by K. J. Parker
“He’s my uncle,” she said.
“My God,” he replied, and offered her a cinnamon biscuit.
When Oida walked on, there was sudden, total silence; she could hear his boots squeaking slightly as he crossed the stage. He was holding a five-string rebec in his left hand, the bow in his right; she knew for a fact that it wasn’t his, because he’d been whining about having to leave his behind, afraid it would be broken or stolen. He didn’t seem to have noticed that he wasn’t alone. He tucked the rebec under his chin, and began to play.
It wasn’t his usual sort of thing at all—a set of variations on a theme by Procopius (for her? Surely not). The first movement was slow, a complex melody rising like smoke on a windless day. Then, without warning, the key changed, the tempo quickened and the strange, lazy incantation became a reckless dance, wild and dangerous, swaying up and down the scale, swooping and staggering and abruptly stopping in mid-sequence. When it started again, the theme flashed in and out of a dark, malevolent fugue that made her hands clench and her eyes ache. Just when she thought she was about to drown in it, the fugue collapsed and the original theme soared up out of the wreckage, bright and harsh as winter sunlight, and quickly died away into stunned silence.
After a moment that seemed to last a very long time, the soldiers started to clap. There was a slightly grudging feel to the applause, as though they’d been tricked into agreeing to something they didn’t hold with. Oida nodded the most perfunctory bow possible, tucked the rebec under his arm, and sang them “Dogs of War,” which was what they’d come to hear. By the third verse, all six thousand of them had joined in. As the fifth verse ended, she realised she’d been singing, too—a mistake, as all who knew her well would testify, but luckily nobody could’ve heard her over the universal roaring.
After “Dogs” he gave them “The Longest Road,” “Where My Heart Takes Me,” all nine verses of “Grey Green Hills” and finally “My Life for Yours,” perhaps her least favourite song in the whole world, at the end of which she found she was in floods of tears.
“There you go,” he said abruptly (they’d been talking about different philosophies of salad dressing). “I think that’s it, paid in full.”
From somewhere he’d magically produced a big cloth bag, about the size of a bunch of grapes. His hand was clawed around it in a way that suggested it was heavy. “What?” she said.
“My gambling debt,” he said. “Go on, take it, before I strain something.”
The coach chose that moment to ride a particularly deep rut. The bag jarred out of his hand, fell on the coach floor and split open. Gold coins—the big, chunky Blemyan tremisses, each one roughly equivalent to ten angels Imperial. She looked at them, and then at him. “Where in God’s name did you get—?”
“My fee.” He smiled. “For the gig. That’s nearly all of it.”
All that money. He’d made all that money in half an hour. All she could think to say was, “They paid you in cash?”
He laughed. “Of course not. Government scrip. Which I was able to change at ninety-nine trachy to the hyperpyron at the Knights, before we left. You do realise,” he added gravely, “that now I’ll be barely breaking even on this trip.”
She stared at him. “Don’t be silly.”
“Two thousand angels,” he reminded her, “for the spinet. Well, don’t just sit there, that’s your money on the floor. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a crack just below the doorframe.”
She swooped like a hawk; unfortunately, so did he, at precisely the same moment, and their heads collided with a solid crack. He sat up sharply, moaning. She started picking up coins.
“They call it the Beautiful City,” he observed, peering out of the window. “God knows why.”
She was facing backwards, so she couldn’t see. “It was all right,” she said. “Mind you, we didn’t get to see much of it last time.”
“That’s because we arrived from the north. Actually, it looks much better from that direction. All the good stuff, architecturally speaking, is crowded in around the Northgate.” He sat back in his seat. “What we both need,” he said solemnly, “is a bath.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “Because we’re here by royal invitation, protocol demands that we’re met by the Grand Logothete, the Grand Domestic, the Count of the Stables and/or the Chamberlain. There’ll be a short religious service followed by an exchange of the Kiss of Peace, a thanksgiving offering to the Sea for our safe arrival, even though we’ve come overland, and a ritual meal of honeycakes and white bread. And that’s before they’ve even checked our papers.”
