Use of Weapons (38 page)

The
tent was dark inside, filled with a thick and heavy atmosphere at once stale
and sweet; heavy with perfume, smoky with incense. All was sweet and rich and
highly decorated; the hanging rugs were thick and picked out with many colours
and precious metal thread; the carpet was piled like a field of golden grain,
and the plump, scented cushions and languorously thick coverings made a
fabulously patterned landscape under the dark flute of roof. Small censers
smoked lazily; little night-heaters sat extinguished, dream-leaf holders and
crystal chalices, jewelled boxes and clasped books were strewn across the
undulating fabric landscape like glittering temples on the plains.

Lies.
The tent was bare and he sat on a sack stuffed with straw.

The
girl watched him move. It was a hypnotic movement, barely noticeable at first,
but once you had seen it, once the eye grew accustomed to it, it became very
obvious and quite fascinating. He moved from the waist, round and round,
neither slowly nor quickly, his head describing a flattened circle. It reminded
the girl of the way that, sometimes, rising smoke would begin to twist as it
rose towards the hole in the roof of a tent. The man's eyes seemed to move in
compensation for this subtle, ceaseless motion, shifting tinily behind the
brown-pink lids.

The
tent was just big enough for the girl to stand up in. It was pitched at a
crossroads in the desert, where two tracks crossed the sea of sand. It would
have been a town or even a city long since, but the nearest water was three
days' ride away. The tent had been here for four days, and might be here
another two or three, depending on how long the man stayed in the dream-leaf
sleep. She took up a pitcher from a small tray and filled a cup with water. She
went over to the man, and put the cup to his lips, holding one hand under his
chin as she carefully tipped the cup.

The
man drank, still moving. He turned his face away after he'd drunk half the
water in the cup. She took a cloth and dabbed at his face, removing a little of
the sweat.

Chosen,
he said to himself. Chosen, Chosen, Chosen. A long way to a strange place.
Taking the Chosen one through the scorching dust and the mad tribes of the
badlands to the lush meadows and gleaming spires of the Perfumed Palace on the
cliff. Now he reaped a little reward.

The
tent sits between the trade routes, outside turned in for the season, and in
the tent sits a man, a soldier, back from uncounted wars, scarred and seared
and broken and healed and broken and healed and repaired and made good again...
and for once he was unwary, guard down, committing his mind to a wild,
affecting drug, and his body to the care and protection of a young girl.

The
girl, whose name he did not know, brought water to his lips and a cool cloth to
his brow. He remembered a fever, a hundred and more years ago, a thousand and
more years away, and the hands of another girl, cool and tender, soothing and
smoothing. He heard the lawn birds keen from the grounds outside the great
house that lay in the estate cradled in the broad river's bend; an oxbow of
calm in the livid landscape of his memories.

Torpor-heavy,
the drug flowed through him, winding and unwinding, a current of random
ordering. (He remembered a stone beach on the river's banks, where the
ever-flowing water had swept silt, sand, gravel, pebbles, stones and boulders
in a linear progression of size and weight, ordering - through its steady,
liquid weight - the elemental stone in a curve, like something distributed on a
graph.)

The
girl watched and waited, calm that the stranger had taken to the drug like one
of their own, and was himself calm under its influence. She hoped this was, as
he seemed to be, an exceptional man, and not an ordinary one, for that would
imply their nomad kind was not the uniquely strong race they believed they
were.

She
had feared the power of the drug would be too much for him, and that he would
shatter like a red-glowing cooking pot dropped into water, the way she had
heard other strangers had, vainly thinking the dream-leaf was just another
dalliance in their self-indulgent lives. But he had not fought it. For one who
was a soldier, used to fighting, he had displayed a rare insight in just giving
in without a struggle, and accepting the prescriptions of the drug. She
admired this in an outsider. She doubted the conquerors would be so pliably
strong. Even some of their own young men - often the most impressive, in every
other way - could not accept the crushing gifts the dream-leaf brought, and
yelped and gibbered through an abbreviated nightmare, mewling for their
mother's breast, pissing and shitting and crying and screaming their most
shaming fears to the desert winds. The drug was rarely fatal, in the supervised
quantities that had become ritual, but the after-effects could be; more than
one young brave had chosen the blade in the belly to the disgrace of knowing a
leaf had been stronger than he.

It
was, she reflected, a pity that this man was not one of their own kind; he
might have made a good husband, and sired many strong sons and cunning
daughters. Many marriages were made in dream-leaf tents, and she had at first
taken it as an insult that she had been asked to shepherd the stranger through
his leaf-days, until she'd been convinced it was an honour, that he had done
their people a great service, and she would be allowed her pick of the tribe's
young novitiates, when their testing time came.

And,
when he took the dream-leaf, he had insisted on the stage that they normally
reserved for their elder soldiers and matriarchs; no child's dose for him. She
watched him circle, flexing continually from the waist, as though he sought to
stir something in his brain.

By
the roads, by the crossed signs of those single lines, worn by trade, commerce
and passing knowledge; thin trails in the dust, pale marks in the brown page of
the desert. The tent stood in Summer, when the white side was turned out and
the black side in. In Winter it was outside-in.

He
imagined that he felt his brain revolve inside his skull.

In
the white tent that was black, and both at once, by the crossroads on the desert,
a white/black impermanence like a fallen leaf before the winds blow, trembling
in the breeze beneath the poised wave that was the stone circumference of
mountains, capped by snow and ice like foam frozen in the high thin air.

