Inversions

20. THE BODYGUARD

“I told the boy a story of my own.”

“You did?”

“Yes. It was a pack of lies.”

“Well, all stories are lies, in a way.”

“This was worse. This was a true story turned into a lie.”

“You must have felt there was a reason to do that.”

“Yes, I did.”

“What was the reason you felt that way?”

“Because I wanted to tell the story, but I could not tell it truly to a child. It is the only story I know worth telling, the story I think most about, the story that I live again and again in my dreams, the story that feels as if it needs to be told, and yet a child could not understand it, or if they could, it would be an inhuman thing to tell them it.”

“Hmm. It doesn’t sound like a story you have ever told me.”

“Shall I tell it to you now?”

“It sounds like a painful story to tell.”

“It is. Perhaps it is painful to hear, too.”

“Do you want to tell it to me?”

“I don’t know.”

The Protector returned to his palace. His son still lived, though his grip on life seemed tenuous and frail. Doctor BreDelle took over from Doctor AeSimil but he was no more able to determine what was wrong with the boy than he was able to treat him successfully. Lattens drifted in and out of consciousness, sometimes unable to recognise his father or his nurse, on other occasions sitting up in bed and pronouncing himself feeling much better and almost recovered. These periods of lucidity and apparent recovery grew further and further apart, however, and the boy spent more and more time curled up in his bed, asleep or in a halfway stage between sleep and wakefulness, eyes closed, limbs twitching, muttering to himself, turning and moving and jerking as though in a fit. He ate almost nothing, and would drink only water or very diluted fruit juice.

DeWar still worried that Lattens might be being poisoned in some subtle way. He arranged with the Protector and the superintendent of an orphans’ home that a set of twins be brought to the palace to act as tasters for the boy. The two identical boys were a year younger than Lattens.

They were slightly built and a poor start in life had left them with delicate constitutions which made them prone to any passing illness. Nevertheless, they thrived while Lattens weakened, happily finishing off each of the meals he barely tasted, so that by the proportion consumed it might have seemed to a casual observer that it was he who tasted the food for them.

For a few days after their even more hurried return to Crough, UrLeyn and those in his immediate party had out-distanced the news from Ladenscion, and there was a frustrating lack of new intelligence from the war. UrLeyn stamped about the palace, unable to settle to anything, and found little solace even in the harem. The younger girls in particular only made him annoyed with their simpering attempts at sympathy, and he spent more time with Perrund than with all of them, just sitting talking on most occasions.

A hunt was arranged, but the Protector called it off just before it started, worried that the chase might take him too far away from the palace and the sick bed of his son. He attempted to apply himself to the many other affairs of state, but could find little patience for courtiers, provincial representatives or foreign dignitaries. He spent longer in the palace library, reading old accounts of history and the lives of ancient heroes.

When news did eventually arrive from Ladenscion it was equivocal. Another city had been taken but yet more men and war machines had been lost. A few of the barons had indicated that they wanted to discuss terms that would let them remain loyal to Tassasen in theory and through token tribute, but retain the independence they had achieved through their rebellion. As generals Ralboute and Simalg understood that this was not a course the Protector wished to pursue, more troops were called for. It was to be hoped that as this news had undoubtedly crossed with the fresh soldiers already on their way to the war, this last request was redundant. This intelligence had been delivered in a coded letter and there seemed little to debate or discuss as a result of it, but UrLeyn convened a full war cabinet in the map-hall nevertheless. DeWar was invited to attend but commanded not to speak.

“Perhaps the best thing would be for you to take yourself away, brother.”

“Take myself away? What? Go on an improving tour? Visit some old aunt in the countryside? What do you think you mean, ‘take myself away’?”

“I mean that perhaps the best thing would be for you to be somewhere else,” RuLeuin said, frowning.

“The best thing, brother,” UrLeyn said, “would be for my son to make a full and swift recovery, the war in Ladenscion to end immediately in total victory, and my advisors and family to stop suggesting idiocies.”

DeWar hoped RuLeuin would hear the annoyance in his brother’s voice and take the hint, but he kept on. “Well then,” he said, “the better thing, I should have said, rather than the best, might be to go to Ladenscion, perhaps. To take on all the responsibilities of the war’s command and so to have less room in your mind for the worry the boy’s illness must be causing you.”

