‘Stop it!’ Darckense said, her voice tiny.
‘Don’t be so…’ Livueta started to say.
She looked over the edge of the parapet, to where she thought she’d heard a noise.
‘Give it here!’
‘Let it go!’
‘Please stop; please stop. Let’s go back in, please…’
Livueta didn’t hear them. She was staring, wide-eyed, dry-mouthed, over the stone parapet. A black-covered man picked up the rifle the guard sergeant had dropped. The guard sear-geant himself lay on the gravel. Something glittered in the black-dressed man’s hand, reflecting the lights of the house. The man pushed the slack form of the sergeant off the gravel, into the lake.
Her breath caught in her throat. Livueta ducked down. She flapped her hands at the two boys. ‘St…’ she said. They still struggled.
‘St…’
‘Mine!’
‘Let go!’
‘Stop!’ she hissed, and struck them both on the head. They both stared at her. ‘Somebody just killed that sergeant; just out there.’
‘What?’ Both boys looked over the parapet. Elethiomel still held the gun.
Darckense squatted down and started to cry.
‘Where?’
‘There; that’s his body! There in the water!’
‘Sure,’ Elethiomel said in a whispered drawl. ‘And who…’
The three of them saw one shadowy figure move towards the house, keeping in the shade of the bushes bordering the path. A dozen or so men – just patches of darkness on the gravel – moved along the side of the lake, where there was a narrow strip of grass.
‘Terrorists!’ Elethiomel said excitedly, as the three all ducked back behind the balustrade, where Darckense wept quietly.
‘Tell the house,’ Livueta said. ‘Fire the gun.’
‘Take the silencer off first,’ Cheradenine said.
Elethiomel struggled with the end of the barrel. ‘It’s stuck!’
‘Let me try!’ All three tried.
‘Fire it anyway,’ Cheradenine said.
‘Yeah!’ Elethiomel whispered. He shook the gun, hefted it. ‘Yeah!’ he said. He knelt, put the gun on the stone bulwark, sighted.
‘Be careful,’ Livueta said.
Elethiomel aimed at the dark men, crossing the path towards the house. He pulled the trigger.
The gun seemed to explode. The whole deck of the stone boat lit up. The noise was tremendous; Elethiomel was thrown back, gun still firing, blasting tracer into the night sky. He crashed into the bench. Darckense shrieked at the top of her lungs. She leapt up; firing sounded from near the house.
‘Darkle; get down!’ Livueta screamed. Lines of light flickered and cracked above the stone boat.
Darckense stood screaming, then started to run for the stairs. Elethiomel shook his head, looked up as the girl ran past him. Livueta grabbed at her and missed. Cheradenine tried to tackle her.
The lines of light lowered, detonating chips of rock off the stones all around them in tiny clouds of dust, at the same time as Darckense, still screaming, stumbled to the stairs.
The bullet entered Darckense through the hip: the other three heard – quite distinctly – the noise that it made, above the gunfire and the girl’s scream.
He was hit too, though he didn’t know by what at the time.
The attack on the house was beaten off. Darckense lived. She almost died, from loss of blood, and shock; but she lived. The best surgeons in the land fought to rebuild her pelvis, shattered into a dozen major pieces and a hundred splinters by the impact of the round.
Bits of bone had travelled her body; they found fragments in her legs, in one arm, in her internal organs, even a piece in her chin. The army surgeons were fairly used to dealing with that sort of injury, and they had the time (because the war hadn’t yet started then) and the incentive (for her father was a very important man) to put her back together as best they could. Still, she would walk awkwardly until she stopped growing, at least.
One of the bone shards travelled further than her own body; it entered his. Just above the heart.
The army surgeons said it would be too dangerous to operate. In time, they said, his body would reject the fragment of bone.
But it never did.
He started to crawl round the pool again.
Caldera! That was the word, the name.
(Such signals were important, and he’d found the one he’d been looking for.)
Victory, he said to himself, as he hauled himself round, scattering a last few of the bird-droppings out of his way, and apologising to the insects. Everything was going to be just fine, he decided. He knew that, now, and knew that in the end you always won, and that even when you lost, you never knew, and there was only one fight, and he was at the centre of the whole ridiculous thing any way, and Caldera was the word, and Zakalwe was the word, and Staberinde was the word, and –
They came for him; they came down with a big beautiful ship, and they took him up and away and they made him all better again…
‘They never learn,’ the sky sighed, quite distinctly.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
It was years later that Cheradenine – returned from the military academy and looking for Darckense, and sent in that direction by a monosyllabic gardener – walked up the soft carpet of leaves to the door of the little summerhouse.
He heard a scream from inside. Darckense.
He dashed up the steps, drawing his pistol, and kicked the door open.
Darckense’s startled face twisted over her shoulder, regarding him. Her hands were still clasped round Elethiomel’s neck. Elethiomel sat, trousers round his ankles, hands on Darckense’s naked hips under her bunched-up dress, and looked calmly at him.
Elethiomel was sitting on the little chair that Livueta had made in her carpentry class, long ago.
‘Hi there, old chap,’ he said to the young man holding the pistol.
Cheradenine looked into Elethiomel’s eyes for a moment, then turned away, holstering the pistol and buttoning the holster and walking out, closing the door behind him.
Behind him he heard Darckense crying, and Elethiomel laughing.
The island in the centre of the caldera became quiet again. Some birds flew back to it.
The island had changed, thanks to the man. Scraped in a circle all round the central depression of the islet, drawn in a pathway of black bird droppings cleared away from the pale rock, and with the appropriate tail of just the right length leading off to one side (its other end pointing at the rock, which was the central dot), the island seemed to have a letter or simple pictogram printed on it, white on black.
It was the local signal for ‘Help me!’, and you would only have seen it from an aircraft, or from space.
A few years after the scene in the summerhouse, one night while the forests burned and the distant artillery thundered, a young army major jumped up onto one of the tanks under his command, and ordered the driver to take the machine through the woods, following a path which wound between the old trees.
They left behind the shell of the recaptured mansion and the glowing red fires which lit its once grand interior (the fires reflected on the waters of an ornamental lake, by the wreckage of a demolished boat made of stone).
The tank ripped through the woods, demolishing small trees and little bridges over streams.
He saw the clearing with the summerhouse through the trees; it was lit by a flickering white light, as though by God.
They got to the clearing; a star-shell had fallen into the trees above, its parachute entangled in the branches. It sizzled and sputtered and shed a pure, sharp, extreme light all over the clearing.
Inside the summerhouse, the little wooden chair was quite visible. The tank’s gun was pointing straight at the small building.
‘Sir?’ the tank commander said, peering worriedly from the hatch beneath.
Major Zakalwe looked down at him.
‘Fire,’ he said.
* * *
Eight
The first snow of the year settled over the upper slopes of the cleft city; it floated out of the grey-brown sky and fitted itself over the streets and the buildings like a sheet thrown over a corpse.
He dined alone at a large table. The screen he had wheeled into the middle of the brightly lit room flickered with the images of released prisoners from some other planet. The balcony doors were lying open, and through them drifted small examples of the falling snow. The rich carpet of the room was frosted white where the snow had settled, and stained dark further in where the heat of the room had melted the crystals back into water again. Outside, the city was a mass of half-unseen grey shapes. Ordered lights ran in lines and curls, dimmed by distance and passing flurries.
Darkness came like a black flag waved over the canyon, drawing back the greyness from the shores of the city, then pushing forward the individual specks of street and building lights as though in recompense.