“How do you do it?”
“The commander of one army, or battalion if you’re all broken up over a distance, writes insulting letters to the enemy commander, and their messengers run them back and forth, and then they say, ‘Well, let’s meet in two days on the hill with the big rock that looks like a nose.’ And then they get their troops to polish all their boots and armor, and everyone trots out in the morning two days later, and then they have a fight, and someone goes home, and someone doesn’t. I mean, I’ve read lots of foreign books about how to do war differently, but I don’t see why you would, unless you were a dirty cheat. This way has rules, and everyone knows how to play it, and you know who wins fair and square.”
“As long as you can count on the other person playing by the rules too. They don’t, always.”
“Dirty cheats,” she said again. “I might not win that battle, but they’d lose everyone’s respect.”
“Not everyone’s, not always. If you’re on the side of righteousness—or whatever people have decided is the side of righteousness, rather—you can get away with all sorts of shady things. Not that I’m recommending you should,” I added hurriedly, in the face of her stony glare. “I’m just saying, people do. Other people might, even if you don’t. Other people might have popular opinion behind them, and know it, and decide that they have a little bit of leeway to work with. Not with ethics, but with what people will forgive.”
“I don’t want to believe that people are like that,” she said. She added another slosh of menovka to her cup, even though she hadn’t yet drained it. “I have to believe that people are basically ethical and won’t forgive a duplicitous leader.”
“Surely you’ve seen it happen.”
She waved dismissively. “Might have looked like that was what was happening, but I think it was something else.”
“Tell me about what it was.”
She paused. She wavered. I held myself in readiness. And then she said, “No.”
THE TWELFTH TALE:
Memory
I’ll tell you about something else.
There was once . . . I was just a kid, hadn’t even learned to ride a horse yet, and we went off to settle up with Enc over whether or not they owned Lake Yuskaren. Not for any reason, really, just because it was something to bicker about and the King of Order at that time felt like it had been too long since we’d had a good lively fistfight with Enc. It’s just a lake. It doesn’t matter.
So they packed us off in carts and we met up with the Enc and it was all fine. Heigh-ho, just your typical slap-fight with live steel. Saw people around me dying. Saw people on the other side dying. Probably killed some of ’em myself, that said. I don’t think I managed to strike a single fatal blow actually there on the field, ’cause after all I was still brand-new to this thing and didn’t really have any idea what I was doing. I know I got a couple good limb shots in. If I killed anyone, it wasn’t on the field, but later, when they’d been taken bleeding back to their medics.
Anyhow.
Maybe I’ve been in too many battles. Maybe that one was worse than I recall. Remembering it, it’s like looking at something through a dirty window. I can see what’s happening, for the most part, but it’s blurry and grimy and it doesn’t make me feel anything. Sort of makes me . . . not-feel.
I suppose you’re expecting me to say something about the horrors of war. Yeah. There’s only two types of weather in which battles happen: it’s always either beating down sun so you’re dying of heat before you even get your helmet on, or it’s raining so hard you’re slodging through the mud and then all the blood on the ground makes it worse. Too inconvenient to fight in the snow, so at least there’s that.
There is a spot on the grimy window that’s clean, though. One bit that stands out clear. Don’t know why. We were marching home, and we’d stopped for the night. There was a little brook near my camp, and a friend and I took off our boots and socks and soaked our feet in the water and refilled our canteens. Just sitting there in silence. We didn’t have anything to talk about. And he just started crying out of nowhere. That’s what I remember clear—the biting cold of the brook over my feet and the tears on his face. Still didn’t say anything, we just sat there while he took these wrenching, gasping sobs, and I was . . . embarrassed, I suppose. I must have asked him eventually what was wrong, and he—war does funny things to your brain, you know. He was devastated, apparently, because he’d torn a hole in his pack.
