The next time he came round, everything had changed. He felt vulnerable and exposed. As his eyes opened and he tried to remember how to see, he slowly made out dusty streaks of light in a brown gloom, and saw earthenware pots near a mud or earth wall, and a small fireplace in the centre of the room, and spears leaning against a wall, and other blades. Straining his neck to bring his head up, he could see something else; the rough wooden frame he was tied to.
The wooden frame was in the shape of a square; two diagonals made an X inside the square. He was naked, his hands and feet lashed, one to each corner of the frame, which was propped against a wall at about forty-five degrees. A thick hide strap secured his waist to the centre of the X, and all over his body were markings of blood and paint.
He relaxed his neck. 'Oh shit,' he heard himself croak. He didn't like the look of this.
Where the hell was the Culture? They ought to be rescuing him; that was their job. He did their dirty work, they looked after him. This was the deal. So where the hell were they?
The pain came back, like an old friend by now, from almost everywhere. Straining his neck like that had hurt. Sore head (maybe concussion); broken nose, cracked or broken ribs, one broken arm, two broken legs. Maybe internal injuries; his insides felt pretty sore too; the worst, in fact. He felt bloated and full of decay.
Shit, he thought, I might actually be dying.
He shifted his head, grimacing, (pain poured in as if some protecting shell on his skin had been cracked by the movement) and looked at the ropes lashing him to the wooden frame. Traction was no way to treat a fracture, he told himself, and laughed very briefly, because with the first contraction of his stomach muscles his ribs pulsed suddenly, as though they were at red heat.
He could hear things; distant noises of people shouting now and again, and children yelling, and some sort of animal baying.
He closed his eyes, but heard nothing more distinct. He opened them again. The wall was earth, and he was probably underground, for there were thick sawn-off roots sticking into the space around him. The light was composed of two nearly vertical shafts, slightly angled beams of direct sunlight, so... near midday, near the equator. Underground, he thought, and felt sick. Nice and hard to find. He wondered if the plane had been on course when it crashed, and how far from the crash site he'd been carried. No point in worrying about it.
What else could he see? Crude benches. A coarse cushion, dented. It looked like somebody had sat there, facing him. He assumed it was the owner of the hand he had felt, if there had been one. There was no fire in a circle of stones set underneath one of the holes in the roof. Spears leant against the wall, and other weaponish things were strewn about the place. They were not battle-weapons; ceremonial, or maybe torture. He caught a whiff of something awful, just then, and knew it was gangrene, and knew it must be him.
He began to slip over the edge again, uncertain whether he was falling asleep or really going unconscious, but hoping for one or the other, willing either, because all this was more than he could handle just now. Then the girl came in. She had a jug in her hand, and set it down before looking at him. He tried to speak, but couldn't. Maybe he hadn't really spoken earlier when he'd thought he said, 'Shit.' He looked at the girl and attempted a smile.
She went out again.
He felt somehow heartened, seeing the girl. A man would have been bad news, he thought. A girl meant things might not be so bad after all. Maybe.
The girl came back, with a bowl of water. She washed him, rubbing away the the blood and the paint. There was some pain. Predictably nothing happened when she washed his genitals; he'd have liked to show signs of life, just for form's sake.
He tried to speak, but failed. The girl let him sip some water from a shallow bowl, and he croaked at her, but nothing distinguishable. She left again.
The next time she came back with some men. They wore many strange clothes, like feathers and skins and bones and wooden tiles of armour laced with gut. They were painted too, and they brought pots and small sticks with them, and used them to paint him again.
They finished and stood back. He wanted to tell them he didn't suit red, but nothing came out. He felt himself falling away, out into the darkness.
When he came to again, he was moving.
The entire frame he was strapped to had be lifted and carted out of the gloom. He faced the sky. Blinding light filled his eyes, dust filled his nose and mouth, and shouts and screams filled his mind. He felt himself shiver like a fever victim, tearing pain from each shattered limb. He tried to shout, and to raise his head to see, but all there was was noise and dust. His insides felt worse; skin taut over his belly.
Then he was upright again, and the village was beneath him. It was small, there were some tents, some wicker and clay dwellings and some holes into the ground. Semi-arid; an indeterminate scrub - stamped down inside the perimeter of the village - vanished quickly beyond it, into a yellow-glowing mist. The sun was just visible, low down. He couldn't work out if it was dawn or dusk.
What he really saw were the people. They were all in front of him; he was up on a mound, the frame tied to two large stakes, and the people were beneath him, all on their knees, heads bowed. There were tiny children, their heads forced down by nearby adults, there were old people held up from collapsing completely by those around them, and every age in between.
Then in front of him walked three people, the girl and two of the men. The men, one on either side of the girl, lowered their heads, knelt down quickly and arose again, and made a sign. The girl did not move, and her gaze was fixed on a point between his eyes. She was dressed in a bright red gown now; he could not remember what she had worn before.
One of the men held a large earthenware pot. The other had a long, curved, broad-bladed sword.
'Hey,' he croaked. He couldn't manage anything else. The pain was getting very bad now; being upright didn't do his broken limbs any good at all.
