by K. J. Parker
He looked puzzled. “It’s really quite straightforward,” he said. “God tests His servant. The servant passes the test. Everybody wins. That’s it.”
I might have known. After all, I’ve spent a big slab of my working life with audiences. “That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is presently winging its way over your head like a flock of geese. Really, don’t you get it?”
“Get what?”
“Fine.” I leaned back against the floorboards of the bridge. “Job complains to God. Why are you doing this to me? Remember?”
“Of course.”
“God says, where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Which is a weak and ambivalent answer, but I assume what He’s saying is, puny mortal, you can’t begin to understand the mysteries of My providence, so don’t even bother trying. Essentially correct?”
He shrugged. “More or less.”
“Fine. Now try and look at it the way I do, as if it was a play I was thinking about putting on at the theatre. God says all that to Job, yes? But, a few scenes earlier, we saw it all for ourselves. We saw Satan leading God into temptation; bet you your faithful servant will crumple up like a dead leaf, he says, and God falls for it like a ton of bricks. He tortures this good, pious man—kills his sons, brings him out all over in boils, for crying out loud—and why? Because the tempter tempted Him, and the tempter won. And what’s His excuse? Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth? Which,” I added bitterly, “is garbage—”
He was shocked. “Steady on,” he said.
“Yes, but it is. How dare He say His divine plan is ineffable and too sublime for mortal brains, when we’ve just seen it for ourselves? And it’s not even a plan, it’s God being made a monkey of by the Devil.” I shook my head, rather ostentatiously. “Take away the fool, gentlemen. They’d boo it off the stage in Southwark.”
He was looking at me, but I couldn’t help that. “Fine,” he said. “You may just have a point, though I’m not saying you do, I’m just—”
“Saying?”
He nodded. “But I still don’t see the difficulty. You’ve achieved salvation. What more could you possibly want?”
I smiled. “You mean, I should be content. As I was before all this started.”
You know when you’re playing chess, and you think you’re doing rather well, and then your opponent says, Checkmate, and you look, and he’s right. He stared at me. “So?”
“Ask me what I want.”
“All right. What do you—?”
“I want it all back,” I said. “I want my theatre and my ship and my businesses and my farms. And if God isn’t inclined to give them to me, I’m asking you. Your lot.”
He was horrified. “You can’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“There would have to be a price.”
I laughed out loud. I’d had a hunch for some time, and now was the time to see if I was right. I stuck my hand into the heart of the fire and held it there.
He was gawping at me as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Of course not. I can spot a fake a mile off.”
“But it’s—”
“Just stage fire. Like stage blood, or the fake daggers that retract when you stab someone.” My fingers weren’t even warm. “My stuff,” I said. “Do I get it back, or not?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Yes, please.”
* * *
And it was so. Just like that. Magic.
When he vanished into thin air, I fished an ember out of the root of the fire, wrapped it in moss and tucked it into the heel of one of my spare clogs. It was still faintly smouldering when I got back to London. I called to see my lord Devereaux, newly released from the Tower, with a full pardon. In this shoe, I told him, I have an ember of genuine authentic hell-fire. How much do you want for it? he asked.
With the proceeds, I rebuilt my theatre. Master Allardyce’s play—well, you don’t need me to tell you, you’ll have been to see it, six or seven times, like everybody else in London. Within six months, I was better off than I’d ever been. And now? I’m content. I have everything I could possibly want. I mean it.
* * *
When I was a boy, I found a message in a bottle. Last week, master Cork came to see me. “You’ll like this,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “What is it?”
He showed me a tiny scrap of parchment. “This is Merlin’s handwriting,” he said. “It was found in a bottle by a boy on a beach in Wales, a hundred years ago. Great scholars of the church tried to decipher it, but none of them was wise or good enough, and they failed. In frustration, they threw it away. But only last week, it turned up in a sack of old scraps on its way to the paper-mill, and by some miracle I was there and recognised it for what it was. And now it can be yours,” he added, “for a mere five pounds.”