That’s what he said. Clear as crystal I remember that. Happens to soldiers a lot; I know that now. It’s called battle-fatigue. Affects everyone differently. Some, they wake up with nightmares and cold sweats for years. Some go to the drink. Some fall into anger over and over, as suddenly as a landslide. And some cry over torn holes in their packs, inconsequential things, because they feel like . . . like the hole is there because they’ve failed, maybe, or like they don’t have any control, even over something very small and simple. I don’t rightly know.
And I suppose for some people, it means they let the windows of their memory get grimy so they don’t have to look through anymore.
“So that was that,” she said. She had turned her chair around and straddled it so she could rest her elbows on the back. She refilled her cup again—offered it to me, but I declined. We sat in silence for a few minutes while she drank. “Zorya Miroslavat told me she’s going to get Taishineya out of office while we have the opportunity,” she whispered.
“Didn’t you just say something about the people’s opinion of a duplicitous leader?”
She nodded. “I’ve only ever seen Zorya Miroslavat build the law strong and solid, but she’s kicking dents in it now, and I’m afraid the people won’t forgive her.” She was quiet, then snorted. “I’m lying again: I’m afraid she’ll do something that I won’t forgive her for.”
“Is she more popular than Taishineya Tarmos?”
Vihra Kylliat shrugged. “I think the common folk don’t much care about either of them. Taishineya’s popular amongst the upper crust: merchants and foreign nobles and rich folk and so forth. Zorya Miroslavat is in charge of the Ministry that sends people to jail, but that also gets justice for wrongs done. She’s half and half with public opinion.”
“And you?”
“Oh, everyone hates me,” she said immediately. “Unless there’s a war, which . . . well, we haven’t been at war in a few years, Anfisa Zofiyat’s predecessor took good care of that before he went crazy and threw himself out of the Tower.”
“Figuratively threw, or . . . ?”
“No, literally. Out a window. It was probably suicide. We checked. The room was locked from the inside, and he’d tacked strips of cloth across the door too, from frame to frame. There’s no way someone could have murdered him and then done that and gotten out. And of course, the note he left, even though it was mostly incoherent. Definitely suicide.” She took a sip and looked speculative. “Or a blackwitch, now that I think about it. We didn’t think of that before.”
“Perhaps it’s better that Pattern has been unmade, then. I’ve heard that none of their Primes ended well in . . . How long? Decades, at least.”
“Something like that.”
“But you were saying that everyone hates you?”
“They do. Unless there’s a war.”
“What about the skirmishes with the Umakh?”
“Pfffht. That’s nothing. They raid a few border towns once a year, usually in the spring, and they kill people, they steal livestock, they attack the tax caravans. That’s all the trouble they give us. They’re nothing, anyway; we outnumber them, and we have better weapons. . . . And cities, you know, with walls to keep them out.”
“And if they lay siege?”
“Not their style either. They don’t have the patience for it. They’re idiots and savages with a pack of wild horses. They’d camp out for two or three days and get bored.” She shook her head. “They pillage a few towns just to ease the boredom. Capture sheep and husbands a
nd wives.”
“Surely you must get some public goodwill from chasing them off?”
She shrugged. “Maybe a few hours, when the troops come home triumphant. By the end of the day, though, someone’s been arrested for disorderly behavior or public drunkenness, or for brawling in the streets, and then it’s back to general complaints about the great unfairness of the Ministry of Order. There’s no way to win—we’re the big mean grouches, the wet blanket, the people who ruin everyone’s fun. And now Zorya Miroslavat might turn the people against her too, if she ends up exiling Taishineya. She might be a frivolous idiot, but she’s got a good public face and people feel good about Coin in general. People like the post office, and the mint, and being able to buy interesting things from far away. And banks. People love banks. Jails and armies, not so much.” She let her cup dangle by its rim from her fingertips. “Casimir Vanyos is dead, and Rostik Palos—that’s the Duke of Law—is going to be killed, so we’ll have to have an election for Law, which wasn’t due for another ten years. Pattern is disbanded, but we still have to sort out the transition and reallocation of jurisdiction, which will be a huge fucking mess from beginning to end. I can already see it happening. And, and, we’ll have to investigate Taishineya’s entire office for embezzlement if she’s found guilty, which she will be because Zorya Miroslavat’s already said as much. So once that’s sorted out, we’ll have to elect Coin anew as well, but we were expecting an election for that next year, so there’s already been a few interested candidates putting themselves forward. Two elections at once. Can you imagine? That’s only supposed to happen once every forty years. Chaos. I don’t like chaos.”
