| R and R
A week has passed and they are walking towards the mess hall for breakfast. The sky above them is the clear, pale blue of a robin’s egg.
“Good morning, Commander Cockroach.”
Cal looks up and sees Severson. She nods to him as he passes by on his way to the recruit barracks.
“Why does he call you that?” Kai asks. “You are not an insect.”
She laughs. “Have ye ever tried killin’ a cockroach, Kai? They don’t die easily.”
“You have died,” he says earnestly.
“And yet, here I am.” She shrugs a little. “I turn forty soon. I always thought I’d die before I reached that age.”
“There is still time,” Kai says ominously.
Cal laughs again, but deep down, the comment bothers her.
Later, after Kai has gone off to train, and Cal sits alone in the visiting officers’ quarters, she begins to dwell on it. It isn’t the prospect of death that bothers her – far from it. Every true Razan wishes for a good death in battle. It is the fact that, despite so many close calls, she is still here. Why?
She recalls the last conversation she had with that old eccentric, Callum Fitzhugh. “Die well,” is his usual parting comment, but last time he simply said farewell.
“Ye usually say ‘Die well,’” she says to him as he nudges his horse into a trot.
He turns and looks at her sadly. “I think we both know that you won’t.”
Cal goes to the window and looks out. She can just about make out where the desert begins, about fifty miles or so to the south.
She should stay. Be with Kai. Work towards her promotion. Find death on the battlefield against the barbarian hoards, just as Lenar did. Earn herself a brazier at the Temple of Raza in Kaldor City.
But something tells her she cannot.
There is someone she must speak to first. Someone she must visit.
Her father. |