Sometimes you don’t argue, even when you know you could get it for less. When I’d got rid of him, I spread it out on my desk. It kept trying to curl up at the corners. The writing, as I’d guessed some time ago, was just ordinary Welsh, which none of the learned, high-born Fathers could read. All it said was—
The plague is carried by the fleas that infest rats.
Which is just the sort of thing you’d expect Merlin to know; that wise, humane, practical pagan Welshman. Was it genuine? I think so. My poor old friend the priest died of the plague, remember.
My mother used to preserve things in bottles. Properly sealed, they keep good indefinitely.
I walked down to Westminster and squelched through the sticky black mud until I found what I was looking for. It was there, sure enough; a bottle, its green head sticking up out of the loathsome glop. I knelt down and washed it out, then popped the scrap of parchment into it, shoved in the cork I’d had the forethought to bring with me, and threw the bottle out as far as I could make it go.
Copyright © 2016 K.J. Parker
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K.J. Parker is the author of the best-selling ‘Engineer’ trilogy (Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Escapement) as well as the previous ‘Fencer’ (The Colours in the Steel, The Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) and ‘Scavenger’ (Shadow, Pattern, Memory) trilogies, and has twice won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. K.J. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
THE THREE DANCERS OF GIZARI
by Tamara Vardomskaya
“And for the main ballroom,” Nahemiah Froll said, tossing the latest issue of Arts Today in our direction as she paced heavily over the mosaic floor, “I want that piece that Estorges made for Hestland’s Public Opera. The Three Dancers of Gizari.”
I tried to forget that I knew to the penny how much that thousand-year-old mosaic she was stomping on had cost (1,023,048.18 thalers sterling, not counting shipping it across the sea and all the wrangling with the insurer), something Nahemiah had not cared to know when she ordered it for her architect and curator, Izida Charteret, to fit into her palace.
Izida now stood near me, half-lit by a rose window of her own design. We both knew exactly what Nahemiah was talking about, as she expected us to. But this time, for this sculpture out of all the paintings and sculptures and transfigurations and works of magic described in Arts Today, I did not trust myself to reply. Let Izida, the artist, the aristocrat, comment.
“The one that the Public Opera then rejected as obscene? If you want to branch out into modern artists at last, Chief, why not Tammen? He’s all the rage right now. If...” she paused, “what you desire is fine female nudes that emanate sensuality.”
I had never understood how Izida, older and university-educated, could so blindly fail to anticipate the effect of her words. Or perhaps my time in the theater looking at faces gave me the advantage there. Or perhaps it was that unlike her I had been born and raised an underling, always watching the subtle signs of my lady’s displeasure—such as knowing
that using “my lady” instead of “Chief” to her would be grounds for dismissal. Especially when the veins in Nahemiah’s forehead just below her ornate cloche hat (40ts.; the imitations on the street went for 3.50) bulged as they did now.
“You look at Tammen’s paintings, sculptures, transformations,” Nahemiah said in that ice-cold tone that masked white-hot rage, “and you see men doing things and women—looking bored. Nude, clothed, all his women have no expression on their faces at all, and any sensuality of theirs hasn’t a hen’s tooth of true emotion behind it. And men hail him as a genius! You know why the men at the Public Opera rejected Estorges? Because he dared show women looking happy, unabashedly, unashamedly happy!”
She opened Arts Today with a sudden movement; the spine had clearly been broken at the spread with the dynamic-captures of the “obscene” sculpture. That was striking: all of the newspapers from her chains that Nahemiah read every day, she sent back in pristine condition, only their content copied to her formidable brain. But then, Arts Today was not yet in her chain, even as she bought a profiled work after nearly every issue.
“I got you to show these men what women can do”—she pointed at Izida, though not at me—”and I will now get these men to see and feel women being happy.”