“I somehow suspect you vastly prefer Order,” I said.
She barked a laugh, then sobered. “Some of them have already started campaigning.”
“The candidates?”
Vihra Kylliat nodded. “Vultures, all of them. Fighting over who gets to peck out the eyes from the carcass. It’s your fault, you know.”
“I don’t see how that could possibly be true!” I still don’t see how it could have been true—not at that point, anyway. Regarding what came later, all right—I’ll own that. But at the point I’m telling you about, I was still playing short-term games: things that would keep my neck intact a week or a month out, that’s as far as I was thinking, and usually it was shorter—keep myself from freezing to death each night, for example. And I suppose that’s why everything I’d been doing had been so ineffective, had only dug myself in deeper. If I had just stopped battering myself against the bars of my cage, I might have saved myself sooner.
“You threw everything out of balance and you know it. You spoiled the system.”
“It wasn’t a very good system, then, if one harmless old man could cause so much trouble. You’re probably better off this way—build a new one. A better one.” You see? I was already testing the lines I was planning on presenting to Ivo.
“Who the fuck are you to tell us whether our system is any good or not?” she asked sharply. “There’s no such thing as a perfect government. Ours was working well enough. We were muddling along. Then you come in with your fucking wonder-tales, you tattle on everybody to anyone who will listen to you, you watch everything fall to pieces, and then you sit here as prim as anything and tell me it’s not your fault at all.”
“Muddling along!” I scoffed. “Your Duke of Law was poisoning your King of Law! And, may I point out, he started long before I ever got here. You call that muddling along?”
She shrugged. “If you hadn’t been here, we would have fallen for it. He was extremely old, after all. But since you were here, spies and treachery were on everyone’s mind already, and so—investigation. And what do you know, we found the bloody dagger. Figuratively. He died in his sleep, very calmly; I think they said his heart gave out from the poisoning. We would have fallen for it, and it would have been very sad, but we would have just kept muddling along without much of a fuss. But you? You secrete fuss from your pores.”
I crossed my arms. “You can’t blame me for the death throes of a country I only stepped foot into a few months ago.”
“I don’t know about that. I somehow think you’re the type to leave destruction and ruin in your wake.” Which is patently ridiculous, of course. She didn’t know anything about me and she never cared to learn. “Anyway, some of the potential candidates for Coin want you killed. Executed. Done away with. A sacrificial goat, as it were. So they can point to it and say that the government ought to obey the will of the people, and so on and so forth. And so they can say that they were the ones who pushed your death sentence through and got justice for the people of the realm, and so on and so forth, you get the picture.”
I said nothing, except, “And will you?”
“Will I?”
“Have me killed?”
“Not yet,” she said, with unusual candor for the topic. “You haven’t told me the rest about my general. You never finished the story about her and the Ten Noble Heroes.”
“So when those stories are done, you’ll kill me?”
“I don’t know yet. I can’t trust you an inch with anything where the truth might be important. But I can sit here”—she gestured expansively with her artificial hand—“and drink menovka. And make you tell me things that might be lies, or might not. Doesn’t matter if they are, I guess.”
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t matter if they are.”
THE TENTH TALE (CONTINUED):
The Sergeant of Yew and Silk
Where did I leave off? She was standing in the banquet hall and telling her story, talking about how she’d carried General Ano out of the mountains, though he was ancient and gravely injured and sick with fever.
“Does he live still?” asked Empress En Bai.