DeWar, sitting just behind UrLeyn at the head of the map table, could see some of the others looking at RuLeuin with expressions of disapproval and even mild scorn.

UrLeyn shook his head angrily. “Great Providence, brother, what do you think I am? Were either of us raised to be so lacking in feeling? Can you simply turn off your emotions? I cannot, and I would treat with the gravest suspicion anybody who claimed they could. They would not be a man, they would be a machine. An animal. Providence, even animals have emotions.” UrLeyn glanced round the others gathered about the table, as though daring any of them to assert such coldness for themselves. “I can’t leave the boy like this. I did try to, as you may recall, and I was called back. Would you have me go and then be worrying about him every day and night? Would you have me there in Ladenscion while my heart was here, taking command but unable to give it my full attention?”

RuLeuin finally seemed to see the wisdom in remaining silent. He pressed his lips together and studied the table top in front of him.

“We are here to discuss what to do about this damned war,” UrLeyn said, gesturing at the map of Tassasen’s borders spread out in the centre of the great table. “The condition of my son keeps me here in Crough but other than that it has no bearing on our meeting. I’ll thank you not to mention it again.” He glared at RuLeuin, who still stared tight-upped at the table. “Now, has anyone anything to say which might actually prove useful?”

“What is to be said, sir?” ZeSpiole said. “We are told little in this latest news. The war continues. The barons wish to keep what they hold. We are too far from it to be able to contribute much. Unless it is to agree to what the barons propose.”

“That is scarcely more helpful,” UrLeyn told the Guard Commander impatiently.

“We can send more troops,” YetAmidous said. “But I wouldn’t advise it. We have few enough left to defend the capital as it is, and the other provinces have been stripped bare already.”

“It is true, sir,” said VilTere, a young provincial commander called to the capital with a company of light cannon. VilTere’s father had been an old comrade of UrLeyn’s during the war of succession and the Protector had invited him to the meeting. “If we take too many men to punish the barons we might be seen to encourage others to emulate them by leaving our provinces devoid of policing.”

“If we punish the barons severely enough,” UrLeyn said, “we might be able to convince these ‘others’ of the folly of such a course.”

“Indeed, sir,” the provincial commander said. “But first we must do so, and then they must hear about it.”

“They’ll hear about it,” UrLeyn said darkly. “I have lost all patience with this war. I will accept nothing else than complete victory. No further negotiations will be entered into. I am sending word to Simalg and Ralboute that they must do all they can to capture the barons, and when they do they are to send them here like common thieves, though better guarded. They will be dealt with most severely.”

BiLeth looked stricken. UrLeyn noticed. “Yes, BiLeth?” he snapped.

The foreign minister looked even more discomfited. “I…” he began. “I, well…”

“What, man?” UrLeyn shouted. The tall foreign minister jumped in his seat, his long, thin grey hair flouncing briefly.

“Are you… is the Protector quite… it’s just that, sir…”

“Great Providence, BiLeth!” UrLeyn roared. “You’re not going to disagree with me, are you? Finally found a sliver of backbone, have we? Where in the skies of hell did that fall from?”

BiLeth looked grey. “I do beg the Protector’s pardon. I would simply beg to ask him reconsider treating the barons in quite such a fashion,” he said, a desperate, anguished look on his narrow face.

“How the fuck should I treat the bastards?” UrLeyn asked, his voice low but seething with derision. “They make war on us, they make fools of us, they make widows of our women-folk.” UrLeyn slammed a fist on to the table, making the map of the borderlands flap in the breeze. “How in the name of all the old gods am I supposed to treat the sons of bitches?”

BiLeth looked as if he was about to cry. Even DeWar felt slightly sorry for him. “But sir,” the foreign minister said in a small voice, “several of the barons are related to the Haspidian royal family. There are matters of diplomatic etiquette when dealing with nobility, even if they are rebellious. If we can but prise one away from the others and treat with him well, then perhaps we can bring him to our side. I understand—”

“You understand very little, it would seem, sir,” UrLeyn told him in a voice dripping with scorn. BiLeth seemed to shrink in his seat. “I’ll have no more talk of etiquette,” he said, spitting out the word. “It has become clear that these scum have been teasing us,” UrLeyn told BiLeth and the others. “They play the seductress, these proud barons. They act the coquette. They hint that they might succumb to us if we treat them just a little better, that they will be ours if only we flatter them a little more, if only we can find it in our hearts and our pockets to provide them with a few more gifts, a few more tokens of our esteem, why then they will open their gates, then they will help us with their less cooperative friends and all their resistance so far will prove to have been for show, a pretty fight they have been putting up for the sake of their maidenly honour.” UrLeyn hit the table again. “Well, no! We have been led along for the last time. The next leading will be done by an executioner, when he pulls on the chain of one of these proud barons and brings him to the public square to be tormented like a common murderer and then put up to burn. We’ll see how the rest of them respond to that!”