He
swept away, leaving the tent, so that it fell away beneath him, became a speck
beside the thin trails in the dust, and the mountains swam past, white capping
ochre, and the trails and the tent disappeared, and the mountains shrank, and
the glaciers and the starveling snows of summer became white claws on the rock,
and the curved edge pressed in, compressing the view, so that the globe beneath
became a coloured boulder, stone, pebble, gravel, grain of sand, speck of
silt-dust, then was lost in the sandstorm whirl of the great revolving lens
that was the home of all of them, which itself became a fleck on a thin bubble
surrounding emptiness, skeined to its lonely siblings by the fabric that was
only a slimly different articulation of nothingness.

More
specks. All vanished. Darkness reigned.

He
was still there.

Beneath
it all, he'd been told, was more. All you had to do, Sma said, was think in
seven dimensions and see the whole universe as a line on the surface of a
torus, starting at a point, becoming a circle as it was born, then expanding,
moving up the inside of the torus, over the top, to the outside, then
relapsing, falling back in, shrinking. Others had gone before it, others came
after it (the greater/smaller spheres outside of/inside their own universe,
seen in four dimensions). Different time-scales lived outside and inside the
torus; some universes expanding forever, others living less than a blink of an
eye.

But
it was too much. It all meant too much to matter. He had to concentrate on what
he knew and what he was and what he had become, for the moment at least.

He
found a sun, a planet, out of all that existence, and fell towards it, knowing
this was the place, the font of all his dreams and memories.

He
searched for meaning, found ashes. Where does it hurt? Well, just
here
, actually. A wrecked summerhouse,
smashed and burned. No sign of a chair.

Sometimes,
like now, the banality of it all quite took his breath away. He stopped and
checked, for there were drugs that did that; took your breath away. He was
still breathing. Probably his body was already set up to ensure that anyway,
but the Culture - Chaos bless it twice - had set up a further program in him,
to make certain. Cheating, as far as these people were concerned (he saw the
girl in front of him, and watched her, through mostly-closed eyes, then closed
again), but that was just too bad; he'd done something for them, little though
they really knew it, and now they could do something for him.

But
the throne, Sma had said once, is the ultimate symbol for many cultures. To
sit, in splendour, is the highest articulation of power. The rest come to you;
lower, often bowing, frequently backing off, sometimes prostrate (though that
is always a bad sign, said the Culture's blessed statistics), and to sit, to be
made less animal by that evolutionarily uncalled-for posture, signified the
ability to use.

There
were some small civilisations - barely more than tribes, Sma had said - where
they slept sitting, in special sleep chairs, because they believed that to lie
down was to die (did they not always find the dead lying down?).

Zakalwe
(was that really his name? It suddenly sounded strange and alien in his
remembrance), Zakalwe, Sma said, I visited a place (how had they come to this?
What had made him mention anything about this? Had he been drunk? Guard down
again? Probably trying to seduce Sma, but ended up under the table again),
Zakalwe I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a
chair. Not torture - that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the
par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon
them - but actually set it up to kill them while they sat. They - get this -
they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through
them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, like some obscene
image of a commode, producing a fatal gas; or a cap over their head, and their
hands dipped in some conducting fluid, to fry their brains.

You
want to know the punch-line? Yeah, Sma, give us the punch-line. This same state
had a law that forbade - and I quote - 'cruel and unusual punishments!' Can you
believe that?

He
circled around the planet, so far away.

Then
fell towards it, through the air to the ground.

He
found the shell of the mansion, like a forgotten skull; he found the wrecked
summerhouse, like a shattered skull; he found the stone boat, like a deserted
image of a skull. Fake. It was never floating.

He
saw another boat; a ship; a hundred thousand tonnes of destruction, sitting in
its own dry image of desuetude, its layers bristling outwards. Primary,
secondary, tertiary, anti-aircraft, small...

He
circled, then tried to approach, zeroing in...

But
there were too many layers, and they defeated him.

He
was thrown out again, and had to circle the planet once more, and as he did so,
saw the Chair, and saw the Chairmaker - not the one he'd thought of, before;
the other Chairmaker, the real one, and one that he had to keep returning to,
through all the memories - in all his ghastly glory.

But
some things were too much.

Some
things were too much to bear.

Damn
people. Damn others. Damn there being other people.

Back
to the girl. (Why did there have to be other people?)

Yes
she still had little experience as a guider-through, but as a stranger the man
had been given to her, because they thought she was the best of the untried.
But she would show them. Perhaps, through this, they were already considering
her for the Matriarchs.

She
would lead them one day. She felt this in her bones. The same bones that ached
when she saw a child fall; the same ache in her cupped child-bones that came
when she saw someone fall hard to the ground, would be her guide through the
politics and tribulations of the tribe. She would prevail. Like this man here
in front of her, but different. She had that inner strength, too. She would
lead her people; it was like a child inside her, growing, that certainty. She
would stir her people against the conquerors; she would show their brief
hegemony for what it was; a side-track on the desert trail that was their
destiny. The people beyond the plains, in their corrupt perfumed palace on the
cliff, would fall beneath them. The power and thought of the women, and the
power and bravery of their men - desert thorns - would crush the decadent petal-people
of the cliffs. The sands would be theirs again. Temples would be carved in her
name.

Lies.
The girl was young and knew nothing of the tribes' thoughts or destiny. She was
a scrap thrown to him, to ease his passage into what they imagined would be his
death-dream. Her vanquished people's fate scarcely mattered to her; they had
replaced that ancient heritage with thoughts of prestige and gadgets.