by Iain Banks
Still she did not say a word, but looked slowly round at the door which lay open behind her, opposite the double doors through which DeWar had entered.
DeWar moved quickly. He pushed the door open with the pommel of his sword and looked into the room. He stood there for some time. He backed away, until his shoulder hit one of the columns supporting the roof of the room. The sword hung loose in his hand. His head lowered until his chin rested on the white shirt over his chest.
Perrund watched him for a moment, then turned away. Still kneeling, she dried her hands as best she could on her thin gown, looking at the rim of the fountain's bowl, a hand or so in front of her eyes.
Suddenly DeWar was at her side, standing by her wasted arm, his bare feet by her calf. The sword came slowly down to rest on the marble rim of the fountain's bowl, then slid with a grating noise near to her nose. It dipped, and the blade went under her chin. The metal was cold on her skin. A gentle pressure lifted her face until she was looking up at him. The sword remained pressed against her throat, cold and thin and sharp.
"Why?" he asked her. There were, she saw, tears in his eyes.
"Revenge, DeWar," she said quietly. She had thought that if she could speak at all, her voice would quiver and shake and quickly break and leave her sobbing, but her voice was steady and unstrained.
"For what?"
"For killing me, and my family, and for raping my mother and my sisters." She thought her own voice sounded much less affected than DeWar's. She sounded reasonable, almost unconcerned, she thought.
He stood looking down at her, his face wet with tears. His chest was coming and going inside the loosely tucked and still unbuttoned shirt. The sword at her throat, she noticed, did not move.
"The King's men," he said, his voice catching. The tears continued to stream.
She wanted to shake her head, though she was worried that the slightest movement would cut her skin. But then he would be doing that soon enough anyway, if she was lucky, she thought, and so, tentatively, she did shake her head. The pressure of the sword blade across her throat did not waver, but she avoided cutting herself.
"No, DeWar. Not the King's men. His men. Him. His people. He and his cronies, those closest to him."
DeWar stared down at her. The tears were fewer now. They had made a damp patch on the white shirt, below his chin.
"It was all as I have told you, DeWar, except that it was the Protector and his friends, not one of the old nobles still loyal to the King. UrLeyn killed me, DeWar. I thought I would return the compliment." She opened her eyes wide and let her gaze fall to the blade of the sword in front of her. "May I beg you to be quick, for the friends we once were?"
"But you saved him!" DeWar shouted. Still the sword barely moved.
"Those were my orders, DeWar."
"Orders?" He sounded incredulous.
"When what had happened to my town and my family and to me had happened, I wandered away. I found a camp, one night, and offered myself to some soldiers, for food. They all took me too, and I did not care,
because I knew then that I had become dead. But one was cruel and wanted me in a way I did not want to be taken, and I found that once one was dead it was very easy indeed to kill. I think they would have killed me in return for his death, and that would have been that, and perhaps the better for all of us, but instead their officer took me away. I was brought to a fortress over the border, in Outer Haspidus, mostly manned by Quience's men but commanded by forces loyal to the old King. I was treated kindly, and there I was introduced to the art of being a spy and an assassin." Perrund smiled.
If she had been alive, she thought, her knees, on the cold white marble tiles, would be hurting a little by now, but she was dead and so they troubled somebody else. DeWar's face was still streaked with tears. His eyes stared, seeming to bulge in their sockets. "But I was ordered to bide my time, by King Quience himself," she told him. 'UrLeyn was to die, but not at the height of his fame and power. I was commanded that I must do everything I could to keep him alive until his utter ruin had been contrived."
She gave a small, shy smile and moved her head fractionally to look at her wasted arm. "I did. And in the process I became above suspicion."
There was a look of utter horror on DeWar's face. It was, she thought, like looking at the face of somebody who had died in agony and despair.
She had not seen, or wanted to see, UrLeyn's face. She had waited until, having been given the news she claimed to have been called away to receive, he had fallen into a fit of sobbing and buried his face in the pillow, then she had risen, lifted a heavy jet vase in her one good hand and brought it crashing down on the back of his skull. The sobbing had stopped. He had not moved again or made a further sound. She'd slit his throat for good measure, but she had done that while straddling his back, and still she had not seen his face.
"Quience was behind it all," DeWar said. His voice
,sounded strangled, as though he had a sword at his throat, not she at hers. "The war, the poisoning."
"I do not know, DeWar, but I imagine so." She looked deliberately down at the sword blade. 'DeWar." She looked up into his eyes with a hurt, pleading expression. "There is no more I can tell you. The poison was delivered by innocents to the Paupers" Hospital, where I received it. Nobody I know knew what it was or what it was for. If you have the nurse as well, you have the totality of our conspiracy. There is no more to tell." She paused. "I am already dead, DeWar. Please, if you would, finish the job. I am suddenly so weary." She let the muscles supporting her head relax so that her chin rested on the blade. It, and through it DeWar, was now taking all the weight of her head and its memories.
