Sharps

by K. J. Parker

  “He’s an accredited political officer seconded from the foreign office.”

  “Right. One last thing.” Suidas was starting to fidget with his hands, rubbing the scar on his right hand with his thumb. “How many way stations are there between C9 and the DMZ?”

  Phrantzes’ eyes opened a little wider. “Seven.”

  “And we’re nearly at the border. And we haven’t stopped.”

  A moment’s silence. Then Phrantzes said: “Totila said he wanted to make up the lost time.”

  “Stopping at way stations isn’t optional. Not if you’re Permian soldiers on Scherian soil, anyhow. You’d have to stop and show your papers. And we haven’t left the road, so we haven’t just bypassed them all. Even if Totila’s decided to break the rules and just ride on by without stopping to show his pass, there should’ve been some reaction. The station garrisons should’ve scrambled their horsemen and come after us, or ridden ahead across country so the next station down the line could bar the road. No, the only conclusion I can draw is, all the stations between C9 and the DMZ have been closed down.” He stopped, giving Phrantzes an opportunity to speak. No reply. “Now,” he said, “why would anybody do that?”

  A look of panic crossed Phrantzes’ face, but it soon passed. “It’s entirely possible,” he said, “that from time to time, all the stations are closed down simultaneously, for some reason. Don’t ask me what it could be,” he added quickly, “I’m not an expert.”

  “You used to be.”

  “That was seven years ago, and there was a war on. Things are almost certainly different now. It’s equally possible that nobody thought to tell me that just such a closedown would be taking place at the same time as we set out for Permia. Furthermore,” he went on, as Suidas opened his mouth, “the local bandits would quite likely know the closedown timetable, and make use of it in their business. In fact, if there is a regular network closedown, that’s precisely what they’d do. It might also be the case that the Permians know about it, and my office doesn’t; which would explain why Permian units are standing by. To cover for our people,” he added forcefully, “in a spirit of mutual co-operation and trust. Well,” he added, “it’s possible. Isn’t it?”

  “You seem to think so.”

  “Rather more possible,” Phrantzes said, “than some enormous conspiracy against us, involving multiple arms of government, requiring enormous effort, employing highly unreliable agents such as common highwaymen, not to mention wildly, bizarrely oversophisticated for the purpose. If someone wanted to kill us,” he added quietly, “there are much easier ways in much more convenient places. Also,” he went on mildly, “we’re still alive. I put it to you: anybody with the resources to concoct a conspiracy on the scale you’re imagining would surely have got the job done. They wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble, and then relied on a small group of bandits with farm tools to overcome the four finest swordsmen in Scheria.”

  Suidas scowled at him; then he changed the scowl to a smile. “That reminds me,” he said. “The swords, in the crate. How did they suddenly, magically turn from foils to sharps?”

  Phrantzes slowly shook his head. “I don’t think that’s going to help your case,” he said. “If I was plotting to murder us, I wouldn’t surreptitiously replace our fake weapons with real ones. Counterproductive, don’t you think?”

  Suidas glared furiously at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “When I’m bored, I start thinking about things. You’re probably right,” he added. “I remember a time in the War, we were taking food to the siege of Flos Verjan, and we were promised they’d have finished building a bridge over the Renec, like we’d been asking them to do for I don’t know how long. So we got there, no bridge; and then a bunch of engineers showed up, told us they’d just got their orders to start building it. And then, of course, that was cancelled, because the Irrigator moved the Renec seven miles to the east and we didn’t need to cross it any more. I guess it’s just something like that, and I’ve built up this wonderful theory—”

  “I remember that bridge,” Phrantzes interrupted. “I was the one who tried to get it built.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No, certainly not. I was in charge of supplies to Flos Verjan, and it seemed ridiculous that our convoys had to go the long way round, adding two days to the journey, when a simple bridge would take a few men a week to build. Of course, the general wouldn’t allow a bridge there because he was planning to divert the river, but I was far too low down the hierarchy to be told about the grand design. So I spent a great deal of time and energy lobbying for what I saw as an entirely reasonable project, and of course I was wasting my time and making a fool of myself.” He smiled. “I remember how angry I felt, and how inappropriate that seemed, because of course the flooding of Flos Verjan was the biggest victory in the War, and I was upset because it got in the way of my personal bridge. Later, of course, I could see how ridiculous I’d been about it, but at the time …”

  The chaise was slowing down. Suidas pulled the window down and stuck his head out. “Looks like the border,” he said. “There’s a blockhouse, and a gate across the road, and a couple of soldiers.”

