After retrieving the Albian-Setetic translation manual for the princess as she’d requested, Roskvir decided to give her a wide berth for the next few days. He avoided her chamber as much he could, and Hildr and her ladies-in-waiting followed suit at his request: they would accompany him when he needed to visit, and stopped by twice more daily for matters of safety, but otherwise left the child to her own devices.

  He couldn’t imagine not being bored out of his mind, in her shoes. And he thought it almost certainly impossible that she would really be able to learn much from the manual, given that it was written for the instruction of Albian officers on the translation of Albian to Setetic, not the other way around. But it was clear the princess didn’t want the slightest thing to do with any of them.

  So Roskvir instead spent his time behind a desk, trying to brush up his own skills with the native language of that land. The new office he’d received near that of the shogun was well-suited for studying, and so he thought he might try making up for lost time.

  Even over the course of days, though, his progress had remained glacial. His mind just wasn’t suited to the comprehension of new languages, or so he was beginning to understand. The most basic grammatical rules eluded him, as if mastering one forced all the others back out of his head.

  On the second day of almost uninterrupted study, he felt as though even the pace of a glacier would be overstating his progress, as he embarrassed himself with yet another short exercise labeled ‘introductory.’

  He read the text of the section aloud, as if that would make its meaning clearer. In fact, it had the opposite effect, the noise of his own words splitting his concentration.

  His stomach grumbled, as if in exasperated reply to the foreign nonsense-sounds. One hand of his office wall clock advanced with a conspicuous tick. He’d been stuck on that section for almost two hours.

  He sighed. For all its unpleasantness, the battlefield was at least straightforward. He was good at it. Not like… whatever it was, that was in front of him. The type of work for diplomats and ambassadors.

  And neither did he feel particularly suited to the task of nannying petulant children, he thought to himself.

  How did I find myself here?

  The past few weeks felt blurred and indistinct.

  His stomach grumbled again. Enough was enough.

  He stood for his coat in a huff, tossing the manual onto his desk. But it as if taunted him, from where it lay splayed on his desk, forcing him to pause with one foot out the door.

  He wondered if the child might’ve been reading the same book at that very moment. Certainly, he would at least be much more capable than any child when it came to grasping such abstract concepts as foreign grammar… right?

  The rational part of him knew that should be true. But he wasn’t sure he believed it. He was really quite terrible at languages.

  And the child, so strange.

  The trip from his office to the Tanngnjostr’s bow canteen was no small journey, on that behemoth warship. But spurred on by hunger and frustrated energy, he made good time, and caught the lunch meal preparations still being served as he arrived. Selecting a metal tray from the stack of cleaned ones, he slid it along the counter, forgoing the trouble of demonstrating his rank in order to get special officer’s rations. He’d never much cared to receive more than ration meat and bread.

  After the cook slopped the last spoonful of gray meat onto his tray, he turned to survey the canteen. A waving hand caught his eye, while scanning the rows of benches and tables for a spot.

  Roskvir slotted himself down onto the bench beside the man who’d waved him over, setting his tray across from a second old companion.

  “Englihavt!” Dalgrandr slapped Rosvkir's shoulder as he sat down. “All those promotions haven’t made you forget where you came from, then?”

  Roskvir smiled, spearing a slice of gray meat with his fork.

  “Oh, it hasn’t been that long. And I’ve only technically had the one promotion. I’m on a probationary period for the next, currently.”

  “Still humble, I see!” grinned Dalgrandr. “Well, everyone in the old company knows you deserve it. Damn, it's good to see you still kicking. But, maybe it just feels longer than it's really been.”

  Roskvir chewed his first bite. The rations tasted bland, but he sort of liked that about it.

  “To tell you the truth, We all thought your career was over after your first promotion. To that bitch, Taerfoer’s platoon,” Dalgrandr went on.

  The man across the table, Svansel, made a religious gesture across his chest at Thjali’s mention.

  “It wasn’t all bad,” Roskvir lied, hoping not to dwell on the subject. “Good experience, really. Not every officer you two’ll serve under will be the most… agreeable.”

  “But of course, you’d say that, Englihavt. Disagreeable’s one thing. The vizeadmiral’s another,” said Dalgrandr, losing some of his joviality. “We’ve all heard the stories. Come now, it's not like you owe her any favors… do you?”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Roskvir looked around, then leaned in, as if to tell a secret.

  “Yeah, well, to tell you the truth,” he said, “— and this was by no means a rare opinion, among her officers — often, I’d catch myself wondering how much better things might be, if she ever ended up getting a taste of her own medicine. Have someone a step above assign her to some ‘high attrition zone, for once.”

  Svansel’s eyes widened.

  But Dalgrandr slapped Roskvir on the back harder than before, bursting into laughter.

  “Who is this man, who’s replaced leutnant Englihavt and taken his place?” Between guffaws, he exaggerated his surprise with a hand over his open mouth. “Insubordination from our Roskvir? I would’ve never—!”

  “So, how has this place treated the two of you, so far?” asked Roskvir, as soon as he caught a lull in Dalgrandr’s laughter. He hoped to steer the conversation in a new direction, if possible.

