Use of Weapons (29 page)

Father
looked up then, and saw the children, but looked at Elethiomel, not at
Cheradenine. They were all sent to bed soon after.

When
they returned to the house in the country a few days later, Elethiomel's mother
was crying all the time, and did not come down for meals.

'Your
father was a murderer. They put him to death because he killed lots of people.'
Cheradenine sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the stone bulwark. It
was a beautiful day in the garden and the trees sighed in the wind. The sisters
were laughing and giggling in the background, collecting flowers from the beds
in the centre of the stone boat. The stone ship sat in the west lake, joined to
the garden by a short stone causeway. They had played pirates for a while, and
then started investigating the flower beds on the upper of the boat's two
decks. Cheradenine had a collection of pebbles by his side, and was throwing
them, one at a time, down into the calm water, producing ripples that looked
like an archery target as he tried always to hit the same place.

'He
didn't do any of those things,' Elethiomel said, kicking the stone bulwark,
looking down. 'He was a good man.'

'If
he was good, why did the King have him killed?'

'I
don't know. People must have told tales about him. Told lies.'

'But
the King's clever,' Cheradenine said triumphantly, throwing another pebble into
the spreading circles of waves. 'Cleverer than anybody. That's why he's king.
He'd
know
if they were telling lies.'

'I
don't care,' Elethiomel insisted. 'My father wasn't a bad man.'

'He
was, and your mother must have been
extremely
naughty too, or they wouldn't have made her stay in her room all this time.'

'She
hasn't been bad!' Elethiomel looked up at the other boy, and felt something
build up inside his head, behind his nose and eyes. 'She's ill. She can't leave
her room!'

'That's
what she says,' Cheradenine said.

'Look!
Millions
of flowers! Look; we're
going to make perfume! Do you want to help?' The two sisters ran up behind
them, arms full of flowers. 'Elly...' Darckense tried to take Elethiomel's arm.

He
pushed her away.

'Oh,
Elly... Sheri, please don't,' Livueta said.

'She
hasn't been bad!' he shouted at the other boy's back.

'Yes
she ha-as,' Cheradenine said, in a sing-song voice, and flicked another pebble
into the lake.

'She
hasn't
!' Elethiomel screamed, and ran
forward, pushing the other boy hard in the back.

Cheradenine
yelled and fell off the carved bulwark; his head struck the stonework as he
fell. The two girls screamed.

Elethiomel
leant over the parapet and saw Cheradenine splash into the centre of his
many-layered circle of waves. He disappeared, came back up again, and floated
face down.

Darckense
screamed.

'Oh,
Elly, no!' Livueta dropped all her flowers and ran towards the steps. Darckense
kept on screaming and squatted down on her haunches, back against the stone
bulwark, crushing her flowers to her chest. 'Darkle! Run to the house!' Livueta
cried from the staircase.

Elethiomel
watched the figure in the water move weakly, producing bubbles, as Livueta's
steps sounded slapping on the deck underneath.

A
few seconds before the girl jumped into the shallow water to haul her brother
out, and while Darckense screamed on, Elethiomel swept the remaining pebbles
off the parapet, sending them pattering and plopping into the water around the
boy.

No,
that wasn't it. It had to be something worse than that, didn't it? He was sure
he remembered something about a chair (he remembered something about a boat
too, but that didn't seem to be quite it either). He tried to think of all the
nastiest things that could happen in a chair, dismissed them one by one as they
hadn't happened to him or to anybody he knew - at least as far as he could
remember - and finally concluded that his fixation on the idea of a chair was a
random thing; it just so happened to be a chair and that was all there was to
it.

Then
there were the names; names that he'd used; pretend names that didn't really
belong to him. Imagine calling himself after a
ship
! What a silly person, what a naughty boy; that was what he was
trying to
forget.
He didn't know, he
didn't understand how he could have been so stupid; now it all seemed so
clear, so obvious. He wanted to forget about the ship; he wanted to bury the
thing, so he shouldn't go calling himself after it.

Now
he realised,
now
he understood, now
when it was too late to do anything about it.

Ah,
he made himself want to be sick.

A
chair, a ship, a... something else; he forgot.

The
boys learned metalwork, the girls pottery.

'But
we're not peasants, or... or...'

'Artisans,'
Elethiomel provided.

'You
will not argue, and you shall learn something of what it is to work with
materials,' Cheradenine's father told the two boys.

'But
it's common!'

'So
is learning how to write, and to work with numbers. Proficiency in those skills
will not make you clerks any more than working with iron will make you
blacksmiths.'

'But...'

'You
will do as you are told. If it is more in accord with the martial ambitions you
both lay claim to, you may attempt to construct blades and armour in the course
of your lessons.'

The
boys looked at each other.

'You
might also care to tell your language tutor that I instructed you to ask him
whether it is acceptable for young men of breeding to begin almost every
sentence with the unfortunate word, "But". That is all.'

'Thank
you, sir.'

'Thank
you, sir.'

Outside,
they agreed that metalwork might not be so bad after all. 'But we've got to
tell Big-nose about saying "But". We'll get lines!'

'No
we won't. Your old man said that we
might
care to tell Big-nose; that's not the same as actually
telling
us to tell him.'

'Ha.
Yeah.'

Livueta
wanted to take up metalwork too, but her father would not allow her to; it was
not seemly. She persevered. He would not relent. She sulked. They compromised,
on carpentry.

The
boys made knives and swords, Darckense pots, and Livueta the furniture for a
summerhouse, deep in the estate. It was in that summerhouse where Cheradenine
discovered...

