The Two of Swords--Part Nineteen

by K. J. Parker

  “It wasn’t exactly hard,” Lycao said. “And so what if she has? We don’t owe her an explanation.”

  “Yes we do,” Procopius said firmly. “I have to tell you,” he went on, “Lycao didn’t vote for you. Neither did Thratta, come to that. But, as I pointed out, the Lodge is not and never has been a democracy. Congratulations, Commissioner. I have great pleasure in appointing you the third Triumvir of the Lodge.”

  She kept her face completely blank, though it took an effort she didn’t know she was capable of. Third Triumvir; therefore, there had been a vacancy, therefore—

  “Well,” Lycao said. “Say something.”

  “The head on the stake,” she said. “Oh, that.” Senza pulled a face. “She keeps banging on about the stupid head, and Lycao wouldn’t let me tell her.”

  Procopius sighed. “She might as well go and see for herself.”

  So she went and looked. It gave her no pleasure, much to her surprise. Then she went back in. When she got back, Thratta had moved up to make room for her.

  “What about Oida?” she said. “Is he safe?”

  “Properly speaking,” Procopius said, “we ought to be very annoyed with you.” He waited for a reaction, got none and went on: “You concluded a peace agreement with Forza Belot on behalf of the Lodge, with absolutely no authority to do so.”

  She nodded. “Forza thought I could speak for Axio, and Axio was head of the Lodge,” she said. “It was easier to give him what he wanted than tell him the truth.”

  “Easier,” Lycao repeated, glaring at her. Procopius shut her up with a tiny gesture of his hand.

  “I knew Axio wasn’t in charge,” she went on. “But he – well, both of them – were acting like he was. I assumed they were on his side.”

  “You can’t be expected to be right about everything,” Procopius said, kindly and just a little bit patronisingly. “You’ve done very well as it is. Tell me, when we met on the road—”

  “Did I know? No.”

  Procopius nodded. “You just thought us running into each other at that precise moment was a gigantic coincidence.”

  She smiled. “Actually, yes. Did you write the letter? To Forza?”

  Procopius looked at her for a moment before answering. “Oida wrote the letter,” he said. “With his left hand. I dictated it, if that’s what you meant.”

  “Is he all right? Is he going to be all right?”

  That made Senza grin. Procopius hesitated. “But you figured it out after that. About me, I mean.”

  She made herself be patient. “Sort of,” she said. “I knew Oida had to be right about a schism in the Lodge, though I had my doubts, God knows, right up until I realised he was ambidextrous. So it wasn’t hard to work out that Axio was the leader of the breakaway faction, and what he wanted was Oida dead and the throne for himself, in that order. Don’t ask me how long all that was going on, because I haven’t a clue.”

  “Longer than any of us realised,” Thratta said sadly. “It simply never occurred to us that a Craftsman—”

  Procopius frowned at him, and he fell silent. “Go on,” he said.

  “So Axio arranged for me to be ordered to kill Oida,” she said. “Partly because I’d be the only one he trusted enough to get close enough to do it, partly because—”

  Lycao, to her surprise, lifted her hand. “Yes, we know. You don’t have to say it. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with more of a talent for cruelty.”

  “Axio wanted me to kill Forza,” she went on. “That all went wrong.”

  “Of course it did,” Senza put in. “Axio thought he could outsmart my brother. Always a mistake.”

  “And Forza showed you the letter,” Procopius prompted her.

  “Yes. And I knew when I saw the bit about not lifting a finger. But I got it right, but for the wrong reason. I thought Oida couldn’t have written that because he’d lost his finger and couldn’t write.”

  Procopius smiled. “He wasn’t happy about it,” he said. “Refused point blank, until I assured him you’d be all right. I told him, Forza’s not a naturally cruel man – be quiet, Senza – so he’d spare your life once you’d got his attention and interest. Also, a rapprochement with the Lodge has been on his mind for a while now, and he knew you were something quite high up, or would be; saving you for later, I think you could say. Anyway, eventually Oida agreed to do as he was told. But I thought you ought to know, he didn’t do it lightly.”

