Part 24

Quila and Terise

‘The word is they’ve taken Biterra,’ Terise said. She stood with her back to the hut door, feeling the wood rough against her hands like comfort. ‘We just heard. They’ve got a division in Santana now and a mixed division from some of the other UP planets in Camino, going down to Terra Nueve in the east. I don’t know about the islands; someone said all the guards had run away from the prison on Worm Island and left the prisoners there locked in to rot, but I don’t know if it’s true. They’re still fighting in Airdrossa, there’s resistance there and all over Drossa province, but they’re not leaving all that many troops behind to deal with it. Most of them went to Biterra, and from there, they’ll be going north. They’ll be coming along the tracks to Santos, for Desailly in Chaireddan, and for us.’

***

It was Ihanakan who had brought them the news. Since Airdrossa had fallen the screen had been nothing but pictures of cheering crowds from the Free Ty station and shaky-shot atrocities from Kayro; no use for information. Their network of supporters was gone, destroyed in a welter of blood and dust, it was only the Jeba, coming through the mountains in ever-larger numbers, who could bring them any reliable news of the campaign.

Terise had first noticed them a day or so after the Airdrossa bombardment started, but since then it seemed that every day there was another group. Ten or twenty Jeba, mixed in age from gnarled elders to babes in arms, two or three in front carrying the long poles, higher than their heads, that they used as walking sticks, and the rest following behind with bundles on their backs.

Sometimes the leaders would be men, sometimes women. Terise had never been able to work out how Jeban leadership worked. They would stalk into the camp, confer briefly with Ihanakan, then leave through the north gate. She would watch them plodding steadily up the road into the mountains, till they were hidden by the trees. They never stopped for food or even water, when she asked Ihanakan why he would not answer. She wondered if the Jeba, like Terrans, would prefer not to picnic in a graveyard.

Ihanakan always had something for them after they had left: the interim president chosen; the Kayro TV station bombed; Santana burning and the air full of the phantasmagoric scent of a thousand roasting flowers. The righteous wrath of UP, wielded by the Chi!me, coming at last to end ViaVera once and for all. That last time, he’d come up to the palace as he always did, asked for Issa with nothing in his voice to show that he had anything unusual to say to her.

She had been sitting with Ladyani in one corner of the hall, while Terise was settled opposite mending a jacket. Terise was too far away to hear it, what Ihanakan said or what they said to him in reply. She never did know precisely how he’d announced the end; she hadn’t had to ask. She’d got to her feet, jacket and needle falling unheeded to the floor before her, when she’d seen their faces, the same sick excitement on both of their faces, shining in their eyes like joy.

Then they’d called the council and told them and the planning had started for the last stand. It was only at the end, when it was all worked out and the full futility of anything they could do was laid bare, that any of them had dared to suggest what they had been thinking all along. Terise had stayed in the room, since it didn’t seem to matter now whether they knew she heard or not, although she still sat rather apart from the circle. She’d seen the look go round, from Roberto to Sario to Wolf, it needs to be said, but not me, not me to say it, and surprisingly, it was Wolf who gave in.

He’d been sprawling in his chair as he always did, giving that air of inattention that Terise had always imagined him practicing in his hut to get right. Now he pulled himself up, cleared his throat. ‘If you’d go, we could get you away, Issa,’ he said. ‘A few of us could get you to safety, if we went now. It’s worth considering.’

Her face froze. ‘Oh, really?’ The words were mild enough, but for the bite in her voice. ‘And where were you thinking I’d go? Zargras, perhaps? Chi!me itself, have a holiday, why not? Worth considering, indeed.’ She pushed her chair back, signalling that the meeting was over, but Wolf refused to be put off. ‘You could go to one of the islands,’ he said, doggedly. ‘Corio, Aiga perhaps. We’ve got support there, we know places you could stay.’

‘Yes, stay in comfort till they catch me!’

‘They don’t know you exist! You’re a myth, a story to them. They don’t know who you are! Roberto and Sario, Ladyani and I…’ ‘Leave me out of it,’ Ladyani interjected. ‘…We’re the ones on their list, we’re the ones they’ll chase, not you. We can get you to the coast tonight. Terise can go with you.’ Terise said immediately, ‘I’m not going without Lad,’ but no one paid her any attention.

