Use of Weapons (9 page)

In
the meantime, while supplies held out, what could be more pleasant? No more
long cold marches, no boggy excuses for camps, no outside latrines, no scorched
earth to try and scrape a meal from. Not much action, and maybe he would get
itchy feet eventually, but that was more than compensated for by being able to
satisfy the more highly-placed itches of some of the noble ladies also trapped
in the castle.

Anyway,
he knew in his heart that there was a relief in not being listened to,
sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always
might
have been right, and in the
working out of whatever plan was followed, there was anyway always blood;
better it was on their hands. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he
had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.

'Ha,'
Keiver said, rocking in the china chair. 'We found more grass seed today.'

'Oh,
good.'

'Indeed.'

Most
of the courtyards, gardens and patios were already given over to pasture;
they'd torn the roofs off some of the less architecturally important halls and
planted there as well. If they weren't blown to bits in the meantime, they
might - in theory - feed a quarter of the castle's garrison indefinitely.

Keiver
shivered, and wrapped the cloak more tightly about his legs. 'But this is a
cold old place, Zakalwe, isn't it?'

He
was about to say something in reply when the door at the far end of the room
opened a crack.

He
grabbed the plasma cannon.

'Is...
is everything all right?' said a quiet, female voice.

He
put the gun down, smiling at the small pale face peering from the doorway, long
black hair following the line of the door's studded wood.

'Ah,
Neinte!' Keiver exclaimed, rising only to bow deeply to the young girl
(princess, indeed!) who was - technically, at least, not that that precluded
other, more productive, even lucrative, relationships in the future - his ward.

'Come
on in,' he heard the mercenary tell the girl.

(Damn
him, always taking the initiative like that; who did he think he was?)

The
girl crept into the room, gathering her skirts in front of her. 'I thought I
heard a shot...'

The
mercenary laughed. 'That was a little time ago,' he said, rising to show the
girl to a seat near the fire.

'Well,'
she said, 'I had to dress...'

The
man laughed louder.

'My
lady,' Keiver said, rising slightly late, and flourishing what would now -
thanks to Zakalwe - look like a rather awkward bow. 'Forfend we should have
disturbed your maidenly slumber...'

Keiver
heard the other man stifle a guffaw as he kicked a log further into the fire.
The princess Neinte giggled. Keiver felt his face heat up, and decided to
laugh.

Neinte
- still very young, but already beautiful in a delicate, fragile way - wrapped
her arms round her drawn-up legs, and stared into the fire.

He
looked from her to Keiver, in the silence that followed (except that the deputy
vice-regent-in-waiting said, 'Yes, well.'), and thought - as the logs crackled
and the scarlet flames danced - how like statues the two young people suddenly
looked.

Just
once, he thought, I'd like to know whose side I'm really on in something like
this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with
concentrated nobility - such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver's
vacant-looking eyes - facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute
force and brute intelligence) trying to protect these delicate, simpering
products of a millennia's privilege, and never knowing whether I'm doing the
tactically or the strategically right thing.

The
Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cut-off between
the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in
the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they
ever expected the mammal brain to cope with.

He
recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning
(itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the
intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were
never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could
be known, or predicted, or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded
very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it
came down to people and problems.

This
girl was what it came down to, here, this time; barely more than a child, and
trapped in the great stone castle with the rest of the cream or scum (depending
on how you looked at it), to live or die, depending on how well I advise, and
on how capable these clowns are of taking that advice.

He
looked at the girl's, flame-lit face, and felt something more than distant
desire (for she was attractive), or fatherly protectiveness (for she was so
young, and he, despite his appearance, so old). Call it... he didn't know what.
A realisation; an awareness of the tragedy the whole episode represented; the
break-up of the Rule, the dissolution of power and privilege and the whole
elaborate, top-heavy system this child represented.

The
muck and dirt, the king with fleas. For theft, mutilation; for the wrong
thoughts, death. An infant mortality rate as astronomical as the
life-expectancy was minute, and the whole grisly, working package wrapped in a
skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the
knowing over the ignorant (and the worst of it was the pattern; the repetition;
the twisted variations of the same depraved theme in so many different places).

So
this girl, called a princess. Would she die? The war was going against them, he
knew, and the same symbolic grammar that presented her with the prospect of
power if things went well, also dictated her use, her expendability, if all
failed about them. Rank demanded its tribute; the obsequious bow or the mean
stab, according to the outcome of this struggle.

He
saw her suddenly old, in the flickering firelight. He saw her shut in some
slimed dungeon, waiting, hoping, scabbed with lice and ragged in sack-cloth,
head shaved, eyes dark and hollow in the raw skin, and finally marched out one
snow-filled day, to be nailed to a wall with arrows or bullets, or face the
cold axe blade.

Or
maybe that too was too romantic. Maybe there would be some desperate flight to
asylum, a lonely and bitter exile spent growing old and worn, barren and
senile, forever remembering the ever more golden old times, composing futile
petitions, hoping for a return, but growing slowly, inevitably, into something
like the pampered uselessness her upbringing had always conditioned her for,
but without any of the compensations she had been bred to expect from her
station.

