously afforded me by the military, I infiltrate the pantry, where I can eavesdrop on the help.  It has become my custom, now; I cannot seem to break the habit.

Amid the clatter of washing dishes, and the sizzle and fragrant steam of something yummy becoming a dessert, I hear one scullion say to to another, “Have we got the old man safely packed away to the lowlands?”  No news there;  everyone knows that Bregan Peshawr winters in Sargeddohl with his brother’s widow.

A gruff voice says, “Yeah, but now we’ll have to deal with the youngster.  He sees a lot more.  And he’s not deaf in one ear.”

Okay, now you have my interest.

“Don’t worry about it.  Cyran’s bunch already picked up the delivery at the hunting-lodge.”)

E finally speaks when I detail the loot taken from the hunting lodge.  "Alysha will redistribute the weapons where we need them most," e says.  "We can't waste any on people like you..." and I sweat in the cold and stale tent air, "...who can improvise on the spot."  Then e straightens and stares at me full on, resting a hand on a pistol at hir side.  "I already got the full report, from several different sources.  If you had lied about Kief, I'd have taken you out right now and shot you myself."

"I prepared for that possibility."  Yet even now the blood drains from my head and leaves me sick, just to hear hir say it out loud.

E paces around me.  "You came in here unarmed.  But like I said, you don't need..."

"That's not what I meant!  If you’d stopped trusting me, I...I'm not sure I'd mind dying."

"Oh, that's a fine way to evade responsibility—you'd not only cost us Kief, you'd cost us yourself, too."

"I, I admit I used bad judgment.  I'd run for days on leaf instead of sleep, I..."

"Oh damn the leaf and leave it out of this!  You had to shoot him at that point or he'd have cost us the most strategic network we've ever established in this entire revolution."  E comes around the table and stands too close to my face, with hir arms crossed, and I suddenly remember that I’m taller than hir, and it doesn’t help at all.  "You want to know what your biggest mistake was, Deirdre?"

I swallow and say, "Tell me."

"You told Kief to take charge in the first place—even quieted resistance in the ranks to the idea.  Damn you for that, Deirdre!"  I step back from hir hot breath in my face but e steps forward to match.  "He had his problems, sure, but with a strong hand over him I couldn't have asked for a better soldier.  And you cost me Lucinda, and Fatima, and every last soldier and civilian who died from his bad judgment, which all boils down to your bad judgment to let him do the judging!"  He glares at me, quivering, before saying, in a quieter but no less merciless voice, “You’re going to have to live with that for the rest of your life, Deirdre Keller.”

(Court-Marshal!  My fellow officers owe me thanks.  If a man had come up with the proposal, they would have rewarded him...and shielded the tender young females from the knowledge of the blood that must be shed in their protection.

“They’ll have picked it clean, though,” says my unwitting informant, “of more than what we stashed there.  They’ll have to.  Too many in that lot.”  An army, then?  Duly noted.

“We can always blame bandits.”  And how, pray tell, would that differ from guerillas preying off the land?  I prevent myself from chuckling.

Now, what would my fellow Generals do with the intelligence of this servant network?  The brutes would probably round up the servants and torture them, reasserting their precious sense of power over the lower classes, and thus incur the wrath of every taxpayer deprived of help, while garnering, for their trouble, a fat lot of meaningless gibberish.

 No, let the prey run wild for a time, to lead to bigger game.  Let them speak freely, as only the socially invisible can do, among themselves. 

I sigh.  I should not have to resort to such sly advantages.  If only the other officers didn’t leave me out of the loop, I could become as honest as the rest of them.  And possibly as ineffectual.  I shrug and smile, there in the dark of the pantry, amid the spices and the dust.

Invisible—servants and female officers have much in common.)

E breaks away to go brood over the map again.  "For the record, everybody I interrogated tried to cover for you.  Malcolm almost succeeded.  Lufti cried when I winnowed out the truth.  But I haven't stayed alive this long without knowing evasion when I smell it."  E laughs bitterly a moment, saying, “Maybe I’d have done as good as ol’ Sanzio Whitesleeves at his profession.  But I think the fact that my soldiers love me has a lot to do with my success.”

