The Good, the Bad and the Smug

by Tom Holt

  “Reverse the process.” The little man sat up and curled his legs round. “Interesting question. Theoretically—” He frowned. “Theoretically yes, I suppose you could. Probably just a case of realigning the drive train so the wheel runs the other way. Why?”

  “Well.” The prince took a moment to order his thoughts. Understandable, since there were so few of them in such a large empty space; like rounding up stray goats in the desert. “The thing of it is, lately straw’s shot up. In price, I mean. It’s getting ridiculous. Chappie I was talking to the other day, straw merchant, he told me straw’s worth half as much again as gold. By volume, that is, not weight. But volume’s what matters, isn’t it? When you spin it, I mean.”

  “Quite.”

  “Well,” said the prince, “there you are. Can’t be a coincidence, can it? And I was thinking. Here I am with loads and loads of gold. Now, if I could get it turned back into straw, I could double my money, just like that.”

  The little man nodded. “Sell straw for gold, use the gold to buy straw—”

  “You’ve got it. Quite a clever idea, I thought.”

  “Indeed.” His eyebrows pulled together, like politicians closing ranks after a sex scandal. “You may well be on to something there.”

  “Absolutely. So.” The prince gave the little man a hopeful look, like a dog watching his master eating. “Can you do it?”

  “Gold into straw,” the little man said. “Yes, I do believe I can.”

  “Wonderful.” The prince beamed at him. “I’ll get it carted up here first thing in the morning.”

  “Yes. You could do that, I suppose.”

  Quite possibly it was all the time Valentine had been spending with the little man recently that had sharpened his sensibilities. “You sound like–oh, I don’t know. Like you think it’s not such a good idea after all.”

  The little man flexed his bruised knee, which was starting to stiffen up. “I was just asking myself,” he said, “if you’ve thought this thing through.”

  “Well, no,” said the prince. “I got the idea and I came over straight away. No point hanging about, I always say.”

  “Mphm.”

  “There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?”

  “Well.” The little man massaged his knee. “Let’s think about this, shall we? I turn your gold back into straw. You have lots of straw, which you sell for lots of gold.”

  “Exactly. You see, I was right.”

  The little man nodded. “So far so good,” he said. “But then word gets about, and all the other princes bring me their gold and tell me to turn it back into straw. Before too long, everybody’s got straw, nobody’s got gold. Then what happens?”

  “Everybody’s dead rich?”

  Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. “It doesn’t quite work like that,” the little man said gently. “When everybody’s got straw and nobody’s got gold, what tends to happen is that the price of straw falls, while the price of gold goes back up.”

  “Oh.” The prince blinked. “So we’re back where we started.”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “A bit pointless, in fact.”

  “Well, yes,” the little man said apologetically. “No real advantage to anybody, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh.” The prince thought for a moment. “So basically, forget the whole thing.”

  “Mphm. Only—”

  “What?”

  “Well,” the little man said, “there’s a chance that you won’t be the only one who comes up with the gold-back-to-straw idea. I mean, it was really clever of you, don’t get me wrong, but the fact is, there’s quite a few people out there, dozens of them maybe, who are almost as smart as you are. And one or two of them might think of it too, quite independently.”

  “Oh.” Valentine frowned. “So it might happen anyway.”

  “That’s right. Almost certain to, actually.”

  “So I need to turn my straw back into gold so as to get in first.”

  “Yes and no.” The little man’s toes were going to sleep. He flexed them. “Think about it. Your neighbours turn their gold into straw. Everybody’s got straw. Everybody now wants gold.”

  “Right.”

  “Now just suppose,” the little man said, “that you don’t convert your gold. You keep your gold as gold. Then, when everybody else has got straw and wants gold—”

  “I’ll have it. And I can sell it.”

  “Yes.”

  “For lots and lots and lots of straw.” The prince sucked his lower lip. “Or should that be gold? I’m confused.”

  “Or,” the little man said quietly, “you might consider a third alternative.”

