The warrior's apprentice (2 page)

Precious seconds would be wasted climbing down like some arthritic little old lady—perhaps if he hit the ground rolling—the proctor was staring—Kostolitz had already reached the next obstacle—Miles jumped.

Time seemed to stretch itself, as he plummeted toward the sand, especially to allow him the full sick savor of his mistake. He hit the sand with the familiar shattering crack.

And sat, blinking stupidly at the pain. He would not cry out—at least, the detached observer in the back of his brain commented sardonically, you can’t blame it on the brace—this time you’ve managed to break both of them.

His legs began to swell and discolor, mottled white and flushed. He pulled himself along until they were stretched out straight, and bent over a moment, hiding his face in his knees. Face buried, he permitted himself one silent rictus scream. He did not swear. The vilest terms he knew seemed wholly inadequate to the occasion.

The proctor, awakening to the fact that he was not going to stand up, started toward him. Miles pulled himself across the sand, out of the path of the next pair of candidates, and waited patiently for Bothari.

He had all the time in the world, now.

Miles decided he definitely didn’t like the new antigrav crutches, even though they were worn invisibly inside his clothing. They gave his walk a slithery uncertainty that made him feel spastic. He would have preferred a good old-fashioned stick, or better yet a swordstick like Captain Koudelka’s that one could drive into the ground with a satisfying thunk at each step, as if spearing some suitable enemy—Kostolitz, for example. He paused to gather his balance before tackling the steps to Vorkosigan House.

Minute particles in their worn granite scintillated warmly in the autumn morning light, in spite of the industrial haze that hung over the capital city of Vorbarr Sultana. A racket from farther down the street marked where a similar mansion was being demolished to make way for a modern building. Miles glanced up to the high-rise directly across the street; a figure moved against the roofline. The battlements had changed, but the watchful soldiers still stalked along them.

Bothari, looming silently beside him, bent suddenly to retrieve a lost coin from the walkway. He placed it carefully in his left pocket. The dedicated pocket.

One corner of Miles’s mouth lifted, and his eyes warmed with amusement. “Still the dowry?”

“Of course,” said Bothari serenely. His voice was deep bass, monotonous in cadence. One had to know him a long time to interpret its expressionlessness. Miles knew every minute variation in its timbre as a man knows his own room in the dark.

“You’ve been pinching tenth-marks for Elena as long as I can remember. Dowries went out with the horse cavalry, for God’s sake. Even the Vor marry without them these days. This isn’t the Time of Isolation.” Miles made his mockery gentle in tone, carefully fitted to Bothari’s obsession. Bothari, after all, had always treated Miles’s ridiculous craze seriously.

“I mean her to have everything right and proper.”

“You ought to have enough saved up to buy Gregor Vorbarra by now,” said Miles, thinking of the hundreds of small economies his bodyguard had practiced before him, over the years, for the sake of his daughter’s dowry.

“Shouldn’t joke about the Emperor.” Bothari depressed this random stab at humor firmly, as it deserved. Miles sighed and began to work his way cautiously up the steps, legs stiff in their plastic immobilizers.

The painkillers he’d taken before he’d left the military infirmary were beginning to wear off. He felt unutterably weary. The night had been a sleepless one, sitting up under local anesthetics, talking and joking with the surgeon as he puttered endlessly, piecing the minute shattered fragments of bone back together like an unusually obstreperous jigsaw puzzle. I put on a pretty good show, Miles reassured himself; but he longed to get off stage and collapse. Just a couple more acts to go.

“What kind of fellow are you planning to shop for?” Miles probed delicately during a pause in his climb.

“An officer,” Bothari said firmly.

Miles’s smile twisted. So that’s the pinnacle of your ambition, too, Sergeant? he inquired silently. “Not too soon, I trust.”

Bothari snorted. “Of course not. She’s only...” He paused, the creases deepening between his narrow eyes. “Time’s gone by...” his mutter trailed off.

Miles negotiated the steps successfully, and entered Vorkosigan House, bracing for relatives. The first was to be his mother, it seemed; that was no problem. She appeared at the foot of the great staircase in the front hall as the door was opened for him by a uniformed servant-cum-guard. Lady Vorkosigan was a middle-aged woman, the fiery red of her hair quenched by natural grey, her height neatly disguising a few extra kilos weight. She was breathing a bit heavily; probably had run downstairs when he was spotted approaching. They exchanged a brief hug. Her eyes were grave and unjudgemental.

“Father here?” he asked.

“No. He and Minister Quintillian are down at headquarters, arm-wrestling with the General Staff about their budget this morning. He said to give you his love and tell you he’d try to be here for lunch.”

“He, ah—hasn’t told Grandfather about yesterday yet, has he?”

“No—I really think you should have let him, though. It’s been rather awkward this morning.”

