CURIOUS TALE SATURDAYS: ARCHIVE

Two-Way Relationships

on the

Guard of Galavar:

The Captain-Lieutenant’s Relationships, Part 1

Saturday, November 3, 2018

The Guard of Galavar was a relatively later innovation in Galan history, the culmination of Galavar's political philosophy coming full circle—back to the simple premise of an agile system of meritocratic elitism, after years of experimentation with the organization of his government.

What Galavar had discovered, after years of trying out some far more sophisticated arrangements, was that—if you'll forgive me, and him—"Checks and balances just hold great people back." With ordinary people, that's a good thing: The limitation on their powers also constrains the fallout from their ignorance, greed, evil designs, and other unsatisfactory traits. But with the elite—and I don't mean "high society" elite; I mean truly exceptional individuals—that same limitation was an impediment to their greatness. And so Galavar came back to the premise he had first devised in his youth: Don't build a system of government by the shackled. Build a system of government by great people unleashed.

Having made this determination, Galavar shrunk his "imperative" government (that is, the key decision-makers) extensively, from dozens of individuals to just himself and six others: the people who would rule over the various directorates. Everyone else in government was merely a part of the civil service. But these six would have virtually absolute power within their respective spheres to proceed with the tasks of developing Sele, developing Galan society, and preparing to build the Galance. It was the most beautiful and purest repudiation that Galavar—a student of history—had ever seen of the premise that "power corrupts." And for him it worked, at least so far as we know up to the point of the beginning of After The Hero.

Of course, it also drastically intensified the problem of the succession, but that is a topic for another day.

This Week: Interrelationships!

There are fifteen relationships between the original six Guards of Galavar. And, believe it or not, I've never talked about most of those relationships before.

The Guard's strength isn't just from the excellence of its people, but from the strong working relationships between those people. More than anything else, the Guard of Galavar, collectively, is what made it possible for Galavar's gambit to succeed as well as it did. Government doesn't work if its people don't work together.

I know there are also tons of group dynamics on the Guard involving at least three people (quite a large number of group permutations), but that's too big of a list to get into, and it's even a touch beside the point. (There are also the six Guard relationships with Galavar himself, and the additional relationships involving future members of the Guard such as Benzan, but these—like the problem of the succession—are a story for another time.) Plus, on a daily basis it was much likelier that two Guards, as opposed to more than two, would get together for something relating to work.

Even if we limit ourselves to pairs, fifteen is still a big number! A full third of these fifteen relationships involve the Captain of the Guard of Galavar, Arderesh Valeran. Each of his relationships with the other five Guards was especially crucial to the overall success of the Guard of Galavar as a self-regulating engine of government.

This week—and next—therefore, I'll be looking at those five relationships. We're going in order of seniority, so today is Resh's relationships with DeLatia and Silence, and next week we're looking at his relationships with Zirin, Gregor, and Jemis.

I hope you enjoy these little vignettes!

The Captain-Lieutenant's Relationships

Right from the beginning, Arderesh Valeran himself was a consummate diplomat and manager. Galavar was always insistent that, if the popular claims were to be believed that Galavar was the greatest potential leader the world had seen in many lifetimes, then Resh was the greatest second-in-a-command the world had seen in at least as long a time, and that Galavar's own success would never have been possible without Resh being exactly who he was.

Great people are not perfect people. Each of the Guards, and Galavar himself, had many weaknesses, both temperamentally and situationally. More than anyone, it was Arderesh who bypassed these weaknesses and kept them from rotting out the center of Galan power. Power may not corrupt, but it does amplify what is already there, and the Guard of Galavar was such an explosively powerful engine that any weaknesses among its parts were especially dangerous, having the potential to destroy the Galan project if not worse. Resh made sure the engine held together, by making sure its parts operated in harmony.

If reduced to a single word, Resh was an outstanding diplomat. He was also an outstanding manager, and I've often thought of him over the years as the governmental equivalent of the managing editor at a big newspaper—the person who holds it all together on a daily basis while the editor-in-chief plots strategy.

