Gordon Dickson: Dorsai!

As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest uncle’s ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Sirius.

And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the innermost recesses of his heart.

A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles, he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind’s eye; and he felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great, hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution. He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever; but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him back.

Then suddenly — as suddenly as it had come — the spell was broken. He turned toward the craft that would take him home.

As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft of his cane.

“Be welcome to this house,” said his father and straightened up. “You’d better get out of that uniform and into some man’s clothes. Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

The men of the household of Eachan Khan Graeme sat around the long, shimmering slab of the dining board in the long and shadowy room, at their drinking after the women and children had retired. They were not all present, nor — short of a minor miracle — was it ever likely that they would be, in this life. Of sixteen adult males, nine were off at the wars among the stars, one was undergoing reconstructive surgery at the hospital in Omalu, and the eldest, Donal’s granduncle, Kamal, was quietly dying in his own room at the back of the household with an oxygen tube up his nose and the faint scent of the bay lilac to remind him of his Maran wife, now forty years dead. Sitting at the table were five — of which, since three o’clock this afternoon — Donal was one. Those others who were present to welcome him to his adulthood were Eachan, his father; Mor, his elder brother, who was home on leave from the Friendlies; and his twin uncles Ian and Kensie, who had been next in age above that James who had died at Donneswort. They sat grouped around the high end of the table, Eachan at its head, with his two sons on his right and his two younger twin brothers on his left.

“They had good officers when I was there,” Eachan was saying. He leaned over to till Donal’s glass, and Donal took it up automatically, listening with both ears.

“Freilanders all,” said Ian, the grimmer of the two dark twins. “They run to stiffness of organization without combat to shake them up. Kensie says Mara or Kultis, and I say why not?*’

“They have full companies of Dorsai there, I hear,” said Mor, at Donal’s right. The deep voice of Eachan answered from his left.

“They’re show guards. I know of those. Why make a cake of nothing but icing? The Bond of Kultis likes to think of having an unmatched bodyguard; but they’d be fanned out to the troops fast enough in case of real trouble between the stars.”

“And meanwhile,” put in Kensie, with a sudden smile that split his dark face, “no action. Peacetime soldiering goes sour. The outfits split up into little cliques, the cake-fighters move in and an actual man — a Dorsai — becomes an ornament.”

“Good,” said Eachan, nodding.

Donal swallowed absently from his glass and the unaccustomed whiskey burned fiercely at the back of his nose and throat. Little pricklings of sweat popped out on his forehead; but he ignored them, concentrating on what was being said. This talk was all for his benefit, he knew. He was a man now, and could no longer be told what to do. The choice was his, about where he would go to take service, and they were helping him with what knowledge they had, of the eight systems and their ways.

“…I was never great for garrison duty myself,” Eachan was continuing. “A mercenary’s job is to train, maintain and fight; but when all’s said and done, the fighting’s the thing. Not that everyone’s of my mind. There are Dorsal and Dorsal — and not all Dorsal are Graemes.”

“The Friendlies, now—” said Mor, and stopped with a glance at his father, afraid that he had interrupted.

“Go on,” said Eachan, nodding.

“I was just about to point out,” said Mor, “there’s plenty of action on Association — and Harmony, too, I hear. The sects will always be fighting against each other. And there’s bodyguard work—”

“Catch us being personal gunmen,” said Ian, who — being closer in age to Mor man Mor’s father — did not feel the need to be quite so polite, “That’s no job for a soldier.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest it,” said Mor, turning to his uncle. “But the psalm-singers rate it high among themselves, and that takes some of their best talent. It leaves the field posts open for mercenaries,”

‘True enough,” said Kensie, equably. “And if they had less fanatics and more officers, those two worlds would be putting strong forces out between the stars. But a priest-soldier is only troublesome when he’s more soldier than priest.”

“I’ll back that,” said Mor. “This last skirmish I was in on Association, an elder came down the line after we’d taken one little town and wanted five of my men for hangmen.”

“What did you do?” asked Kensie.

“Referred him to my Commandant — and then got to the old man first and told him that if he could find five men in my force who actually wanted such a job, he could transfer them out the next day.”

Ian nodded.

“Nothing spoils a man for battle like playing butcher,” he said.

“The old man got that,” said Mor. “They got their hangmen, I heard — but not from me.”

“The lusts are vampires,” said Eachan, heavily, from the head of the table. “Soldiering is a pure art. A man with a taste for blood, money or women was one I never trusted.”

“The women are fine on Mara and Kultis,” grinned Mor. “I hear.”

“I’ll not deny it,” said Kensie, merrily. “But you’ve got to come home, some day.”

“God grant that you all may,” said Eachan, somberly. “I am a Dorsai and a Graeme, but if this little world of ours had something else to trade for the contracts of out-world professionals besides the blood of our best fighting men, I’d be more pleased.”

“Would you have stayed home, Eachan,” said Mor, “when you were young and had two good legs?”

“No, Mor,” said Eachan, heavily. “But mere are other arts, beside the art of war — even for a Dorsai.” He looked at his eldest son. “When our forefathers settled this world less than a hundred and fifty years ago, it wasn’t with the intention of providing gun-fodder for me other eight systems. They only wanted a world where no man could bend the destinies of another man against that second man’s will.”