Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

The tent, behind her in a little dip in the ground, glowed with a soft, enveloping warmth. She looked at the time display in the nightsight. Still an hour before she could wake Miz and claim her place between the other two sleepers.

She walked around a little, trying to keep awake and warm. Her swollen hand pulsed regular messages of pain up her arm. The rain tumbled through the branches in great gathered drops, plopping onto her cap and shoulders and wetting her face. The camouflaged fatigues were waterproof, but dribbles had snuck down her neck, perhaps while she’d been asleep; she could feel them insinuating their way down her back and between her breasts with a cold, unwelcome intimacy.

She sat on a fallen trunk, looking out at the spray-shredded surface of the fjord and listening to the gusting wind charging out of the dark, thick-clouded night. The rain cleared for a while, revealing details on the far side of the fjord, so that she was able to look out to where the Solipsists’ fires had burned that night. That pair of fierce specks had glittered through the evening like baleful eyes from the depths of an ancient myth, and-despite the fact that the shore the Solipsists were travelling on had looked more rugged and indented than their own had been that day-they had burned still further ahead than they had the night before.

A great gust of wind shook the trees above her, dislodging drops that struck her face. She wiped them from the nightsight lenses with the heel of her good hand.

Where the Solipsists’ twin fires had blazed against the steep dark mat of forest there was only one faint image left now; a last dying memory of warmth in the loud surrounding night, like one of those eyes slowly closing, the life within it going out.

She watched that hazy, uncertain image and-for all that it was the product and symbol of people who had for no good reason she could discern suddenly become her enemies-she willed that distant, ember memory to prevail against the leaching cold that made her teeth ache and her body shiver, and against the laws that ran the universe and the system and the world and every thing and body within it; the laws of decay, consumption, exhaustion and death.

Then the rain came again, brushing its way up the fjord in tall sheets, and by that interposing sweep extinguished-if not the fading embers themselves-the projected image of that fire in her eyes.

“But what’s he like?”

“Oh… Attractive, I suppose.”

“What? Tallish, darkish, handsomish? Hunkish?”

“All of the above. Well, maybe not hunkish… But that’s not it; it’s his… manner. When you hear him, it sounds like something between philosophy and politics, and even if you don’t agree with what he’s saying you can’t help being impressed by the way he says it. It’s as though he knows even more than he’s saying, knows everything, but still really needs your approval, your agreement for it to be true, and you just can’t help but give it. You feel flattered, privileged… seduced.

“It looked like there was a big but vague organisation there; something that had grown up organically around him. And even though most of the people I saw were young, there were plenty of older people there too, and I got the impression he was talking to the establishment on the Ghost; maybe beyond. But he was just an amazing person.”

“Obviously,” Zefla said, smiling at her as they walked.

It was cold. The weather had turned just before dawn, the heavy rain clouds blowing away before a chill, clear sky that had shed moonlight and sparse junklight on the forested mountains of the fjord, coating them in silent silver. Then Thrial had risen, casting a rich glow like pink gold down the fjord.

After a miserably small breakfast which had left them all hungry, and with only a quarter of a foodslab left each, Miz and Dloan had decided to make a serious effort to kill something edible for lunch. The two men had set off uphill when they broke camp that morning, hoping to find game in the higher forest.

Sharrow and Zefla walked through patches of frost and puddles skinned with brittle crusts of thin, glass-clear ice. Their breath smoked in the air.

Sharrow felt spacey and vague and slightly numb; she kept shivering, even though she didn’t really feel cold. She put it down to lack of food. She felt ashamed at how pampered she had become; she hadn’t realised how much simple things like toilet paper and a toothbrush meant to her, and felt demeaned that their absence could assume such significance.

Her hand throbbed dully inside her glove; she had taken some painkillers. She hadn’t changed the plaster that morning because the hand had swelled up during the night and it hurt too much when she’d tried taking the glove off. She’d decided just to let it be; perhaps it would get better of its own accord.

“Probably end up as one of those sordid cult leaders,” Zefla said after a while as they plodded into a bare area of the forest where a fire had left thousands of tree trunks standing upright and bare, black posts already surrounded by slender young trees forcing their way towards the sky around them. “You know, pedalling some weird concoction of re-tread gibberish and living in a palace while their. followers sleep shifts and work the streets and give you this big flatline smile when you tell them where to stuff their tracts.”

“No,” Sharrow said, shaking her head (and felt dizzy when she did that, and stumbled on a blackened branch crusted with white). “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen to this guy, not at all.”

Zefla looked at Sharrow as they walked, an expression of concern on her face. “You all right?” she asked.

“Hungry!” Sharrow laughed. She nodded to herself, breathing deeply in the chill air and staring up at the blue expanse above. “How about you?”

“Never better,” Zefla said, scratching through her gathered-up hair to her itchy scalp. “Could use a shower, though.” She took another look at Sharrow as she stumbled again. “Maybe we’ll take another rest soon.”

“Yes,” Sharrow said, shaking her head briefly as though trying to clear it. “Why not?”

They tramped amongst the fresh young trees and the burned dead.

Sharrow and Zefla stopped in a small clearing near the shore to eat the last of their food, then waited for Miz and Dloan to rejoin them. Sharrow continued to deny there was anything wrong with her, then fell fast asleep, propped against a tree trunk. Zefla was worried; she thought Sharrow looked ill. Her grey, drawn face twitched as Zefla watched, and her lips worked.

Zefla looked up at the mountain slopes. She was surprised they hadn’t heard any shots. She left Sharrow to sleep and went down to the shingle beach. She left her little back-pack there, so that Miz and Dloan wouldn’t walk past them. Then she went back to sit with Sharrow.

The men arrived an hour later. They were both limping; Dloan from the bullet wound he’d received the night Cenuij had died, Miz from the combination of hard boots and soft feet.

They were empty-handed. Zefla thought they had brought something, but it was only the back-pack she’d left on the shingle. They had shot at a few birds with their laser pistols and killed one, but it had been crawling with parasites when they’d picked it up and they hadn’t thought it was worth eating. They still hadn’t seen any large animals, though they had heard impressive bellowing noises from still further upslope.

“Fish,” Miz said, as he and Dloan tore into the last of their foodslabs and Sharrow looked sleepily at them, frowning and rubbing her left glove. “We’ll do some fishing.” He grinned at the others. “Fish; we’ll eat fish tonight.” He patted the pocket of his fancy hunting jacket that held the fishing gear.