‘You’ve got it all worked out.’

‘Someone has to think about your safety, since you won’t.’

Issa grinned at him, showing her teeth. ‘No, I won’t,’ she echoed. ‘I won’t, and I don’t, and I’m not going. Try and make me.’

He stood up. ‘You don’t want to see me make you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Ladyani stepped between them. ‘I might be interested.’

Wolf’s tone was immediately conciliatory. ‘Lad, I’m only saying for her own good…’

‘I think she knows what’s for her own good.’ Ladyani patted him on the shoulder. ‘Why don’t you go organize your squads?’

‘I suppose…’

‘Yeah, Wolf,’ Issa added inopportunely from behind Ladyani’s shoulder. ‘Stop trying to save people and get back to killing them. It’s what you’re good at.’

She smiled at him again from safety and enraged, he shouted at her.

‘You bloody Karnes, you’re all the same. You’re exactly like your bloody father and your bloody sister! Why do you always have to be the martyrs? Why do you think it’s your fucking God-given right to kill yourselves while the rest of us stand around and watch? When Mara…’

‘Yes, what about Mara?’ Issa snapped back, ‘what about my sister who’s everyone’s property but mine?’ She flung up her arms, her voice rich with sarcasm. ‘My wonderful, caring sister, who never did anything for me.’

‘That’s not fair, she saved you!’ That was Sario, shocked into response. ‘She got you away from the government.’

‘She got me away? She saved me? Is that what you think? What makes you think I asked to be saved? Especially by you?’

‘You were a child…’

‘Beppe the head guard used to give me rides round the garden on his back. There were flowers, big, pink flowers all around the walls, I remember. I was happy there. I liked it there, it was quiet. Then she came and took me and there was nothing but dark and screaming and then I was here and then she left me here. She left me here, with you.’

To Terise, her voice was as real as she had ever heard it, stripped of pretense and all her usual chill naivety, and somehow familiar. The tone caught at the edge of her mind, reminding her of something, what was it? A girl’s voice, harsh with crying, smoky light and a fish half-gutted on the table, ‘I hate you, you never let me do anything, I wish you weren’t my mother!’ She had been thirteen then. Her father had been out on the boat; she would never have dared to say anything like it to her mother in his hearing. She couldn’t remember what she had been angry about.

‘She left me here with you,’ Issa repeated. ‘She told you to take care of me, didn’t she? Or maybe she didn’t and you just assumed she would have meant to, as if she would have remembered me at all. So you took care, such fine care of me, and what did you teach me? A hundred ways to kill, a hundred ways to die. How to make a weapon of pain itself, how to forge yourself so that everything that did not serve the cause melted away.

‘You taught me this and I learned. I learned so well that now, Wolf, you stand there and say, as if you were accusing me of something, that all I know is death. What else did she leave me? What else is there?’ The sharpness was back in her voice, the dangerous smile on her face. ‘I’m staying here,’ she said. ‘You know you can’t make me do anything else.’

She turned on her heel and strode out of the room. The councilors went, muttering, about their duties, trying not to catch each other’s eyes. Ladyani and Terise were left alone.

‘I should go and check on her,’ Terise said, ‘she was pretty upset.’

‘Leave her. She’ll be better by herself.’ He stood still for a moment, regarding her.

‘Do you regret it?’ he asked.

She looked at him in puzzlement. ‘Regret what?’

‘Coming here with me. That I came and told you, brought you.’ He shrugged, smiling. ‘It.’

‘Oh. It. That’s a funny thing to ask. Why d’you think I would?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. You could have been a professor.’

‘Dottore again? I thought I’d got away from that.’ She laughed. ‘I don’t think I ever would have been. A civil servant, that would have been me, with a tiny flat and a frilleh for company, what a life.’ A man with grey streaks in his red hair, a girl and a boy in front of their house by the sea. Walking away. ‘No,’ she’d pronounced with decision. ‘I can’t think of anything better I could have done with my life. I don’t regret it.’