  “Really? Is there one?”

  The little man nodded. Then he leaned forward slightly and lowered his voice. “Strictly between you and me,” he said, “yes, there is.”

  “Gosh. What is it?”

  The little man shook his head. “First, you’ve got to promise you’ll keep it strictly to yourself.”

  “Sure.”

  “No telling anyone.”

  “Promise.”

  “Right, then.” The little man glanced over his shoulder. “You exchange your gold,” he said, “for other stuff.”

  The prince waited, anticipating something else. Then he said, “What other stuff?”

  “Ah.” The little man smiled. “This is where it gets technical.”

  “Oh.”

  “But that’s all right,” the little man assured him. “I understand it all, so you don’t have to. If I were you, when the gold price goes right back up again, I’d exchange all my gold for land.”

  “Land?” The prince looked at the little man as though he’d just started doing chicken impressions. “What, you mean hills and woods and fields and stuff?”

  “Well, maybe not hills and woods. Not to begin with, anyway.”

  “But I’ve got loads of land. Miles and miles of it.”

  “Quite,” the little man said. “And that’s a good thing. And the more of it you’ve got, the more straw you can grow. Then, the next time the gold price goes down and the straw price goes up—”

  “I can sell my straw and buy—” The prince pulled a face. “Sorry, you’ve lost me again.”

  “More land,” said the little man. “And ploughs and plough-horses and harrows and seed-drills and all that sort of thing. Farm stuff. To grow more straw.”

  “To buy more land?”

  “To grow more straw. You’ve got it. We call it investing in infrastructure.”

  “Do we?”

  “Yes. Also,” the little man went on, “you can build factories for making ploughs and harrows and seed-drills, and mines for getting metal for making all that stuff. Cheaper to make them yourself than to have to buy them from the dwarves. And houses, of course. You’ll need lots of houses, for all the people who do all this work to live in.”

  The prince rubbed his ear. “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Of course,” the little man went on, “you’ll be needing lots of people to come and work for you, so you’ll have to offer them good wages, and make sure the houses you build for them are nice and clean and don’t fall down. But that’s all right.”

  “Is it?”

  “Oh yes. By this stage you’ll be so rich it really won’t matter. You’ll be able to afford it easily.”

  “I will?”

  “Trust me. It’s what we call economic growth.”

  “Good Lord.” The prince was silent for a long time. Then he said, “But supposing the other princes see how rich I’m getting, and start copying me? Then they’ll offer even higher wages, so people will go and work for them instead.”

  “Simple. You just pay your people even more. That’ll sort that out, you’ll see.”

  “Ah.”

  “And it wouldn’t just be wages,” the little man went on. “You could offer them other stuff as well. Like, free visits to the doctor when they’re ill, schools where their kids can learn readin
g and writing, that sort of thing. Then everybody will want to come and work for you, and you’ll have no trouble growing more straw than all the rest of the princes put together.”

  “And all this straw,” the prince said thoughtfully. “I bring it to you and—”

  “Yes. Or,” the little man added, “on second thoughts, why bother? Why not just keep it as straw? Just knowing that it can be spun into gold makes it as good as gold really, doesn’t it?”

  There were furrows on the prince’s forehead you could’ve planted potatoes in. “I suppose it does, now you mention it.”

  “It’s straw representing gold, you see. So long as everybody knows that one bale of straw stands for a hundred thousand gold marks, it’s every bit as good. Doesn’t even have to be straw. Could be–oh, I don’t know, little bits of paper, even. With one straw-bale written on them. Much more convenient, that’d be. Just so long as everyone knows that for each bit of paper, there’s a straw-bale in a barn somewhere. Saves lugging the stuff about on carts. In fact,” the little man went on, “you won’t actually need me any more.”

  “Oh, but surely—”

  The little man shook his head. “To all intents and purposes,” he said, “straw will be gold and gold will be straw. No point having me here, turning one into the other and back again. Not when everybody understands.”

