My Beautiful Life

by K. J. Parker

  I nodded. So if I asked you to lead the palace guard against them, you’d refuse.

  I can’t refuse, he said, not a direct order. But do you know what the Robur do to their prisoners?

  Eat them, I said, yes, I know.

  He shook his head. Not the high-ranking ones, he said, not the kings and princes and generals. What they do is, they get a round wooden post, about eight feet long, two or two and a half inches diameter, and they put a nice sharp point on it. They ram the pointy end about eighteen inches up your arse, then they plant the other end two feet in the ground. It’s reckoned to be the most painful way a man can die, and it usually takes about six to eight hours. And it’s no good your friends rescuing you, because by then the damage is done, all that happens is you live another twelve hours or so in unimaginable pain. I’ll go if you tell me to, he went on, but on balance I’d rather not.

  Later, I asked Bemba if it was true. He nodded. But they only do that to their worse enemies, he said; sorcerers and traitors and anyone who brings dishonour on the king. Like we have? I asked. Yes, he said.

  THAT WAS ALL I could manage that day. While I was trying to get some sleep, Edax came to see me.

  I hadn’t set eyes on him since they made me emperor. In fact, I seemed to remember giving explicit orders. Keep him the hell away from me, I think I might have said. But there he was, looking pale and thin but otherwise more or less normal. You’re ill, he said.

  So they tell me, I said.

  He nodded and sat down on my bed. Are you going to die?

  I don’t know, I told him. The doctors say, sooner or later all this bulk will collapse my heart. Or I may suddenly get better.

  He frowned. You look terrible, he said. Look, if you die, does that mean I’m emperor?

  No, I said.

  I think it does, he said. You don’t have any kids, and I’m your only relative. Well, there’s Nico, but he’s blind and he’s got no cock, and the law says that means you can’t be emperor. I’ve got a cock, he said. I’m qualified.

  Have him poisoned, they’d told me, or put away somewhere, a nice quiet island or a monastery on a mountaintop, the ones where they raise and lower visitors in a basket. I was shocked. He’s my brother, I told them.

  I’m emperor, I told him, because I married the old emperor's daughter.

  Fine, he said, I’ll do that. But I don’t think it’s necessary, strictly speaking. I think, soon as you die, it just sort of happens. Look, why don’t you get that clerk of yours to look it up? Never hurts to be prepared. You know, in case the worst happens.

  Listen to me, I said. I’m sorry. About what happened with Nico. I had no choice.

  He shrugged. Water under the bridge, he said. You’re the boss now, that’s what matters. But if anything were to happen to you, I think I ought to know where I stand. Continuity, he said. It’s essential for the wellbeing of the empire.

  To everything there is a purpose, Scripture says, and everything is useful under the Sun. Except for my brother Edax. I’ll ask Bemba to look into it, I said. And I did.

  No, he told me, there’s not a great deal you can do, unless you want him killed or blinded. Actually, he’s quite right. He would be the lawful heir.

  Me on the Imperial throne, with Edax by my side. This is why. I never knew He had a sense of humour.

  I SENT FOR colonel Aelian. I want you to take command of the City guard, I told him, while I’m away.

  He looked at me. You’re going somewhere, he said.

  Bemba will be City Prefect, I said, but most likely everyone will give him a hard time, because of who he is, so I want you to look after him. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?

  He didn’t like the idea of nurse-maiding a Robur eunuch, but he’d already refused one direct order. Of course, he said. Where are you going?

  Thank you, I said. You’ve set my mind at rest.

  Stilian had been the colonel-in-chief of the Guards, and he didn’t have a second-in-command. Or rather he had eight, each leading a battalion of a thousand men. I sent for them. We’re going north, I told them. There was an awkward silence. Excuse me, your majesty, one of them said eventually, but the Guards never leave the City.

  Talking hurt me and tired me out. The duty of the Guards, I said, is to guard the person of the Emperor. Yes? They nodded. And the emperor is going north, I told them. So you’re coming too.

  Another long silence. May I ask where we’re going?

  To fight the Robur, I said.

  They looked at each other. They weren't born and bred sons of the six families. They were working soldiers who’d spent their life in the army and gradually worked their way up, from junior subalterns to majors. Bloody stupid orders that got you killed were their natural predator, like foxes are with rabbits. Didn’t mean they had to like it. Do I understand, one of them said, that your majesty will be leading the army in person?

  I was getting tired of the conversation. Unless one of you wants to do it.

  No volunteers. Does your majesty have any military experience?

  I sighed. No, I said. But while I’ve been lying here, my clerk has read me a couple of good books about strategy, and if I don’t shame you into going, you won’t go. Or if you do, you'll find an excuse to stop somewhere and wait till the Robur have sacked the City and gone back home. Which is fair enough, you've got a duty to your men. But your duty to me comes first. Doesn’t it?