  “Oh, well, we were over the ocean for so long that I was just happy to stretch my legs on solid ground for once, back after our first landing,” said Dalgrandr. “That’s basically what it was, anyway. A nice leisurely stroll. At least as far as the old company was concerned. Didn’t even raise my rifle the whole time I was on the ground.”

  Dalgrandr raised his drink to that, then took in a long draught. Roskvir looked to Svansel.

  The other man wavered. When at last he answered, he was even more soft-spoken than Roskvir remembered.

  “2nd Artillery hadn’t much to do in the landings. Wasn’t any counterbattery fire needed. We were told the marines swept through everything too fast for there to be any large concentrations to disrupt,” Svansel explained. “So, my company just assisted the military police until we left. Got close to some natives.”

  “Oh?” Dalgrandr paused with his fork halfway to his mouth “I barely got a good look at any of them before shipping out again. What we heard in the briefings… is that really how they all look?”

  Svansel nodded.

  “Some of them, just like the briefings. Worse, even. Like manure.”

  “Some of them, only?” Dalgrandr asked.

  “Some of them just look tanned, like a farm worker gets in the summer. But the darkest — they look like… like… crust you find at the bottom of the oven. Soot black,” Svansel nodded. "But that's just looks. All of them seemed simple, not just the darker ones. More than I’d expected, even for foreigners.”

  Roskvir stopped chewing.

  “Yeah, dim and docile, in my experience” said Dalgrandr. “I assisted the military police for a while back on the first day, and we all had a time of it, getting their civilians into camps. It was like herding sheep.“

  “Quite dim,” agreed Svansel. “But it's not that surprising, I suppose. The rumor is, before we landed? They thought they were alone. The only society in the whole world. That all else was ocean. And of course, like I said, we didn’t have need of counterbattery fire because they don’t have field guns at all. They figured out gunpowder, but not to put it into a gun bigger than a soldier’s rifle. Or to have any other real fortifications in a city that big, of such importance.”

  “I heard from a friend I’ve got, in the 8th Grenadiers, that they fight like cowards. Because they’ve no habit of it, isolated as they’ve been,” added Dalgrandr. “Is that true?”

  Svansel shrugged.

  “Your company saw some real action, didn’t it, Englihavt? Is that part true, from what you saw? Do they fight like cowards?”

  At that, Roskvir remembered.

  However much against his will, he remembered.

  One morning, not more than a week before.

  He remembered just how cowardly the natives of the land had been, not a week previous, when they’d fought to the last man atop that hill, before the great library.

  Fighting, and dying, to the very last.

  Defending the safety of their charge, he thought. In the forecourt of the library he’d then burnt to the ground.

  And he remembered many other days, longer past.

  Previous campaigns in different lands. Other faces, mangled in fear and pain. Crying faces, pleading faces. The feeling of a sjael, not a meter from him. A person’s manifest will to fight, to carry on: flickering, fading, then gone. Its wielder impaled on the end of his totem blade.

  He chewed again, slowly, staring at the table. Then swallowed the tasteless chunk of ration meat.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking up at last. “Like cowards.”

  “Thought as much,” said Dalgrandr. “Takes brains to care about more than just the next day’s bread, about king and country. To care enough to be brave. If what you’re saying is right,” he gestured to Svansel, “then it figures.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Roskvir did nothing to carry the conversation, and the other two seemed happy just to eat.

  For a while, the loud ambience of the canteen grew louder around them. The indistinct blend of other conversations filled the space with a sort of white noise that helped Roskvir regain his balance.

  “Do either of you… have any children?” Roskvir asked his two old comrades.

  Dalgrandr snorted.

  “Not unless Berta’s been up to no good, while I’ve been away, no,” he said.

  Svansel paused, then reached into his coat to produce a small metal locket.

  The portrait of a woman was inlaid on one side of the inner casing. On the other was a child, three or four years old. As he held it up to their gazes, the keepsake shook in Svansel’s unsteady hand.

  “Ah,” said Roskvir, studying the pictures.

  After a moment, Svansel returned the locket to his coat. Dalgrandr returned to the last bits of his ration tray.

  “Why do you ask?” said Svansel.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Roskvir lied. “I was going to ask what you might do when they, you know, misbehave. Throw a tantrum.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Svansel smiled. “My wife takes care of all the matters with the children, even when I have time back home to stay with them. I suppose… my father used to use the belt with me, when I was young. But he was rather merciful about it, still. And I don’t think I could ever go even that far with my boy, even when he’s older.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Roskvir considered the man across the table, then returned his nod.

  Pushing around the last bits of slop on his tray, he decided he didn’t need to finish them. He stood from the table, again nodding to both men.

  “Well, thanks for lunch. I better be going, though. The big brass will want me to be on top of things.”

  “Busy man,” said Dalgrandr.

  “I’ll be seeing you two, then.”

  They both raised a hand in farewell.

  “It was great to see you, Englihavt. Great to see that you haven’t changed,” added Dalgrandr.

  Roskvir managed a smile.

  “Of course."

  "We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.”

  Alistair MacLean