(Sanzio understands, at least.  He who knows torture better than anyone would want to, realizes that it can’t solve nearly as much as those removed from the act might think, though he follows orders when he must.  And he comprehends the mindset and resources of the angry disempowered more than any male officer in the standard army; even the lowest caste among them can’t wait to forget the weakness of their past—they enlist, in fact, precisely to forget.  Sanzio, however, does not afford himself the comfort of dishonesty; whatever others might imagine, he couldn’t do his job without the torment of empathy.  I think I’d have lost my mind without him.

Unfortunately, I fear that he no longer sees me as a woman.  I sigh again, in careful silence, but can no longer muster a smile.  I used to be someone desired.  I could have enjoyed letting others make the decisions, if it made them happy.  But the men just don’t know what to do!)

For awhile Cyran says nothing and I stand there, wondering if e just forgot to dismiss me.  Finally e says, more softly, "Having seen both sides, you want to know what I think is the problem with female soldiers?"

"Yes, Memsir."

"You get too fornicatin' scared to take command even if you've got the best idea in the world of what's going on."  And hir voice gets nastier by the minute.  "You want to make nice, make sure everybody likes you, keep the peace at all costs—in the middle of a war!  Some kind of socializing instinct that I've read about, tend and bond and all that."  Then e turns to me and snarls, "But we can't afford instincts in the army—male or female—that get in the way of winning."

(“Is Shandi still seeing that young buck from Kwan Manor?”

“More fool her—he’s also stringing Kimmet along.”  And just like that the conversation between the servants ceases to offer anything of value.

Speaking of young bucks, what about Cherone?  Instinct favors him, if not taste.  Hearty, almost bucolic, even in this rarified chateau.  Handsome, in a rugged way, and when he doffs all the blousing for his skiing gear, you can see how muscular he has made himself.

Could he pretend, for now, that I am not a general at all, that we fell in love on sight across the length of a pretty ballroom?  Could we pretend, for just one sweet night, before I face the music, that we could live happily ever after?)

E starts to pace again, just not at me, not around me.  "You can't use your sex as an excuse.  Men aren't born diplomats—they’ve got actual brain differences from women that way, I've read that, too—but they learn to do it when the time comes to forge alliances.  Women aren't born leaders, either—but they learn to do it."  E shakes hir head.  "Instinct!"

(Time to slip back, before the help needs the next ingredient from the pantry.  Cherone and I both know that he would soon bore me, and I would embarrass him in public.  Sometimes I hate what I have become, what my first lover made of me.  But there’s no going back now, is there?)

E swivels to face me.  "For years I've throttled Marduk back by the throat whenever I saw fit, and kicked Alysha forward—do I have to play the same games with you?"

"N-no, Memsir."

"You let the instincts run full bore when you need ‘em—be a bitch defending her whelps when the situation calls for it—but when the time for instinct passes, hold a gun to its head and get it back in its cage.  I need a full person in every officer—brains and heart and intuition, not just guts and reflexes."  E turns away and swears, and says, "You'd think the Tilián would teach you all this before you got here."

"I'm sure they would've, memsir, if they'd known I'd have a war to fight."

"It's something you need anyway, every day.  Lucinda knew that—no one had a more womanly heart underneath the scars and scowls.  You gonna try and fill her shoes, Deirdre, you'd better do your best to imitate her ways and hope to God her spirit hovers over your shoulder from this point on."  Abruptly e rolls up the map, turns away to shove it in a chest and slams the lid shut.  "You can keep your goddam field commission.  Now get outta my tent—dismissed!"

Cyran, Cyran, there is nothing on this entire planet that I want less.

