Inversions (6 page)

Then she turned to the wild-haired woman. ‘You must tell me the truth, Mrs Elund,’ she said. She nodded to me to open her bag while she pulled the sick child further up the bed and then had me bunch the straw mattress up underneath her back and head. As I knelt to this, I could feel the heat coming off the girl’s fevered skin. ‘Has she been like this for three days?’

‘Three, two, four .. . who knows!’ wailed the wildhaired woman. ‘All I know is my precious daughter is dying! She’s going to die! Oh, Doctor, help her! Help us all, for no one else will!’ The thick-set woman suddenly threw herself, with some awkwardness, off the cushion and on to the floor, burying her head in the folds of the Doctor’s cloak even as the Doctor was unfastening the garment and trying to free herself from it.

‘I’ll do what I can, Mrs Elund,’ the Doctor said, and then looked at me as she let the cloak fall off her shoulders and the girl on the bed started to splutter and cough. ‘Oelph, we’ll need that cushion, too.’

Mrs Elund sat up and looked round. ‘That’s mine!’ she cried as I gathered up the burst cushion and stuffed it behind the sick girl’s head while the Doctor held her upright. ‘Where am I to sit? I’ve given up my bed for her already!’

‘You must find somewhere else,’ the Doctor told her. She reached down and pulled up the girl’s thin dress. I looked away as she examined the child’s mid-parts, which appeared inflamed.

The Doctor bent closer, rearranging the child’s legs and taking some instrument from her bag. After a while she put the girl’s legs back together and pulled the patient’s dress and skirts back down. She busied herself with the child’s eyes and mouth and nose, and held her wrist for a while, eyes closed. There was silence in the room save for the noises of the storm and the occasional sniffle from Mrs Elund, who had settled on the floor with the Doctor’s cape wrapped half around her. I had the distinct impression the Doctor was trying to control a desire to shout and scream.

‘The money for the song school,’ the Doctor said tersely. ‘If I went to the school now, do you think they would tell me it had been spent there on Zea’s lessons?’

‘Oh, Doctor, we’re a poor family!’ the wild-haired woman said, putting her face in her hands again. ‘I can’t watch what they all do! I can’t keep watch on what she does with the money I give her! She does what she wants to do, that one, I tell you! Oh, save her, Doctor! Please save her!’

The Doctor shifted her position where she knelt and reached in under the bed. She pulled out a couple of fat clays, one stoppered, one not. She sniffed the empty clay and shook the stoppered one. It sloshed. Mrs Elund looked up, her eyes wide. She swallowed. I caught a whiff from the clay. The smell was the same as that on Mrs Elund’s breath. The Doctor looked at the other woman over the top of the empty clay. ‘How long has Zea known men, Mrs Elund?’ the Doctor asked, replacing the clays under the bed.

‘Known men!’ the wild-haired woman screeched, sitting upright. ‘She’

‘And on this bed, too, I’d think,’ the Doctor said, pulling up the girl’s dress to look at the bed’s covers again. ‘That’s where she’s picked up the infection. Somebody’s been too rough with her. She’s too young.’ She looked at Mrs Elund with an expression I can only say I was devoutly glad was not directed at me. Mrs Elund’s jaw worked and her eyes went wide. I thought she was about to speak, then the Doctor said, ‘I understood what the children said when they left, Mrs Elund. They thought Zea might be pregnant, and they mentioned the sea captain and the two bad men. Or did I misunderstand something?’

Mrs Elund opened her mouth, then she went limp and her eyes closed and she said, ‘Oooh . . .’ and fell in what looked like a dead faint to the floor, folding herself on to the Doctor’s cloak.

The Doctor ignored Mrs Elund and busied herself at her bag for a moment before bringing out a jar of ointment and a small wooden spatula. She drew on a pair of the rike’s bladder gloves she’d had the Palace hide-tailor make for her and pulled the girl’s dress up once more. I looked away again.

The Doctor used various of her precious ointments and fluids on the sick child, telling me as she did so what effect each ought to have, how this one alleviated the effects of high temperature on the brain, how this one would fight the infection at its source, how this one would do the same job from inside the girl’s body, and how this one would give her strength and act as a general tonic when she recovered. The Doctor had me remove her cloak from underneath Mrs Elund and then hold the cloak out of a window in the other room, waiting with arms that became increasingly sore until it was saturated with water before bringing it back inside and placing its dark, sopping folds over the child, whose clothes, save for a single tatty shift, the Doctor had removed. The girl continued to shake and twitch, and seemed no better than when we had arrived.