No
no no, he didn't want to think about that, thank you. He knew what was coming.

Dammit,
he'd rather think about the other bad time, the day with the gun they'd taken
from the armoury...

Na;
he didn't want to think at all. He tried to stop thinking about it all by
bashing his head up and down, staring at the mad blue sky and hitting his head
up-down, up-down off the pale scaly rocks beneath his head where the guano
pellets had been swept away, but it hurt too much and the rocks just gave and
he didn't have the strength seriously to threaten a determined speckfly
anyway, so he stopped.

Where
was he?

Ah
yes, the crater, the drowned volcano... we're in a crater; an old crater in an
old volcano, long dead and filled with water. And in the middle of the crater
there was a little island and he was
on
the little island, and he was looking
off
the
little island at the crater walls and he was a
man
wasn't he children, and he was a nice man and he was
dying on
the little island and...

'Scream?'
he said.

Doubtfully,
the sky looked down.

It
was blue.

It
had been Elethiomel's idea to take the gun. The armoury was unlocked but
guarded at the moment; the adults seemed busy and worried all the time, and
there was talk of sending the children away. The summer had passed and still
they hadn't gone to the city. They were getting bored.

'We
could run away.'

They
were scuffing through the fallen leaves on a path through the estate.
Elethiomel talked quietly. They couldn't even walk out here now without guards.
The men kept thirty paces ahead and twenty behind. How could you play properly
with all these guards around? Back nearer the house they were allowed out
without guards, but that was even more boring.

'Don't
be silly,' Livueta said.

'It's
not silly,' Darckense said. 'We could go to the city. It would be something to
do.'

'Yes.'
Cheradenine said. 'You're right. It would be.'

'Why
do you want to go to the city?' Livueta said. 'It might be... dangerous there.'

'Well
it's boring here,' Darckense said.

'Yeah,
it is,' Cheradenine agreed.

'We
could take a boat and sail away,' Cheradenine said.

'We
wouldn't even really have to sail, or row,' Elethiomel said. 'All we'd have to
do is push the boat out and we'd end up in the city eventually anyway.'

'I
wouldn't go,' Livueta said, kicking at a pile of leaves.

'Oh,
Livvy,' Darckense said. 'Now you're being boring. Come on. We've got to do
things together.'

'I
wouldn't go,' Livueta repeated.

Elethiomel
pressed his lips together. He kicked hard at a huge pile of leaves, sending
them up into the air like an explosion. A couple of the guards turned round
quickly, then relaxed, looked away again. 'We've got to do something,' he said,
looking at the guards ahead, admiring the big automatic rifles they were
allowed to use. He'd never even been allowed to touch a proper big gun; just
piddling little small-bore pistols and light carbines.

He
caught one of the leaves as it fell past his face.

'Leaves...'
he turned the leaf, this way and that, in front of his eyes. 'Trees are
stupid,' he told the others.

'Of
course they are,' Livueta said. 'They don't have nerves and brains, do they?'

'I
don't mean that,' he said, crumpling the leaf in his hands. 'I mean they're
such a stupid idea. All this waste every autumn. A tree that kept its leaves
wouldn't have to grow new ones; it would grow bigger than all the rest; it
would be the king of the trees.'

'But
the leaves are beautiful!' Darckense said.

Elethiomel
shook his head, exchanging looks with Cheradenine. 'Girls!' he laughed,
sneering.

He
forgot what the other word was for a crater; there was another word for a
crater, for a big volcanic crater, there was definitely another word for it,
there was absolutely and positively another word for it, I just put it down
for a minute here and now some bastard's swiped it, the bastard... if I could
just find it, I... I just put it down here a minute ago...

Where
was the volcano?

The
volcano was on a big island on an inland sea, somewhere.

He
looked around at the distant heights of the crater walls, trying to remember
where this somewhere was. As he moved, his shoulder hurt, where one of the robbers
had stabbed him. He'd attempted to protect the wound by shooing the clouds of
flies away, but he was fairly sure they'd already laid their eggs.

(Not
too near the heart; at least he still carried her there, and it would take a
while for the corruption to spread that far. He'd be dead by then, before they
found their way to his heart and her.)

But
why not? Go ahead; be my guests, little maggots, eat away, sup your fill; quite
probably I'll be dead anyway by the time you hatch, and will save you the pain and
torment of my attempts to scratch you out... Dear little maggots,
sweet
little maggots. (Sweet little me;
I'm the one that's being eaten.)

He
paused and thought about the pool, the little puddle that he orbited around,
like a captured rock. It was at the bottom of a small depression, and it seemed
to him that he kept on trying to get out away from the stinking water and the
slime and the flies that crowded around it and the bird shit he kept crawling
through... He didn't manage it; he always seemed to end up back here for some
reason, but he
thought
about it a
lot.

The
pool was shallow, muddy, rocky and smelly; it was foul and horrid and bloated
past its normal limits with the sickness and the blood that he had spilled out
into it; he wanted to leave, to get well away from it. Then he would send in a
heavy-bomber raid.

He
started to crawl again, hauling himself round the pool, disturbing pellets and
insects, and heading off towards the lake at one point, then coming back, back
to the same point as before, and stopping, gazing transfixed at the pool and
the rock.

What
had he been doing?

Helping
the locals, as usual. Honest counsel; advisor, keeping the loonies at bay and
people sweet; later leading a small army. But they'd assumed he'd betray them,
and that he'd use the army he'd trained as his own power base. So, on the eve
of their victory, the very hour they'd finally stormed the Sanctum, they'd
struck at him, too.