"What do you really think their chances are?"
Ian shook his head.
"But," he said, shuffling together the papers he had spread out before him on the lounge table, "of course, where they're looking is away out, beyond the areas of strategy I know. We can hope."
"Did you ever stop to think that possibly Michael,
with his knowledge of these Naharese, could give them some insights they wouldn't otherwise have?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "I told them both that; and told Michael to make himself available to them if they thought they could use him. So far, I don't think they have."
He got up, holding his papers and we went out; I to the band quarters and Michael's office, he to his own office and the overall job of organizing our supplies and everything else necessary for the defense.
Michael was not in his office. The orderly directed me to the first wall, where I found him already drilling his men on the emplaced weapons there. I worked with him for most of the morning; and then we stopped, not because there was not a lot more practice needed, but because his untrained troops were exhausted and be ginning to make mistakes simply out of fatigue.
Michael sent them to lunch. He and I went back to his office and had sandwiches and coffee brought in by his orderly.
"What about this?" I asked, after we were done, getting up and going to the wall where the archaic-looking bagpipe hung. "I asked Ian about it. But he said he'd only played highland pipes and that if I wanted a demonstration, I should ask you."
Michael looked up from his seat behind his desk, and grinned. The drill on the guns seemed to have done something for him in a way he was not really aware of himself. He looked younger and more cheerful than I had yet seen him; and obviously he enjoyed any attention given to his instruments.
"That's a gaita gallega," he said. "Or, to be correct, it's a local imitation of the gaita gallega you can still
find occasionally being made and played in the province of Galicia in Spain, back on Earth. It's a perfectly playable instrument to anyone who's familiar with the highland pipes. Ian could have played it - I'd guess he just thought I might prefer to show it off myself."
"He seemed to think you could play it better," I said.
"Well. . ." Michael grinned again. "Perhaps, a bit."
He got up and came over to the wall with me.
"Do you really want to hear it?" he asked.
"Yes, I do."
He took it down from the wall.
"We'll have to step outside," he said. "It's not the sort of instrument to be played in a small room like this."
We went back out on to the first terrace by the deserted weapon emplacements. He swung the pipe up in his arms, the long single drone with its fringe tied at the two ends of the drone, resting on his left shoulder and pointing up into the air behind him. He took the mouthpiece between his lips and laid his fingers across the holes of the chanter. Then he blew up the bag and began to play.
The music of the pipes is like Dorsai whiskey. People either cannot stand it, or they feel that there's nothing comparable. I happen to be one of those who love the sound - for no good reason, I would have said until that trip to Gebel Nahar; since my own heritage is Spanish rather than Scottish and I had never before realized that it was also a Spanish instrument.
Michael played something Scottish and standard - The Flowers of the Forest, I think - pacing slowly up and down as he played. Then, abruptly he swung around and stepped out, almost strutted, in fact; and played something entirely different.
I wish there were words in me to describe it. It was anything but Scottish. It was hispanic, right down to its backbones - a wild, barbaric, musically ornate challenge of some sort that heated the blood in my veins and threatened to raise the hair on the back of my neck.
He finished at last with a sort of dying wail as he swung the deflating bag down from his shoulder. His face was not young any more, it was changed. He looked drawn and old.
"What was that?" I demanded.
"It's got a polite name for polite company," he said. "But nobody uses it. The Naharese call it Su Madre."
"Your Mother?" I echoed. Then, of course, it hit me. The Spanish language has a number of elaborate and poetically insulting curses to throw at your enemy about his ancestry; and the words sumadre are found in most of them.
"Yes," said Michael. "It's what you play when you're daring the enemy to come out and fight. It accuses him of being less than a man in all the senses of that phrase - and the Naharese love it."
He sat down on the rampart of the terrace, suddenly, like someone very tired and discouraged by a long and hopeless effort, resting the gaita gallega on his knees.
"And they like me," he said, staring blindly at the wall of the barrack area, behind me. "My bandsmen, my regiment - they like me."
"There're always exceptions," I said, watching him. "But usually the men who serve under them like their Dorsai officers."
"That's not what I mean." He was still staring at the wall. "I've made no secret here of the fact I won't touch a weapon. They all knew it from the day I signed on as bandmaster."
"I see," I said. "So that's it."
He looked up at me, abruptly.
"Do you know how they react to cowards - as they consider them - people who are able to fight but won't, in this particular crazy splinter culture? They encourage them to get off the face of the earth. They show their manhood by knocking cowards around here. But they don't touch me. They don't even challenge me to duels."
"Because they don't believe you," I said.
"That's it." His face was almost savage. "They don't. Why won't they believe me?"
"Because you only say you won't use a weapon," I told him bluntly. "In every other language you speak, everything you say or do, you broadcast just the opposite information. That tells them that not only can you use a weapon, but that you're so good at it none of them who'd challenge you would stand a chance. You could not only defeat someone like that, you could make him look foolish in the process. And no one wants to look foolish, particularly a macho-minded individual. That message is in the very way you walk and talk. How else could it be, with you?"
"That's not true!" he got suddenly to his feet, holding the gaita. "I live what I believe in. I have, ever since - "
He stopped.
"Maybe we'd better get back to work," I said, as gently as I could.
"No!" The word burst out of him. "I want to tell someone. The odds are we're not going to be around after this. I want someone to. . ."
He broke off. He had been about to say "someone to understand. . ." and he had not been able to get the words out. But I could not help him. As I've said, since Else's death, I've grown accustomed to listening to people. But there is something in me that tells me when to speak and when not to help them with what they wish to say. And now I was being held silent.
He struggled with himself for a few seconds, and then calm seemed to flow over him.
"No," he said, as if talking to himself, "what people think doesn't matter. We're not likely to live through this, and I want to know how you react."
He looked at me.
"That's why I've got to explain it to someone like you," he said. "I've got to know how they'd take it, back home, if I'd explained it to them. And your family is the same as mine, from the same canton, the same neighborhood, the same sort of ancestry..."
"Did it occur to you you might not owe anyone an explanation?" I said. "When your parents raised you, they only paid back the debt they owed their parents for raising them. If you've got any obligation to anyone - and even that's a moot point, since the idea behind our world is that it's a planet of free people - it's to the Dorsai in general, to bring in interstellar exchange credits by finding work off-planet. And you've done that by becoming bandmaster here. Anything beyond that's your own private business."