Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  Choubris tethered his rowel by the single low door to the ruin and left it noisily cropping moss from the wall. The mersicor trailing behind the rowel, brought in case he found his master mountless, nibbled daintily at some flowers. Holse preferred rowels to mersicors – they were less skittish and harder working. He might have taken a flying beast, he supposed, but he trusted those even less. Royal servants above a certain rank were expected to be able to fly, and he had suffered the instruction – and the instructors, who had not spared him their opinion that such honour was wasted upon one so coarse – but had not enjoyed the learning.

  A proper searching, like so many things, was best done on foot, from the ground. Hurling oneself grandly across the sky was all very well and certainly gave the impression of lordly oversight and superiority, but what it really did was give you the opportunity to miss all details at once, rather than one at a time, which was the ration for decent folk. Plus, as a rule – a most fixed and strict rule, it had long struck Choubris – it was the people who had to make things work on the ground who ended up paying for such sweepingly overgeneralised judgementing. This principle seemed to apply to high-ups of all distinctions, whether their height was literal or metaphorical.

  “Sir?” he called into the hollow round of stones. His voice echoed. The masonry was ill-dressed, worse within than without. The lower tier of piercings – much too wide for any real fortification – gave out on to pleasant views of hill and forest. The Xiliskine Tower rose pale and vast in the distance, disappearing beyond the clouds into the heavens. Plumes of smoke and wisps of steam were scattered across the landscape like missed stalks after a harvest, all leaning away from the backing wind.

  He limped further into the folly. His left leg still hurt from where that seed-brained mersicor had fallen on him the day before. He was getting too old for such shenanigans; he was in his middle years now and starting to fill out nicely and become distinguished (or develop a paunch and become grey and grizzled, by his wife’s less forgiving measure). His whole side, every rib, pained him when he took a deep breath, or tried to laugh. Not that there’d been much laughing.

  Choubris had seen many signs of battle while he’d been riding round the area: whole wastelands of torn-up fields and shattered forests, the land raddled with a pox of craters; entire woods and brush forests still on fire, smoke walling the sky, other fires only just exhausted or extinguished, leaving vast black tracts of razed ground, seeping wispy fumes; the wrecks of smashed war machines lying crippled like enormous broken insects with tracks unrolled behind them, a few still leaking steam; some great dead battle beasts, spread crumpled and forlorn – uoxantch, chunsels and ossesyi, plus a couple of types he didn’t recognise.

  He’d seen bands of wounded troops, walking in lines or borne on carts and wagons, groups of soldiers dashing about importantly on mersicors, a few airborne men on caude, slowly criss-crossing, dipping and wheeling when searching for any still surviving enemy or stray fallen, or making straight and fast if bearing messages. He’d passed engineers rigging or repairing telegraph lines, and thrice he’d pulled off roads and tracks to let hissing, spitting, smoke-belching steam vehicles past. He’d patted and comforted the old rowel, even though she’d seemed unbothered.

  He’d come, too, upon numerous details digging charnel pits for the enemy dead, of which there seemed a great many. The Deldeyn, Holse thought, looked much like normal folk. Perhaps a little darker, though that might have been the effect of death itself.

  He’d stopped and talked to anybody willing to spare the time, pretty much regardless of rank, partly to enquire about missing nobles on white chargers, mostly because, as he would freely admit, he enjoyed flapping his jaw. He took a little crile root with the captain of one company, shared a pipe of unge with a sergeant from another and was grateful to a quartermaster-lieutenant for a bottle of strong wine. Most of the soldiers were more than happy to talk about their part in the battle, though not all. The mass-burial men, in particular, tended to the taciturn, even surly. He heard a few interesting things, as any fellow open to easy discourse was bound to.

  “Prince?” he yelled, louder, voice echoing off the rough stones inside the folly. “Sir? Are you here?” He frowned and shook his head beneath the open crown of the empty tower. “Ferbin?” he shouted.

