Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 9

was interrupted by a series of booms.
    We turned to look east, but it was impossible to see far in the drizzle. Fairview shook his head. "The enemy certainly has its big guns there somewhere. I wish I knew where."
    "At least they aren't shelling the camp presently," said Tice. "A brief respite. Gentlemen, if you will excuse me . . . "
    I waited until Tice was well out of earshot before asking in a low voice, "Do you think we can trust him?"
    Fairview shrugged. "Can one ever trust an Eighth Landsteader? Tice and his men have a reputation for honor. I suppose we'll see tonight whether they live up to it."
    I looked sharply at Fairview. "You think the mounted infantry will lead us into an ambush?"
    "Tice does seem to have taken great care to ensure that he would be in charge of the scouting." Fairview took out a cigarette, studied it, and then threw it away with a gesture of disgust. "Now I'm as bad as the war-fiends of whom the General is always complaining. The General is right about this much: we need to trust our allies in this war. If the Dozen Landsteads fall once more to quarrelling amongst one another—"
    "—we'll lose this war." I sighed heavily. "The General is leading us, Tice is scouting for us, the Mippite guns are hidden somewhere. . . . I don't like the odds we're facing."
    "Think of the women and children at Fort Frederick." Fairview spoke softly. Like me, he was unmarried, and knowing him, he would not have fathered any illegitimate children. But he had been raised by his grandmother after his mother died of influenza and his father died in an earlier war between the Ninth Landstead and the Sixth and Seventh Landsteads. He had a high opinion of his grandmother and of all women and children and creatures that are in need of help.
    Which was probably why Doyle was with us, rather than at the bottom of the Bay, where he deserved to be.
    I furrowed my brow, thinking. Fairview's estimate of women was high enough that I wondered sometimes what was preventing him from marrying. But since I lived in fear that Fairview would ask me the same question, I had never raised the topic with him. Not that there would have been anything strange about my answer. After all, friendship is a bond as strong as marriage. Our friendship was unusual only insofar as Fairview and I had not created other bonds in our life. Most of the officers in the Allied Armies were married or were sharing their beds with their soldier-servants . . .
    If you were a Mippite, you'd probably be screwing up your face in disgust at this point. I've heard that Mippites are so dedicated to the principles of egalitarianism that they've recently passed a law that forbids sexual relations between men of different ranks. In the Dozen Landsteads, we all had a long laugh when we heard of that law. For us, it makes no sense to have sexual relations, except with someone of lower rank. Would you really want a wife who had veto power in your marriage? Or would you really want your bed-service given to you by a man who could dictate at what time of day you held your dinner?
    But Mippites, with their endless talk of love-mates and the joys of equality, are oblivious to all this. That was one of the causes of strain between our nation and theirs: our clear superiority in understanding proper social relations.
    Fairview and I were Landsteaders through and through, and I suppose that, in the ordinary way of things, we would have taken one of our men to bed, or perhaps would have married. But circumstances had always been against us.
    We had first met when we were young boys, living on the same block of Balmer, the harbor capital of the Ninth Landstead. We'd attended the same boarding school – one that discouraged its students from choosing liegemen until after their university years.
    Well, after we'd attended university – together, of course – we'd been too busy with naval battles to worry about such matters. That was half a lifetime ago; the battles had continued for many seasons.
    Finally the war with the Eighth Landstead had ended, and we had returned to civilian life. Fairview was appointed as the pilot on an ocean steamship; I took a position as quartermaster on the same steamer. With duties that sent us away from land for most of the year, our marital prospects appeared poor, but certainly this would have been the time for us to choose liegemen for our beds.
    And perhaps we would have, if keeping track of Doyle's activities hadn't occupied all our