Inversions (11 page)

She was looking at the sunset again. The light caught the edge of her cheek, outlining it in a colour like that of red gold. Her hair, falling loose across her shoulders, was glossily radiant with highlights like spun ruby.

‘Were you still in Drezen when the rocks fell from the sky, mistress?’

‘Hmm? Oh. Yes. I didn’t leave until about two years later.’ She seemed lost in thought, and her expression suddenly melancholy.

‘Did you come by way of Cuskery, by any chance, mistress?’

‘Why, Yes, Oelph, I did,’ the Doctor said, her expression lightening as she turned to me. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. My mouth had gone quite dry while I wondered whether to say anything about what I had heard from Walen’s page and Jollisce. ‘Umm, is it far from there to here?’

‘The voyage is a good half a year,’ the Doctor said, nodding. She smiled up at the sky. ‘A very hot place, lush and steamy and full of ruined temples and various odd animals that have the run of the place because they are held to be sacred by some ancient sect or another. The air is saturated with the smell of spices, and when I was there there was a full night, when Xamis and Seigen had both long set, almost together, and Gidulph, Jairly and Foy were in the day sky, and Iparine was eclipsed by the world itself and for a bell or so there was only the starlight to shine on the sea and the city, and the animals all howled into the darkness and the waves I could hear from my room sounded very loud, though it was not really dark, just silver. People stood in the streets, very quiet, looking at the stars, as though relieved to find their existence was not a myth. I wasn’t in the street just then, I was .. . I’d met a terribly nice Sea Company captain that day. Very handsome,’ she said, and sighed.

In that instant she was like a young girl (and I a jealous youth).

‘Did your ship go straight from there to here?’

‘Oh no, there were four voyages after Cuskery: to Alyle on the Sea Company barquentine Face of Jairly,’ she said, and smiled broadly, staring ahead. ‘Then from there to Fuollah on a trireme, of all things . . . a Farossi vessel, ex-Imperial navy, then overland to Osk, and from there to Illerne by an argosy out of Xinkspar, finally to Haspide on a galliot of the Mifeli clan traders.’

‘It all sounds most romantic, mistress.’

She gave what looked like a sad smile. ‘It was not without its privations and indignities on occasion,’ she said, tapping at the top of her hoot, ‘and once or twice this old dagger was drawn, but yes, looking back, it was. Very romantic.’ She took a deep breath and let it out, then swivelled and looked up into the skies, shading her eyes from Seigen.

‘Jairly has not yet risen, mistress,’ I said quietly, and was surprised at the coldness I felt. She looked at me oddly.

Some sense returned to me. No matter that since my fever in the palace, when she had said that we ought to be friends, she was still my mistress and I was still her servant as well as her apprentice. And as well as a mistress, I had a Master. Probably nothing I could find out from the Doctor would be new to him, for he had many sources, but I could not be sure, and so I supposed I had an obligation to him to find out all I could from her, in case some small piece of it might prove useful.

‘Was that I mean taking the Mifeli clan ship from Illerne to Haspide how you came to be employed by the Mifelis?’

‘No, that was just coincidence. I helped around the seamen’s infirmary for a while after I first landed before one of the younger Mifelis needed treatment on a homebound ship it had signalled ahead to the Sentry Isles. The Mifelis’ own doctor then suffered terribly from seasickness and would not go out on the cutter to meet the galleon. I was recommended to Prelis Mifeli by the infirmary’s head surgeon, so I went instead. The boy lived, the ship came in and I was made the Mifeli head-family doctor right there on the docks. Old man Mifeli doesn’t waste time making decisions.’

‘And their old doctor?’

‘Pensioned off.’ She shrugged.

I watched the rear end of the two hauls for a while. One of them shat copiously. The steaming shit disappeared under our wagon, but not before wreathing us in its vapours.

‘Dear me, what an awful smell,’ the Doctor said. I bit my tongue. This was one of the reasons that people who were in a position to do so usually kept as much distance between themselves and beasts of burden as they could.

‘Mistress, may I ask you a question?’