“Yes,” answered Ger Zha. “He has been taken to the healers.”
“Thank you,” said the Empress, and this caused a stir of wonder through the hall, for the emperors and Empresses of Genzhu do not thank mere lieutenants. They do not thank their archpriests or high chamberlains either. “He is a great man and the ancestors smile on him. We must honor him for his work on the campaign, even in noble defeat. He will have the finest healers and physicians, and when he is well again, he will lead the second campaign. A mind like that must not be wasted.”
If you ever doubted that Ger Zha was an extraordinary woman, you may lay your doubts to rest, because she laughed. She laughed in the middle of the banquet hall, amongst all the glittering nobles and lavish feast dishes. She laughed while the Empress stared at her. “Imperial Majesty,” she said, “Reflected Brilliance of the Mirror of Heaven, a mind like that has had its time. It is not wastage to let it rest. It may well waste another mind that could have had its chance to do the thing properly. General Ano is no longer fit.”
“How dare you,” the Empress said. “How dare you speak such treason?”
“I carried him through the mountains, Your Majesty!” Ger Zha cried, all mirth lost. “I carried him across half of Genzhu! Through forests, over hills and rivers, through valleys and the karst peaks. I know better than anyone that he is no longer fit! He is an old man, a tired man, a man near death even now, a man who has laid down his life for the empire’s glory for multiple generations now, and he is no longer fit. I’ll call it a miracle if he ever rides a horse again, and that’s if the healers can pull his mind back from the fevers that ravage it.
“And you think his defeat noble, Majesty? You think it merely a fine and tragic story, the prelude to a second story where General Ano leads the empire’s troops to crush the mountain tribes? That story has already happened, madam! That was the Second Battle of Sie Jeu, sixty years ago, and you may recall that General Ano was not the one who led the first battle. Honor him now by letting him be remembered in his days of glory! Honor him by allowing him some grace in his twilight years! If you send him out again, he will lose again, and thousands more Genzhun soldiers will die, and the treasury will be reduced by millions, all fo
r naught.”
The Empress called for her to be silent, called for her to be arrested, and the court was cycling towards chaos, but Ger Zha held something bright in the air and screamed, “You will not! You will not take me! You will not touch me! I am sworn directly to General Ano, I am under the wing of his personal protection, and my words are his words!”
The bright thing she held was Ano’s own signet, still on its chain, which he had worn around his neck for decades. The sigil was stained carnelian from the hundreds of thousands of wax seals it had pressed. The hall stumbled to a halt again.
“He demands no honor, Majesty,” Ger Zha said. “He expects a trial. He expects death for what he’s done. He knows himself a fool and a failure, even if you do not. My words are his words, and I have sworn to bear them to you. As a messenger-in-fealty, I cannot be punished for speaking for him.”
She could, of course—the Empress could have done whatever she wished with Ger Zha. But it would have been a dishonorable thing, and it would have gained nothing for the Empress but personal satisfaction.
And so—General Ano was put on trial a little time later, a frail old man, his mind further muddled though his fevers had broken, and Empress En Bai found him guilty of negligence in the pursuit of his duty, and she requested his resignation as general, which he gave with a quavering, weak voice. The Empress proclaimed he would spend the rest of his days under house arrest—which is what they called it when frail old generals were sent to live in quiet, peaceful houses in the country with every comfort they could possibly require. And when she had said her piece, the general cleared his throat and blinked his eyes like a tortoise, and said, “I have served faithfully for more than half a century, Majesty, and I would beg a boon of you.”
And that is how Ger Zha was promoted to sergeant. And a year or two later when Ano passed away, she found that he had left her a generous portion of his estate, and a message—that no one but they two could ever really know those mountains, because they two were the ones who had passed through them like thieves in the night. That there was glory to be won, if she reached out her hand. That honor, not strength, had carried them both out to safety, and that honor would carry her as far as she ever wished to go.
A Conspiracy of Truths Page 25