The chanting people seemed to swing about his head; the sunlight dipped and veered, and the three people in front of him became many, multiplying and wavering, unsteady in the waste of mist and dust before him.
Where the hell was Culture?
There was a terrible roaring noise in his head, and the diffuse glow in the midst which was the sun was starting to pulse. The sword glittered to one side; the earthenware pot gleamed on the other. The girl stood directly in front of him, and put her hand into his hair, grasping it.
The roaring noise was filling his ears, and he could not tell if he was shouting and screaming or not. The man to his right raised the sword.
The girl pulled his hair, yanking his head out; he screamed, above the roaring noise, as his broken bones grated. He stared at the dust at the hem of the girl's robe.
'You bastards!' he thought, not sure, even then, exactly who he meant.
He managed to scream one syllable. 'El -!'
Then the blade slammed into his neck.
The name died. Everything had ended but it still went on.
There was no pain. The roaring noise was actually quieter. He was looking down at the village and the crouching people. The view swung; he could still feel the pull of the roots of his hair straining at the skin on his scalp. He was swung round.
The slack, headless body dribbled blood down its chest.
That was me! he thought. Me!
He was swung round again; the man with the sword was wiping blood from the blade with a rag. The man with the earthenware pot was trying not to look into his staring eyes, and holding the pot out towards him, the lid in his other hand. So that's what it's for, he thought, feeling somehow stunned into an eerie calmness. Then the roaring noise seemed to gather and start to fade at once. The view was going red. He wondered how much longer this could go on. How long did a brain survive without oxygen?
Now I really am two, he thought, remembering, eyes closing.
And he thought of his heart, stopped now, and only then realised, and wanted to cry but could
not, for he had finally lost her. Another name formed in his kind. Dar...
The roar split the skies. He felt the girl's grip loosen. The expression on the face of the youth holding the pot was almost comically fearful. People looked up from the crowd; the roar became a scream, a blast of air swept dust into the air and made the girl holding him stagger; a dark shape swung quickly through the air above the village.
A little late... he heard himself think, slipping away.
There was more noise for a second or two - screams, maybe - and something whacked into his head, and he was rolling away, dust in his mouth and eyes... but he was starting to lose interest in all that stuff, and was happy to let the darkness wash over him. Maybe he was picked up again, later.
But that seemed to happen to somebody else.
When the terrible noise came, and the great, carved black rock landed in the middle of the village - just after the sky's offering had been separated from his body and so joined to the air - everybody ran into the thinning mist, to get away from the screaming light. They gathered, whimpering, at the water hole.
After only fifty heartbeats, the dark shape appeared above the village again, rising hazily into the thinner mists near the sky. It did not roar this time, but moved quickly off with a noise like the wind, and shrank to nothing.
The shaman sent his apprentice back to see how things stood; the quaking youth disappeared into the mist. He returned safely, and the shaman led the still terrified people back to the village.
The body of the sky-offering still hung limply on the wooden frame at the summit of the mound. His head had disappeared.
After much chanting and grinding entrails, spotting shapes in the mists and three trances, the priest and his apprentice decided it was a good omen, and yet a warning at the same time. They sacrificed a meat-animal belonging to the family of the girl who had dropped the sky-offering's head, and put the beast's head in the earthenware pot instead.
Five
'Dizzy! How the devil are you?' He took her hand and helped her up onto the wooden pier from the roof of the just-surfaced module. He put his arms round her. 'Good to see you again!' he laughed. Sma patted his waist, finding herself unwilling to hug him back. He didn't seem to notice.
He let her go, looked down to see the drone rising up from the module. 'And Skaffen-Amtiskaw! They still letting you out without a guard?'
'Hello, Zakalwe,' the drone said.
He put his arm round Sma's waist. 'Come on up to the shack; we'll have lunch.'
'All right,' she said.
They walked along the small wooden pier to a stone path laid across the sand, and on into the shade under the trees. The trees were blue or purple; huge puff heads of dark colour standing out against the pale blue sky, and tugged at by a warm, intermittent breeze. They sweated delicate perfumes from the tops of their silver-white trunks. The drone lifted to above tree height a couple of times, when other people passed on the path.
The man and woman walked through the sunlit avenues between the trees until they came to where a wide pool of water trembled reflections of twenty or so white huts; a small, sleek seaplane floated at a wooden jetty. They entered the cluster of buildings and climbed some steps to a balcony that looked over the pool and the narrow channel that led from it to the lagoon on the far side of the island.
The sun was sifted through the tree-heads; shadows moved to and fro along the veranda and over the small table and the two hammocks.
He motioned Sma to sit on the first hammock; a female servant appeared and he ordered lunch for two. When the servant had gone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated down and sat on the parapet of the veranda's wall, overlooking the pool. Sma levered herself into the hammock carefully.
'It true you own this island, Zakalwe?'
'Um...' he looked round, apparently uncertain, then nodded his head. 'Oh yes; so I do.' He kicked off his sandals and slumped into the other hammock, letting it sway. He picked up a bottle from the floor, and with each sway of the hammock poured a little more from the bottle into two glasses on the small table. He increased the swing when he had finished to be able to hand her drink to her.
