Iain Banks: Inversions

The version which purported to be by the lady’s own hand and which she claimed she only committed to paper to counter the sensationalised untruths of the dramatic edition could hardly have been more different. In it, the bodyguard whose trust she had just violated and whose master she had most cruelly done to death, took her by the hand (from which she had barely finished washing their master’s blood) and led her out of the harem. They told those waiting nervously outside that UrLeyn was well, but sleeping deeply, at last, as though he already knew the cause of the boy’s illness had been discovered.

DeWar said he would take the concubine Perrund to Guard Commander ZeSpiole’s offices to confront the nurse who had accused her. Falsely, he suspected. DeWar apologised to chief eunuch Stike and handed him back his keys. He told some of the assembled guards to remain where they were and the rest to go back to their normal posts and tasks. He led the lady Perrund away, politely but firmly.

They were seen leaving the palace by the groom who supplied them with mounts, and observed leaving the city by a variety of honest citizens.

It was about the time they were galloping through the city’s northern gate that Stike tried to open the doors into the small court, on the top-most level of the harem.

The key would not fit properly into the lock, in which something appeared to be lodged.

The doors were broken down. The foreign body which had been inserted into the lock after the doors had been secured proved to be a piece of marble in the shape of a little finger, broken from one of the maidens in the fountain in the centre of the raised pool in the little court.

UrLeyn’s body was discovered in the bedroom off the court. His blood saturated the sheets. His body was quite cold.

DeWar and Perrund were never caught. They made their way after unrecounted adventures to Mottelocci, in the Half-Hidden Kingdoms, where DeWar, surprisingly, was not known at all, but which he knew a great deal about, and where he rapidly established a good name for himself.

The two became merchants, and later founded a bank. Perrund wrote the account from which I have taken half my story. They married, and their sons — and allegedly their daughters too — continue to this day to run a trading enterprise that supposedly rivals that of our own Mifeli clan. The company’s symbol, reportedly, is a simple torus, a ring, such as might be cut from one end of a hollow pipe. (This symbol is one half of what I suspect is not the only set of correspondences within and between these two tales, but — considering the implications of these far too bamboozling for this old head to encompass — I have left it to the reader to discover their own points of similarity, draw their own conclusions and blaze their own trails of speculation.)

At any rate, DeWar and Perrund, we are told, both died in the mountains, in an avalanche in a mountain pass, five years ago. The snow and ice of the unforgiving peaks is their only tomb, but as they died after what appears to have been a long and happy life together, I beg to repeat that I prefer the former version of their fates, even if it is not supported by any facts whatsoever.

And now I think my divided tale is finished. I am sure there is much I have not said, much that could justifiably have been added had we — had I — only known a little extra, discovered a trifle more, but, as I have indicated above, sometimes (indeed probably always) one simply has to make do with what there is.

My wife is due to return soon from the market. (Yes, I married, and I love her now as I always have, for her own sake, not for that of my lost love, even if as I will admit she does look just a little like the good Doctor.) She took two of our grandchildren with her to look for presents, and they will expect me to play with them when they come back. I do little real work now I am so old, but still there is a life to be lived.