'Barbarian! Infidel!'
'You'll run out of expletives soon; I'd advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys' strong point, has it?'
'We will crush you!'
'Hey; I'm crushed, I'm crushed.' He waved one hand languidly. 'Now back off.'
The woman howled and shook the small chair.
Maybe, he thought, I ought to be thankful for the chance to be away from the responsibilities of command, the minute-to-minute changes in conditions that the fools couldn't deal with themselves and that bogged you down as surely as the mud; the continual flood of reports of units immobilised, washed away, deserting, cut off, retreating from vital positions, yelling for help, for relief, for reinforcements, more trucks, more tanks, more rafts, more food, more radios... past a certain point there was nothing he could do; he could only acknowledge, reply, turn-down, delay, order to make a stand; nothing, nothing. The reports kept on coming in, building up like a one-colour, paper mosaic of a million pieces, the picture of an army, bit-by-bit disintegrating, softened by the rain just like a sheet of paper, made soggy and tearable and gradually coming apart.
That was what he was escaping by being marooned here... yet he was not secretly thankful, he was not actually glad; he was furious and angry at being away, at leaving it all in the hands of others, of being away from the centre, from knowing what was happening. He fretted like a mother for a young son just marched off to war, driven to tears or pointless screams for the powerlessness of it, the heedless unstoppable momentum. (It struck him then that the whole process didn't really require any enemy forces at all. The battle was him and the army under his command, against the elements. A third party was superfluous.)
First the rains, then their unheard-of severity, then the landslide that had cut them off from the rest of the command convoy, then this bedraggled idiot of a would-be assassin...
He swung back upright again, held his head in his hands.
Had he tried to do too much? He had had ten hours sleep in the last week; had that clouded his mind, impaired his judgement? Or had he slept too much; might that little extra bit of wakefulness have made all the difference?
'I hope you die!' the woman's voice squawked.
He looked at her, frowning, wondering why she had interrupted his thoughts, wishing she'd shut up. Maybe he should gag her.
'You're retreating,' he pointed out. 'A minute ago you were telling me I would die.' He slumped back on the bed.
'Bastard!' she screamed.
He looked at her, suddenly thinking that he was as much a prisoner where he lay as she was where she sat. Snot gathered under her nose again. He looked away.
He heard her snort back, then spit. He would have smiled if he'd had the strength. She showed contempt with a spit; what was her one dribble compared to the deluge that was drowning a fighting machine he had worked two years to bring together and train?
And why, why had he tied her to a chair of all things? Did he try to make chance and fate redundant by scheming against himself? A chair; a girl tied to the chajr... about the same age, maybe a little older... but the same slim figure, with a lying greatcoat that tried to pretend she was bigger, but failed. About the same age, about the same shape...
He shook his head, forcing his thoughts away from that battle, that failure.
She saw him look at her and shake his head.
'Don't you laugh at me!' she screamed, shaking backwards and forwards in the chair, furious at his scorn.
'Shut up, shut up,' he said wearily. He knew it wasn't convincing, but he could not sound any more authoritative.
She shut up, remarkably.
The rains, and her; sometimes he wished he did believe in Fate. Maybe it did sometimes help to believe in Gods. Sometimes - like now, when things fell against him and every turn he took brought him up against another vicious twist of the knife, another hammering on the bruises he'd already collected - it would be comforting to think that it was all designed, all pre-ordained, all already written, and you just turned the pages of some great and inviolable book... Maybe you never did get a chance to write your own story (and so his own name, even that attempt at terms, mocked him).
He didn't know what to think; was there as petty and suffocating a destiny as some people seemed to think?
He didn't want to be here; he wanted to be back where the busy to-and-fro of teport and command stifled all other traffic in the mind.
'You're losing; you've lost this battle, haven't you?'
He considered saying nothing, but on reflection she would take this as a sign he was weak, and so continue.
'What a penetrating insight,' he sighed. 'You remind me of some of the people who planned this war. Cross-eyed, stupid and static.'
'I'm not cross-eyed!' she screamed, and instantly started crying, her head forced down by the weight of huge sobs that shook her body and waved the folds of the coat, making the chair creak.
Her dirty long hair hid her face, falling from her head over the wide lapels of the greatcoat; her arms were almost level with the ground, so far forward had she slumped in her crying. He wanted the strength to go over and cuddle her, or bash her brains out; anything to stop her making that unnecessary noise.
'All right, all right, you haven't got cross-eyes, I'm sorry.'
He lay back with one arm thrown across his eyes, hoping he sounded convincing, but sure he sounded as insincere as he was.
'I don't want your sympathy!'
'Sorry again; I retract the retraction.'