“I’ll bet.” He gazed up at the stairs. It was more than his bad legs that made them seem mountainous. Well, let’s get the worst over with first... “Upstairs, is he?”

“In his rooms. Although he actually took a walk in the garden this morning, I’m glad to say.”

“Mm.” Miles started working his way upstairs.

“Lift tube,” said Bothari.

“Oh, hell, it’s only one flight.”

“Surgeon said you’re to stay off them as much as possible.”

Miles’s mother awarded Bothari an approving smile, which he acknowledged blandly with a murmured, “Mi-lady.” Miles shrugged grudgingly and headed for the back of the house instead.

“Miles,” said his mother as he passed, “don’t, ah... He’s very old, he’s not too well, and he hasn’t had to be polite to anybody in years—just take him on his own terms, all right?’

“You know I do.” He grinned ironically, to prove how unaffected he proposed to be. Her lips curved in return, but her eyes remained grave.

He met Elena Bothari, coming out of his grandfather’s chambers. His bodyguard greeted his daughter with a silent nod, and won for himself one of her rather shy smiles.

For the thousandth time Miles wondered how such an ugly man could have produced such a beautiful daughter. Every one of his features was echoed in her face, but richly transmuted. At eighteen she was tall, like her father, fully six feet to his six-and-a-half; but while he was whipcord lean and tense, she was slim and vibrant. His nose a beak, hers an elegant aquiline profile; his face too narrow, hers with the air of some perfectlybred aristocratic sight-hound, a borzoi or a greyhound. Perhaps it was the eyes that made the difference; hers were dark and lustrous, alert, but without his constantly shifting, unsmiling watchfulness. Or the hair; his greying, clipped in his habitual military burr, hers long, dark, straight-shining. A gargoyle and a saint, by the same sculptor, facing each other across some ancient cathedral portal.

Miles shook himself from his trance. Her eyes met his briefly, and her smile faded. He straightened up from his tired slouch and produced a false smile for her, hoping to lure her real one back. Not too soon. Sergeant . . .

“Oh, good, I’m so glad you’re here,” she greeted him. “It’s been gruesome this morning.”

“Has he been crotchety?”

“No, cheerful. Playing Strat-O with me and paying no attention—do you know, I almost beat him? Telling his war stories and wondering about you—if he’d had a map of your course, he’d have been sticking pins in it to

mark your imaginary progress... I don’t have to stay, do I?”

“No, of course not.”

Elena twitched a relieved smile at him, and trailed off down the corridor, casting one disquieted look back over her shoulder.

Miles took a breath, and stepped across General Count Piotr Vorkosigan’s inner threshold.

CHAPTER TWO

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The old man was out of bed, shaved and crisply dressed for the day. He sat up in a chair, gazing pensively out the window overlooking his back garden. He glanced up with a frown at the interrupter of his meditations, saw that it was Miles, and smiled broadly.

“Ah, come, boy...” He gestured at the chair Miles guessed Elena had recently vacated. The old man’s smile became tinged with puzzlement. “By God, have I lost a day somewhere? I thought this was the day you were out on that 100 kilometer trot up and down Mt. Sencele.”

“No, sir, you haven’t lost a day.” Miles eased into the chair. Bothari set another before him and pointed at his feet. Miles started to lift them, but the effort was sabotaged by a particularly savage twinge of pain. “Yeah, put ‘em up. Sergeant,” Miles acquiesced wearily. Bothari helped him place the offending feet at the medically correct angle and withdrew, strategically Miles thought, to stand at attention by the door. The old Count watched this pantomime, understanding dawning painfully in his face.

“What have you done, boy?” he sighed.

Let’s make it quick and painless, like a beheading... “Jumped off a wall in the obstacle course yesterday and broke both my legs. Washed myself out of the physical tests completely. The others—well, they don’t matter now.”

“So you came home.”

“So I came home.”

“Ah.” The old man drummed his long gnarled fingers once on the arm of the chair. “Ah.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and thinned his lips, staring out the window, not looking at Miles. His fingers drummed again. “It’s all the fault of this damned creeping democratism,” he burst out querulously. “A lot of imported off-planet nonsense. Your father did not do Barrayar a service to encourage it. He had a fine opportunity to stamp it out when he was Regent—which he wasted totally, as far as I can see...” he trailed off. “In love with off-planet notions, off-planet women,” he echoed himself more faintly. “I blame your mother, you know. Always pushing that egalitarian tripe...”

“Oh, come on,” Miles was stirred to object. “Mother’s as apolitical as you can get and still be conscious and walking around.”

“Thank God, or she’d be running Barrayar today. I’ve never seen your father cross her yet. Well, well, it could have been worse...” The old man shifted again, twisting in his pain of spirit as Miles had in his pain of body.