YetAmidous slapped the table with the flat of his hand and stood up out of his seat. “Well said, sir! That’s the spirit!”

ZeSpiole watched BiLeth shrink further in his seat, and exchanged looks with RuLeuin, who looked down. ZeSpiole pursed his lips and studied the map on the table. The others gathered round the table — lesser generals, advisors and aides — busied themselves in a variety of other ways, but none looked directly at the Protector or said anything in contradiction.

UrLeyn gazed round at their faces with a look of mocking admonition. “What, is there nobody else to take my foreign minister’s side?” he asked, waving one hand at the subsiding form that was BiLeth. “Is he to remain alone and unseconded in his campaign?”

Nobody said anything. “ZeSpiole?” UrLeyn said.

The Guard Commander looked up. “Sir?”

“Do you think I am right? Should I refuse to entertain any further advances from our rebellious barons?”

ZeSpiole took a deep breath. “I think we might profitably threaten the barons with what you have mentioned, sir.”

“And, if we take one, carry it out, yes?”

ZeSpiole studied the great fan of window on the wall opposite, where glass and semi-precious stones shone with sunlight. “I can appreciate the prospect of seeing one of the barons so humbled, sir. And as you say, there are enough widows in this city who would cheer his screams sufficient to drown them out.”

“You see no intemperateness in such a course, sir?” UrLeyn asked reasonably. “No rashness, no cruel impetuousness which might rebound on us?”

“That would be a possibility, perhaps,” ZeSpiole said, with a flicker of uncertainty.

“A ‘possibility’, ‘perhaps’?” UrLeyn said in a voice that mocked the Guard Commander’s. “But we must do better than that, Commander! This is an important matter. One that needs our gravest consideration. We cannot make light of it, can we? Or perhaps not. Perhaps you disagree. Do you disagree, Commander?”

“I agree that we must think hard about what we are going to do, sir,” ZeSpiole said, his voice and manner serious.

“Good, Commander,” UrLeyn said with what appeared to be sincerity. “I am glad we have extracted a hint of decision from you.” He looked round everybody else. “Are there any other views I should hear from any of you?” Heads went down all around the table.

DeWar began to be thankful that the Protector had not thought to turn round and ask him his opinion. Indeed he still worried that he might. He suspected nothing he could say would make the General happy.

“Sir?” said VilTere. All eyes turned to the young provincial commander. DeWar hoped he wasn’t going to say something stupid.

UrLeyn glared. “What, sir?”

“Sir, I was, sadly, too young to be a soldier during the war of succession, but I have heard from many a commander whose opinion I respect and who served under you that your judgment has always proved sure and your decisions far-sighted. They told me that even when they doubted your decree, they trusted you, and that trust was vindicated. They would not be where they are, and we would not be here today” — at this the young commander looked round the others — “were it otherwise.”

The other faces round the table searched UrLeyn’s for a response before they reacted.

UrLeyn nodded slowly. “Perhaps I should take it ill,” he said, “that it is our most junior and most recently arrived recruit who holds the highest opinion of my faculties.”

DeWar thought he detected a sense of cautious relief around the table.

“I’m sure we all feel the same way, sir,” said ZeSpiole with an indulgent smile to VilTere and a cautious one to UrLeyn.

“Very well,” UrLeyn said. “We shall consider what fresh troops we might be able to send to Ladenscion and we shall tell Ralboute and Simalg to prosecute the war against the barons without respite or negotiation. Gentlemen.” With that, and a perfunctory nod, UrLeyn rose and marched away. DeWar followed.

“Then let me tell you something closer to the truth.”

“Only closer?”

“Sometimes the truth is too much to bear.”

“I have a strong constitution.”

“Yes, but I meant that sometimes it is too much for the teller, not the told.”

“Ah. Well then, tell me what you can.”

