Iain Banks: Matter

Choubris tethered his rowel by the single low door to the ruin and left it noisily cropping moss from the wall. The mersicor trailing behind the rowel, brought in case he found his master mountless, nibbled daintily at some flowers. Holse preferred rowels to mersicors — they were less skittish and harder working. He might have taken a flying beast, he supposed, but he trusted those even less. Royal servants above a certain rank were expected to be able to fly, and he had suffered the instruction — and the instructors, who had not spared him their opinion that such honour was wasted upon one so coarse — but had not enjoyed the learning.

A proper searching, like so many things, was best done on foot, from the ground. Hurling oneself grandly across the sky was all very well and certainly gave the impression of lordly oversight and superiority, but what it really did was give you the opportunity to miss all details at once, rather than one at a time, which was the ration for decent folk. Plus, as a rule — a most fixed and strict rule, it had long struck Choubris — it was the people who had to make things work on the ground who ended up paying for such sweepingly overgeneralised judgementing. This principle seemed to apply to high-ups of all distinctions, whether their height was literal or metaphorical.

“Sir?” he called into the hollow round of stones. His voice echoed. The masonry was ill-dressed, worse within than without. The lower tier of piercings — much too wide for any real fortification — gave out on to pleasant views of hill and forest. The Xiliskine Tower rose pale and vast in the distance, disappearing beyond the clouds into the heavens. Plumes of smoke and wisps of steam were scattered across the landscape like missed stalks after a harvest, all leaning away from the backing wind.

He limped further into the folly. His left leg still hurt from where that seed-brained mersicor had fallen on him the day before. He was getting too old for such shenanigans; he was in his middle years now and starting to fill out nicely and become distinguished (or develop a paunch and become grey and grizzled, by his wife’s less forgiving measure). His whole side, every rib, pained him when he took a deep breath, or tried to laugh. Not that there’d been much laughing.

Choubris had seen many signs of battle while he’d been riding round the area: whole wastelands of torn-up fields and shattered forests, the land raddled with a pox of craters; entire woods and brush forests still on fire, smoke walling the sky, other fires only just exhausted or extinguished, leaving vast black tracts of razed ground, seeping wispy fumes; the wrecks of smashed war machines lying crippled like enormous broken insects with tracks unrolled behind them, a few still leaking steam; some great dead battle beasts, spread crumpled and forlorn — uoxantch, chunsels and ossesyi, plus a couple of types he didn’t recognise.

He’d seen bands of wounded troops, walking in lines or borne on carts and wagons, groups of soldiers dashing about importantly on mersicors, a few airborne men on caude, slowly crisscrossing, dipping and wheeling when searching for any still surviving enemy or stray fallen, or making straight and fast if bearing messages. He’d passed engineers rigging or repairing telegraph lines, and thrice he’d pulled off roads and tracks to let hissing, spitting, smoke-belching steam vehicles past. He’d patted and comforted the old rowel, even though she’d seemed unbothered.

He’d come, too, upon numerous details digging charnel pits for the enemy dead, of which there seemed a great many. The Deldeyn, Holse thought, looked much like normal folk. Perhaps a little darker, though that might have been the effect of death itself.

He’d stopped and talked to anybody willing to spare the time, pretty much regardless of rank, partly to enquire about missing nobles on white chargers, mostly because, as he would freely admit, he enjoyed flapping his jaw. He took a little crile root with the captain of one company, shared a pipe of unge with a sergeant from another and was grateful to a quartermaster-lieutenant for a bottle of strong wine. Most of the soldiers were more than happy to talk about their part in the battle, though not all. The mass-burial men, in particular, tended to the taciturn, even surly. He heard a few interesting things, as any fellow open to easy discourse was bound to.

“Prince?” he yelled, louder, voice echoing off the rough stones inside the folly. “Sir? Are you here?” He frowned and shook his head beneath the open crown of the empty tower. “Ferbin?” he shouted.

He ought not to call his master by his name like that, but then it looked like the prince wasn’t here after all, and there was a thrill to be had from such address. Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being inferior, Choubris held. Besides, he’d been told often enough that he could use the familiar term, though such licence was only ever offered when Ferbin was very drunk. The offer was never renewed in sobriety so Choubris had thought the better of acting on the privilege.

He wasn’t here. Maybe he wasn’t anywhere, alive. Maybe the gaudy dope had accorded himself war hero status by mistake, riding neck-clutch like a terrified child wherever his idiot mount had taken him, to be shot by one side or other or fall off a cliff. Knowing Ferbin, he’d probably thought to raise his head again just as he went charging under an overhanging bough.

Choubris sighed. That was it, then. There was nowhere obvious left to look. He could wander the great battlefield pretending to search for his lost master, skipping through triage pens, inhabiting field hospitals and haunting morgue piles all he liked, but, unless the WorldGod took a most unlikely personal interest in his quest, he’d never find the blighter. At this rate he’d be forced to return to his wife and children, in the littler though hardly less savage battlefield that was their apartment in the palace barracks.

And now who’d have him? He’d lost a prince (if you wanted to take an uncharitable view of the matter, and he knew plenty that would); what were the chances he’d get to serve any other quality again, with that recorded against him? The King was dead and tyl Loesp was in charge, at least until the boy prince came of age. Choubris had a feeling in his gut that a lot of things — things that had seemed settled and comfortable and pleasantly just-so for honest, respectable, hard-working people — would change from here onwards. And the chances of a proven prince-misplacer bettering himself under any regime were unlikely to be good. He shook his head, sighed to himself. “What a sorry mess,” he muttered. He turned to go.

“Choubris? Is it you?”

He turned back. “Hello?” he said, unable to see where the voice had come from. A sudden feeling inside his belly informed him, somewhat to his surprise, that he must have a degree of genuine human fondness for Prince Ferbin after all. Or perhaps he was just glad not, in fact, to be a prince-loser.

There was movement up on one wall, at the base of one of the impractically wide windows on the second tier; a man, crawling out of a fissure in the rough stonework that was mostly hidden by a rustling tangle of wallcreep. Choubris hadn’t even noticed the hidey-hole. Ferbin completed his emergence, crawled to the edge of the window ledge, rubbed his eyes and looked down at his servant.

“Choubris!” he said, in a sort of loud whisper. He glanced around, as though afraid. “It is you! Thank God!”

“I already have, sir. And you might thank me , for such diligence in the looking.”

“Is there anybody with you?” the prince hissed.

“Only the aforesaid deity, sir, if the more insistent priests are to be believed.”