  He ought not to call his master by his name like that, but then it looked like the prince wasn’t here after all, and there was a thrill to be had from such address. Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being inferior, Choubris held. Besides, he’d been told often enough that he could use the familiar term, though such licence was only ever offered when Ferbin was very drunk. The offer was never renewed in sobriety so Choubris had thought the better of acting on the privilege.

  He wasn’t here. Maybe he wasn’t anywhere, alive. Maybe the gaudy dope had accorded himself war hero status by mistake, riding neck-clutch like a terrified child wherever his idiot mount had taken him, to be shot by one side or other or fall off a cliff. Knowing Ferbin, he’d probably thought to raise his head again just as he went charging under an overhanging bough.

  Choubris sighed. That was it, then. There was nowhere obvious left to look. He could wander the great battlefield pretending to search for his lost master, skipping through triage pens, inhabiting field hospitals and haunting morgue piles all he liked, but, unless the WorldGod took a most unlikely personal interest in his quest, he’d never find the blighter. At this rate he’d be forced to return to his wife and children, in the littler though hardly less savage battlefield that was their apartment in the palace barracks.

  And now who’d have him? He’d lost a prince (if you wanted to take an uncharitable view of the matter, and he knew plenty that would); what were the chances he’d get to serve any other quality again, with that recorded against him? The King was dead and tyl Loesp was in charge, at least until the boy prince came of age. Choubris had a feeling in his gut that a lot of things – things that had seemed settled and comfortable and pleasantly just-so for honest, respectable, hard-working people – would change from here onwards. And the chances of a proven prince-misplacer bettering himself under any regime were unlikely to be good. He shook his head, sighed to himself. “What a sorry mess,” he muttered. He turned to go.

  “Choubris? Is it you?”

  He turned back. “Hello?” he said, unable to see where the voice had come from. A sudden feeling inside his belly informed him, somewhat to his surprise, that he must have a degree of genuine human fondness for Prince Ferbin after all. Or perhaps he was just glad not, in fact, to be a prince-loser.

  There was movement up on one wall, at the base of one of the impractically wide windows on the second tier; a man, crawling out of a fissure in the rough stonework that was mostly hidden by a rustling tangle of wallcreep. Choubris hadn’t even noticed the hidey-hole. Ferbin completed his emergence, crawled to the edge of the window ledge, rubbed his eyes and looked down at his servant.

  “Choubris!” he said, in a sort of loud whisper. He glanced around, as though afraid. “It is you! Thank God!”

  “I already have, sir. And you might thank me, for such diligence in the looking.”

  “Is there anybody with you?” the prince hissed.

  “Only the aforesaid deity, sir, if the more insistent priests are to be believed.”

  Ferbin looked most unkempt, and unslept, too. He glanced about the place again. “Nobody else?”

  “An old though dependable rowel, sir. And for yourself—”

  “Choubris! I am in the most terrible danger!”

  Choubris scratched behind one ear. “Ah. With respect, sir, you might not be aware; we did win the battle.”

  “I know that, Choubris! I’m not an idiot!”

  Choubris frowned, but remained silent.

  “You’re absolutely sure there’s nobody else about?”

  Choubris looked back to the small door, then up at the sky. “Well, there are lots of people
about, sir; half the Greater Army is tidying up or licking its wounds after our famous victory.” It was beginning to dawn on Choubris that he might have the ticklish job of telling the prince that his father was dead. This ought to mean, of course, that Ferbin was effectively king, but Choubris knew people could be funny regarding that whole good news/bad news business. “I am alone, sir,” he told Ferbin. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Perhaps you’d best get down from there.”

  “Yes! I can’t stay here for ever.” The drop was easily jumpable, but Ferbin made to turn round and lower himself half way to the earthen floor of the folly. Choubris sighed and stood by the wall to help. “Choubris, have you anything to drink or eat?” Ferbin asked. “I’m parched and famished!”

  “Wine, water, bread and saltmeat, sir,” Choubris said, forming a stirrup with his hands, back against the wall. “My saddle bags are like a travelling victualler’s.”