* * *

(We sleep in Tumblebugs' underground parking garage these nights; we've dragged our beds down and each parking-space marks out a little room without walls.  Row after shadowy row of beds, each pretending to be its own private domain, with personal effects piled all around in unidentifiable lumps of darkness, but they don't form any real barriers, we can still hear each other whimpering in dreams.  The sound of gunfire above doesn't let up, either, but you get tired enough, you can learn to sleep through anything, I guess.

"Night shift's having a hard time of it," Max says from his bed, next space over.

“At least you gave the soldiers their own hard time by day,” I say, trying to pull my blankets closer around me.  I swear the avalanches he’s triggered with that pink stone of his cost the government more lives than anything the rest of us could do with bullets.

“I can’t do that much longer,” he admits.  “We’re running out of food.”

I shiver where I lie.  Nobody ever meant these blankets to do their job in a cold garage, in snow-season.  It doesn't even help that I've taken covers from some of the beds that don't belong to anyone anymore.  More and more beds go empty all the time.

"I wish we still had electricity," Max tells me.

"They had to shoot down the windmill, first thing," I say.  "They just had to."

"Doesn't matter, though.  We don't have outlets down here, anyway.”  I feel cramped, curled up this tight, but straightening out would lose heat.  “But if we did have electricity, and outlets, I'd move some of those towel-heaters down here.  We could warm up our blankets all toasty, and then layer on more to keep the heat in.  Insulation's no good if you've got no heat to hold in to begin with."

"Please.  Don't make me think about it."

"No—do think about it.  They say that picturing something warm raises your temperature."

"Then I'm going to think of roasting government soldiers over a barbecue in Hell."

"That's the spirit, kid."

"Max?"

"What?"

"Uh...never mind."  I wish I didn't know that he was gay.  I wish I didn't care.  Two could sleep warmer tonight than one.

I huddle under my blankets, trying to tug in every stray corner that might admit the slightest draft.  I'm a fool.  I'm a cold and shivering fool.

          Silently I get up, blankets wrapped tightly around me, and I go over to Max's cot.  I know he won't try anything.  I've known him long enough to trust him that much.  I throw my blankets over his and burrow in under the layers.  Then we lie there back to back, trying to find some sleep through the thunder of explosions cracking cement, our old quarters going up in dust and smoke.)

          Most of us still huddle together against the cold, lying on the gritty rock, now that Cyran has redistributed tents to mothers with infants, as e should.  At least e left us some sleeping-bags, one of which I cram into with Kiril and Lufti, with scarce room to breathe.    But they do keep me warm.  And, while I don’t think I’ll ever quite get used to sleeping with others (it doesn’t help how Kiril snores practically in my ear) I do like snuggling with my “whelps”.

          Yet here I lie, unable to sleep, staring up at the moon-dimmed stars, consumed by the loneliness of my new command.

          (I slip out of Cherone’s sweet, sweaty bed.  A lovely jock, who could never truly know me, but who might not care if he did.  I could almost fall in love with him—had I been the easily impressed damsel of my youth.

          No one goes about at this hour, so I stand at the window, naked and stained as I am, and regard my naked, stained, but still beloved country, in all her untamed savagery, from his high tower window.  I gaze out over the mountain forest, stark in black and the luminous blue of the full moon’s light, and I feel the kindred freedom of my flaws, bared to my world.

          Silently, comforted by the sound of the dear boy snoring, I carry my clothing to the bathroom of the suite next door, and scrub myself thoroughly, then don my uniform once more, every button, every detail, fluff out my blonde curls, and place the cap at just the right rakish angle.  Then I spread out one of my terrain maps from my purse and study it carefully.

          I always keep letter material in my purse, as well.  I jot down the orders, slide the letter into its cylinder, and dip the end in molten wax from one of Cherone’s romantic bathroom candles.  Lotus scent—he doesn’t have starlight gardenia.  I hesitate only for a second, then stamp the end with my general’s ring, while I still have it.  Appreciated or not, imperfect or not, I have at least this one virtue left: that I remain a loyal daughter of the Charadoc.)