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this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with
concentrated nobility - such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver's
vacant-looking eyes - facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute
force and brute intelligence) trying to protect these delicate, simpering
products of a millennia's privilege, and never knowing whether I'm doing the
tactically or the strategically right thing.
    The
Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cut-off between
the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in
the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they
ever expected the mammal brain to cope with.
    He
recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning
(itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the
intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were
never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could
be known, or predicted, or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded
very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it
came down to people and problems.
    This
girl was what it came down to, here, this time; barely more than a child, and
trapped in the great stone castle with the rest of the cream or scum (depending
on how you looked at it), to live or die, depending on how well I advise, and
on how capable these clowns are of taking that advice.
    He
looked at the girl's, flame-lit face, and felt something more than distant
desire (for she was attractive), or fatherly protectiveness (for she was so
young, and he, despite his appearance, so old). Call it... he didn't know what.
A realisation; an awareness of the tragedy the whole episode represented; the
break-up of the Rule, the dissolution of power and privilege and the whole
elaborate, top-heavy system this child represented.
    The
muck and dirt, the king with fleas. For theft, mutilation; for the wrong
thoughts, death. An infant mortality rate as astronomical as the
life-expectancy was minute, and the whole grisly, working package wrapped in a
skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the
knowing over the ignorant (and the worst of it was the pattern; the repetition;
the twisted variations of the same depraved theme in so many different places).
    So
this girl, called a princess. Would she die? The war was going against them, he
knew, and the same symbolic grammar that presented her with the prospect of
power if things went well, also dictated her use, her expendability, if all
failed about them. Rank demanded its tribute; the obsequious bow or the mean
stab, according to the outcome of this struggle.
    He
saw her suddenly old, in the flickering firelight. He saw her shut in some
slimed dungeon, waiting, hoping, scabbed with lice and ragged in sack-cloth,
head shaved, eyes dark and hollow in the raw skin, and finally marched out one
snow-filled day, to be nailed to a wall with arrows or bullets, or face the
cold axe blade.
    Or
maybe that too was too romantic. Maybe there would be some desperate flight to
asylum, a lonely and bitter exile spent growing old and worn, barren and
senile, forever remembering the ever more golden old times, composing futile
petitions, hoping for a return, but growing slowly, inevitably, into something
like the pampered uselessness her upbringing had always conditioned her for,
but without any of the compensations she had been bred to expect from her
station.
    With
a feeling of sickness, he saw that she meant nothing. She was just another
irrelevant part of another history, heading - with or without the Culture's
carefully evaluated nudges in what they saw as the right direction - for what
would probably be better times and an easier life for most. But not her, he
suspected, not right at this moment.
    Born
twenty years earlier, she might have expected a good marriage, a