  Senza looked straight at her, then shook his head. She filed that away for later reference.

  “If you want to know when I knew that you’re the head of the Lodge,” she went on, “it was when you came in just now and Senza gave you his seat. That’s when I knew. Before that, it was just a guess.”

  “Intuition,” Procopius said approvingly. “Intuition is the daughter of Faith, as someone or other once said. But that’s not what you wanted to talk about, is it?”

  She took a deep breath. “No,” she said.

  “Fair enough.” Procopius stood up. “But I don’t want to listen to you, so I made you a Triumvir instead. It’s always been a rule of mine, in the many positions of authority I’ve held over the years. If you can’t beat them, promote them. Congratulations.”

  And then he walked out.

  Lycao escorted her to her new quarters.

  “You’ll have to excuse the decor,” she said, as she unlocked the door and handed over the key. “Used to belong to the late emperor’s second-favourite mistress. You can clear it all out if you want.”

  It took her a moment to get used to the glare. Everything was gold, or gold leaf, or cloth-of-gold, or gilded mosaic tiles. She sat down on a spindly legged gold chair and kicked her shoes off, and saw that Lycao had followed her in. “Sit down, please,” she said, and Lycao perched on the edge of the gold-canopied bed. “You chose this room for me, didn’t you?”

  “Tart’s boudoir? No, actually. There are fourteen habitable State apartments, and nine of them are already taken. The other five are worse than this.”

  She shrugged. “Was there something?”

  Lycao glared at her, then relaxed. “We don’t have to be enemies,” she said. “Yes, I resent the fact that you’ve been made a Triumvir and you haven’t done nearly as much as I have to deserve it. But you would have done it, wouldn’t you? Killed Oida, I mean. If he hadn’t told you the truth, about the schism.”

  She decided to lie. “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t have done that,” Lycao said. “They tried to make me – kill Senza, I mean, or hand him over to his brother, which would have been the same thing. And I wouldn’t do it. Which was downright disobeying an order, so properly speaking I shouldn’t even be in the Lodge, let alone a Triumvir. So, who am I to throw stones at you?”

  “I understand,” she said. “How you must have felt.”

  Lycao thought for a moment. “You know what,” she said, “maybe you do. Probably the only one of them who does. Who knows, maybe we’ll be friends after all. I doubt it, though, I’m not easy to like.” She grinned. “Hard to break the habits of a lifetime.”

  She waited for a moment or so, in case Lycao wanted to say anything else. Then she said, “You always did love Senza, didn’t you?”

  “Always.” No hesitation. “But he always loved me, and the Lodge realised how useful that made me, the only chink in the combined armour of the otherwise invincible Belot brothers. I wouldn’t kill him, but I’d play horrible games with him, that I was prepared to do, for the Lodge.” She shrugged. “You do know the full story, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you? Damn.” Lycao gave her a savage look. “I assumed – Oh, what the hell. I’ll make Senza tell you. It’ll be good for him.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Lycao smiled at her, then stood up. “Don’t push your luck,” she said, and left the room.

  So she amused herself by exploring for a while. There was plenty to explore. In a cedar clothes press (plated, n
eedless to say, in thin sheets of beaten gold) she found a dozen heartbreakingly beautiful dresses, presumably the property of the room’s previous tenant. They could only have been made by the Scocali Brothers of Choris Anthropou, and none of them fitted. She also found jewellery, cosmetics, perfumes and the most beautiful shoes in the whole world (which didn’t fit either) but no books. She did find a comb, tortoiseshell decorated with garnets and lapis lazuli, but the knots in her hair were too much for it and it broke.

  She was regretting the death of a thing of great beauty when someone knocked on the door. It was Senza Belot. She smiled at him and told him to come in.

  “Dear God,” he said, looking round. “Is all this stuff real?”

  “I think so.”

  “You could pay six squadrons of cavalry for a year—”

  “You could,” she corrected him. “Not me, I’m just a burglar. Please sit down.”

