Part 8

Quila

They took the ViaVera woman straight up to Quila’s room and left her there waiting while they went back outside to the street.

‘This is insane,’ Du’Fairosay said. ‘Have you any idea…’

‘Obviously not,’ Quila snapped back. ‘Your objection is noted, Fairo, will you leave it now? I need to know if you can block the bugs in that room.’

He considered. ‘For how long?’

‘A couple of hours, no more.’

‘Yes, I can scramble them, it’s not a problem. I’ve got the kit set up in my room, so I know it works. Terran bugging isn’t very sophisticated.’

‘Good,’ she said, then the meaning of the rest of his sentence hit home to her. ‘Why did you fix the stuff in your room? You wouldn’t say anything in there worth hearing, surely?’

He shrugged.

‘I like to sleep in private.’

Quila couldn’t think of a suitable response. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We’d better go back up.’

When she came back into the room the ViaVera woman was sitting exactly where they’d left her, hunched on the end of the bed with her black cloak pulled back from her head. They watched each other in wary silence until Du’Fairosay came in behind them with his terminal in his hand. He counted down silently with the other; 3…2…1

‘All right, it’s clear.’

The ViaVera woman smiled. ‘That’s a good trick,’ she said.

Du’Fairosay looked startled. ‘Your good opinion is noted,’ he said stiffly, then smiled briefly back.

‘So,’ said Quila, cutting across them. ‘You said you wanted my help? How can I help you?’

The ViaVera woman looked at the floor, struggling. Then she collected herself, took a breath and said, with only the faintest quiver, ‘By saving someone’s life.’

‘That’s a laudable objective, but I need to know more than that. Who is the someone, another guerrilla?’

The woman smiled slightly at the word and Quila was fleetingly proud at having remembered to say it.

‘Yes, another guerrilla. My…my man. I need to get him out, I need to get him away from it all, he’ll die if he doesn’t. I can get him away, but he’s wanted, he’s got a price on his head whole cities would envy. I need immunity for him, and believe me when I say I will do anything for you if you’ll help me.’

‘I don’t know what you could do…’

‘I could give you information. You want to know what ViaVera are thinking? I’m part of the inner circle, I can tell you. I can tell you things you didn’t dream you wanted to know, you’ll never have a source as close to the boss as me. But I need your guarantee, that you’ll help him.’

Her words were rapid, tripping over themselves, desperate. Quila felt for her. She said gently,

‘It’s true information is always valuable, but you must understand, I can’t just protect anyone I choose. I have to give accounts of my actions, justify myself to my superiors. Do you understand? I can’t just agree without knowing anything about him, or about you. My name is Quila, I don’t even know yours.’

The woman bit her lip. She was older than her, Quila thought, though by how much she couldn’t tell, and her face was criss-crossed with lines carved by the sun and the wind. Above her sun-tanned cheeks her eyes were unexpectedly olive; a clear green like a pool so that she saw for a sudden moment what she would have looked like as a child.

‘My name is Terise,’ she said.

Behind her right shoulder, Du’Fairosay made a noise, quickly silenced. The woman, Terise, stared at him.

‘You knew I was here? Have you…?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Was it you who were following me?’

Out of the corner of her eye, Quila could sense Du’Fairosay start to answer. Over whatever he was going to reply, she said decisively, ‘no, of course not. We would never do anything like that.’

Terise nodded, Quila didn’t know her well enough to tell if she looked convinced.

‘And your man is…?’

‘Ladyani.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of him.’

Du’Fairosay said ‘One of ViaVera’s leaders. He has a reputation for being both mad and dangerous.’

Terise glared at him, but she didn’t comment. ‘He and I joined ViaVera together when we were young,’ she said.

A long time ago, that must have been, Quila thought. If she had that past with anyone, she would want to save them too. She watched the woman sitting on her bed. It was so strange, actually having a terrorist, one of the feared ViaVera, here in her room, picking at the fringe of her cloak. She probably shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t resist.

‘Why did you join?’

Terise shrugged.

‘When I heard what they did to our place, our people, I didn’t have a choice. Do you want to know the story? Ladyani and I came from the same village. It was just a little place by the sea north of Camino: on a clear day you could see right across the bay to Trentama. My father was a fisherman and his father was the mechanic, and he used to sit behind me in the priest’s classroom and flick things at my hair. He didn’t care about learning, Ladyani, all he wanted was to get back in his father’s workshop, get on with the job. They had this big pit in the middle of the floor, you know? There wasn’t a boat in the village that hadn’t been over that at one time or another, with Ladyani and his father standing underneath.

‘The children didn’t stay in school for very long, usually by the time you were ten or eleven you’d be working and there just wouldn’t be time. But, I don’t know, I always liked it. The priest used to give me extra lessons, after the others had gone, and my father wouldn’t take a girl on the boat, so I just carried on. When I was fourteen, the priest wrote to some friend of his in Biterra, and the friend told him about this scholarship that poor kids could go for. It was once a year, and there was one scholarship, can you imagine, one, for everyone in the whole of Ty who couldn’t afford to pay, but if you got it, you went to college in the city and everything was paid, even your food. You’ve heard of things like that? I can tell your friend has.’

Quila looked round, but Du’Fairosay’s face was expressionless, betraying nothing.

