Iain Banks - Whit

I suppose you could label what passed there as meditation, but that might be to dignify it over much. Really I was just letting everything that had happened recently wash through me and from me, imagining that the river I gazed at was the stream of events I had been submerged in for the last nine days, and it was all now flowing away, leaving no more than a thin deposit of memory behind like a skin of river mud.

I wanted to feel washed clean, absolved of whatever I had been accused of, before I went back to the farm and my Grandfather.

I could not understand what had happened. I had held the tiny zhlonjiz jar in my hand for the first time in the house of Gertie Fossil; I knew I had not stolen it. I had read the note that the vial had come wrapped in, I could recall exactly the feel of its paper between my fingers, see the writing on it - enough like Salvador's for it certainly not to be in any way suspicious - and almost smell it.

I had thought the unction's inclusion in my kit-bag a gesture that was both practical and sweet; it had never occurred to me that it might be a trick.

I tried to think why it had been done, and by whom. I had to face the fact that there might be poisoned thoughts behind the smiling faces of my fellows in our Order. I was the privileged one, after all; brought to my exalted prominence by a simple accident of birth. Certainly I had the Gift of Healing to recommend me to my fellow faithfuls' favour, but that has always seemed extra, something that never sat entirely square with our Faith in its purest form. Part of our creed promoted the idea that those born on the 29th of February became different and better because they were led to realise how much this mattered and symbolised, rather than emerged already semi-divine from the womb (otherwise how does one account for the fact that those born on that date in the past have not been especially gifted or wise?). In a sense, it is just luck that determines who is born a Leapyearian, even though there is a hint in the Orthography that God has a fingertip on the scales if not a hand in the whole business. So might not one - or even some - of my fellows feel aggrieved at my rank and suspicious of my uncanny power, convinced in their own minds that they were both more deserving, and more pure? In theory they ought to feel glad for me, support me and - if not actually worship me - honour and venerate me, and accept that God would be unlikely to have let somebody utterly lacking in worth be born into my position or receive my gift, but I cannot deceive myself that in such matters theory always carries the day in the depths of the human soul, or that our followers are somehow immune from irrationality, jealousy and even hate.

I found it hard even to imagine that my Grandfather himself could be behind this; perhaps only the memory of that sudden, shocking slap to my face made it remotely thinkable. Could Salvador himself feel envious of me? It hardly made sense; his whole life - since his rebirth on the storm-scoured Harrisian beach that night - had led towards the exalted state that first his son Christopher and now I occupied and would, perhaps, pass on to my offspring (not that it had to be me; a Luskentyrian Leapyearian is a Luskentyrian Leapyearian, after all, but we had made it a direct, in-family line so far and such seeming coincidences tend to develop a momentum and a tradition - even a theology - of their own), but who was to say how rational he was being, as he came to appreciate the imminence of his own death?

Allan was another man with cause to resent me; under a different system, all the Community and Order might fall to him on Grandfather's death (though how did one take account of Brigit and Rhea and Calli and Astar, and even uncle Mo? After all, neither of Salvador's original two marriages had been sanctioned by the state or established church). But what could he stand to gain? Nothing could alter the fact of my birth-date - the event had been observed by half the women of the Order - or shake what was one of the central tenets of our Faith; what were we if we did not believe in the interstitial, out-of-the-way nature of blessedness, exemplified by that one day in one thousand four hundred and sixty-one? Allan already controlled much of the day-to-day running of the Order; he had more power than I could imagine wanting for myself and we had never really disagreed over the way we saw the Order going when the sad time came that meant my accession. To attack me was to attack the Order itself and the very Faith through which Allan drew his influence, threatening everything.

Calli? Astar? Together or alone they might see me as a threat to their authority, but they too stood to lose much more than they could possibly gain. Erin? Jess? Somebody else who somehow felt confident of producing a Leapyearian next year, and wanted me out of the way, or at least compromised, beforehand?

None of these possibilities seemed to make much sense.

As for how it had been done, getting the vial itself would have been easy; it normally resided in the unlocked box on the altar in the meeting hall, which itself was always open. Getting it into my kit-bag would hardly have been more difficult; I recalled packing the bag in my room and leaving it there while I met with my Grandfather, Allan and Erin again. Later I went across the courtyard to brother Indra's workshop to see how the inner-tube boat was progressing, and then returned to my room to fetch the bag and leave it outside the meeting hall in the mansion house while we all convened again to pray and sing.

Anybody could have slipped up to my room, or dropped the vial into my bag while it was outside the meeting room; there was no lock on my room door - I don't think there is a functioning lock anywhere in the farmhouse - and we are anyway simply unused to guarding property or caring much about chattels; there is no culture of watchfulness or wariness in our Order that would raise suspicions in the first place.

The last opportunity somebody would have had to put the vial in my bag would have been that morning, as I was getting into the inner-tube boat; who had carried my bag from the farm? How many people had handled it before it was delivered into my hands?

I recalled that I'd found the zhlonjiz vial at the bottom of my kit-bag, implying that it had been hidden by somebody with plenty of time to place it there rather than having been simply dropped into my bag, but the jar had been tiny and - jiggled and bounced around as I'd walked from the coast into Edinburgh - it would have had plenty of time to work its way down from the top to the bottom of the kit-bag. I'd opened the bag twice after I'd packed it in my room, I thought, for food and for the vial of river mud, so maybe I would have seen the little vial sitting on top of the other things packed in there, but - again due to its size - maybe not.

I was a very poor investigator, I thought. I had failed to confront Morag and now I was failing to work out when, how and why somebody had made it look as if I was a common thief.

I shook my head at my own dreadful incompetence, and rose with creaking trousers if not joints to dust myself down, bid farewell to the river and return to whatever it was I had to face at the Community.

I returned to the mansion house at about six; in the office, Allan said that Salvador had eaten early and was having a nap; he'd call me if and when Grandfather wanted to see me. I went to the farmhouse for the evening meal, eaten in the kitchen with various Brothers and Sisters in an unusual and strained atmosphere which was only relieved by the children being barely less boisterous and loud than normal. Sister Calli, who was supervising the kitchen that evening, did not speak to me, and made a point of not serving me my food. Astar was kinder if still as quiet as ever, just coming up to me and standing by me, patting me on the shoulder. A few of the younger ones tried to ask me questions but were hushed by Calli or Calum.