  He opted for the spindly gold chair, which sagged under his weight. She perched on the bed, where Lycao had sat. “She sent me,” he said.

  “I gathered.”

  He smiled at her. Most people would say he was the good-looking brother, though if she had to choose she’d have picked Forza. “She said I had to come and tell you the whole story.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  That made him grin. “She’ll know if I don’t.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on my honeymoon. And then we’re off to Blemya, for the wedding.”

  Blemya. “Who’s getting married?”

  He looked at her. “The queen. Didn’t you know?”

  “Who’s she getting married to?”

  Senza shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It was Forza who started it,” he said.

  “You’re not going to tell me.”

  “On the contrary,” Senza said solemnly. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

  We were always close (Senza said). He’s a year older than me, but by the time I was thirteen I was much taller and broader than him. We were never apart more than a minute or so all day long. We took our lessons together, hunted together, slept in the same room, did everything together. And we were always competitive, even as kids. I guess we have our father to thank for that. He used to say that strife is creation, and you can’t start a fire unless two flints collide.

  Anyway, when I was fifteen and Forza was sixteen, our father set us a challenge. I think there were four events, unless I’ve forgotten one. We had to write a sonnet, cut and stack a cord of firewood, play three games of chess and shoot five ends at a hundred yards. I lost the chess, but I won at everything else. The prize was a falcon, and I really wanted that bird, more than anything in the world. Forza already had one, he’d been given it for his sixteenth birthday, and I wanted to have one, too, better than his and earned, not just given to me as a present.

  So, I won the falcon, and a couple of days later I went to the mews first thing in the morning, and there it was, lying on the ground, dead. Someone had crept down in the night and twisted its neck. Forza swore blind it wasn’t him, but he kept grinning at me all day, and I’d heard him get up in the night. So I waited a few days, and then I asked him, suddenly, straight out: why? And he looked at me and said: because I can’t enjoy anything if you’ve got it, too. And then he looked me in the eye and said, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done it, will you forgive me? So of course I said yes. He smiled and thanked me, and we were fine for a long time after that. But I hadn’t forgiven him. I guess I developed my tactical instincts quite young.

  Anyway, Forza turned eighteen and they all said it was high time he got married, and there was this girl he really liked, our neighbour’s daughter, and our father was all for it, because it’d mean sorting out a problem with grazing rights and access to water for the sheep. I think Forza was actually in love with her, or believed he was; also, as soon as he was married, Father would build him a house and give him his share of the land, he’d be a grown-up, independent, and I know he was really looking forward to that. I’d been given some money by our grandmother, and I spent all of it on a wedding present for him. I bought him a pure white falcon. They’re very rare, and I knew he’d always wanted one.

  So, the night before the wedding, I slipped out of the house and walked over to our neighbour’s house. I knew the layout of the place quite well, so I knew which window was hers. I shinned up the wall; luckily it was a warm night so the shutters were open. I’d got some archers’ root. It’s what poachers use to poison the tips of their arrowheads. You boil the root and then distil it, over a long period of time. I’d been worried sick they’d find my still out in the woods, but I got away with it. I used to take chances then. Anyway, I found a brooch in her jewel box, dipped the pin in the poison and pricked her in the web between her fingers, where nobody would think of looking. The prick woke her up. I remember, she looked at me sort of blearily, and then the light in her eyes went out and she was dead. First time I’d ever seen anyone die, as a matter of fact. That stuff’s good, believe me. You probably know about it, of course, in your line of work.

  I was back well before dawn and I know nobody saw me, and I’d taken great care not to leave footprints. I’d taken a pair of Forza’s old shoes to do the job in, and I pitched them into the furnace on my way back in, snuck up the stairs in my stocking feet. It was a well-planned exercise, though I say it myself. There was absolutely no proof against me, and, needless to say, no proof was needed. There are some things you just know, without needing proof. He knew I’d done it.

