The Devil You Know

by K. J. Parker

  I first became interested in Mysia when I read the bit about the ants in Peregrinus’s Geography—you know, about how the Mysians train ants to dig for gold; the ants burrow into the earth and come back up with specks of gold dust clinging to their legs, which the Mysians carefully brush off with the pin-feather of a woodcock. It reminded me of something else I’d read, about a gold mine in Blemya where the dust was so close to the surface that the grass grew up through it and forced it to the surface; and that mine was well documented and real.

  I couldn’t do anything about it at the time, as I was on the run in Antecyra, sleeping rough in a derelict dovecote and stealing pigswill to eat. But as soon as I was back in a place with libraries, I started to read everything I could lay my hands on about Mysia, and gradually it all started to come together. Rusty brown and greenish yellow rocks, beds of porphyry, bits of stone brought back by travellers with a distinctive honeycomb look about them, accounts of dried-up riverbeds and lava fields; all of them connected to one particular place, the mountain range in the middle of which the Empire had built the Citadel.

  I searched the Imperial archives at Rosh Roussel. The military surveyors had chosen the site on purely strategic grounds, but that might just mean they were unobservant, or ignorant. Buried in the survey notes I found references to gold nuggets found in dried-up watercourses, together with strict instructions from the commander-in-chief to hush up such finds and discourage off-duty prospecting; the last thing they wanted was the garrison deserting en masse to go gold prospecting.

  What with one thing and another, I never had time or liberty to go to Mysia; not until I made my big score in the paint trade, at which point I lost interest in get-rich-quick projects, settled down, and got disgracefully old. But I never stopped being interested. If only I were fifty years younger, I kept telling myself. And then, quite suddenly, I was.

  No problem finding excuses to go strolling in the hills around the Citadel, unobserved by my servant/keeper. I couldn’t very well take a pick and shovel with me; luckily, I didn’t need them. Peregrinus was right after all; there was gold dust to be found in the anthills, kick them over with your toe and there it was, glittering in the sun.

  Query: why had nobody else found it? Quite simple, really. The Mysians aren’t interested in gold, never have been. Their currency and medium of exchange is fine woollen cloth. As for invading soldiers, they were under orders not to stray too far from the Citadel, lest they be caught and eaten by the savages.

  A few cursory inspections led me to what I’d known all along I’d eventually find. At first I couldn’t believe it, so I smuggled out a few tools. I didn’t have to dig very far.

  The two low, plump, free-standing hills half a mile from the Citadel, the ones the Imperial surveyors nicknamed the Cow and Calf, are solid gold. Two enormous nuggets, with a bit of peat and cooch-grass on top.

  And, best thing of all, he didn’t know about them. Nobody did; except me.

  * * *

  He was up to something, and I had no idea what it was.

  It did occur to me that maybe he was after the vast gold deposits buried under the mountains nearby; but no, it couldn’t be that. If he’d wanted unlimited gold, all he’d have had to do was ask me; no need for soldiers and invasions. Besides, what good would gold be to him, in his situation? One truth abides, and overshadows all the rest—you can’t take it with you. And it’s not like gold’s any good for anything except as a source and repository of wealth. You’d have to be desperately, profoundly stupid to trade your immortal soul for mere purchasing power. So, clearly, it wasn’t that.

  I can’t pretend I was enjoying Mysia. “Cultural desert” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Generally speaking, whenever a certain number of humans congregate in one place, they tend to generate art in some form or another, even if it’s just whittled bones and splodges of ochre on the cave wall. And all human art (tautology; all art is human; it’s the only thing we omnipotents can’t do) has merit, if you look at it long enough and closely enough. Except in Mysia. The Mysians don’t sculpt or paint, they don’t scratch incuse decorations on the handles of their axes, they don’t even tattoo their bodies or weave fish bones into their hair. Having no gods, they carve no idols. There is no word for artist in the Mysian language; instead there’s a long-winded periphrasis that translates as man-who-deceives-others-into-giving-food-by-spoiling-bits-of-wood.