  I could see what was going through their heads. There’s nobody here but us, we could hold a pillow over his face and then tell everyone his heart gave out. Nico would have done it like a shot. Doesn’t it, I repeated. They nodded. But with respect, your majesty, one of them said, you must be out of your mind.

  THEY FILLED A cart with goose feathers. It was bearable, most of the time.

  Even so, I didn’t enjoy the journey north. The Great Military Road, which the old emperor's great-grandfather built to be the main artery of the empire, hadn’t had any money spent on it for about forty years, there being no money to spend, and the farmers had taken to robbing the paving-slabs to build walls and barns. I must do something about it, I thought, and then it occurred to me that, one way or another, I wouldn’t be around long enough. That bothered me. You spend your life thinking, it’s all right, I’ll do something about this or that later, when I’ve got five minutes, I’ll put it all right. Then suddenly you’re like a man setting out on a long journey, and just as the ship casts off, he remembers all the things he forgot to pack.

  I’d left Bemba behind to mind the store, but he’d found me a countryman and colleague of his, the only other Robur in the Service. His name was Sidoco (actually his name was Buffalo With A Split Horn, but life’s too short) and he was a year or so older than me, a big, strong man. Bemba had made him swear by his honour to defend me to the death, which made me feel uncomfortable. Look, I said, if it comes to anything like that, run like hell. But he shook his head and explained that if he did that, his spirit would be cursed and he’d probably be reborn as a cockroach, and he despised cockroaches.

  The Robur, Sidoco told me, live in huge wagons, with wheels taller than a man. These wagons are the only homes they have, or want; so when they go to war, their wives and children and sheep and goats and cows all go with them, and when the men are fighting, they form the wagons in a circle with the livestock in the middle. The wagons are so massively built, they’re as good as a city wall, and a few good archers can defend them against an army. They despise settled people, he said, and the only reason they hadn’t invaded the Empire long ago was that we didn’t have anything they wanted. Wealth to them means women, children and livestock; they’re polygamous, and treat anyone’s children as their own, because they need the manpower. So, when a man kills his enemy, he takes his family as his own, and everybody seems quite happy about the arrangement. They don’t eat meat, apart from their dead enemies; they reckon rearing living things for slaughter is barbaric. Who’d take something as gracefu
l as an antelope or a partridge, they say, and tum it into shit? One of the reasons they fight so well is, they aren’t really afraid of death. They believe in reincarnation, and the purpose of life is to live and die well, to earn merit, to be born into a better status next time round. So they don’t understand about ambition. Your position in society isn’t something you earn for yourself—at least you do, but not in this lifetime—and trying to improve on what you’ve been allotted is the most appalling blasphemy, and all it’ll get you is a short, horrible life as a beetle next turn of the wheel. I have to admit, I liked the sound of the Robur. A lot of what they thought and how they went about things made a certain degree of sense, and it irked me that I was duty bound to wipe them off the face of the earth. Still, not much chance of that.

  The eight battalion commanders asked me what my plan of campaign was. I told them I didn’t have one, but I was open to suggestions.

  AT LEAST IT was over relatively quickly. At this point, the Robur had split into two roughly equal parties, about eighty thousand fighting men in each. One party had gone east, to sack Macestre. The other struck south, with a view to clearing up the string of big towns along the north bank of the Redwater before rejoining their friends for the main assault on the City. It was the southern party that found us, as we struggled through the mountain passes at Cans Juifrez.

  The Robur realised that they had us exactly where they wanted us. If they waited for us to come down into the plain, there was a risk—small, but you never know— that our cavalry might work some miracle and carve them up. In the mountains, our cavalry were useless. A large part of tactical genius is taking advantage of the critical moment. An hour after the news of our arrival reached the wagons, eighty thousand Robur warriors were running—literally running—up the mountainside to catch us before we could slip away.

  When they got there, they could see the way our minds had been working. We were waiting for them in a superb defensive position, a canyon with steep sides, only one narrow way in, and there we’d deployed the finest heavy infantry in the world, drawn up in phalanx. It was, they conceded, the best anyone could have done, in our position, given our pathetically small numbers. And yes, it’d be difficult, and their losses would be heavy, but they outnumbered us ten to one. And true, the Imperial heavy infantryman wears the best armour skill and money can provide, but the Robur archers are the best in the world, and their bows are very strong.

  They shot at us. We knelt behind our shields, and the arrows mostly didn’t penetrate. They charged. We drove them back. Shooting and kneeling, charging and repulsing; it was a long day, and come nightfall, very little to show for it. But during the evening, Robur scouts came in and said they’d found a narrow track that led round the back of the canyon. If the army split into two, and half of them went round the back way, when the Sun rose they’d be able to take us in front and rear, and that would be that.