She looked up. “Papers?”
“It’s all right, you’re with me. I include you, for administrative purposes.” He reached in his pocket for some raisins; she could have told him he’d finished them off an hour ago. “Then I expect we’ll be escorted to the palace and shown our quarters, which will take up the rest of the afternoon, and then there’s bound to be a reception, followed by a formal dinner. You may just get a shot at a bath sometime around midnight, assuming they keep the water hot all day and night.” He gave her a sad smile. “You see what I’ve got to put up with.”
She had a nasty feeling he knew what he was talking about. There had been all sorts of annoying ceremonies the last time, though she hadn’t paid much attention to them, being preoccupied with the job she’d had to do. “How come you know so much about it?”
From his inside pocket he produced the Emperor Sarpitus on Protocol. “The Blemyans follow pre-Reform Imperial procedure,” he said. “They’re mad keen on it, because of their pretty notion that they’re the last remnant of the true Empire, and the lads in Choris and Rasch are just jumped-up pretenders. It’s quite interesting, actually, because they preserve certain archaic forms that died out in the empire proper a hundred years or more before Sarpitus wrote it all down.”
“No, it’s not,” she said firmly. “Interesting, I mean.”
He shrugged. “More fun to read about than to actually experience, I grant you. Oh, that reminds me.” He leaned forward and fished something out from behind the seat cushion. “I got this for you. Well, the CO back at the army base gave it to me as a thank-you for doing the gig, but I don’t want it, and I know you feel naked without one.”
She unwrapped the narrow bundle of cloth, knowing what she’d find: a Blemyan officer’s dirk, service issue but decorated with lots of fancy gilded engraving. She slid it an inch out of its scabbard, then put it back again. She felt guilty and ashamed but very grateful. “I agree,” she said. “Not your style at all.”
“Quite. Now put it away and don’t play with it: they can get terribly stuffy about concealed weapons in this town.”
She frowned. “I won’t be going anywhere in public,” she said. “That was part of the deal. You’re going to get them to send me home, as quickly as possible.”
He looked at her for a moment. “I think we may have to modify the plan a bit,” he said.
“What? Hey, that’s not—”
“I’m sorry,” he said firmly. “It’s annoying and maybe I should’ve anticipated it, but there it is. You’ve been invited to be presented to the queen. You can’t not go, it’d be the most appalling breach of etiquette.”
She remembered that there’d been a letter waiting for him at the last way station; but he hadn’t said anything about it, and she’d assumed it was nothing. “You might’ve told me.”
“And then it’d have been hanging over you all day yesterday, and you’d have been miserable and depressed. It’s fine,” he went on, “we’ll get you out as quickly as we can, you’ve just got to do this one thing, and—”
“I can’t meet the queen,” she said. “She’ll recognise me. Half the bloody Court—”
He smiled. “I think you overestimate your memorability,” he said sweetly. “No offence. I’d remember you anywhere, naturally. But if you recall, it was a large delegation, and we stuck you at the back so
people wouldn’t notice you. It’ll be all right.”
“I’m wanted for murder.”
He shook his head. “Suspected of, not wanted for,” he said casually. “There’s a difference. Besides, the woman they thought might just possibly have had something to do with that business was a priestess in government service. You’re my niece. You’re a lady of leisure and you’ve never been to Blemya before in your life. Just remember that and everything will be fine, you’ll see.”
“You must be out of your mind. Stop the coach, I’ll walk from here.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t care. I’ll find my own way home. I’ve got money. I can take care of myself. Whatever I do, it’s got to be safer than—”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, no,” he said. “Not possible. They’re expecting you now, and if you don’t show up I don’t think I’ll be able to think of a convincing reason for you not being there. If I say you wandered off or got kidnapped by bandits, they’d insist on sending a regiment to find you. It’s a nuisance,” he added, raising his voice over hers, “but so long as we’re sensible and we play it cool, there won’t be a problem, I promise you. Come on, you’re a professional. You can handle this.”