She hesitated for a moment. ‘You have been asking me various questions already, Oelph,’ she said, and graced me with a sly, amused look. ‘I take it you mean may you ask me a question that may be impertinent?’

‘Umm . . .’

‘Ask away, young Oelph. I can always pretend I didn’t hear you.’

‘I was just wondering, mistress,’ I said, feeling most awkward, and very warm all of a sudden, ‘why you left Drezen?’

‘Ah,’ she said, and taking up the whip waggled it over the yokes of the two hauls, barely tickling their necks with the end of it. She looked briefly at me. ‘Partly the urge to have an adventure, Oelph. just the desire to go somewhere nobody I knew had been before. And partly . . . partly to get away, to forget somebody.’ She smiled brightly, dazzlingly at me for a moment before looking away up the road again. ‘I had an unhappy love affair, Oelph. And I am stubborn. And proud. Having made up my mind to leave and having announced that I would travel to the other ends of the world, I could not I would not back down. And so I hurt myself twice, once by falling for the wrong person, and then a second time by being too obstinate even in a more temperate mood to retreat from a commitment made in a fury of injured pride.’

‘Was this the person who gave you the dagger, mistress?’ I asked, already hating and envying the man.

‘No,’ she said, with a sort of snorting laugh which I thought was most unladylike. ‘I had been wounded by him quite enough without carrying such a token of his.’ She gazed down at the dagger, sheathed as usual in the top of her right boot. ‘The dagger was a gift from . . . the state. Some of the decoration on the dagger was given to me by another friend. One I used to have terrible arguments with. A double-edged gift.’

‘What was it you argued about, mistress?’

‘Lots of things, or lots of aspects of the same thing. Whether the might beyond might had a right to impose its values on others.’ She looked at my puzzled expression and laughed. ‘We argued about here, for one thing.’

‘Here, mistress?’ I asked, looking around.

‘About’ She seemed to catch herself, then said, ‘About Haspide, the Empire. About this whole other hemisphere.’ She shrugged. ‘I won’t bore you with the details. In the end I left and he stayed, though I did hear later that he too sailed away, some time after I did.’

‘Do you regret coming here now, mistress?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling. ‘For most of the voyage to Cuskery I did . . . but the equator signalled a change, as they say it often does, and since then, no. I still miss my family and friends, but I am not sorry now that I made the decision.’

‘Do you think you will ever go back, mistress?’

‘I have no idea, Oelph.’ Her expression was troubled and hopeful at once. Then she produced another smile for me. ‘I am the doctor to the King, after all. I would consider that I have not done my job properly if he would let me leave. I may be forced to look after him until he’s an old man, or until he grows displeased with me because I grow whiskers on my lips and my hair thins on my head and my breath smells, and he has my head chopped off because I interrupt him once too often. Then you might have to become his doctor.’

‘Oh, mistress,’ was all I could say.

‘I don’t know, Oelph,’ she confided in me. ‘I’m not so sure about making plans. I’ll wait and see which way fate takes me. If Providence, or whatever we wish to call it, has me stay, then I’ll stay. If it somehow calls me back to Drezen, I’ll go.’ She dipped her head towards me and with what she probably thought was a conspiratorial look said, ‘Who knows, my destiny might lead me back through Equatorial Cuskery. I might get to see my handsome Sea Company captain again.’ She winked at me.

‘Was the land of Drezen much affected by the rocks from the sky, mistress?’ I asked.

She did not seem to heed my tone, which I had worried might seem excessively frosty. ‘More than here in Haspidus,’ she said. ‘But much less than the Inlands of the Empire. One city on a far northern island was washed almost entirely away by a wave, killing ten or more thousand people, and some ships were lost, and of course the crop yields all over were down for a couple of growing seasons; so the farmers moaned, but then the farmers always do. No, we escaped relatively lightly.’

‘Do you think it was the work of the gods, mistress? There are those who say that Providence was punishing us for something, or perhaps just punishing the Empire. Others hold that it was the work of the old gods, and that they are coming back. What do you think?’

