He was about to say something in reply when the door at the far end of the room opened a crack.
He grabbed the plasma cannon.
"Is… is everything all right?" said a quiet, female voice.
He put the gun down, smiling at the small pale face peering from the doorway, long black hair following the line of the door's studded wood.
"Ah, Neinte!" Keiver exclaimed, rising only to bow deeply to the young girl (princess, indeed!) who was — technically, at least, not that that precluded other, more productive, even lucrative, relationships in the future — his ward.
"Come on in," he heard the mercenary tell the girl.
(Damn him, always taking the initiative like that; who did he think he was?)
The girl crept into the room, gathering her skirts in front of her. "I thought I heard a shot…"
The mercenary laughed. "That was a little time ago," he said, rising to show the girl to a seat near the fire.
"Well," she said, "I had to dress…"
The man laughed louder.
"My lady," Keiver said, rising slightly late, and flourishing what would now — thanks to Zakalwe — look like a rather awkward bow. "Forfend we should have disturbed your maidenly slumber…"
Keiver heard the other man stifle a guffaw as he kicked a log further into the fire. The princess Neinte giggled. Keiver felt his face heat up, and decided to laugh.
Neinte — still very young, but already beautiful in a delicate, fragile way — wrapped her arms round her drawn-up legs, and stared into the fire.
He looked from her to Keiver, in the silence that followed (except that the deputy vice-regent-in-waiting said, "Yes, well. ), and thought — as the logs crackled and the scarlet flames danced — how like statues the two young people suddenly looked.
Just once, he thought, I'd like to know whose side I'm really on in something like this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with concentrated nobility — such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver's vacant-looking eyes — facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute force and brute intelligence) trying to protect these delicate, simpering products of a millennia's privilege, and never knowing whether I'm doing the tactically or the strategically right thing.
The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cut-off between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with.
He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known, or predicted, or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.
This girl was what it came down to, here, this time; barely more than a child, and trapped in the great stone castle with the rest of the cream or scum (depending on how you looked at it), to live or die, depending on how well I advise, and on how capable these clowns are of taking that advice.
He looked at the girl's, flame-lit face, and felt something more than distant desire (for she was attractive), or fatherly protectiveness (for she was so young, and he, despite his appearance, so old). Call it… he didn't know what. A realisation; an awareness of the tragedy the whole episode represented; the break-up of the Rule, the dissolution of power and privilege and the whole elaborate, top-heavy system this child represented.
The muck and dirt, the king with fleas. For theft, mutilation; for the wrong thoughts, death. An infant mortality rate as astronomical as the life-expectancy was minute, and the whole grisly, working package wrapped in a skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the knowing over the ignorant (and the worst of it was the pattern; the repetition; the twisted variations of the same depraved theme in so many different places).
So this girl, called a princess. Would she die? The war was going against them, he knew, and the same symbolic grammar that presented her with the prospect of power if things went well, also dictated her use, her expendability, if all failed about them. Rank demanded its tribute; the obsequious bow or the mean stab, according to the outcome of this struggle.
He saw her suddenly old, in the flickering firelight. He saw her shut in some slimed dungeon, waiting, hoping, scabbed with lice and ragged in sack-cloth, head shaved, eyes dark and hollow in the raw skin, and finally marched out one snow-filled day, to be nailed to a wall with arrows or bullets, or face the cold axe blade.
Or maybe that too was too romantic. Maybe there would be some desperate flight to asylum, a lonely and bitter exile spent growing old and worn, barren and senile, forever remembering the ever more golden old times, composing futile petitions, hoping for a return, but growing slowly, inevitably, into something like the pampered uselessness her upbringing had always conditioned her for, but without any of the compensations she had been bred to expect from her station.
With a feeling of sickness, he saw that she meant nothing. She was just another irrelevant part of another history, heading — with or without the Culture's carefully evaluated nudges in what they saw as the right direction — for what would probably be better times and an easier life for most. But not her, he suspected, not right at this moment.
Born twenty years earlier, she might have expected a good marriage, a productive estate, access to the court, and lusty sons, talented daughters… twenty years from now, perhaps an astutely mercantile husband, or even — in the unlikely event this particular genderist society was heading that way so soon — a life of her own; academic, in business, doing good works; whatever.
But, probably, death.
High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire's treasure, and he sitting by a log fire was a sad and lovely princess… I used to dream about such things, he thought. I used to long for them, ache for them. They seemed the very stuff of life, its essence. So why does all this taste of ashes?
I should have stayed on that beach, Sma. Perhaps after all I am getting too old for this.
He made himself look away from the girl. Sma said he tended to get too involved, and she was not totally wrong. He'd done what they'd asked; he'd be paid, and at the end of all this, after all, there was his own attempt to claim absolution for a past crime. Livueta, say you will forgive me.
"Oh!" The princess Neinte had just noticed the wreckage of the bloodwood chair.
"Yes," Keiver stirred uncomfortably. "That, ah… that was, umm, me, I'm afraid. Was it yours? Your family's?"
"Oh, no! But I knew it; it belonged to my uncle; the archduke. It used to be in his hunting lodge. It had a great big animal's head above it. I was always frightened to sit in it because I dreamt the head would fall from the wall and one of the tusks would stick right into my head and I'd die!" She looked at both men in turn and giggled nervously. "Wasn't I silly?"
"Ha!" said Keiver.
(While he watched them both and shivered. And tried to smile.)
"Well," Keiver laughed. "You must promise not to tell your uncle that I broke his little seat, or I shall never be invited to one of his hunts again!" Keiver laughed louder. "Why, I might even end up with my head fixed on one of his walls!"
The girl squealed and put a hand to her mouth.
(He looked away, shivering again, then threw a piece of wood onto the fire, and did not notice then or afterwards that it was a piece of the bloodwood chair he had added to the flames, and not a log at all.)