Inversions

EPILOGUE

It strikes me, having written this, how little we can ever know.

The future is by its very nature unfathomable. We can predict a very little way into it indeed with any reliability, and the further we attempt to see into what has not yet happened, the more foolish we later realise we have been — with the benefit of hindsight. Even the most obviously predictable events, which seem the most likely to occur, can prove fickle. When the rocks fell from the sky back when I was a child, did millions of people the previous evening not believe that the suns would rise as usual, on schedule, the following morning? And then the rocks and the fire fell from the sky, and for whole countries the suns did not rise that day, and indeed for many millions of people they would never rise again.

The present is in some ways no more sure, for what do we really know about what is happening now? Only what is happening immediately around us. The horizon is the usual maximum extent of our ability to appreciate the moment, and the horizon is far away, so events there must be very large for us to be able to see them. Besides, in our modern world the horizon is in reality not the edge of the land or the sea, but the nearest hedge, or the inside of a city wall or the wall of the room we inhabit. The greater events in particular tend to happen somewhere else. The very instant that the rocks and the fire fell from the sky, when over half the world woke up to chaos, on the far side of the globe all was well, and it took a moon or more before the sky darkened with unusual clouds.

When a king dies, the news might take a moon to travel to the furthest corners of his kingdom. It might take years to travel to countries on the far side of the ocean, and in some places, who knows, it might slowly stop being news at all as it travels, becoming instead recent history, and so barely worth the mentioning when travellers exchange the latest developments, so that the death that shook a country and unseated a dynasty only arrives centuries later, as a short passage in a history book. So the present, I repeat, is in some ways no more knowable than the future, for it takes the passage of time for us to know what is happening at any given moment.

The past, then? Surely there we can find certainty, because once something has happened it cannot unhappen, it cannot be said to change. There may be further discoveries which throw a new light on what has happened, but the thing itself cannot alter. It must stay fixed and sure and definite and therefore introduce some certainty into our lives.

And yet how little historians agree. Read the account of a war from one side and then from the other. Read the biography of a great man written by one who has come to despise him, then read his own account. Providence, talk to two servants about the same event that same morning in the kitchen and you may well be told two quite different tales, in which the wronged becomes the wrong-doer and what seemed obvious from one telling seems suddenly quite impossible given the other.

A friend will tell a story which involves the two of you in such a way that you know it did not happen so at all, but the way he tells it is more amusing than the reality, or reflects better on the two of you, and so you say nothing, and soon others will tell the story, altered again, and before long you may find yourself telling it the way you know for a certainty it simply did not happen.

Those of us who keep journals occasionally find we have, with no malice or thought of tale or reputation enhancement whatsoever, remembered something quite erroneously. We may for a goodly part of our lives have been giving a perfectly plain account of some past occurrence, one that we are quite sure of and seem to remember very well indeed, only to come across our own written account of it, recorded at the time, and find that it did not happen the way we remembered it at all!

So we can never be sure of anything, perhaps.

And yet we must live. We must apply ourselves to the world. To do so we have to recall the past, attempt to foresee the future and cope with the demands of the present. And we struggle through, somehow, even if in the process — perhaps just to retain what we can of our sanity — we convince ourselves that the past, present and future are much more knowable than they really are or can ever be.

So, what happened?

I have spent the rest of a long life returning to the same few instants, without reward.

I think there is not a day when I do not think back to those few moments in the torture chamber of the palace of Efernze in the city of Haspide.

I was not unconscious, I am sure of that. The Doctor only convinced me that I was for a short while. Once she had gone, and I had recovered from my grief, I became more and more certain that precisely the amount of time which I thought had passed then, had passed. Ralinge was on the iron bed, poised to take her. His assistants were a few steps away, I cannot recall exactly where. I closed my eyes to spare myself the awful moment, and then the air filled with strange noises. A few moments — just a handful of heartbeats at the most, on that I would stake my life — and there they all were, the three of them, violently dead, and the Doctor already released from her bonds.

How? What could possibly move with such speed to do such things? Or, what trick of will or mind could be employed to make them do such things to themselves? And how was she able to appear so serene in the moments immediately thereafter? The more I think back to that interlude between the deaths of the torturers and the arrival of the guards, when we sat side by side in the small barred cell, the more sure I become that she somehow knew that we would be saved, that the King would suddenly find himself at death’s door and she would be summoned to save him. But how could she have been so calmly certain?

Perhaps Adlain was right, and there was sorcery at work. Perhaps the Doctor had an invisible bodyguard who could leave egg-sized bumps on the heads of knaves and slip unnoticed behind us into the dungeon to butcher the butchers and release the Doctor from her manacles. It almost seems like the only rational answer, yet it is the most fanciful of all.

Or perhaps I did sleep, swoon, or become unconscious or whatever you like to call it. Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.

