Use of Weapons (24 page)

She'd
thumped back to the concrete; he'd turned round to see the car scraping off the
slipway, torn away by the surging brown tide. Still on its side, it had sunk
almost immediately.

He'd
turned back, and felt tempted to kick the unconscious woman. He'd kicked the
knife instead, sending it whirling away into the river, following the drowned
staff car.

'You
won't win,' the woman said, spitting. 'You can't win, against us.' She shook
the little chair, angrily.

'What?'
he said, shaken from his reverie.

'We'll
win,' she said, giving a furious shake that rattled the chair's legs on the
stone floor.

Why
did I tie the silly fool to a chair, of all things? he thought. 'You could well
be right,' he told her, tiredly. 'Things are looking... damp at the moment.
Make you feel any better?'

'You're
going to die,' the woman said, staring.

'Nothing
more certain than that,' he agreed, gazing at the leaking roof above the rag
bed.

'We
are invincible. We will never give up.'

'Well,
you've proved fairly vincible before.' He sighed, remembering the history of
this place.

'We
were betrayed!' the woman shouted. 'Our armies never were defeated; we were -'

'Stabbed
in the back; I know.'

'Yes!
But our spirit will never die. We -'

'Aw,
shut up!' He said, swinging his legs off the narrow bed and facing the woman.
'I've heard that shit before. "We was robbed." "The folks back
home let us down." "The media were against us." Shit...' He ran
a hand through his wet hair. 'Only the very young or the very stupid think wars
are waged just by the military. As soon as news travels faster than a despatch
rider or a bird's leg the whole... nation... whatever... is fighting. That's your
spirit; your will. Not the grunt on the ground. If you lose, you lose. Don't
whine about it. You'd have lost this time too if it hadn't been for this
fucking rain.' He held up a hand as the woman drew breath. 'And no, I don't
believe God is on your side.'

'Heretic!'

'Thank
you.'

'I
hope your children die! Slowly!'

'Hmm,'
he said, 'I'm not sure I qualify, but if I do it'd be a long spit.' He
collapsed back on the bed, then looked aghast, and levered himself back up
again. 'Shit; they really must get to you people young; that's a terrible thing
for anybody to say, let alone a woman.'

'Our
women are more manly than your
men
,'
the woman sneered.

'And
still you breed. Choice must be limited, I suppose.'

'May
your children suffer and die horribly!' the woman shrieked.

'Well,
if that's really the way you feel,' he sighed, lying back again, 'then there's
nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so
obviously are.'

'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
t
eport 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 fastidiousness, 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?'