Chapter 5 #4
Revenge, after all, is the Mesoge way. I was brought up on it.
In the Mesoge, out of ten men who live beyond the age of twelve, at least one will be killed in a feud.
I have no idea why we do that, but we do.
In the Mesoge, everything is against you – the landscape, the weather, the absentee landlord’s bailiff, the far-distant government’s recruiting sergeants, the tax collectors, wolves, bears, fowl pest, footrot and the Undead.
So naturally, we voluntarily pay a tithe of our precious manpower to our own insatiable lust for revenge.
Ticoniaster of Scona wrote that there are two basic types of morality: good versus evil, and honour versus shame.
Blood feuds, he wrote, are an extreme manifestation of an ethos that prizes honour above all else.
Far be it from me to contradict Ticoniaster, but I don’t think so.
In the Mesoge, I think we turn on each other and tear each other apart because at least it’s our decision, our choice.
When everything else is out of your control, it makes a kind of sense.
I’m not proud of where I’m from and what shaped me.
I’m not proud of anything, to be perfectly honest with you.
Nor do I deny my origin. I think the only reason I’m reluctant to use my fists is because I can hurt people so much more effectively with words.
The Mesoge way, with the benefit of a monastery education.
She – I realised I was assuming the thing occupying Svangerd’s body was female, which probably says something about me – did me the favour of making me admit that to myself, after thirty years of self-deception.
Thanks a lot. The surgeon’s knife can’t help shedding blood, after all.
Saloninus once wrote a play (now lost) in which an assassin stabs a victim, but instead of killing him, he cuts out a tumour that would otherwise have been fatal.
According to our sources, there was also a comedy subplot about three men and a dancing bear, but the sources are not, alas, reliable.
Anyway. I sulked all the way from the Devil’s Chair to Ogier, and then it rained non-stop for two days and nights.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the road between Ogier and Nithdale.
In high summer it’s more or less the earthly paradise.
The road runs along the top of an extended ridge, with the green valleys on one side and the lake on the other; it’s flat, easy going, and when the heather and the gorse are in bloom and the larks are whirring about, it’s gorgeous up there, particularly if you cherish the peace and quiet that comes with empty space and no people.
When it’s chucking it down, on the other hand, it’s not quite so idyllic.
There’s no shelter, the wind drives each raindrop into the sodden fibres of your clothes like a nail, the track turns to runny mud and you can’t see twenty yards ahead through the swirling clouds of moisture.
You reach the point where you know you can’t get any wetter, not even if you roll down the hill and jump in the lake, so all you can do is resign yourself to being a temporary amphibian and try and think about something else.
“Is this normal?” she asked.
“You what?”
“This.”
“You mean the rain? Yes, for this time of the year.”
“Heavens.” I noticed that she’d moved up from riding behind me to beside me. “I know this sounds silly, but I’ve never been in heavy rain before. Not for days at a time.”
I shrugged. “Why should you, if you come from the south?”
“I come from everywhere.” She sounded like something was bugging her. Like I cared. “So presumably I’ve been here before, at some point. And presumably it’s always been like this up here, so presumably I’ve been out in it. But if I have, I don’t remember it. I find that odd.”
Two minutes ago, if you’d asked me, I’d have told you the last thing I wanted to do was talk to her. “Why?”
“I don’t forget things. At least, I’m not supposed to.”
“So maybe you’ve never been here before. More than likely, I’d imagine. The world’s a big place.”
“Bigger than you could possibly imagine. And I’ve been everywhere. I know I have. But this – I don’t think I could ever forget being soaked to the skin like this.”
Curiosity: it kills cats and drives men to write books, or at least it did once upon a time, when the world was young and there were giants in the land. “Then you must have been here in summer,” I said. “I don’t think you ever got around to answering my question. What are you?”
“Ah. That’d be telling.”
“Yes, it would. Tell me.”
