The Business by Iain M. Banks

Author:Iain M. Banks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780748109920
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2008-09-04T04:07:55+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

You rise with the sun in Thulahn. The same as any place where artificial light is still a novelty, I suppose. I woke to find a little fat quilted lady bustling around my room, slamming open the window shutters to let in some eye-wateringly bright light, talking away either to herself or possibly to me and pointing at the washstand, where a large, gently steaming pitcher now stood beside the inset bowl. I was still rubbing my eyes and trying to think of something rude to say, like, When were your people thinking of inventing the Door Lock, or even the Knock? when she just bustled straight out again and left me alone and grumpy.

I washed with the warm water in the bowl. There was a bathroom down the end of the hall with a large fireplace in one corner and a rather grand scroll-topped bath on a platform in the middle of the room, but it took a lot of water-pitchers to fill it and the palace servants clearly required advance notice to organise both the fire and the water.

Technically my room was en suite, if a cubicle the size of a telephone box with the end of a pipe sticking up between two shoe-shaped tiles counts as en suite. There was real toilet paper, but it was miniaturised and unhelpfully shiny. I flushed with the water out of the washing bowl.

Breakfast was served in the room by my little fat quilted lady, who arrived talking, talked as she plonked down the plates and jugs and kept talking as she nodded to me and left. I could hear her talking all the way down the hall. Maybe it was a religious thing, I thought; the opposite of a vow of silence.

Breakfast consisted of stiff fried pancakes and a bowl of watery porridge. I tried a little of each, recalled the variety of mono-taste beige food from the evening before and was reminded that managing my weight, and indeed even losing quite a few pounds in a matter of days, had proved remarkably easy the last time I’d visited Thulahn.

‘Her Royal Highness is looking forward to meeting you.’

‘Is she? That’s nice.’ I grabbed a strap and hung on.

Thulahn had cars before it had roads. Somehow, this came as no surprise. Well, it had a car, if not in the plural: a 1919 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith purchased in India by the Prince’s great-grandfather when he was King. It had been dismantled and carried across the mountain paths by teams of sherpas and eventually reassembled in Thulahn the following summer.

There was, however, nowhere to drive it, a point which had perhaps escaped the then King when he’d made the purchase. At the time a main road in Thulahn consisted of a boulder-strewn pathlet wandering along the side of a steep hill with broader bits every now and again where two heavily laden porters or yaks could pass without one knocking the other off the cliff, while a principal street in Thuhn

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.