Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

Seb looked embarrassed—she couldn’t imagine why—and scratched at his neck. “Back then you rode like a tick on a cowdog, and just as happy. You were hardly ever off your pony, until your mother died, and they were happy enough to see you back on it. Until you disappeared.”

She couldn’t remember that—couldn’t remember a time when she would have chosen to spend all those hours on a horse. What she remembered was how much she hated it, the lessons and the sore muscles and all the work of picking out hoofs and grooming and mucking out a stall. Could this be true, that an illness had wiped out not only her pleasure in horses, but all memory of a time when she had enjoyed them?

“I guess you’d planned pretty well,” he went on, “because they couldn’t pick up your traces anywhere. No one thought of what you’d really done; they thought you’d gotten lost, or gone up in the mountains and had an accident. And no one ever knew the whole story, because you didn’t make a lot of sense when we found you.”

“The fever,” said Esmay. She was sweating now; she could feel it, like a sick slime all over.

“That’s what your father said.” Sebastian had said it before; now his voice echoed with her memory, and her new adult ability to interpret nuances of expression compared the two versions and found hidden disbelief.

“My father said . . . ?” Esmay said, carefully neutral, not looking at his face. Not directly, anyway; she could see the pulse in his throat.

“You’d forgotten it all, with the fever, and all for the better, he said. Don’t bring it up, he said. Well, I guess you know by now it wasn’t all a dream . . . I suppose those Fleet psychnannies dug it out and helped you deal with it, eh?”

She was frozen; she was simmering in her own terror. Cold and hot at once, closer than she wanted to some terrible truth, and yet not able to move away. She could feel his gaze on her head, and knew if she looked up she would not be able to hide her terror and confusion. Instead, she busied her hands among the little dishes of breads and condiments, pouring the tea, handing over a delicate cup and saucer with the spray-pattern touched with silver . . . she could hardly believe her hands were so steady.

“Not that I could have argued with your father, of course. Under the circumstances.”

Under the circumstances Esmay could cheerfully have wrung his neck, but she knew that wouldn’t work.

“It was not only my duty to him as my commander, but . . . he was your father. He knew best. Only I did wonder sometimes if you remembered something from before the fever. If perhaps that was what changed you . . . .”

“Well, my mother had died.” Esmay got that out past her tight throat. Her voice, too, was steady as her hands. How could that be, with terror shaking the roots of her mind? “And I was sick so long—”

“If you’d been my daughter, I think I’d have told you. It helps the trainees to talk things through after a bad engagement.”

“My father thought differently,” Esmay said. Dust was no dryer than her mouth; she felt drought-cracks opening in her mind, bottomless mouths to trap her . . .

“Yes. Well, anyway, I’m glad you had the chance to deal with it in the end. But it must’ve been hard when you had that traitor captain to deal with, that second betrayal—” The almost musing tone of his voice sharpened. “Esmaya! Is something wrong? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“It would be most helpful if you could simply tell me the story from your point of view,” Esmay managed to say; her voice was thickening now, the dust compressing into angular blocks of rock-hard clay. “Remember, I had only my own somewhat fragmentary memories to go on, and the psychnannies found them somewhat inadequate.” The psychnannies would have found them inadequate, if they’d found them at all, but they hadn’t. They had assumed that anyone with her background would have had any such problems dealt with earlier. And she, convinced by her family’s insistence that everything in the nightmares was just fever dreams, had been afraid to let them know she had problems. She’d been afraid of being labeled crazy or unstable, unfit for duty . . . rejected, to come home a failure. Was this why her family had assumed she’d fail, even to the point of keeping her trail horse unassigned?

“Perhaps you should ask your father,” Coron said doubtfully.

“I suspect he would be displeased at having his judgment questioned,” Esmay said with all sincerity. “Even by the Fleet’s psychiatric specialists.” Coron nodded. “It would be a help, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“If you’re sure,” Coron said. She had to meet his eyes a moment; she had to endure the worry in them, the tightness of the lines around his eyes, the furrowed brow. “It’s not a pleasant matter—but of course you know that already.”

Nausea bucked in her gut, sending sour signals to her mouth. Not yet, she begged it. Not until I know. “I’m sure,” she said.

It had been a time of riot and civil disorder, when a single small child, if determined and sure of herself, could travel by pony and then by rail some thousand kilometers. “You’d always been good at explaining yourself,” Coron said. “You could come up with a story the moment you were caught out. I suppose that’s why no one really noticed you—you spun some yarn about being sent to an auntie or grandmother, and since you didn’t act scared or confused, and you had enough money, they let you on the trains.”

All this was supposition; they had not been able to trace her path between the time she left the pony—they never found it, but in those days it might well have ended up in someone’s stew pot—and the last part of her journey, the train she’d taken right into disaster.

“The last despatches home had given your father’s station as Buhollow Barracks, and that’s where the train would have gone. But in the meantime the rebels had overrun the eastern end of the county, putting everything they had into an assault aimed at the big arms depot at Bute Bagin. The force at Buhollow Barracks was too small to hold them, so your father had rolled aside to hook around and cut them off from the rear, while the Tenth Cav moved up from Cavender to hit them in the flank.”

“I remember that,” Esmay said. She remembered it from the records, not from real memory. The rebels had counted on her father’s reputation which had never included leaving a plum like Buhollow unprotected . . . they had planned to immobilize his forces there with part of their army, while the rest went on to Bute Bagin and the supplies there. Later, his decision to abandon Buhollow and trap the rebel army would be taught as an example of tactical brilliance. He had done what he could for the town. The civilian population of Buhollow fled ahead of the rebels; they had been told which way to go. Most of them survived.

But Esmay, crammed in amongst refugees from earlier fighting, had ridden the train two stops too far. Both sides had mined the railroad; although the official reports said a rebel mine had blown the low bridge over the Sinets Canal just as the locomotive passed, Esmay had never been sure. Would any government admit its own mines had blown up its own train?

She did remember the enormous jolt that slammed the carriage crooked. They had been going slowly; she had been stuffed between a fat woman with a crying baby and a skinny older boy who kept poking her ribs. The jolt rocked the carriage, but didn’t knock it over. Others weren’t so lucky. She could just recall jumping down from the step—a big jump for her at that age—and following the woman and her baby for no reason than that the woman was a mother. The skinny boy had poked her once more then turned away to follow someone else. Streams of frightened people scurried away from the train, away from the blowing smoke and screams at the front end of the train.