  Well; I’ve been in deserts before, sand deserts and ice deserts, landscapes of volcanic rock, bleak plateaux blasted clean of life by war and weapons you couldn’t begin to imagine. On such occasions, I seek solace in a good book. But that was one thing I simply couldn’t do in Mysia. It came as something as a shock to me when I realised it. All my favourite books were either written by Saloninus, or commentaries on, rejections of, or defences of his works and theories. And here I was, shackled by chains of contract to the man himself. I remember opening my battered old copy of Human, All Too Human and glancing down at the so-familiar text, and thinking, I can’t accept any of this anymore. I felt utterly betrayed, bereft, and destitute.

  I know, you shouldn’t allow what you know of the artist as a man to influence your view of his work. Take music. Jotapian was a horrible person, a drunkard who beat his wife and scarred his children for life with his atrocious behaviour. Mavortis’s views on women and people with dark skin were simply loathsome. And the greatest of them all, Procopius—it takes quite a bit to shock me, as you can imagine, but he does, to the core. So; the knowledge that Saloninus was treacherous, insincere, devious, mercenary—I knew all that, and it had never fazed me before. But actually meeting him, spending every waking moment with him, was different. I have to say, the sense of loss was overwhelming. No, I didn’t enjoy Mysia. Not one bit.

  * * *

  “Guess what,” he said to me. “There’s gold in them thar hills.”

  He’d come back from one of his early morning tramps. I should’ve accompanied him, but he didn’t ask me to and I’m not at my best in the mornings. “Is that right?” I said.

  He nodded happily. “This is the most amazing stroke of luck,” he said. Then he paused. “I’m assuming it’s luck,” he added. “Or have you been helping and neglected to tell me?”

  I assured him I had nothing to do with it. He shrugged. “Makes no mind,” he said. “You do realise, this makes everything so much easier. It solves the one problem I hadn’t got around to dealing with.”

  He sat down on a folding stool on the verandah of the lookout post he’d taken to using as an office. It had a splendid view of the mountains. I brought him a cup of jasmine tea and a plate of honeycakes; his favourite. “What problem?” I asked.

  “You know perfectly well,” he said. “In twenty years’ time I won’t be here and you’ll stop funding the garrison. At that point, the soldiers will go away and there’ll be the most almighty war, as the three nations scramble to grab Mysia. The whole scheme will founder and everything will go wrong. You foresaw that, naturally.”

  “Well, yes.”

  He laughed, and slapped me rather hard on the back. “Well,” he said, “now that won’t happen. There’s enough gold in the hills here to hire every mercenary soldier in the world. Which,” he added cheerfully, “is what we’re going to do.”

  I felt as though I’d just walked into an invisible wall. “Are we? Why?”

  “What we’re going to do,” he went on, “is turn Mysia into a genuine, functional pirate kingdom. We’ll send out the word to all the nations of the Earth. Give us your vermin, your scum, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores. The mountains are made of pure gold; all you have to do is hack it out, smelt it down, and spend it.” He grinned so wide I thought his face would split. “What’s even better than an independent, strong Mysia? An independent, strong, malignant Mysia, the sump and abscess of the known world, something the civilised nations can unite against but never actually defeat. They’ll mount crusades against it, t
hey’ll blockade it, lay it under permanent siege; every nation will send its best fighting men to join the glorious cause. But it won’t do a bit of good, because of the impregnable castle and the gold. It’s a basic tenet of military science. No stronghold can be taken if a mule laden with gold bars can leave it unobserved. Did I mention these hills are honeycombed with caves and tunnels?”

  “No. Besides, they aren’t.”

  He looked at me. “They will be,” he said, “in the next five minutes. That’s an order.”

  I sighed. His wish, my command. Actually, it was a tricky one; how to riddle a mountain with wormholes without the whole lot collapsing, and in such a way that the besieged can get out but the besiegers can’t use the tunnels to get in. It took me forty-five seconds to figure out how it could be done. Practically an eternity.

  “Well?”

  “All done,” I told him. “Do you want detailed schematics?”

  “Yes.”

  “On your desk,” I said. “In sealed brass tubes.”

