The Two of Swords--Part Nineteen

by K. J. Parker

  When he’d finished, she stood up. Her back was stiff from crouching, and her ribs ached. “Axio wanted the first pack because he wanted to be head of the Lodge, and the head of the Lodge keeps the first pack. He thought if he got his hands on them, it’d somehow mean he was legitimate. But that’s not how it works, he was kidding himself.” She smiled. “He wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought he was, and look where it got him.”

  “He was my friend,” Musen said. “And Teucer shouldn’t have killed him. There was no need for that.”

  She shook her head. “I really don’t give a damn,” she said, “not any more. For what it’s worth, I think Axio was trying to do the right thing, just like a good Craftsman should, only he would insist on going about it in the worst possible way. Anyway, he’s dead now, and the pack needs to come home. I want you to go and get it and bring it to me, and then you can leave. Or stay, if you want to, whatever makes you feel better.”

  He looked at her for a long time. “They’ll be safe?”

  “They’ll be with the head of the Lodge, where they belong.” Suddenly she grinned. “Bless him, he doesn’t even know they were ever missing. He’s going to have a fit when he finds out.”

  Musen said there was something he wanted. It wasn’t valuable, in fact it was no use to anyone except him, and he reckoned he’d earned it.

  So she found a basket and fetched it for him. Axio didn’t look quite so handsome now. His skin was chalk-white and the birds had been at his eyes and his lips and the lobes of his ears. “What do you want it for?” she asked.

  “I’m going to bury him,” Musen replied. “It’s the decent thing to do, isn’t it?”

  Clearly Musen wasn’t going to be up to using a pick and a shovel for some time, so she sent down to the kitchens for a big cheese jar, filled with honey. “It won’t improve him,” she said, “but it’ll stop him getting any worse.”

  “Thanks,” Musen said. “You hated him, didn’t you?”

  She thought about her reply before answering. “It was hard not to,” she said. “But the head of the Lodge reckons he could have been a fairly good emperor, if he’d had the chance.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I agree,” she said. “And he was a true Craftsman, after his fashion. He could have been useful, if he hadn’t taken a wrong turning.”

  He looked at her. “He was my friend,” Musen said. “And he forgave me, when others wouldn’t have. He was worth ten of you. If he’d been in charge of the Lodge, things wouldn’t have got in this mess.”

  When Musen was fit to travel, she let him have a cart and six men with spades and a crowbar. But there was one condition. Musen didn’t like it, but she insisted, and he was in no position to argue.

  The new word was “reconstruction”, though nobody seemed to know what it meant. She attended meetings with Lodge officials from all over the two empires, which would soon be one empire again, who told her about grandiose plans for resettling the deserted areas, reclaiming land that had gone back to scrub and wilderness, reopening mines and quarries, redeveloping shattered communities, renewing vital infrastructure such as roads and bridges; everything they said began with “re-”, and it was all terribly exciting and positive, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to believe in it, any more than she could believe that she was an incredibly important person whose approval was needed for all these wonderful projects. She listened politely, trying her best to understand, occasionally asking a question when it became obvious that someone had missed something or misunderstood something that made such and such a Grand Plan utterly unworkable; and sometimes they tried to talk their way past her, until she had to be firm with them, and sometimes they looked astonished and ashamed, and implored her to tell them how to fix the problem, as if she had the faintest idea. And when she asked where the money was coming from, or all these new settlers, or skilled craftsmen or experienced foresters, stock-breeders, mineworkers, the answer was always the same. Blemya, of course. Because once Blemya rejoined the empire—

  Another word beginning with re-. And then she would nod and let the point go, because she didn’t want to hear or talk about Blemya, with its huge surplus population, its vibrant economy, its immeasurable expanses of river-irrigated wheatfields, and its young and easily manipulated queen.

  One other common theme emerged from this babble of conversations. Nothing could happen until Blemya was reincorporated into the empire, which would only happen when the emperor married the queen, which could only happen once the emperor had been duly crowned. Eventually she couldn’t stand it any more and asked: why hasn’t any of this happened yet? To which there was no answer, because nobody knew.

  But somebody had to know; and, since she was the second most powerful human being in the empire these days (Thratta seemed to count for less and less these days, she didn’t know why and didn’t really care) and she didn’t know, that really only left Procopius. So she asked to see him, and was told he was busy. He was away; he had a cold; he was finishing a particularly demanding piece of music and couldn’t be disturbed on any account. After a while she realised that the people she’d been asking didn’t know who Procopius really was, so she sought out Sutento, who did. He replied that he’d pass on the message and would get back to her shortly. He said this several times a day for a week, and each time she actually believed him. And then she decided to do something about it.