  Ferbin lowered one boot to his servant’s hands, narrowly avoiding scarring him with his spur. “Wine? What sort?”

  “Fortified, sir. Better so than this place.” Choubris took the prince’s weight in his cupped hands and grunted in pain as he lowered him.

  “Are you all right?” Ferbin asked when he was on the ground. He looked frightened, grey with worry or shock or something or other. His clothes were filthy and his long fair hair all tangled and matted. Also, he smelled of smoke. Choubris had never seen him look so distressed. He was crouched, too; Choubris was used to looking up to his prince, but they were of a level now.

  “No, sir, I’m not all right. I had a beast fall on me in the confusion yesterday.”

  “Of course! Yes, I saw. Quick, let’s crouch down here.” Ferbin pulled Choubris to one side, by a tall bush. “No, wait; fetch me something to eat and drink. If you see anybody, don’t tell them I’m here!”

  “Sir,” Choubris said, deciding to humour the fellow for now. Probably all he needed was something in his belly.

  As the traitors and regicides set to burn the old building, having taken themselves and the bodies of the murdered outside, Ferbin had started looking for a way out.

  He felt dazed, stunned, half dead himself. His vision seemed to have shrunk, or his eyes would not move properly in their orbits, because he seemed only able to see straight ahead. His ears appeared to think he was near a great waterfall or in a high tower in a storm, for he could hear a terrible roaring noise all about him that he knew was not really there, as if the WorldGod, even the World itself, was shrieking in horror at the foulness of what had been done in that awful ruin.

  He’d waited for people loyal to the King to come rushing in when they heard the shots that killed the priest and the young medic, but nobody did. Others had appeared, but they seemed calm and unconcerned and merely helped move the bodies and bring some kindling and lampstone to start the fire. They were all traitors here, he thought; to reveal himself now would be to die like the others.

  He’d crept away, sick and weak with the shock of it, barely able to stand. He climbed to the next highest floor by steps set against the building’s rear wall, as they lit the fires below. Smoke came up quickly, initially grey then turning black, filling the already shadowy spaces of the antique factory with still greater darkness and making him choke. At first most of the fumes made for the great hole in the gable wall, but then they thickened around him, stinging in his nose and throat. Had the sound of crackling and roaring below not been so loud, he’d have feared being heard outside as he hacked and coughed. He looked for windows on the side of the building where he’d crawled and climbed, but could see nothing.

  He found more steps, leading him still further up, into what must be the building’s loft and felt along the wall with his fingers, coughing now with every breath, until he found what appeared to be a window. He pulled at a shutter, pushed at some already broken glass, and it gave. Smoke surged out around him. He stuck his head forward, gulping in cool clear air.

  But he was too high up! Even if there was nobody on this side to see him, he’d never survive the fall uninjured. He looked out, dipping his head beneath the current of smoke and heat exiting around and above him. He expected to see a track or yard, four storeys below. Instead he stung himself on a rain-sticky brattle bush. He felt down and his hand closed on damp earth. In the vague red afterlight of a long-set sun, he saw that he was, incredibly, somehow back to ground level. The building was situated on a river bank so steep that one side was fully four floors high while the other, pressed against the valley’s steep side, was barely one.

  He pulled himself out, still coughing, and crawled away across rain-wet, glutinously muddy ground to wait beneath some nearby bushes while the abandoned building burned.

  “All due respect and such, sir, but have you gone mad?”

  “Choubris, I swear on the WorldGod, on my dead father’s body, it’s just as I’ve said.”

  Choubris Holse had noticed earlier, while his master was swallowing wine from the upended bottle and tearing off lumps of bread with his teeth – it seemed that take away the table and you took away the accompanying manners – that Prince Ferbin was unarmed while he, of course, still had his trusty short-knife on his belt, not to mention an army pistol issued a couple of days ago he seemed to have forgotten to return and which was tucked into his waistband by the small of his back. Not to mention – and he rarely did – a small but exceedingly sharp emergency knife reassuringly scabbarded down one boot. These facts had, he judged, just gone from being of barely passing interest to moderately important, given that it now appeared he was dealing with a bizarrely deluded madman.

