by K. J. Parker
She slumped back into her seat and rubbed her throbbing jaw. All her possessions, her books, everything, dispersed to the four winds; and her sister, crying her eyes out. And she hated being called Tel. “All right,” she said. “How long are you staying for?”
“A month. Two at the most.”
“Two months? Oh, for—”
“I didn’t actually plan this to be difficult for you,” he said. “I thought I was saving your life.”
In the back of her mind she was doing geography. Assuming he’d come from Rasch or Choris, heading for Blemya—however you planned the route, it was still considerably more than a minor detour. If he’d heard of her arrest as soon as he’d landed and set off straight away; even so, he must’ve driven most of a day and through the night, on bad roads, in this rattletrap coach. More than just trivial inconvenience. “I suppose I could get a boat from Tryphola.”
“With no papers? Please don’t. I have some influence in Blemya, but I’d rather not have to fritter it away on rescuing you again.”
He was right, it was a stupid idea. “Fine,” she said. “So, what am I?”
He grinned at her. “I suppose mistress is out of the question?”
“Social secretary,” she said. “Or accompanist. I can play the flute.”
“I’ve heard you. No thanks. I’ll just have to say she’s with me and let them draw their own conclusions.”
He’d heard her? When? She’d played in Temple a few times, that was all. “Do what you like. I’ll try my best not to get under your feet.”
“Oh, come on.” He scowled at her, then grinned. “Don’t be like that. Think about it. A month in Blemya, with tolerably good food, clean sheets and nothing to do but relax. When did you last have any time off? Well?”
“I don’t like time off. I get bored.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He turned his head and looked out of the window. If they were headed for Blemya, those must be the famous Aldocine Marshes. They looked grey and flat. “You can’t keep on like this, straight from one gruelling job to another: you must be mentally and physically exhausted. Quite apart from anything else, that’s how mistakes get made.”
The coach passed over a rut; she felt like she’d been kicked. “So you’re saying what happened back there was my fault? I screwed up, because I’m tired.”
“No, of course not, it wasn’t your fault.” He sounded convincingly certain of that, and she wondered how he came to know operational details of something he’d had nothing to do with. “No, you handled it perfectly well, it was just rotten bad luck. But that’s not the point. You need a rest. And now you’re going to get one.”
“Boring,” she said. “And boredom makes me incredibly stressed. Give it two days and I’ll be sharpening my claws on the furniture.”
“I think anybody who knows you is used to that.”
Just for a moment, she could think of nothing to say.
Oida managed to sing, in spite of his fat lip, and she heard the cheering from the balcony of her room. She had decided not to go—too many people, some of them quite possibly government officials who might’ve been in the capital when she was last in Blemya; a good excuse for not watching him being worshipped by six thousand devoted followers. Remarkable, she mused, how often there’s a good reason that masks the real reason. Very good-natured of Providence to arrange it that way.
She was asleep in her chair when he knocked on her door. She considered not hearing him, but that would only make him knock louder.
“What are you reading?” he asked, as she poured him tea.
“Your Saloninus,” she replied. “I nipped down and borrowed it from you.”
His door had been locked, with a guard outside, but his window overlooked the square, same as hers. He raised an eyebrow. “On the balance of probabilities I’d say he makes out his case. But some of the arguments strike me as a bit woolly.”
She’d read three chapters and fallen asleep; and she hadn’t exactly had a tiring day. “How did it go?”
“What? Oh, the show. All right, I suppose. Actually, I’m not sure the injury doesn’t help a bit, in the lower register.”
“Splendid. Next time you do a concert, ask me nicely and I’ll hit you. I expect you’re worn out after all that singing.”
“Not really, no.” He swilled the dregs round in his tea bowl. “Matter of fact, performing makes me all bouncy and full of energy. It’s the morning after when I feel like death.” He leaned forward and picked the book up off the floor, marked the place with the feather, closed it and put it on the table. “You know I told you we’d be here about a month.”
