The shadow-figure above him, dark against light, passed on.
He lay a while longer, then got up. It wasn’t too difficult to walk at first, but then the planes came back again, and though he didn’t get hit by a bullet, something splintered somewhere nearby, as he passed by some tents that shook and rippled as the bullets hit them, and he wondered if the sharp, puncturing pain in his thigh was a bit of wood or stone, or even bone, from somebody in one of the tents. ‘No,’ he muttered to himself as he limped away, heading for the biggest breach in the wall. ‘No; not funny. Not bone. Not funny.’
An explosion blew him off his feet, into and through a tent. He got up, head buzzing. He looked round and up at the citadel, its summit starting to glow with the first direct sunlight of the day. He couldn’t see the module any more. He took a shattered wooden tent pole to use as a crutch; his leg was hurting.
Dust wrapped him, screams of engines and aircraft and human voices pierced him; the smells of burning and stone-dust and exhaust fumes choked him. His wounds talked to him in the languages of pain and damage, and he had to listen to them, but paid them no further heed. He was shaken and pummelled and tripped and stumbled and drained and fell to his knees, and thought perhaps he was hit by more bullets, but was no longer sure.
Eventually, near the breach, he fell, and thought he might just lie here for a while. The light was better, and he felt tired. The dust drifted like pale shrouds. He looked up at the sky, pale blue, and thought how beautiful it was, even through all this dust, and, listening to the tanks as they came crunching up through the slope of wrecked stones, reflected that, like tanks everywhere, they squeaked more than they roared.
‘Gentlemen,’ (he whispered to the rabid blue sky) ‘I am reminded of something the worshipful Sma said to me once, on the subject of heroism, which was something like: “Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”‘ He sighed. ‘Well, no doubt she didn’t say every age and every state, because the Culture just loves there to be exceptions to everything, but… that was the gist of it… I think…’
He rolled over, away from the achingly blue sky, to stare at the blurred dust.
Eventually, reluctantly, he pushed himself over, and then half up, then to his knees, then clutched at the tent-pole crutch and forced down on it, and got to his feet, ignoring all the pestering aches and pains, and staggered for the piled wreckage of the walls, and somehow dragged and hauled and scraped his way to the top, where the walls ran smooth and wide for a way, like roadways in the sky, and the bodies of a dozen or so soldiers lay, blood pooling, the ramparts around them scarred with bullet holes and grey with dust.
He staggered towards them, as though anxious to be one of their number. He scanned the skies for the module.
It was some time before they spotted the “Z” sign he made from the bodies on the top of the walls, but in that language it was a complicated letter, and he kept getting mixed up.
* * *
I
No lights burned on the Staberinde. It sat squat against the grey leechings of the false dawn, its dim silhouette a piled cone which only hinted at the concentric loops and lines of its decks and guns. Some effect of the marsh mists between him and the ziggurat of the ship made it look as though its black shape was not attached to the land at all, but floated over it, poised like some threatening dark cloud.
He watched with tired eyes, stood on tired feet. This close to the city and the ship, he could smell the sea, and – nose this close to the concrete of the bunker – a limey scent, acrid and bitter. He tried to remember the garden and the smell of flowers, the way he sometimes did whenever the fighting started to seem just too futile and cruel to have any point whatsoever, but for once he could not conjure up that faintly-remembered, beguilingly poignant perfume, or recall anything good that had come out of that garden (instead he saw again those sun-tanned hands on his sister’s pale hips, the ridiculous little chair they’d chosen for their fornication… and he remembered the last time he had seen the garden, the last time he’d been to the estate; with the tank corps, and he’d seen the chaos and ruin Elethiomel had visited upon the place that had been the cradle for both of them; the great house gutted, the stone boat wrecked, the woods burned… and his last glimpse of the hateful little summer house where he’d found them, as he took his own retaliatory action against the tyranny of memory; the tank rocking beneath him, the already flare-lit clearing whiting out with bright flame, his ears ringing with a sound that was no sound, and the little house… was still there; the shot had gone right through, exploded somewhere in the woods behind, and he’d wanted to weep and scream and tear it all down with his own hands… but then had remembered the man who had sat there, and thought how he might treat something like this, and so had gathered the strength to laugh at it, and ordered the gunner to aim at the top step beneath the little house, and saw it all finally lift and burst into the air. The debris fell around the tank, sprinkling him with earth and wood and ripped bundles of thatch).
The night beyond the bunker was warm and oppressive, the land’s day-time heat trapped and pressed to the ground by the weight of clouds above, sticking against the skin of the land like some sweat-soaked shirt. Perhaps the wind changed then, for he thought he detected the smell of the grass and the hay in the air, swept hundreds of kilometres from the great prairies inland by some wind since spent, the old fragrance going stale now. He closed his eyes and leant his forehead against the rough concrete of the bunker wall, beneath the slit he’d been looking through; his fingers splayed out lightly on the hard, grainy surface, and he felt the warm material press into his flesh.
Sometimes all he wanted was for it all to be over, and the way of it did not really seem to matter. Cessation was all, simple and demanding and seductive, and worth almost anything. That was when he had to think of Darckense, trapped on the ship, held captive by Elethiomel. He knew she didn’t love their cousin any more; that had been something brief and juvenile, something she’d used in her adolescence to get back at the family for some imagined slight, some favouring of Livueta over her. It might have seemed like love at the time, but he suspected even she knew it was not, now. He believed that Darckense really was an unwilling hostage; many people had been taken by surprise when Elethiomel attacked the city; just the speed of the advance had trapped half the population, and Darckense had been unlucky to be discovered trying to leave from the chaos of the airport; Elethiomel had had agents out looking for her.
So for her he had to go on fighting, even if he had almost worn away the hate in his heart for Elethiomel, the hate that had kept him fighting these last years, but now was running out, just worn down by the abrading course of the long war.
How could Elethiomel do it? Even if he didn’t still love her (and the monster claimed that Livueta was his real desire), how could he use her like another shell stored in the battleship’s cavernous magazines?
And what was he supposed to do in reply? Use Livueta against Elethiomel? Attempt the same level of cunning cruelty?
Already Livueta blamed him, not Elethiomel, for all that had happened. What was he supposed to do? Surrender? Barter sister for sister? Mount some mad, doomed rescue attempt? Simply attack?
He had tried to explain that only a prolonged siege guaranteed success, but argued about it so often now that he was starting to wonder if he was right.
‘Sir?’
He turned, looked at the dim figures of the commanders behind him. ‘What?’ he snapped.
‘Sir,’ – it was Swaels – ‘Sir, perhaps we should be setting off now, back to headquarters. The cloud is breaking from the east, and it will be dawn soon… we shouldn’t be caught in range.’