LITMIR.BIZ

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my mother bore that day. I am a second son, a soldier son. My poor little brother who died before he drew breath should have been the priest for our family. Both my father and my mother wonder daily why the good god did not bless them with a priest son, but they accepted his will. As do I. I bowed my head to the good god’s yoke and came here to serve him as I am fated to do. And I shall!’

      He spoke with vehemence, and for the first time, I wondered if, free to choose his own road, Gord would have chosen differently. Certainly his ungainly body did not look as if the good god had meant him to be a soldier. Could the priest who had attended him after his birth have been mistaken about the relative ages of the twins? I had seen enough of stock to know that when sheep dropped twins it was not always the largest that came first. I do not think I was the only one who suddenly harboured a tiny doubt of Gord’s fitness to be my fellow.

      Gord knew it. He offered what further proof he had. ‘My family does not circumvent the laws of the good god. I have a younger brother. My father has not named him as priest son to replace my twin who died. No, Garin will be our family artist. Much as my father would love to have a priest son, the good god did not bless our family with one, and my father has never ignored the will of the good god.’

      The silence that followed his words betrayed that some of us still wondered, and Corporal Dent grinned, rejoicing evilly in the suspicions he had sown. If he had stopped there, I think he would have retained a great deal of power over us, but he pushed it one step further. ‘Five demerits more for every man at this table for your earlier mockery of me. Subordinates should never laugh at the man who commands them.’

      Some of us would now be marching off demerits until sundown, and we knew it. Inwardly, I snarled at the little popinjay, but I kept my eyes down and my tongue still. Across from me, Kort picked up his fork and began eating. A wise move. If we had not finished by the time the order came to clear off all tables, we would simply go hungry. Gradually, the rest of us took up our utensils and began to eat. My hunger, so pressing just a few minutes ago, seemed to have fled. I ate because I knew logically that it was a good idea, not from any eagerness. Dent looked around at all of us and probably decided that we were well cowed. He had just taken up a spoon full of soup when Spink shocked me by speaking.

      ‘Corporal Dent, I do not recall that any of us here mocked you. We enjoyed a remark that Cadet Trist made, but surely you do not think you were the butt of any joke amongst us?’ Spink’s face was solemn and without guile as he asked his question. His earnestness caught Corporal Dent off-guard. He stared at Spink, and I could almost see him searching his memory to find the insult that he had claimed to himself.

      ‘You laughed,’ he said at last. ‘And that offended me. That is sufficient.’

      A strange thing happened then. Spink and Trist exchanged a look. I almost pitied Corporal Dent at that moment, for I suddenly knew that, all unknowing, he had forged a brief alliance between the two rivals. Trist spoke, his sincerity almost as convincing as Spink’s had been. ‘Your pardon, Corporal Dent. From now on, I am sure we will all endeavour to save our laughter for when you are not present.’ He looked round at all of us as he spoke, and we all managed to nod gravely and with great apparent sincerity. It was as if a chain of resolve suddenly linked us. No matter how we might clash elsewhere, from now on we would be united against Dent. He rewarded our deception of him by nodding solemnly and saying, ‘Even as it should be, Cadets,’ completely unaware that we had now secured his permission to mock him behind his back.

      That thought gave me comfort that evening as our entire patrol marched off our demerits together. It even somewhat sustained me during the next day of classes. All of us had been too weary to do more than a cursory job on our assignments, and we were soundly berated by our instructors and given an extra heavy load of study work as punishment. The egalitarian injustice that we laboured under seemed to unite us as we stood straight despite Corporal Dent’s efforts to grind us down.

      Yet it did not extend as widely as I’d hoped. United against Dent we might be, but Spink and Trist still chafed one another. They seldom challenged each other directly for our loyalty; the division was now most plain in how they treated Gord.

      Gord continued to tutor Spink in his maths, and gained for his efforts a solid friend. Spink’s scores were not astounding, but his marks were solid and passing. We all knew that without Gord’s help, Spink would have been on probation if not expelled from the Academy. Gord was generous with the time he gave Spink, and most of us admired him for it. But after Dent’s accusation about Gord’s birth, Trist began to needle Gord in sly ways. He began to refer to Gord’s drilling of Spink on his basic maths facts as his ‘catechism lesson’. Occasionally, he would refer to Gord as ‘our good bessom’, a term usually reserved for a priest who instructs acolytes. The nickname spread throughout our patrol. I think that Spink and I were the only ones who never jestingly called him ‘Bessom Gord’. On the surface, it was just a play on Gord’s role in drilling Spink on repetitive facts, but the undercurrent was that perhaps, just perhaps, Gord had been intended for the priesthood rather than the military. Every time someone called him Bessom Gord, I felt a small prick of doubt about him. I am sure Gord felt the jab of the possible insult more keenly.

      Gord was stoic about it, as he was about almost all the teasing he endured. Stoic as a priest, I one day found myself thinking, and then tried to stifle the thought. He had an almost inhuman capacity to tolerate mockery. I think that even Trist regretted his cruelty the next day when he unthinkingly asked ‘Bessom Gord’ to pass the bread at table, for Corporal Dent immediately seized on the name, and used it at every opportunity. It spread like wildfire from the corporal throughout the second-year cadets who would call mockingly for Bessom Gord to come and bless them as we were marching past them on our way to classes. When that happened, it felt as if the mockery fell on all of us, and I could almost feel the ill will building toward Gord. It was hard not to resent him for the mockery that included us.

      However stoically Gord might endure his torment, Spink betrayed his anger at every taunt. Usually it was subtle, a scowl or a tightening of his shoulders or fists. When it happened within our own chambers, he would sometimes speak out angrily, bidding the teaser to shut his mouth. A number of times, he and Trist almost came to blows. Slowly it became obvious to me that when Trist needled Gord, Spink was the actual target. When I spoke to Spink about it, he admitted he was aware of that, but could not control his reaction. If Trist had attacked him directly, I think Spink might have been a better master of himself. Somehow, he had become Gord’s protector, and every time he failed in that role, it ate at him. I feared that if it ever led to blows, one of us would be expelled from the Academy.

      Each day seemed longer than the last in that final week before our holiday. The cold and the wet and the early dark of afternoon seemed to stretch our class hours and even our drill times to infinity. The weather always seemed to flux between drizzle and snow when we were drilling. Our wool uniforms grew heavy with damp and our ears and noses burned with cold. When we returned to our dormitories after our evening soup, our uniforms would steam and stink until the air of our rooms seemed thick with memories of sheep. We would take our places around the study table and try to keep our eyes open as our bodies slowly warmed in the ever-chilly room. Our study mentors regularly prodded us to stay awake and do our lessons, but more than one pencil went rolling out of a lax hand, and more than one head would nod and then abruptly jerk upright. It was a slow and headachy torture to sit there, burdened with the knowledge that the work must be done but unable to rouse any interest or energy to do it. It left tempers frayed and sharp words flew more than once because of spilled ink or someone wobbling the table when someone else was writing.

      It began that night with just such an incident. In moving his book, Spink had nudged Trist’s inkwell. ‘Careful!’ Trist sharply rebuked him.

      ‘I did you no harm!’ Spink retorted.

      A simple thing but it set all our nerves on edge. We tried to settle back into our studies, but there was the feel of a storm in the air, a hanging tension between Spink and Trist. Trist had spoken glowingly several times that day of the carriage that would come for him early tomorrow morning, and of the days off that he expected to enjoy with his father and elder brother. He had mentioned dinner parties they would attend, a play they were going to and the well-born girls he

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