When Mrs Elund made the noises that indicated she was coming back from her faint, the Doctor ordered her to find a fire, a kettle and some clean water to boil. Mrs Elund seemed to resent this, but left without too many curses muttered under her breath.

‘She’s burning up,’ the Doctor whispered to herself, one graceful, long-fingered hand on the child’s forehead. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that the girl might die. ‘Oelph,’ the Doctor said, looking at me with worry in her eyes. ‘Would you see if you can find the children? Hurry them up. She needs that ice.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ I said wearily, and made for the stairs and their mixture of sights, sounds and smells. I had just been starting to think that parts of me were drying off.

I exited into the loud darkness of the storm. Xamis had set by now and poor Seigen, somewhere beyond the clouds, seemed to have no more power to penetrate them than an oil lamp. The rain-lashed streets were deserted and gloomy, full of deep shadows and buffeting squalls that threatened to bowl me over into the gurgling open sewer overflowing at the centre of each thoroughfare. I headed downhill under the darkly threatening bulk of the over-hanging buildings, in what I imagined must be the direction of the docks, hoping that I could find my way back and starting to wish that I’d taken one of the people in the outer room as a guide.

I think sometimes the Doctor forgets that I am not a native of Haspide. Certainly I have lived here longer than she, for she only arrived a little over two years ago, but I was born in the city of Derla, far to the south, and passed the majority of my childhood in the province of Ormin. Even since I came to Haspide most of the time I have spent here has been not in the city itself but in the Palace, or in the summer palace in the Yvenage hills, or on the road to it or on the way back from it.

I wondered if the Doctor had really sent me out to look for the children or whether there was some arcane or secret treatment she intended to carry out which she did not want me to witness. They say all doctors are secretive I have heard that one medical clan in Oartch kept the invention of birthing forceps secret for the best part of two generations but I had thought Doctor Vosill was different. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she really did think I’d be able to make the ice she’d requested arrive quicker, though it seemed to me there was little I could really do. A cannon boomed out over the city, marking the end of one watch and the start of another. The sound was muffled by the storm and seemed almost like part of it. I buttoned my coat up as far as I could. While I was doing this the wind whipped my hat off my head and sent it tumbling down the street until it fetched up in the street’s central drain. I ran after it and lifted it out of the stinking stream, wrinkling my nose in disgust at the smell. I rinsed it as best I could under an overflowing drain, wrung it out and sniffed at it, then threw it away.

I found the docks after a while, by which time I was thoroughly soaked again. I hunted in vain for an ice warehouse, and was told in no uncertain terms, by the odd sea-faring and trading types I discovered in a few small ramshackle offices and a couple of crowded, smoke-stuffed taverns, that I was in the wrong place to find ice warehouses. This was the salt-fish market. I was able to confirm this when I slipped on some fish guts lying rotting under a windruffled puddle and was nearly pitched into the troubled, tossing waters of the dock alongside. I could have got wetter as a result of such a fall, but unlike the Doctor I cannot swim. Eventually I found myself being forced by a tall stone wall which started sheer on a wind-whipped quay and extended off into the distance to walk back uphill into the maze of tenements.

The children had beaten me to it. I arrived back at the accursed building, ignored the frightful threats of the foul-smelling harridan at the door, dragged myself up the steps past the smells and through the cacophony of sounds, following a trail of dark water spots to the top floor, where the ice had been delivered and the girl packed in it, still covered in the Doctor’s cloak and now again surrounded by her siblings and friends.

The ice arrived too late. We had arrived too late, perhaps by a day or so. The Doctor struggled through into the night, trying everything she could think of, but the girl slipped away from her in a blazing fever the ice could not alleviate, and sometime around when the storm started to abate, in the midnight of Xamis, while Seigen still struggled to pierce the tattering dark shrouds of the storm clouds and the voices of the singers were carried away and lost on the quickness of the wind, the child died.

‘ Let me search him, General.’

‘We can’t search him, DeWar, he’s an ambassador.’

‘ZeSpiole is right, DeWar. We can’t treat him as though he’s some peasant supplicant.’