“Two at the outside, yes.”
He pursed his lips. “Well,” he said, “it’s possible there may be a slight change of plan. Apparently, the queen would like me to sing for her. I met some big-nose from the Chamberlain’s department. Apparently, soon as they heard in the capital that I was coming, she sent for me. Rather flattering, actually, I’d sort of got the impression I wasn’t highbrow enough for her.”
She felt a great weight pressing down on her. “You’re going to the capital.”
“I don’t think I can refuse. The Chamberlain’s man did say it’d be all right to do the other two shows I’ve got scheduled first—entertaining the troops is top priority, which is just as well since they’re both paying jobs, while I don’t suppose a command performance for Her Majesty will involve any actual money.” He looked at her steadily. “It’d probably mean another three weeks.”
“Four at the outside,” she said, before he could. “Bloody hell, Oida.”
“I know, I know, it’s a nuisance. Not to mention the risk involved in taking you to the capital, though I’ve been thinking about that. Trouble is,” he went on, pouring himself more tea, “I can’t really send you home on your own, the way things are at the moment. They’ve promised me an escort, but I don’t think they’d spare a squadron of cavalry so my sidekicks and hangers-on can go home without me.”
“The hell with that,” she protested. “I can look after myself.”
That made him grin. “No doubt,” he said, “and, anyway, I think they’re exaggerating this whole insurgency thing out of all proportion. If you were going south, maybe; but north to the coast, I’m sure you’d be fine. But that’s not the point. If I sent you home and they didn’t provide an escort, the relevant officials would lose face. You know how these things work. I really don’t want to put anybody’s back up.”
A good reason; it made the palms of her hands itch. “So what am I supposed to do for three months? Sit about all day while you—?”
“As I said, I’ve been thinking.” He beamed at her. “How would you like to be my niece?”
Something exploded inside her; she contained it as best she could. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “You haven’t even got a brother.”
“Actually, I have.” For some reason, that made him frown. “It’s a matter of record, if you care to look me up in the Notitia.”
“You’re in the—”
He grinned. “Afraid so. Just enough Imperial blood in my veins to paint a butterfly’s wings, but, yes, I qualify. And you can bet the Chamberlain’s read up on me, so he’ll know. Fortuitously, my brother’s current status and activities are highly obscure, which is a way of saying they haven’t caught him yet. For all I know, he might well have a daughter, scores of them, enough for a battalion of heavy dragoons. The point is, if I’m a purple-blood and you’re my niece, then you’re purple, too.” He smiled. “Well, a sort of pale lilac. But it means they’d have to look after you.”
She stared at him. “I could go home.”
“I don’t see why not.” He sipped his tea and put the bowl down. “But I don’t see us being able to arrange that until we actually reach the capital. It’d mean sweet-talking the higher-ups in the Chamberlain’s office, which can only be done on the spot.”
She frowned. “But I can’t go to the capital,” she pointed out. “Can I?”
“You can’t be seen in the capital. There’s a slight but effective difference.”
She breathed out slowly through her nose. Oida a scion of the Imperial house. Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? The same Providence that ensures that buttered bread always lands butter-side down would see to that. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll do that, then. Thank you, Uncle Oida.”
He scowled at her. “My brother’s much older than me,” he said.
“Of course he is,” she replied gravely. “Now, you get off to bed. Are you sure you can manage the stairs?”
Six days in the coach across the Great East Plains. They were using the military road, reckoned by experienced travellers to be one of the best in the world; it was flat, level and straight, free of ruts and potholes, and it seemed to go on for ever. The view from the window was always the same and mostly sky—blue, cloudless. It wasn’t unbearably hot, and every twenty miles there was a way station, with clean water and stabling for the horses. They changed escorts every two days (there was a reason for this; Oida had explained it, but she hadn’t been listening) but it was inconceivable that they should be attacked out here on the plains. The thought that anything could be alive out there, even savages, was simply grotesque. You’d have to rethink all your definitions of what constituted life.
