by K. J. Parker
The ambassador nodded, and folded his hands on the table. “My understanding,” he said, “is that at the moment you have no effective field army. Is that correct?”
Psellus smiled. “Yes.”
Perhaps the ambassador hadn’t been expecting a one-word answer. He flinched, as though Psellus had just said something rude. “We can offer you twelve thousand archers, eight thousand men-at-arms and eleven hundred heavy cavalry,” he said. “We’ve already taken the precaution of mustering them at Liancor…”
“Where’s that?”
Another rude word, apparently. The ambassador took a moment to recover, then said, “It’s the closest point on our side to the road the savages are likely to take. We’ve mobilised simply as a precaution, to discourage them from trespassing on our territory.” He smiled. “We have no quarrel of our own with either the Vadani or the savages. However…” He snatched a little breath, and Psellus thought: Ah. He’s about to lie to me. “However, we feel that it would be impossible, ethically speaking, for us to stand idly by and watch while the savages over-run and destroy a great city crammed with helpless civilians, women and children. We are prepared to help you…”
“Thank you.”
The ambassador looked like a man trying to wrestle with an opponent made entirely out of water; there was nothing to get hold of, and it kept slipping away unexpectedly. “Provided,” he went on, “that you in turn recognise the nature of the commitment we’re making to you, and undertake to bear it in mind when the post-war balance of power comes to be reassessed. For a long time now, we’ve been actively seeking a closer relationship with the Republic, a relationship which you have hitherto seemed less than eager to pursue. We feel—”
“Excuse me.” Psellus held up his hand (nice to find a use for it at last). “I’m very new at this, and I’m afraid I don’t speak the language very well. You’ve probably heard I didn’t want the job, I’m really not capable of doing it, by any stretch of the imagination, and I still don’t quite understand how I came to be given it. One minute they were going to execute me, the next… well, here I am.” He shook his head sadly. “But there we are, it’s done and can’t be helped, and now it’s all on my shoulders, whether I like it or not.” He looked up. “You don’t mind me telling you all that, do you?”
The ambassador was staring at him. “No, of course not. Your frankness is—”
“The thing is,” Psellus went on, looking over the ambassador’s shoulder at a mark on the wall, “I really do have to find a way of saving the City, because nobody else is willing or able, and so if I don’t do it – well, it’s not something that bears thinking about. So, I’ve got to manage it somehow, but I don’t know the first thing about diplomacy, so I’m not even going to try. I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I do the best I can. Is that all right?”
The ambassador nodded. He seemed to be having trouble finding any words.
“Thank you,” Psellus said. “This is how I think matters stand, and perhaps you’ll be kind enough to tell me if I’ve got it all disastrously wrong. Now then. Like me, you can’t really bring yourself to believe that the savages will be able to take the City, even though there’s a quite ridiculously huge number of them, and they’ve got the abominator Vaatzes helping them, which means if they haven’t already built siege engines as good as the ones we make, they’ll do so pretty soon. No; you look at our walls and the City gates, and you think – just as I used to do – there’s no power on earth that could ever crack that particular nut, engines or no engines.” He paused to draw breath, then went on, “But you know that we haven’t got any proper soldiers any more; we have no army of our own, and so many mercenaries got killed fighting the Eremians and the Vadani that they simply don’t want to work for us any more, especially now the savages have found a way of crossing the desert and have joined up with our enemies. You believe – quite rightly, of course – that we’re terrified, feeling helpless, we don’t know what to do, and so we’d be willing to pay anything and make any concessions you’d care to name in return for the loan of your army, just to make us feel a little bit safer until we’ve had a chance to pull ourselves together and figure out how we’re going to defend our city.” He paused again, smiled meekly and asked, “Is that about right, or have I misunderstood you entirely?”
“That’s about right,” the ambassador said.
“Splendid, I’m glad about that. It’s so important that people tell me when I make mistakes, or how will I ever learn? Anyway; I’m sure you know much more about fighting wars than any of us do, so you must’ve assessed the position and decided that the advantages – the concessions you can screw out of us while we’re on our knees like this – outweigh the rather dreadful risk you’re running, picking a fight with a million savages. Oh, did you know that, by the way? Actually, it’s closer to eight hundred thousand, when you leave out the carters and drovers and all the people in the army who don’t actually fight, but that’s still an awful lot. You do know; excellent. Well, of course you do, now I come to think of it; I imagine it was you who gave us the figures in the first place, because we haven’t got any scouts, and who else would be out there counting?” Psellus smiled again, and continued: “Now I’m the last person to tell you that you’ve made a bad decision, and it’s very encouraging to know you’ve got so much faith in us, since you know so much more about these things than we do. I still can’t help thinking that in your shoes, the last thing I’d want to do is let myself get dragged into a war that’s none of my business, fighting against a vast army of savages who’ll wipe me off the face of the earth if they win. Still, if that’s a risk you’re happy to take, far be it from me to argue with you. We need you desperately, and in return you can have anything you want.”
There was a long, dead silence. “Anything?”
