"Use of Weapons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain)

XII

They shared their eyrie with the state coach of the Mythoclast, a cluttered army of statues, and a jumble of assorted chests, cases and cupboards packed with treasure from a dozen great houses.

Astil Tremerst Keiver selected a roquelaure from a tall chiffonier, closed the cabinet's door and admired himself in the mirror. Yes, the cloak looked very fine on him, very fine indeed. He flourished it, pirouetting, drew his ceremonial rifle from its scabbard, and then made a circuit of the room, around the grand state coach, making a "ki-shauw, ki-shauw!" noise, and pointing the gun at each black-curtained window in turn as he swept by them (his shadow dancing gloriously across the walls and the cold grey outlines of the statues), before arriving back at the fireplace, sheathing the rifle, and sitting suddenly and imperiously down on a highly-wrought little chair of finest bloodwood.

The chair collapsed. He thumped into the flagstones and the bolstered gun at the side fired, sending a round into the angle between the floor and the curve of wall behind him.

"Shit, shit, shit!" he cried, inspecting his breeks and cloak, respectively grazed and holed.

The door of the state coach burst open and someone flew out, crashing into an escritoire and demolishing it. The man was still and steady in an instant, presenting — in that infuriatingly efficient martial way of his — the smallest possible target, and pointing the appallingly large and ugly plasma cannon straight at the face of deputy vice-regent-in-waiting Astil Tremerst Keiver the Eighth.

"Eek! Zakalwe!" Keiver heard himself say, and threw the cloak over his head. (Damn!)

When Keiver brought the cloak down again — with, he felt, all the not inconsiderable dignity he could muster — the mercenary was already rising from the debris of the little desk, taking a quick look round the room, and switching off the plasma weapon.

Keiver was, naturally, immediately aware of the hateful similarity of their positions, and so stood up quickly.

"Ah. Zakalwe. I beg your pardon. Did I wake you?"

The man scowled, glanced down at the remains of the escritoire, slammed shut the door of the state coach, and said, "No; just a bad dream."

"Ah. Good." Keiver fiddled with the ornamental pommel of his gun, wishing that Zakalwe didn't make him feel — so unjustifiably, dammit — inferior, and crossed in front of the fireplace to sit (carefully, this time) on a preposterous porcelain throne stationed to one side of the hearth.

He watched the mercenary sit down on the hearth-stone, leaving the plasma cannon on the floor in front of him and stretching. "Well, a half watch's sleep will have to suffice."

"Hmm," Keiver said, feeling awkward. He glanced at the ceremonial coach the other man had been sleeping in, and so recently vacated. "Ah." Keiver drew the roquelaure about him, and smiled. "I don't suppose you know the story behind that old carriage, do you?"

The mercenary — the so-called (Ha!) War Minister — shrugged. "Well," he said. "The version I heard was that in the Interregnum, the Archpresbyter told the Mythoclast he could have the tribute, income and souls of all the monasteries he could raise his state coach above, using one horse. The Mythoclast accepted, founded this castle and erected this tower with foreign loans, and using a highly efficient pulley system powered by his prize stallion, winched the coach up here during the Thirty Golden Days to claim every monastery in the land. He won the bet and the resulting war, disestablished the Final Priesthood, paid off his debts, and only perished because the groom in charge of the prize stallion objected to the fact that the beast died of its exertions, and strangled him with its blood and foam-flecked bridle… which, according to legend, is immured within the base of the porcelain throne you're sitting on. So we're told." He looked at the other man and shrugged again.

Keiver was aware that his mouth was hanging open. He closed it. "Ah, you know the story."

"No; just a wild guess."

Keiver hesitated, then laughed loudly. "By hell! You're a rum chap, Zakalwe!"

The mercenary stirred the remains of the bloodwood chair with one heavily-booted foot, and said nothing.

Keiver was aware that he ought to do something, and so stood. He wandered to the nearest window, drew back the drape and unlocked the interior shutters, levered the external shutters aside and stood, arm against the stones, gazing out at the view beyond.

The Winter Palace, besieged.

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).

So this girl, called a princess. Would she die? The war was going against them, he knew, and the same symbolic grammar that presented her with the prospect of power if things went well, also dictated her use, her expendability, if all failed about them. Rank demanded its tribute; the obsequious bow or the mean stab, according to the outcome of this struggle.

He saw her suddenly old, in the flickering firelight. He saw her shut in some slimed dungeon, waiting, hoping, scabbed with lice and ragged in sack-cloth, head shaved, eyes dark and hollow in the raw skin, and finally marched out one snow-filled day, to be nailed to a wall with arrows or bullets, or face the cold axe blade.

Or maybe that too was too romantic. Maybe there would be some desperate flight to asylum, a lonely and bitter exile spent growing old and worn, barren and senile, forever remembering the ever more golden old times, composing futile petitions, hoping for a return, but growing slowly, inevitably, into something like the pampered uselessness her upbringing had always conditioned her for, but without any of the compensations she had been bred to expect from her station.

With a feeling of sickness, he saw that she meant nothing. She was just another irrelevant part of another history, heading — with or without the Culture's carefully evaluated nudges in what they saw as the right direction — for what would probably be better times and an easier life for most. But not her, he suspected, not right at this moment.

Born twenty years earlier, she might have expected a good marriage, a productive estate, access to the court, and lusty sons, talented daughters… twenty years from now, perhaps an astutely mercantile husband, or even — in the unlikely event this particular genderist society was heading that way so soon — a life of her own; academic, in business, doing good works; whatever.

But, probably, death.

High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire's treasure, and he sitting by a log fire was a sad and lovely princess… I used to dream about such things, he thought. I used to long for them, ache for them. They seemed the very stuff of life, its essence. So why does all this taste of ashes?

I should have stayed on that beach, Sma. Perhaps after all I am getting too old for this.

He made himself look away from the girl. Sma said he tended to get too involved, and she was not totally wrong. He'd done what they'd asked; he'd be paid, and at the end of all this, after all, there was his own attempt to claim absolution for a past crime. Livueta, say you will forgive me.

"Oh!" The princess Neinte had just noticed the wreckage of the bloodwood chair.

"Yes," Keiver stirred uncomfortably. "That, ah… that was, umm, me, I'm afraid. Was it yours? Your family's?"

"Oh, no! But I knew it; it belonged to my uncle; the archduke. It used to be in his hunting lodge. It had a great big animal's head above it. I was always frightened to sit in it because I dreamt the head would fall from the wall and one of the tusks would stick right into my head and I'd die!" She looked at both men in turn and giggled nervously. "Wasn't I silly?"

"Ha!" said Keiver.

(While he watched them both and shivered. And tried to smile.)

"Well," Keiver laughed. "You must promise not to tell your uncle that I broke his little seat, or I shall never be invited to one of his hunts again!" Keiver laughed louder. "Why, I might even end up with my head fixed on one of his walls!"

The girl squealed and put a hand to her mouth.

(He looked away, shivering again, then threw a piece of wood onto the fire, and did not notice then or afterwards that it was a piece of the bloodwood chair he had added to the flames, and not a log at all.)