‘Of course not, DeWar,’ said BiLeth, who was the Protector’s advisor on most matters foreign. He was a tall, thin, imperious man with long, scant hair and a short, considerable temper. He did his best to look down his very thin nose at the taller DeWar. ‘What sort of ruffians do you want us to appear?’

‘The ambassador certainly comes with all the usual diplomatic accoutrements,’ UrLeyn said, striding onwards along the terrace.

‘From one of the Sea Companies, sir,’ DeWar protested. ‘They’re hardly an Imperial delegation of old. They have the clothes and the jewels and the chains of office, but do any of them match?’

‘Match?’ UrLeyn said, mystified.

‘I think,’ ZeSpiole said, ‘the chief bodyguard means that all their finery is stolen.’

‘Ha!’ BiLeth said, with a shake of his head.

‘Aye, and recently, too,’ DeWar said.

‘Nevertheless,’ UrLeyn said. ‘In fact, all the more so because of that.’

‘Sir?’

‘All the more so ?’

BiLeth looked confused for a moment, then nodded wisely.

General UrLeyn came to a sudden stop on the white and black tiles of the terrace. DeWar seemed to stop in the same instant, ZeSpiole and BiLeth a moment later. Those following them along the terrace between the private quarters and the formal court chambers generals, aides, scribes and clerks, the usual attenders bumped into each scribes other with a muffled clattering of armour, swords and writing boards as they drew to a stop behind.

‘The Sea Companies may be all the more important now that the old Empire is in tatters, my friends,’ General UrLeyn said, turning in the sunlight to address the tall, balding figure of BiLeth, the still taller and shadow-dark bodyguard and the smaller, older man in the uniform of the palace guard. ZeSpiole a thin, wizened man with deeply lined eyes had been DeWar’s predecessor as chief bodyguard. Now instead of being charged with the immediate protection of UrLeyn’s person he was in command of the palace guard and therefore with the security of the whole palace. ‘The Sea Companies’ knowledge,’ UrLeyn said, ‘their skills, their ships, their cannons . . . they have all become more important. The collapse of the Empire has brought us a surfeit of those who call themselves Emperors . . .’

‘At least three, brother!’ RuLeuin called.

‘Precisely,’ UrLeyn said, smiling. ‘Three Emperors, a lot of happy Kings, or at least Kings who are happier than they were under the old Empire, and indeed a few more people calling themselves Kings who would not have dared to do so under the old regime.’

‘Not to mention one for whom the title King would be an insult, indeed a demotion, sir!’ YetAmidous said, appearing at the General’s shoulder.

UrLeyn clapped the taller man’s back. ‘You see, DeWar, even my good friend General YetAmidous rightly numbers me with those who have benefited from the demise of the old order and reminds me that it was neither my cunning and guile nor exemplary generalship which led me to the exalted position I now hold,’ UrLeyn said, his eyes twinkling.

‘General!’ YetAmidous said, his broad, furrowed, rather doughy-looking face taking on a hurt expression. ‘I meant to imply no such thing!’

The Grand Aedile UrLeyn laughed and clapped his friend on the shoulder again. ‘I know, Yet, don’t worry. But you take the point, DeWar?’ he said, turning to him again, yet raising his voice to make it clear he was addressing all the rest of those present, not just his chief bodyguard. ‘We have been able,’ UrLeyn told them, ‘to take more control of our own affairs because we do not have the threat of Imperial interference hanging over us. The great forts are deserted, the drafts are returned home or have become aimless bands of brigands, the fleets were sunk vying with one another or left rotting, deserted. A few of the ships had commanders who could hold them together with respect rather than fear, and some of those ships are now part of the Sea Companies. The older Companies have found a new power now that the Empire’s ships no longer harry them. With that power they have a new responsibility, a new station in life. They have become the protectors, not the raptors, the guards, not the raiders.’

UrLeyn looked round all the people in the group, standing blinking on the terrace of black and white tiles under the fierce glare of Xamis and Seigen at their mid.

BiLeth nodded even more wisely than before. ‘Indeed, sir. I have often’

‘The Empire was the parent,’ UrLeyn went on, ‘and the Kingdoms and the Sea Companies, to a lesser degree were the children. We were left to play amongst ourselves for much of the time, unless we made too much noise, or broke something, whereupon the adults would come and punish us. Now the father and the mother are dead, the degenerate relatives dispute the will, but it is too late, and the children have grown to young adulthood, left the nursery and taken over the house. Indeed, we have quit the tree-house to occupy the whole estate, gentlemen, and we must not show too much disrespect to those who used to play with their boats in the pond.’ He smiled. ‘The least we can do is treat their ambassadors as we would wish ours to be treated.’ He clapped BiLeth on the shoulder, making the taller man waver. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Absolutely, sir,’ BiLeth said, with a scornful look at DeWar.

