Sharps (17 page)

She closed the book and opened it again, the way fortune-tellers in the Flower Market did when purporting to tell you who you were going to marry. The idea was, the first letter of the first word on the left-hand page was the initial of your future husband.

Although
.

But of course you had to be trained, or an old peasant woman with hill-country blood, or it didn’t work. She scowled at the book and fought back the urge to throw it out of the window. There was, of course, a certain amount of leeway, since the tradition didn’t specify whether the initial was your one true love’s first name or surname. She tried again.

Generally
.

She smiled; another myth exploded. She read:

Generally speaking, military dictatorships contain from the outset the seeds of their own undoing. One has only to contemplate the vicissitudes of the Western Empire in the sixth and seventh centuries
AUC
to form the inescapable view that
—

The hell with that. She realised that she was gripping the book so tightly that her nails were cutting half-moon grooves in the pages. I will
not
be defeated by a book, she told herself, and read the whole chapter. Then she closed the book and put it away in her pocket.

Her great-great-grandfather, according to family tradition, had been a hermit. At that time, there had been a fashion for rich noblemen to decorate the grounds of their estates with follies – ruined castles, abandoned monasteries, hermitages. The proprietor of the estate where her family had worked as farm labourers for generations came back from the customary grand tour of the Eastern Empire determined to go one better. He had a column built, forty feet high, on the top of the hill overlooking his ornamental lake. In the Mesoge, far to the east of the capital, he had ridden across part of the great desert, where the most extreme ascetics retired to live lives of perfect solitude and contemplation; to which end they climbed to the top of pillars and columns and sat, perfectly still, sunk in meditation for years at a time. That, he decided, was real class; so as soon as the column had been raised, he let it be known that he was looking to hire an ascetic to go and sit on it. No qualifications or previous experience were required, since the ascetic would be purely for show. The duties would consist simply of sitting quite still whenever anybody might be watching. Supplies of food and water would lugged up a long ladder twice a week (there was a cunningly hidden recess in the top of the column, so the pots and baskets wouldn’t be visible from the ground) and the applicant would be permitted to wear thick woollen hose under his ascetic rags during the winter months. Iseutz’s great-great-grandfather, who by all accounts was precious little use for anything else, was the only man on the estate to apply for the job, and he did it, well and conscientiously, for two years, until the novelty wore off and he was allowed to come down. Two years’ arrears of quite generous pay were waiting for him, and although he managed to drink a significant proportion of it, enough was left to enable him to set up a little dry-goods business, which his wife and daughter ran so successfully that his grandson was able to go to school and become a great success in the banking sector.

It was a pity, Iseutz had often felt, that she hadn’t inherited her ancestor’s ability to sit still. She thought of him from time to time, imagined him surveying the grand, gorgeous vista – the lake, the great house, the parkland and the mountains beyond – like some divine audience, almost like the Invincible Sun himself, possessed of the leisure of his betters, enjoying the spectacle they’d spent so much time, effort and money on creating, the complete effect of which only he could see. The right sort of man could be quite happy up there, provided it wasn’t raining, simply observing, collecting data, slowly and scientifically collating and refining the results of his observations into a coherent unified theory that would explain—There, the daydream broke down. But the patience, the ability to watch rather than take part; that would be nice, she often thought. Of course, they’d never have got her up there because she was scared to death of heights, and if they had managed it, she’d have jumped off the column after five minutes from sheer intolerable boredom. But in any case, such an opportunity was unlikely to present itself in her lifetime. Nobody had that kind of money any more.

Outside the window, the landscape was changing. They’d been climbing steadily for several hours, and now they appeared to have reached a plateau of sorts. The road ran along the top of a broad ridge, slowly dropping away into what she guessed was a deep river valley. On the other side, she saw hillsides purple with heather, with occasional patches of yellow gorse. Green gullies marked the courses of small streams. There were no trees anywhere. A long way away, she saw the white tops of mountains.

She tried to imagine what all this enormous empty space would look like reduced to lines on a map, and concluded that they’d crossed into the Demilitarised Zone, previously known as the Debatable Land, the cause and principal arena of the War. She’d learned all about it from her tutor, a thin, harassed man with a bald head and a stringy white beard, who’d come both highly recommended and cheap. The problem, he’d told her, was that when the Eastern and Western Empires had fought each other to a standstill, two hundred years ago, they hadn’t been able to agree a boundary in this sector. Rather than allow the negotiations to founder over a trivial scrap of moorland, they’d agreed to defer a decision and set up a boundary commission. Both sides then issued their unilateral declarations of victory, and pending the commission’s report, they’d reached an informal agreement whereby both sides used the land for summer grazing – it was, after all, useless for anything else. The commission took its time; before it could announce its findings, the Aram Chantat burst into the Eastern Empire, the Suessones attacked the West, and the frontier provinces of Scheria and Permia took advantage of the resulting chaos to break away from their Imperial masters. Fighting off the barbarian invasions left both empires too weak to reclaim their lost provinces (no great loss, in any case). Scheria and Permia declared and secured their independence and found that they’d inherited a little piece of the Great War. Scheria, having considerably greater manpower at its disposal, immediately occupied the Debatable Land and parcelled it out among the leading families, who sent in their shepherds. Not long afterwards, the first major silver strike was made in Permia, whose military aristocracy suddenly realised that they could now afford to pay for a war of their own.