  “So what would you do?”

  “I might retire,” the little man said. “Or go somewhere else. That’s not important. I’m just a simple guy with a spinning-wheel.”

  “I’d miss you.”

  The little man was suddenly aware of an unexpected constriction in his throat. “No you wouldn’t,” he said, a little hoarsely. “You’ll be far too busy running your rich and flourishing kingdom.”

  “I will. I’ll miss you.”

  “Nonsense. Anyway,” the little man went on, wiping his nose on his sleeve, “that’s what I suggest you do. Up to you, of course. A clever man like you, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought of something much better.”

  “What, me? No chance.” The prince grinned. “All right,” he said, “let’s just run through that again, make sure I’ve got it straight in my mind.”

  “Good idea. Fire away.”

  “I keep my gold as gold,” the prince said, counting the points off on his fingers as he made them. “I use it to buy land and ploughs and stuff, and hire a lot of men at good wages, and I grow a lot of straw. With the money I make from the straw, I buy more land and hire more men and pay higher wages. And that makes me rich.” He paused. “Is that it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Are you sure. It doesn’t sound—”

  “That’s because it’s technical.”

  “Ah, right. Of course. Right, then,” the prince said, jumping up from the stool, “I’ll go off and do that, right away.”

  “Splendid.”

  “Jolly decent of you to let me in on the secret.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “And of course I won’t breathe a word to a soul. Promise.”

  “I know you won’t. Mind how you—” A crash, followed by the sound of velvet tearing on brambles. “Go,” the little man added. More tearing noises; then silence, broken only by the gentle sigh of the wind in the treetops.

  Well now, the little man said to himself. Nearly there. Amazing, he mused, how quickly these people caught on, even the kings and the princes. With the right approach and a certain degree of patience, it was entirely possible to train them to perform simple tasks. Not as bright as dolphins or chimps, maybe, but smarter than most rats and almost on a par with seals. And compared with the politicians and economists back home, they were a race of intellectual supermen. Six months; as soon as the harvest’s in and the wheat’s been threshed, I’ll have done my job and everything will be just fine, sure as my name is—

  He laughed. Private joke.

  His knee creaked as he stood up. He fished around in the grass and found his wrench, with which he tightened the retaining nut on the crank pivot. It slipped and took a chunk out of the top of his thumb. He swore and bound up the cut with a rather grubby handkerchief.

  “Hello.”

  The little man frowned, then turned slowly. “You’re back.”

  “Yes.” Prince Valentine, his sleeves ragged and his hair uncharacteristically scruffy, appeared from behind a tree. “Been thinking.”

  “Ah.”

  “About what you said.”

  “Well, that’s the trouble with thinking. Once you start, it can be hard to stop.”

  “And I thought,” the prince went on, “that’s all well and good, I thought, dashed clever scheme and all that, but–please don’t take this the wrong way, I wouldn’t ever dream of criticising…”

  “But?”

  “A bit complicated,” the prince said. “Long-winded, don’t you know. Lots of A leading to B resulting in C, if you see what I’m driving at.”

  “A slight element of complexity, certainly,” the little man conceded, “but not enough to worry about, I wouldn’t have said.”

  “Ah, but that’s because you’re smart,” the prince pointed out. “Brainy chap like you, takes all that sort of guff in his stride. Different for us thickos, don’t you know. Much better if we can keep it simple. That way, there’s less chance of me getting it wrong and ballsing it all up.”

  “Well—”

  “And then,” Valentine continued brightly, “I had an idea. Really simple and straightforward, but ends up with the same result, me getting rich and all that. Want to hear it?”

  “I can hardly contain myself.”

  “Well.” Valentine sat down on the stool again. “What I do is, I wait till all the other kings’ wheat crops are nearly ready to harvest, then I send out my most trusted men, in secret and all that style of thing, and they burn it all to the ground. Well? Is that smart, or what?”

  “Um.”