‘There you are,’ UrLeyn said. He turned on his heel. ‘Come.’ He paced away.

DeWar was still at his side, a piece of blackness moving across the tiles. ZeSpiole had to walk fast to catch up. BiLeth took longer strides. ‘Delay the meeting, sir,’ DeWar said. ‘Let it be held in less formal circumstances. Invite the ambassador to meet you . . . in the baths, say, then’

‘In the baths, DeWar,’ the General scoffed.

‘How ridiculous!’ BiLeth said.

ZeSpiole just chuckled.

‘I have seen this ambassador, sir,’ DeWar told the General as the doors were opened for them and they entered the coolness of the great hall, where half a hundred courtiers, officials and military men were waiting, scattered about its plain stone floor. ‘He does not fill me with confidence, sir,’ DeWar said quietly, quickly looking round. ‘In fact he fills me with suspicion. Especially as he has requested a private meeting.’

They stopped near the doors. The General nodded to a small alcove set into the thickness of the wall where there was just enough room for two to sit. ‘Excuse us, BiLeth, Commander ZeSpiole,’ he said. ZeSpiole looked discomfited, but nodded. BiLeth drew back a little as though profoundly insulted, but then bowed gravely. UrLeyn and DeWar sat in the alcove. The General held up one hand to prevent the people approaching them from coming too close. ZeSpiole held out his arms, keeping people back.

‘What do you find suspicious, DeWar?’ he asked softly.

‘He is like no ambassador I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t have the look of one.’

UrLeyn laughed quietly. ‘What, is he dressed in seaboots and a storm cape? Are there barnacles on his heels and seabird-shit on his cap? Really, DeWar. . .’

‘I mean his face, his expression, his eyes, his whole bearing. I have seen hundreds of ambassadors, sir, and they are as various as you might expect, and more. They are unctuous, open-seeming, blustering, resigned, modest, nervous, severe . . . every type. But they all seem to care, sir, they all seem to have some sort of common interest in their office and function. This one . . .’ DeWar shook his head.

UrLeyn put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘This one just feels wrong to you, is that right?’

‘I confess you put it no better than I, sir.’

UrLeyn laughed. ‘As I said, DeWar, we live in a time when values and roles and people are changing. You do not expect me to behave as other rulers have behaved, do you?’

‘No, sir, I do not.’

‘Just so we cannot expect every functionary of every new power to conform to expectations formed in the days of the old Empire.’

‘I understand that, sir. I hope I am already taking that into account. What I am talking about is simply a feeling. But it is, if I may term it so, a professional feeling. And it is partly for those, sir, that you employ me.’ DeWar searched his leader’s eyes to see if he was convinced, if he had succeeded in transmitting any of the apprehension he felt. But the Protector’s eyes still twinkled, amused more than concerned. DeWar shifted uncomfortably on the stone bench. ‘Sir,’ he said, leaning closer, his expression pained. ‘I was told the other day, by someone whose opinion I know you value, that I am incapable of being other than a bodyguard, that my every waking moment, even when I am meant to be relaxing, is spent thinking of how better to keep you from harm.’ He took a deep breath. ‘My point is that if I live only to shield you from danger and think of nothing else even when I might, how much more must I attend to my anxieties when I am at the very core of my duty, as now?’

UrLeyn regarded him for a moment. ‘You ask me to trust your mistrust,’ he said quietly.

‘Now the Protector does put it better than I could have.’

UrLeyn smiled. ‘And why would any of the Sea Companies wish me dead in the first place?’

DeWar dropped his voice still further. ‘Because you are thinking of building a Navy, sir.’

‘Am I?’ UrLeyn asked with seeming surprise.

‘Aren’t you, sir?’

‘Why would anyone think that?’

‘You turned over some of the Royal Forests to the people, and then recently introduced the condition that some of the older trees might be thinned.’

‘They’re dangerous.’

