Iain Banks: Matter

“Do we prevail, Mertis?”

The other man looked round at the others present. Then he said, “We prevail, sir. The battle is won. The Deldeyn have surrendered and ask our terms. They conditioned only that their massacre cease and they be treated honourably. Which we have allowed, so far. The Ninth and all that it holds lies open to us.”

The King smiled. Ferbin felt relieved. It sounded like things had gone well. He supposed he really ought to make his entrance now. He took a breath to speak, let them know he was there.

“And Ferbin?” the King asked. Ferbin froze. What about him?

“Dead,” tyl Loesp said. It was said, Ferbin thought, with somewhat insufficient grief or pity. Almost, a chap less charitable than himself might have thought, with relish.

“Dead?” his father wailed, and Ferbin felt his eyes moisten. Now. Now he needed to let his father know that his eldest surviving son still lived, whether he smelled of shit or not.

“Yes,” tyl Loesp said, leaning over the King. “The vain, silly, spoiled little brat was blown to bits on Cherien ridge, some time after midday. A sad loss to his tailors, jewellers and creditors, I dare say. As to anyone of consequence, well…”

The King made a spluttering noise, then said, “Loesp? What are you—?”

“We are all of one mind here, are we not?” tyl Loesp said smoothly, ignoring the King — ignoring the King! — and looking round everybody present.

A chorus of low, muttered voices gave what must have been assent. “Not you, priest, but no matter,” tyl Loesp told the holy man. “Continue with the reading, if you would.” The priest did as he was instructed, eyes now wide. The doctor’s assistant stared at the King, then glanced at the doctor, who was looking back at him.

“Loesp!” the King cried, something of his old authority back in his voice. “What do you mean by this insult? And to my dead child? What monstrosity of—”

“Oh, do be quiet.” Tyl Loesp laid his helmet at his feet and leaned further forward, putting his knuckles to his cheeks and resting his mailed elbows on the King’s armoured chest; an act of such unprecedented disrespect that Ferbin found it almost more shocking than anything he’d heard. The King winced, breath wheezing out of him. Ferbin thought he heard something bubbling. The doctor had finished exposing the wound in the King’s side.

“I mean the cowardly little cunt is dead, you old cretin,” tyl Loesp said, addressing his only lord and master as though he was a beggar. “And if by some miracle he’s not, he soon will be. The younger boy I think I’ll keep alive for now, in my capacity as regent. Though — I’m afraid — poor, quiet, studious little Oramen may not live to the point of accession. They say the boy’s interested in mathematics. I am not — save, like yourself, for its trajectorial role in the fall of shot — however I’d compute his chances of seeing his next birthday and hence majority grow less substantial the closer the event creeps.”

“What?” the King gasped, labouring. “Loesp! Loesp, for all pity—”

“No,” tyl Loesp said, leaning more heavily on the blood-bright curve of armour, causing the King to moan. “No pity, my dear, dim old warrior. You’ve done your bit, you’ve won your war. That’s monument and epitaph enough and your time is past. But no pity, sir, no. I shall order all the prisoners of today killed with the utmost dispatch and the Ninth invaded with every possible severity, so that gutters, rivers — heavens, water wheels too, for all I care — run with blood, and the shrieking will, I dare say, be terrible to hear. All in your name, brave prince. For vengeance. For your idiot sons too, if you like.” Tyl Loesp put his face very close to that of the King and shouted at him, “The game is over, my old stump! It was always greater than you knew!” He pushed himself back off the King’s chest, making the prone man cry out again. Tyl Loesp nodded at the doctor, who, visibly gulping, reached out with some metal instrument, plunging it into the wound in the King’s side, making him shudder and scream.

“You traitors, you treacherous bastards!” the King wept, as the doctor took a step back, instrument dripping blood, face grey. “Will no one help me? Bastards all! You murder your king!”

Tyl Loesp shook his head, staring first at the writhing King, then at the doctor. “You ply your given trade too well, medic.” He moved round to the other side of the King, who flailed weakly at him. As tyl Loesp passed, the priest stuck out a hand, clutching at the nobleman’s sleeve. Tyl Loesp looked calmly down at the hand on his forearm. The priest said hoarsely, “Sir, this is too much, it’s — it’s wrong.”

Tyl Loesp looked at his eyes, then back at his clutching hand, until the priest released him. “You stray your brief, mumbler,” tyl Loesp told him. “Get back to your words.” The priest swallowed, then lowered his gaze to the book again. His lips began to move once more, though no sound issued from his mouth.

Tyl Loesp moved round the broken door, shoving the doctor back, until he stood by the King’s other flank. He crouched a little, inspecting. “A mortal wound indeed, my lord,” he said, shaking his head. “You should have accepted the magic potions our friend Hyrlis offered. I would have.” He plunged one hand into the King’s side, arm disappearing almost to the elbow. The King shrieked.

“Why,” tyl Loesp said, “here’s the very heart of it.” He grunted, twisting and pulling inside the man’s chest. The King gave one final scream, arched his back and then collapsed. The body jerked a few more times, and some sound came from his lips, but nothing intelligible, and soon they too were still.

Ferbin stared down. He felt frozen, immobilised, like something trapped in ice or baked to solidity. Nothing he had seen or heard or ever known had prepared him for this. Nothing.

There was a sharp crack. The priest fell like a sack of rocks. Tyl Loesp lowered his pistol. The hand holding it dripped blood.

The doctor cleared his throat, stepped away from his assistant. “Ah, the boy, too,” he told tyl Loesp, looking away from the lad. He shook his head and shrugged. “He worked for the King’s people as well as us, I’m sure.”

“Master! I—!” the youth had time to say, before tyl Loesp shot him as well; in the belly first, folding him, then in the head. The doctor looked quite convinced that tyl Loesp was about to shoot him, too, but tyl Loesp merely smiled at him and then at the two knights at the door. He stooped, took a towel from the waistband of the murdered assistant, wiped his pistol and his hand with it, then dabbed a little blood from his arm and sleeve.

He looked round the others. “This had to be done, as we all know,” he told them. He looked distastefully at the body of the King, as a surgeon might at a patient who has had the temerity to die on him. “Kings are usually the first to talk, and at some length, of overarching destiny and the necessity of fulfilling greater purposes,” he said, still wiping and dabbing. “So let’s take all that billowy rhetoric as heard, shall we? We are left with this: the King died of his wounds, most honourably incurred, but not before swearing bloody vengeance on his enemies. The prancing prince is dead and the younger one is in my charge. These two here fell prey to a sniper. And we’ll burn down this old place, just for good measure. Now, come; all our fine prizes await.”

He threw the bloodied towel down on to the face of the felled assistant and then said, with an encouraging smile, “I believe we are concluded here.”

Oramen was in a round room in the shade wing of the royal palace in Pourl when they came to tell him that his father and his elder brother were dead and he would, in time, be king. He had always liked this room because its walls described an almost perfect circle and, if you stood at its very centre, you could hear your own voice reflected back at you from the chamber’s circumference in a most singular and interesting fashion.