And Ladyani had leaned over to her then and planted a kiss on her brow. ‘I always said you were mad,’ he’d said, and he’d laughed with her.

***

‘It’s strange,’ she said now to Quila, ‘now we know they’re coming, it’s almost like it’s a relief. The air is different, it’s more like it used to be, when we were preparing for a big operation, everyone busy and knowing that they were making a difference.’

‘I know. I can hear them singing when they walk past the wall, like they’re happy.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Terise sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I haven’t done well by you. I should have left you in the cairn field, someone might have found you who could have taken better care of you than I have. Or I should have been quicker, then you never would have been wounded at all. I am sorry about that.’

‘I don’t think it would have made any difference.’ Her voice was toneless. ‘I’m dead already, didn’t I tell you that? I’ve been dead since I boarded the ship on Zargras, since Ai’Amadi tried to talk me out of it and I didn’t understand. I was just hiding it well.’ She tried to smile, but Terise was undeceived.

She said, gently, ‘I think it will only be days. From what Ihanakan says, they won’t be long in Chaireddan, or Ultima. We’ll go out to fight them, but… well, you know. We aren’t exactly as well-equipped as them.’

‘No, you get your weapons from the Gargarin, don’t you? I recognize the style. We made sure they never got the best blaster tech. Got to keep them in the right suit, haven’t we? Stars above, I never thought I would be wearing it too.’

‘And that’s for the ones who actually have the Gargarin rifles. There are a few Chi!me blasters and some Terran stuff, but the way things have been going, if there’s a big engagement some of us have to have Espada and to be honest, we’d be better off throwing rocks at them. What I wouldn’t give for a decent weapon! But there was never the money to equip all of us properly, we all have to take what we can get.’

Quila regarded her with an air of discovery. ‘You like it, don’t you? Fighting, I mean. You enjoy it.’

Terise shrugged. ‘Some of it, sometimes, I suppose. I suppose I always liked having fought, you know? Having been brave, having won a battle, having everything complicated come down to something that’s so simple, just you and the enemy and your weapon in between. It’s like innocence, that moment. I suppose I like that. Not so much the rest of it.’

‘So not the train to Santos, then?’

‘No. Not that.’

There was a pause.

‘You know I cried when Mara died?’ Quila went on. ‘I told you I used to have pictures of her. I admired her so much. When I was young, I used to look up at her on my wall and it was like she knew me, you know? I was older than that when she was killed, maybe four cycles, but it still hurt. It seemed like that was when it all started to go wrong, though even with Mara there were things…

‘You don’t know how difficult it is to support a group that uses violence. Even when Mara was alive, it was difficult for people on Chi!me to say they sympathized with ViaVera, even though no one has ever trusted the Benanist government, even though most people condemned Sept Karne’s murder. There was so much support you could have had, so much goodwill. But, after a while, it just became too hard. And after the train to Santos… Why did you do it? Why, after everything good that ViaVera had stood for, did you just throw it all away? You didn’t have to, you didn’t need to, why did you? Did you just want the blood?’

Terise’s mouth twisted. ‘It was a mistake.’

Her tone was so bitter that Quila looked up sharply.

‘Were you there?’

‘What makes you think you have the right to ask?’

‘I didn’t think it mattered, now. Were you?’

Her eyes were wide in her thin face, unwavering. Terise sighed.

‘Yes, I was there and yes, I still do hear the screams, even over all the others. It was a mistake. We thought the explosive would break the tube, that it would stop the train, destroy the goods wagons in the middle, hit some of the big corporations, you know. Mara always said, it’s not about ideology, it’s about money. Get the Benan companies pulling out, that’s when we’ll see some difference. We were going to ransom the passengers, we never thought that the tube wouldn’t shatter and the train would just sit there, burning.’

‘Five hundred people died in that train.’

‘Four hundred and ninety-seven, including twenty-three children, and I’ve listened to every single one. Don’t you think I know?’

She waved her hand, as if to dispel the memory.

‘I don’t know why it went wrong, God knows we’d spent long enough working it out. It was Issa’s first mission, if you want to know, she planned it. It was all her idea, every detail, she was so insistent it would work. I suppose we must have been too busy worrying about her.’