I sighed and silently began making notes. Costs of journey to Halispell (32ts. by ship, then between 0.25 and 0.5 ducats by train), ship schedules, Nahemiah’s contacts, or rather, mine. My Chief wanted the Three Dancers of Gizari. All through the years of building and rebuilding the elaborate palace we now stood in, Izida, and later I, had done what the Chief wished.
The flare of Izida’s nostrils now showed a skeptical distaste. I had seen it many times in front of a design that she wasn’t pleased with, whether drawn by another’s hand or her own. It had always made me yearn to do all I could to change her expression, that nose and cheekbone doing more than any of Nahemiah’s shouts.
But, looking at the spread in Arts Today, I instead found myself gripped by the energy in the women’s expressions, indeed by their unabashed joy. Joy that I had never seen in Izida or Nahemiah, for all the beauty one had wrought and the other had bought. Joy that I would never feel from any allatir sculpture adorning Nahemiah’s collection, acquired by me but not meant for me.
As always, it would be Nahemiah’s thalers sterling that I would count out on green-edged checks and assignation notes to pay for the sculpture, and it would be Nahemiah’s palace home, amid mosaics and paintings and tapestries, that it would stand in.
But it was I, Bethenica Morning, Nahemiah’s financial manager, who truly wanted it.
* * *
Nahemiah Froll. People have called her mightier than queens. To some, a visionary, a builder, a challenger to the aristocracy, a new baroness of modern print. To some, an art connoisseur, collector, and patroness of peerless taste. To others, a tyrannical despot, who had built her newspaper empire by simply buying up newspapers that dared publish criticism of her. To others, a whim-driven bitch, who tore down million-thaler creations because she didn’t like them today, and threw away friends, entertaining guests, lovers just as easily.
If they asked me to describe her, I would simply say that if her fancies were volatile because she loved the process of change and creation, she always paid my 30ts. a week fully and on time.
* * *
Just before I headed for the motor-car to take me to the ship headed across the strait, I went to see Izida, up in her naturally tasteful apartment. The drapes of pure white velvet, the carpets also; her paintings, and those of artists she admired—most of them from Halispell, most of them men—provided the only color. No sculptures.
Simplicity and elegance, she would say, saving the intricacy for my Chief. As if a bleaching in color could hide that the materials (20ts. a yard) were still fit for the Count of Schellerbide’s daughter she once was.
Twenty years ago, she’d had enough of the Count not understanding that his daughter’s passion and genius lay not in governing estates or bride-market balls with eligible noblemen, but in turning designs to stone and wood and gardens. No occupation for a lady, the Count had said. But in Tavalland, by Hestland’s standards still the wild colonies half a century after the Independence Act, titles meant nothing, and so his heiress had bolted there, finished her schooling and found Nahemiah Froll’s patronage, and stopped being a lady. Or claimed to. Her taste in drapes, her high speech, her refined yet thoughtless manner, her unconscious expectation of obedience, all told otherwise to me.
She had never carved allatir stone, never tried to make art that swayed emotions directly rather than merely through the eyes. But Nahemiah had set an allatir statue on the landing leading to her suite. An elegant panther (485ts.).
As always, I silently cringed passing by the panther emanating luxury. Thoughts floated up in my mind. You are important, they assured me. You are wealthy. You are worth it all.
You are worth thirty thalers a week, I retorted. Stop lying to yourself. I hastened my step, then had to pause before entering Izida’s suite so she would not note my rapid heartbeat.
“Just so you know,” I said, “I depart.”
“Find out the prices on Tammen paintings, while you are there,” she said without looking up from her drafting table. “The Chief can still change her mind. As she is wont to do.”
As usual, she would not ask me for news about any family or friends in Halispell, not about the fine townhouse where she had spent her childhood winters. The Count had never forgiven her, naming a distant male cousin as heir but seemingly keeping himself alive and hearty by the blaze of anger at his disowned daughter. She in turn never mentioned his name, not even in our most intimate hours.