  He smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “Well, I call that a good morning’s work. Of course,” he went on, “if there hadn’t been gold there already, I’d have had to make you put it there, so it’s all as broad as it’s long, strictly speaking. But this way, I’ve saved you a job.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said.

  I left him to his tea and cakes and slouched back to the Citadel, to oversee the installation of the five giant trebuchets he’d ordered. I was deeply troubled. Not in itself unusual; but I had a distinct feeling that I’d missed something. That’s not a normal or comfortable feeling for me. I don’t miss things. Like I said, I live and have my being in the detail. Also, if I had that feeling, it was because I was meant to. It was as though he’d put up a big painted sign saying UP TO SOMETHING and was sitting directly beneath it.

  I dug out my copy of the contract and read it over, for the umpteenth time. The words hadn’t changed since I last looked at them. There they still were, as airtight and lawyerproof as they’d always been. When he died, he’d be ours. Until then, he could have anything he wanted. A wonderfully straightforward document, its phrasing a miracle of functional elegance, as close to a work of art as we’re capable of getting.

  So, then, the big unanswered question: why bother to dig gold out of the ground when he could have all the gold he wanted for the asking?

  * * *

  The bad guys started to arrive.

  It sounds ridiculous coming from me, but the sight of evil en masse is one I find disturbing. They came by the shipload and the cartload; mostly men, of course; mostly from cities. Some came in groups, heavily armed and ferociously suspicious. Some drifted in singly—desperate rather than actively wicked, most of the singletons were. I think the majority of them were more concerned with a few free meals than the prospect of unlimited wealth. Because the Citadel is so vast, we had plenty of accommodation, and my organisation provided the food and the beer. There were any number of loud, angry meetings in the Great Hall, with passionate, violent men demanding to know what the catch was, and Saloninus repeating, over and over again, there isn’t one. The more he asserted it, the less they believed him, which is human nature for you. Within days of the establishment of the Commune, as we decided to call it for want of a better name, I was aware of half a dozen conspiracies to overthrow the government by force and take control; they all foundered, of course, as soon as they faced the fact that there was no government to overthrow and no control to take. All they could’ve done to assert their personalities would have been to slaughter the cooks—who, being undead, wouldn’t have minded in the least—but it never happened because nobody could be bothered.

  The first thing they all wanted to know, of course, was Where’s the gold? And I would point to the hillside, and tell them where they could be issued with picks, shovels, buckets, all free of charge. There was a lot of grumbling about backbreaking hard labour, my mother didn’t raise me to be no miner, and so forth. But hardly any of them left on that score. The work was too easy. It literally was a case of scuff off a few inches of turf and help yourself. I’d expected that a minority would gang up to rob the diggers, but it didn’t happen; more trouble and effort than it was worth. As a community, apart from a few drunken stabbings, we had something approaching a zero crime rate. I found that seriously disturbing, as you can imagine.

  “What are you up to?” I asked him, one night after dinner. “Go on, you can tell me.”

  He smiled and patted me on the arm. “Bear up,” he said. “Only nineteen years and nine more months to go.” He poured himself a glass of wine; instinctively started to offer me one, realised. “When it’s all over and I’ve gone where I’m going,” he said, “will you come and visit me?”

  I looked at him. I felt embarrassed. “If you like,” I said.

  “I’d really appreciate that,” he said. “It’d be rather less daunting if I knew there’d be a friendly face.”

  What could I possibly say?

  * * *

  I guess the other thing that was getting me down was not having very much to do. Usually when I’m on an assignment I hardly have time to breathe; bring me gold, bring me rubies, bring me the severed heads of my enemies, bring me the most beautiful woman in the world. Nothing but rush and scurry, and when you’re run off your feet, you don’t have time to brood. But once the bad guys were all nicely settled in, I wasn’t really needed for anything. Saloninus more or less boarded himself up in that shed he’d taken such a liking to, with piles of books and papers and mathematical instruments and alembics and astrolabes and retorts and flasks and who knows or cares what; when I asked if there was anything I could do to help, he scowled at me and yelled, yes, piss off and let me concentrate. Which left me at a loose end, somewhere I’m not comfortable being.

