‘I know that,’ he said. He glanced out at the dark outline of the Staberinde, and felt himself flinch a little, as though he expected its huge guns to belch flame right there and then, straight at him. He drew a metal shutter across the concrete slit. It was very dark in the bunker for a second, then somebody switched on the harsh yellow lights and they all stood there, blinking in the glare.
They left the bunker; the long mass of the armoured staff car waited in the darkness. Assorted aides and junior officers leapt to attention, straightened caps, saluted and opened doors. He climbed into the car, sitting on the fur-covered rear bench, watching as three of the other commanders followed, sitting in a line opposite him. The armoured door clanged shut; the car growled and moved, bumping over the uneven ground and back into the forest, away from the dark shape resting in the night behind.
‘Sir,’ Swaels said, exchanging looks with the other two commanders. ‘The other commanders and I have discussed -‘
‘You are going to tell me that we should attack; bomb and shell the Staberinde until it is a flaming hulk and then storm it with troop hovers,’ he said, holding up one hand, ‘I know what you’ve been discussing and I know what… decisions you think you’ve arrived at. They do not interest me.’
‘Sir, we all realise the strain you are under because your sister is held on the ship, but -‘
‘That has nothing to do with it, Swaels,’ he told the other man. ‘You insult me by implying that I even consider that a reason for holding off. My reasons are sound military reasons, and foremost of those is that the enemy has succeeded in creating a fortress that is, at the moment, almost impregnable. We must wait until the winner floods, when the fleet can negotiate the estuary and the channel, and engage the Staberinde on equal terms; to send in aircraft or attempt to engage in an artillery duel would be the height of folly.’
‘Sir,’ Swaels said. ‘Much as we are distressed at having to disagree with you, we nevertheless -‘
‘You will be silent, Commander Swaels,’ he said icily. The other man swallowed. ‘I have sufficient matters to worry about without having to concern myself with the drivel that passes for serious military planning between my senior officers, or, I might add, with replacing any of those senior officers.’
For a while there was only the distant grumbling noise of the car engine. Swaels looked shocked; the other two commanders were staring at the rug floor. Swaels’ face looked shiny. He swallowed again. The voice of the labouring car seemed to emphasize the silence in the rear compartment as the four men were jostled and shaken; then the car found a metalled road, and roared off, pressing him back in the seat, making the other three sway towards him before sitting back again.
‘Sir, I am ready to lea -‘
‘Must this go on?’ he complained, hoping to stop Swaels. ‘Can’t you lift even this small burden from me? All I ask is that you do as you ought. Let there be no disagreement; let us fight the enemy, not amongst ourselves.’
‘… to leave your staff, if you so wish,’ Swaels continued.
Now it was as though the noise of the engine did not intrude inside the passenger cell at all; a frozen silence – held not in the air, but in the expression of Swaels’ face and the still, tensed bodies of the other two commanders – seemed to settle over the four, like some prescient breath of a winter that was still half a year away. He wanted to close his eyes, but could not show such weakness. He kept his gaze fixed on the man directly across from him.
‘Sir, I have to tell you that I disagree with the course you are pursuing, and I am not alone. Sir, please believe me that I and the other commanders love you as we love our country; with all our hearts. But because of that love, we cannot stand by while you throw away everything you stand for and all we believe in trying to defend a mistaken decision.’
He saw Swaels’ hands knit together, as though in supplication. No gentleman of breeding, he thought, almost dreamily, ought to begin a sentence with the unfortunate word “but”…
‘Sir, believe me I wish that I was wrong. I and the other commanders have done everything to try to accommodate your views, but we cannot. Sir, if you have any love for any of your commanders, we beseech you; think again. Remove me if you feel you must, sir, for having spoken like this; court-martial me, demote me, execute me, forbid my name, but, sir; reconsider, while there is still time.’
They sat still, as the car hummed along the road, swerving occasionally for corners, jiggling left-right or right-left to avoid craters, and… and we must all look, he thought, as we sit here, frozen in the weak yellow light, like the stiffening dead.
‘Stop the car,’ he heard himself saying. His finger was already depressing the intercom button. The car rumbled down through the gears and came to a halt. He opened the door. Swaels’ eyes were closed.
‘Get out,’ he told him.
Swaels looked suddenly like an old man hit by the first of many blows. It was as though he had shrunk, collapsed inside. A warm gust of wind threatened to close the door again; he held it open with one hand.
Swaels bent forward and get slowly out of the car. He stood by the dark roadside for a moment; the cone of light thrown out by the staff car’s interior lights swept across his face, then disappeared.
Zakalwe locked the door, ‘Drive on,’ he told the driver.
They raced away from the dawn and the Staberinde, before its guns could find and destroy them.
They had thought they’d won. In the spring they’d had more men and more materiel and in particular they had more heavy guns; at sea the Stabennde lurked as a threat but not a presence, famished of the fuel it needed for effective raids against their forces and convoys; almost more of a liability. But then Elethiomel had had the great battleship tugged and dredged through the seasonal channels, over the ever-changing banks to the empty dry-dock, where they’d blasted the extra room and somehow got the ship inside, closed the gates, pumped out the water and pumped in concrete, and – so his advisors had suggested – probably some sort of shock-absorbing cushion between the metal and the concrete, or the half-metre calibre guns would have shaken the vessel to pieces by now. They suspected Elethiomel had used rubbish; junk, to line the sides of his improvised fortress.
He found that almost amusing.
The Staberinde was not really impregnable (though it was, now, quite literally unsinkable); it could be taken, but it would exact a terrible price in the taking.
And of course, having had their breathing space, and time to re-equip, perhaps the forces in and around the ship and the city would break out; that possibility had been discussed, too, and Elethiomel was quite capable of it.
But whatever he thought about it, however he approached the problem, it always came back to him. The men would do as he asked; the commandrs would too, or he’d have them replaced; the politicians and the church had given him a free hand and would back him in anything he did. He felt secure in that; as secure as any commander ever could. But what was he to do?
He had expected to inherit a perfectly drilled peace-time army, splendid and impressive, and eventually to hand that over to some other young scion of the Court in the same creditable condition, so that the traditions of honour and obedience and duty could be continued. Instead he found himself at the head of an army going to furious war against an enemy he knew was largely made up of his own countrymen, and commanded by a man he had once thought of as a friend as well as almost a brother.
So he had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle.
He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight. His success had amazed him, as it had others, probably not least Elethiomel, but now, poised on the brink of victory – perhaps – he just did not know what to do.