Inversions (10 page)

‘Did something like your story happen there?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Were you one of the people?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Sometimes,’ Perrund said, sitting back with a look of exasperation on her face, ‘I can quite understand why rulers employ torturers.’

‘Oh, I can always understand,’ DeWar said softly. ‘Just not . . .’ He seemed to catch himself, then sat upright, pulling his tunic tighter down. He looked up at the vague shadows cast on the softly glowing bowl of the light dome overhead. ‘Perhaps we have time for a game of something. What do you say?’

Perrund remained looking at him for a moment, then sighed and also drew herself upright. ‘I say we had better play “Monarch’s Dispute”. It is the one game you might be suited for. Though there are also,’ she said, waving to a servant at a distant door, ‘”Liar’s Dice” and “Secret Keep”.’

DeWar sat back on the couch, watching Perrund as she watched the servant approach. ‘And “Subterfuge”,’ she added, ‘and “Blaggard’s Boast” and “Whiff of Truth” and “Travesty” and “The Gentleman Misinformant” and . . .’

‘My master has a plan for your mistress. A little surprise.’

‘I’ll bet!’

‘More like a big one! Eh?’

‘So would mine.’

There were various other comments and whistles from round the table, though nothing, in retrospect, that seemed much like wit.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Feulecharo, apprentice to Duke Walen, just winked. He was a stocky fellow, with wild brown hair that resisted all attempts to control it save those employing shears. He was polishing a pair of boots while the rest of us tucked into our evening meal, in a tent on the Prospect Plain, one day into the 455th Circuition. On this first rest stop it was traditional for the senior pages and apprentices to dine together. Feulecharo had been allowed to join us by his master, but he was being punished for one of his regular misdemeanours with extra work, hence the boots, and a set of rustily ancient ceremonial armour he was supposed to polish before we set off the next day.

‘What sort of plan?’ I insisted. ‘What can the Duke want with the Doctor?’

‘Let’s just say he’s suspicious,’ Feulecharo said, tapping his nose with a polishing brush.

‘Of what?’

‘My master is suspicious, too,’ Unoure said, breaking a piece of bread in half and smearing some gravy round his plate.

‘How very true,’ drawled Epline, page to Guard Commander Adlain.

‘Well, he is,’ Unoure insisted sullenly.

‘Still testing out his new ideas on you, is he, Unoure?’ one of the other pages called. He turned to the others. ‘We saw Unoure in the baths once’

‘Aye, it would be the once!’

‘What year was that?’

‘We did,’ continued the page, ‘and you should see the lad’s scars! I tell you, Nolieti is a perfect beast to him!’

‘He teaches me everything!’ Unoure said, standing up, his eyes bright with tears.

‘Shut up, Unoure,’ Jollisce said. ‘Don’t let this rabble bait you so.’ Slight but elegantly fair, and older than most of us, Jollisce was page to Duke Ormin, who was the Doctor’s employer after the Mifeli trading family and before the King commandeered her services. Unoure sat down again, muttering under his breath. ‘What plans, Feulecharo?’ Jollisce asked.

‘Never mind,’ Feulecharo said. He started whistling and began to pay uncharacteristically close attention to the boots he was polishing, and soon started to talk to them, as though trying to persuade them to clean themselves.

‘That boy is intolerable,’ Jollisce said, and took up a pitcher of the watered wine which was the strongest drink we were allowed.

A little after supper, Jollisce and I wandered along one edge of the camp. Hills stretched ahead of us and on both sides. Behind us, past the lip of the Prospect Plain, Xamis was still slowly setting in a fiery riot of colour, somewhere far beyond the near-circle of Crater Lake, falling over the round edge of sea.

Clouds, caught half in Xamis’s dying light and half in the late morning glare of Seigen, were lit with gold on one side, and red, ochre, vermilion, orange, scarlet . . . a wide wilderness of colours. We walked amongst the settling animals as each was quieted. Some the hauls, mostly had a bag over their heads. The better mounts had elegant eye-muffs while the best had their own travelling stables and lesser beasts merely warranted a blindfold made of whatever rag came to hand. One by one they folded themselves to the ground and prepared to sleep. Jollisce and I walked among them, Jollisce smoking a long pipe. He was my oldest and best friend, from the time when I had briefly been in the service of the Duke before being sent to Haspide.

‘Probably it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Feulecharo likes to listen to himself talk, and he likes to pretend he knows something everybody else doesn’t. I wouldn’t worry about it, but if you think you ought to report it to your mistress, then of course you must do so.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. I recall (looking back on that earlier self from this more mature vantage point) that I was not sure what to do. Duke Walen was a powerful man, and a schemer. He was not the sort of man somebody like the Doctor could afford to have as an enemy, and yet I had to think of my own, real Master, as well as my Mistress. Should I tell neither of them? Or one if so, which? Or both?