As well as Saloninus on frailty, Oida had brought Eutolm’s Meditations on Darkness and Light, a selection of Structuralist lyric poetry, Achis and Sinuessa (but no pictures) and Notes on the Rituals and Protocols of the Imperial Court by the Emperor Sarpitus II, the annotated edition with notes and commentaries. She read them all. Then they played chess—Oida had a travelling set; pegs on the base of each piece and holes in the middle of each square—but he got upset when he lost and they stopped. There was always sleep, but if she slept too much during the day she stayed awake all night, and the stone benches in the way stations were uncomfortable enough as it was. Oida was happy to talk; he was much better read than she thought he’d be, and tremendously well informed about every aspect of current affairs, but that just made her want to hit him.
“All right,” she said one day, in desperation. “What do you do on long road journeys? When you’re on your own, I mean?”
He frowned at her. “Actually, it’s when I get a lot of work done.”
For a moment she couldn’t think what he meant. Then it occurred to her that by work he meant writing music. Somehow, she’d always assumed that it just came to him, fully formed and complete, in moments of enraptured inspiration, or else he bought it cheap from struggling young musicians and passed it off as his own. “Am I in the way?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “I can’t work when there’s someone else there. I need to hum, and I’m self-conscious.”
“Don’t mind me.”
“Yes, but I could. It’s like peeing. You might not mind, but I would.”
“I’m sorry.”
He grinned. “Don’t be,” he said. “I’m pretty much up to date on commissions, and I never do anything on spec. Great art, I’ve always felt, is like a pearl; thousands of layers of creativity and sensibility built up around an inner core of money.”
“Write that down before you forget it. Anyway, I’m sorry. I hate to think I’m depriving posterity of a masterpiece.”
He looked at her carefully, as if assessing whether she’d bear his weight. “You don’t like my stuff, do you?”
“Not a lot, no.”
“Interesting. I know you like Procopius. Did I ever mention he’s my cousin?”
“Oh, God.”
“Don’t be like that. Do you only go for the heavy stuff, or do you sometimes like something with a tune in it?”
She smiled. “I love tunes. I just don’t like yours much.”
“Fair enough.” He nodded judicially. “I don’t, either. I think they’re trivial and derivative. But in one pan of the scales we’ve got you and me, and in the other about a million people who think they’re wonderful. So I’d venture to suggest that you and I are probably wrong.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “But what I think about a whole lot of things doesn’t really matter a damn, so that’s all right.”
“Quite. So, what do you do on long journeys?”
“I take plenty of books. For a trip like this, I’d bring at least thirty pounds, by weight.”
He nodded again. “I think being bored is about the worst thing that can happen to you.”
“Yes. Well, not quite. I’ve been raped three times and tortured twice, and once I was three days in a derelict barn with multiple stab wounds. But boredom is very bad, yes.”
“I see.” He pursed his lips. “In that case, I suggest we play Frame-of-Reference.”
She blinked. “I don’t know that one.”
“Oh, it’s great fun. I say three things, lines from poems or titles of books or characters from plays, and you say a fourth, which has got to be connected to the other three. Then I say a fifth, and you say a sixth, and so on. The trick is, when it’s your turn, to change the frame of reference so I can’t follow. Like, I say Diacritus, then Phemia on board ship, then Santor counting the stars; all arias from The Wedding of Heaven and Hell. But then you say Cinentia, which changes the frame of reference to Sanippo’s Eclogues, and of course there’s only four of them, so I can’t follow. Get the idea?”
She looked straight back at him. “I don’t think I’d enjoy that very much.”
He looked disappointed. “Fair enough,” he said. “In that case, how about a game of Shields?”
“You’ve got cards?”
“Of course I’ve got cards. I’d sooner go out without my trousers on.”