  “There you are then,” Phrantzes said cheerfully. “Everything normal.”

  Suidas couldn’t be bothered to argue. He was watching the soldiers. He tried to imagine how he’d react if he was a border guard and he was suddenly faced with a squad of Blueskin cavalry he hadn’t been told about, coming out of Scheria. At such short notice he couldn’t properly reconstruct such a complex train of emotions, but he was fairly sure he wouldn’t just stand there looking bored, which was what the two soldiers were doing.

  He reached across and prodded the side of Tzimisces’ nose with his forefinger. “Wake up,” he said, as Tzimisces grunted and opened his eyes. “We’re at the border.”

  “What? Oh, splendid. I’d better have a word with the station officer.”

  Sliding out from under his travelling rug, Tzimisces opened the door and melted out of the carriage. Suidas listened hard, but he couldn’t hear voices. “You were on Carnufex’s staff in the War?” he said.

  “That’s right,” Phrantzes said.

  “How long?”

  “About eight years. Before that I was at GHQ.”

  Suidas nodded. “Not a field officer, then.”

  “Not really. I did spend a certain amount of time up around the lines, but …”

  “They’re opening the gates, anyway,” Suidas said. “I think I’ll just get out and see if I can …”

  “Better not.”

  There was something in Phrantzes’ voice that made Suidas hesitate; and then Tzimisces came back, climbing into the chaise and under his rug so fluently that it was hard to believe he hadn’t been there all the time. The chaise started to move.

  “Thanks for waking me up,” Tzimisces said. “Well, I had a quick word with the captain, and everything’s fine. Totila’s troop is going to escort us right though to Joiauz, and they’ve arranged for a cart to meet us in the Zone with food and tents and blankets and so forth, so we shouldn’t have to rough it too much.”

  “Why are all the way stations shut down?” Suidas demanded.

  Tzimisces didn’t even blink. “Some ridiculous misunderstanding,” he replied. “The captain explained it to me. Once every three months or so, the way stations do an invasion drill. Part of it involves closing down the network and shadowing an imaginary invasion force, like we did in the War when the Aram Chantat launched their raids. Apparently, some fool scheduled a drill and nobody thought to mention it.”

  Suidas looked at him. He was sure Tzimisces had been asleep, right up to the moment he’d woken him. “Well,” he said, “that explains it.”

  “Indeed. I shall have to mention it in my report. Of course, the Permians will hear about all this and we’ll look rather silly, I’m afraid. The fact that they had to rescue us, on our own soil, will play very well in some quarters, I
fancy. Still, it could’ve been worse.” He smiled. “I suppose you know this road quite well.”

  “It’s been a while,” Suidas replied.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose it’s changed all that much since your day. More potholes, I imagine. There simply isn’t the money for road maintenance.”

  Suidas smiled bleakly and said nothing; after a moment, Tzimisces picked up his book and started to read. This time, the title on the spine was just visible: scrawly brown handwriting, Pescennius and Berenice. Suidas smothered a grin. He remembered Sontha buying a copy of it in the bookseller’s market, as a present for her mother, one of whose many faults was a penchant for poisonously soppy verse romances. Tzimisces’ copy had a distinctly home-made look, though Suidas couldn’t really imagine the political officer sitting on a high stool in the writing room of the City Library, slowly and painfully copying out the text as the light from the tall east-facing windows slowly dwindled. Rather more likely, he decided (though on no evidence, he admitted to himself, as he drifted off to sleep), the book was the forfeited property of some political prisoner put to death on a trumped-up charge, and Tzimisces was reading it as part of a twisted attempt to get into its deceased owner’s mind. Well, it was a theory, anyway.