‘Listen,’ Jollisce said, stopping and turning to me (and it seemed to me he’d waited until there was nobody else around before he divulged this last piece of intelligence). ‘If it’s any help, I have heard that Walen might have sent somebody to Equatorial Cuskery.’

‘Cuskery?’

‘Yes, do you know of it?’

‘Sort of. It’s a port, isn’t it?’

‘Port, city-state, Sea Company sanctuary, lair of sea monsters if you believe some people . . . but the point is, it’s about the furthest north people come in any numbers from the Southern lands, and they supposedly have quite a number of embassies and legations there.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, apparently one of Duke Walen’s men has been sent to Cuskery to look for somebody from Drezen.’

‘From Drezen!’ I said, then lowered my voice as Jollisce frowned and looked about us, over the sleeping bodies of the great animals. ‘But . . . why?’

‘I can’t imagine,’ Jollisce said.

‘How long does it take to get to Cuskery?’

‘It takes nearly a year to get there. The journey is somewhat quicker coming back, they say.’ He shrugged. ‘The winds.’

‘That’s a long way to send somebody,’ I said, wondering.

‘I know,’ Jollisce said. He sucked on his pipe. ‘My man assumed it was some trade thing. You know, people are always expecting to make their fortunes from spices or potions or new fruits or something, if they can get stuff past the Sea Companies and avoid the storms, but, well, my master came by some information that indicated Walen’s fellow was looking for just one person.’

‘Oh.’

‘Hmm.’ Jollisce stood and faced the Xamis-set, his face made ruddy by the glow of flame-coloured cloud in the west. ‘Good sunset,’ he said, drawing deep on his pipe.

‘Very,’ I agreed, not really looking.

‘Best ones were just around the time the Empire fell, of course. Didn’t you think?’

‘Hmm? Oh yes, naturally.’

‘Providence’s recompense for the sky falling in on us,’ Jollisce mused, frowning into the bowl of his pipe.

‘Hmm. Yes.’ Who to tell? I thought. Who to tell. . .

Master, the Doctor attended the King in his tent each day during the Circuition from Haspide to Yvenir because our monarch was afflicted with an aching back.

The Doctor sat on the side of the bed King Quience lay upon. ‘If it’s really that sore, sir, you should rest it,’ she told him.

‘Rest?’ the King said, turning over on to his front. ‘How can I rest? This is the Circuition, you idiot. If I rest so does everybody else, and then by the time we get to the Summer Palace it’ll be time to come back again.’

‘Well,’ the Doctor said, pulling the King’s shift up out of his riding breeches to expose his broad, muscled back. ‘You might lie on your back in a carriage, sir.’

‘That would hurt too,’ he said into his pillow.

‘It might hurt a little, sir, but it would quickly become better. Sitting on a mount will only make it worse.’

‘Those carts, they sway all over the place and the wheels bang down into holes and ruts. These roads are much worse than they were last year, I’m sure. Wiester?’

‘Sir?’ the fat chamberlain said, quickly stepping out of the shadows to the King’s side.

‘Have somebody find out whose responsibility this bit of road is. Are the appropriate taxes being collected? If they are, are they being spent on it and if not where are they going?’

‘At once, sir.’ Wiester bustled off, leaving the tent.

‘You can’t trust Dukes to levy taxes properly, Vosill,’ the King sighed. ‘At any rate, you can’t trust their tax collectors. They have too damn much authority. Far too many tax collectors have bought themselves baronies for my liking.’

‘Indeed, Sir,’ the Doctor said.

‘Yes. I’ve been thinking I might set up some sort of more . . . town- or city-sized, umm . . .’

‘Authority, Sir?’

‘Yes. Yes, authority. A council of responsible citizens. Perhaps just to oversee the roads and city walls and so on, at first. Things they might care about more than Dukes, who only bother about their own houses and how much game is in their parks.’

‘I’m sure that’s a very good idea, sir.’

‘Yes, I’m sure it is too.’ The King looked round at the Doctor. ‘You have them, don’t you?’

‘Councils, Sir?’

‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve mentioned them. Probably comparing our own backward arrangements unfavourably, I don’t doubt.’

‘Would I do that, sir?’

‘Oh, I think you would, Vosill.’

‘Our arrangements do seem to produce comfortable roads, I would certainly claim that.’

‘But then,’ the King said glumly, ‘if I take power from the barons, they’ll get upset.’

‘Well, make them all arch-Dukes, sir, or give them some other awards.’

The King thought about this. ‘What other awards?’

‘I don’t know, sir. You might invent some.’

