Inversions (29 page)

DeWar thought he detected a sense of cautious relief around the table.

‘I’m sure we all feel the same way, sir,’ said ZeSpiole with an indulgent smile to VilTere and a cautious one to UrLeyn.

‘Very well,’ UrLeyn said. ‘We shall consider what fresh troops we might be able to send to Ladenscion and we shall tell Ralboute and Simalg to prosecute the war against the barons without respite or negotiation. Gentlemen.’ With that, and a perfunctory nod, UrLeyn rose and marched away. DeWar followed.

‘Then let me tell you something closer to the truth.’

‘Only closer?’

‘Sometimes the truth is too much to bear.’

‘I have a strong constitution.’

‘Yes, but I meant that sometimes it is too much for the teller, not the told.’

‘Ah. Well then, tell me what you can.’

‘Oh, there is not so much, now I approach it. And it is a common story. All too common. The less I tell you of it the more you could be hearing it from a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand mouths or more.’

‘I have a feeling it is not a happy story.’

‘Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.’

‘Ah.’

‘You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ingredients imply the finished article, and the method of its making, do they not? It is men who fight wars, wars are fought taking villages, towns and cities, where women tend the hearths, and when the place that they live is taken, so are they. Their honour becomes one of the spoils, their bodies too invaded. That territory taken. So my story is no different from that of tens of thousands of women, regardless of their nation or their tribe. And yet for me it is everything. For me it is the most important thing that ever happened to me. For me it was the end of my life, and what you see before you is like a ghost, a spirit, a mere shade, unsubstantial.’

‘Please, Perrund.’ He reached out his hands towards her in a gesture that required no response and did not seek to end in a touch. It was instead a movement of sympathy, even supplication. ‘If this hurts you so, you don’t need to continue for me.’

‘Ah, but does it hurt you, DeWar?’ she asked, and there was a sharp edge of bitterness and accusation in her voice. ‘Does it make you embarrassed? I know you have a regard for me, DeWar. We are friends.’ These two sentences were uttered too quickly for him to be able to react. ‘Are you upset on my behalf, or your own? Most men would rather not hear what their fellows have done, what people who may indeed be very like them are capable of. Do you prefer not to think about such things, DeWar? Do you think that you are so different? Or do you become secretly excited at the idea?’

‘Lady, I gain no benefit or pleasure at all from the subject.’

‘Are you sure, DeWar? And if you are, do you really think you speak for the majority of your sex? For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not merely for show?’

‘You must believe that we are not all the same. And even if all men might be said to have . . . base urges, we do not all give in to them, or pay them any respect, even in secret. I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear what happened to you. . .’

‘But you have not heard, DeWar. You have not heard at all. I have implied that I was raped. That did not kill me. That alone might have killed the girl I was and replaced her with a woman, with a bitter one, with an angry one, or one who wished to take her own life, or attempt to take the life of those who violated her, or one who simply became mad.

‘I think I might have become angry and bitter and I would have hated all men, but I think I would have survived and might have been persuaded, by the good men I knew in my own family and in my own town, and perhaps by one good man in particular who must now for ever remain in my dreams, that all was not lost and the world was not quite so terrible a place.

‘But I never had that opportunity to recover, DeWar. I was pushed so far down in my despair I could not even tell in which direction the way back up lay. What happened to me was the least of it, DeWar. I watched my father and my brothers butchered, after they had been forced to watch my mother and my sisters being fucked time after time by a fine and numerous company of high-ranking men. Oh! You look down! Does my language upset you? Are you offended? Have I violated your ears with my intemperate, soldiers’ words?’

‘Perrund, you must believe that I am sorry for what happened to you . . .’

‘But why should you be sorry? It was not your fault. You were not there. You assure me that you disapprove, so why should you be sorry?’

‘I would be bitter in your place.’

‘In my place? How could that be, DeWar? You are a man. In the same place you would be, if not one of the violators, one of those who looked away, or remonstrated with their comrades afterwards.’

‘If I was the age you were then, and a pretty youth’

‘Ah, so you can share what happened to me. I see. That is good. I am comforted.’

‘Perrund, say anything you want to me. Blame me if it will help, but please believe I . . .’

‘Believe you what, DeWar? I believe you feel sorry for me, but your sympathy stings like salty tears in a wound because I am a proud ghost, you see. Oh yes, a proud ghost. I am an enraged shade, and a guilty one, because I have come to admit to myself that I resent what was done to my family because it hurt me, because I was raised to expect everything to be done for me.