Arderesh Valeran and Lilit DeLatia

What a pair, these two! Lilit DeLatia was by far the most outgoing and outsized member of the Guard, and in that respect she was much like Galavar himself. At her worst she was brash, petty, stubborn, and mean to others. When she had bad working relationships, they could get especially bad. She also had a tendency to walk over people, dominate them, intimidate them, and wasn't above crushing them if they were persistently an obstacle to them.

She was also one of the wisest people on the Guard, possessing more insight even than Galavar into the nature of what we'd call the human condition. She had the read on people, and she was rarely wrong. She understood large-scale structures like few could, and thereby was able to grasp the entirety of what Gala was trying to achieve, even before there was a Gala. She was the first by Galavar's side—even before Resh, in a sense, for although Galavar had met Resh earlier, it was with DeLatia that he first coalesced his vague ambitions about changing the world into a specific plan for accomplishing that change. Her help was indispensable in every step of Gala's creation and development.

And this is all before we get into the fact that her genius in military strategy was arguably even more of an outlier in the annals of history than was Galavar's genius as a leader. Nobody that anyone in Gala had ever met was a better master of martial strategy. She understood the movements, dispositions, and proclivities of military forces and actions like few people ever had. She could predict the outcomes of battles with ferocious accuracy. By the same token, she could also predict when a battle would be closely matched and likely come down to chance.

Her knowledge of military history was vast, giving her access to a terrifying breadth of practical knowledge to go with her theory. Even though DeLatia's personal preference might not have been to lead Gala's military, it was recognized from an early time that there was no one better suited to do it, and so Galavar gave her the authority to build and lead his army.

DeLatia was also perhaps the greatest and most ardent champion of Galavar personally. She believed in him, utterly. She loved spending time with him, loved building him up, loved advising him. She loved the power that flowed through him and into her—she didn't have the independent streak of a Silence or a Gregor.

She loved that Galavar could always follow along with her. She never had to dumb it down for him. He always understood.

She loved his ruthless professionalism, too. When shit was on the line, he didn't mess around or bullshit. He was quick to admit when he was wrong, and eager to learn. And he was drama-free. He was, in so many ways, a vision of her own ideal self, with all the competencies and none of the foibles.

With such a strong bond between DeLatia and Galavar, you might think Arderesh Valeran would be an after thought to her, but the truth was exactly opposite: DeLatia had enormous respect for Resh, and a great deal of personal warmth for him. He was, after all, Galavar's chosen second-in-command, and one of the strongest living proofs of Galavar's own competence. It was a validation of Galavar that Resh was so able. And so, both out of this inbuilt esteem and out of practicality, DeLatia and Resh actually worked very closely together, very frequently, on a great many things.

Resh was her go-to whenever Galavar was unavailable, or whenever she had something not worth bothering him with. She accurately perceived how capable and intelligent he was, and trusted him fully—which for her (as with many on the Guard) took the form of heightened collaboration and inclusion.

DeLatia, as one of the principal architects of the Guard itself—which in part she actually modeled on her own Army High Command—and as someone deeply invested in its success, worked with Resh almost daily to understand what the Guard was up to, how it was doing, and what needed attention. She was a precious comrade to Resh in this work, for whom the Guard's success was his top mandate, and someone whose insight he relied upon heavily. In the same respect, Resh was somebody DeLatia was comfortable going to with questions and problems, both as an equal and in Resh's capacity as her superior. DeLatia sat near the pinnacle of Galan power, with only two people above her, and her profound esteem for both of them—both as colleagues and superiors—was one of the most stabilizing forces in Gala.

This is because DeLatia was a creature of structure and law and order, and she respected not only the person but the position. She was one of the few on the Guard (the other being Gregor) who held special respect for the power of authority in itself—the office and not just the officer. It was she, in fact, who was one of the most consistent voices for a larger, more Imperial-style imperative government in Gala. And even though she ultimately lost that argument, she poured her institutional respect into the eventual form that the Galan government took.

DeLatia was also very high-maintenance, and easily rubbed people wrong—including (and quite often) people she loved and respected, not just her enemies. With her habitual selfishness, frequent tactlessness, and overall assertive personality, she had a bad habit of getting in her own way. And it was Resh, even more than Galavar, who would walk her through the stages of understanding all the china she'd smashed. She listened to him; he had free rein like few others did to tell her she was fucking up and needed to pause and take stock of the situation. In fact, besides Resh, only Galavar himself, and her own second-in-command Maris Diva, could reliably talk her down from the brinks she didn't need to be on.

