Tales of Neveryon by Samuel R. Delany Page A

much time and trouble in the coming years. Some that he remembered he never got an opportunity to use. But even more than the practice and the instruction (and because Gorgik practiced most, at the end of the sixweeks he was easily the best in his class), this was the education he took with him. And Myrgot was away from the castle when his commission began …

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    There was an oxcart ride along a narrow road with mountains looking over the trees to the left. With six other young officers, he forded an icy stream, up to his waist in foam; a horse ride over bare rocks, around steep slopes of slate … ahead were the little tongues of army campfires, alick on the blue, with the desert below white as milk in a quarter light.
    Gorgik took on his garrison with an advantage over most: five years’ experience in the mines as a foreman over fifty slaves.
    His garrison contained only twenty-nine.
    Nor were they despairing, unskilled, and purchased for life – though, over the next few years, from time to time Gorgik wondered just how much difference that made in the daily texture of their lives, for guards’ lives were rough in those days. Over those same years, Gorgik became a good officer. He gained the affection of his men, mainly by keeping them alive in an epoch in which one of the horrors of war was that every time more than ten garrisons were brought together, twenty percent were lost through communicable diseases having nothing to do with battle (and much of the knowledge for this could be traced back to some of Master Narbu’s more eccentric saws concerning various herbs, moldy fruit rinds, and moss – and not a few of Baron Curly’s observations on botany that Gorgik found himself now and again recalling to great effect). Asregards the army itself, Gorgik was a man recently enough blessed with an unexpected hope of life that all the human energy expended to create an institution solely bent on smashing that hope seemed arbitrary and absurd enough to marshal all his intelligence toward surviving it. He saw battle as a test to be endured, with true freedom as prize. He had experienced leading of a sort before, and he led well. But the personalities of his men – both their blustering camaraderie (which seemed a pale and farcical shadow of the brutal and destructive mayhem that, from time to time, had broken out in the slave quarters at the mines, always leaving one or two dead) and the constant resignation to danger and death (that any sane slave would have been trying his utmost to avoid) – confused him (and confusion he had traditionally dealt with by silence) and depressed him (and depression, frankly, he had never really had time to deal with, nor did he really here, so that its effects, finally, were basically just more anecdotes for later years on the stupidity of the military mind).
    He knew all his men, and had a far easier relationship with them than most officers of that day. But only a very few did he ever consider friends, and then not for long. A frequent occurrence: some young recruit would take the easiness of some late-night campfire talk, or the revelations that occurred on a foggy morning hike, as a sign of lasting intimacy, only to find himself reprimanded – and, in three cases over the two years, struck to the ground for the presumption: for these were basic and brutal times – in a manner that recalled nothing so much (at least to Gorgik, eternally frustrated by having to give out these reprimands) as the snubs he had received in the halls of the High Court of Eagles the mornings after some particularly revelatory exchange with some count or princess.
    Couldn’t these imbeciles learn?
    He had.
    The ones who stayed in his garrison did. And respected him for the lesson – loved him, some of them would even have said in the drunken evenings that, during some lax period that, now at a village tavern, now at a mountain campsite where rum had been impounded from a passing caravan, still