She let go a long sigh. “The hell with it, why not? Promise you won’t tell anyone.”
“I swear by almighty God.”
“In whom you don’t believe, fine. But nobody’s ever going to listen to a word you say, because you’re a self-proclaimed atheist. All right, then, what am I? I’m a demon.”
I let that hang in the air for a while before I said anything.
“If you say so,” I said. “And according to Orosian there’s a sort of lizard somewhere in the great southern desert called a Blemmyan Devil.
It’s nine feet long, it’s got moss growing on its back and it hardly ever moves. What’s in a name?”
“No,” she said, “actually there isn’t. Orosian copied the story from Pachimer, who read it in an old book of traveller’s tales, written by a clerk who’d never been outside the monastery grounds in his life, who based it on a bit in Stichibald’s Natural History, in which he describes the three-foot-long lizards of north-eastern Blemmya.
And that, as your grandmother used to say, is how tales get about. ”
“The point being,” I said, “you can assign the name demon to the species you belong to, but that doesn’t mean anything. Look at that theatre we passed a while back. They started calling it the Devil’s Chair, but it was a theatre.”
“I think I explained about that.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I bet you anything you like it was called that long before your people started using it as a base of operations, if they ever did, bearing in mind I’ve only got your word for it.
I bet they started using it because it had a really bad reputation with the locals, so they knew nobody would go there and see what they were up to. ”
“You bet me anything I like? All right. What I’d like is for you to try and be a bit more civil.”
“It wasn’t a real bet. It was a figure of speech.”
“Please?” she said. “Look, I don’t mean you any harm.
Even if I did, I’m not allowed to do you any harm.
And we’ve still got a long way to go together, and I’ve been stuck in a really dreary book for centuries, and I have to admit, I like having someone to talk to.
Preferably one of the very few people alive in this era of the world who isn’t pig ignorant and congenitally stupid. ”
“Fuck you,” I said. “You’re a demon.”
“Like you said, what’s in a name?” Under the sodden hood of her habit she was grinning.
Svangerd very rarely grins, except in a vulpine manner that betokens no good to anybody.
That’s a great shame, because her grin is quite heartbreakingly lovely.
“There,” she said. “Caught you out in a circular argument. Five points to me and a free go.”
I felt something give way inside me; not quite as intense as a rib breaking, but much more frightening. “Answer my question,” I said. “Properly. What are you?”
“All right.” She paused for a moment. “Let’s see. What am I? Well, I’m alive, that’s a good start. I know I’m alive, which doesn’t always follow. I’m very old, though I don’t seem to suffer from ageing. I don’t think death applies to me. Have you ever heard of entropy?”
“No.”
“Forget I mentioned it.” She paused for a moment, marshalling her thoughts.
I do that. It annoys Svangerd enormously.
“I don’t think I have a body of my own. Either I live in other people’s bodies or I just am, if that makes any sense to you, no, of course it doesn’t, sorry.
It’s something I can do. Probably the closest you’ve ever been to that is plays, in a theatre. ”
“I’ve never seen a play in a theatre. We don’t have them any more.”
“No, of course you don’t, I forgot. Well, in a theatre you sit in a seat and watch things happen in front of you.
That’s what I do, when I’m not inside a body.
It’s not the same, of course, because you would still have arms and legs and a head and lungs and feet, but you’re sitting still for two hours scarcely using them, so you forget about them for a while.
You’re not, what’s the word, interacting.
Physically, with what’s going on. You’re just a spectator. Same with me.”
“It sounds horrible.”
“Not when you’re used to it. Actually, it’s not so much being used to it as that being my natural state.
Being in a body is what I’ve grown used to.
Anyway, moving on. I can fly, like a bird.
I can swim underwater, like a fish. I can read what people are thinking, though I try not to unless it’s necessary, because where there’s more than three or four people together, it’s like trying to walk through brambles.
I know everything that’s going on, or I could do, if I chose to listen. ”
“Listen?”