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The outer walls of the hospital were painted bright red, so that they would not be attacked by enemy aircraft. He had seen enemy hospitals from the air, strung out across the white glare of the berg’s snow hills like bright drops of blood fallen frozen from some wounded soldier.
Talibe shrugged. ‘Oh well.’ She went out of the ward; he heard her put the chair down on the corridor floor as the doors swung closed. He looked at the window again. Talibe took the chair away each time because he’d gone crazy when he’d first seen it, when he woke up for the first time.
He wished he could forget that; forget about the chair, and the Chairmaker, forget about the Staberinde.
Then he remembered seeing the white chair at his bedside and filling his lungs with all the air in the world and screaming like a hurricane until the end of time,
To fight for what would inevitably melt and could never provide food or minerals or a permanent place to live, seemed an almost deliberate caricature of the conventional folly of war. He enjoyed the fight, but even the way the war was fought disturbed him, and he had made enemies amongst the other pilots, and his superiors, by speaking his mind.
The suited men wore visored helmets, their pale brown faces visible inside, foreheads marked with a blue circle. The circles actually seemed to glow, he thought, and he wondered if they were there because of some generous religious principle, to help snipers.
supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster’s common tongue, but even so he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.
‘It’s not cynicism,’ he said flatly. ‘I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.’
‘Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,’ he said. ‘And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.’
‘I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.’ He looked at Erens. ‘You’ve attacked the wrong thing.’
‘That was a thousand years ago,’ Ky said. ‘The books are published still; they have become an entire industry, an entire philosophy, a source of un-ending argument and -’ ‘Is there an ending to this story?’ he asked, holding up one hand. ‘No,’ Ky smiled smugly. ‘There is not. But that is just the point.’
‘But just because something does not have an ending,’ Ky shouted, ‘doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a . . .’ The man closed the elevator door, outside in the corridor; Ky rocked forward in the seat and watched the lift-level indicator ascend to the middle of the ship. ‘. . . conclusion,’ Ky said, quietly.
He allowed himself the luxury of letting the memories wash over him,
Staberinde, the great metal ship stuck in stone (and a stone ship, a building stuck in water), and the two sisters. Darckense; Livueta (and of course he’d realised at the time that he was taking their names, or something like their names, in making the one he masqueraded under now). And Zakalwe, and Elethiomel. Elethiomel the terrible, Elethiomel the Chairmaker .
Ask them all back home; what does this name mean to you? War, perhaps, in the immediate aftermath; a great family, if your memory was long enough; a kind of tragedy. If you knew the story. He saw the chair again. Small and white. He closed his eyes, tasting bitterness in this throat.
Metal ship, stone ship, and the unconventional chair.
“Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”’
No lights burned on the Staberinde. It sat squat against the grey leechings of the false dawn, its dim silhouette a piled cone which only hinted at the concentric loops and lines of its decks and guns. Some effect of the marsh mists between him and the ziggurat of the ship made it look as though its black shape was not attached to the land at all, but floated over it, poised like some threatening dark cloud.
‘Livueta . . .’ he said, annoyed, and pushed himself away from the wall, trying to glance round her at whatever was happening in the hall round the little white chair.
He stumbled another couple of steps, shook Sma off, and turned round once, taking in the parkland; shaped trees and manicured lawns, ornamental walls and delicate pergolas, stone-bordered ponds and shady paths through quiet groves. And, in the distance, set amongst mature trees, the tattered black shape of the Staberinde
‘They’ve made a fucking park out of it,’ he breathed, and stood, swaying, bent slightly at the waist, looking at the battered silhouette of the old warship.