  If only certain proverbs were true. I had idle hands, but nobody found work for them to do. I couldn’t catch up on my paperwork, because I’m always punctilious about writing up my logs and filing my reports as I go along. Mysia being Mysia, and reading being out of the question, all I could occupy myself with was long walks in the hills (I hate walking in the country, particularly uphill) and tearing myself apart trying to figure out what he was up to. Not a happy time for me, I have to say.

  Then one day—I guess it was about a year after we arrived in Mysia—he called me in to his shack. You can tell how demoralised I’d become; I didn’t even remember to provide jasmine tea and honeycakes. I sat down on an upturned crate and looked at him mournfully. “What can I do for you?”

  He smiled. “You’re bored, aren’t you?”

  “Is it that obvious?” I sighed. “I’m sorry. I won’t let it show in future.”

  He waved the apology away. “I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said. “I’m being inconsiderate. Major fault of mine, so people tell me, I just don’t think about others, only myself.”

  “That’s all right,” I said warily.

  “Anyway.” He clapped his hands together. “I’ve got a job for you.”

  I was ashamed of how pathetically grateful I was to hear him say that. “Your wish is my command, master. What can I do for you?”

  He handed me a sheet of paper. “I want you to get these people and bring them here. Offer them so much money they won’t be able to refuse. Then find somewhere comfortable for them to work.”

  On the paper were the names of all the greatest living painters, sculptors, and architects in the world. My heroes, every one of them. “These people,” I stammered. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “I fancy being a patron of the arts,” he said with a chuckle. “So give them anything they want, whatever it takes to help them produce their finest work. All right?”

  Stunned doesn’t begin to cover it. “Of course,” I said. “My wish—I mean, your wish—”

  “You already said that. Get on with it.”

  A significant slip of the tongue. My wish; my greatest, most fervent wish—to see art aga
in, beautiful and wonderful works of art, the one thing I and my kind can’t do, but humans can. As soon as the angel choirs stopped singing inside my head, I asked him. “Why?”

  “Get on with it,” he repeated. “And go away. I’m working.”

  * * *

  I had no trouble at all persuading them to come. They fell, as all artists and creative people do, into two well-defined categories: those who desperately needed money, and those who were desperately afraid they’d be needing money very soon, even though they were temporarily solvent. I suspect I could’ve got them for far less than I actually paid, but I didn’t want to. Not my money, after all, and there’s something rather special about seeing pathetic gratitude in the eyes of men you admire.

  I had studios built for them in the high turrets of the Citadel, so they could revel in the light. Special cranes to lift colossal blocks of marble. The richest, rarest pigments—none of Saloninus’s synthetic blue for my boys, nothing but the purest lapis lazuli and carnelian, flown direct from the mountains and arid deserts of Permia by overworked demons. I even—not without some misgivings, since I was a respectable majordomo, not a pimp—arranged for a supply of inspiration; the painters, after all, had to paint something, and when I told them to use their imaginations, they just looked at me. So Inspiration arrived in a long train of covered coaches, which meant yet more work for me—changes to the plumbing, that sort of thing. And, since the last thing I wanted was the artists getting into fights with the cutthroats and murderers, there had to be plenty of inspiration to go round.

  “In fact,” someone said to me, as we stood watching the roof being put on yet another magnificent new extension to the Palace of Beauty, “what you’re building here is the ideal republic.”

  I looked at him. He was quite possibly the finest icon-painter of his generation, a small, bald man with a limp. “What?” I said.

  “You’ve got everything,” he said. “Unlimited wealth means infinite leisure, a prerequisite for contemplation of the truly worthwhile. Your strong and well-respected warrior caste ensure total security. A happy and contented underclass grow all the food, which they sell for inflated prices to the better sort. As for them, you couldn’t ask for a more suitable set of founding fathers for a great nation; fearless warriors, artistic geniuses, and women specially selected for their beauty, charm, and ability to get on with all different sorts of people. All under the benign, feather-light governance of a genuine philosopher-king. Come back in a hundred and twenty years, this country will be populated by a race of supermen.”