Psellus nodded vigorously. “You name it. Money, land – you can have Eremia if we win, it’s no use to us, or the Vadani silver mines if you’d prefer, it’s entirely up to you. Just say what you want and I’ll have a treaty drawn up. And in return, you’ll lend us your army. Well?”
The ambassador took a moment to clear his throat. “Agreed,” he said.
“Splendid.” Psellus beamed at him. “There, we’ve made an alliance, and it was so much easier than I thought it’d be. When Boioannes was in charge, it used to take weeks to hammer out a treaty, and he knew a lot about diplomacy, unlike me. Now, how soon can your soldiers get here? Or…” Psellus frowned. “Here’s where it gets difficult again. I don’t know whether we need them here at the City, or whether they’d be more useful hindering the savages and making it hard for them to reach us. You’re the expert. What do you think?”
Nothing in the ambassador’s long and varied experience had prepared him for a question like that. “It’s a complicated decision,” he said. “On the one hand…”
“The way I see it,” Psellus went on, “an army of a million people is obviously a great advantage in a battle, no doubt about it, but until you actually get to the battlefield, it’s also a tremendous problem. Must be. Food and so forth, hay for the horses, clean water. Now, we’ve done a little research – dreadful, really, it’s taken something like this to make us realise just how woefully ignorant we are about everything other than making things and selling them – and we can’t see how the enemy can keep themselves fed and watered just from what they can find in the fields and villages, which means they must be having to bring in their food and so on from somewhere else. God only knows where,” Psellus added with a grin. “I mean to say, you increase the population of the mountain duchies by a million, the Eremians and the Vadani could only just about feed themselves at the best of times, so it’s not like there can be any huge granaries bursting at the seams with stockpiled sacks of flour. Probably some of your merchants have been trading with them – it’s perfectly all right, I quite understand – but from the little I know about your people, I don’t suppose that can have made much difference. No, the only source of
supply I can think of is the savages’ own herds of cattle – they’re nomads, as I’m sure you know, that’s how they live, and they must have managed to bring their cattle with them across the desert when they came. Which is fine, of course, from their point of view, except that there can’t be all that much pasture in the mountains for all those hundreds of thousands of animals; and when the grass has all been eaten, and any hay that our men overlooked while they were there, they’ll have to slaughter most of them before they starve; and yes, they can salt down the carcasses, but even that won’t last for ever. Time, you see. They’re almost as short of it as we are.” Psellus stopped talking for a moment, as if thinking about something, then added, “Of course, all this stuff is just what’s occurred to me while I’ve been thinking about it, and like I’ve told you already, I’m hopelessly ignorant about military matters, so I may have got it all completely wrong. But if I’m right – and if I’m not, do please say so – it seems to me that the best use we can make of your army is messing about with their lines of supply. Would you agree?”
The ambassador hesitated, as though trying to translate what he’d heard into a language he could understand. “Of course,” he said. “It’s the only logical—”
“Though obviously,” Psellus went on, “there’s a bit more to it than that. The last thing we want to do is make them come here before we’ve done what we can to get ready for them. If your soldiers were to drive off all their cattle, it could force them to attack us straight away, simply because the only reserve of food large enough to feed them and close enough to be any use is what we’ve got here – though I think you ought to know, we’re not exactly well provided for in that department ourselves. Of course, I’ve made arrangements for every ship we can buy or hire to bring in as much food as possible from across the sea – the old country won’t send us soldiers any more, but they’re still happy to sell us wheat, thank goodness – but it’s all got to come in through Lonazep, and I understand it’s absolute chaos there at the moment. Still, they probably don’t know that, and if they do, it’s not as though they’d have a choice, if we somehow contrived to run off all their livestock. So, we don’t want to leave them starving. We just want to slow them right down, so we’ve got time to build up our walls and get in as much food as we can for a long siege. That’s our best chance, I reckon. If it’s a matter of who starves first, I think we can win. If it comes to fighting, we might as well not bother.” Psellus breathed out (he still wasn’t used to talking uninterrupted for so long), then added, “Do you think I’m on the right lines here, or have I got it all wrong? Really, I’d value your opinion. It’s been such a worry, trying to learn all this very difficult stuff in such a tearing hurry. It’d be a relief if an expert like yourself can reassure me I haven’t made a dreadful mess of it all.”
The ambassador looked at him warily for a while, then said, “Can I ask you what you did before all this?”
“I was a clerk.”
“A…”
Psellus nodded. “I was a records clerk for nine years, after I’d finished my apprenticeship. Then I got my transfer from the executive to the administrative grade; I was a junior secretary in the Compliance directorate for six years, and then general secretary for five years after that. And then,” he added sadly, “Ziani Vaatzes came along, and now look at me. Lord of all I survey. I met him once, did you know that? Vaatzes. He’s the key to it all, of course.” Psellus shook his head. “I’m terribly sorry, I’m rambling, and you’re a busy man. Now then, about this army of yours.”