He told a good story, she’d say that much for him. When she came to read round the subject for herself, she realised it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that. Scherian historians advanced a fairly convincing case for the land having originally belonged to the semi-nomadic tribes from whom the Scherians claimed descent. Permian authors drew attention to the ruins of a once significant city, now almost totally obliterated, whose monuments bore inscriptions in the long since extinct Middle Zeuxite language, which the Permians were believed to have spoken before they were conquered by the Eastern Empire, a thousand years ago. Another thing her tutor hadn’t told her – quite possibly he hadn’t known it himself – was that before the Great War, Western Imperial surveyors had reported substantial deposits of iron, copper and lead in the Debatable Land. Nothing had been done about it, of course, because the deposits were a long way down inside the hills, and the West lacked the technical skill necessary for deep-cast mining, so the minerals would have been too expensive to exploit. But deep-cast mining was what the Permians did best, and it was logical to assume that that was why they’d been prepared to fight so long and so hard for what was otherwise a modest expanse of second-rate sheep pasture.

Bearing all that in mind, she took another look at the landscape. It still struck her as vacant space to be got through as quickly as possible, devoid of any possible interest or value. There were no houses, none at all, and she found that sort of emptiness disturbing. Even her distinguished ancestor would’ve gone mad out here, she decided, with nothing to look at but heather. There was nothing to suggest that people had ever been here, or that they existed anywhere in the world. She shivered, opened her book again, and soon fell asleep.

She dreamt, as she often did, of the drowning of Flos Verjan. There was no reason for this, except perhaps that her father had told her about it once when she was quite young, and her imagination had seized on it and made it real. She imagined herself standing in the market square, which was really the Bakers’ Market in the City, and looking up at the surrounding mountains, and seeing a great white and blue sheet of water falling towards her – an extraordinary thing, based on nothing in her own experience, but unmistakably vivid, and she’d never doubted for a moment what it was; rather like an abstract concept suddenly transformed into matter. It wasn’t ice, because it moved as it fell, and it wasn’t a waterfall, because every waterfall has sides to it, after a fashion, and this was entirely unconfined. Besides, she’d never seen a waterfall, although there was a picture of one in one of her school books (so badly drawn it could be anything). She stood with her neck craned back, watching from underneath as it fell, and fell, and fell; it was impossible to judge its speed because it was so huge and so shapeless, so there was no immediate impression of it getting bigger as it came closer. She felt no urge to run, because she knew it’d be pointless. The water was so big, there’d be no chance of getting clear. She could see a rainbow through it; quite pretty, in a way. She knew instinctively that when it reached her, she’d drown, and wake up. She knew that drowning here was waking up on the other side, which raised a number of quite intriguing issues about the nature of life, death and resurrection that she’d have liked to follow up on once she was awake (but when she tried to think them through afterwards, her mind seemed foggy and sluggish; she could feel the connections and insights and sparks of intuition evading her, and it made her angry). She was vaguely aware that all the people she’d ever known were standing next to her, and if she turned her head she’d be able to see them, even the dead ones, but instead she kept her eyes fixed on the falling water. Also, very much at the back of her mind, she felt a furious rage against the Irrigator, who had somehow brought himself to do this utterly inhuman thing, just to win a war and cause a map to be slightly redrawn.

This time, as the water fell, and fell, and fell, she knew that the man standing beside her, also looking up, was the Irrigator’s son – not Addo, but the one who, she vaguely knew, had died in the War. It was a silent dream this time, but she was sure he was muttering something about sending his only begotten son to die for all the people – which was absurd, because General Carnufex had four sons, everybody knew that, though of course one of them had been killed in action. As the water surged down to touch her, and she opened her eyes and saw Addo, head against the bulkhead, eyes closed, dribbling slightly, she realised that it had been a sort of play on words, the Irrigator’s son and the Invincible Sun, the son of the invincible Irrigator, the son of the Sun sent to die for the people every night and be resurrected every morning, to the greater glory of his Father in heaven. For some reason she found that intensely annoying, as though she’d been playing silly word games with herself, and had somehow contrived to lose.

Addo had woken up and was looking at her, and she realised she must’ve made a noise. She did that, apparently; spoke or even screamed in her sleep, though not necessarily when she was having nightmares.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“You made a sort of—”

“Yes,” she snapped. “But I’m fine now.”

He winced, and she suddenly felt rather stupid. Maybe, she thought, I’m blaming him for my dream, which would be silly. She remembered that he had a chess set, and that she’d finished her book and traded it for one she really didn’t want to read, although she could never admit that. They had a long journey ahead of them. It would, therefore, be in her best interests to be nice to the son of the Irrigator.

She glanced at him and wanted to smile. He was having the most terrible trouble deciding where to aim his eyes. He couldn’t look at her, because she’d just snapped at him. But they were sitting opposite each other, and it was a small, enclosed space. His only real option was to look out of the window. “Do you mind if I have the blind down?” she asked, standing up and yanking it shut. “The sun’s in my eyes.”

It wasn’t, of course. He mumbled a sort of consent. Now he couldn’t look out of the window. She gave him her best friendly smile.

“How about a game of chess?” she said.

*

He tried to lose, but he wasn’t that good. He managed to spin it out, at any rate. She fought to the very last. He tried to engineer a stalemate, but made a careless move that proved to be checkmate. She glowered at him, but said, “Another?”

“If you like.”

Winning at chess was one of those things he couldn’t help, like being his father’s son. Winning came naturally; losing was something he’d had to work at, and he didn’t quite have the tactical flair necessary to lose convincingly at will. Against a poor or mediocre player he was generally all right, but someone with just enough ability to be awkward, like Iseutz, presented him with real difficulties. For the second game he tried to think long-term, building a complex and far-reaching strategy based on what he’d learned about her play in the first game. She liked to attack strong pieces, so he devised a beautiful trap for his own queen. She took the bait eventually, only to sacrifice her own queen in the process. That left him with a significant advantage in capital pieces (the idea was that once his queen was dead, she’d be able to mop them up at her leisure) and he won again, this time quite quickly.

“That was smart,” she said, her voice sheer ice. “Sacrificing your queen like that. I really fell for it, didn’t I?”