Hal went out, picking up the utensils of Amid's lunch as he went. These reminded him that he, himself, had not yet eaten today. When he got to the nearest of the dormitory kitchens, he found it, now in the early afternoon, almost empty. He ate a quick lunch and went on, out to the circle. There were only two people waiting there, a thin, tall, elderly man named Dans, with dark brown eyes that always seemed to give him a stare, and a small, athletic young woman with blond hair, known as Trekka. "I think duty took you out of your normal turn, Friend," said Dans. "Trekka's first, but would you care to go before me?" "Before me, as well, Friend," said Trekka.
Hal grinned at them. "No, you don't," said Hal. "I can get put in your debt like that once, but I'm too clever to be caught twice. I'll follow Dans. "
As it turned out, however, several of those currently walking were very close to the point where they wanted to stop. Hal and the other two were all walking the circle within five minutes of his arrival.
As always, when he began this, Hal shed his concern with daily matters as he would drop a winter cloak after stepping into a building's warmth. There was nothing special about the circle to facilitate this, or even anything metaphysical about it, since he had been able to do it since childhood. It was no more than the extent to which anyone lets go of their pattern of directed thoughts, when he or she slips off into daydreams.
But on this occasion, the urgency of the possible coming search by the troops and its attendant problems may have lingered a little in his consciousness and directed the otherwise free flight of his mind, for he found it once more occupied with the passage from Cletus Grahame's work on tactics and strategy that he had called up from memory in his reconnaissance below. Once more he felt tugging at him the feeling that there was more to the passage than he had read off the printed page in his memory.
Now, freed by the movement and voices of the circle to go seeking, he traced down the source of that feeling. He was a boy again, the boy Donal, back on Dorsai. There, in the big, shelf-walled library of Graemehouse, filled with old-fashioned books of printed and bound paper, there had been a number of large boxes on one shelf which had held the original manuscript of Cletus's writings. As the boy Donal, once he had mastered reading, which he had done so early that he could not remember when he had first started to read, anything written was to be gobbled wholesale.
Those had been the days when he could so lose himself in reading that he could be called to dinner by someone literally standing at his side, and not hear the voice of whoever it was.
During that period of his life he had ended up reading, along with everything else that was there to be read in Graemehouse, the manuscript version of Cletus's work. It had been handwritten on the grayish-white, locally made Dorsai paper, and here and there, there had been corrections and additions made in the lines. In particular, in certain spots whole passages had been crossed out. Notes had not been made by Cletus on the manuscript, usually, when such a passage was deleted, and Hal had often played with trying to figure out why his great-great-grandfather had decided not to include it. In the case of the neatly exed out section of the remarks on terrain, the note in the margin had said - "of utility only for a minority of readers."
Of utility only to a minority? Why? Hal had puzzled over that reason, set down in the time-faded, pale blue ink of Cletus's round handwriting. He remembered going into the office which had been Cletus's to begin with, and that of the head of the family ever since, and sitting down in the hard, adult-sized, wooden swivel chair at the desk there, to try it by imitating Cletus as Cletus had worked, he could divine the meaning of the note.
Why only a minority of readers? As a boy, the phrase had seemed to threaten to shut Hal out. What if he would be among the majority who would not understand it'? He had read the deleted passage carefully and found nothing in it that could conceivably be useful, but there was, unfortunately, no way for him to test himself with its information in practice until he was grown up and an officer, himself, facing a specific terrain to be dealt with.
He had not even asked any of his elders about the passage, afraid that their answer would confirm his fear that he might be among those who could not use what Cletus had originally planned to include in his work.
Later on, when as Donal he had been grown up and an officer in fact, the deleted passage had become so deeply buried in his memory that he had almost forgotten it, and, in any case, by that time he had evolved intuitional logic, which in every way that he could see did all and more that Cletus's passage had promised.
The deleted passage itself was short and simple enough. Now, walking the circle, Hal had left awareness of the ledge and the Chantry Guild far behind, and he found himself, as in the earlier case with Sir John Hawkwood, being both Cletus, seated at his desk and writing that passage, and someone watching the slim, unremarkable man with his sleeves rolled up, writing away.
"If, having fully surveyed and understood the terrain," the deleted passage had read, "the officer will concentrate on it, resurveying it in memory, and imagining enemy troops or his own moving across it, eventually he will find the image in his mind changing from a concept to a vision. For the purposes of which I write, there is a great difference between the two - as any great painter can attest. A concept is the object or scene imagined in three dimensions and as fully as is humanly possible. But it remains a creature of the mind of the one imagining it. It is, in a sense, connected with the mind that created it. But a completed mental picture, once brought into existence, has an existence entirely separate from the one who conceived it. A painter - and I speak as a failed painter, myself - can point anything he has conceptualized, adapting or improving it as he wishes. But with a completed mental picture it will have acquired a life of its own. To make it otherwise, even in the smallest degree, would be to destroy the truth of it. He has no choice but to point it as it exists, which may be greater than, or different from, his original concept. I would guess that the same phenomenon occurs in the case of the writers of fiction, when they speak of the story as taking control of itself, taking itself away from the author. Such situations in which a character, for example, in effect refuses to be, say, or do what the author originally intended, and insists that he or she will be, say or do something else instead. "As painters and authors come to have such completed mental pictures and learn to trust them, instead of holding to their original conceptualizations, so effective field officer must learn to trust his own tactical or strategic visions, when then, develop from his best conceptualization of a military situation. In some way, more of the mind, spirit and capability of the human having the vision seems to be involved with the problem, and the vision is always therefore greater than the mere conceptualization. "For example: in the case of the management of available terrain, the officer may find the ground he has surveyed apparently hanging in midair, in miniature, like a solid thing before him, and he will be able to watch as the enemy forces, and his own, move across it. Further, as he watches it, these envisioned characters may create before him just the tactical movements that he needs to bring about the result he desires. "This is an ability of almost invaluable use, but it requires concentration, practice and belief, to develop it. The crossed-out section ended.