  Tzimisces wasn’t the only one reading. Iseutz opened Principles of Political Theory at random and made a valiant attempt at the first paragraph on the left-hand page. It was written in ordinary modern Imperial Standard and she knew what all the words meant, but those words in that particular order seemed to deflect her mind, like a good parry in Third.

  The institution we commonly refer to as democracy would, properly speaking, be more aptly termed an elective, or even in many cases a sortative, oligarchy, where the democratic element consists merely of the selection, often by random, perverse or otherwise unsound procedures, of the membership of the personnel of the ruling elite. Further vitiating factors include the process whereby candidates are chosen and promoted – the self-limiting caucus, the various forms of patronage, actual and indirect corruption; issues regarding voting procedure, electoral colleges, oversight and the proportion of votes received required to constitute a genuine mandate; the discretion of a purportedly representative body to dissolve or prolong its term of office, to co-opt, to form coalitions. When we compare the patterns of legislative activity of such representative democracies with oligarchies based on qualification by birth, property or faction membership, we find a significant correlation in terms of—

  She frowned, and read it again. It still didn’t make much sense. But the creep Tzimisces had read it, apparently for pleasure, and if he could manage it, so could she. Even so, when she’d agreed to swap books with him, she hadn’t realised she was getting such a raw deal. Lifting her head slightly, she saw that the creep was several pages into Pescennius and giving every indication of enjoying it. At the very least, she decided, she had to give him credit for being able to read her handwriting.

  She closed the book and opened it again, the way fortune-tellers in the Flower Market did when purporting to tell you who you were going to marry. The idea was, the first letter of the first word on the left-hand page was the initial of your future husband.

  Although.

  But of course you had to be trained, or an old peasant woman with hill-country blood, or it didn’t work. She scowled at the book and fought back the urge to throw it out of the window. There was, of course, a certain amount of leeway, since the tradition didn’t specify whether the initial was your one true love’s first name or surname. She tried again.

  Generally.

  She smiled; another myth exploded. She read:

  Generally speaking, military dictatorships contain from the outset the seeds of their own undoing. One has only to contemplate the vicissitudes of the Western Empire in the sixth and seventh centuries AUC to form the inescapable view that—

  The hell with that. She realised that she was gripping the book so tightly that her nails were cutting half-moon grooves in the pages. I will not be defeated by a book, she told herself, and read the whole chapter. Then she closed the book and put it away in her pocket.

  Her great-great-grandfather, according to family tradition, had been a hermit. At that time, there had been a fashion for rich noblemen to decorate the grounds of their estates with follies – ruined castles, abandoned monasteries, hermitages. The proprietor of the estate where her family had worked as farm labourers for generations came back from the customary grand tour of the Eastern Empire determined to go one better. He had a column built, forty feet high, on the top of the hill overlooking his ornamental lake. In the Mesoge, far to the east of the capital, he had ridden across part of the great desert, where the most extreme ascetics retired to live lives of perfect solitude and contemplation; to which end they climbed to the top of pillars and columns and sat, perfectly still, sunk in meditation for years at a time. That, he decided, was real class; so as soon as the column had been raised, he let it be known that he was looking to hire an ascetic to go and sit on it. No qualifications or previous experience were required, since the ascetic would be purely for show. The duties would consist simply of sitting quite still whenever anybody might be watching. Supplies of food and water would lugged up a long ladder twice a week (there was a cunningly hidden recess in the top of the column, so the pots and baskets wouldn’t be visible from the ground) and the applicant would be permitted to wear thick woollen hose under his ascetic rags during the winter months. Iseutz’s great-great-grandfather, who by all accounts was precious little use for anything else, was the only man on the estate to apply for the job, and he did it, well and conscientiously, for two years, until the novelty wore off and he was allowed to come down. Two years’ arrears of quite generous pay were waiting for him, and although he managed to drink a significant proportion of it, enough was left to enable him to set up a little dry-goods business, which his wife and daughter ran so successfully that his grandson was able to go to school and become a great success in the banking sector.