Later, in the ten minutes or so between appointments (he had his beautiful clock to thank for such an indecent degree of precision; he still loved it for its beauty, but it nagged him like a wife), he wrote down the minutes of his meeting with the ambassador and compared them with the plan he’d prepared beforehand. Well, he thought, now at least we have a few soldiers, thanks to the incredible stupidity of the Cure Doce. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But then they’d been brought up to believe the Republic was invincible; invincible and gullible. Two mistakes, and they’d probably cost the Cure Doce their existence. Not that it mattered, if they could buy him time to turn the City into one of those extraordinary star shapes he’d seen in the book.
He put the sheet of minutes on the pile of papers to be filed, and spent his last few moments of solitary peace going over his plan for the meeting with the architects. He would never be able to understand the book, but they might.
Suddenly, he smiled. Wouldn’t it be a superb piece of irony, he thought, if we actually contrived to get away with it? A million enemies, and we beat them because there’s too many of them to take the City. The sheer perversity of it appealed to him enormously. They lose, because they sent a million men to do the job of fifty thousand; I beat a million men by fighting just one.
Which reminded him. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the pile, inked his pen and wrote, wastefully, in the middle of the page:
His wife.
2
He was cold, hungry, and still damp, though it had stopped raining through the hole in the roof. He could feel drops of water trickling down his forehead from his sodden cap, and smell the stench of drying wool.
I might be late, he remembered her saying. It’s hard for me to get away in the evenings. Well, of course it was. She had a husband to look after, and right now he’d be the busiest man in the City; rushed off his feet, frustrated by his inferiors, yelled at by his masters for not working miracles, painfully aware that nothing was under his control, but everything was his fault. So, naturally, when he finally got home from work, he’d expect a hot meal on the table and everything just so. That didn’t alter the fact that she had other responsibilities, and no excuse for not performing them efficiently.
He had to have a new coat. This one was worn out, useless. She’d have to steal one from her husband – shouldn’t be a problem, she could say that she was sick to death of seeing him in that tatty old thing, so she’d thrown it out, given it to a beggar …
(He grinned angrily. That’d be no less than the truth.)
The straw he lay on was filthy, too. Of course, straw was a problem, a luxury the Republic couldn’t afford, now that all the carts were being used to carry grain and flour for the coming siege. That didn’t alter the fact that it stank and was starting to go black, because of the damp. It was all intolerable, every wretched detail. She’d have to find him somewhere else.
Worst of all, needless to say, was not knowing what was going on. All he knew was what he could figure out from what he’d seen in the streets, when he’d felt brave enough to venture outside. Constant traffic, of course, all the grain carts blocking every thoroughfare in the City – that was the fault of the highways superintendent at the prefecture. He tried to remember the man’s name, but he couldn’t, though he could dimly picture a short, plump man with a big moustache. Whoever he was, he wasn’t doing his job very well. In any event, the gridlocked traffic told him that they were still getting in supplies; so the enemy hadn’t taken Lonazep (it would have been the first thing he’d have done) or cut the road to the coast. Since they weren’t fools, or at any rate the Vadani duke was no fool, he didn’t know enough about the leaders of the savages to form an opinion, the logical inference was that they hadn’t taken steps to cut the City’s supply lines because they weren’t in a position to do so. And that, of course, could mean any one of many things. That aside, all the factories had moved from four to three shifts. He couldn’t approve of that. Lengthening shifts was all very well, but it was a proven fact that working men too hard always led to a slump in productivity. So, whoever had ordered the shifts to be cut either didn’t understand simple management, or else needed to give the impression he was doing something, even if he knew it’d be counterproductive. Since that was the more likely explanation, it suggested that things weren’t going well for the new regime. He smiled at that, but it worried him. Even though they were his enemies, he was relying on them to save the C
ity, just as everybody else was. Didn’t the morons realise they simply couldn’t afford to make mistakes?
He heard footsteps, and felt his stomach twist with instinctive terror; but it was only her, finally.
“You’re late,” he grumbled. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
She was wearing a scarf over her hair; it was drenched, so presumably it had started raining again. She had the child with her. “I thought I told you—”
“I told him I had to take Moritsa to the doctor,” she snapped. “It was the only way I could get out of the house at this time of night.”
He scowled at her; stupid woman. Talking like that in front of the child, bringing it here. Didn’t she realise that the child now knew where he was? Naturally she’d have made it promise not to tell anybody, but children couldn’t be relied on to keep secrets. They told their friends at school: I know a secret, my mummy’s taking food to a strange man in a stable; and then the friend told its father, who happened to be a corporal in the Watch. Still, he couldn’t very well say anything, since he’d already made the point several times. The last thing he could afford was for her to take offence and stop coming.
“You did bring the food, didn’t you?” he said.
She took a basket from the little girl’s hand and gave it to him. He snatched off the cloth that covered it. “Is this all?”
“It’s not easy,” she replied defensively. “You wouldn’t believe how much prices have gone up lately, and we aren’t made of money. I’m just surprised he hasn’t noticed we’re feeding four instead of three. Usually he goes over the household accounts at least once a week. Just as well he’s so busy at work. When he gets home, he’s too tired to do anything except flop in a chair.”