There had been a time—one which she tried not to think about, because of other, unrelated issues—when she’d made a comfortable living playing Shields with men in coaches, or on ships, or in way stations and inns. Oida, she knew for a fact, had plenty of money, whereas she was uncomfortably aware of not having a single stuiver to her name until she got back to Rasch. She clicked her tongue. “Oh, go on, then,” she said.
There was always the sickening possibility that he was letting her win, though she was fairly sure he wouldn’t be capable of doing that. In any event, by the time they reached Mancio she could take comfort in the fact that money would be the least of her worries for quite some time. As the towers of the city resolved themselves out of the heat haze on the horizon, she thanked him for the games and said she’d be happy to take a letter of credit, if he was short of ready cash.
He frowned at her. “Hang on,” he said. “We weren’t playing for real money, were we?”
“I was.”
“Yes, but—” She could see the battle going on inside his head. “I’ll write you a note,” he said sadly. “I don’t carry huge sums like that on me. I’d need porters.”
“That’s perfectly all right.”
He sighed, took out his writing set and a piece of parchment. He passed her the ink bottle and asked her to hold it while he wrote out the note, resting on the lid of the rosewood box. She checked to make sure he’d signed it, then thanked him politely.
“Of course, you won’t be able to cash it,” he said. “Not till we get back to Rasch. Well, you could cash it in Choris, I suppose, but I don’t imagine you’ll be going there.”
“But I thought—”
He shook his head. “I don’t have an account in Blemya,” he said. “I’m with the Theudat brothers: they don’t do business here. I suppose you could try and discount it, through the Knights or Ocnisant’s or someone like that, but you’d be lucky to get three marks in the angel. Wait till you get home. It’s not worth the aggravation.”
“But—” She stopped herself. “I wanted to do some shopping in Mancio,” she said. “Get myself something to wear, for one thing. And something to read.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said cheerfully. “I can lend you enough for that, when we get there.”
He lent her one ang
el thirty, which he claimed was all he could spare in cash money until they reached the capital. At five Blemyan hyperpyra to the angel (not so much an exchange rate, more an act of war; but what can you do?) she had enough for a couple of dresses, serviceable second-hand shoes and the complete set of Parrhasius’ Sermons. She decided she could survive with that, but it wasn’t going to be fun.
In return, he shamed her into coming to the show. She pulled faces and said that her shabby clothes would show him up; he told her she’d look good in anything, even an old sack, and he’d really like her to be there. He suffered, he told her, from nerves—a statement which, if true, was one of the most shocking things she’d heard in a long time.
True it proved to be. He was fine when they arrived at the camp gate and a select group of officers fawned over him as if he was the Annunciation, and he was cheerful enough to be insultingly condescending to the garrison commander, a seven-foot-tall mahogany Imperial twenty-year veteran who was struck dumb in his presence and could do nothing but mumble. But when they were alone in the officers’ mess, the temporary green room, waiting for the start of the show, Oida started shaking, quite visibly, and pacing up and down. He could hear them, he explained; the audience outside, the hum of their voices. It set off a sort of buzzing noise in his ears, and he couldn’t think straight or remember anything. That’s just silly, she told him, he’d been on stage hundreds of times, thousands. He gave her a hopeless look. “I know,” he said. “That just makes it worse.”
“Pull yourself together, for crying out loud,” she advised him helpfully. He grinned weakly at her and promised he’d do his best.
They’d saved her a seat in the front row, and a junior officer came to lead her to it. She felt awful leaving him in that state, but there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do.
The man sitting next to her was some sort of political: white hair, beautiful fingernails. “I put in for a ticket as soon as I heard about it,” he was saying, “but they said no, limited to military personnel only. So I applied to be logistics liaison officer, with the honorary rank of colonel. By the time that came through all the seats were taken, so I had to do a deal. It’s cost the federal government forty tons of flaked barley, but I’m here.”