  She resolved to start at the bottom. She found out the name of the woman who was in charge of the linen – bedclothes and dirty laundry – and from her she got the name of the housekeeper, who told her which chambermaid looked after the fifth floor of the west wing, where she had an idea Sutento lived. In fact, he was on the sixth floor, but now she was getting somewhere. She found the room and a dark corner of the corridor outside with a good view of its door; shortly before the third night watch, she made her way there and settled down to wait. Not long after, the door opened and Sutento came out to start his daily round of duties. It was one of the hardest tailing jobs she’d ever done, since there was precious little cover in the corridors and stairways of the palace, and too many people knew her by sight, so she couldn’t get away with pretending to be a servant. She followed him to the kitchens, the wardrobe, the room where the boy cleaned the boots, the stables, the counting house, the cartulary, the housekeeper’s room, the pantry, the map room, the linen store. Finally she followed him up a long, winding staircase (which, if her mental picture of the geography of the palace was accurate, simply couldn’t exist) with a heavy oak door at the top end. Then and only then she pushed past him and hammered on the door.

  “You can’t go in there,” Sutento said urgently, tugging on her sleeve.

  “Go away before I break your arm,” she said.

  He carried on tugging, and things would have gone badly with him if the door hadn’t opened.

  “Oh,” Procopius said, “it’s you. Was there something?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  He thought for a moment, shrugged and stood aside to let her pass. Shaking Sutento’s clawed fingers out of her sleeve, she barged through the door, and the first thing she saw was—

  “Hello.”

  “You.”

  Oida stood up. He was filthy with caked mud, and his head was crudely bandaged with a length of sailcloth, brown with dry blood. He smiled at her feebly, then sat down again.

  “As I was saying.” Procopius swept past her as if she wasn’t there. “The fifteenth would suit the Aelian ambassador, and if the Mezentines can’t get there by then they’ll just have to read about it in despatches. Is that all right with you?”

  Oida nodded, looking at her.

  “Fine,” Procopius said, “I’ll arrange for formal invitations and let the chamberlain know. He’s bound to say it’s not enough notice, but screw him, I’ve had enough of his whining. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner we can get it all over and done with, the sooner we can get on.” He waited for Oida to nod, then turn
ed and glared at her. “An unexpected pleasure,” he said. “Come in, sit down, I hate being loomed at from doorways.”

  There was a little three-legged stool, child-sized. She sat on it, her knees under her chin.

  “Oida,” Procopius went on, “has just come from Blemya. He managed to get himself shipwrecked, which is why we’ve all been hanging around waiting for him, but he’s here now, so no harm done. We’ve just been deciding the date of the coronation.” He paused. “And the wedding.”

  She turned her head so she couldn’t see Oida at all. “Am I invited?”

  “You can go if you want,” Procopius said, “though I can’t see the point in you dragging all the way out there. Thratta will be representing the Lodge, so you won’t be needed.”

  “She can come if she likes,” Oida said quietly.

  Procopius didn’t seem to have heard him. “If I were you I wouldn’t bother,” he went on. “You’ll be far too busy. Once we’ve got the coronation out of the way, you’ll be tied up negotiating the instruments of reunion with the Blemyans. Don’t worry, there isn’t actually anything to negotiate, but you know how obsessed those people are with doing everything by the book. I think you’ll just have to read out the terms of the treaty so they can say ‘we agree’ at the end of each section.”

  “I think I’ll go,” she said.

  Procopius shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “So long as the work gets done, it’s up to you how you do it. Right.” He turned his back on her. “You’d better go and get yourself seen to, and then you’ll need to see the tailor. Your blasted cousin was completely the wrong size, so none of his robes and regalia are going to fit you, and they reckon it’d be easier to make new ones from scratch than try and let out the old ones. He had an unusually small head, apparently, so we can’t even reuse the crown.”

  Oida stood up, and she saw that his right foot was bare and grimy with sand and silt. He limped past her and the door closed behind him.

  “Now, then,” Procopius said. “What do you want?”

  She couldn’t remember, and he told her to go away. She ran down the stairs, nearly tripping and breaking her neck, but by the time she reached the corridor it was empty.

  Fine, she told herself, he’s safe and well, and he’s going to be crowned emperor. On balance, she wished him well. He’d saved her life once or twice, tried to save her life a few times but turned up too late, only putting in an appearance when she’d saved her own life perfectly efficiently, but it’s the thought that counts; he’d been there when she needed him more often than she could remember, and he’d helped bury her mother. He was the best, the only friend she’d ever had. He’d lied to her and used her, got her into desperate trouble, made her do appalling things, and whether he actually cared a damn for her she really didn’t know. It made no odds. He was going to marry the beautiful young Queen of Blemya and breed heirs for the reconstituted empire, his duty to the Lodge, the world, the future. And he wrote quite jolly tunes, but he was no Procopius—And he’d left her his vast, ridiculously easily earned fortune, out of sheer altruism and love, and then neglected to die, and lost most of it through politics and war. None of which mattered. Instead, she was a Triumvir of the Lodge, with responsibility for building the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and that ought to be enough for any serious-minded person, surely.

  So, all that being the case, she stayed in her room for the next three days, holding meetings there, having all her meals and official papers sent up, so he’d be sure to be able to find her, if by any chance he were to come looking, though why he should feel the need she couldn’t say.

