The Quiet Pools

Meyfarth frowned. “It’s a bit astonishing to me that your love-making had but one pattern. You’re in bed together, the three of you. Everyone shifts positions, and there’s his cock at your mouth, or yours at his. You realize that’s his hand on your buttocks, not hers—”

“I wasn’t going to let him do that to me,” Christopher said coldly.

“Do what?”

“He started trying to take over. He started trying to make Kristen look to him first. If I’d let him have that, too, I’d have lost everything he hadn’t already taken.”

“And so—”

“We’d started out even. I didn’t care for the way things changed. She liked both of us together. But she liked him alone best. How was I supposed to feel?” he demanded. “Why are we talking about this? What does this have to do with me now?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“If there is anything, yes, goddammit. If not, then let’s move on.”

“I heard the answers in what you said. I’m wondering why you didn’t.”

Christopher balked at the implied criticism. “Maybe you’re going to have to rub my nose in it.”

“All right,” Meyfarth said calmly. “I will. You drew a sharp line between yourself and Donald in your marriage and pointed everything toward Kristen.”

“Yes.”

“And you expected Loi and Jessica to do the same.”

“I—” Christopher stopped in mid-denial, looking surprised. “Maybe I did.”

“You wanted Kristen’s position. You wanted to be the focus.”

“At least sometimes, yes. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Meyfarth ignored the question. “You thought you chose both Loi and Jessica. You thought they were going to give you that.”

“Yes.”

“That being the only man would make you the focus.”

“Ah—”

“But the truth is that Loi did the choosing. She’s the one at the center. She’s where you wanted to be. And you’re only just realizing it.”

Christopher stared at Meyfarth. His expression was half wild-eyed indignation, half wide-eyed revelation. His mouth worked and his eyes grew bright with moisture.

“God,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Yes. I never saw it. I never saw it. She’s just like Donald. Like Donald all over again.”

CHAPTER 16 —GAG— “… the imperative command.”

Stone-rough and patchy white, the sheer vertical walls of Fort Jesus were slowly crumbling, shedding their brittle masonry skin. Mikhail Dryke touched the brick above a narrow-arched cannon portal, and his hand came away powdered with dust and a smear of mold and yellow lichen.

Peering out through the portal at narrow Mombasa Harbor, Dryke watched as a small sailing ship passed unconcernedly under the cannon’s one-eyed gaze. The sixteenth-century Portuguese fortress was a toothless dog, its black-barreled cannon resting on laughable fake carriages or lying uselessly on the ground in rows. There were no breeching ropes to restrain them, no powder, no linstock and worm, and the pyramided shot had been welded into mere decoration.

But the fort’s command of the harbor, and the craft in its design, were still evident to Dryke’s eye. The stronghold stood where Leven Reef pinched the navigable channel down to a few hundred meters’ width. The guns of the lower gallery controlled the channel, while the high parapet commanded the harbor entrance and land approaches.

So simple, and so effective. For a hundred years, the garrison at Fort Jesus—rarely more than a few hundred men—had been the anchor of Portuguese power all along the East African coast. And when it finally fell, it took a three-year siege by an Omani fleet numbering more than three thousand men to win the victory.

Dryke walked slowly along the seaward parapet, trying to imagine that moment. He had meant to come to Fort Jesus on his last trip to Kasigau, but the chaos of the Singapore incident had denied him the opportunity. He was not much interested in the museum rooms below, in the relics of Portuguese, Mazrui, Omani, and Muscat occupations. His interest was the equation of siege and fortification—war as a chess problem, in an age without aircraft, without rockets or computers, without lasers or atomic weapons.

There was not much time for what might be called hobbies in Mikhail Dryke’s life, but this one he could accommodate. On every continent there were walled cities, forts and castles, relics of that simpler time. As his travels allowed, Dryke indulged himself with side trips to explore them. It was somehow a restful exercise, somehow refreshing and yet somehow far away and foreign to contemplate two enemies who fought their battles face-to-face.

In his seven years working for Allied, he had managed visits to several dozen sites. A few would bear longer and more leisurely exploration. Eben-Emael, the first victim of the Blitzkrieg. Chateau Galliard, Richard the Lion-Hearted’s cliff-top stronghold on the Seine. The Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, where popes took refuge and Hadrian lay entombed.

And heading the list, the spectacular Krak des Chevaliers, the great fortress built by the crusading Knights Hospitalers in twelfth-century Palestine, near the border of Lebanon. Not even the regional wars of the twentieth century had managed to destroy its magnificence or bring down the towered walls. Against such standards, Fort Jesus was mean and ordinary, a rude structure with a dull history.

Settling on a low wall on the gallery level, Dryke began sketching his defense of Fort Jesus. The sketches were amusements, exercises—the adult remnant of a childhood game. He made no excuses for it, to himself or to anyone else. It seemed to him that he had come by both his career and his hobby honestly, led by blood and breeding both.

Dryke was born in Kaliningrad to a Russian mother and an English father—ironically, a few kilometers from the site of the thirteenth-century fortress of the Teutonic Knights, though he would not learn that until years later. Edward Dryke was an electronic intelligence technician in the Peace Force; Lina Koshevaia was a security officer at the Kaliningrad naval base where Dryke was attached.

When Mikhail was eight, Edward left the Peace Force for a job in the British electronics industry, and the family left Kaliningrad for Coventry, an hour from the Welsh border. Within a few months, they had begun taking weekend outings to explore the abbeys and castles of Wales—Cardiff and Caerphilly, Harlech and Valle Crucis. Drawing campaign maps and fighting imaginary battles in the back seat of the Leyland, Mikhail cemented his fascination with matters military.

And, in time, he learned a lesson that carried forward into adulthood, a lesson reinforced when a ruptured cerebral aneurysm stole his father’s soul, when a Nexus flathead’s gun spilled his mother’s blood on a Birmingham street. The lesson was hard. Dryke had never verbalized it, but he had internalized it: There is nothing that you cherish that cannot be taken from you, no treasure that cannot be lost—

No matter how grand, no matter how imposing, the fortresses and castles had all fallen. Each had been a grand edifice in its time, bustling with the discords of life. Now they were dead museums, containing but a faint echo of their former greatness. The halls were empty, the walls unmanned.

It had been the same fight in every world and every time— against weakness and neglect and corruption, against tactics and numbers and valor and luck. And it was still the same in the present day.

Fort Houston. Castle Kasigau. The walled city of Memphis. Outside were the forces of chaos, swarming, massing, undermining the walls, building engines of destruction. Dryke carried the shield of his liege as captain of the queen’s knights, looked out at the world through the dark, suspicious eyes of the besieged.