“I will. Goodbye, Izida.” I knew not to expect her to soften, to show more of her secrets to me than I learned from servants’ gossip. She had everything I lacked, and so our inequality was only right and proper.
Estorges’s art was the first I’d seen, in seven years working here, that outshone hers in my mind.
* * *
The village of my childhood lay down by the sea, below the hill where Nahemiah’s palace was then just rising from the ground. My own father had sold fish and squid for the tables in Nahemiah’s builders’ camp, and had not possessed much beyond a hut and a stove (worth maybe 10ts. on a good day) to disinherit me of when I ran away at seventeen with a traveling theater. Of my inheritance, I took only his family name, Morning, refusing out of perverse honesty to assume a better one. If Nahemiah Froll could rise from a prospector’s daughter, so could I, I had thought then, not realizing how much lay in the Froll married name, or in her father’s silver vein that she inherited—what cost there is to overcoming a name.
The stage, its painted sets and lights and music and drama, seemed my passion, but I soon learned I had little acting talent beyond “third citywoman from left.” Instead, almost unconsciously at first and not thinking that my knack for numbers and details was anything special, I fell into being the one who actually knew what was going on. From painting sets and stitching costumes, I became stage manager, remembering all the director’s changing whims during rehearsal, and all the cues for the actors and stagehands and lighting hands that they couldn’t remember themselves, and where in the script we were. I was the woman they went to, the small but mighty household god behind the footlights. None of the theatrical people had any idea how the cost of breakfast that day or of thread to mend the curtains fitted into their budget. I turned their finances around and made them the most successful traveling company in all of western Tavalland, such that in five years they—or rather, I, for I was the one negotiating and writing the checks, although I was only twenty-two and had never set foot in a university—were able to purchase a permanent theater (3,215 thalers, with 1,000 down and the rest amortized over ten years, plus 1,823.45 adding up in repairs and renovations) in Dies Incanti, the largest city on the western coast.
Six other theater companies and two Dies Incanti newspapers approac
hed me discreetly in the next year trying to purchase my skills as a treasurer. It was after I rebuffed the second newspaper that its owner, Nahemiah Froll, arrived at my office herself.
And the price she named, 20ts. a week with room and board and raises yearly, was one I was willing to sell myself for. Or rather, not for the money itself, but for the chance to be part of a theater far grander than any in Dies Incanti, of a drama greater and more real than any theater could give, and where, again, I was the god behind the footlights, knowing all the cues. Nahemiah was the producer, Izida was the director, but no director can do without a stage manager. I could live my life surrounded by mosaics and music, sunken pools and thoroughbred horses, dynamic-picture stars and poet laureates, enjoying almost all the comforts my Chief’s heart desired, no matter that not a penny I was counting was my own.
And walking among Nahemiah’s allatir statues, I thought, would give me pure joy and passion in a way that the theater could not, with all of its empathetic trickery drawn from stories not about my class of people. At least the sculptures did not lie.
Except that I learned that if they spoke truth, it was not to me.
* * *
To the music of the rattling train and the engineer’s whistle, both so subtly different in rhythm and pitch from the Tavalland rail, I arrived at the Halispell Central Station with its famous mosaic walls and ceiling. Nahemiah had never been interested in Queen Ethelburga-style mosaics, so I did not know their price. The train journey in first class had cost three eighths of a ducat (nearly 12ts.), and the cup of tea and piece of orange flan I had purchased, an additional three pennies. In Tavalland they would have cost half that. But my Chief allowed me to draw on expenses, if I were not extravagant in my mission—which was to follow two farwrites to Estorges’s lodgings in the Artisans’ Quarter, these days crowded with painters, writers, and musicians rather than artisans’ guilds. And to return with the money exchanged and the sculpture wrapped in felt for shipping across the sea.