  Ferbin put the bottle down and let the end of the bread drop to his lap, setting his head back against the wall of the ruin, as though looking up through the foliage of the bush he’d insisted they hide beneath before he’d been prepared to break his fast. “Even you don’t believe me!” he cried, despairing. He put his head in his hands and wept.

  Choubris was taken aback. He’d never seen the prince weep like this, not sober (everybody knew that to drink was to increase the hydrographical pressure within a body, thus expressing the relevant fluids from all available bodily orifices, so that didn’t count).

  He ought to try to comfort him somehow. Perhaps he’d misunderstood. He’d try to get the matter clear.

  “Sir, are you really saying that,” he began, then he too looked round as though afraid of being overheard, “that tyl Loesp, your father’s best friend; the glove to his hand, the very edge of his sword and all that, murdered your father?” He spoke the word in a whisper.

  Ferbin looked at him with a face of such desperate fury and despair that Choubris felt himself flinch at the sight of it. “Plunged his filthy fist into my father’s chest and wrung the living force out of his beating heart!” Ferbin said, his voice sounding like it never had; all gasped and rough and wild. He sucked in a terrible, faltering breath, as though each atom of air hesitated in his mouth before being hauled howling to his lungs. “I saw it clear as I see you now, Choubris.” He shook his head, his eyes filling with tears and his lips curling back. “And if trying to think it away, if trying to persuade myself I was in any way mistaken, or drugged, or hallucinating, or dreaming could make it so, then by God I’d jump at that, I’d welcome that with both arms, both legs and a kiss. A million times over I’d rather be safely mad having imagined what I saw than know my only derangement is the grief of having seen what did take place!” That last phrase he roared into his servant’s face, one hand grasping the collar at Choubris’ throat.

  Choubris put one hand behind his back, partly to steady himself so that he did not fall over backwards and partly to bring the army pistol within quick reach. Then his master’s face went slack and he seemed to crumple in on himself. He put one hand on each of Choubris’ shoulders and let his head fall to his servant’s chest, wailing, “Oh, Choubris! If you don’t believe me, who will?”

  Choubris felt the heat of the other man’s face upon his breast, and a dampness sp
read across his shirt. He lifted his hand to pat the prince’s head, but that seemed too much like the action one would take with a woman or a child, and he let his hand fall back again. He felt shaken. Even at his most raucously or self-pityingly drunken, the prince had never seemed so moved, so affected, so distressed, by anything; not the death of his elder brother, not losing a beloved mount to a wager, not realising his father thought him a dolt and a wastrel – nothing.

  “Sir,” Choubris said, taking the prince by his shoulders and setting him upright again. “This is too much for me to absorb at the single sitting. I too would rather think my own dear master mad than entertain the possibility that what he says is true, for if it’s so then – by God – we are all halfway to madness and the heavens themselves might fall upon us now and cause no increase in disaster or disbelief.” Ferbin was biting both his quivering lips together, like a child trying not to cry. Choubris reached out and patted one of his hands. “Let me tell you what I’ve heard, various but consistent from a mixture of guileless strapping military types, and seen on an army news sheet, too; what is the official and authorised version, as you might say. Perhaps hearing this will make a compromise in your poor head with the fever possessing you.”

  Ferbin laughed bitterly, putting his head back again and sobbing even while he seemed to smile. He raised the wine bottle to his lips, then let it fall aside, dropping it to the bare ground. “Pass me the water; I’ll pray some dead cur upstream polluted it, so I may poison myself by mouth as you pour it in at my ear. A job worth doing!”

  Choubris cleared his throat to hide his astonishment. This was unprecedented; Ferbin putting aside a bottle unfinished. He was mad with something all right. “Well, sir. They say the King died of his wound – a small-cannon shot to his right side.”