So Resh would be her intermediary. She often worked through him, or alongside him, with other members of the Guard and of the Galan government in general. In their arrangements she often furnished the raw power and he was the control rod that made sure there wasn't a meltdown. It usually worked.

And, in the course of it all, he was often right there in the fire zone with her. She was a debater—a fighter of words—and her first instincts were always to go toe to toe. So many of their conversations would begin with her yelling at him and airing her own point of view at the expense of his efforts to moderate or influence it. He didn't mind; he knew—they both knew—that it had nothing to do with Resh himself. Her words were often sharp, but they were never meant to hurt.

It wasn't just her behavior that he moderated. Resh was one of her favorite springboards for crazy ideas, wild speculation, and conflicts. He had a way of grasping things quickly, like Galavar did, and he was alone among the people at the top of being able to not only grasp new ideas but somehow stay neutral on them. To her, he didn't take sides; he just described reality as he saw it. He would always give his opinion when asked, but he was peerless in being able to present all sides of a debate fairly—one of his most valued traits among all the Guards (and many others too). Even when he did give his opinion, he had a way of making it seem like just an opinion, rather than Truth. DeLatia could never be such a person herself, and because of this he was priceless to her.

Of the fifteen Guard pairs, their working relationship was one of the strongest and one of the most active. But they weren't just good colleagues. They were good friends. DeLatia frequently visited Resh in his home, and vice versa. They dined together, and played sports and games together. Resh was an avid fan of racquet sports and was always cajoling DeLatia to join him, as part of her lifelong journey to slim down from the stupendous corpulence of her Imperial years.

It was in this area that Resh provided another great help to DeLatia: One of the things she struggled with the most, as a Guard, was the knowledge that she lacked the image of a great military leader. She had never personally witnessed so much as a single skirmish, let alone led a great campaign. She had no real-world experience at all. Moreover, for most of her life she was incapable of fighting—far too fat and unfit to be any danger in physical combat to anyone other than herself. And she knew, because of her lack of experience and lack of fitness, that her soldiers harbored doubts about her. She harbored those same doubts herself. Resh was one of the few people she could admit it to, and he helped her greatly in presenting herself as the leader she needed to be for the sake of the morale and efficiency of her army. In her earliest and hardest years of reputation-building, he often appeared alongside her when she addressed her commanders and troops, and made a show of extending great deference to her knowledge and wisdom. He held her up as one of the paragons of Sourros—God of Logic and Wisdom—for she had lived in the Empire, which also had allegiance to Sourros, and had benefited both from the Imperial tradition and the Ieikili one—the two worthiest Sourran perspectives.

Though the initiative was always her own, Resh helped DeLatia stay on course over the years, continually pushing herself to become better. When she told him she was going to train for a wark-riding certification, Resh volunteered to go for it along with her. He promptly washed out on the first day, but the gesture meant a lot to her, and it was one of countless such gestures over the years.

They laughed and joked together. DeLatia had a pretty coarse sense of humor, and Resh, surprisingly enough, wasn't completely a stranger to that land either. She was comfortable around him; she could be herself around him. And to Resh, DeLatia was someone fiery and trustworthy and fiercely loyal—a good friend, and a great achiever. He knew the importance of his diplomatic role, but his diplomacy meant nothing if he was not empowering the parties around him to go off and accomplish great things. And she did, and he admired her for it.

Arderesh Valeran and Silence Terlais

Silence was one of those people whom it was impossible to fail to notice. Even among the highest of echelons, the Guard of Galavar, she would be that person to come up with ideas and proposals that would prompt shock and astonishment for those around her, and fiery outbursts in the case of people like DeLatia. Others took the world as it was; Silence was the only prominent figure in Gala who considered "reality" to be a part of the manipulable environment. Her mind was on a different plane—perhaps owing to the fact that she had actually lived on a different plane, Junction City, in her youth. But, regardless of the source of it, Silence was a genius among geniuses—the kind of intellect whose insights and questions didn't necessarily excite people so much as unsettle them.

