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.
More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honour and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity. To acknowledge the interest millions of other people had in whatever happened here was to place too great a burden on him; it would be to admit, by implication, that he was at least partially responsible for the deaths already of hundreds of thousands, even if nobody else could have fought more humanely.
So he waited; held back the commanders and the squadron leaders, and waited for Elethiomel to reply to his signals.
The two other commanders said nothing. He put out the lights in the car, un-shuttered the doors, and looked out at the dark mass of the forest, racing past under dull dawn skies the colour of steel.
They moved past dim bunkers, dark trenches, still figures, stopped trucks, sunken tanks, taped windows, hooded guns, raised poles, grey clearings, wrecked buildings and slitted lamps; all the paraphernalia of the outskirts of the headquarters camp. He watched it all and wished — as they moved closer to the centre, to the old castle that had become his home in all but name over the last couple of months — he wished that he did not have to stop, and could just go on driving through the dawn and the day and the night again forever, cleaving the finally unyielding trees towards nothing and nowhere and no-one — even if it was in an icy silence — secure in the nadir of his sufferings, perversely content that at least now they could grow no worse; just to go on and on and never have to stop and make decisions that would not wait but which might mean he would commit mistakes he could never forget and would never be forgiven for…
The car reached the castle courtyard and he got out. Surrounded by aides, he swept into the grand old house that had, once, been Elethiomel's HQ.
They pestered him with a hundred details of logistics and intelligence reports and skirmishes and small amounts of ground lost or gained; there were requests from civilians and the foreign press for this and that. He dismissed them all, told the junior commanders to deal with them. He took the stairs to his offices two at a time, handed his jacket and cap to his ADC, and closed himself in his darkened study, his eyes closed, his back against the double doors, the brass handles still clutched in his hands at the small of his back. The quiet, dark room was a balm.
"Been out to gaze upon the beast, have you?"
He started, then recognized Livueta's voice. He saw her by the windows, a dark figure. He relaxed. "Yes," he said. "Close the drapes."
He turned on the room lights.
"What are you going to do?" she said, walking slowly closer, her arms folded, her dark hair gathered up, her face troubled.
"I don't know," he admitted, going to the desk and sitting. He put his face in his hands and rubbed it. "What would you have me do?"
"Talk with him," she said, sitting on the corner of the desk, arms still crossed. She was dressed in a long dark skirt, dark jacket. She was always in dark clothes now-days.
"He won't talk to me," he said, sitting back in the ornate chair he knew the junior officers called his throne. "I can't make him reply."
"You can't be saying the right things," she said.
"I don't know what to say, then," he said, closing his eyes again. "Why don't you compose the next message?"
"You wouldn't let me say what I'd want to say, or if you let me say it, you wouldn't live up to it."
"We can't just all lay down our weapons, Livvy, and I don't think anything else would work; he wouldn't pay any attention."
"You could meet face to face; that might be the way to settle things."
"Livvy; the first messenger we sent personally came back without his SKIN!" He screamed the last word, suddenly losing all patience and control. Livueta flinched, and stepped away from the desk. She sat in an ornamental winged couch, her long fingers rubbing at the gold thread sewn into an arm.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I didn't mean to shout."
"She's our sister, Cheradenine. There must be more we can do."
He looked about the room, as though for some fresh inspiration, "Livvy; we have been over this and over this and over this; don't you… can't I get it through? Isn't it clear?" He slapped both hands on the desk. "I am doing all I can. I want her out of there as much as you do, but while he has her, there is just nothing more I can do; except attack, and that probably would be the death of her."
She shook her head. "What is it between you two?" she asked. "Why won't you talk to each other? How can you forget everything from when we were children?"
He shook his head, pushed himself up from the desk, turned to the book-lined wall behind, gaze running over the hundreds of titles without really seeing them. "Oh," he said tiredly, "I haven't forgotten, Livueta." He felt a terrible sadness then, as though the extent of what he felt they had all lost only became real to him when there was somebody else there to acknowledge it. "I haven't forgotten anything."