“Oh, there is not so much, now I approach it. And it is a common story. All too common. The less I tell you of it the more you could be hearing it from a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand mouths or more.”

“I have a feeling it is not a happy story.”

“Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.”

“Ah.”

“You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ingredients imply the finished article, and the method of its making, do they not? It is men who fight wars, wars are fought taking villages, towns and cities, where women tend the hearths, and when the place that they live is taken, so are they. Their honour becomes one of the spoils, their bodies too invaded. That territory taken. So my story is no different from that of tens of thousands of women, regardless of their nation or their tribe. And yet for me it is everything. For me it is the most important thing that ever happened to me. For me it was the end of my life, and what you see before you is like a ghost, a spirit, a mere shade, unsubstantial.”

“Please, Perrund.” He reached out his hands towards her in a gesture that required no response and did not seek to end in a touch. It was instead a movement of sympathy, even supplication. “If this hurts you so, you don’t need to continue for me.”

“Ah, but does it hurt you, DeWar?” she asked, and there was a sharp edge of bitterness and accusation in her voice. “Does it make you embarrassed? I know you have a regard for me, DeWar. We are friends.” These two sentences were uttered too quickly for him to be able to react. “Are you upset on my behalf, or your own? Most men would rather not hear what their fellows have done, what people who may indeed be very like them are capable of. Do you prefer not to think about such things, DeWar? Do you think that you are so different? Or do you become secretly excited at the idea?”

“Lady, I gain no benefit or pleasure at all from the subject.”

“Are you sure, DeWar? And if you are, do you really think you speak for the majority of your sex? For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not merely for show?”

“You must believe that we are not all the same. And even if all men might be said to have… base urges, we do not all give in to them, or pay them any respect, even in secret. I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear what happened to you…”

“But you have not heard, DeWar. You have not heard at all. I have implied that I was raped. That did not kill me. That alone might have killed the girl I was and replaced her with a woman, with a bitter one, with an angry one, or one who wished to take her own life, or attempt to take the life of those who violated her, or one who simply became mad.

“I think I might have become angry and bitter and I would have hated all men, but I think I would have survived and might have been persuaded, by the good men I knew in my own family and in my own town, and perhaps by one good man in particular who must now for ever remain in my dreams, that all was not lost and the world was not quite so terrible a place.

“But I never had that opportunity to recover, DeWar. I was pushed so far down in my despair I could not even tell in which direction the way back up lay. What happened to me was the least of it, DeWar. I watched my father and my brothers butchered, after they had been forced to watch my mother and my sisters being fucked time after time by a fine and numerous company of high-ranking men. Oh! You look down! Does my language upset you? Are you offended? Have I violated your ears with my intemperate, soldiers’ words?”

“Perrund, you must believe that I am sorry for what happened to you…”

“But why should you be sorry? It was not your fault. You were not there. You assure me that you disapprove, so why should you be sorry?”

“I would be bitter in your place.”

“In my place? How could that be, DeWar? You are a man. In the same place you would be, if not one of the violators, one of those who looked away, or remonstrated with their comrades afterwards.”

“If I was the age you were then, and a pretty youth—”

“Ah, so you can share what happened to me. I see. That is good. I am comforted.”

“Perrund, say anything you want to me. Blame me if it will help, but please believe I…”

“Believe you what, DeWar? I believe you feel sorry for me, but your sympathy stings like salty tears in a wound because I am a proud ghost, you see. Oh yes, a proud ghost. I am an enraged shade, and a guilty one, because I have come to admit to myself that I resent what was done to my family because it hurt me, because I was raised to expect everything to be done for me.

“I loved my parents and my sisters in my own way, but it was not a selfless love. I loved them because they loved me and made me feel special. I was their baby, their chosen beloved. Through their devotion and protection I learned none of the lessons that children usually learn, about the way the world really works and the way that children are used within it, until that single day, that one morning when every fond illusion I held was torn from me and the brutal truth forced into me.

“I had come to expect the best of everything, I had come to believe that the world would always treat me as I had been treated in the past and that those I loved would be there to love me in return. My fury at what happened to my family is partly caused by that expectation, that happy assumption, being defiled and obliterated. That is my guilt.”