There was something in the way he’d said it that made her skin tingle. Good reasons, she thought. “If I get caught, you’ll be in trouble, too,” she said. “You won’t be able to smarm your way out of it: they’ll know you knew and you lied. And then they’ll guess you were mixed up in it the last time. It’s your neck on the block as well as mine.”
He looked at her, expressionless. “Yes,” he said. “I had actually thought of that for myself, thank you. I’m risking my life as well as my career and my professional standing. Don’t ask me why, because I’m not sure I know. But there it is.”
She felt as if she’d been punched. Perfectly true; he had so much to lose, and he was risking it all, because of her, and it wasn’t even a paying job … It made her feel angry, but other things as well, things best ignored. “Fine,” she snapped. “This whole business has got completely out of control, so we’ll just have to make the best of it we can.”
He grinned. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “I love it when you’re grateful.”
“Oh, drop dead.”
He thought of it at the last minute. She protested, told him it was a stupid idea and that it’d attract attention rather than deflecting it. He took out the book, found the place (bookmarked with a feather) and handed it to her without a word. She read it and handed it back.
It worked. As he’d anticipated, the Chamberlain knew all about the ordinance in Sarpitus that decreed that women who had recently recovered from various specifically female ailments were required to be veiled in public; the ordinance wasn’t widely followed in Blemya, he said, because the rule was actually introduced sometime after the Blemyan code of etiquette crystallised into its present form … However, the Court was always happy to recognise the younger tradition, particularly where a close relative of a distinguished visitor was concerned.
“You think you’re so clever,” she hissed at him, as the State coach drove them to the palace.
“Well, I am,” he answered mildly.
“The sooner you can get me out of this horrible country, the better for both of us. I really can’t face a whole week smothered in bloody cheesecloth. I can’t breathe.”
“We’ll get you a proper veil,” he reassured her. “Silk or something.”
Their apartments in the palace were amazing. Oida’s suite had been built as a council chamber, with seating for two hundred; they’d stripped out the benches and installed a bath, with hot water piped up from the huge thousand-gallon copper in the main kitchen, two floors below. The bath itself had once been the sarcophagus of a long-dead king; its sides were carved with graphic scenes of the Day of Judgement, the punishment of the damned and the enrapturement of the Elect. All four walls and the ceiling were covered with mosaics, mostly scenes of feasting and the hunt. The bed was the size of a large hay wagon, and the chamber pot was rose-pink alabaster. Her room was next door; half the size but still bewilderingly huge. The walls were decorated with tapestries and the ceiling was a fresco of a personified Blemya trampling on a nest of disturbingly realistic snakes, presumably representing the old Empire; there was, however, no bath.
“That’s all right,” Oida said. “You can use mine. Any time.”
She glowered at him. “I’ll send down for a big basin of hot water and a sponge.”
“As you wish.” He sat down on her bed. “A bit on the lumpy side compared to mine. Still, a damn sight better than what we’ve been used to lately. Now aren’t you glad you came?”
“No.”
“Ah well.” He stood up, then knelt down and placed his hand palm-down on the marble floor. “Underfloor heating,” he said. “They run hot water through bloody great copper pipes under the floor tiles.”
“I thought it was a bit stuffy in here. Can you make it stop?”
“Not really. It’d mean putting out the fire in the big boiler down in the cellars, which supplies hot water to the whole palace complex. I don’t think it’s gone out any time in the last hundred and fifty years.” He stood up. “You’ll just have to grin and bear it,” he said. “If it gets too much for you, I suggest taking a blanket and a pillow out on to the balcony.”
She growled at him. “We didn’t get anything like this the last time.”