'Thank you.'
He sipped at his drink and closed his eyes. She watched the glass on his chest where his hands held it, and watched the liquid swill this way, that way, lethargic and eye-brown. She moved her gaze to his face and saw he had not changed; hair a bit darker than she remembered; swept away from his broad, tanned forehead and tied in a pony-tail behind. Fit-looking as ever. No older-looking, of course, because they'd stabilised his age as part of his payment for the last job.
His eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded, and he looked back at her, smiling slowly. The eyes look older, she thought. But she could have been wrong.
'So,' she said, 'we playing games here, Zakalwe?'
'What do you mean, Dizzy?'
'I've been sent to get you back again. They want you to do another job. You must have guessed that, so tell me now whether I'm wasting my time here or not. I'm in no mood to try and argue you...'
'Dizzy!' he exclaimed, sounding hurt, pivoting his legs off the hammock and onto the floor, then smiling persuasively, 'Don't be like that; of course you're not wasting your time. I've already packed.'
He beamed at her like a happy child, his tanned face open and smiling. She looked at him with relief and disbelief.
'So what was all the run-around for?'
'What run-around?' he said innocently, sitting back in the hammock again. 'I had to come here to say goodbye to a close friend, that was all. But I'm ready to go. What's the scam?'
Sma stared, open-mouthed. Then she turned to the drone. 'Do we just go now?'
'No point,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. 'The course the GSV's on, you can have two hours here, then go back to the Xenophobe; it can match with the What in about thirty hours.' It swivelled to look at the man. 'But we need a definite word. There's a teratonne of GSV with twenty-eight million people on board charging in this direction; if it's to wait here it has to slow down first, so it needs to know for sure. You really are coming? This afternoon?'
'Drone, I just told you. I'll do it.' He leaned towards Sma. 'What is the job again?'
'Voerenhutz,' she told him. 'Tsoldrin Beychae.'
He beamed, teeth gleaming. 'Old Tsoldrin still above ground? Well, it'll be good to see him again.'
'You have to talk him back into his working clothes again.'
He waved one hand airily. 'Easy,' he said, drinking.
Sma watched him drink. She shook her head.
'Don't you want to know why, Cheradenine?' she asked.
He started to make a gesture with one hand that meant the same as a shrug, then thought better of it. 'Umm; sure. Why, Diziet?' he sighed.
'Voerenhutz is coalescing into two groups; the people gaining the upper hand at the moment want to pursue aggressive terraforming policies...'
'That's sort of...' he burped, 're-decorating a planet, right?'
Sma closed her eyes briefly. 'Yes. Sort of. Whatever you choose to call it, it's ecologically insensitive, to put it mildly. These people - they call themselves the Humanists - also want a sliding scale of sentient rights which will have the effect of letting them take over whatever even intelligently inhabited worlds they're militarily able to. There are a dozen brush-fire wars going on right now. Any one of them could spark the big one, and to an extent the Humanists encourage these wars because they appear to prove their case that the Cluster is too crowded and needs to find new planetary habitats.'
'They also,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, 'refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists.'
'I see,' he nodded, and looked very serious. 'And you want old Beychae to get into harness with these Humanist guys, right?'
'Cheradenine!' Sma scolded, as Skaffen-Amtiskaw's fields went frosty.
He looked hurt. 'But they're called the Humanists!'<
br />
'That's just their name, Zakalwe.'
'Names are important,' he said, apparently serious.
'It's still just what they call themselves; it doesn't make them the good guys.'
'Okay.' He grinned at Sma. 'Sorry.' He tried to look more business-like. 'You want him pulling in the other direction, like last time.'
'Yes,' Sma said.
'Fine. Sounds almost easy. No soldiering?'
'No soldiering.'
'I'll do it.' He nodded.
'Do I hear the sound of a barrel-bottom being scraped?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered.
'Just send the signal.' Sma told it.
'Okay,' said the drone. 'Signal sent.' It made a good impression of glowering at the man with its fields. 'But you'd better not change your mind.'
'Only the thought of having to spend any time in your company, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, could possibly disinduce me from accompanying the delightful Ms Sma here to Voerenhutz.' He glanced concernedly at the woman. 'You are coming, I hope.'
Sma nodded. She sipped at her drink, while the servant laid some small dishes on the table between the hammocks.
'Just like that, Zakalwe?' she said, once the servant had gone again.
'Just like what, Diziet?' He smiled over his glass.
'You're leaving. After, what... five years? Building up your empire, sorting out your scheme to make the world a safer place, using our technology, trying to use our methods... you're prepared just to walk away from it all, for however long it takes? Dammit, even before you knew it was Voerenhutz you'd said yes; could have been on the other side of the galaxy, for all you knew; could have been the Clouds. You might have been saying yes to a four-year trip.'
He shrugged. 'I like long voyages.'
Sma looked into the man's face for a while. He looked unworried, full of life. Pep and vim were the words that came to mind. She felt vaguely disgusted.
He shrugged, eating some fruit from one of the little dishes, 'Besides, I have a trust arrangement set up. It'll all be looked after until I come back.'
Use of Weapons Page 11