‘I think it could be any of those things, Oelph,’ the Doctor said thoughtfully. ‘Though there are some people in Drezen philosophers who have a much more bleak explanation, mind you.’

‘Which is what, mistress?’

‘That such things happen for no reason at all.’

‘No reason?’

‘No reason beyond the workings of pure chance.’

I thought about this. ‘Do they not think that there is good and bad? And that one deserves to be emulated and the other not, but rather punished?’

‘A very small number would say that there are no such entities. Most agree there are, but that they only exist in our minds. The world itself, without us, does not recognise such things, just because they are not things, they are ideas, and the world contained no ideas until people came along.’

‘So they believe that Man was not created with the world?’

‘That’s right. Or at least not people with wits.’

‘Are they then Seigenists? Do they believe that the Lesser Sun created us?’

‘Some would say it did. They would claim that people were once no more than animals and that we too used to fall asleep promptly when Xamis set, and rise when it rose. Some believe that all we are is light, that the light of Xamis holds the world together like an idea, like a hugely complicated dream, and the light of Seigen is the very expression of us as thinking beings.’

I tried to comprehend this curious concept, and was just starting to decide that it was not so different from normal beliefs when the Doctor asked suddenly, ‘What do you believe in, Oelph?’

Her face, turned to me, was the colour of the soft, tawny dusk. Seigen-light caught fallen wisps of her half-curled red hair.

‘What? Why, what all other civil people believe, mistress,’ I said, before thinking that perhaps she, coming from Drezen where they obviously had some odd ideas, might believe something quite different. ‘That is to say, what people hereabouts, that is in Haspidus . . .’

‘Yes, but what do you personally believe?’

I frowned at her, an expression such a graceful, gentle face did not deserve to have directed at it. Did the Doctor really imagine that everybody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher. ‘I believe in Providence, mistress.’

‘But when you say Providence, do you really mean god?’

‘No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,’ I said.

I was trying not to insult her by sounding as though I was talking to a child. I had experienced aspects of the Doctor’s naïveté before, and ascribed it to simple ignorance of the manner in which matters were organised in what was to her a foreign land, but even after the best part of a year it appeared there were still subjects that each of us assumed we viewed in a mutual light and from a similar perspective which in fact we saw quite differently. ‘The laws of Nature determine the ordering of the physical world and the laws of Man determine the ordering of society, mistress.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, with an expression that might have been simply thoughtful or tinged with scepticism.

‘One set of laws grows out of the other as do plants from the common clay,’ I added, remembering something I’d been taught in Natural Philosophy (my determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success).

‘Which is not so dissimilar to the light of Xamis ordering the major part of the world, and that of Seigen illuminating the human,’ she mused, staring towards the sunset again.

‘I suppose not, mistress,’ I agreed, struggling to follow.

‘Ha,’ she said. ‘All very interesting.’

‘Yes, mistress,’ I said, dutifully.

Adlain: Duke Walen. A pleasure, as ever. Welcome to my humble tent. Please.

Walen: Adlain.

A: Some wine? What about food? Have you eaten?

W: A glass, thank you.

A: Wine. I’ll take some too. Thank you, Epline. So, you are well?

W: Well enough. You?

A: Fine.

W: I wonder, could you . . . ?

A: What, Epline? Yes, of course. Epline, would you . . . ? I’ll call . . . Now then, Walen?… There is nobody else here.

W: Hmm. Very well. This doctor. Vosill.

A: Still her, eh, dear Duke? This is becoming an obsession. Do you really find her that interesting? Perhaps you ought to tell her. She may prefer older men.

W: Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves, Adlain. You know the substance of my complaint.

A: I regret I don’t, Duke.

W: But you have told me of your own doubts. Did you not have her writing checked in case it was a code or something similar?

A: I thought about it. I decided not to, directly.

W: Well, perhaps you should, directly. She is a witch. Or a spy. One of the two.

A: I see. And what strange old gods or other demons do you think she serves? Or which master?

W: I do not know. We will not know, unless we put her to the question.