‘I loved my parents and my sisters in my own way, but it was not a selfless love. I loved them because they loved me and made me feel special. I was their baby, their chosen beloved. Through their devotion and protection I learned none of the lessons that children usually learn, about the way the world really works and the way that children are used within it, until that single day, that one morning when every fond illusion I held was torn from me and the brutal truth forced into me.

‘I had come to expect the best of everything, I had come to believe that the world would always treat me as I had been treated in the past and that those I loved would be there to love me in return. My fury at what happened to my family is partly caused by that expectation, that happy assumption, being defiled and obliterated. That is my guilt.’

‘Perrund, you must know that should not be a cause for guilt. What you feel is what any decent child feels when they realise the selfishness they have felt when they were younger still. A selfishness that is only natural to children, especially those who have been loved so intensely. The realisation occurs, it is felt briefly and then it is rightly set aside. You have not been able to set yours aside because of what those men did to you, but’

‘Oh, stop, stop! Do you think I do not know all this? I know it, but I am a ghost, DeWar! I know, but I cannot feel, I cannot learn, I cannot change. I am stuck, I am pinned to that time by that event. I am condemned.’

‘There is nothing I can do or say that can alter what happened to you, Perrund. I can only listen, only do what you will let me do.’

‘Oh, do I persecute you? Do I make you a victim now, DeWar?’

‘No, Perrund.’

‘No, Perrund. No, Perrund. Ah, DeWar, the luxury of being able to say No.’

He went, half kneeling, half on his haunches by her then, putting himself very near to her but still not touching her, his knee near hers, his shoulder by her hip, his hands within grasp of hers. He was close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to feel the heat from her body, close enough to feel the hot breath that laboured from her nose and her half-open mouth, close enough for one hot tear to hit her clenched fist and spatter even tinier droplets on to his cheek. He kept his head bowed, and crossed his hands on his raised knee.

The bodyguard DeWar and the court concubine Perrund were in one of the palace’s more secret places. It was an old hiding hole in one of the lower levels, a space the size of a cupboard which led off one of the public rooms in the original noble house which had formed the basis of the greater building.

Retained more for sentimental than practical reasons by the first monarch of Tassasen and through a kind of indifference by subsequent rulers, the rooms which had seemed so grand to that first king had long since been judged too small and mean of proportion by future generations and were nowadays used only for storage.

The tiny room had been used to spy on people. It was a listening post. Unlike the alcove DeWar had burst from to attack the Sea Company assassin, it was not built for a guard but for a noble, so that he could sit there, with only a small hole in the stonework between him and the public room that hole perhaps hidden by a tapestry or painting and listen to what his guests were saying about him.

Perrund and DeWar had come here after she had asked him to show her some of the parts of the palace he had discovered on the wanderings which she knew he took. Shown this tiny room, it had suddenly reminded her of the secret compartment in their house in which her parents had concealed her when the town was sacked during the war of succession.

‘If I knew who those men were, DeWar, would you be my champion? Would you avenge my honour?’ she asked him.

He looked up into her eyes. They looked extraordinarily bright in the dim light of the hidden room. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you knew who they were. If you could be sure. Would you ask me to?’

She shook her head angrily. She wiped away her tears with her hand. ‘No. The ones I could identify are dead now, anyway.’

‘Who were they?’

‘King’s men,’ Perrund said, looking up and away from DeWar, as though telling the small hole where the ancient noble had thought to eavesdrop on his guests. ‘The old King’s men. One of his baron commanders and his friends. They had been in charge of the siege and the taking of the town. Apparently we were favoured. Whoever was their spy had told them my father’s house held the town’s most comely maidens. They came to us first, and my father tried to offer them money to leave us alone. They took that badly. A merchant offering a noble man money!’ She looked down at her lap, where her good hand, still damp with tears, lay beside her wasted hand in its sling. ‘I knew all their names, eventually. All the noble ones, at any rate. They died during the rest of the course of the war. I tried to tell myself that I felt good when I heard about the first few dying, but I did not. I could not. I felt nothing. That was when I knew I was dead inside. They had planted death in me.’

