“We’ve got just about enough of Michael’s troops to man that first wall and have a handful in reserve,” he said. “Most of them have never touched anything but a handweapon in their life, but we’ve got to use them to fight with the emplaced energy weapons against foot attack up the slope. I’d like you to get them on the weapons and drill them—Michael should be able to help you, since he knows which of them are steady and which aren’t. Get breakfast in you; and I’ll tell you what I expect the regiments to do on the attack and what I think we might do when they try it.”
He went on talking while my food came and I ate. Boiled down, his expectations—based on what he had learned of the Naharese military while he had been here, and from consultation with Michael—were for a series of infantry wave attacks up the slope until the first wall was overrun. His plan called for a defense of the first wall until the last safe moment, destruction of the emplaced weapons, so they could not be turned against us, and a quick retreat to the second wall with its weapons—and so, step by step retreating up the terraces. It was essentially the sort of defense that Gebel Nahar had been designed for by its builders.
The problem would be getting absolutely green and excitable troops like the Naharese bandsmen to retreat cool-headedly on order. If they could not be brought to do that, and lingered behind, then the first wave over the ramparts could reduce their numbers to the point where there would not be enough of them to make any worthwhile defense of the second terrace, to say nothing of the third, the fourth, and so on, and still
have men left for a final stand within the fortress-like walls of the top three levels.
Given an equal number of veteran, properly trained troops, to say nothing of Dorsai-trained ones, we might even have held Gebel Nahar in that fashion and inflicted enough casualties on the attackers to eventually make them pull back. But unspoken between Ian and myself as we sat in the lounge, was the fact that the most we could hope to do with what we had was inflict a maximum of damage while losing.
However, again unspoken between us, was the fact that the stiffer our defense of Gebel Nahar, even in a hopeless situation, the more difficult it would be for the Governors and William to charge the Dorsai officers with incompetence of defense.
I finished eating and got up to go.
“Where’s Amanda?” I asked.
“She’s working with Padma—or maybe I should put it that Padma’s working with her,” Ian said.
“I didn’t know Exotics took sides.”
“He isn’t,” Ian said. “He’s just making knowledge —his knowledge—available to someone who needs it. That’s standard Exotic practice as you know as well as I do. He and Amanda are still hunting some political angle to bring us and the Dorsai out of this without prejudice.”
“What do you really think their chances are?”
Ian shook his head.
“But,” he said, shuffling together the papers he had spread out before him on the lounge table, “of course, where they’re looking is away out, beyond the areas of strategy I know. We can hope.”
“Did you ever stop to think that possibly Michael,
with his knowledge of these Naharese, could give them some insights they wouldn’t otherwise have?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I told them both that; and told Michael to make himself available to them if they thought they could use him. So far, I don’t think they have.”
He got up, holding his papers and we went out; I to the band quarters and Michael’s office, he to his own office and the overall job of organizing our supplies and everything else necessary for the defense.
Michael was not in his office. The orderly directed me to the first wall, where I found him already drilling his men on the emplaced weapons there. I worked with him for most of the morning; and then we stopped, not because there was not a lot more practice needed, but because his untrained troops were exhausted and beginning to make mistakes simply out of fatigue.
Michael sent them to lunch. He and I went back to his office and had sandwiches and coffee brought in by his orderly.
“What about this?” I asked, after we were done, getting up and going to the wall where the archaic-looking bagpipe hung. “I asked Ian about it. But he said he’d only played highland pipes and that if I wanted a demonstration, I should ask you.”
Michael looked up from his seat behind his desk, and grinned. The drill on the guns seemed to have done something for him in a way he was not really aware of himself. He looked younger and more cheerful than I had yet seen him; and obviously he enjoyed any attention given to his instruments.
“That’s a gaita gallega,” he said. “Or, to be correct, it’s a local imitation of the gaita gallega you can still
find occasionally being made and played in the province of Galicia in Spain, back on Earth. It’s a perfectly playable instrument to anyone who’s familiar with the highland pipes. Ian could have played it—I’d guess he just thought I might prefer to show it off myself.”
“He seemed to think you could play it better,” I said.
“Well. . .” Michael grinned again. “Perhaps, a bit.”
He got up and came over to the wall with me.
“Do you really want to hear it?” he asked.
“Yes, I do.”
He took it down from the wall.
“We’ll have to step outside,” he said. “It’s not the sort of instrument to be played in a small room like this.”
We went back out on to the first terrace by the deserted weapon emplacements. He swung the pipe up in his arms, the long single drone with its fringe tied at the two ends of the drone, resting on his left shoulder and pointing up into the air behind him. He took the mouthpiece between his lips and laid his fingers across the holes of the chanter. Then he blew up the bag and began to play.
The music of the pipes is like Dorsai whiskey. People either cannot stand it, or they feel that there’s nothing comparable. I happen to be one of those who love the sound—for no good reason, I would have said until that trip to Gebel Nahar; since my own heritage is Spanish rather than Scottish and I had never before realized that it was also a Spanish instrument.
Michael played something Scottish and standard— The Flowers of the Forest, I think—pacing slowly up and down as he played. Then, abruptly he swung around
and stepped out, almost strutted, in fact; and played something entirely different.
I wish there were words in me to describe it. It was anything but Scottish. It was hispanic, right down to its backbones—a wild, barbaric, musically ornate challenge of some sort that heated the blood in my veins and threatened to raise the hair on the back of my neck.
He finished at last with a sort of dying wail as he swung the deflating bag down from his shoulder. His face was not young any more, it was changed. He looked drawn and old.
“What was that?” I demanded.
“It’s got a polite name for polite company,” he said. “But nobody uses it. The Naharese call it Su Madre.”
“Your Mother?” I echoed. Then, of course, it hit me. The Spanish language has a number of elaborate and poetically insulting curses to throw at your enemy about his ancestry; and the words su madre are found in most of them.
“Yes,” said Michael. “It’s what you play when you’re daring the enemy to come out and fight. It accuses him of being less than a man in all the senses of that phrase—and the Naharese love it.”
He sat down on the rampart of the terrace, suddenly, like someone very tired and discouraged by a long and hopeless effort, resting the gaita gallega on his knees.
“And they like me,” he said, staring blindly at the wall of the barrack area, behind me. “My bandsmen, my regiment—they like me.”
“There’re always exceptions,” I said, watching him. “But usually the men who serve under them like their Dorsai officers.”
“That’s not what I mean.” He was still staring at the wall. “I’ve made no secret here of the fact I won’t touch a weapon. They all knew it from the day I signed on as bandmaster.”
“I see,” I said. “So that’s it.”
He looked up at me, abruptly.
“Do you know how they react to cowards—as they consider them—people who are able to fight but won’t, in this particular crazy splinter culture? They encourage them to get off the face of the earth. They show their manhood by knocking cowards around here. But they don’t touch me. They don’t even challenge me to duels.”