The metal, warm now, dropped slowly away from beneath her, so that she had to stop herself falling forwards and striking the rim of the fountain pool. She looked up. DeWar, his own head hanging down, was sliding the sword back into its scabbard.
"I told him the boy was dead, DeWar!" she said angrily. "I lied to him before I crushed his filthy skull and slit his scrawny old-man's throat!" She struggled to her feet, her joints protesting. She went to DeWar and took his arm with her good hand. "Would you leave me to the guard and the questioner? Is that your judgment?"
She shook him, but he did not respond. She looked down, then grabbed at the nearest weapon, his long knife. She pulled it from its sheath. He looked alarmed and took two rapid steps backwards, away from her, but he could have stopped her taking it, and he had not.
"Then I'll do it myself!" she said, and brought the knife quickly up to her throat. His arm was a blur. She saw sparks in front of her face. Her hand began to sting almost before her eyes and mind had registered what had happened. The knife he had knocked from her hand smacked into a wall and fell with a metallic clatter to the marble floor. The sword hung in his hand again.
"No," he said, moving towards her.
EPILOGUE
It strikes me, having written this, how little we can ever know.
The future is by its very nature unfathomable. We can predict a very little way into it indeed with any reliability, and the further we attempt to see into what has not yet happened, the more foolish we later realise we have been — with the benefit of hindsight. Even the most obviously predictable events, which seem the most likely to occur, can prove fickle. When the rocks fell from the sky back when I was a child, did millions of people the previous evening not believe that the suns would rise as usual, on schedule, the following morning? And then the rocks and the fire fell from the sky, and for whole countries the suns did not rise that day, and indeed for many millions of people they would never rise again.
The present is in some ways no more sure, for what do we really know about what is happening now? Only what is happening immediately around us. The horizon is the usual maximum extent of our ability to appreciate the moment, and the horizon is far away, so events there must be very large for us to be able to see them. Besides, in our modern world the horizon is in reality not the edge of the land or
the sea, but the nearest hedge, or the inside of a city wall or the wall of the room we inhabit. The greater events in particular tend to happen somewhere else. The very instant that the rocks and the fire fell from the sky, when over half the world woke up to chaos, on the far side of the globe all was well, and it took a moon or more before the sky darkened with unusual clouds.
When a king dies, the news might take a moon to travel to the furthest corners of his kingdom. It might take years to travel to countries on the far side of the ocean, and in some places, who knows, it might slowly stop being news at all as it travels, becoming instead recent history, and so barely worth the mentioning when travellers exchange the latest developments, so that the death that shook a country and unseated a dynasty only arrives centuries later, as a short passage in a history book. So the present, I repeat, is in some ways no more knowable than the future, for it takes the passage of time for us to know what is happening at any given moment.
The past, then? Surely there we can find certainty,
because once something has happened it cannot unhappen, it cannot be said to change. There may be further discoveries which throw a new light on what has happened, but the thing itself cannot alter. It must stay fixed and sure and definite and therefore introduce some certainty into our lives.
And yet how little historians agree. Read the account of a war from one side and then from the other. Read the biography of a great man written by one who has come to despise him, then read his own account. Providence, talk to two servants about the same event that same morning in the kitchen and you may well be told two quite different tales, in which the wronged becomes the wrong-doer and what seemed obvious from one telling seems suddenly quite impossible given the other.
A friend will tell a story which involves the two of you in such a way that you know it did not happen so at all, but the way he tells it is more amusing than the reality, or reflects better on the two of you, and so you say nothing, and soon others will tell the story, altered again, and before long you may find yourself telling- it the way you know for a certainty it simply did not happen.
Those of us who keep journals occasionally find we have, with no malice or thought of tale or reputation enhancement whatsoever, remembered something quite erroneously. We may for a goodly part of our lives have been giving a perfectly plain account of some past occurrence, one that we are quite sure of and seem to remember very well indeed, only to come across our own written account of it, recorded at the time, and find that it did not happen the way we remembered it at all!
So we can never be sure of anything, perhaps.
And yet we must live. We must apply ourselves to the world. To do so we have to recall the past, attempt to foresee the future and cope with the demands of the present. And we struggle through, somehow, even if in the process — perhaps just to retain what we can of our sanity — we convince ourselves that the past, present and future are much more knowable than they really are or can ever be.
So, what happened?
I have spent the rest of a long life returning to the same few instants, without reward.
I think there is not a day when I do not think back to those few moments in the torture chamber of the palace of Efernze in the city of Haspide.
I was not unconscious, I am sure of that. The Doctor only convinced me that I was for a short while. Once she had gone, and I had recovered from my grief, I became more and more certain that precisely the amount of time which I thought had passed then, had passed. Ralinge was on the iron bed, poised to take her. His assistants were a few steps away, I cannot recall exactly where. I closed my eyes to spare myself the awful moment, and then the air filled with strange noises. A few moments — just a handful of heartbeats at the most, on that I would stake my life — and there they all were, the three of them, violently dead, and the Doctor already released from her bonds.
