‘If you’re going to kill me, please will you do it quickly?’
He was getting annoyed at these constant interruptions.
‘Well, I wasn’t going to kill you, but keep on whining like this and I may change my mind.’
‘I hate you.’ It seemed to be all she could think of.
‘And I hate you too.’
She started crying again, loudly.
He looked out into the rain again, and saw the Staberinde.
Defeat, defeat, the rain whispered; tanks foundering in the mud, the men giving up under the torrential rain, everything coming to bits.
And a stupid woman, and a runny nose… He could laugh at it, at the sharing of time and place between the grand and the petty, the magnificently vast and the shoddily absurd, like horrified nobility having to share a carriage with drunk and dirty peasants being sick over them and copulating under them; the finery and fleas.
Laugh, that was the only answer, the only reply that couldn’t be bettered or itself laughed down; the lowest of the low of common denominators.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he said, turning suddenly. The thought had just occurred to him that maybe she didn’t realise who he was, and he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised to find out that she had tried to kill him just because he was in a big car, and not because she had recognised the Commander-in-Chief of the entire army. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that; he almost expected it.
She looked up. ‘What?’
‘Do you know who I am? Do you know my name or rank?’
‘No,’ she spat. ‘Should I?’
‘No, no,’ he laughed, and turned away.
He looked briefly out at the grey wall of rain, as though it was an old friend, then turned, went back to the bed and fell onto it again.
The government wouldn’t like it either. Oh, the things he’d promised them, the riches, the lands, the gains of wealth, prestige and power. They’d have him shot if the Culture didn’t pull him out; they’d see him dead for this defeat. It would have been their victory but it would be his defeat. Standard complaint.
He tried to tell himself that, mostly, he’d won. He knew he had, but it was only the moments of defeat, the instants of paralysis that made him really think, and try to join up the weave of his life into a whole. That was when his thoughts returned to the battleship Staberinde and what it represented; that was when he thought about the Chairmaker, and the reverberating guilt behind that banal description…
It was a better sort of defeat this time, it was more impersonal. He was the commander of the army, he was responsible to the government, and they could remove him; in the final reckoning, then, he was not responsible; they were. And there was nothing personal in the conflict. He’d never met the leaders of the enemy; they were strangers to him; only their military habits and their patterns of favoured troop movements and types of build-up were familiar. The cleanness of that schism seemed to soften the rain of blows. A little.
He envied people who could be born, be raised, mature with those around them, have friends, and then settle down in one place with one set of acquaintances, live ordinary and unspectacular, unrisky lives and grow old and be replaced, their children coming to see them… and die old and senile, content with all that had gone before.
He could never have believed he would ever feel like this, that he would so ache to be like that, to have despairs just so deep, joys just so great; to never strain the fabric of life or fate, but to be minor, unimportant, uninfluential.
It seemed utterly sweet, infinitely desirable, now and forever, because once in that situation, once you were there… would you ever feel the awful need to do as he had done, and try for those heights? He doubted it. He turned back to look at the woman in the chair.
But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird… but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.
If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.
‘Ah! The camp leader and the camp follower. You haven’t quite got it right thought, sir, you’re supposed to tie her in the bed…’
He jumped; spun round, hand going to the holster at his waist.
Kirive Socroft Rogtam-Bar kicked the door shut and stood shaking rain from a large shiny cape in the doorway, smiling ironically and looking annoyingly fresh and handsome considering he’d had no sleep for days.
‘Bar!’ He almost ran to him, they clapped their arms about each other and laughed.
‘The very same. General Zakalwe; hello there. I wondered if you would like to join me in a stolen vehicle. I have an Amph outside…’
‘What!’ He threw open the door again and looked out onto the waters. There was a large and battered amphibious truck fifty metres away, near one of the towering machines.
‘That’s one of their trucks,’ he laughed.
Rogtam-Bar nodded unhappily. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. They seem to want it back, too.’
‘They do?’ He laughed again.
‘Yes. By the way, I’m afraid the government has fallen. Forced out of office.’
‘What? Because of this?’
‘That’s the impression I got, I must say. I think they were so busy blaming you for losing their idiotic war that they didn’t realise people connected them with it as well. Wide asleep as usual.’ Rogtam-Bar smiled. ‘Oh; and that manic idea of yours; the commando squad placing the sink-charges on the Maclin reservoir? It worked. Sent all that water into the dam and made the thing overflow; didn’t actually break, according to the intelligence reports, but it… over-topped, is that the expression? Anyway; an awful lot of water went down the valley and swept away most of the Fifth Army’s High Command… not to mention quite a bit of the Fifth itself, judging from the bods and tents seen floating past our lines over the last few hours… And there we all were, thinking you were crazy for dragging that hydrologist around with the general staff for the past week.’ Rogtam-Bar clapped his gloved hands. ‘Whatever. Things must be serious; there’s talk of peace, I’m afraid.’ He looked the General up and down. ‘But you’ll have to present a prettier picture than that, I suspect, if you’re to start talking terms with our pals on the other side. You been mud wrestling, General?’
‘Only with my conscience.’
‘Really? Who won?’
‘Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn’t solve anything.’
‘I know the scenario well; usually crops up when one is trying to decide whether to open the next bottle, or not.’ Bar nodded at the door. ‘After you.’ He produced a large umbrella from within his cloak, opened it and held it out. ‘General; allow me!’ Then he looked into the centre of the room. ‘And what about your friend?’
‘Oh.’ He looked back at the woman, who had turned herself around and was staring, horrified, at them. ‘Yes, my captive audience.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve seen stranger mascots; let’s take her, too.’
‘Never question the high command,’ Bar said. He handed over the umbrella. ‘You take this. I’ll take her.’ He looked reassuringly at the woman, tipped his cap. ‘Only literally, ma’am.’
The woman let out a piercing shriek.
Rogtam-Bar winced. ‘Does she do that a lot?’ he asked.
‘Yes; and watch her head when you pick her up; near busted my nose.’
‘When it’s such an attractive shape already. See you in the Amph, sir.’
‘Right you are,’ he said, manoeuvering the umbrella through the doorway, and walking down the concrete slope, whistling.
‘Bastard infidel!’ the woman in the chair screamed, as Rogtam-Bar approached her and the chair from behind, cautiously.
‘You’re in luck,’ he told her. ‘I don’t normally stop for hitchers.’
He picked up the chair with the woman in it and took them both down to the vehicle, where he dumped them in the back.
She screamed the whole way.
‘Was she this noisy all the time?’ Rogtam-Bar asked, as he reversed the machine back out into the flood. ‘Mostly.’
‘I’m surprised you could hear yourself think.’ He looked out into the pouring rain, smiling ruefully.
In the ensuing peace, he was demoted, and stripped of several medals. He left later that year, and the Culture didn’t seem in the least displeased with how he’d done.
* * *
Seven
The city was built inside a canyon two kilometres deep and ten across; the canyon wound through the desert for eight hundred kilometres, a jagged gash in the crust of the planet. The city took up only thirty of those kilometres.