  So that’s what they did; and the guards fought like heroes, to the very last man, and then it was all over. And then the Robur, carefully counting the dead, for obvious reasons, made a disturbing discovery. There were only a thousand dead guards. But the scouts had seen eight thousand men marching into the other end of the canyon.

  DEAR GOD, IT shouldn’t have worked. The battalion commanders told me it wouldn’t, that I was a fool and I’d get them all killed. I said, yes, it’s a stupid idea, so please, give me a better one. And they couldn’t, so we did it my way, and it worked.

  One thousand men—volunteers, God forgive me— stayed to defend the pass, while the other seven thousand slipped out down the funny little goat track, crept past the Robur and dashed like lunatics to get to the wagons before the Robur figured they’d been had. We made it, and in good time, even though we were hindered by having to lug me along on a stretcher. Eliminating the sentries on the wagons was an awkward moment, a point at which the whole thing could have gone horribly wrong, but the guards are good at that sort of thing, and we managed it. In half an hour, in the dark, we got control of the wagons, and when the Sun rose, we had all the women and kids rounded up and roped together. And now, one of the battalion Commanders said to me, we can negotiate.

  I shook my head. No, I said.

  But that’s crazy, he said. We’ve got them by the balls. The Robur love their kids. We can get out of this alive, if we play our cards right.

  No, I told him. All right, let’s suppose we strike a deal and they honour it, which they won’t, because it’s no sin to break a promise to the likes of us. Let’s suppose we do a deal, and they go away. And next year, they come back. Sorry, I told him, but we’ve got to do it properly. He closed his eyes and counted to ten, and stalked away to organise the defence.

  We let the scouts get up nice and close, so they could see we had the women and children up close to the wagons. That way, if the best archers in the world shot at us with their wonderful cane bows, they’d be shooting their own families. So instead they charged us with their spears and scimitars, and we shot them with our second-best archers and second-best bows as they came. They charged six times, and then they faltered, because suddenly there were so very few of them left; and then I gave the order to mount up, and our cavalry burst out of there and slaughtered them, until they were all dead.

  I say we. All I did was lie there, in my feathers, listening to the horrors and not knowing what was going on. Then something happened—later they told me a Robur managed to scramble onto a wagon, he got shot and fell on me. Anyway, it hurt like hell and I passed out, and when I came round I couldn’t see.

  The Divine Clemency of the Emperor, I believe they call it.

  WE SPARED ONE man, just one; and we sent him to tell the other Robur army to come and collect their widows and orphans, and not to come bothering us again.

  (And that was the good part; because wealth to the Robur is women and children and livestock, and suddenly the survivors were twice as rich as they had been; so they went home perfectly satisfied, and with honour. I imagine they'll be back in thirty years or so, once a new generation has grown up, but that’s a problem for another day. The war is never over.)

  The doctors told me my sight would return, could well return, might possibly return, until I told them to leave me alone. The bump I got in the battle did me no good at all, and then it rained and I got soaked to the skin, which more or less finished me. The ride back to the City was no fun at all. They tell me my heart stopped once, and Sidoco jumped on me and punched me and got it going again; and I had a stroke, and various other unpleasant things. None of which I minded, but I couldn’t make anyone else see that. Not that it mattered, at that.

  What I wanted was for them to put me on a ship to the island where I’d sent Nico, so he could tell me what he thought of me before I died, but the doctors wouldn’t allow it; and besides, I can’t imagine I’d have lasted as far as the island, and politically it was important that I die in the City. Talking of which; Edax will almost certainly be emperor. The soldiers kept telling me to have him killed while there was still time, all the way from the Redwater to the City, and I knew they were giving me good advice, but I couldn’t make myself do it, he’s my brother; this is why. When I die, in the City, he’ll be there to take the crown off the bed and stick it on his head, and then he’ll be safe for a little while, until people get sick to death of him, which probably won’t be very long. I hope not, anyway; the less time he’s in charge, the less harm he’ll be able to do. What happens after he’s gone, I simply can’t imagine. Those are other prayers, for someone else to make. I can’t do everything myself; and what little I’ve done, I’ve done badly.

  But—that’s why I’ve told Bemba to write on the top of his scroll, My Beautiful Life. All my life I’ve done terrible, bad things. I’ve stolen, I’ve murdered, I’ve betrayed. I had my wife locked up in a tower, and I blinded my brother. Sometimes I ask why; and the answer stays the same. Where was I when He laid the foundations of the earth? This is why. I know I’ve been given the a
nswer, and I know I’ve never managed to understand it. But that’s my fault. And then I was given the sign, a sign so clear, even a fool like me could see it. And it was the last thing I ever saw, which pleases me. Anything else after that would’ve been a dreadful anticlimax.

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. It’s been a beautiful life, one way and another.