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The city's magazines had also contained several dozen tons of gunpowder, but that posed no particular transportation problems, since From and his engineers were busily expending it as they completed the destruction of northern Sindi.
If they were going to get all the other captured supplies out, though—and God knew K'Vaern's Cove could use every scrap of food in Sindi, especially if things worked out to leave a Boman field army still active in the area—then that corduroy road through the swamps had to be held. And while this would-be Boman Napoleon, Camsan, seemed to be chasing Rastar and Honal as fanatically as one could wish, there were still other bands of barbarians wandering around out there. If one of them should hit the convoys of wagons and flar-ta lumbering back and forth between Sindi and D'Sley, the results could be catastrophic. Which meant he needed Roger functional. Now.
He thought about a solution and grimaced. The obvious one—which wouldn't work—was to call Roger and tell him to get over it. The one which would work, unfortunately, wasn't a good answer in the long-term. The consequences could be literally cosmic, but it was the only one that might work in less than the couple of days it would take Roger to get over his funk without it.
"Eva," he said, "I'm go
"Okay," the sergeant major said. "What are we go
"Get me Nimashet."
* * *
Nimashet Despreaux paused.
The prince sat on the river bank, rocking back and forth, his rifle across his lap. She knew, intellectually, that there was no way he would use it on her, but she also knew that he wasn't tracking very well at the moment. So she cleared her throat just a bit nervously.
"Your Highness?"
Roger looked out over the rippling water. He was sca
He started without turning his head when someone laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Go away. That's an order. I'm busy."
"Roger. Your Highness. It's time to leave." Despreaux wondered if she could get the rifle away from him without inflicting—or suffering—damage, then decided to shelve that question. Even if she'd been able to get the rifle, he'd still have his pistol, and facing Roger with a pistol in his hand was a losing proposition. "We need to get your cavalry into position," she said.
"Fuck it," the prince said in a flat voice. "Let Ther tell Chim what to do. And Turkol. I'm done giving orders, or even making requests. All I ever do is fuck things up. Even us."
He looked up over his shoulder at last, and the sergeant almost stepped back at his expression.
"Look at us, what there is of 'us.' " He snorted bitterly. "I can't even carry on a fucking conversation with a woman I love without totally screwing up."
"You didn't screw up, Roger," the sergeant said, sitting down at his side. Her heart had taken a tremendous lurch at the word "love" but she knew he didn't need her throwing herself at him at the moment. "I did. I realize that now. In fact, I've realized it all along—I just didn't want to admit I have, because it was so much easier to go on being mad at you, instead. But all you were trying to say was that fraternization is a bad idea, and you were right. If you don't watch it, it screws up a unit faster than anything else ever could."
"That wasn't what I was trying to say," the prince said. "It is a bad idea, but with so much fooling around going on in the Company, what damage could one more affair do?"
"So what did you mean to say?" Despreaux asked warily. "I assume you weren't going to refer to the hired help?"
"No." Roger rubbed his face and looked out on the water again. "What I meant to say was: I don't fool around. Put a period on the end of that sentence. I did a couple of times, and they were outright disasters. And I felt like a shit each time. All I could think about was that I didn't want another bastard in the world. I didn't want to betray someone like my father and mother had."
He pulled his helmet off and set it on the ground. The river bank was covered in a low, soft ground cover, somewhat like short clover, under the shade of a massive jungle giant. It was as comfortable a place as any on the planet to deal with bleak despair.
"I didn't know what the relationship was between my mother and the bastard formerly known as 'my father,' " he said. "But I did know that wondering what the relationship was, and blaming myself for whatever it wasn't, had to be the worst way for a kid to grow up. And there are places in the Empire where it matters how 'pure' you've been, and I had to think about that, too. Most people think I never gave a good goddamn about my obligations as a prince, but that's not true, either. Of course, it's not surprising they think that way—I managed to screw up those obligations, too, after all. But that didn't mean I didn't care, or that I didn't recognize that the risk was too great for me to justify fooling around."
"At all?" the incredulous sergeant asked. "For how long? And, I mean, uh . . ."
"I lost my virginity when I was fifteen. To a younger daughter of the Duke of New Antioch. A very ambitious daughter."
"I've heard about that one," Despreaux said carefully. The "scene" was a minor legend in the Emperor's Own and the cause of one of the few resignations of a company commander in its history. "And I've heard that nobody had ever seen you 'with' anyone else. But, I mean, what do you—I mean, that's a looong time."
"Yes, it is. Thank you for pointing that out."
"It's not good for you, you know," the Marine said. "It's not healthy. You can develop an enlarged prostate even while you're young. Sure, they can fix it, but prevention is a much, much better alternative."
"Do I really have to discuss the details of my non-sex life with you?" the prince asked. "Especially right now?"
"No, you don't," Despreaux admitted. "But didn't anybody ever talk to you about it? Didn't you have a counselor?"
"Oh, sure. Plenty of them. And they all took the same position: I needed to release my bonds to my father, put my sense of his betrayal of me behind me, and take responsibility for my own life. This is referred to as 'reality therapy' or 'quit being such a fucking whiner.' Which would have worked real well, except that it wasn't my father I resented the hell out of."
"Oh." The sergeant tugged at an earlobe. "That has to be weird. Everybody in the Empire regards the Empress like, well, like a goddess, I guess."
"Yep," Roger said bitterly. "Everyone but her son. I never, ever forgave her for the fact that I didn't have a dad. She at least could have remarried or something. I finally figured out that was one of the reasons I went into sports—look at all those father figures."
"Oh," Despreaux said again, and then, very, very carefully, "And Kostas?"
"Sort of," Roger said with something halfway between a chuckle and a sob, then drew a deep breath. "Kostas was hard to see as the kind of larger-than-life pattern kids want in their fathers, I guess. But in every other way that counted, he was the closest I ever got. Could have gotten, maybe. He was always there when I needed him . . . and I wasn't there when he needed me. Of course."