DeWar waited a long time before he said, softly, ‘And yet you live, and you saved the life of the one who ended the war and brought about a better law. There is no right of’

‘Ah, DeWar, there is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but…’

‘And yet,’ DeWar insisted, ’still you are alive. And there are people who have the highest regard for you and feel their lives have been the better for having known you. Did you not say you had found a type of peace and contentment here, in the palace?’

‘In the harem of the chief,’ she said, though with something more like measured disdain than the fury that had been in her voice earlier. ‘As a cripple kept on out of sympathy in the collection of mates for the foremost male of the pack.’

‘Oh, come. We may act like animals, men especially. But we are not animals. If we were there would not be the shame in acting so. We act otherwise, too, and set a better marker. Where is love in what you say of where you are now? Do you not feel even slightly loved, Perrund?’

She reached out quickly and put her hand on his cheek, letting it rest there, as easily and naturally as though they were brother and sister or a husband and wife, long married.

‘As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise.’ She smiled a small, empty smile. ‘Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember,something I may discuss and mull and theorise over.’ She shook her head. ‘But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman talking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead.’

She stood, before he could say more. ‘Now, please, take me back to the harem.’

I do not believe the Doctor thought there was anything amiss. I know I did not suspect anything. The gaan Kuduhn seemed to have disappeared as quickly as he had arrived, taking ship for far Chuenruel the day after we’d met him, which left the Doctor a little sad. There had, when I thought about it later, been hints that the palace was preparing for a large contingent of new guests a degree more activity in certain corridors than one might have expected, doors being used that were not normally open, rooms being aired but none of it was particularly obvious, and the web of rumour that connected all the servants, assistants, apprentices and pages had not yet woken up to what was going on.

It was the second day of the second moon. My mistress was visiting the old Untouchable Quarter, where once the lowest classes, foreigners, bondagers and quarantiners were forced to dwell. It was still a far from salubrious area, but no longer walled and patrolled. It was there that the Master Chemicalist and Metaliciser (or so he styled himself) Chelgre had his workshop.

The Doctor had risen very late that morning and seemed much the worse for wear for about a bell or so. She sighed heavily and frequently, she said little to me but rather muttered to herself, she appeared a trifle unsteady on her feet and her face was pale. However, she shook off the effects of her hangover with astonishing rapidity, and while she remained subdued for the rest of the morning and the afternoon, she seemed otherwise back to normal after her late breakfast, just before we set off for the Untouchable Quarter.

Of what had been said the night before, not a further word was spoken. I think both of us were a little embarrassed at what we had admitted and implied to each other, and so achieved an unspoken but fully mutual agreement to keep our own counsel on the subject.

Master Chelgre was his usual strange and singular self. He was of course well known around the Court, both for his wild-haired and ragged appearance and his abilities with cannons and their dark powder. I need say no more for the purposes of this report. Besides, the Doctor and Chelgre talked of nothing that I could understand.

We returned by the fifth bell of the afternoon, on foot but escorted by a couple of barrow boys pushing a small cart loaded with straw-wrapped clays containing yet more chemicals and ingredients for what I was starting to suspect would be a long season of experiments and potions.

At the time, I recall feeling mildly resentful of this, for I did not doubt that I would be heavily involved in whatever the Doctor had in mind, and that my efforts would be in addition to those domestic tasks she had come to rely on me performing as a matter of course. To me, I strongly suspected, would fall most of the weighing and measuring and grinding and combining and diluting and washing and scouring and polishing and so on which this new batch of observations would require. There would be proportionately less time for me to spend with my fellows, playing cards and flirting with the kitchen girls, and, without being shy about it, that sort of thing had become relatively important to me in the past year.

Even so, I suppose, it could be said that in some cellar of my soul I was secretly pleased to be so relied upon by the Doctor and was looking forward to being crucially involved with her efforts. These would, after all, mean us being together, working as a team, working as equals, closeted in her study and workshop, passing many happily intense evenings and nights together, striving for a shared goal. Could I not hope that a greater regard might blossom in such intimate circumstances, now that she knew it was in my thoughts? The Doctor had been decisively rejected by the one she loved, or at least the one she believed she loved, while the manner in which she had declined the connotation of my interest in her seemed to me to be more to do with modesty than hostility or even indifference.

Yet I did feel a degree of petulance towards the ingredients being wheeled up the street in front of us that evening. How I regretted that feeling, so soon afterwards. How unsure that future I had envisaged for myself and her really was.

