NaNoWriMo 2022
Big Black Book
American Kingdom Day 25
Previous chapter:
Coffee break was a welcome relief. Not because I wasn’t enjoying the presentation on Sun Tzu and his strategies with more or less contemporary examples provided by Sir Duane. I could eat that up.
It was that my brain needed a chance to pause and digest some of this stuff.
Standing outside, looking at green hills, drinking a hot coffee and munching on a fragrant Danish was exactly what I needed.
“You’ve met Duke Francis, I assume?”
Sir Duane, sharing the moment. For once I was glad that it wasn’t Nathan pestering me. I just wanted to relax. Annie and Oscar were sitting together, not quite holding hands but their body language indicated that this might have been on their minds. Or perhaps something more. Kind of sweet, really.
Nathan and Hazel were looking through the big black book.
“Twice now. It was all a bit of a rush. He came to lunch with the people who recruited me the day before, we had a bit of a chat and the next thing I knew he was taking my pledge the next morning. He’s actually my lawyer now. I have something that needs to be done there and he said he’d throw it to one of his interns.”
“He’s quite a character,” Duane said. “A real flair for the dramatic. Probably worth seeing him perform before a jury in court.”
I smiled as I recalled walking off into a gathering thunderstorm with him to a limo that just happened to be in the exact right place at the exact right time. And wasn’t that Sun Tzu to the letter?
Gosh. I needed to get my brain onto other paths.
“Do you see him often here?”
“He’s a regular lecturer for our recruits, and of course he’s here for the annual June gathering but he pops in and out for various meetings. Probably be the next Prince of the Carolinas; he’s very well regarded.”
“How are all these titles arranged? Is there an election or something?”
“The Duke will cover all that far better than I.”
“I’ll have to wait, then.”
“Just enjoy the moment. It’s all we really have.”
“Oh?”
“The past is gone, we’ll never get that back. And the future may never happen the way you think it should. Might as well enjoy what we have. I do. I love it here.”
He swept his arm around the vista of hills and trees. Flower gardens nearby, deer cropping the grass at the edge of the forest. Blue sky with fleecy-white clouds.
I held up my coffee cup in salute. “Doesn’t get any better than this.”
We drank it all in, saying nothing.
Two more periods of Sun Tzu before we broke for lunch. I was beginning to feel less than loving towards the smug old sage by the end. I’ll bet his wife found ways to take him down a peg or two.
We had a break of ten minutes between periods. Old military timing, that. Just enough time for a cigarette and it had become traditional, even though hardly anybody smoked any more in the services. Not if they wanted to pass their annuals, anyway.
Hazel and I took a bathroom break.
“We saw you chatting up the boss,” she said, though she was smiling. “Teacher’s pet, is it?”
“Small talk while we enjoyed the Creation,” I responded. “At least I thought it was good to give my eyes something restful to look at.”
“Nathan’s keen to crack the code of how they pick a winner. He enlisted me in the campaign. I’m pretty darn good at cracking codes.”
“It’s all alphabetical, then? Annie tops the course and Oscar comes last.”
“It’s a wonder the boys at NSA didn’t recruit you when you left the Rangers. That’s quite an intellect you’ve got there.”
I closed my door on her, occupying myself with other matters for the moment.
“Okay,” I said, when she joined me at the basins. “come clean.”
“I’d love to but there’s no solution yet. We’ve discovered a few patterns.”
“All the students have been Christian and ex-military?”
She looked at me. “You want to be serious or just screw around?”
“Sorry, Hazel. My head’s full of this Sun Tzu asshole. I’ll be nice.” I took her arm and we sauntered together back to the classroom.
“Well, we didn’t look at every course but those we did, going back about ten years or so, all had an odd number of students. Three, five, seven, nine… That’s got to be deliberate. The biggest class size was fifteen in 2017, and the smallest was three in 2021. You’d expect class sizes between three and fifteen to be equally divided between odd and even numbers, but no. That’s too big a discrepancy to be random.”
“Well, what about this course? You four were assigned to it before I’d even given my pledge.”
“Mmmm, but maybe we were just marking time. There were no classroom sessions, just odd jobs and learning how the course would be run. We didn’t properly begin until just now. Maybe if you hadn’t shown up one of us would have been eliminated on the range day.”
“Now you’re joking. They wouldn’t kill someone just to make an odd number.”
“Oh, you!!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll turn off my brain and let you talk for a bit. I think I need a service.”
Poor choice of words there. If I didn’t get serviced pretty soon I’d be walking around cross-eyed.
“It’s not just the number of students that is odd. Sometimes there are more than one sent off to the Palace, and that number is always odd as well. That only happens when the course goes the full four weeks Sir Duane promised. Most of the time it ends early and one student is marked for the Regent.”
Well, that’s easy enough, I thought. Sometimes a student excels and the result is a foregone conclusion. Why keep on racing when the winner is clear?
“That’s what I thought,” Hazel said, reading my mind. “But if they didn’t pick the top student early and went the full course, then why not pick two equally good students at the end? Or four? There was one course where all five students were selected for the Palace. It’s always an odd number.”
There was the germ of an idea forming in my mind now as we returned to the classroom. Annie and Oscar together, myself in between Hazel and Nathan, five students keen to hear more about China’s Ancient Warring States period.
Next scene:
The whole story:
Notes:
We’re about to find out why I’d used up a good section of the middle on the recruit course, where apparently nothing is happening. Don't worry, things will make sense soon, and besides I’ve already decided that this novel is going well over 50,000 words.
Molly