“Well,” she said, “it is done.”
“And much more remains to be done,” Batra said.
“That’ll get done too,” Anaplian said, beginning to lose patience. She was short on patience. She had been told this was a fault. “I imagine,” she added.
The metallic bush rolled back a little, and the face on its surface seemed to nod. “Djan Seriy, I have news,” Batra said.
Something about the way the creature said this made her quail. “Really?” she said, feeling herself battening down, shrinking inward.
“Djan Seriy, I have to tell you that your father is dead and your brother Ferbin may also be deceased. I am sorry. Both for the news itself and to be the one who bears it.”
She sat back. She drew her feet up so that she was quite enclosed in the gently swinging egg of the suspended seat. She took a deep breath and then unfolded herself deliberately. “Well,” she said. “Well.” She looked away.
It was, of course, something she had tried to prepare herself for. Her father was a warrior. He had lived with war and battle all his adult life and he usually led from the front. He was also a politician, though that was a trade he’d had to train himself to do well rather than one that he had taken to entirely naturally and excelled at. She had always known he was likely to die before old age took him. Throughout the first year when she had come to live amongst these strange people that called themselves the Culture she had half expected to hear he was dead and she was required to return for his funeral.
Gradually, as the years had passed, she had stopped worrying about this. And, also gradually, she had started to believe that even when she did hear he was dead it would mean relatively little to her.
You had to study a lot of history before you could become part of Contact, and even more before you were allowed to join Special Circumstances. The more she’d learned of the ways that societies and civilisations tended to develop, and the more examples of other great leaders were presented to her, the less, in many ways, she had thought of her father.
She had realised that he was just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous. Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centuries and millennia by a thousand different species.
This is how power works, how force and authority assert themselves, this is how people are persuaded to behave in ways that are not objectively in their best interests, this is the kind of thing you need to make people believe in, this is how the unequal distribution of scarcity comes into play, at this moment and this, and this…
These were lessons anybody born into the Culture grew up with and accepted as being as natural and obvious as the progression of a star along the Main Sequence, or evolution itself. For somebody like her, coming in from outside, with a set of assumptions built up in a society that was both profoundly different and frankly inferior, such understanding arrived in a more compressed time frame, and with the impact of a blow.
And Ferbin dead too, perhaps. That she had not expected. They had joked before she’d left that he might die before his father, in a knife fight over a gambling game or at the hand of a cuckolded husband, but that had been the sort of thing one said superstitiously, inoculating the future with a weakened strain of afflictive fate.
Poor Ferbin, who had never wanted to be king.
“Do you need time to grieve?” Batra asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she said. “My father. Did he die in battle?”
“Apparently so. Not on the battlefield, but of his wounds, shortly after, before he could receive full medical attention.”
“He’d rather have died on the field itself,” she told Batra. “He must have hated having to settle for second best.” She found that she was both crying a little, and smiling. “When did it happen?” she asked.
“Eleven days ago.” Batra made a bristling motion. “Even news of such importance travels slowly out of a Shellworld.”
“I suppose,” Anaplian said, her expression thoughtful. “And Ferbin?”
“Missing, on the same battlefield.”
Anaplian knew what that meant. The vast majority of those labelled missing in battles either never reappeared at all, or turned up dead. And what had Ferbin being doing anywhere near a battle in the first place? “Do you know where?” she asked. “Exactly how far-flung a province was it?”
“Near the Xiliskine Tower.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Near the Xiliskine Tower,” Batra repeated. “Within sight of Pourl — that is the capital, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Anaplian said. Her mouth was suddenly quite dry. Dear God, it had all fallen away, then. It had all crumbled and gone. She felt a sorrow she barely understood.
“So was this some… Excuse me.” She cleared her throat. “Was this a final stand, in that case?”
And why hadn’t she heard? Why had no one told her things had reached a point of such awful desperation? Were they afraid she’d try to return and use her new-found skills and powers to intercede? Were they worried she’d try to join the fray, was that it? How could they?
“Now, Djan Seriy,” Batra said, “while I have been briefed in this, I cannot claim to have immediate access to an expert database. However, I understand that it was the result of what was expected to be a surprise attack by the Deldeyn.”
“What? From where?” Anaplian said, not even trying to hide her alarm.
“From this Xiliskine Tower.”
“But there’s no way out of…” she began, then put one hand to her mouth, pursing her lips and frowning as she stared at the floor. “They must have opened a new…” she said, more to herself than to Batra. She looked up again. “So, is the Xiliskine controlled by the Aultridia now, or…?”
“First, let me assure you that as I understand it, Pourl and your father’s people are not under threat. The Deldeyn are the ones facing disaster.”
Anaplian’s frown deepened, even as the rest of her body showed signs of relaxing. “How so?”
“Your father had effectively completed his Wars of Unity, as he termed them.”
“Really?” She felt a surge of relief and a perverse urge to laugh. “He did keep busy.”
“The Deldeyn would appear to have assumed that they’d be his next target. They therefore staged what they hoped would be a decisive, pre-emptive surprise attack on your father’s capital city, having been convinced by the — Oct? Inheritors?”
“Synonyms.” Anaplian flapped one hand again. “Either.”
“That they, the Oct, would deliver the Deldeyn forces in secret to where a new portal would be opened in the Xiliskine Tower through which they might effect such an attack, taking the city. This was a ruse, and one which the Sarl were party to. Your father’s forces were waiting for the Deldeyn and destroyed them.”
Anaplian looked confused. “Why were the Oct deceiving the Deldeyn?”
“This is still a matter for conjecture, apparently.”
“And the Aultridia?”
“The other Conducer species. They have backed the Deldeyn in the past. They are believed to be considering military and diplomatic action against the Oct.”
“Hmm. So why…?” Anaplian shook her head once more. “What is going on back there?” she asked. Again, Jerle Batra suspected this question was not really directed at him. He let her continue. “So, Ferbin’s in charge — no, of course, he’s probably dead too. Oramen, then?” she asked, looking worried and sceptical at once.