The old man, her father’s friend, came in from brickmaking and found me in his tent, sheltering from the sun. He’d been looking for me, he said.
He made a lunge and grabbed a handful of my hair. “I’m onto you,” he said. “I know what your game is.”
I reminded myself that this was unlikely. “Let go,” I said. “You’re hurting me.”
Always a silly thing to say. He tightened his grip. “I’ve been trying to figure you out,” he said. “Why would a man like you, a blueskin, want to rescue our queen, bring her here and try and talk us into breaking away from the Echmen. Makes no sense.”
“I told you why.”
“Then,” he went on, “I figured it out. It’s her you’re after. You fancy her. Or you want to marry her and make yourself king. Well, it won’t work.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s impossible.”
Not what he expected to hear. “You what?”
“And I can prove it,” I said. “If you’ll just let go of me.”
Ah, the power of the simple conditional clause. If X, then Y; it’s a bait nobody can resist. “Go on, then,” he said, and let go of my hair.
I put a yard or so between him and me. He might look old, but he was fast and very strong. “You think,” I said, “that I’m doing this because I’m in love with the queen, or I want to marry her and be the king. That’s not true.”
“You said you can prove it.”
I nodded. Then I put my hand on the hem of my tunic and lifted it. He stared and pulled a face. “Oh,” he said.
This bit isn’t really something I wanted to talk about, but apparently the narrative requires it. I go where the narrative takes me, like driftwood on a river in spate. Oh well.
I was seventeen. My first posting was the Seventh Lancers, a very prestigious regiment, based at Scoira Limen. Our family is old and distinguished but no longer affluent, so I knew that if I wanted to fit in and shine, I’d have to be good at something and make myself popular. Fortunately, there’s one thing I’m good at. I’m a crack shot, and the army loves its archers.
That’s why I spent my legacy on the bow, and it turned out to be a good investment. I wasn’t the very best, but I was in the top ten. In my first year I won two silver medals and a bronze, and I made sure I was a good loser; people like that. When the news of my father’s death broke, that did me no harm either. He’d died defending a pointless outpost on the wrong side of a river we should never have crossed in the first place, after the main expeditionary force had been routed by a superior enemy; my father’s garrison bought the idiots enough time to get back into Robur territory, but it was deemed necessary to break down the bridge, to stop the enemy streaming across it, and my father and his men were stuck on the far side. Official despatches said he died a noble and honourable death. I happen to think there’s no such thing. But it made me sort of a hero’s son – by no means a rarity, because there was a lot of noble and honourable death about at that time, a minor epidemic – and so people liked me, as if I’d somehow persuaded him telepathically to stay at his post and die with his boots on.
Strange things start happening inside your head when people like you. At first you feel smug and a tiny bit guilty. Then, without realising it, you begin to believe. If they like me, you find yourself thinking, there must be something there to like. In vain you try reminding yourself where all this comes from; they like me because I happen to be able to group all six inside the inner gold at thirty yards, or because my father got killed because of the incompetence of the joint chiefs of staff. You start to spin cobwebs of rationalisation; ah yes, but what they really like is how modest and unassuming I am as I walk forward to pull my arrows out of the target, how bravely I took the news about his death. It somehow slips your mind that you practised that modest and unassuming stuff beforehand until you were pitch perfect, and that one of the first things that crossed your mind when the adjutant told you the news was, act brave, they’ll love you for it. Instead, you see someone different in mirrors, a likeable man, a good man, someone who’s worth something.
I started getting invitations to dinner. I didn’t mind that at all, since a free meal is one you don’t have to pay for, and money was tight. My father, it turned out, had been living beyond his means; he was the hare and his means were a pack of old, tired hounds struggling to catch up. The house and the land covered his debts and there would have been a bit to spare, only he’d left that to the Golden Spire monastery, to endow a chantry for his soul. My mother’s brother reluctantly gave me an allowance, enough so I wouldn’t look bad and let the family down, but it wasn’t all that much and, besides, it didn’t feel right. I decided I’d have to get an early promotion. When you make full lieutenant, the army starts paying you, rather than the other way round. Since we weren’t on active service, the only path to promotion was popularity. Just as well, I decided, that I was such a jolly good fellow.
Advancement at Scoira Limen centred around the adjutant general, a sensitive, cultured man who collected old porcelain and early Mezentine folksongs. His more mundane responsibilities were mostly carried out by his elder son, Colonel Theudahad, a born administrator, prematurely bald. His younger son, Lieutenant Carloman, was a keen archer, almost but not quite as good as me. Colonel Theudahad’s only weakness was a fondness for gambling. He was a slave to it but, as befitted a born administrator, he preferred to bet on sure things. Carloman and I made the semi-final of the regimental summer knockout competition.
I was sitting on my bunk polishing my helmet when Carloman came in and sat down beside me. He wasn’t his normal cheerful self.
“My brother,” he said.
“What about him?”
“He’s ordered me to throw the match.”
That made no sense. I said as much.
“He’s got a lot of money on you,” Carloman said. “The thing of it is, because I’m his brother everybody thinks the fix is in and you’ll throw the match so I’ll win. So you’re three to two and I’m sixteen to one.”