‘And after that, were they all mistakes?’

Terise grimaced. ‘It would be so easy to say yes, wouldn’t it? So much simpler to pretend we never meant to hurt anyone, we’re little saints up here on our pyre. Well, we aren’t. You know the answer as well as I do.’

‘But did you never think of passive resistance? Why does violence have to be the answer? As I said, there were many, many people on Chi!me who were sympathetic to Mara, to your cause, but they couldn’t support the sort of indiscriminate violence they saw from you even when Mara was alive, let alone after. You made yourself outcasts, you must see that.’

‘Of course I do, but what other choice did we have? You talk about peace, about finding non-violent solutions as if that ever works, as if the best way to stop soldiers with guns from burning your home is to sit down in the street and sing songs while they do it.

‘You know what they did to my village, to my family and Ladyani’s. You know what they did to Mara’s family, what they did to her, what they do to any of us when they catch us. You’ve never had to think of your comrades tortured, of friends locked up in the dark for the rest of their lives and now starved when their guards run away. Are you telling me that we should let them get away with that? That we could ever have won by letting them do whatever they pleased? Disobedience, passive resistance, making a face at the policeman when his back is turned, the peasants do these all the time and they don’t make any difference. They aren’t free. You can’t reason with a state; you can’t appeal to its better nature. You can only fight it and kill it.’

She paused. An image of the wooden cross outside Three Trees flickered in her inner eye.

‘You don’t understand anything,’ she went on. ‘You talk as if we should be ashamed of our victories, apologize for fighting back, while the things we maybe should be ashamed of you don’t even see.’

There had been strips of black cloth fluttering from the crosspiece, she remembered, left behind when the villagers had taken the priest’s body down. They had shot the man who’d organized the burial, too.

‘You don’t care what we do when you don’t hear about it, the unspectacular violence that the screens don’t show. But in public you want us to be the bearers of your conscience, parrot your principles so that you can say to yourself in your soft bed far away, “oh, I do hope ViaVera are alright” and go to sleep. So you couldn’t support us. Well, we did what we had to do, and we didn’t ask for your help.’

Quila looked rueful. ‘No. Well, I suppose I asked for that. I’m sorry. It’s just… I find it so difficult to understand. I’ve been here for a long time now and it seems so normal, so…domestic. I talk to you and I could be talking to anyone I’ve known, as if we were, well, friends. But then I remember what you do, what you all do and I don’t understand it. How do you do it? How do you kill someone?’

‘I don’t think we have a monopoly on it,’ Terise rejoined. ‘Why don’t you ask your people when they get here?’

Quila ignored the jibe. ‘I mean face to face. How do you do it? How do you bring yourself to it, to be close enough to feel them living and then make them stop?’

Terise considered. ‘Well, it helps if you don’t remind yourself that they are living. It becomes like a contest, fighting, you know. You just have to get through it, you don’t think about it. But, I suppose sometimes, when it’s harder, you find the person inside who knows. Someone who knows how to kill, who knows it’s necessary. They’re there all the time, watching, all you have to do is let them out. You don’t even know what they’re doing, it all goes past in a haze, as if you weren’t there at all, and when you come back to yourself you’re surrounded by corpses and you think, is this what I did?’

‘So you make a killer, something you’re not responsible for. Something that’s not you, or not the real you. Is that what you’ve all done?’

‘No,’ Terise answered. ‘I told you, you don’t understand. The person inside, the killer, they’re what’s real.’

She stood straighter against the door. The afternoon sun shone through the cracks around her, catching in her hair and the threads of her ragged jacket, crowning her in golden light. ‘You think this is real, this home, this comfort, this life? It’s all pretense, it’s all nothing. We are what we are made to be, you think we could live in the heart of the flame and not be touched? We struggle, and we are the struggle, there’s nothing else. Whatever else we were was burned away, on the train to Santos, on a rooftop in Chaireddan, on a thousand different pyres. We are the blast, we are the blot, we are the blood and the carnage and the death. That’s the truth, it’s always been the truth. Everything else is just transitory.’