  It was a pity, Iseutz had often felt, that she hadn’t inherited her ancestor’s ability to sit still. She thought of him from time to time, imagined him surveying the grand, gorgeous vista – the lake, the great house, the parkland and the mountains beyond – like some divine audience, almost like the Invincible Sun himself, possessed of the leisure of his betters, enjoying the spectacle they’d spent so much time, effort and money on creating, the complete effect of which only he could see. The right sort of man could be quite happy up there, provided it wasn’t raining, simply observing, collecting data, slowly and scientifically collating and refining the results of his observations into a coherent unified theory that would explain—There, the daydream broke down. But the patience, the ability to watch rather than take part; that would be nice, she often thought. Of course, they’d never have got her up there because she was scared to death of heights, and if they had managed it, she’d have jumped off the column after five minutes from sheer intolerable boredom. But in any case, such an opportunity was unlikely to present itself in her lifetime. Nobody had that kind of money any more.

  Outside the window, the landscape was changing. They’d been climbing steadily for several hours, and now they appeared to have reached a plateau of sorts. The road ran along the top of a broad ridge, slowly dropping away into what she guessed was a deep river valley. On the other side, she saw hillsides purple with heather, with occasional patches of yellow gorse. Green gullies marked the courses of small streams. There were no trees anywhere. A long way away, she saw the white tops of mountains.

  She tried to imagine what all this enormous empty space would look like reduced to lines on a map, and concluded that they’d crossed into the Demilitarised Zone, previously known as the Debatable Land, the cause and principal arena of the War. She’d learned all about it from her tutor, a thin, harassed man with a bald head and a stringy white beard, who’d come both highly recommended and cheap. The problem, he’d told her, was that when the Eastern
and Western Empires had fought each other to a standstill, two hundred years ago, they hadn’t been able to agree a boundary in this sector. Rather than allow the negotiations to founder over a trivial scrap of moorland, they’d agreed to defer a decision and set up a boundary commission. Both sides then issued their unilateral declarations of victory, and pending the commission’s report, they’d reached an informal agreement whereby both sides used the land for summer grazing – it was, after all, useless for anything else. The commission took its time; before it could announce its findings, the Aram Chantat burst into the Eastern Empire, the Suessones attacked the West, and the frontier provinces of Scheria and Permia took advantage of the resulting chaos to break away from their Imperial masters. Fighting off the barbarian invasions left both empires too weak to reclaim their lost provinces (no great loss, in any case). Scheria and Permia declared and secured their independence and found that they’d inherited a little piece of the Great War. Scheria, having considerably greater manpower at its disposal, immediately occupied the Debatable Land and parcelled it out among the leading families, who sent in their shepherds. Not long afterwards, the first major silver strike was made in Permia, whose military aristocracy suddenly realised that they could now afford to pay for a war of their own.

  He told a good story, she’d say that much for him. When she came to read round the subject for herself, she realised it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that. Scherian historians advanced a fairly convincing case for the land having originally belonged to the semi-nomadic tribes from whom the Scherians claimed descent. Permian authors drew attention to the ruins of a once significant city, now almost totally obliterated, whose monuments bore inscriptions in the long since extinct Middle Zeuxite language, which the Permians were believed to have spoken before they were conquered by the Eastern Empire, a thousand years ago. Another thing her tutor hadn’t told her – quite possibly he hadn’t known it himself – was that before the Great War, Western Imperial surveyors had reported substantial deposits of iron, copper and lead in the Debatable Land. Nothing had been done about it, of course, because the deposits were a long way down inside the hills, and the West lacked the technical skill necessary for deep-cast mining, so the minerals would have been too expensive to exploit. But deep-cast mining was what the Permians did best, and it was logical to assume that that was why they’d been prepared to fight so long and so hard for what was otherwise a modest expanse of second-rate sheep pasture.