  Meanwhile, she met with the leaders of the Aram Chantat and the Rosinholet, who said they were perfectly happy to act as the Lodge’s army, or the empire’s if that was what they wanted to call it, just so long as they were earning more than they could get anywhere else. She met the dean and chapter of Beal, who reluctantly agreed to second a number of members of faculty to the Imperial court, to train and supervise local governors, parish headmen, teachers for village schools. She met high-ranking Lodge officials from places she’d never heard of, listened to their reports, took an intelligent interest, realised that they knew far more about the people and problems of their regions than she could assimilate in a lifetime, and gave them permission to carry on doing whatever it was they did. She met confessors and experts on doctrine, architects and town planners and mining engineers and experts on supply and demand, Treasury officers and revenue officers and logistical planners and men who knew about drains, disease and malnutrition. She met Saevolus Andrapodiza, who promised her a quarter of a million farmers at three angels a head for ten years, farm implements and livestock not included. It was all quite ludicrous. In her little room she was building the Great Society, taking careful thought for all the real difficulties and dangers that no king or politician could ever hope to tackle, but which she could deal with easily because she was starting with a clean slate; the land would belong to the farmers, not earls or abbots or conglomerates of investors; taxes would be enough to cover essential services but nothing more, no vanity wars or monstrous sinecures or jobs for someone’s son-in-law; everything would be planned and thought out in advance, learning from the mistakes of history, doing the right thing, balancing the needs and abilities of the people – here, in her little room, on paper or in earnest dialogue with intelligent, motivated men of goodwill. It was probably all a game, or an aptitude test, and all the people she met were probably actors. And it didn’t really matter; outside the magical walls of the palace, if ever she left them, she would find empty roads, burned-out towns, fields choked with brambles and thorn saplings, and if she got down on her hands and knees and scrabbled about, sooner or later the skulls and bones of dead soldiers, dead farmers’ wives, dead men’s dead children, dead because of Procopius, dead so that she could have her clean slate. And, in another reality, in a few days’ time she would stand in the palace chapel and see the new High Priest of the Invincible Sun (appointed by her; he was an idiot, but biddable) crown Oida as supreme ruler of the world, which he wouldn’t be, just another loyal Craftsman obeying orders. And then Blemya, for the wedding. Fair enough. She’d never had the least bit of luck in bloody Blemya, but this time, presumably, she wouldn’t have to murder anyone unless she wanted to.

  Procopius came to see her (had the nerve to show his face, was how she saw it). He sat down unasked in the comfortable chair and helped himself to sugared almonds from the jar.

  “It had to be you, of course,” he said – they’d been discussing road-mending schedules. “Nobody else could do it.”

  She smiled at him. “Bullshit.”

  He waved away the affront, like a father parrying a child’s punch. “You were born in poverty and raised a slave. As a field agent, you’ve seen more of the empire than anyone I know—”

  “Except Oida.”

  “More than him, even. And you read: philosophy and history and ethical theory, for pleasure. And your judgement is mature and your instincts are good, but when you have to, you do something unexpected and shocking, but which makes sense when you come to analyse it.”

  “Like killing a political officer.”

  “No great loss,” Procopius said, and for a moment she hated him. “And, most of all, you didn’t want the job. You didn’t think you were capable of it, you have absolutely no ambition, and your faith is unshakable. I’d like to take credit for all that and say I had my eye on you from the day you were born, I trained you, carefully chose all your miseries and experiences to shape you into the perfect instrument for the great work ahead.” He clicked his tongue. “Actually, you grew like a weed in a crack in the wall, and I wouldn’t have noticed you if it hadn’t been for Oida. But he kept talking about you—” He stopped, frowned. “You wouldn’t be here now, doing this job, if Oida hadn’t insisted.”

  “I don’t understand. Insisted on what?”

  Procopius looked away, deliberately turning the good side of his face tow
ard her. “He refused point blank to marry the queen unless I made you a Triumvir. I pleaded with him, yelled at him, gave him a direct order, but he can be as stubborn as a mule sometimes. And now look: you’re so perfectly suited for the job, and I had nothing to do with it.”

  She gave him a long, cold stare. “Silly me,” she said. “I was under the impression I got promoted on merit.”

  He stood up. “Don’t push your luck,” he said, and left before she could say anything she’d live to regret.

  *

  One thing she’d promised herself. No power on earth was going to keep her from being at Oida’s coronation. The look on his face when they put the golden hoop round his silly head would, she felt sure, make up for a great deal—

  So, of course, she missed it. On Coronation Day morning she was up bright and early, to get through the day’s paperwork. In with a load of other stuff for her to sign – requisitions for supplies and materials, travel permits, counter-signatures to show she’d read stuff she hadn’t read but should have – was a death warrant. She fished it out and glanced at it, feeling she owed the poor bastard that, whoever he was. She saw that one Musen had been condemned to death for desertion, dereliction of duty and stealing two horses, saddles, harness, clothing and sixty-five angels cash from Lodge resources. Execution was scheduled for noon that day. It had already been signed, by some functionary whose name she didn’t recognise. This copy was for information only.