"A catapult bolt came whirring over the wall, ripped through [van Rijn's] sleeve and showered ice chips where it struck." (p. 470)
He is nearly hit by a flamethrower.
"A slingstone bounced off his leather-decked abdomen, an arrow ripped along one cheek, blowgun darts pincushioned his double cuirass." (p. 475)
Then he fights with an ax, kills one Drak'ho with a blow to the head and strangles another that has wrestled him from behind. With Wace and the Lannachska, he drives the defenders back. Van Rijn could have been killed at any moment. However, he is protected by the laws of action-adventure fiction. If our hero is to die in combat, then it will be dramatically near the end of a narrative, not casually in a skirmish.
When they have fought to the pre-planned cease-fire, van Rijn tells Wace:
"'Comes now the talking. So far we have had it soft. This is the times that fry men's souls. Ha! Have you got the nerve to see it through?'" (p. 481)
Talking is harder? Sure. It could all go wrong. Van Rijn and Wace could be lynched by enraged Diomedeans from either side. We remember another conversation:
"'I am not a man of war,' Desai said.
"Beneath a shelf of brow ridge, Uldwyr's eyelids expressed skepticism while his mouth grinned. 'You mean you don't like physical violence. It was quite an effective war you waged at the conference table.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Day Of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 74-238 AT p. 84.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Diplomacy is about the art of encouraging contending powers to settle for an equality of dissatisfaction. But that only works when the disputing powers are not driven by EXISTENTIAL ambitions that other powers would consider a mortal threat to them. Then diplomacy becomes war by other means, an effort by one power to weaken and/or restrain another. As was the case with a Terran Empire confronted by an aggressively expansionist Merseian Roidhunate dominated by an ideology of racial supremacy.
Sean
Indeed. Agreed. the MR was aggressively expansionist dominated by an ideology of racial supremacy and their dream collapsed when the TE wore them out.
One thing I don't understand: Why didn't the MR expand in the direction opposite to the TE, and wait for the TE to collapse? They were playing the "long game".
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
Poul Anderson did address that point in both ENSIGN FLANDRY and THE GAME OF EMPIRE. Merseia did not try to turns its attention elsewhere because it dared not, after making an enemy of the Empire. We see the Protector, Tacywyr the Dark, reflecting in THE GAME OF EMPIRE that Merseia could not simply turn its back on so huge a power as the Terran Empire. Doing so would have exposed the Roidhunate to attack if a "militarist" faction within the Empire came to power there.
Sean
Diplomacy and war aren't separate: they're both means of getting people to do what you want -- both political action. Diplomacy depends on persuasion, but it's often persuasion backed by threat. War almost involves negotiation from time to time. The means change, but the objective is the same, getting other people to do what you want.
Indeed.
Agreed: Merseian Roidhunate is aggressively expansionist dominated by an ideology of racial supremacy, yet continuing conflicts with the TE wore them out to, and their dream collapsed. Was this like the USSR during the Cold War?
A point I don't understand:
If the M R's "frontward" expansion in the direction from Orion was blocked by the TE, then why didn't they just expand in the "back" (the frontier opposite the TE), wait for it to fall apart (maybe with some "help", as the M R was wont to provide), and pick up the pieces? They supposedly were in it for the "long game".
A new thought: How much longer would the TE have lasted if David F hadn't helped Merseia, or had helped in a different way?
-kh
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Keith!
Mr. Stirling: I agree, diplomacy, as well as war, is one of the means used by a powerful nation for getting other people in other nations to do what it wants them to do. Diplomacy is persuasion often backed by the threat of force. Yes, even in times of war diplomatic relations between belligerents are not totally ruled, because it often suits them to reach agreements on SOME matters.
Keith: I tried to answer your question. Merseia did not DARE to simply ignore the Empire and expand away from it. Doing so would have exposed the Roidhunate to attack by the Empire, esp. after Merseia had already spent centuries harassing, aggressively probing, and seeking to undermine Terra. Brechdan Ironrede and his eventual successor (at several removes) as Protector, Tachwyr the Dark, made very similar like this in ENSIGN FLANDRY and THE GAME OF EMPIRE.
Sean
Hi Keith,
I got the impression that the Roidhunate did expand (also) away from the Empire, especially early on - to the point that it became worrying for the still expanding Terran Empire (mentioned in THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND). At that point, the young Roidhunate must have realized angering or scaring Imperial Terra, at the time in its prime, would have been an extremly bad idea. If nothing else, the trashing meeted out to Ythri for that very reason (also in THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND) would have given them pause. Terra was not going to stand by idly while Merseia waxed too strong.
In the days of Flandry, a slow, controlled expansion away from Terra was back on, tempered by the need to keep Terra in check. There is at least one reference in a Flandry novel (alas, can't remember which one) about another world having been added to the Roidhunate.
But even then, a the struggle with Terra must have consumed the majority of Merseian resources. For example, opening up a new front on the distant other end of Terran Empire by means of setting up bases in the Syrax cluster (in the vicinity of Antares) must have been a titanic effort (WE CLAIM THESE STARS/HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE), and its failure after the Ardazirho changed sides and helped Terra destroy those bases must have been a very heavy blow - probably the costliest defeat inflicted on Mersia before Flandry's bombardment of Chereion.
The Roidhunate conquers another world in ENSIGN FLANDRY.
@ Johan, et all: Thank you.
Let's talk about the Terran Empire vs. the Merseian Roidhunate:
My impression is that they are portrayed a bit like a declining USA vs. USSR. The MR has a long-term plan to establish a large number of Merseian-ruled realms. The TE doesn't want that and wants to hold on to what they have. I gather no one wants an all-out confrontation, which I gather would be a MAD scenario with a time window of under 2 hours (the time it takes a missile, ship, weapons platform, drone, etc. under maximum secondary drive to get to within the 1 ly detection range of a strategic target). ISTM that if the MR had just done what the Reagan Administration did with the USSR over a much longer time period- 2-5 centuries), they could have defeated the TE and picked up the pieces. There are a lot of other things (mentioned and unmentioned) in PA s works they could have done to speed things up.
That being said: how would YOU defeat your opponent (TE or MR), and over what time frame?
Shall we discuss?
-kh
-kh
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