The Three-Cornered War| Chapter | F | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
The Three-Cornered War
Having their son at home had been a strange experience for them. As a boy, he’d been considered marginally retarded. Big, fat, and dumb, his schoolmates had put it. But seldom to his face, because violent could easily have been added. Not that he’d been truculent. Actually he’d been self-effacing, tried to go unnoticed. But when he was angered, his big fists flew. It was that which, soon after his seventeenth birthday, had taken him from public school to reformatory.
Now he stood in their living room, bigger than ever but hardbodied. And even to them, charismatic! At age twenty-six, he was by far the Confederation’s most famous military figure in centuries. Not in the army, but commanding the 1st Special Projects Regiment, the glamorous White T’swa. Still a teenager, he’d led the defense of Terfreya. Then the regiment’s survivors had dropped out of sight for a few years, completing their training on other worlds.
Seeing him again, his mother was almost unable to speak. Her love for him, her only child, had been blunted only occasionally by his troubles at school. Despite her usual meekness, she’d defended him as best she could, even against a father who had problems of his own. A worrier who sometimes attacked his son with abusive mouth, and less often with his hands, a troubled man who’d tried but too often failed. Whose saving grace was appreciation of his wife’s goodness, an awareness that kept him from abusing her physically, and for the most part verbally.
Now Artus’s calm, self-assured presence awed them. Years earlier they’d seen action videos of the guerrilla war he’d led on Terfreya. Now news television was showing cubeage of the defense of Smolen, in the forests of distant Maragor. They’d viewed a column of crude sleighs, loaded with munitions and supplies. The gaunt horses pulling them were coated with rime from their own breath. They’d watched other people’s sons die in battle. Watched their own son, a large and imposing total stranger, leading a file of deadly White T’swa on skis.
To those who’d known him only as a kid, it was unreal. And more unreal to have him there live, a smiling man who seemed even larger than he was. At the terminal, he’d hugged first his mother, then his father. The hug had startled Darlek Romlar, and triggered guilt. There were no cameras standing by—only his parents had known he was coming—and Artus wore casual civilian clothes. To better ensure privacy, he’d arrived on a routine government courier flight.
He’d had few friends in school, but on the second day he’d visited two of them, and two of his old teachers who had treated him with sensitivity. The visits blew his privacy, of course, and that evening he was respectfully contacted by local television, which was, of course, government controlled. He put them off, scheduling them for his last day there. On the third day he’d taken his parents for a two-day trip to Cobalt Lake, and the Great Cascade of the Alvslekk. There they’d seen the sights from a horse-drawn carriage, and eaten in fine restaurants. His mother adored him, while silently worrying about the cost. His father began to feel more comfortable with him.
Lotta had stayed at Landfall. The Iryalan culture did not require that fiancés and fiancées be approved by, or even meet their prospective in-laws. And on the job there was always more needing her personal attention than she had time for.
They were married the day after Artus returned. On Iryala, weddings were personal and intimate. Thus the reception was small but elegant; Lord Kristal had paid for it. The regiment was widely scattered on leave, and few even knew of it. A dozen attended. Colonel Voker had flown in from the Blue Forest Military Reservation, along with his T’swa counterpart, Dak-So. The T’swa colonel was larger than Artus, his scarred black face set off strikingly by his white dress scarf.
Sir Varlik Lormagen was also there, with his wife and their son Kusu. Kusu was OSP’s Director of Research and Development, while Varlik had been the original "White T’swi." He’d served as correspondent with the T’swa Red Scorpion Regiment, in the Technite War on Kettle, more than thirty years earlier. The concept of T’swa-trained Iryalan regiments had originated with him.
After the reception, the newlyweds left on the traditional "love trip," five days on the coast, alone at a guest cottage on Lormagen beach property.
That evening, after a swim in a backwater pool, they sat on a split-log bench beneath a darkening sky, holding hands, and watching the surf crash on massive basalt. The first stars were appearing in the east. Artus chuckled.
"A beautiful day," he said, and grinned down at the woman beside him. "Who’d have imagined? It’s quite a world, at least for its luckiest man."
"Artus," she answered, "luck is made, more often than not. Remind me to give you my advanced lecture on ‘the parts of man.’ "
"Parts of man?" he said. "If you’ll give me a lecture, I’ll give you a demonstration."
She jabbed him with an elbow. "That’s not one of the parts I referred to." She got to her feet, then sat astride his lap, leaning against him, her face close to his. "Although if you’re up to it again . . ." she purred.
| Chapter | F | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
