The spirit of Dorsai

Prologue

She was tall, slim, and so blonde as to be almost white-haired. There was an erectness to her body that no man could have possessed without stiffness. As she sat cross-legged, her grey eyes gazing down into the valley on the Dorsai that held Fal Morgan and the surrounding homesteads, her face had the quality of a profile stamped on a silver coin.

"Amanda…" said Hal Mayne, gently.

Lost in her thoughts, she did not hear him; and the moment was so close to perfection that he was reluctant to disturb it. The part of him that was a poet, which had survived the months of being a hunted guerrilla on Harmony and even the sickness and the brutalities of the prison there before his escape, stirred again, watching her. Here, on the roof of a warriors' world, under a clean and cloudless sky in a time when the human race was everywhere submitting to the chains of a new slavery, she wore an armor of sunlight, unconquerable. Beside her, in his much taller, wide-shouldered but gaunt, body, pared thin by privation and suffering, he felt like some great dark bird of earth-bound flesh and bone, bending above an entity of pure spirit.

As he waited, her eyes lost their abstraction. As if they had been separated so far that his voice, speaking her name, had had to stretch across time and space to only now reach her, she turned finally back to him.

"Did you say something?" she asked.

"I was going to say how much you resemble that picture of her - of the first Amanda Morgan," he said. "It could be a picture of you."

She smiled a little.

"Yes," she said, "both the second Amanda to bear the name, and I look very much like her. It happens."

"It's still a strange thing, with only three of you of that name in your family in two hundred years," he said. "Does it just happen she had her picture printed at the same age you are now?" he said.

"No." She shook her head. "It wasn't."

"It wasn't?"

"No. That picture you saw in our hall was made when she was much older than I am now."

He frowned.

"It's true," she said. "We age very slowly, we Morgans - and she was something special."

"Not as special as you," he said. "She couldn't be. You're Dorsai - end-result Dorsai. She lived before people like you were what you are now."

"That's not true," the third Amanda said. "She

was Dorsai before there was a Dorsai world. What she was, was the material out of which our people and our culture here were made."

He shook his head, slowly.

"How can you be so sure about what she was - two hundred standard years ago?"

"How can I?" She looked at him far a moment. "In many ways, I am her."

He watched her.

"A reincarnation?"

"No," she answered. "Not really. But something… more as if time didn't matter. As if it's all the same thing; her, there in the beginning of our world, and I here, at…"

"The end of it," he suggested.

"No." She looked at him steadily with those grey eyes. "The end won't be until the last Dorsai is dead. In fact, not even then. The end will only be when the last human is dead - because what makes us Dorsai is something that's a part of all humans; that part the first Amanda had when she was born, back on Earth."

Something - the shadow of a swooping bird, perhaps - shuttered the sunlight from his eyes far a split second.

"You think so much of her," he said, thought-fully. "But it's Cletus Grahame and his textbooks on the military art he wrote two hundred years ago - it's Donal Graeme and the way he brought the inhabited worlds together, one hundred years ago - that other worlds think of when they use the word 'Dorsai'."

"We've had Graemes far our next neighbor since Cletus," she replied. "What's thought of them, they earned. But the first Amanda was here before either of them. She founded our family. She cleared the outlaws from these mountains before Cletus came; and when she was ninety-three, she held Foralie district against Dow deCastries' veteran troops when they invaded, thinking they'd have no trouble with the children, the women, the sick and the old that were all that were left here, then."

"You mean," Hal said, "that time deCastries tried to take over the Dorsai, at the very end of Cletus' struggle with him?"

"With him and all the power of Earth behind him, in a time when everyone thought Earth was more powerful than all the other inhabited worlds combined."

"But wasn't it Cletus who gave directions for the defense of Dorsai, that time?"

"Cletus wasn't here. He left two of his officers, Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer to coordinate the defense and give the districts a general survey of the strategical and tactical situations involved. But their job was only a matter of laying out the military physics of the situation, with Cletus' theories and principles as guidelines. It was up to each district individually after that, to draw up its own plan for dealing with the invaders. That's what Foralie did - knowing it would be under the gun more than any other district, since Foralie homestead was here, and Cletus would be expected to return to it as soon as he heard the Dorsai had been invaded."

"And it was the first Amanda who was given charge of Foralie district, by the people in the district, then?" he asked. "Why her? She hadn't been a soldier."

"I told you," she said. "During the Outlaw Years, she'd led the way in clearing out the lawless mercenaries. After she did that - and other things - with just the women, the cripples, old men and children to help her, the rest of the districts fallowed her example and law came to all the Dorsai. She was the best person to command."

"How did they do it, then?"

"Clean out the outlaws?" the third Amanda asked.

"No - though I want to hear that sometime, too. What I meant was, how did Amanda and Foralie district defeat first-line troops? Most military scholars seem to think that the invaders defeated themselves, that they had to defeat themselves; because there was no way a gaggle of women, children and old people could possibly have done it."

"In a way you could say the troops did defeat themselves - did you ever read Cletus' Tactics of Mistake?" she answered. "But actually what happened was a case of putting our strengths against the weaknesses of the invaders."

"Weaknesses? What weaknesses did first-line troops have?"

She looked at him again with those level eyes.

"They weren't willing to die unless they had to."

"That?" Hal looked at her curiously. "That's a weakness?"

"Comparatively. Because we were."

"Willing to die?" he studied her. "Non-combatants? Old people, mothers - "

"And children. Yes." The armor of sunlight around her seemed to invest her words with a quality of truth greater than he had ever known from anyone else. "The Dorsai was farmed by people who were willing to pay with their lives in others battles, in order to buy freedom far their homes. Not only the men who went off to fight, but those at home had that same image of freedom and were willing to live and die far it."

"But simply being willing to die - "

"You don't understand, not being born here," she said. "It was a matter of their being able to make harder choices than people less willing. Amanda and the others in the district best qualified to decide sat down and considered a number of plans. They all entailed casualties - and the casualties could include the people who were considering the plans. They chose the one that gave the district the greatest effectiveness against the enemy for the least number of deaths; and, having chosen it, they were all ready to be among those who would die, if necessary. The invading soldiers had no such plan - and no such courage."

He shook his head.

"I don't understand," he said.

"That's because you're not Dorsai. And because you don't understand someone like the first Amanda."

"No," he said. "That's true. I don't."

He looked at her.

"How did it happen?" he asked. "How did she-how did they do it? I have to know."

"You do?" Her gaze was unmoving on him.

"Yes," he said. There were so many things he had not been able to explain, things he had not admitted to her yet. There was the matter of his visit to Foralie, and the particular moment in which he had stepped into the doorway which some of the towering Graeme men, such as Ian and Kensie, the twin uncles of Donal Graeme, had been said to fill from sill to lintel and from side to side. As it had been with them, Hal's unshod feet had rested on the sill and the top of his head brushed the lintel. But unlike them, his shoulder-points had not touched the frame on either side.

It might be that with recovered health and some years of growth yet, that, too, could happen. But it did not matter. What mattered - and what he could not yet bring himself to talk about - was the sudden, poignant, feeling in him of kinship with the Graemes, unexpected as a blow, that had come on him without warning, as he stood in the doorway.

"I need to know," he said again.

"All right," she said. "I'll tell you just how it was."