Miles lay in his chair, making no effort to defend the issue or himself. The Count could be trusted to argue himself down, taking both parts, in a little time.

“We must bend with the times, I suppose. We must all bend with the times. Shopkeepers’ sons are great soldiers, now. God knows, I commanded a few in my day. Did I ever tell you about the fellow, when we were fighting the Cetagandans up in the Dendarii Mountains back behind Vorkosigan Surleau—best guerilla lieutenant I ever had. I wasn’t much older than you, then. He killed more Cetagandans that year... His father had been a tailor. A tailor, back when it was all cut and stitched by hand, hunched over all the little detailing...” He sighed for the irretrievable past. “What was the fellow’s name...”

“Tesslev,” supplied Miles. He raised his eyebrows quizzically at his feet. Perhaps I shall be a tailor, then. I’m built for it. But they’re as obsolete as Counts, now.

“Tesslev, yes, that was it. He died horribly when they

caught his patrol. Brave man, brave man...” Silence fell between them for a time.

The old Count spotted a straw, and clutched at it. “Was the test fairly administered? You never know, these days—some plebian with a personal ax to grind...”

Miles shook his head, and moved quickly to cut this fantasy down before it had a chance to grow and flower. “Quite fair. It was me. I let myself get rattled, didn’t pay attention to what I was doing. I failed because I wasn’t good enough. Period.”

The old man twisted his lips in sour negation. His hand closed angrily, and opened hopelessly. “In the old days no one would have dared question your right...”

“In the old days the cost of my incompetence would have been paid in other men’s lives. This is more efficient, I believe.” Miles’s voice was flat.

“Well...” the old man stared unseeingly out the window. “Well—times change. Barrayar has changed. It underwent a world of change between the time I was ten and the time I was twenty. And another between the time I was twenty and forty. Nothing was the same... And another between the time I was forty and eighty. This weak, degenerate generation—even their sins are watered down. The old pirates of my father’s day could have eaten them all for breakfast and digested their bones before lunch... Do you know, I shall be the first Count Vorkosigan to die in bed in nine generations?” He paused, gaze still fixed, and whispered half to himself, “God, I’ve grown weary of change. The very thought of enduring another new world dismays me. Dismays me.”

“Sir,” said Miles gently.

The old man looked up quickly. “Not your fault, boy, not your fault. You were caught in the wheels of change and chance just like the rest of us. It was pure chance, that the assassin chose that particular poison to try and kill your father. He wasn’t even aiming for your mother. You’ve done well despite it. We—we just expected too much of you, that’s all. Let no one say you have not done well.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The silence lengthened unbearably. The room was growing warm. Miles’s head ached from lack of sleep, and he felt nauseous from the combination of hunger and medications. He clambered awkwardly to his feet. “If you’ll excuse me, sir...”

The old man waved a hand in dismissal. “Yes, you must have things to do...” He paused again, and looked at Miles quizzically. “What are you going to do now? It seems very strange to me. We have always been Vor, the warriors, even when war changed with the rest of it...”

He looked so shrunken, down in his chair. Miles pulled himself together into a semblance of cheerfulness. “Well, you know, there’s always the other aristocratic line to fall back on. If I can’t be a Service grunt, I’ll be a town clown. I plan to be a famous epicure and lover of women. More fun than soldiering any day.”

His grandfather fell in with his humor. “Yes, I always envied the breed—go to, boy...” He smiled, but Miles felt it was as forced as his own. It was a lie anyway— “drone” was a swear word in the old man’s vocabulary. Miles collected Bothari and made his own escape.

Miles sat hunched in a battered armchair in a small private parlor overlooking the street side of the great old mansion, feet up, eyes closed. It was a seldom used room; there was a good chance of being left alone to brood in peace. He had never come to a more complete halt, a drained blankness numb even to pain. So much passion expended for nothing—a lifetime of nothing stretching endlessly into the future—because of a split second’s stupid, angry self-consciousness...

There was a throat-clearing noise behind him, and a diffident voice; “Hi, Miles.”

His eyes flicked open, and he felt suddenly a little less like a wounded animal hiding in its hole. “Elena! I gather you came up from Vorkosigan Surleau with Mother last night. Come on in.”

She perched near him on the arm of another chair. “Yes, she knows what a treat it is for me to come to the capital. I almost feel like she’s my mother, sometimes.”

“Tell her that. It would please her.”

“Do you really think so?” she asked shyly.

“Absolutely.” He shook himself into alertness. Perhaps not a totally empty future...

She chewed gently on her lower lip, large eyes drinking in his face. “You look absolutely smashed.”

He would not bleed on Elena. He banished his blackness in self-mockery, leaning back expansively and grinning. “Literally. Too true. I’ll get over it. You, ah—heard all about it, I suppose.”

“Yes. Did, um, it go all right with my lord Count?”