‘They take one poor kid a year and make out it evens the scales, it makes it all alright that that one kid has the chance to fit in and be ashamed of where they came from all their life.’

Du’Fairosay opened his mouth as if to say something, but turned away to the window instead.

‘Well, so,’ Terise went on, ‘I didn’t think that then. I suppose I thought it was exciting, like everyone does, a chance to get out of the village. And it was an excuse to go on studying and it was better than getting married. My parents didn’t mind, so I tried for it when I was sixteen, and I got it.’

Quila smiled. ‘Out of everyone in Benan Ty? That was impressive.’

Terise shrugged again. ‘It was a long time ago. Everyone was really worried for me. It was strange, they’d all been so pleased when I was taking the exam, and then when I’d won they were all, ‘Oh, be careful, we wish you weren’t going, we’ll pray for you.’ They’d have done better to keep their prayers for themselves. I’d had a thing with Ladyani that summer, nothing serious, but I gave him the address of the place I was staying, just in case he wanted to write. I went off to college in Camino two days before my seventeenth birthday and I didn’t think I’d see him again.’

‘How did you like the college?’

‘It was alright, I suppose. It wasn’t what I thought it would be like, I remember I could just feel myself being remade, every day. I suppose if I’d stayed there I’d be a good little civil servant now, wondering what to do about the ViaVera problem. But instead, when I’d been there about two months, Ladyani came and found me. He’d walked all the way from the sea to Camino with no map and no money and nothing but the clothes he stood up in. He woke me up by banging on my window at four in the morning. I let him in, sat him down and he told me…’

She stopped.

‘What?’

‘That everyone was dead.’

‘Everyone?’

‘Everyone. The whole village. The men, the women, the children, the animals, even the boats smashed on the beaches and left to burn. It’s what they do.’

‘But…why? What was the point?’

‘It was punishment, you see. They’d killed a CAS man. Oh, not deliberately, not like that, they hadn’t even known who he was. Ladyani said a stranger had come ashore in a little boat for the night, and got in an argument with Big Tel in the cantina about some stupid game the men had been playing that afternoon. The way Ladyani told it, he threw his drink over Tel, Tel hit him and he knocked his head on the edge of the bar and went down stone dead. It was when they were going through his pockets that they found his ID.

‘Ladyani said Tel got up with it in his hand and went straight off to turn himself in. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even stop to say goodbye to his wife. They hung him on a hook outside the police station in Saibre and he took three days dying, but that wasn’t enough. CAS men are worth more than other people, you see; one death doesn’t quite cut it.

‘Ladyani was in the pit when they came, underneath my father’s boat. They searched through all the buildings, dragging people out, but they didn’t find him. He had to stand there for two hours and listen to it, listen to them shooting and killing, raping the women, chasing the children down so they could cut them in pieces… I’d like to say I can’t imagine what it was like, but I can. They were everyone he knew in the world.’

She looked across at Du’Fairosay, in his place by the window.

‘If he is mad, or dangerous, he has cause.

‘He climbed out while they were finishing and ran away before they fired the workshop. He said the last thing he saw from the hilltop were all the boats tied up along the shoreline, burning so bright it looked like the sand was reflecting the sun. I don’t know why he came to me. He said he remembered where I was and he thought I should know. In the morning when he said he was going to find ViaVera and join them, I said I’d come and join them too. We walked our shoes to ribbons getting to them and when we limped in, the first thing Mara said was…’

‘Mara? You knew Mara Karne?’ A young woman with an ancient weapon, black hair falling round her shoulders like a curtain. Was that another woman in the group behind her? She would never see the image again to check.

‘Of course I knew her. I was her friend. I was there when she died. When I said I was part of the inner circle, I wasn’t lying to you. Anything you want to know, I can tell you.’

‘I believe you. But the thing is, I don’t need information.’

‘Don’t you? Are you sure?’

‘Yes, quite sure. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not here to spy on you or outwit you. I’m here to make peace between ViaVera and the government – what I need is honesty, far more than clandestine information. I need you to talk to each other, and that’s where you can help.’ She leaned forward. ‘You say you’re part of the inner circle? Do you influence what they do? What your leader does?’

‘Does anyone? Well, I suppose so. Yes. It’s not easy but, yes, I have as much influence as anyone.’

‘Then that’s what you can do. You get ViaVera to the talks table with the government and whatever happens at the talks, I’ll get you and Ladyani immunity. You’ll be able to get him out whenever you want, no one will stop you, you have my word.’ ‘You’d do all that, just for the talks? You don’t want to know anything?’ ‘That’s right.’

‘Are you a fool or a saint, do you think?’

Quila laughed.

‘We don’t have saints on Chi!me, but maybe here I can be both. We’ll see what happens to the talks. But I mean what I say. You get your people to the talks table and you’ll have everything you want, I promise. And now you’d better let Du’Fairosay take you outside, before someone comes to find out what’s wrong with the transmitter.’ She stood up. ‘It was nice to meet you, Terise.’ To her surprise, she found she meant it.

‘How do I contact you?’

‘You mean all that secret codes over the networks stuff? You don’t. I’ll see you at the talks, remember?’

‘Yeah. I’ll look forward to it.’ She took Quila’s hand and gripped it, quite hard, for a second before releasing. ‘Thank you. And it was nice to meet you too.’