Inversions

DeWar stared down at her. The tears were fewer now. They had made a damp patch on the white shirt, below his chin.

"It was all as I have told you, DeWar, except that it was the Protector and his friends, not one of the old nobles still loyal to the King. UrLeyn killed me, DeWar. I thought I would return the compliment." She opened her eyes wide and let her gaze fall to the blade of the sword in front of her. "May I beg you to be quick, for the friends we once were?"

"But you saved him!" DeWar shouted. Still the sword barely moved.

"Those were my orders, DeWar."

"Orders?" He sounded incredulous.

"When what had happened to my town and my family and to me had happened, I wandered away. I found a camp, one night, and offered myself to some soldiers, for food. They all took me too, and I did not care,

because I knew then that I had become dead. But one was cruel and wanted me in a way I did not want to be taken, and I found that once one was dead it was very easy indeed to kill. I think they would have killed me in return for his death, and that would have been that, and perhaps the better for all of us, but instead their officer took me away. I was brought to a fortress over the border, in Outer Haspidus, mostly ma

If she had been alive, she thought, her knees, on the cold white marble tiles, would be hurting a little by now, but she was dead and so they troubled somebody else. DeWar's face was still streaked with tears. His eyes stared, seeming to bulge in their sockets. "But I was ordered to bide my time, by King Quience himself," she told him. 'UrLeyn was to die, but not at the height of his fame and power. I was commanded that I must do everything I could to keep him alive until his utter ruin had been contrived."

She gave a small, shy smile and moved her head fractionally to look at her wasted arm. "I did. And in the process I became above suspicion."

There was a look of utter horror on DeWar's face. It was, she thought, like looking at the face of somebody who had died in agony and despair.

She had not seen, or wanted to see, UrLeyn's face. She had waited until, having been given the news she claimed to have been called away to receive, he had fallen into a fit of sobbing and buried his face in the pillow, then she had risen, lifted a heavy jet vase in her one good hand and brought it crashing down on the back of his skull. The sobbing had stopped. He had not moved again or made a further sound. She'd slit his throat for good measure, but she had done that while straddling his back, and still she had not seen his face.

"Quience was behind it all," DeWar said. His voice

,sounded strangled, as though he had a sword at his throat, not she at hers. "The war, the poisoning."

"I do not know, DeWar, but I imagine so." She looked deliberately down at the sword blade. 'DeWar." She looked up into his eyes with a hurt, pleading expression. "There is no more I can tell you. The poison was delivered by i

The metal, warm now, dropped slowly away from beneath her, so that she had to stop herself falling forwards and striking the rim of the fountain pool. She looked up. DeWar, his own head hanging down, was sliding the sword back into its scabbard.

"I told him the boy was dead, DeWar!" she said angrily. "I lied to him before I crushed his filthy skull and slit his scrawny old-man's throat!" She struggled to her feet, her joints protesting. She went to DeWar and took his arm with her good hand. "Would you leave me to the guard and the questioner? Is that your judgment?"

She shook him, but he did not respond. She looked down, then grabbed at the nearest weapon, his long knife. She pulled it from its sheath. He looked alarmed and took two rapid steps backwards, away from her, but he could have stopped her taking it, and he had not.

"Then I'll do it myself!" she said, and brought the knife quickly up to her throat. His arm was a blur. She saw sparks in front of her face. Her hand began to sting almost before her eyes and mind had registered what had happened. The knife he had knocked from her hand smacked into a wall and fell with a metallic clatter to the marble floor. The sword hung in his hand again.

"No," he said, moving towards her.

EPILOGUE

It strikes me, having written this, how little we can ever know.

The future is by its very nature unfathomable. We can predict a very little way into it indeed with any reliability, and the further we attempt to see into what has not yet happened, the more foolish we later realise we have been — with the benefit of hindsight. Even the most obviously predictable events, which seem the most likely to occur, can prove fickle. When the rocks fell from the sky back when I was a child, did millions of people the previous evening not believe that the suns would rise as usual, on schedule, the following morning? And then the rocks and the fire fell from the sky, and for whole countries the suns did not rise that day, and indeed for many millions of people they would never rise again.

The present is in some ways no more sure, for what do we really know about what is happening now? Only what is happening immediately around us. The horizon is the usual maximum extent of our ability to appreciate the moment, and the horizon is far away, so events there must be very large for us to be able to see them. Besides, in our modern world the horizon is in reality not the edge of the land or the sea, but the nearest hedge, or the inside of a city wall or the wall of the room we inhabit. The greater events in particular tend to happen somewhere else. The very instant that the rocks and the fire fell from the sky, when over half the world woke up to chaos, on the far side of the globe all was well, and it took a moon or more before the sky darkened with unusual clouds.

When a king dies, the news might take a moon to travel to the furthest corners of his kingdom. It might take years to travel to countries on the far side of the ocean, and in some places, who knows, it might slowly stop being news at all as it travels, becoming instead recent history, and so barely worth the mentioning when travellers exchange the latest developments, so that the death that shook a country and unseated a dynasty only arrives centuries later, as a short passage in a history book. So the present, I repeat, is in some ways no more knowable than the future, for it takes the passage of time for us to know what is happening at any given moment.

The past, then? Surely there we can find certainty,

because once something has happened it ca

And yet how little historians agree. Read the account of a war from one side and then from the other. Read the biography of a great man written by one who has come to despise him, then read his own account. Providence, talk to two servants about the same event that same morning in the kitchen and you may well be told two quite different tales, in which the wronged becomes the wrong-doer and what seemed obvious from one telling seems suddenly quite impossible given the other.