How? What could possibly move with such speed to do such things? Or, what trick of will or mind could be employed to make them do such things to themselves? And how was she able to appear so serene in the moments immediately thereafter? The more I think back to that interlude between the deaths of the torturers and the arrival of the guards, when we sat side by side in the small barred cell, the more sure I become that she somehow knew that we would be saved, that the King would suddenly find himself at death's door and she would be summoned to save him. But how could she have been so calmly certain?
Perhaps Adlain was right, and there was sorcery at work. Perhaps the Doctor had an invisible bodyguard who could leave egg-sized bumps on the heads of knaves and slip unnoticed behind us into the dungeon to butcher the butchers and release the Doctor from her manacles. It almost seems like the only rational answer, yet it is the most fanciful of all.
Or perhaps I did sleep, swoon, or become unconscious or whatever you like to call it. Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.
What more is there to tell? Let me see.
Duke Ulresile died, in hiding, in Brotechen province, a few months after the Doctor left us. It was a simple cut from a broken plate, they say, which led to blood poisoning. Duke Quettil died soon afterwards, too, from a wasting disease which affected all the extremities and turned them necrotic. Doctor Skelim was unable to do anything.
I became a doctor.
King Quience ruled another forty years, in exceptionally good health until the very end.
He left only daughters, so now we have a queen. I find this less troubling than I would have thought.
Lately they have taken to calling the Queen's late father Quience the Good, or sometimes Quience the Great. I dare say one or other will have been settled on by the time anybody comes to read this.
I was his personal physician for the last fifteen years, and the Doctor's training and my own discoveries made me, by all accounts, the best in the land. Perhaps, indeed, one of the best in the world, for when, partly due to the ambassadorship of gaan Kuduhn, more frequent and reliable links with the archipelagic republic of Drezen were established, we discovered that while our antipodean cousins rivalled and indeed even exceeded us in many ways, they were not quite so advanced in medicine, or indeed anything else, as the Doctor had implied.
Gaan Kuduhn came to live amongst us and became something of a father to me. Later he became a good friend and spent a decade as ambassador to Haspidus. A generous, resourceful and determined man, he confessed to me once that there was only one thing he had ever set his wits to that he had failed to accomplish, and that was trying to track down the Doctor, or indeed hunt down exactly where she had come from.
We could not ask her, for she disappeared.
One night in the sea of Osk, the Plough of the Seas was running before the wind past a line of small, uninhabited islands, bound for Cuskery. Then the glowing green apparition that mariners call chain-fire began to play about the rigging of the ship. All were at first amazed, but then they became in fear of their lives, for not only was the chainfire brighter and more intense than anything the sailors could recall seeing in the past, but the wind increased suddenly and threatened to tear the sails, bring down the masts or even turn the great galleon over entirely.
The chain-fire disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, and the wind fell back to the strong and steady force it had been before. By and by, all but those on watch returned to their cabins. One of the other passengers remarked they had not been able to wake the Doctor to come to see the display in the first place, though nobody thought much of this — the Doctor had been invited to dine with the vessel's captain that evening, but had sent a note declining the invitation, citing an indisposition due to special circumstances.
By the next morning it was realised she was gone. Her door was locked from the inside and had to be forced. The scuttles were screwed open for ventilation, but were too small for her to have squeezed through. Apparently all her belongings, or at any rate the great majority of them, were still there in the cabin. They were packed up and were supposed to be sent on to Drezen, but u
nsurprisingly they disappeared during the passage.
Gaan Kuduhn, hearing all this, like I, nearly a year later, became fixed upon letting her family know what had happened to her and what good she had done in Haspidus, but for all his enquiries on the island of Napthilia and in the city of Pressel, including some which he made himself on a visit there, and despite the numerous occasions when he seemed on the very brink of discovering her nearest ones, he was always frustrated, and never did find anybody who had actually met or known the woman we knew as Doctor Vosill. Still, I think that was one of the few things that irked him on his death bed, and there was, in balance, an extraordinarily influential and productive life to look back on.
The old Guard Commander Adlain suffered badly towards the end of his allotment of seasons. I think what consumed him was something like the growing disease that had taken the slaver Tunch, all those years earlier.
I was able to alleviate the pain but in the end it became too much for him. My old master told me, he swore truly, that indeed, as I had always suspected, he had been the officer who had rescued me from the wreck of my home and the dead arms of my parents in the smoking ruins of the city of Derla, but that he had taken me to the orphanage in a fit of guilt, for it had been he who had killed my mother and father and burned their house. Now, he said, from the clawing depths of his agony, I would want to kill him.
I chose not to believe him, but I did what I could to hasten his end, which came, peacefully, less than a bell later. His mind must have been going, of course, for if I had believed for a moment what he had told me, I think I would have been tempted to have left him to suffer.