‘They are healthy, sir, and of the age and shape for ships’ timbers. Then there is the Mariners’ Refuge in Tyrsk, a naval college in the making, and’

‘Enough. Have I been so indiscreet? Are the Sea Companies’ spies so numerous and so perceptive?’

‘And you have held talks with Haspidus and Xinkspar about enlisting, I’d imagine, the wealth of one and the skills of the other in the formation of such a Navy.’

UrLeyn looked troubled now. ‘You know about this? You must eavesdrop from a great distance, DeWar.’

‘I hear nothing that you would not expect me to hear through simple proximity, sir. What I hear, without searching them out, are rumours. People are not stupid and functionaries have their specialities, sir, their areas of expertise. When an ex-admiral comes to call, one may guess it is not to discuss breeding better pack animals for crossing the Breathless Plains.’

‘Hmm,’ UrLeyn said, looking out at the people gathered around them but not seeing them. He nodded. ‘You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.’

‘Exactly, sir.’

UrLeyn slapped his knee and made to stand. DeWar was on his feet first. ‘Very well, DeWar, to humour you, we’ll meet in the painted chamber. And we’ll make the meeting more private even than he has asked for, just me and him. You may eavesdrop. Are you mollified?’

‘Sir.’

*    *    *

Fleet Captain Oestrile, ambassador of the Kep’s Haven Sea Company, dressed in an ornate rendition of a nautical uniform, with long turned-over boots of blue hide, trousers of grey pike-fish skin and a thick, high-collared frock coat of aquamarine edged with gold all topped by a tricorn hat embellished with angel-bird feathers strode slowly into the painted chamber in the palace of Vorifyr.

The ambassador walked down a narrow carpet of gold thread which ended at a small stool set a couple of strides from the front of the only other article of furniture which the gleaming wooden floor supported, namely a small dais topped by a plain chair on which sat the Prime Protector, First General and Grand Aedile of the Protectorate of Tassasen, General UrLeyn.

The ambassador took off his hat and executed a small bow to the Protector, who motioned the ambassador to the stool. The ambassador looked at the low stool for a moment, then unbuttoned a couple of buttons at the lower edge of his coat and sat carefully, laying his extravagantly feathered hat to one side. He had no obvious weapons, not even a ceremonial sword, though around his neck was a belt supporting a stout cylinder of polished hide, with a buttoned cap at one end and finished with inscribed gold filigree. The ambassador looked round the walls of the chamber.

The walls were painted in a series of panels depicting the various parts of the old Kingdom of Tassasen: a forest full of game, a dark and towering castle, a bustling city square, a harem, a pattern of fields sectioning a flood plain, and so on. If the subjects were relatively mundane, the artwork was almost definitively so. People who had heard of the painted chamber which was rarely opened and even more rarely used and who expected something special, were invariably disappointed. The paintings were, it was generally agreed, rather dull and unexceptional.

‘Ambassador Oestrile,’ the Protector said. He was dressed in his usual style of the long jacket and trousers he had made the fashion. The old Tassasen chain of state, with the crown removed, was his only concession to formality.

‘Sire,’ the fellow said.

UrLeyn thought he saw in the ambassador’s manner a little of what DeWar had meant. There was a sort of empty gleam in the young man’s gaze. An expression which included such open eyes and such a wide smile in such a young, shiningly smooth face ought not to be quite as disquieting as it somehow contrived to be. The fellow was of average build, his hair was short and dark, though red-powdered after some fashion UrLeyn did not recognise. He sported fine whiskers for one so young. Young. Perhaps that was part of it, thought UrLeyn. Ambassadors tended to be older and fatter. Well, he should not talk of changing times and changing roles and then be himself surprised.

‘Your journey?’ UrLeyn asked. ‘I trust it was unexciting?’

‘Unexciting?’ the young fellow said, seemingly confused. ‘How so?’

‘I meant safe,’ the Protector said. ‘Your journey was safe?’

The fellow looked relieved for a moment. ‘Ah,’ he said, smiling broadly and nodding. ‘Yes. Safe. Our journey was safe. Very safe.’ He smiled again.

UrLeyn began to wonder if the young fellow was entirely right in the head. Perhaps he was young for an ambassador because he was some doting father’s favourite son, and the father was blind to the fact the lad was soft in the brain. He didn’t speak Imperial very well, either, but UrLeyn had heard a few strange accents from those who were of the nautical powers.