But if that were all there was to her, she wouldn't have been on the Guard. She was also by far the most effective director in Gala. She knew exactly where everything and everyone needed to go. There was nothing that escaped her attention. Many of those around her said that, if a problem appeared unsolvable, give it to Silence, and it would be done.

It's not that she never failed; she actually failed quite a lot. But her failures were often so recondite that people didn't tend to understand them well enough to think of them as failures. For instance, she created her sand fleet not to be "a strategic military force to control, patrol, project power, and move material and personnel across the Sodaplains," even though that's what the charter said, but because she wanted to bring sandships to life so that they could reclaim the desert and awaken it into a living entity, upon which could be built a great civilization. And while she easily succeeded in creating "a strategic military force," she utterly failed in her true ambition. But who saw it that way, other than Silence herself? And as for her more mundane failures, they were drowned out by the fact that she always had another twenty projects about to come to fruition.

In these respects, Arderesh was of great value to Silence in that he was one of her key facilitators. He frequently worked with her to help her attach a practical, marketable aspect onto her projects, and he would advertise her interests to others with greater pragmatism and clarity than she could. As a result, she was able to gain greater access to Galan resources than she otherwise would have. This was an especially critical dynamic early in her time in Gala, when few knew her. Later on, after her mastery of innovation was widely known, it was easier for her, but even then she still relied upon Resh to be her brand ambassador and negotiating representative on numerous occasions. "Get me X," she would tell him, and he would do it. Whenever she tried to do it herself, she often met with painstaking, exasperating failure: People didn't understand her ideas, and they had a very hard time with her personality, especially because she tended to frame impediments to her progress as dire confrontations that left inadequate room for dialogue and compromise.

In the same vein, she was also ludicrously poor at socialization. Silence was great at working with people in a command structure—particularly when she was at the top of it—but she was terrible at making friends and getting along with people outside of a hierarchy. It wasn't that she was mean or vicious, although she could express those emotions even more potently than DeLatia when moved to it; rather, she just didn't know how to interact. Therefore, her few friendships tended to center on intelligence, passion, likeminded interests, and shared projects.

Resh was one of those friends, and their friendship was arguably more important than their working relationship. Resh, for his part, loved her—he really loved her. Though he had his own wife, there was something about Silence that moved him, that aroused his sense of wonder and possibility. Silence was the only person in the world who could make Resh feel a deep, powerful connection with the Cosmos. Her conviction in the grandeur of existence, and her awe at the marvels of it both great and small, made him feel good, and connected, and even immortal, like nobody else could. She was holy to him, and he loved her.

They never talked about it. She knew, and he knew she knew. Silence, who didn't love him back, couldn't give him what he wanted. She'd have gladly given him sex, but it wasn't about sex. It was about something she understood all too well: Silence made Resh feel less alone in the world. Yet, for Silence, Resh didn't. No one did. And so they had an unspoken pact, an unopened book, that they shared. And though it would never be opened, just having it on the shelf meant a lot to Resh. Even Silence got something out of having it there: a story never to be explored. A world that much bigger, and richer.

Their day-to-day friendship was close and easy, and deeply philosophical. They loved talking together. He would often join her as she gazed out at the world from some high perch, and listen to her talk about her dreams, and the way of things. Galavar possessed a deep understanding of what paradise would look like, but he tended to speak about it theoretically and rhetorically. Silence, in contrast, spoke as though she had an open window to it—like she could literally see it. She would stare off into the distance, and he would be enthralled by the words that came out of her mouth. It helped him to open up, and he would vent his frustrations, stresses, sorrows, and secret hopes to her. He never much cared about her replies—she was always telling him what to fix, which wasn't the point—but just being able to speak, for someone who spent much of his working life knowing what not to say, was a great release for him.