“Perrund, you must know that should not be a cause for guilt. What you feel is what any decent child feels when they realise the selfishness they have felt when they were younger still. A selfishness that is only natural to children, especially those who have been loved so intensely. The realisation occurs, it is felt briefly and then it is rightly set aside. You have not been able to set yours aside because of what those men did to you, but—”

“Oh, stop, stop! Do you think I do not know all this? I know it, but I am a ghost, DeWar! I know, but I cannot feel, I cannot learn, I cannot change. I am stuck, I am pinned to that time by that event. I am condemned.”

“There is nothing I can do or say that can alter what happened to you, Perrund. I can only listen, only do what you will let me do.”

“Oh, do I persecute you? Do I make you a victim now, DeWar?”

“No, Perrund.”

“No, Perrund. No, Perrund. Ah, DeWar, the luxury of being able to say No.”

He went, half kneeling, half on his haunches by her then, putting himself very near to her but still not touching her, his knee near hers, his shoulder by her hip, his hands within grasp of hers. He was close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to feel the heat from her body, close enough to feel the hot breath that laboured from her nose and her half-open mouth, close enough for one hot tear to hit her clenched fist and spatter even tinier droplets on to his cheek. He kept his head bowed, and crossed his hands on his raised knee.

The bodyguard DeWar and the court concubine Perrund were in one of the palace’s more secret places. It was an old hiding hole in one of the lower levels, a space the size of a cupboard which led off one of the public rooms in the original noble house which had formed the basis of the greater building.

Retained more for sentimental than practical reasons by the first monarch of Tassasen and through a kind of indifference by subsequent rulers, the rooms which had seemed so grand to that first king had long since been judged too small and mean of proportion by future generations and were nowadays used only for storage.

The tiny room had been used to spy on people. It was a listening post. Unlike the alcove DeWar had burst from to attack the Sea Company assassin, it was not built for a guard but for a noble, so that he could sit there, with only a small hole in the stonework between him and the public room — that hole perhaps hidden by a tapestry or painting — and listen to what his guests were saying about him.

Perrund and DeWar had come here after she had asked him to show her some of the parts of the palace he had discovered on the wanderings which she knew he took. Shown this tiny room, it had suddenly reminded her of the secret compartment in their house in which her parents had concealed her when the town was sacked during the war of succession.

“If I knew who those men were, DeWar, would you be my champion? Would you avenge my honour?” she asked him.

He looked up into her eyes. They looked extraordinarily bright in the dim light of the hidden room. “Yes,” he said. “If you knew who they were. If you could be sure. Would you ask me to?”

She shook her head angrily. She wiped away her tears with her hand. “No. The ones I could identify are dead now, anyway.”

“Who were they?”

“King’s men,” Perrund said, looking up and away from DeWar, as though telling the small hole where the ancient noble had thought to eavesdrop on his guests. “The old King’s men. One of his baron commanders and his friends. They had been in charge of the siege and the taking of the town. Apparently we were favoured. Whoever was their spy had told them my father’s house held the town’s most comely maidens. They came to us first, and my father tried to offer them money to leave us alone. They took that badly. A merchant offering a noble man money!” She looked down at her lap, where her good hand, still damp with tears, lay beside her wasted hand in its sling. “I knew all their names, eventually. All the noble ones, at any rate. They died during the rest of the course of the war. I tried to tell myself that I felt good when I heard about the first few dying, but I did not. I could not. I felt nothing. That was when I knew I was dead inside. They had planted death in me.”

DeWar waited a long time before he said, softly, “And yet you live, and you saved the life of the one who ended the war and brought about a better law. There is no right of—”

“Ah, DeWar, there is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but…”

“And yet,” DeWar insisted, “still you are alive. And there are people who have the highest regard for you and feel their lives have been the better for having known you. Did you not say you had found a type of peace and contentment here, in the palace?”

“In the harem of the chief,” she said, though with something more like measured disdain than the fury that had been in her voice earlier. “As a cripple kept on out of sympathy in the collection of mates for the foremost male of the pack.”

“Oh, come. We may act like animals, men especially. But we are not animals. If we were there would not be the shame in acting so. We act otherwise, too, and set a better marker. Where is love in what you say of where you are now? Do you not feel even slightly loved, Perrund?”

She reached out quickly and put her hand on his cheek, letting it rest there, as easily and naturally as though they were brother and sister or a husband and wife, long married.

“As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise.” She smiled a small, empty smile. “Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mull and theorise over.” She shook her head. “But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman talking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead.”

She stood, before he could say more. “Now, please, take me back to the harem.”