“Oh, sure. I’m the only grandson he’s got, after all. Puts me in an excellent position—I can get away with anything.”

“Did he ask you about changing your name?”

He stared. “What?”

“To the usual patronymic. He’d been talking about, when you—oh.” She cut herself off, but Miles caught the full import of her half revelation.

“Oh, ho—when I became an officer, was he finally planning to break down and allow me my heir’s names? Sweet of him—seventeen years after the fact.” He stifled a sick anger beneath an ironic grin.

“I never understood what that was all about.”

“What, my name—Miles Naismith, after my mother’s father, instead of Piotr Miles, after both? It all goes back to that uproar when I was born. Apparently, after my parents had recovered from the soltoxin gas and they found out what the fetal damage was going to be—I’m not supposed to know this, by the way—Grandfather was all for an abortion. Got in a big fight with my parents—well, with Mother, I suppose, and Father caught in the middle—and when my father backed her up and faced him down, he got huffy and asked his name not be given me. He calmed down later, when he found I wasn’t a total disaster.” He smirked, and drummed his fingers on the chair arm. “So he was thinking of swallowing his words, was he? Perhaps it’s just as well I washed out. He might have choked.” He closed his teeth on further bitterness, and wished he could call back his last speech. No point in being more ugly in front of Elena than he already was.

“I know how hard you studied for it. I—I’m sorry.”

He feigned a surface humor. “Not half as sorry as I am. I wish you could have taken my physicals. Between us we’d make a hell of an officer.”

Something of the old frankness they had shared as children escaped her lips suddenly. “Yes, but by Barrayaran standards I’m more handicapped than you—I’m female. I wouldn’t even be permitted to petition to take the tests.”

His eyebrows lifted in wry agreement. “I know. Absurd. With what your father’s taught you, all you’d need is a course in heavy weapons and you could roll right over nine-tenths of the fellows I saw out there. Think of it—Sergeant Elena Bothari.”

She chilled. “Now you’re teasing.”

“Just speaking as one civilian to another,” he halfapologized.

She nodded dark agreement, then brightened with remembered purpose. “Oh. Your mother sent me to get you for lunch.”

“Ah.” He pushed himself to his feet with a sibilant grunt. “There’s an officer no one disobeys. The Admiral’s Captain.”

Elena smiled at the image. “Yes. Now, she was an officer for the Betans, and no one thinks she’s strange, or criticizes her for wanting to break the rules.”

“On the contrary. She’s so strange nobody even thinks of trying to include her in the rules. She just goes on doing things her own way.”

“I wish I were Betan,” said Elena glumly.

“Oh, make no mistake—she’s strange by Betan standards, too. Although I think you would like Beta Colony, parts of it,” he mused.

“I’ll never get off planet.”

He eyed her sapiently. “What’s got you down?”

She shrugged. “Oh, well, you know my father. He’s such a conservative. He ought to have been born two hundred years ago. You’re the only person I know who doesn’t think he’s weird. He’s so paranoid.”

“I know—but it’s a very useful quality in a bodyguard. His pathological suspiciousness has saved my life twice.”

“You should have been born two hundred years ago, too.”

“No, thanks. I’d have been slain at birth.”

“Well, there is that,” she admitted. “Anyway, just out of the blue this morning he started talking about arranging my marriage.”

Miles stopped abruptly, and glanced up at her. “Really. What did he say?”

“Not much,” she shrugged. “He just mentioned it. I wish—I don’t know. I wish my mother were alive.”

“Ah. Well... There’s always my mother, if you want somebody to talk to. Or—or me. You can talk to me, can’t you?”

She smiled gratefully. “Thanks.” They came to the stairs. She paused; he waited.

“He never talks about my mother anymore, you know? Hasn’t since I was about twelve. He used to tell me long stories—well, long for him—about her. I wonder if he’s beginning to forget her.”

“I shouldn’t think so. I see him more than you do. He’s never so much as looked at another woman,” Miles offered reassuringly.

They started down the stairs. His aching legs did not move properly; he had to do a kind of penguin shuffle to achieve the steps. He glanced up at Elena self-consciously, and grasped the rail firmly.

“Shouldn’t you be taking the lift tube?” she asked suddenly, watching his uncertain placement of his feet.

Don’t you start treating me like a cripple, too... He glanced down the railing’s gleaming helix. “They told me to stay off my legs. Didn’t specify how . . .” He hopped up on the bannister, and shot her a wicked grin over his shoulder.

Her face reflected mixed amusement and horror. “Miles, you lunatic! If you fall off that, you’ll break every bone in your body—”

He slid away from her, picking up speed rapidly. She cantered down the stairs after him, laughing; he lost

her around the curvature. His grin died as he saw what awaited him at the bottom. “On, hell...” He was going too fast to brake...