‘Yes, I might,’ the King said. ‘But then, if I go giving power to the peasants or the tradespeople and so on, they’ll only want more.’

The Doctor continued to massage the King’s back. ‘We do say that prevention is better than cure, sir,’ she told him. ‘The time to look after the body is before there is anything wrong with it. The time to rest is before you feel too tired to do anything else, and the time to eat is before hunger consumes you.

The King frowned as the Doctor’s hands moved over his body. ‘How I wish it was all so easy.’ he said with a sigh. ‘I think the body must be a simple thing in comparison to a state if it can be maintained on the basis of such platitudes.’

The Doctor, I thought, looked a little hurt by this. ‘Then I am glad that my concern is for the health of your body, sir, not that of your country.’

‘I am my country,’ the King said sternly, though with an expression which belied his tone.

‘Then be glad, sir, that your kingdom is in a better state than its king, who will not lie in a carriage like a sensible monarch would.’

‘Don’t treat me like a child, Vosill!’ the King said loudly, twisting round towards her. ‘Ow!’ he said, grimacing, and collapsed back again. ‘What you don’t realise, Vosill,’ he said, through gritted teeth, ‘being a woman, I suppose, is that in a carriage you have less room for manoeuvre. They take up the whole road, you see? A man on a mount, why, he can negotiate his way around all the irregularities on the road surface.’

‘I see, sir. Nevertheless, it is a fact that you are spending the whole day in the saddle, bouncing up and down and compressing the small pads between your vertebrae and forcing them into the nerve. That’s what is making your spine hurt. Lying in a carriage, almost no matter how much it shakes and bounces, will certainly be better for you.’

‘Look, Vosill,’ the King said in an exasperated tone, levering himself up on one elbow and looking round at the Doctor. ‘How do you think it would look if the King took to a pleasuring couch and laid amongst the perfumed pillows of a ladies’ carriage like some porcelain-arsed concubine? What sort of monarch could do that? Eh? Don’t be ridiculous.’ He laid carefully back on his front again.

‘I take it your father never did such a thing, sir.’

‘No, he . . .’ the King began, then looked suspiciously back at the Doctor before continuing. ‘No, he didn’t. Of course not. He rode. And I will ride. I shall ride and make my back sore because that’s what’s expected of me. You shall make my back better because that’s what’s expected of you. Now, do your job, Doctor, and stop this damned prattling. Providence preserve me from the wittering of women! Aow! Will you be careful!’

‘I have to find out where it hurts, sir.’

‘Well, you’ve found it! Now do what you’re supposed to do, which is make it stop hurting. Wiester? Wiester!’

Another servant came forward. ‘He’s just stepped out, sir.’

‘Music,’ the King said. ‘I want music. Fetch the musicians.’

‘Sir.’ The servant turned to go.

The King snapped his fingers, bringing the servant back.

‘Sir?’

‘And wine.’

‘Sir.’

‘What a beautiful sunset, don’t you think, Oelph?’

‘Yes, mistress. Providence’s recompense for the sky falling in upon us,’ I said, recalling Jollisce’s phrase (I was sure it was one he’d heard from somebody else anyway).

‘I suppose it’s something,’ the Doctor agreed.

We were sitting on the broad front bench of the covered wagon which had become our home. I had been counting. I had slept in the carriage for eleven of the last sixteen days (the other five I had been billeted with the other senior pages and apprentices in buildings in one of the towns we had camped within) and I would probably sleep in it again for another seven days out of the next ten, until we reached the city of Lep-Skatacheis, where we would stop for half a moon. Thereafter the wagon would be my home for eighteen days out of twenty-one until we reached Yvenage. Perhaps nineteen out of twenty-two if we encountered difficulties on the hill roads and were delayed.

The Doctor looked away from the sunset, gazing up the road, which was lined with tall trees standing in sandy earth on both sides. An orange-brown haze hung in the air above the swaying tops of the grander carriages ahead. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

‘Very nearly, mistress. This is the longest day’s travel on either leg. The scouts should be in sight of the camp ground and the forward party ought to have the tents erected and the field kitchens set up. It is a long draw, but they say the way to look at it is as saving a day.’

Ahead of us on the road were the grand carriages and covered wagons of the royal household. Immediately in front of us were two hauls, their broad shoulders and rumps swaying from side to side. The Doctor had refused a driver. She wanted to take the whip herself (though she used it little). This meant that we had to feed and care for the beasts ourselves each evening. I did not appreciate this, though my fellow pages and apprentices certainly did. So far the Doctor had taken on a much higher proportion of this menial work than I’d expected, but I resented doing any of it at all, and found it hard to believe that she could not see she was exposing both of us to ridicule by taking on such a degrading task.