Iain Banks: Inversions

DeWar looked into the eyes of the lady Perrund and smiled. “Perfectly possible, my lady.”

“Good,” she said, crossing one arm across the other and settling back to lean over the game board again. “That is what I shall choose to believe, then. Now we can restart our game. It was my move, I believe.”

DeWar smiled as he watched Perrund put one clenched fist to her mouth. Her gaze, beneath long fair lashes, flicked this way and that across the game board, coming to rest on pieces for a few moments, then sweeping away again.

She wore the long, plain red day-gown of the senior ladies of the court, one of the few fashions the Protectorate had inherited from the earlier Kingdom, which the Protector and his fellow generals had overthrown in the war of succession. It was a given within the court that Perrund’s seniority was founded more upon the intensity of her earlier service to the Protector UrLeyn than on her physical age, a reputation — that of most favoured concubine to a man who had not yet chosen a wife — she was still fiercely proud of.

There was another reason for her promotion to such seniority, and the mark of that was the second badge she wore, the sling — also red — that supported her withered left arm.

Perrund, anybody in the court would tell you, had given more of herself in the service of her beloved General than any other of his women, sacrificing the use of a limb to protect him from an assassin’s blade and indeed very nearly losing her life altogether, for the same cut that had severed muscles and tendons and broken bone had opened an artery as well, and she had come close to bleeding to death even as UrLeyn had been hurried away from the melee by his guards and the assassin had been overpowered and disarmed.

The withered arm was her only blemish, even if it was a terrible one. Otherwise she was as tall and fair as any fairy-tale princess, and the younger women of the harem, who saw her naked in the baths, inspected her golden-brown skin in vain for the more obvious signs of encroaching age. Her face was broad — too broad, she thought, and so framed it carefully in her long blonde hair to make it look slimmer when she did not wear a head-dress, and chose head-dresses which performed the same function when she was to be seen in public. Her nose was slim and her mouth at first plain until she smiled, which she often did.

Her pupils were gold flecked with blue and her eyes were large and open and somehow innocent. They could quickly look hurt at insults and when she was told tales of cruelty and pain, but such expressions were like summer storms — over quickly and immediately replaced by a prevailing, temperate brightness. She seemed to take an almost childish delight in life in general which was never far from being embodied in the sparkle of those eyes, and people who thought they knew about such things said they believed she was the only person in the court whose force of gaze could match that of the Protector himself.

“There,” she said composedly, moving a piece across the board into DeWar’s territory and then sitting back. Her good hand massaged the withered one, which lay in the red sling, motionless and unresponding. DeWar thought it looked like the hand of a sickly child, it was so pale and thin and the skin so nearly translucent. He knew that she still experienced pain from the disabled limb, three years after the initial injury, and that she did not always realise when her good hand stroked and kneaded the sick one, as it did now. He saw this without looking at it, his gaze held by hers as she leaned further back into the couch’s cushions, which were as plump, red and numerous as berries on a winter bush.

They sat in the visiting chamber of the outer harem, where on special occasions close relatives of the concubines were sometimes allowed to visit them. DeWar, once again waiting on UrLeyn while the General spent a while with the harem’s most recent young recruits, had for some time been granted the singular dispensation of being allowed to enter the visiting chamber whenever the Protector was in the harem. This meant that DeWar was a little closer to UrLeyn than the General would ideally have preferred his chief bodyguard to be during such interludes, and much further away than DeWar felt comfortable with.

DeWar knew the sort of jokes that circulated the Court about him. It was said that his dream was to be so close to his master at all times that he could wipe the General’s backside in the toilet and his prick in the harem-alcove. Another was that he secretly desired to be a woman, so that when the General wanted sex he need look no further than his faithful bodyguard, and no other bodily contact need be risked.

Whether Stike, the harem’s chief eunuch, had heard that particular rumour was moot. Certainly he watched the bodyguard with what appeared to be great and professional suspicion. The chief eunuch sat massively in his pulpit at one end of the long chamber, which was lit from above by three porcelain light-domes. The chamber’s walls were entirely covered with thickly pendulous swathes of ornately woven brocade, while further loops and bowls of fabric hung suspended from the roof spaces between the domes, ruffling in the breeze from the ceiling louvres. The chief eunuch Stike was dressed in great folds of white and his vast waist was girdled with the gold and silver key-chains of his office. He occasionally spared a glance for the few other veiled girls who had chosen the visiting chamber for their giggled conversations and petulant games of card and board, but he concentrated on the only man in the room and his game with the damaged concubine Perrund.

DeWar studied the board. “Ah-ha,” he said. His Emperor piece was threatened, or certainly would be in another move or two. Perrund gave a dainty snort, and DeWar looked up to see his opponent’s good hand held up flat against her mouth, painted finger-nails golden against her lips and an expression of innocence in her wide eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“You know what,” he said, smiling. “You’re after my Emperor.”

“DeWar,” she said, tutting. “You mean I’m after your Protector.”

“Hmm,” he said, putting his elbows on his knees and his chin on his bunched fists. Officially the Emperor was called the Protector piece now, after the dissolution of the old Empire and fall of the last King of Tassasen. New sets of the game of “Monarch’s Dispute” sold in Tassasen these days came in boxes which, to those who could read, proclaimed the game they contained to be “Leader’s Dispute”, and held revised pieces: a Protector instead of an Emperor, Generals in place of Kings, Colonels instead of Dukes, and Captains where before there had been Barons. Many people, either fearful of the new regime or simply wishing to show their allegiance to it, had thrown out their old sets of the game along with their portraits of the King. It seemed that only in the Palace of Vorifyr itself were people more relaxed.

DeWar lost himself studying the position of the pieces for a few moments. Then he heard Perrund make another noise, and looked up again to see her shaking her head at him, eyes glittering.

Now it was his turn to say, “What?”

“Oh, DeWar,” she said. “I have heard people in the Court say you are the most cunning person they know in it, and thank Providence that you are so devoted to the General, because if you were a man of independent ambition they would fear you.”

DeWar shrugged. “Really? I suppose I ought to feel flattered, but—”

“And yet you are so easy to play at Dispute,” Perrund said, laughing.

“Am I?”

“Yes, and for the most obvious reason. You do too much to protect your Protector piece. You sacrifice everything to keep it free from threat.” She nodded at the board. “Look. You are thinking about blocking my Mounted piece with your eastern General, leaving it open to my Tower after we’ve exchanged Caravels on the left flank. Well, aren’t you?”