Carloman shrugged. “Lot of it about,” he said. “Look, I’m only telling you because for crying out loud, whatever you do, don’t have a headache or an off day, all right? There’s only so much I can do to make it look convincing, so it’d be a great favour to me personally if you shot really, really well.”
“I’ll do my best,” I promised him.
I was as good as my word. I slaughtered him. It was one of those days when everything is perfect. There was a very slight left-side wind at fifty yards, just enough to be a problem unless you knew precisely where to hold, which I did. Halfway through the fifty yard, I’d only dropped two points. I was narrowing the whole world down into a coloured ring, a rainbow reflected in a lake on a still day; all I had to do was concentrate every fibre of my being on the target and my eyes and hands and arms and back would do all the rest. My final score was 142 out of 144, with twenty inner golds. I don’t think anyone on earth could’ve beaten me that day.
Talk about the conquering hero. I was invited to dinner at the adjutant general’s lodgings in the Prefecture. Carloman was thrilled because he hadn’t had to screw up deliberately and hadn’t lost face. Theudahad was delighted because he’d just made a very substantial sum of money. The old man was beside himself with joy because he’d just paid a small fortune for a tiny plain white jug, which he assured us was genuine Three Clouds period. And the old man’s daughter, Lady Melaxuntha – did I mention her? No, I don’t suppose I did.
They didn’t have anything like her where I came from. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful; in fact, looking back, I’m not sure she was beautiful at all. But – there’s this theory, about dogs. They can’t really see things when they’re still, only when they’re moving. Lady Melaxuntha’s face was never still, never the same two seconds together. It changed with every word, every expression, every emotion. I imagine that if she held perfectly still, she’d be handsome going on plain. I expect the wind would be very different if you caught it when it wasn’t blowing. But if it wasn’t blowing, it wouldn’t be the wind.
Like her father, she was a collector. She collected junior officers. You know what collectors are like; they want you to look at the exhibits, but you mustn’t touch them. By the same token, she wanted to be looked at, gazed at in speechless adoration, but finger marks were definitely not allowed, in case they spoiled the patina. All very harmless and innocent, and a source of gentle amusement to her and her family.
My father knew a man whose wife kept a leopard. Her husband had been given it by a Sashan diplomat. It’s a very special, prestigious gift in Sashan society. The idea is, you turn it loose in your deer park, chase it with hounds and kill it, preferably on foot with a sword. Barbaric, said his wife, we’re not doing that, and I guess her husband, who’d have had to take care of the on-foot-with-a-sword side of things, didn’t give her much of an argument. Instead, she tamed the horrible thing. It was just like a big pussycat. It curled up in a basket and slept a lot. It held still while she tied bows round its neck. If you were very patient and gentle, it would eat bits of cake from your hand; its tongue, she said, was slightly abrasive, like fine sharkskin. And then one day it killed her, and by the time they were able to get into the room and kill it, it had already eaten her head and both legs. Moral: don’t play with savage things that are stronger than you are.
Such as love. I have no idea what Lady Melaxuntha saw in me, as against the sixteen or so other subalterns in her collection. Maybe it was my ability to read crosswinds, or my fairly pleasant speaking voice, though I doubt it. Something about me snagged in her long, luxurious fur, and then into her flesh. To begin with she was subtle and discreet, so much so that it went over my head like a flock of geese; but her brothers, who knew her well, must have noticed something, because their manner towards me changed. When she invited me to dinner at the house they were perfectly pleasant, but they looked at me, just making sure I was where they could see me. Gradually the stress and tempo of the flirtation changed. Junior officers don’t actually receive formal training in flirting. It’s something they’re expected to know already or pick up as they go along. But there’s definitely an orthodox way of going about it, like good form in fencing. I always reckoned I was a bit of a duffer at it; good enough to get by but not one of my strong suits. I really don’t like doing things I’m not good at. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t in love with her, certainly not like she was with me. But when she was in full flight she was irresistible.
There was a sort of summer house out at the back of the adjutant general’s lodgings. It was based on a pavilion, which is a sort of tent you pitch when you want to watch the tournament or the archery contest in comfort. Nobody used it in autumn, once the evenings started drawing in and there was a nip in the air, so it was ideally suited to the purpose. We met there four times, no bother at all. The fifth time was different.
I remember looking up and seeing Carloman, and five other junior officers who I thought of as my friends. The look on Carloman’s face was indescribable. She caught sight of him, put two and two together and started to scream – thank God you’re here, look what he’s doing to me, I told him to stop but he wouldn’t. He told her to shut up and get out. I don’t think he believed her, but that wasn’t the point.
I tried to stand up, but one of the men I thought of as a friend hit me so hard I could scarcely breathe, and I flopped down again. Carloman had brought a knife. He showed it to me. “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” he said.
“Carlo,” I started to say, and got a mouthful of toecap.
“But it’s not your eye that’s the problem, is it? Not to worry. I’m going to cut it off, and then nothing like this will ever happen again.”