  “Because,” Valentine went on enthusiastically, “if all their wheat burns down, straw’ll be really, really scarce, and then I’ll get you to spin my gold back into straw, like we were talking about just now, and then I’ll be the only one with straw and I’ll be rich.” He beamed. “Great idea, isn’t it? Though I do say so myself as shouldn’t.”

  “Um.”

  “And the best part of it is,” the prince continued happily, “if we do it that way, we’ll need you more than ever to do the gold-into-straw spinning, and then you won’t have to go away. Which would be nice. Because I’d miss you, like I said.”

  The little man opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Well, anyway, that was my idea,” Valentine said. “I’ll give it a go, see what happens. After all, if it doesn’t work, we can always try it your way next year. Or the year after that. Right, then.” He shuffled his feet for a moment, then said, “There wouldn’t happen to be a short-cut back to the road that doesn’t go through all those bloody brambles, would there? Only—”

  The little man pointed. “Straight on down the hill, then left,” he mumbled. “Brings you out by the Hangman’s Oak.”

  “Got you, splendid. Well, thanks for your time. You look after yourself, all right?”

  Off he went whistling, and it was a while before the little man found the strength and energy to get off the ground and back on his stool. Then he sat for a while, his foot resting on the treadle.

  Burn down all the standing corn. Well, quite. Look at it one way, it’s the practical, businesslike, don’t-get-involved, hedge-fundy thing to do. And there was a man once, in Chicago, Illinois, who wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with that. In fact, he’d have gone straight out and bought a hundred gallons of kerosene and a box of matches. And nobody would’ve missed him, except his enemies. And nobody liked him much, not even his mother.

  He sighed. Tasked with preventing the arson and the ensuing famine, the man from Chicago would’ve known what to do. A discreet arrangement, just business, involving a specialist flown in from a distant city, the whole thi
ng made to look like an accident so as not to spook the markets. Just business. Globally speaking and taking the long view, probably the right thing to do.

  But instead—

  “Oh hell,” said the little man.

  Time for Plan B.

  Yes, thought the Dark Lord, yes, I understand. I’ll see to it straight away. Then he woke up.

  Wonderful thing, sleep. He yawned and stretched. This new body was really quite marvellous. True, after a week cooped up in the corporeal form of a female Elf, pretty much anything would be an improvement. But it wasn’t just that. This one–he could be himself in a body like this. For the first time in ages, he could think.

  Seven feet tall, not an ounce of fat, chest like a barrel, arms like legs. Human, most of it, but that couldn’t be helped, and after the Elf body, it felt luxurious and wonderfully light and airy. He extended the arms and flexed the fingers. Fantastic. There was so much he could do with fingers like that: wield a sword, sign death warrants, crush the life out of a hated enemy, play the flute, paint watercolours, pick flowers with the morning dew still on them, anything he liked. The possibilities were endless. No limits.

  Had he been dreaming? He wasn’t sure. It’s always disconcerting to start something new when you’re no longer in the first flush of youth, and experiencing your first dreams at the age of 3,000,479 was a bit unnerving. For one thing, he wasn’t sure he was doing it right. Weren’t you supposed to remember what you’d been dreaming about when you woke up? He’d read about it in Wickedpedia and opinion seemed to be divided. He could only remember tiny flashes, and they faded away to nothing within thirty seconds of opening his eyes. And sometimes, in his dreams, he wasn’t himself, he was someone else, which was bizarre. And was it, well, normal, for the stuff that happened in dreams to be quite so silly?

  At his command, trembling at his frown, he had necromancers, dark wizards, masters of all the malign arts, who presumably knew all this stuff and would be able to tell him, if he asked. The trouble was, he didn’t like to. It’d be embarrassing. The embodiment of evil can do a great many things, including ordering arbitrary executions and putting whole species to the sword on a whim, and nobody would think less of him for it. Quite the reverse. But blushing and shuffling his feet, he knew intuituively, were out. He’d lose respect, and without respect—