A warm wind seemed to blow us up the Market Square towards the Blister Gate, where long shadows advanced to meet us. We entered the palace. The Doctor paid the barrow boys off and a handful of servants were summoned to help me carry the clays, crates and boxes up to our apartments. I laboured under a rotund clay I knew was full of acid, chafing at the thought of having to share the same cramped set of rooms with it and its fellows. The Doctor was talking about having a workbench-level hearth and chimney constructed to allow the noxious fumes to escape better, but I suspected that even so the next few moons would see me with running eyes and an aching nose, not to mention hands pimpled with tiny burns and clothes perforated with pin-head holes.

We achieved the Doctor’s apartments just as Xamis was setting. The casks, clays and so on were distributed about the rooms, the servants were thanked and given a few coins, and the Doctor and I lit the lamps and set to unpacking all the inedible and poisonous provisions we had purchased from Master Chelgre.

A knock came at the door just after seventh bell. I answered it to find a servant I did not recognise. He was taller and a little older than me.

‘Oelph?’ he said, grinning. ‘Here. A note from the GC.’ He shoved a sealed piece of paper addressed to Doctor Vosill into my hand.

‘The who?’ I asked, but he had already turned and was sauntering off down the corridor. I shrugged.

The Doctor read the note. ‘I am to attend the Guard Commander and Duke Ormin in the Suitor’s Wing,’ she said, sighing and pushing her fingers through her hair. She looked round the half-unpacked cases. ‘Would you mind doing the rest of this, Oelph?’

‘Of course not, mistress.’

‘I think it’s obvious where everything goes. Like with like. If there is anything unfamiliar, just leave it on the floor. I’ll try not to be too long.’

‘Very well, mistress.’

The Doctor buttoned her shirt up to the neck, sniffed at one of her armpits (just the sort of thing she did which I found unladylike and even distressing, but which I look back on now with an ache of longing), then shrugged, threw on a short jacket, and made for the door. She opened it, then came back, looked round the mess of straw, box-planks, twine and sacking that lay strewn across the floor, picked up her old dagger which she had been using to cut (or rather saw) the twine around the boxes and crates, and went off, whistling. The door closed.

I do not know what made me look at the note which had summoned her. She had left it lying on top of an opened crate, and as I pulled the straw out of another box nearby, the fold of creamy paper kept attracting my eye. Eventually, after a glance at the door, I lifted the note and sat down to read it. It said little more than what the Doctor had told me. I read it again.

D. Vosill kindly to meet D. Ormin and G.C. Adlain in the Suitor’s Wing on receipt privately. P.G.t.K. Adlain.

Providence Guard the King, indeed. I looked at the last word for a few moments. The name at the end of the note was Adlain, but it did not look like his writing, which I knew. Of course the note had probably been dictated, or composed and written by Epline, Adlain’s page, on his master’s instructions. But I thought I knew his writing, too, and this was not it. I cannot claim that I thought any further or at any greater depth.

I could claim a host of reasons for what I did next, but the truth is that I do not know, unless instinct itself can be cited. Even to call it instinct may be to dignify the urge. At the time it felt more like a whim, or even a sort of trivial duty. I cannot even claim that I felt fearful, or had a premonition. I simply did it.

I had been prepared to follow the Doctor from the start of my mission. I had expected to be told to shadow her one day, to follow her into the city on one of the occasions she did not take me along with her, yet never had my Master requested such a thing. I had assumed that he retained other people, more experienced and adept at such behaviour, and less likely to be recognisable to the Doctor, for such work. So, in putting out the lamps, locking the door behind me and following her, I was in a sense doing something I had long thought I would one day find myself doing. I left the note lying where I had picked it up.

The palace seemed quiet. I supposed most people were preparing for dinner. I ascended to the roof-floor. The servants who had their rooms up here would all be busy just now, and probably nobody would see me as I flitted by. Also, this way to the old Suitor’s Wing was shorter. For somebody who was not thinking about what he was doing, I was thinking remarkably clearly.

I descended to the dark confines of the Little Court by the servants’ stairs and skirted the corner of the old North Wing (now in the southern part of the palace) by the light of Foy, Iparine and Jairly. Lamps burned in the distant windows of the main part of the palace, pointing my way for a few steps before the light was eclipsed by the shuttered façade of the old North Wing. Like the Suitor’s Wing, this would not normally be used at this time of year unless there was a great state occasion. The Suitor’s Wing looked shuttered and dark, too, save for one sliver of light showing at the edge of the main doorway. I kept to the two-thirds darkness at the foot of the old North Wing’s wall as I approached, and felt exposed beneath the single intrusive eye of Jairly.

