"Hmm. Well, on the other hand," he said, "I suppose it is only fair." He put down his dominoes on the table, put his hands on his knees and stared over the top of Ajayi's head. "Strangely similar to yours, in a way... might be a common link. There was this gun involved... anyway." He cleared his throat again, putting his fist to his mouth and coughing. He was still staring over his companion's head, as though the red crow was still on the broken flagpole above them and he was addressing it, not the woman.
"Well, anyway... suffice to say that after a long... ahm... and strenuous campaign... and not one we had expected to survive really, I might add, I was with others of our guard corps on the roof of... this big palace in this city. There were celebrations; the... ahm... this dignitary... well, a prince actually; this was one of those backward places as well, and we were limited by the rules to fairly crude weapons and equipment and stuff... well this prince was due to appear on..." Quiss looked briefly at Ajayi, then around at the balcony they sat on,'... on a sort of balcony thing like this," he said lamely. He cleared his throat again.
"Well, there was this huge crowd waiting to greet the prince; maybe a million locals, all armed to the mandibles with pitchforks and muskets and things - but all more or less on our side, and anyway glad the fighting was over - and we were guarding the palace roof with a few unobtrusive missiles, just in case there was some desperate last-ditch aircraft attack, not that that was very likely, we thought.
"We were all a bit... umm... happy, I suppose, and we were celebrating too, and in high spirits anyway, glad to be alive, and we had some drink... and two of us - this other captain and me -were having a lark, daring each other to walk along this sort of balustrade thing on the roof, looking over the crowd, above the balcony where this prince and his cronies were going to appear, and we were closing our eyes and walking along, and standing on one leg and drinking, and using these big machine-guns to balance ourselves... sounds a bit undisciplined, I know, but like I say..." Quiss coughed.
"This other captain and myself, we collided while we were walking along the parapet; walked right into each other while our eyes were closed... of course, our comrades thought it was a great laugh, but while the other fellow was falling towards the roof and into the arms of these other drunken types, I was falling the other way, over the edge of the roof. All there was down that way was the balcony about ten metres down, and then the ground about twenty metres beneath that. I was off-balance, going over, my comrades were out of reach; I mean that was it; I was going to plummet right down to my death. I was a goner." Quiss looked briefly at Ajayi, his expression one of pained sincerity, then he looked away again and continued.
"But... well, like I said, I was holding this big machine gun, and just sort of without thinking about it, pure instinct I suppose, I... I brought this big machine-gun round, and pointed it down the way, and fired it off." Quiss cleared his throat loudly, shaking his head and narrowing his eyes. Thing was set on anti-aircraft rate; just about leapt out of my hands. Could barely control it, but the recoil was enough to bring me upright again, let me get my balance on the parapet before the magazine ran out of bullets. So I was saved.
"Only trouble was, the prince and his retinue had just come out on to the balcony beneath me as this was happening, and got caught in this hail of fragging AA shells that bugger of a gun had sprayed all over the place. Killed the prince and quite a few of his pals, not to mention several dozen in the crowd underneath.
"Crowd got very annoyed. Pandemonium; riot and mayhem. Palace was sacked. Cost us forty days and half a brigade to calm the upset. That's it." Quiss shrugged, looked down at the table.
"Yours sounds more dramatic," Ajayi said, trying not to sound amused. "Back from the brink of death." She played a domino.
"Oh, yes," Quiss said, and his eyes took on a misty, distant expression as he looked up, "I felt really great for about half a second."
Ajayi smiled, "So, it would appear we share an element of slightly thoughtless irresponsibility, and projectile weapons." She looked up at the ramshackle heights of the castle above them. "The links don't seem all that close, but there you are. Here we are. Does any of this actually help us?"
"No," Quiss said, shaking his great grey head sadly, "I don't think so."
"Still," Ajayi said, "I'm glad we both know now."
"Yes," Quiss said, placing his second last piece. He coughed. "Sorry I ah... laughed. Shouldn't have. Bad form. Apologies."
His head was down, so he did not see Ajayi smile at him, a look of real affection on her old, lined face. "As you say, Quiss," she said, smiling quietly.
Her stomach rumbled. It must be nearly mealtime. A waiter would probably appear soon. Sometimes the waiters took their orders and brought what was ordered, sometimes they brought something quite different, sometimes they didn't take their orders but arrived with what they probably would have ordered anyway. Often they brought far too much food and stood around looking confused, as though looking for other people to serve. At least the times of the meals were relatively predictable, and the food satisfying, usually.
She wanted a break from the games anyway. She could take only so much of this purposeless placing of ivory pieces. After a while she got bored and restless and wanted to do something else.
For a while, when her stiff back and sore leg permitted, she had explored the castle, going off for long walks, at first always with Quiss, who knew the rough lay-out of the place better, then later mostly by herself. Her bones and joints still complained about climbing stairs, but she ignored the pain as best she could and anyway took frequent rests, and trudged through vast areas of the castle, exploring its turrets and rooms and battlements, shafts and halls. She preferred to keep to the upper levels, where there were less people around and the feeling of the castle was more... sane, she supposed.
Lower down, Quiss had told her, things got more chaotic. The kitchens were the worst, in some ways, but there were even stranger places, places Quiss didn't like talking about (she suspected this was just him enjoying the feeling of power which exclusive knowledge gives to people, but perhaps in some clumsy way he thought he was protecting her from something. He meant well; she would allow him this).
Eventually, though, the attraction of the castle's tortuous internal geography palled on her, and now she restricted herself to only very occasional sallies, mostly conducted - as near as possible - on the same level, just to stretch her legs. The very inexhaustibility of the castle's ever-changing topography depressed her after a while, whereas at first it had seemed encouraging that one could never know the place perfectly, that it would never be boring, that it was always constantly changing; falling down, being rebuilt, altered and redesigned. Stuck all the time in a human frame which would not change, imprisoned in this one age, this cage of cells, the analogue of organic change and growth and decay which the castle exhibited seemed somehow unfair; an unpleasant reminder of something she might never have again.
Now she filled up her spare time with reading. She took books from the interior walls of the castle and read them. They were in many different languages, most of them tongues from the nameless planet which was the castle's Subject and from where all the books seemed to originate. These languages she could not understand.
Some of the books, however, appeared to have been produced on this single globe as translations into other - alien - languages, some of which Ajayi could to varying degrees understand. She often wondered, as she read, if perhaps the name of the Subject world was some sort of clue; it had been carefully removed from any and every book in the castle which mentioned it, the word cut out from each page it had been written on.