Iain Banks Culture 06 Inversions

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something which I could not make out, then he ordered her stripped and placed
on an iron bed by the brazier. As the Doctor was manhandled by the two guards
who had brought her to this awful place, the torturer slowly undid and pulled
off his thick leather apron, and then began to unbutton his trousers in a
deliberate, reverential manner. He watched the two guards
four eventually, for the Doctor put up a remarkably powerful fight as they
stripped my mistress naked.
And so I saw what I had always hoped to see, and was able to view what I had
envisaged during many hundreds of shameful soporific imaginings.
The Doctor, nude.
And it meant nothing. She was struggling, pulling and heaving and trying to
punch and kick and bite, her skin mottled with exertion, her face hot with
tears and reddened with fear and fury. This was no soft dream of lust. Here
was no emollient vision of loveliness.
Here was a woman about to be violated in the most base and disgusting ways
possible, and then tortured, and then, eventually, killed. She knew this as
well as I, and as well as
Ralinge and his pair of assistants did, and as well as the guards who attended
us.
What was my most fervent hope at that point?
It was that they did not know of my devotion to her. If they thought me
indifferent, I
might only hear her screams. If they thought for a moment, for the merest
heart-beat, that
I loved her, then the very rules of their profession would require that my
eyelids be cut out and I would be forced to watch her every torment.
Her clothes were thrown away, landing in a heap in one corner by a bench.
Something clinked. Master Ralinge looked at the Doctor as she was secured,
quite naked, to the iron bed frame. He. looked down at his manhood, stroking
it, then he dismissed the guards.
They looked both disappointed and relieved. One of Ralinge's assistants locked
the chamber door behind them. There was upon Ralinge's face a bright and
shining, almost luminescent smile as he moved towards her.
The Doctor's dark clothes settled where they had fallen.
My eyes filled with tears, thinking of how she had thought to check her
progress as she had left her apartments, being so careful as to go back and
pick up that stupid, blunt and useless dagger that she carried with her
whenever she remembered. What good could that do her now?
Master Ralinge said the first words that I could recall in detail since the
Doctor had read out the note in her apartments, half a bell and an entire
age earlier.
'First things first, madam,' he said. He climbed up on to the bed the Doctor
had been strapped to, his swollen manhood held poised within one fist.
The Doctor looked into his eyes quite calmly. She made a clicking noise with
her mouth and her face took on a look of disappointment. 'Ah,' she said,
matter-of-factly. 'So you are serious.' And she smiled. Smiled!
Then she said something that sounded like an instruction in a language I did
not know. It was not the language she had used with the gaan Kuduhn, a day
earlier. It was a different kind of language. A language from somewhere, I
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thought, even as I heard it and closed my eyes for I could not bear to see
what was going to happen next beyond even far
Drezen. A language from nowhere.
And, well, what happened next?
How many times I have tried to explain it, how many times I have attempted to
make sense of it. Not so much for others, but for myself.
My eyes as I hope will seem understandable given the feelings I lave
attempted to imply through this journal were closed at the time. I simply
did not see what happened during the next few heart-beats.
I heard a whirring noise. A noise like a waterfall, a noise like a sudden
wind, like an arrow as it passes nearby one's ear. Then a long gasp which I
realised later must in reality have been two gasps, but in any case a long
exhalation of sound, and then a thud, a punch-like concussion of what, in
retrospect, was air and flesh and bone and . . . what?
More bone? Metal? Wood?
Metal, I think.
Who knows?
I felt a strange, dizzying sensation. I may have been senseless, for a while.
I do not know.
When I woke, if I woke, it was to something that was impossible.
The Doctor stood over me, clad in her long white shirt. She was bald, of
course, having been shaved. She looked utterly different. Alien.
She was undoing my bonds.
Her expression seemed cool and assured. Her face and scalp were freckled with
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