And yet, there was a closeness, an identity, between them of a kind that I have never seen in any other two human beings.
"Do you have to go back right away?" Ian was asking me. "Or will you be staying to take Amanda back?"
"I can stay," I said. "My leave-time to the Dorsai wasn't that tight. Can I be of use, here?"
"Yes," Ian said. "You and I should talk. Just a minute, though - "
He turned to greet Amanda in his turn and tell Michael to check and see if the Conde was available for a visit. Michael went out with the soldier who had met us at the vehicle pool. It seemed that Michael and his bandsmen, plus a handful of servants and the Conde himself, added up to the total present population of Gebel Nahar, outside of those in this room. The ram parts were designed to be defended by a handful of people, if necessary; but we had barely more than a handful in the forty members of the regimental band Michael had led, and they were evidently untrained in anything but marching.
We left Kensie with Amanda and Padma. Ian led me into an adjoining office, waved me to a chair, and took one himself.
"I don't know the situation on your present con tract - " he began.
"There's no problem. My contract's to a space force leased by William of Ceta. I'm leader of Red Flight under the overall command of Hendrik Gait. Aside from the fact that Gault would understand, as any other Dorsai would, if a situation like this warranted it, his forces aren't doing anything at the moment. Which is why I was on leave in the first place, along with half his other senior officers. I'm not William's officer. I'm Gault's."
"Good," said Ian. He turned his head to look past the high wing of the chair he was sitting in and out over the plain at where the little flashes of light were visible. His arms lay relaxed upon the arms of the chair, his massive hands loosely curved about the ends of those chair arms. There was, as there always had been, something utterly lonely but utterly invincible about Ian. Most non-Dorsais seem to draw a notice able comfort from having a Dorsai around in times of physical danger, as if they assumed that any one of us would know the right thing to do and so do it. It may sound fanciful, but I have to say that in somewhat the same way as the non-Dorsai reacted to the Dorsai, so did most of the Dorsai I've known always react to Ian.
But not all of us. Kensie never had, of course. Nor, come to think of it, had any of the other Graemes to my knowledge. But then, there had always been some thing - not solitary, but independent and apart - about each of the Graemes. Even Kensie. It was a characteristic of the family. Only, Ian had that double share of it.
"It'll take them two days to settle in out there," he said now, nodding at the nearly invisible encampments on the plain. "After that, they'll either have to move against us, or they'll start fighting among them selves. That means we can expect to be overrun here in two days."
"Unless what?" I asked. He looked back at me.
"There's always an unless," I said.
"Unless Amanda can find us an honorable way out of the situation," he said. "As it now stands, there doesn't seem to be any way out. Our only hope is that she can find something in the contract or the situation that the rest of us have overlooked. Drink?"
"Thanks."
He got up and went to a sideboard, poured a couple of glasses half-full of dark brown liquor, and brought them back. He sat down once more, handing a glass to me, and I sniffed at its pungent darkness.
"Dorsai whiskey," I said. "You're provided for, here."
He nodded. We drank.
"Isn't there anything you think she might be able to use?" I asked.
"No," he said. "It's a hope against hope. An honor problem."
"What makes it so sensitive that you need an Adjuster from home?" I asked.
"William. You know him, of course. But how much do you know about the situation here in Nahar?"
I repeated to him what I had picked up from Michael and Padma.
"Nothing else?" he asked.
"I haven't had time to find out anything else. I was asked to bring Amanda here on the spur of the moment, so on the way out I had my hands full. Also, she was busy studying the available data on this situation herself. We didn't talk much."
"William - " he said, putting his glass down on a small table by his chair. "Well, it's my fault we're into this, rather than Kensie's. I'm the strategist, he's the tactician on this contract. The large picture was my job, and I didn't look far enough."
"If there were things the Naharese government didn't tell you when the contract was under discussion, then there's your out, right there."
"Oh, the contract's challengeable, all right," Ian said. He smiled. I know there are those who like to believe that he never smiles; and that notion is non sense. But his smile is like all the rest of him. "It wasn't the information they held back that's trapped us, it's this matter of honor. Not just our personal honor - the reputation and honor of all Dorsai. They've got us in a position where whether we stay and die or go and live, it'll tarnish the planetary reputation."
I frowned at him.
"How can they do that? How could you get caught in that sort of trap?"
"Partly," Ian lifted his glass, drank, and put it back down again, "because William's an extremely able strategist himself - again, as you know. Partly, be cause it didn't occur to me, or Kensie, that we were getting into a three-party rather than a two-party agreement."
"I don't follow you."
"The situation in Nahar," he said, "was always one with its built-in termination clause - I mean, for the ranchers, the original settlers. The type of country they tried to set up was something that could only exist under uncrowded, near-pioneering conditions. The principalities around their grazing area got settled in, some fifty Cetan years ago. After that, the neighboring countries got built up and industrialized; and the semi-feudal notion of open plains and large individual holdings of land got to be impractical, on the international level of this world. Of course, the first settlers, those Gallegos from Galicia in northwest Spain, saw that coming from the start. That was why they built this place we're setting in."
His smile came again.
"But that was back when they were only trying to delay the inevitable," he said. "Sometime in more re cent years they evidently decided to come to terms with it."
"Bargain with the more modern principalities around them, you mean?" I said.
"Bargain with the rest of Ceta, in fact," he said. "And the rest of Ceta, nowadays, is William - for all practical purposes."
"There again, if they had an agreement with William that they didn't tell you about," I said, "you've every excuse, in honor as well as on paper, to void the contract. I don't see the difficulty."
"Their deal they've got with William isn't a written, or even a spoken contract," Ian answered. "What the ranchers did was let him know that he could have the control he wanted here in Nahar - as I said, it was obvious they were going to lose it eventually, anyway - if not to him, to someone or something else - if he'd meet their terms."
"And what were they after in exchange?"
"A guarantee that their life style and this pocket culture they'd developed would be maintained and protected."
He looked under his dark brows at me.
"I see," I said. "How did they think William could do that?"
"They didn't know. But they didn't worry about it. That's the slippery part. They just let the fact be known to William that if they got what they wanted they'd stop fighting his attempts to control Nahar directly. They left it up to him to find the ways to meet their price. That's why there's no other contract we can cite as an excuse to break this one."