Inversions

arrived recruit who holds the highest opinion of my faculties.'

DeWar thought he detected a sense of cautious relief around the table.

'I'm sure we all feel the same way, sir,' said ZeSpiole with an indulgent smile to VilTere and a cautious one to UrLeyn.

'Very well,' UrLeyn said. 'We shall consider what fresh troops we might be able to send to Ladenscion and we shall tell Ralboute and Simalg to prosecute the war against the barons without respite or negotiation. Gentlemen.' With that, and a perfunctory nod, UrLeyn rose and marched away. DeWar followed.

'Then let me tell you something closer to the truth.'

'Only closer?'

'Sometimes the truth is too much to bear.'

'I have a strong constitution.'

'Yes, but I meant that sometimes it is too much for the teller, not the told.'

'Ah. Well then, tell me what you can.'

'Oh, there is not so much, now I approach it. And it is a common story. All too common. The less I tell you of it the more you could be hearing it from a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand mouths or more.'

'I have a feeling it is not a happy story.'

'Indeed. Anything but. It is just that of women, especially young women, caught up in a war.'

'Ah.,

'You see? A story that scarcely needs to be told. The ingredients imply the finished article, and the method of its making, do they not? It is men who fight wars, wars are fought taking villages, towns and cities, where women tend the hearths, and when the place that they live is taken, so are they. Their honour becomes one of the spoils, their bodies too invaded. That territory taken. So my story is no different from that of tens of thousands of women, regardless of their nation or their tribe. And yet for me it is everything. For me it is the most important thing that ever happened to me. For me it was the end of my life, and what you see before you is like a ghost, a spirit, a mere shade, unsubstantial.'

'Please, Perrund.' He reached out his hands towards her in a gesture that required no response and did not seek to end in a touch. It was instead a movement of sympathy, even supplication. 'If this hurts you so, you don't need to continue for me.'

'Ah, but does it hurt you, DeWar?' she asked, and there was a sharp edge of bitterness and accusation in her voice. 'Does it make you embarrassed? I know you have a regard for me, DeWar. We are friends.' These two sentences were uttered too quickly for him to be able to react. 'Are you upset on my behalf, or your own? Most men would rather not hear what their fellows have done, what people who may indeed be very like them are capable of. Do you prefer not to think about such things, DeWar? Do you think that you are so different? Or do you become secretly excited at the idea?'

'Lady, I gain no benefit or pleasure at all from the subject.'

'Are you sure, DeWar? And if you are, do you really think you speak for the majority of your sex? For are women not supposed to resist even those they would happily surrender to, so that when they resist a more brutal violation how can the man be sure that any struggle, any protestation is not merely for show?'

'You must believe that we are not all the same. And even if all men might be said to have… base urges, we do not all give in to them, or pay them any respect, even in secret. I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear what happened to you…'

'But you have not heard, DeWar. You have not heard at all. I have implied that I was raped. That did not kill me. That alone might have killed the girl I was and replaced her with a woman, with a bitter one, with an angry one, or one who wished to take her own life, or attempt to take the life of those who violated her, or one who simply became mad.

'I think I might have become angry and bitter and I would have hated all men, but I think I would have survived and might have been persuaded, by the good men I knew in my own family and in my own town, and perhaps by one good man in particular who must now for ever remain in my dreams, that all was not lost and the world was not quite so terrible a place.

'But I never had that opportunity to recover, DeWar. I was pushed so far down in my despair I could not even tell in which direction the way back up lay. What happened to me was the least of it, DeWar. I watched my father and my brothers butchered, after they had been forced to watch my mother and my sisters being fucked time after time by a fine and numerous company of high-ranking men. Oh!

You look down! Does my language upset you? Are you offended? Have I violated your ears with my intemperate, soldiers' words?'

'Perrund, you must believe that I am sorry for what happened to you…'

'But why should you be sorry? It was not your fault. You were not there. You assure me that you disapprove, so why should you be sorry?'

'I would be bitter in your place.'

'In my place? How could that be, DeWar? You are a man. In the same place you would be, if not one of the violators, one of those who looked away, or remonstrated with their comrades afterwards.'

'If I was the age you were then, and a pretty youth-'

'Ah, so you can share what happened to me. I see. That is good. I am comforted.'

'Perrund, say anything you want to me. Blame me if it will help, but please believe I…'

'Believe you what, DeWar? I believe you feel sorry for me, but your sympathy stings like salty tears in a wound because I am a proud ghost, you see. Oh yes, a proud ghost. I am an enraged shade, and a guilty one, because I have come to admit to myself that I resent what was done to my family because it hurt me, because I was raised to expect everything to be done for me.

'I loved my parents and my sisters in my own way, but it was not a selfless love. I loved them because they loved me and made me feel special. I was their baby, their chosen beloved. Through their devotion and protection I learned none of the lessons that children usually learn, about the way the world really works and the way that children are used within it, until that single day, that one morning when every fond illusion I held was torn from me and the brutal truth forced into me.

'I had come to expect the best of everything, I had come to believe that the world would always treat me as I had been treated in the past and that those I loved would be there to love me in return. My fury at what happened to my family is partly caused by that expectation, that happy assumption, being defiled and obliterated. That is my guilt.'

'Perrund, you must know that should not be a cause for guilt. What you feel is what any decent child feels when they realise the selfishness they have felt when they were younger still. A selfishness that is only natural to children, especially those who have been loved so intensely. The realisation occurs, it is felt briefly and then it is rightly set aside. You have not been able to set yours aside because of what those men did to you, but-'

'Oh, stop, stop! Do you think I do not know all this? I know it, but I am a ghost, DeWar! I know, but I cannot feel, I cannot learn, I cannot change. I am stuck, I am pinned to that time by that event. I am condemned.'

'There is nothing I can do or say that can alter what happened to you, Perrund. I can only listen, only do what you will let me do.'

'Oh, do I persecute you? Do I make you a victim now, DeWar?'

'No, Perrund.'

'No, Perrund. No, Perrund. Ah, DeWar, the luxury of being able to say No.'

He went, half kneeling, half on his haunches by her then, putting himself very near to her but still not touching her, his knee near hers, his shoulder by her hip, his hands within grasp of hers. He was close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to feel the heat from her body, close enough to feel the hot breath that laboured from her nose and her half-open mouth, close enough for one hot tear to hit her clenched fist and spatter even tinier droplets on to his cheek. He kept his head bowed, and crossed his hands on his raised knee.

The bodyguard DeWar and the court concubine Perrund were in one of the palace's more secret places. It was an old hiding hole in one of the lower levels, a space the size of a cupboard which led off one of the public rooms in the original noble house which had formed the basis of the greater building.

Retained more for sentimental than practical reasons by the first monarch of Tassasen and through a kind of indifference by subsequent rulers, the rooms which had seemed so grand to that first king had long since been judged too small and mean of proportion by future generations and were nowadays used only for storage.