'Well... I haven't... It's just a... a slight defect, and it didn't stop the army board from taking me.'
(They were also, he recalled, taking children and pensioners, but he didn't say that to the woman.) She was trying to wipe her face on the lapels of the greatcoat.
She sniffed heavily, and when she brought her head back and her hair swung away, he saw there was a large dew-drop on the tip of her nose. He got up without thinking - the tiredness shrieking in indignation - and tore a portion of the thin curtain over the bed-alcove off as he went over to her.
She saw him coming with the ragged scrap and screamed with all her might; she emptied her lungs with the effort of announcing to the rainy world outside that she was about to be murdered. She was rocking the chair, and he had to jump at it and land with one boot on one of the cross-members between the legs to stop it from tipping over.
He put the rag over her face.
She stopped struggling. She went limp, not fighting or squirming but knowing it was utterly pointless to go on doing anything.
'Good,' he said, relieved, 'Now, blow.'
She blew.
He withdrew the rag, folded it over, put it back over her face and told her to blow again. She blew again. He folded it over again and wiped her nose, hard. She squealed; it was sore. He sighed again and threw the rag away.
He didn't lie down again because it only made him sleepy and thoughtful, and he didn't want to sleep because he felt he might never wake up, and he didn't want to think because it wasn't getting him anywhere.
He turned away and stood at the door, which was as close anywhere as it could be and still half open. Rain spattered in.
He thought of the others; the other commanders. Damn; the only other one he trusted was Rogtam-Bar, and he was too junior to take charge. He hated being put into positions like this, coming in on an already established command structure, usually corrupt, usually nepotistic, and having to take so much on himself that any absence, any hesitation, even any rest, gave the clueless froth-heads around him a chance to fuck things up even further. But then, he told himself, what General was ever totally happy with the command he took over?
Anyway, he hadn't left them enough: a few crazy plans that would almost certainly never come off; his attempts to use the weapons that were not obvious. Too much of it was still inside his own head. That one private place, where he knew even the Culture did not look, though through their own warped fast
idiousness, not through inability...
He forgot all about the woman. It was as if she didn't exist when he wasn't looking at her, and her voice and her attempt to cut herself free were the results of some absurd supernatural manifestation.
He opened the cottage door wide. You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as cyphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on for ever.
He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives.
And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
A chair, and a ship that was not a ship, a man with two shadows, and...
'What are you going to do with me?' The woman's voice was quivering. He looked round at her.
'I don't know; what do you think?'
She looked at him with her eyes widening, horrified. She seemed to be gathering her breath for another scream. He didn't understand it; he'd asked her a perfectly normal, pertinent question and she acted as if he'd said he was going to kill her.
'Please don't. Oh please don't, oh please please don't,' she sobbed again, dryly. Then her back seemed to break, and her imploring face bowed almost to her knees as she drooped again.
'Do what?' He was mystified.
She didn't appear to hear him; she just hung there, her slack body jerked by her sobs.
It was at moments like this he stopped understanding people; he just had no comprehension of what was going on in their minds; they were denied, unfathomable. He shook his head and started walking round the room. It was smelly and damp, and it carried this atmosphere as though this was no innovation. This had always been a hole. Probably some illiterate had lived here, custodian of the derelict machines from another, more fabulous age, long-shattered by the conspicuous love of war these people exhibited; a mean life in an ugly place.
When would they come? Would they find him? Would they think he was dead? Had they heard his message on the radio, after the landslide had cut them off from the rest of the command convoy?
Had he worked the damn thing right?
Maybe he hadn't. Maybe he would be left behind; they might think a search was useless. He hardly cared. It would be no additional pain to be captured; he'd drowned in that already, in his mind. He could almost welcome it, if he set his mind to it; he knew he could. All he needed was the strength to be bothered.
'If you're going to kill me, please will you do it quickly?'
He was getting annoyed at these constant interruptions.
'Well, I wasn't going to kill you, but keep on whining like this and I may change my mind.'
'I hate you.' It seemed to be all she could think of.
'And I hate you too.'
She started crying again, loudly.
He looked out into the rain again, and saw the Staberinde.
Defeat, defeat, the rain whispered; tanks foundering in the mud, the men giving up under the torrential rain, everything coming to bits.
And a stupid woman, and a runny nose... He could laugh at it, at the sharing of time and place between the grand and the petty, the magnificently vast and the shoddily absurd, like horrified nobility having to share a carriage with drunk and dirty peasants being sick over them and copulating under them; the finery and fleas.
Laugh, that was the only answer, the only reply that couldn't be bettered or itself laughed down; the lowest of the low of common denominators.
