“What was it you argued about, mistress?”
“Lots of things, or lots of aspects of the same thing. Whether the might beyond might had a right to impose its values on others.” She looked at my puzzled expression and laughed. “We argued about here, for one thing.”
“Here, mistress?” I asked, looking around.
“About—” She seemed to catch herself, then said, “About Haspide, the Empire. About this whole other hemisphere.” She shrugged. “I won’t bore you with the details. In the end I left and he stayed, though I did hear later that he too sailed away, some time after I did.”
“Do you regret coming here now, mistress?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “For most of the voyage to Cuskery I did… but the equator signalled a change, as they say it often does, and since then, no. I still miss my family and friends, but I am not sorry now that I made the decision.”
“Do you think you will ever go back, mistress?”
“I have no idea, Oelph.” Her expression was troubled and hopeful at once. Then she produced another smile for me. “I am the doctor to the King, after all. I would consider that I have not done my job properly if he would let me leave. I may be forced to look after him until he’s an old man, or until he grows displeased with me because I grow whiskers on my lips and my hair thins on my head and my breath smells, and he has my head chopped off because I interrupt him once too often. Then you might have to become his doctor.”
“Oh, mistress,” was all I could say.
“I don’t know, Oelph,” she confided in me. “I’m not so sure about making plans. I’ll wait and see which way fate takes me. If Providence, or whatever we wish to call it, has me stay, then I’ll stay. If it somehow calls me back to Drezen, I’ll go.” She dipped her head towards me and with what she probably thought was a conspiratorial look said, “Who knows, my destiny might lead me back through Equatorial Cuskery. I might get to see my handsome Sea Company captain again.” She winked at me.
“Was the land of Drezen much affected by the rocks from the sky, mistress?” I asked.
She did not seem to heed my tone, which I had worried might seem excessively frosty. “More than here in Haspidus,” she said. “But much less than the Inlands of the Empire. One city on a far northern island was washed almost entirely away by a wave, killing ten or more thousand people, and some ships were lost, and of course the crop yields all over were down for a couple of growing seasons; so the farmers moaned, but then the farmers always do. No, we escaped relatively lightly.”
“Do you think it was the work of the gods, mistress? There are those who say that Providence was punishing us for something, or perhaps just punishing the Empire. Others hold that it was the work of the old gods, and that they are coming back. What do you think?”
“I think it could be any of those things, Oelph,” the Doctor said thoughtfully. “Though there are some people in Drezen — philosophers — who have a much more bleak explanation, mind you.”
“Which is what, mistress?”
“That such things happen for no reason at all.”
“No reason?”
“No reason beyond the workings of pure chance.”
I thought about this. “Do they not think that there is good and bad? And that one deserves to be emulated and the other not, but rather punished?”
“A very small number would say that there are no such entities. Most agree there are, but that they only exist in our minds. The world itself, without us, does not recognise such things, just because they are not things, they are ideas, and the world contained no ideas until people came along.”
“So they believe that Man was not created with the world?”
“That’s right. Or at least not people with wits.”
“Are they then Seigenists? Do they believe that the Lesser Sun created us?”
“Some would say it did. They would claim that people were once no more than animals and that we too used to fall asleep promptly when Xamis set, and rise when it rose. Some believe that all we are is light, that the light of Xamis holds the world together like an idea, like a hugely complicated dream, and the light of Seigen is the very expression of us as thinking beings.”
I tried to comprehend this curious concept, and was just starting to decide that it was not so different from normal beliefs when the Doctor asked suddenly, “What do you believe in, Oelph?”
Her face, turned to me, was the colour of the soft, tawny dusk. Seigen-light caught fallen wisps of her half-curled red hair.
“What? Why, what all other civil people believe, mistress,” I said, before thinking that perhaps she, coming from Drezen where they obviously had some odd ideas, might believe something quite different. “That is to say, what people hereabouts, that is in Haspidus…”
“Yes, but what do you personally believe?”
I frowned at her, an expression such a graceful, gentle face did not deserve to have directed at it. Did the Doctor really imagine that everybody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher. “I believe in Providence, mistress.”
“But when you say Providence, do you really mean god?”
“No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,” I said.
I was trying not to insult her by sounding as though I was talking to a child. I had experienced aspects of the Doctor’s naïveté before, and ascribed it to simple ignorance of the manner in which matters were organised in what was to her a foreign land, but even after the best part of a year it appeared there were still subjects that each of us assumed we viewed in a mutual light and from a similar perspective which in fact we saw quite differently. “The laws of Nature determine the ordering of the physical world and the laws of Man determine the ordering of society, mistress.”
“Hmm,” she said, with an expression that might have been simply thoughtful or tinged with scepticism.
“One set of laws grows out of the other as do plants from the common clay,” I added, remembering something I’d been taught in Natural Philosophy (my determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success).
“Which is not so dissimilar to the light of Xamis ordering the major part of the world, and that of Seigen illuminating the human,” she mused, staring towards the sunset again.
“I suppose not, mistress,” I agreed, struggling to follow.
“Ha,” she said. “All very interesting.”
“Yes, mistress,” I said, dutifully.
Adlain: Duke Walen. A pleasure, as ever. Welcome to my humble tent. Please.
Walen: Adlain.
A: Some wine? What about food? Have you eaten?
W: A glass, thank you.
A: Wine. I’ll take some too. Thank you, Epline. So, you are well?
W: Well enough. You?
A: Fine.
W: I wonder, could you…?
A: What, Epline? Yes, of course. Epline, would you…? I’ll call… Now then, Walen?… There is nobody else here.
W: Hmm. Very well. This doctor. Vosill.
A: Still her, eh, dear Duke? This is becoming an obsession. Do you really find her that interesting? Perhaps you ought to tell her. She may prefer older men.
W: Mocking the wisdom that comes with age is a fit sport only for those who expect never to attain much of it themselves, Adlain. You know the substance of my complaint.
A: I regret I don’t, Duke.
W: But you have told me of your own doubts. Did you not have her writing checked in case it was a code or something similar?