  We were never friends again after that. I guess it was inevitable. He completely lost all interest in the estate and joined the Western military, so I went East. We were both horribly precocious; you don’t grow up competing with someone every bit as good as you at everything without learning how to win, and beat people. I think we might have forgotten about each other – well, not forgotten, naturally, but got on with our separate lives. Only I made a tragic mistake. I fell in love.

  That’s something you should never do, because immediately you’re giving your enemy a hostage. Trouble is, you can’t help it, can you? Anyway, I knew as soon as I set eyes on Lycao that she was the only one for me. She challenged me, just like Forza did, about everything, and I realised I didn’t want to win. That’s an amazing feeling, for someone like me. Someone you want to lose to. So, obviously, I had to have her. And, obviously, Forza would find out, and I knew exactly what he would do then. My own stupid fault, except I couldn’t help it.

  Needless to say, I told her all about it, it was only fair, she had a right to know what she was getting into. I told her what I’d done, and she looked at me for a very long time and said, quite probably in my shoes she’d have done the same thing. So we talked it over, and what we decided was, for the time being anyway, she’d make out that she couldn’t stand the sight of me – I was weird and I scared her, and she wanted nothing to do with me. So, whenever I could get away from my regiment, the story was that I’d caught up with her and was holding her against her will, and then when it was time for me to go back, she’d manage to escape and go into hiding, supposedly from me, really from Forza. It was damned difficult keeping in touch, because she really did have to make herself very hard to find. But we worked out a set of clues that only we knew about. It was risky, because Forza’s no fool; we knew he’d figure them out eventually. But at that stage we were hoping he’d get killed or sent into exile. Kidding ourselves, really, but you’ve got to have some hope, or what do you do?

  Well, Forza figured it out. I sent one of our coded messages, he intercepted it, and got there before I could. He snatched her out of bed in the middle of the night, and handed her straight over to Saevus Andrapodiza; you know, the slave dealer, Saevolus’ father. Saevus put her on a fast ship out of Beloisa, and four days later she was in Aelia.

  That was where Forza made his one and only mistake. He couldn’t resist overdoing it; also, he still believed she couldn
’t stand me. So he had Saevus tell her that I was responsible for selling her to the slavers – I was going to marry into the Imperial family and I wanted her out of the way – so that even if I did find her again she’d hate me. I reckon that’s why he didn’t just kill her outright. He had to go one step further than that, I fancy, in order to outdo me, in order to win. But, of course, she knew that wasn’t true. And eventually, I did find her. But she had rather a rough time in Aelia – well, I don’t need to explain, do I? She’s never got over it, and who can blame her? Something like that either kills you or twists you up inside until you can never be right again.

  By this time, I was commander-in-chief in the East, and Forza was leading the West. Suddenly we had this chessboard, and everybody wanted us to play. I think both of us underestimated the other. We both thought we could win. Actually, chess is a good analogy. You know the sort of game where you end up with only four pieces on the board – white king and rook, black king and rook. You don’t throw up your hands in horror and concede because you’re appalled by the slaughter of innocent pawns. The longer it goes on, the closer you get, the more intense it becomes. And, of course, the degree of skill required increases, and when you’re good at something you enjoy doing it for its own sake, and the harder it gets the more pleasure you get out of it. I probably shouldn’t say this, but I for one, I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, and if I had my time over again – well, I wouldn’t complain, let’s put it that way. They say the only immortality is to be remembered, and nobody’s going to forget Forza and me in a hurry, are they?

  The question that’s bothering me is, did I win? Arguably I did. Got you to thank for that, actually. No, really. You made that crazy peace treaty between Forza and the Lodge. Whether or not he took it at face value I really couldn’t say. But when Lycao and her lot – I mean your lot, sorry – found out that under the treaty he was to get an army of Lodge soldiers – Some opportunities are too good to miss, aren’t they? So she sent him six hundred Rosinholet horse-archers, knowing that he’d send some of them – a hundred, as it turned out – to protect his home and his wife, who he was genuinely fond of. They burned the house down, slaughtered the in-laws and the servants and stuck her head up on a pole. Probably on balance that puts me ahead in the game, but I don’t know.