'Do you know who I am?' he said, turning suddenly. The thought had just occurred to him that maybe she didn't realise who he was, and he wouldn't have been in the least surprised to find out that she had tried to kill him just because he was in a big car, and not because she had recognised the Commander-in-Chief of the entire army. He wouldn't be at all surprised to find that; he almost expected it.
She looked up. 'What?'
'Do you know who I am? Do you know my name or rank?'
'No,' she spat. 'Should I?'
'No, no,' he laughed, and turned away.
He looked briefly out at the grey wall of rain, as though it was an old friend, then turned, went back to the bed and fell onto it again.
The government wouldn't like it either. Oh, the things he'd promised them, the riches, the lands, the gains of wealth, prestige and power. They'd have him shot if the Culture didn't pull him out; they'd see him dead for this defeat. It would have been their victory but it would be his defeat. Standard complaint.
He tried to tell himself that, mostly, he'd won. He knew he had, but it was only the moments of defeat, the instants of paralysis that made him really think, and try to join up the weave of his life into a whole. That was when his thoughts returned to the battleship Staberinde and what it represented; that was when he thought about the Chairmaker, and the reverberating guilt behind that banal description...
It was a better sort of defeat this time, it was more impersonal. He was the commander of the army, he was responsible to the government, and they could remove him; in the final reckoning, then, he was not responsible; they were. And there was nothing personal in the conflict. He'd never met the leaders of the enemy; they were strangers to him; only their military habits and their patterns of favoured troop movements and types of build-up were familiar. The cleanness of that schism seemed to soften the rain of blows. A little.
He envied people who could be born, be raised, mature with those around them, have friends, and then settle down in one place with one set of acquaintances, live ordinary and unspectacular, unrisky lives and grow old and be replaced, their children coming to see them... and die old and senile, content with all that had gone before.
He could never have believed he would ever feel like this, that he would so ache to be like that, to have despairs just so deep, joys just so great; to never strain the fabric of life or fate, but to be minor, unimportant, uninfluential.
It seemed utterly sweet, infinitely desirable, now and forever, because once in that situation, once you were there... would you ever feel the awful need to do as he had done, and try for those heights? He doubted it. He turned back to look at the woman in the chair.
But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird... but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.
If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.
'Ah! The camp leader and the camp follower. You haven't quite got it right thought, sir, you're supposed to tie her in the bed...'
He jumped; spun round, hand going to the holster at his waist.
Kirive Socroft Rogtam-Bar kicked the door shut and stood shaking rain from a large shiny cape in the doorway, smiling ironically and looking annoyingly fresh and handsome considering he'd had no sleep for days.
'Bar!' He almost ran to him, they clapped their arms about each other and laughed.
'The very same. General Zakalwe; hello there. I wondered if you would like to join me in a stolen vehicle. I have an Amph outside...'
'What!' He threw open the
door again and looked out onto the waters. There was a large and battered amphibious truck fifty metres away, near one of the towering machines.
'That's one of their trucks,' he laughed.
Rogtam-Bar nodded unhappily. 'Yes, I'm afraid so. They seem to want it back, too.'
'They do?' He laughed again.
'Yes. By the way, I'm afraid the government has fallen. Forced out of office.'
'What? Because of this?'
'That's the impression I got, I must say. I think they were so busy blaming you for losing their idiotic war that they didn't realise people connected them with it as well. Wide asleep as usual.' Rogtam-Bar smiled. 'Oh; and that manic idea of yours; the commando squad placing the sink-charges on the Maclin reservoir? It worked. Sent all that water into the dam and made the thing overflow; didn't actually break, according to the intelligence reports, but it... over-topped, is that the expression? Anyway; an awful lot of water went down the valley and swept away most of the Fifth Army's High Command... not to mention quite a bit of the Fifth itself, judging from the bods and tents seen floating past our lines over the last few hours... And there we all were, thinking you were crazy for dragging that hydrologist around with the general staff for the past week.' Rogtam-Bar clapped his gloved hands. 'Whatever. Things must be serious; there's talk of peace, I'm afraid.' He looked the General up and down. 'But you'll have to present a prettier picture than that, I suspect, if you're to start talking terms with our pals on the other side. You been mud wrestling, General?'
'Only with my conscience.'
'Really? Who won?'
'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.'
'I know the scenario well; usually crops up when one is trying to decide whether to open the next bottle, or not.' Bar nodded at the door. 'After you.' He produced a large umbrella from within his cloak, opened it and held it out. 'General; allow me!' Then he looked into the centre of the room. 'And what about your friend?'
'Oh.' He looked back at the woman, who had turned herself around and was staring, horrified, at them. 'Yes, my captive audience.' He shrugged. 'I've seen stranger mascots; let's take her, too.'