He also recognized her fragility. For one, he had seen her on that first day, dying on the desert floor. But more importantly he could see how tenuous her grip on the mundane world was, and how vulnerable she was to rejection by others. Though no one disputed her brilliance, many of the people high in the Galan government, including on the Guard, questioned her faculties. She scared people with her dispassionate aggressiveness, and her less frequent but even more terrifying outbursts of passionate aggressiveness. She intimidated them with the novelty of her ideas, in all their strangeness and disturbing ramifications. She didn't buy into the social contract, and people could tell. She didn't have the body language and verbal tonality of a viutar. She didn't act the way she was supposed to act. She didn't fit in—even among a nation of immigrants. It didn't help that her behavior was erratic and often creepy, that she had no apparent regard for her own safety, or that she had fewer reservations than most about killing people when they landed on the wrong side of her sense of justice. Nevertheless, despite those qualities she wasn't a malevolent person—that much was obvious too. She didn't even like mean jokes. She was a gentle soul...but with some very hard edges.

Resh admired her profoundly, and saw how easily she could inadvertently destroy her position in Gala—and he shuddered to think what that would do to her, and, as people became more reliant on her, what it would do to Gala itself. So he resolved, from the earliest days, to be her steadying hand. He went out on many a limb for her, arguing on her behalf both in her company and behind the scenes. He used his own credit to extend his personal trustworthiness and reputation to Silence in the minds of others. He was a frequent visitor on her many projects, working to smooth over the complaints of people who had issues with her style, ideas, or conduct.

This included the Guard of Galavar itself, where he was more of a proponent for Silence and her various agendas than she herself was—for she wrongly expected others to see what she could see. Galavar, having shared the experience of connation with her, always trusted her. But most of the people who would become his Guards didn't, at least at first. DeLatia and Gregor in particular had a real problem with her. Resh was the force that made it all work, winning the compromises necessary from all sides to make things tenable. Few others could have pulled it off. Because of his help, Silence was able to remain on the Guard and remain one of the most prominent figures in Gala. Her high degree of success would not have been possible without his endorsement—and that brought him great satisfaction indeed, for it was at the core of his own purpose on the Guard. No one held greater promise for the possibilities of the future than Silence.

Silence, for her part, recognized his efforts—she was not oblivious to her own shortcomings, even if she didn't know how to resolve them. And she was thankful for him, and his abilities, and it contributed extensively to her respect for the Galan premise as a whole, for she was someone who did not bow to others—the opposite of the highly compliant DeLatia—and for whom the only path to obedience was respect: Silence obliged Resh because she respected him. She was someone used to having to do everything herself; Resh was one of the first and best people she learned she could rely upon.

It would be wrong to let all of these somber details fully define their relationship. In fact they were fast friends as well. Silence had a zany sense of humor that didn't often come out, but which he could sometimes unlock. They would shoot the breeze together, not about important things but just the thoughts and feelings of the moment. They also did many activities together: She was possessed of powerful creature impulses, and often invited him along on her adventures of feasting, sports, crafting projects, games, and other channels for her raw energy. She loved experiencing what her body could do; the athletic spectacle; the richness of eating; the pleasures of sensation. For instance, they composed music together, and jammed together. More eccentrically, she was the kind of person who would wonder what it felt like to run a comb across her belly; the kind of person who would crave the thrill of freefall; the kind of person who would design a sneeze machine so that she could modulate and experiment with her sneezes. And Resh, sometimes more so than others, was a ready companion for her flamboyant expositions and demonstrations. He would try her gadgets himself, and share in her creations.

There were even times when one of them, or both, could forget the world around them long enough that, afterwards, they would feel they had touched Illar.

His Success Is Others' Success

By his nature Resh had very few critics, but one of those criticisms was that he was merely Galavar's shadow, with no will or personality of his own. Yet it wasn't true. In marshaling the other Guards, Resh accomplished something that Galavar couldn't have done nearly as well. Instead, Resh's true nature shone most brightly as a reflection in others. His wisdom and calm showed up in DeLatia's fortitude. His loyalty and resolve showed up in Silence's accomplishments. He sought no glory for himself, nor could he have do so and succeeded as Captain. He was a true servant of Gala, lifting up others rather than himelf, and in that respect he was alone on the Guard, and irreplaceable. And his reward was to always be in the thick of things.

Join me next week, when we look at the other three relationships between Arderesh and the original Guard. Until then, may you find your own Resh Valeran.

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