“True. But then we weren’t guests of honour: we were part of a delegation they were being politely rude to, so we got stuck in the poky little rooms on the fifth floor. More protocol, see. They do love it so.”
She took the makeshift veil off and wound it round a bed post. “Have you found out when we’ve got to do this presentation thing?”
“Not yet. You’d better get ready. We’ve got the reception next, followed by dinner.”
She glanced down at the dress she was wearing. The other one was filthy with dust from the road. “I’m ready now.”
He studied her for a moment. “No,” he said, “you’re not. Try and do something with your hair, for pity’s sake. I don’t know what to suggest about your nails. Make two fists, and lean forward when you eat.”
Both the Eastern and Western ambassadors were at the reception, anxious to meet the celebrated Oida so that they could tell their friends about it when they got home. It was quite easy to tell them apart: the Westerner was short, bald and thin, the Easterner was tall and fat, with a mop of white hair. They both smiled very pleasantly at her, then ignored her completely.
There was also an ambassador, or something vaguely equivalent, from the Lodge, and she was sorely tempted to try and get a private word with him, in the hope that he could expedite her escape, or at the very least get a report back to her superiors, so they’d know she was still alive. But whenever she tried to get near him, he seemed to shy away and find some Blemyan to talk to. He couldn’t be avoiding her, because how could he possibly know who she was; and if he did know, why wouldn’t he want to talk to her? But it was rather strange, and made her feel nervous.
The dinner presented its own problems. She was hungry, and the food looked wonderful—escalopes of pork in a honey and mustard sauce, with chickpeas and anchovies and salad and thin strips of fried apple—but the thought of trying to eat in a veil melted her appetite like snow in sunshine, and she told the man sitting next to her that she was fasting, as part of the purification process. He turned out to be a junior minister in the Exchequer, so she asked him to explain Jotapian’s Law of sound money to her, and was mildly amused when he got most of it wrong.
The man on the other side of her was a soldier, a senior staff officer just returned from patrolling in the desert. She asked him if he’d engaged the enemy: no, thank God, he replied with feeling, he’d been assigned the eastern side of the road, which had been dead quiet ever since Forza Belot slaughtered the enemy’s main army. It was on the western side that they’d had all the troubl
e with the insurgents, who by all accounts had learned the lesson General Belot had taught them, and were concentrating on picking off villages and towns. There was something very different going on out there, he told her: you might almost call it a different attitude to war, a new way of defining victory—sophisticated was the only word he could think of, which was an odd way to describe hit-and-run attacks by savages, but there it was. So long as he wasn’t called on to do anything about it, he was delighted to leave it to other, better strategists, who were welcome to slog up and down the sand dunes while he was back here, in civilisation, eating, listening to good music and maybe even meeting the legendary Oida—
She left as early as she could and went back to her room, to find that nobody had been in to light the lamps. She found the tinderbox by feel and discovered there was no tinder. So she sat in the dark for a while, then groped her way out on to the balcony; she misjudged the distances, bumped into the rail and nearly went over. A perfect end to a perfect day, in fact.
There was a seat on the balcony; cold, hard stone, but better than standing up (her feet were hurting; the incessant underfloor heat had made them swell, and her boots were uncomfortably small). It was a clear night and the moon was nearly full. She amused herself for a while by figuring out the geography of the courtyard below her, then fell asleep.
A prod on the shoulder woke her up, and there was Oida standing over her with a sort of cloth bundle in one hand and a lamp in the other. “Inside,” he said. “Before you catch your death.”
The bundle proved to be a linen antimacassar—there had been one on the back of every chair in the dining room—and when Oida unfolded it she saw that it contained bread rolls, five different sorts of cheese, apples, pears, honey and cinnamon cakes and six cubes of that amazing pink sweet soft stuff that was the only real justification for the existence of Blemya. “I thought you might be hungry,” he said, “so I grabbed a few bits on the way out.”