What more is there to tell? Let me see.

Duke Ulresile died, in hiding, in Brotechen province, a few months after the Doctor left us. It was a simple cut from a broken plate, they say, which led to blood poisoning. Duke Quettil died soon afterwards, too, from a wasting disease which affected all the extremities and turned them necrotic. Doctor Skelim was unable to do anything.

I became a doctor.

King Quience ruled another forty years, in exceptionally good health until the very end.

He left only daughters, so now we have a queen. I find this less troubling than I would have thought.

Lately they have taken to calling the Queen’s late father Quience the Good, or sometimes Quience the Great. I dare say one or other will have been settled on by the time anybody comes to read this.

I was his personal physician for the last fifteen years, and the Doctor’s training and my own discoveries made me, by all accounts, the best in the land. Perhaps, indeed, one of the best in the world, for when, partly due to the ambassadorship of gaan Kuduhn, more frequent and reliable links with the archipelagic republic of Drezen were established, we discovered that while our antipodean cousins rivalled and indeed even exceeded us in many ways, they were not quite so advanced in medicine, or indeed anything else, as the Doctor had implied.

Gaan Kuduhn came to live amongst us and became something of a father to me. Later he became a good friend and spent a decade as ambassador to Haspidus. A generous, resourceful and determined man, he confessed to me once that there was only one thing he had ever set his wits to that he had failed to accomplish, and that was trying to track down the Doctor, or indeed hunt down exactly where she had come from.

We could not ask her, for she disappeared.

One night in the sea of Osk, the Plough of the Seas was running before the wind past a line of small, uninhabited islands, bound for Cuskery. Then the glowing green apparition that mariners call chain-fire began to play about the rigging of the ship. All were at first amazed, but then they became in fear of their lives, for not only was the chain-fire brighter and more intense than anything the sailors could recall seeing in the past, but the wind increased suddenly and threatened to tear the sails, bring down the masts or even turn the great galleon over entirely.

The chain-fire disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, and the wind fell back to the strong and steady force it had been before. By and by, all but those on watch returned to their cabins. One of the other passengers remarked they had not been able to wake the Doctor to come to see the display in the first place, though nobody thought much of this — the Doctor had been invited to dine with the vessel’s captain that evening, but had sent a note declining the invitation, citing an indisposition due to special circumstances.

By the next morning it was realised she was gone. Her door was locked from the inside and had to be forced. The scuttles were screwed open for ventilation, but were too small for her to have squeezed through. Apparently all her belongings, or at any rate the great majority of them, were still there in the cabin. They were packed up and were supposed to be sent on to Drezen, but unsurprisingly they disappeared during the passage.

Gaan Kuduhn, hearing all this, like I, nearly a year later, became fixed upon letting her family know what had happened to her and what good she had done in Haspidus, but for all his enquiries on the island of Napthilia and in the city of Pressel, including some which he made himself on a visit there, and despite the numerous occasions when he seemed on the very brink of discovering her nearest ones, he was always frustrated, and never did find anybody who had actually met or known the woman we knew as Doctor Vosill. Still, I think that was one of the few things that irked him on his death bed, and there was, in balance, an extraordinarily influential and productive life to look back on.

The old Guard Commander Adlain suffered badly towards the end of his allotment of seasons. I think what consumed him was something like the growing disease that had taken the slaver Tunch, all those years earlier.

I was able to alleviate the pain but in the end it became too much for him. My old master told me, he swore truly, that indeed, as I had always suspected, he had been the officer who had rescued me from the wreck of my home and the dead arms of my parents in the smoking ruins of the city of Derla, but that he had taken me to the orphanage in a fit of guilt, for it had been he who had killed my mother and father and burned their house. Now, he said, from the clawing depths of his agony, I would want to kill him.

I chose not to believe him, but I did what I could to hasten his end, which came, peacefully, less than a bell later. His mind must have been going, of course, for if I had believed for a moment what he had told me, I think I would have been tempted to have left him to suffer.

Also before he died Adlain begged me, knowing he was on his death bed, to tell him what had really happened in the torture chamber that evening. He tried to joke that if Quience had not turned the questioning chamber into a wine cellar shortly after the Doctor left us, he might have been tempted to have me interrogated there, just to discover the truth. I think he was joking. It saddened me to have to tell him that I had already, in my reports to him, told him everything that had occurred to the limit of my recollection and descriptive ability.

I have no idea whether he believed me or not.

And so I am old now, and will lie on my own death bed before a few more years are out. The Kingdom is at peace, we prosper, and there is even what the Doctor would, I think, have called Progress. To me fell the immense privilege of being the first Principal of the Medical University of Haspide. I also shouldered the happy duty of being the third President of the Royal College of Physicians, and later served as a city counsellor, when I was in charge of the committee overseeing the construction of the King’s Charitable Hospital and the Infirmary For The Freed. I am proud that one of such lowly birth was able to serve his King and his people in so many different ways during a time of such improvement.

