“Quience was behind it all,” DeWar said. His voice sounded strangled, as though he had a sword at his throat, not she at hers. “The war, the poisoning.”
“I do not know, DeWar, but I imagine so.” She looked deliberately down at the sword blade. “DeWar.” She looked up into his eyes with a hurt, pleading expression. “There is no more I can tell you. The poison was delivered by innocents to the Paupers’ Hospital, where I received it. Nobody I know knew what it was or what it was for. If you have the nurse as well, you have the totality of our conspiracy. There is no more to tell.” She paused. “I am already dead, DeWar. Please, if you would, finish the job. I am suddenly so weary.” She let the muscles supporting her head relax so that her chin rested on the blade. It, and through it DeWar, was now taking all the weight of her head and its memories.
The metal, warm now, dropped slowly away from beneath her, so that she had to stop herself falling forwards and striking the rim of the fountain pool. She looked up. DeWar, his own head hanging down, was sliding the sword back into its scabbard.
“I told him the boy was dead, DeWar!” she said angrily. “I lied to him before I crushed his filthy skull and slit his scrawny old-man’s throat!” She struggled to her feet, her joints protesting. She went to DeWar and took his arm with her good hand. “Would you leave me to the guard and the questioner? Is that your judgment?”
She shook him, but he did not respond. She looked down, then grabbed at the nearest weapon, his long knife. She pulled it from its sheath. He looked alarmed and took two rapid steps backwards, away from her, but he could have stopped her taking it, and he had not.
“Then I’ll do it myself!” she said, and brought the knife quickly up to her throat. His arm was a blur. She saw sparks in front of her face. Her hand began to sting almost before her eyes and mind had registered what had happened. The knife he had knocked from her hand smacked into a wall and fell with a metallic clatter to the marble floor. The sword hung in his hand again.
“No,” he said, moving towards her.
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?