‘By all means,’ replied the voice indulgently. ‘After all, it might work. Forgive me if I don’t join you, though. I’m concentrating on my breathing and I don’t want to lose the rhythm.’
Temrai tried to shout; but the volume of sound he managed to produce was pitiful, more like a cat yowling, and dirt was getting in his mouth. He managed to spit most of it out and swallowed the rest. The effort involved was shattering.
‘I’d give it a rest if I were you,’ the voice advised him. ‘Either they’ll find us or they won’t; just for once, accept the fact that there’s nothing you can do. Relax. You could try meditating.’
‘Meditating?’
‘Seriously. A philosopher I used to know taught me how to do it. Basically it’s all about ignoring your body, making yourself forget it’s there. Of course, the philosopher reckoned it was all about merging your consciousness with the flow of the Principle, but you don’t have to bother with that stuff if you don’t want to. I use it to make myself go to sleep when I’m fidgety.’
‘All right,’ Temrai said dubiously. ‘But I don’t think going to sleep would be terribly clever right now. We might forget to breathe, something like that.’
‘You don’t have to go to sleep, that’s just one of the options. You can also use it to cope with pain, for example, like if you were laid up somewhere with a broken leg.’
‘All right,’ Temrai repeated. ‘How do you do it, then?’
The voice laughed. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ it said. ‘Easy enough to do when you know how, but hard to put into words. You’ve got to convince yourself that your body isn’t really there; bit by bit’s easiest. I usually start with my feet and work up.’
Temrai could remember thinking. No, I don’t think I’ll bother with that; and the next thing he felt was a surge of panic, flaring and quickly subsiding, when he realised that he didn’t seem to have a body any more. But the sensation was pleasant, exhilarating even; he was breathing, but he couldn’t feel the crushing weight of the earth or the pain in his chest. Nor did he have an oppressive sense of being in any one place (how tiresome that would be, to be in only one place at a time; he could vaguely remember what it had been like, and couldn’t imagine how he’d managed to cope with it all these years) -
‘Feeling better?’
‘Much,’ Temrai replied. ‘I must see if I can remember how to do this once we get out of here.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Like a head,’ Temrai replied. ‘A head without a body. But it’s all right. In fact it’s better. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ the voice said. ‘It’s one of the more useful things I’ve picked up in the course of a somewhat adventurous life.’
‘Really?’ Temrai couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or shut. ‘I could get to like being just a head,’ he said.
The voice laughed; it was definitely familiar, almost disturbingly so. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ it said. ‘You never know who’s listening. Favourite saying of my father’s, that was. He was a very superstitious man, in some respects. Not that it did him much good, of course, but that’s another story.’
Temrai had an unpleasant feeling that he knew whose the voice was; except that it wasn’t possible. At least, it was possible, but highly unlikely. ‘Excuse me asking,’ he said, ‘but who…?’
And then he could hear something overhead; he felt himself fall back into his body (his painful, awkward body) like a boy falling out of a tree. There were voices, muffled and far away, and the scrape of metal in dirt, a ringing noise as a shovel-blade fouled a stone. He tried to call out, and realised that his mouth was full of dirt and he couldn’t make a sound.
‘Temrai?’ someone said. ‘Yes, it’s him, over here. I think he’s dead.’
‘We’ll see about that. Gods, I could do without this fucking dust.’
They had to go slowly, for fear of cutting him up or breaking his bones with their picks and shovels. For a long time he wasn’t able to see anything, even though he was sure his eyes were open. He had the worst headache he’d ever had in his life.
‘It’s all right, he’s alive,’ someone called out; and a trebuchet shot pitched nearby, sending a tremor through the ground. ‘Gently now, he may have broken bones. Temrai, can you hear me?’
‘Yes,’ Temrai said, spitting out the words along with a lot of dirt. ‘And please don’t shout, my head’s splitting.’
They lugged him out and put him on a plank; he couldn’t control his arms or legs, and they flopped off and hung over the side. ‘Was there anybody with you?’ one of them asked.
Temrai tried to smile. ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied.
But he was wrong; before they took him away, he heard them shouting to each other – over here, quick, yes he’s still alive. ‘Who is it?’ he asked.
One of the stretcher-bearers called out the question. ‘It’s the spy,’ someone answered. ‘What’s his name? Dassascai. You know, the cook’s nephew.’
Temrai frowned. ‘What did he say?’ he asked.
‘Dassascai,’ the bearer replied. ‘You know-’
‘The spy, yes.’ Temrai sounded confused. ‘Well, if it hadn’t been for him-That’s odd, I could have sworn it was someone else.’
‘I thought you said there was nobody in there with you.’
‘I was mistaken,’ Temrai said. ‘Look, make sure they take care of him, all right?’
They took care of him, as was only proper with someone who’d apparently saved the King’s life (though how he’d managed to do this wasn’t immediately obvious). They dug him out and carried him back to his tent; there were no broken bones, he’d be up and about again in no time.
An oddity, which nobody commented on, was the fact that when they pulled him out he was holding an arrow (just an ordinary Imperial-issue bodkinhead), and when they tried to take it from him he clung on to it as if his life depended on it.
One ship; not an armada or a flotilla, not a horizon crammed with sails, just one small sloop (square-rigged, primitive, limping into the Drutz after a tussle with a seasonal squall) bringing the provincial office’s envoy to the Island.
There was something of a show of strength on the quay to meet him; a platoon of the newly recruited Civil Guard; another platoon from the Ship-Owners’ even more recently recruited National Security Association; and a mob of cut-throats, thieves and housebreakers (by definition) from the Merchant Seamen’s Guild. The three rival units stood still and quiet, staring at the incoming ship and each other with loathing and distrust, while First Citizen Venart Auzeil (in a floor-length red velvet gown and a big wide-brimmed red hat; he’d refused point blank to wear the almost-crown they’d made for him out of bent gold wire and a few scraps of salvaged rabbit fur) nervously picked at a loose thread in his cuff and wondered what was really going on. Flanking him were Ranvaut Votz (for the Ship-Owners’) and a certain Jeslin Perdut (for the Guild), both grimly eyes-front for fear of seeing the other and having to acknowledge their presence. Finally, there was a band – to be precise, two flautists, a fiddler, a rebec player and a girl with a triangle. Venart had no idea where they’d suddenly materialised from, but they looked so excited to be there that he hadn’t the heart to tell them to push off.
The ship nuzzled its way in, and a startled-looking man threw a rope across before scuttling away to the stern; something about the expression on his face suggested that the show of strength was working rather too well. Venart noticed this and, hoping to reassure the visitors, turned to the rebec player and muttered, ‘Play something.’ The band immediately launched into ‘Never More Will I See My True Love’ (the majority choice) and ‘The Sausage-Maker’s Dog’ (the favoured selection of the fiddler and the girl with the triangle) simultaneously. The resulting counterpoint was striking, but hardly calculated to reassure the apprehensive.
‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ muttered Ranvaut Votz loudly, thereby reinforcing Venart’s suspicion that the band’s presence had something to do with the Guild. ‘Tell them to stop that awful noise before it constitutes an act of war.’