With
a feeling of sickness, he saw that she meant nothing. She was just another
irrelevant part of another history, heading - with or without the Culture's
carefully evaluated nudges in what they saw as the right direction - for what
would probably be better times and an easier life for most. But not her, he
suspected, not right at this moment.

Born
twenty years earlier, she might have expected a good marriage, a productive
estate, access to the court, and lusty sons, talented daughters... twenty years
from now, perhaps an astutely mercantile husband, or even - in the unlikely
event this particular genderist society was heading that way so soon - a life
of her own; academic, in business, doing good works; whatever.

But,
probably, death.

High
in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains,
besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire's treasure, and he sitting by a
log fire was a sad and lovely princess... I used to dream about such things,
he thought. I used to long for them, ache for them. They seemed the very stuff
of life, its essence. So why does all this taste of ashes?

I should have
stayed on that beach, Sma. Perhaps after all I am getting too old for this.

He
made himself look away from the girl. Sma said he tended to get too involved,
and she was not totally wrong. He'd done what they'd asked; he'd be paid, and
at the end of all this, after all, there was his own attempt to claim
absolution for a past crime.
Livueta, say
you will forgive me.

'Oh!'
The princess Neinte had just noticed the wreckage of the bloodwood chair.

'Yes,'
Keiver stirred uncomfortably. 'That, ah... that was, umm, me, I'm afraid. Was
it yours? Your family's?'

'Oh,
no! But I knew it; it belonged to my uncle; the archduke. It used to be in his
hunting lodge. It had a great big animal's head above it. I was always
frightened to sit in it because I dreamt the head would fall from the wall and
one of the tusks would stick right into my head and I'd die!' She looked at
both men in turn and giggled nervously. 'Wasn't I silly?'

'Ha!'
said Keiver.

(While
he watched them both and shivered. And tried to smile.)

'Well,'
Keiver laughed. 'You must promise not to tell your uncle that I broke his
little seat, or I shall never be invited to one of his hunts again!' Keiver
laughed louder. 'Why, I might even end up with my head fixed on one of his
walls!'

The
girl squealed and put a hand to her mouth.

(He
looked away, shivering again, then threw a piece of wood onto the fire, and did
not notice then or afterwards that it was a piece of the bloodwood chair he had
added to the flames, and not a log at all.)

Three

Sma
suspected a lot of ship crews were crazy. For that matter, she suspected a fair
few of the ships themselves weren't totally together in the sanity department,
either. There were only twenty people on the very fast picket
Xenophobe
, and Sma had noticed that - as
a general rule - the smaller the crew, the weirder the behaviour. So she was
already prepared for the ship's staff being pretty off the wall even before the
module entered the ship's hangar.

'Ah-choo!'
the young crewman sneezed, covering his nose with one hand while extending the
other to Sma as she stepped from the module. Sma jerked her hand back, looking
at the young man's red nose and streaming eyes. 'Ais Disgarb, Ms Sma,' the
fellow said, blinking and sniffing, and looking hurt, 'Belcome aboard.'

Sma
put her hand out again cautiously. The crewman's hand was extremely hot. 'Thank
you,' Sma said.

'Skaffen-Amtiskaw,'
the drone said from behind her.

'Heddo,'
the young man waved at the drone. He took a small piece of cloth from one
sleeve and dabbed at his leaky eyes and nose.

'Are
you entirely all right?' Sma said.

'Dot
really,' he said. 'God a cold. Blease,' he indicated to one side, 'cob with
be.'

'A
cold,' Sma nodded, falling into step alongside the fellow; he was dressed in a
jellaba, as though he'd just got out of bed.

'Yes,'
the young man said, leading the way through the
Xenophobe
's collection of smallcraft, satellites and assorted
paraphernalia towards the rear of the hangar. He sneezed again, sniffed.
'Sobthig ob a fad on the shib ad the bow-bid.' (Here Sma, immediately behind
the man as they walked between two closely parked modules, turned quickly back
to look at Skaffen-Amtiskaw and mouthed the word. '
What
?' at it, but the machine wobbled, shrugging. ME NEITHER it
printed on its aura field, in letters of grey on a rosy background.) 'Be all
tought it'd be abusing to relax our ibude systebs and cadge colds,' the young
crewman explained, showing her and the drone into an elevator at one end of the
hangar.

'All
of you?' Sma said, as the door closed and the elevator rolled and rose. 'The
whole crew?'

'Yes,
dough dot all ad the sabe tibe. The peebil who've recobered say id's very
pleasid abter it's ober.'

'Yes,'
Sma said, glancing at the drone, which was keeping a standard pattern of formal
blue on its aura field, apart from one large red dot on its side that probably
only she could see; it was pulsing rapidly. When she noticed it she almost
started laughing herself. She cleared her throat. 'Yes, I suppose it would be.'