It was a knife ideally suited to the purpose, one of those hooked jobs they use for pruning roses and cutting leather. The men I thought of as my friends hoisted me up and held my arms. I couldn’t help noticing a certain squeamishness, a reluctance on Carlo’s part actually to touch it – perfectly normal male reticence, I suppose. But grab hold of it he did, and I watched him align the curve of the blade to the radius of the shaft for a quick, clean slice.
It wasn’t deliberate on my part; purely instinctive, combined with some pretty sloppy work on the part of the men holding me down. I don’t actually remember what happened, not well enough to give a coherent account, the sort that would satisfy a historian. I squirmed or bucked or did something. The knife didn’t go where it was supposed to. The pain was horrible and there was blood everywhere.
“Shit, Carlo,” someone said behind me, “you’ve killed him.”
Not really what you want to hear, and the fact that they let go of me made it worse. Carlo had this terrified look on his face; he dropped the knife and backed away. “We should get the doctor,” someone said. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” someone else said. “We’ve got to go, now.” Carlo was thinking about it, making a quick decision, like he’d been trained to do, while his heart and soul went all to pieces. I could see what was going through his mind. If we leave him, he’ll bleed to death in no time flat. No witnesses. She won’t say anything. We can get away with this if we just keep our heads.
He looked at me; furious hatred and a deeply sincere apology, all rolled into one, like a haggis. Then he turned and ran, and the men I thought of as my friends followed him.
So there I was, on my own. I looked at the damage. Between us, them with the knife and me flinching, we’d contrived to sever the top knob, and then the hook of the knife strayed or was deflected into my stomach, about a thumb’s length shy of my navel; a long slit, pumping out blood like crazy, running diagonally up onto the ribcage, petering out before it reached the nipple. I could see why they’d reasoned as they had. The hell with it, I remember thinking. That’s that.
For some reason that now escapes me, it was important at the time that I shouldn’t be found dead in the summer house. I suspect I was trying to be considerate. After all, this mess was essentially of my making, or at least I’d contributed significantly to it, and in spite of everything these people were still my friends, so if I could help them before I died, I would. I stumbled out onto the lawn, then through the back gate into the stable yard, from there into the back alleys. Last thing I recall was finding an open door, lurching through it and hitting the ground.
I remember I had a lot of dreams, which seemed very real. One of them I can actually remember. I was doing something or other, and I looked up and there was this very tall, beautiful woman standing over me. I had a feeling she might be an actress or something like that. Her skin glowed bright, like a candle. “Who shall I send?” she said, “And who will go for us?”
“Here I am,” I remember saying. “Send me.”
Which seemed to settle the matter, because then I woke up. There were people crowding round me, staring at me. One of them said, “Fuck me, he’s alive.” I remember, I was disappointed.
They called a doctor, who told me I really shouldn’t have survived. Sorry, I told him. I meant it. Then they took me to the hospital, where army surgeons sewed me up like a patchwork quilt.
I remember I felt weak as a kitten. The adjutant general came to see me. This is all very bad, he said. I agreed; it was. He’d written to my uncle, he went on. Obviously, I couldn’t remain in the service, and it was probably best if I went abroad for a while. A posting in the diplomatic corps seemed to fit the bill quite nicely; what did I say to that?
I felt sorry for him. I was making a lot of trouble, which he’d done nothing to deserve. I wanted to ask him to tell Carlo, no hard feelings, but I didn’t have the strength to speak.
They sent me to a monastery to convalesce. While I was there, one of the brothers came to see me and asked if I felt like learning Echmen; he understood I was being posted out there, and knowing the language would be useful.
Echmen, then Sashan, then all the languages they had grammars for; I soaked up languages like water, which surprised me. Some people have the gift, I know, but it never occurred to me that I might be one of them. Which is how I came to be a translator, something I’d never even have considered if my best friend hadn’t sliced me open. It only goes to show; silver linings.
“What the hell happened to you?” the old man said.
“I can pee through it,” I told him, “though it hurts like stink. Other than that, it’s neither use nor ornament. So you see, nothing to worry about on that score.”
“Put it away, for fuck’s sake,” he said, and I did. “What happened?” he repeated.
I grinned at him. “It’s the price you pay for seeing the Queen of Heaven,” I replied.
He went very quiet.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes.”
“And that—”
“Nothing worth having comes for free,” I told him. “She said to me, I’m going to spare you, out of all your race, but there’s a price. I’m not complaining.”
He was having a bad time, I could tell. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I thought—”
“Of course you did. I don’t blame you. You’re just watching out for her. That’s good.”
“I never thought—”
“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? And as for me wanting to make myself king, I know that among all the Dejauzi tribes the king has to be physically unblemished, so it’s no good if you’re blind in one eye or you’re missing a foot, or—” I smiled at him. “Whatever. Not to mention the utmost importance of the line of succession. There’s no way the queen could marry someone like me. I suggest you tell everyone. It’ll set their minds at rest.”
He lifted his eyes and looked at me. “You really saw her.”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
“You’ll find out for yourself soon enough,” I said. “If you do as I told you.”
That was like a slap round the face, but maybe he’d asked for it.