With the King in residence, there were supposed to be regular guard patrols, even here where there would not normally be anybody. I had seen no hint of any guards so far, and had no idea how often they made their rounds, or indeed if they really did bother with this part of the palace, but even knowing that men of the palace guard might appear made me more nervous than I felt I really ought to be. What had I to hide? Was I not a good and faithful servant, and devoted to the King? Yet, here I was, quite consciously skulking.

I would have to cross another courtyard in the light of the three moons if I were to use the main entrance of the Suitor’s Wing, but even without thinking about it I knew I did not want to use that front entrance. Then I found what I recalled ought to be here a way which led beneath the North Wing to a smaller galleried courtyard within. There were gates at the far end, just visible in the gloom of the tunnel, but they were open. The narrow courtyard was silent and ghostly. The painted gallery posts looked like stiff white sentries watching me. I took the small tunnel on the far side of the court, also gated but not locked, and one left turn later found myself at the rear of the Suitor’s Wing, in the shadow of all three moons, with the building’s wooden-shuttered facade tall and blank and dark above me.

I stood there, wondering how I was going to get in, then walked along until I found a doorway. The door would be locked, I thought, but then when I tried it, it was not. Now why should that be? I pulled the slab of wood slowly to me, expecting it to creak, but it did not.

The darkness inside was complete. The door closed behind me with a soft thud. I had to feel my way along the corridor inside, one hand on the wall to my right, my other hand out in front of my face. These would be the servants’ quarters. The floor under my feet was naked stone. I passed several doors. They were all locked, save for one which gave access to a large, empty cupboard with a faint acrid, acidic smell which made me suspect it had once contained soap. I banged my hand on one of its shelves and almost swore out loud.

Back in the corridor again, I came to a wooden stairway. I crept upwards and came to a door. From the bottom of the door there was the very faintest suggestion of light, hinted at only when I did not look directly at it. I twisted the handle carefully and pulled the door towards me, for less than a hand’s width.

Down a broad, carpeted corridor lined with paintings I could see that the source of the light was a room at the far end, near the main doorway. I heard a cry and what might have been the sound of a scuffle, and then another cry. Footsteps sounded in the distance, and the light in the doorway changed an instant before a figure appeared there. It was a man. That was about all I could ever be sure of. The fellow came running down the corridor, straight towards me.

It took me a moment to realise that he might actually be heading for the door I was hiding behind. In that time he covered about half the length of the corridor. There was something wild and desperate about him that put a terror into me.

I turned and jumped down the dark stairs, landing heavily and hurting my left ankle. I stumbled towards where I thought the unlocked cupboard door ought to be. My hands flailed around the wall for a moment until I found the door, then I pulled it open and threw myself inside just as a bang and a thin wash of light announced that the man had thrown open the door at the top of the stairs. Heavy footsteps clattered down.

I leant back against the shelves. I put my hand out towards the swinging shadow of the cupboard door to pull it back, but it was out of my reach. The man must have run into it, for there was a loud bang and a yelp of pain and anger. The cupboard door slammed shut and I was left in darkness. Another, heavier door slammed somewhere outside and a key rattled in a lock.

I pushed the cupboard door open. A small amount of light was still falling down the stairway. I heard some noise from the top of the stairs but it sounded distant. It might have been a door closing. I went back to the top of the steps and looked out through the half-open door. Down the broad corridor, the light changed again in the doorway near the main entrance at the far end. I got ready to run again, but nobody appeared. Instead there was a stifled cry. A woman’s cry. A terrible fear shook me then, and I started to walk down the corridor.

I had gone perhaps five or six steps when the main doors at the far end of the hall were thrown open and a troop of guards rushed in, swords drawn. Two of them stopped and looked at me, while the rest made straight for the door where the light was coming from.

‘You! Here!’ one of the guards shouted, pointing his sword at me.

Shouts, and a woman’s frightened voice, came from the lit room. I walked on trembling legs down the hall towards the guards. I was grabbed by the collar and forced into the room, where the Doctor was being held by two tall guardsmen, her arms pinned, forced back against a wall. She was shouting at the men.