Outside, on the snow-strewn plain, amongst the fires and trenches, there were huge wooden siege structures and missile launchers, heavy artillery and rock-throwing catapults; juried field projectors and gas-powered-searchlights; a heinous collection of blatant anachronisms, developmental paradoxes and technological juxtapositions. And they called it progress.
‘I don’t know,’ Keiver breathed. ‘Men fire guided missiles, from their mounts’ saddles; jets are shot down by guided arrows; throw-knives explode like artillery shells, or like as not get turned back by ancestral armour backed by these damned field projectors… where’s it all to end, eh, Zakalwe?’
‘Here, in about three heartbeats, if you don’t close those shutters or pull the black-out drapes behind you.’ He stabbed at the logs in the grate with a poker.
‘Ha!’ Keiver withdrew rapidly from the window, half ducking as he pulled the lever to close the external shutters. ‘Quite!’ He hauled the drape across the window, dusting down his hands, watching the other man as he prodded at the logs in the fire. ‘Indeed!’ He took his place on the porcelain throne again.
Of course, Mr so-called War Minister Zakalwe liked to pretend he did have an idea where it was all going to end; he claimed to have some sort of explanation for it all, about outside forces, the balance of technology, and the erratic escalation of military wizardry. He always seemed to be hinting at greater themes and conflicts, beyond the mere here-and-now, forever trying to establish some – frankly laughable – otherworldly superiority. As though that made any difference to the fact that he was nothing more than a mercenary – a very lucky mercenary – who’d happened to catch the ear of the Sacred Heirs and impress them with a mixture of absurdly risky exploits and cowardly plans, while the one he’d been paired with – him, Astil Tremerst Keiver the Eighth, deputy regent-in-waiting, no less – had behind him a thousand years of breeding, natural seniority and – indeed, for that was just the way things were, dammit – superiority. After all, what sort of War Minister – even in these desperate days – was so incapable of delegating that he had to sit out a watch up here, waiting for an attack that would probably never come?
Keiver glanced at the other man, sitting staring into the flames, and wondered what he was thinking.
I blame Sma. She got me into this crock of shit.
He looked around the cluttered spaces of the room. What had he to do with idiots like Keiver, with all this historical junk, with any of this? He didn’t feel part of it, could not identify with it, and he did not entirely blame them for not listening to him. He supposed he did have the satisfaction of knowing that he had warned the fools, but that was little enough to warm yourself with, on a cold and closing night like this.
He’d fought; put his life at risk for them, won a few desperate rear-guard actions, and he had tried to tell them what they ought to do; but they’d listened too late, and given him some limited power only after the war was already more or less lost. But that was just the way they were; they were the bosses, and if their whole way of life vanished because it was a tenet of that way that people like them automatically knew how to make war better than even the most experienced commoners or outsiders, then that was not unjust; everything came level in the end. And if it meant their deaths, let them all die.
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).