‘But we’re not peasants, or… or…’
‘Artisans,’ Elethiomel provided.
‘You will not argue, and you shall learn something of what it is to work with materials,’ Cheradenine’s father told the two boys.
‘But it’s common!’
‘So is learning how to write, and to work with numbers. Proficiency in those skills will not make you clerks any more than working with iron will make you blacksmiths.’
‘But…’
‘You will do as you are told. If it is more in accord with the martial ambitions you both lay claim to, you may attempt to construct blades and armour in the course of your lessons.’
The boys looked at each other.
‘You might also care to tell your language tutor that I instructed you to ask him whether it is acceptable for young men of breeding to begin almost every sentence with the unfortunate word, “But”. That is all.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Outside, they agreed that metalwork might not be so bad after all. ‘But we’ve got to tell Big-nose about saying “But”. We’ll get lines!’
‘No we won’t. Your old man said that we might care to tell Big-nose; that’s not the same as actually telling us to tell him.’
‘Ha. Yeah.’
Livueta wanted to take up metalwork too, but her father would not allow her to; it was not seemly. She persevered. He would not relent. She sulked. They compromised, on carpentry.
The boys made knives and swords, Darckense pots, and Livueta the furniture for a summerhouse, deep in the estate. It was in that summerhouse where Cheradenine discovered…
No no no, he didn’t want to think about that, thank you. He knew what was coming.
Dammit, he’d rather think about the other bad time, the day with the gun they’d taken from the armoury…
Na; he didn’t want to think at all. He tried to stop thinking about it all by bashing his head up and down, staring at the mad blue sky and hitting his head up-down, up-down off the pale scaly rocks beneath his head where the guano pellets had been swept away, but it hurt too much and the rocks just gave and he didn’t have the strength seriously to threaten a determined speckfly anyway, so he stopped.
Where was he?
Ah yes, the crater, the drowned volcano… we’re in a crater; an old crater in an old volcano, long dead and filled with water. And in the middle of the crater there was a little island and he was on the little island, and he was looking off the little island at the crater walls and he was a man wasn’t he children, and he was a nice man and he was dying on the little island and…
‘Scream?’ he said.
Doubtfully, the sky looked down.
It was blue.
It had been Elethiomel’s idea to take the gun. The armoury was unlocked but guarded at the moment; the adults seemed busy and worried all the time, and there was talk of sending the children away. The summer had passed and still they hadn’t gone to the city. They were getting bored.
‘We could run away.’
They were scuffing through the fallen leaves on a path through the estate. Elethiomel talked quietly. They couldn’t even walk out here now without guards. The men kept thirty paces ahead and twenty behind. How could you play properly with all these guards around? Back nearer the house they were allowed out without guards, but that was even more boring.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Livueta said.
‘It’s not silly,’ Darckense said. ‘We could go to the city. It would be something to do.’
‘Yes.’ Cheradenine said. ‘You’re right. It would be.’
‘Why do you want to go to the city?’ Livueta said. ‘It might be… dangerous there.’
‘Well it’s boring here,’ Darckense said.
‘Yeah, it is,’ Cheradenine agreed.
‘We could take a boat and sail away,’ Cheradenine said.
‘We wouldn’t even really have to sail, or row,’ Elethiomel said. ‘All we’d have to do is push the boat out and we’d end up in the city eventually anyway.’
‘I wouldn’t go,’ Livueta said, kicking at a pile of leaves.
‘Oh, Livvy,’ Darckense said. ‘Now you’re being boring. Come on. We’ve got to do things together.’
‘I wouldn’t go,’ Livueta repeated.
Elethiomel pressed his lips together. He kicked hard at a huge pile of leaves, sending them up into the air like an explosion. A couple of the guards turned round quickly, then relaxed, looked away again. ‘We’ve got to do something,’ he said, looking at the guards ahead, admiring the big automatic rifles they were allowed to use. He’d never even been allowed to touch a proper big gun; just piddling little small-bore pistols and light carbines.
He caught one of the leaves as it fell past his face.
‘Leaves…’ he turned the leaf, this way and that, in front of his eyes. ‘Trees are stupid,’ he told the others.
‘Of course they are,’ Livueta said. ‘They don’t have nerves and brains, do they?’
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said, crumpling the leaf in his hands. ‘I mean they’re such a stupid idea. All this waste every autumn. A tree that kept its leaves wouldn’t have to grow new ones; it would grow bigger than all the rest; it would be the king of the trees.’
‘But the leaves are beautiful!’ Darckense said.
Elethiomel shook his head, exchanging looks with Cheradenine. ‘Girls!’ he laughed, sneering.
He forgot what the other word was for a crater; there was another word for a crater, for a big volcanic crater, there was definitely another word for it, there was absolutely and positively another word for it, I just put it down for a minute here and now some bastard’s swiped it, the bastard… if I could just find it, I… I just put it down here a minute ago…
Where was the volcano?
The volcano was on a big island on an inland sea, somewhere.
He looked around at the distant heights of the crater walls, trying to remember where this somewhere was. As he moved, his shoulder hurt, where one of the robbers had stabbed him. He’d attempted to protect the wound by shooing the clouds of flies away, but he was fairly sure they’d already laid their eggs.
(Not too near the heart; at least he still carried her there, and it would take a while for the corruption to spread that far. He’d be dead by then, before they found their way to his heart and her.)
But why not? Go ahead; be my guests, little maggots, eat away, sup your fill; quite probably I’ll be dead anyway by the time you hatch, and will save you the pain and torment of my attempts to scratch you out… Dear little maggots, sweet little maggots. (Sweet little me; I’m the one that’s being eaten.)
He paused and thought about the pool, the little puddle that he orbited around, like a captured rock. It was at the bottom of a small depression, and it seemed to him that he kept on trying to get out away from the stinking water and the slime and the flies that crowded around it and the bird shit he kept crawling through… He didn’t manage it; he always seemed to end up back here for some reason, but he thought about it a lot.
The pool was shallow, muddy, rocky and smelly; it was foul and horrid and bloated past its normal limits with the sickness and the blood that he had spilled out into it; he wanted to leave, to get well away from it. Then he would send in a heavy-bomber raid.
He started to crawl again, hauling himself round the pool, disturbing pellets and insects, and heading off towards the lake at one point, then coming back, back to the same point as before, and stopping, gazing transfixed at the pool and the rock.
What had he been doing?
Helping the locals, as usual. Honest counsel; advisor, keeping the loonies at bay and people sweet; later leading a small army. But they’d assumed he’d betray them, and that he’d use the army he’d trained as his own power base. So, on the eve of their victory, the very hour they’d finally stormed the Sanctum, they’d struck at him, too.
They’d taken him to the furnace room, stripped him naked; he’d escaped, but soldiers had been pounding down the stairs and he’d had to run. He’d been forced into the river, when they cornered him again. The dive almost knocked him out. Currents took him and he spun, lazily… he woke up in the morning, under a winch housing on a big river barge; he had no idea how he’d got there. There was a rope trailing astern, and he could only guess he’d climbed up that. His head still hurt.
He took some clothes which were drying on a line behind the wheelhouse, but he was seen; he dived overboard with them, swam to the shore. He’d still been hounded, and all the time he was forced further away from the city and Sanctum, where the Culture might look for him. He spent hours trying to work out how to contact them.