‘I’ll put it to them, but to be honest, Trout, I think the fight’s out of this bunch.’
‘You begin to speak like a soldier again, milord. I’ve missed that. I’ll get some wood.’
Kagamandra watched the man depart.
From almost directly above came a rhythmic thumping, while clanging and Lout’s ongoing harangue continued in the kitchen. Outside, children and beasts frolicked in the snow.
He rubbed at his face. Ah, Sharenas. I cannot stay in one place, it seems. Snapping jaws upon my flanks, I am inclined to bolt.
My betrothed? I cannot say. Together and apart, we travel lost to each other, as the fates demand.
This keep seems paltry and small. Not a place she could call home, and I’ll not insult her with the offer.
A child outside attempted a howl, and moments later the hostages gave answer.
Shivering, Kagamandra looked to the ebbing fire, but found little heat there. Trout had best hurry with that wood.
NINETEEN
‘RESTITUTION,’ SAID VATHA URUSANDER, ‘SEEMS SUCH A simple concept. A past wrong made right, even should generations span the injustice. Even if questions of personal culpability no longer obtain, there are the spoils of the crime to consider.’
Renarr slid her gaze from her adoptive father where he stood by the window, over to young Sheltatha Lore, who had a way of making adolescence itself a triumph. Long limbs draped upon the divan, her slim torso slightly curled in feline grace – as if she but awaited the sculptor and the chisel, the unblinking eye finding its myriad obsessions. ‘Art,’ Gallan once said, ‘is the sweet language of obsession.’ Renarr thought that she’d begun to comprehend the poet’s assertion, as she idly gave herself the artist’s eye when looking upon her not-so-innocent charge.
In the meantime, Urusander continued. ‘A concept may seem simple, until its careful consideration unveils unending complications. How does one measure such spoils when cause and effect settle one upon the other in endless repetition, like sediments in stone? Raise up that first cause like a spire – the years after will see it weathered to a stub, its solidity reduced to grains, its height levelled amidst the heaps of its own detritus. Even then, how does one assign a value to all that was gained, over all that was potentially lost? Is innocence worth more than knowing? Is freedom worth more than seeming necessity? What of privilege and greed? And power and force? Are they a match in coin, or weight of gold, to destitution and loss? Helplessness and impotence?’
Plucking at some thread or lint, Sheltatha Lore sighed. ‘Dear me, milord, surely you comprehend that restitution holds a thousand meanings, ten thousand – numbers unending, in fact.’ One supple arm reached out and down to collect up the goblet of wine, which she brought to her lips. A careless mouthful, and then, ‘What about the victim indifferent to gold? Contemptuous of coin? Or the one whose beliefs reject vengeance? What of the Denier in the forest who can only weep for the loss of trees and the deaths of loved ones? How many wagons filled with loot will satisfy him or her? How many newly planted trees, or rebuilt huts? How many monuments to honour their dead? Restitution,’ she said, after another mouthful of wine, ‘may live in the present, promising a just future, but it dwells in the sordid past. The word itself ignores the lesson of its necessity, and so will breed its own generations. But at the last, milord, the only restitution won in the final bargain will be that of the wild’s return, to all that civilization destroyed and enslaved. Restitution is not found in the words of compensation, guilt, and wretched bargaining. It is found in the silence of healing, and that silence only comes when the criminals and their ilk, their very civilization, are gone.’
Urusander turned, with something like delight in his eyes. ‘A sound argument, Sheltatha Lore. I will give your words some thought.’ He turned to Renarr. ‘She is your student? You have many talents indeed, Renarr, to awaken such a lively mind.’
Sheltatha snorted. ‘This lively mind, milord, was forged in neglect and abuse, long before I crossed paths with Renarr. Isn’t that always the way? Isolation hones the inner voice, the unspoken dialogue between the selves – and surely there are many selves within each of us. Some uglier than others.’
There was something of the challenge in Sheltatha’s tone.
‘I see little that is ugly in you,’ Urusander said quietly.
‘Youth is the soul’s disguise, milord. It serves, until it is used up. For now, sir, y
ou are seduced by what you see. What if I told you that a vicious, venal demon hides within me? A thing of scars remembering every wound?’
‘Then, perhaps,’ said Urusander, turning once more to the window, ‘I would welcome you to our company.’
Sighing, Renarr settled back in her chair. ‘Your soldiers don’t want restitution, Father. What they lost can’t be returned to them. No, they want wealth, and land. They want to carve up the holdings of the nobles. They want titles. And see how, for all their simple greed, they are now painted white, as if their every squalid want has been blessed. Is it any wonder they grow bold?’
‘I am subjected to their demands daily, Renarr,’ Urusander replied. ‘If this not be a burden I accept, then someone else surely will.’
‘Hunn Raal,’ said Sheltatha Lore, leaning over to refill her goblet. ‘Now there’s an ugly man.’
‘The Legion readies to march,’ Urusander said, eyes still on whatever had caught his attention through the window. ‘Hallyd Bahann’s delay in returning will no longer hold us back.’
Renarr studied her adoptive father for a moment, and then said, ‘Not by your command? Not in answer to your will? Will you simply be pulled along, swept up in this flood of self-serving indignation?’
‘You advise I defy the wishes of my soldiers?’
‘I advise nothing,’ she replied.
‘No,’ murmured Sheltatha Lore, ‘she’s much too subtle to do that.’
‘In the early morning,’ Urusander said, ‘I can look down upon the pickets. The camp’s guards, standing so still in the whiteness. As if carved from marble. I stand here, a sculptor of these creations, the maker of an army of stone. Three thousand stone hearts in three thousand stone breasts. And I tremble – as I have always done, when I am about to give the command to march, to find battle, to see my creations shattered, broken.’ He lifted a hand and settled it against the cold lead pane. ‘This is a dreadful truth: much as I would like to imagine an army of such perfection that it need never draw a blade, need never deliver death and have death delivered unto it, I recognize the brutal truth. Each and every soldier out there has had his or her flesh hacked away, everything soft – all gone. Leaving nothing but stone, cold and hard. Intent on feeling nothing. Existing only in order to destroy.’