There are still wars, naturally, though not recently in the vicinity of Haspidus. Even yet the three so-called Empires dispute, though with little result save to leave the rest of the world free from Imperial tyranny and so able to thrive in its own various ways. Our navy seems to fight sea battles every now and again, but as they are usually far away and we are as a rule victorious it is as if they do not really count as warfare. Going further back, the barons of Ladenscion had to be taught that who helps them resist one ruler might take it ill when they attempt to forgo all rule. There was civil war in Tassasen, of course, following the death of the Regicide UrLeyn, and King YetAmidous proved a poor leader, though young King Lattens (well, he is not so young any more, I admit, but he still seems young to me) made good most of the ill, and rules well, if quietly, to this day. I am told he is something of a scholar, which is no bad thing in a king, providing it is not taken to excess.

But that was a long time ago. All of this was.

The tale of the concubine Perrund, which forms the counterpoint to my own, and which I have included here with almost no amendment save where her taste foundered occasionally on the skerries of overly ornate prose, I searched out myself, after reading a version in the form of a play which I discovered in another bibliophile’s library here in Haspide.

I chose to end her tale where I did because it is after that point that the two versions diverge most violently. The first version I read, in the guise of a drama in three acts, had the bodyguard DeWar running the lady through with his sword to revenge his dead master and then returning to his home in the Half-Hidden Kingdoms, where he was revealed in his true identity as a prince who had been spurned by his father due to an unfortunate but honourable misunderstanding. A death-bed reconciliation, decorated with pretty speeches, was effected with the expiring King and DeWar reigned well thereafter. I admit I find this the more morally satisfying ending.

The version which purported to be by the lady’s own hand and which she claimed she only committed to paper to counter the sensationalised untruths of the dramatic edition could hardly have been more different. In it, the bodyguard whose trust she had just violated and whose master she had most cruelly done to death, took her by the hand (from which she had barely finished washing their master’s blood) and led her out of the harem. They told those waiting nervously outside that UrLeyn was well, but sleeping deeply, at last, as though he already knew the cause of the boy’s illness had been discovered.

DeWar said he would take the concubine Perrund to Guard Commander ZeSpiole’s offices to confront the nurse who had accused her. Falsely, he suspected. DeWar apologised to chief eunuch Stike and handed him back his keys. He told some of the assembled guards to remain where they were and the rest to go back to their normal posts and tasks. He led the lady Perrund away, politely but firmly.

They were seen leaving the palace by the groom who supplied them with mounts, and observed leaving the city by a variety of honest citizens.

It was about the time they were galloping through the city’s northern gate that Stike tried to open the doors into the small court, on the top-most level of the harem.

The key would not fit properly into the lock, in which something appeared to be lodged.

The doors were broken down. The foreign body which had been inserted into the lock after the doors had been secured proved to be a piece of marble in the shape of a little finger, broken from one of the maidens in the fountain in the centre of the raised pool in the little court.

UrLeyn’s body was discovered in the bedroom off the court. His blood saturated the sheets. His body was quite cold.

DeWar and Perrund were never caught. They made their way after unrecounted adventures to Mottelocci, in the Half-Hidden Kingdoms, where DeWar, surprisingly, was not known at all, but which he knew a great deal about, and where he rapidly established a good name for himself.

The two became merchants, and later founded a bank. Perrund wrote the account from which I have taken half my story. They married, and their sons — and allegedly their daughters too — continue to this day to run a trading enterprise that supposedly rivals that of our own Mifeli clan. The company’s symbol, reportedly, is a simple torus, a ring, such as might be cut from one end of a hollow pipe. (This symbol is one half of what I suspect is not the only set of correspondences within and between these two tales, but — considering the implications of these far too bamboozling for this old head to encompass — I have left it to the reader to discover their own points of similarity, draw their own conclusions and blaze their own trails of speculation.)

At any rate, DeWar and Perrund, we are told, both died in the mountains, in an avalanche in a mountain pass, five years ago. The snow and ice of the unforgiving peaks is their only tomb, but as they died after what appears to have been a long and happy life together, I beg to repeat that I prefer the former version of their fates, even if it is not supported by any facts whatsoever.

And now I think my divided tale is finished. I am sure there is much I have not said, much that could justifiably have been added had we — had I — only known a little extra, discovered a trifle more, but, as I have indicated above, sometimes (indeed probably always) one simply has to make do with what there is.

My wife is due to return soon from the market. (Yes, I married, and I love her now as I always have, for her own sake, not for that of my lost love, even if as I will admit she does look just a little like the good Doctor.) She took two of our grandchildren with her to look for presents, and they will expect me to play with them when they come back. I do little real work now I am so old, but still there is a life to be lived.