The Two of Swords, Part 4

by K. J. Parker

  The Two of Swords: Part Four

  K. J. Parker

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  For David Barrett, with thanks

  4

  Virtue

  From behind the gilded screen he watched the throne come down, then gathered up his papers and put them in order. She joined him a moment later.

  “I hate that thing,” she said. “It’s worse than camels.”

  “People will hear you,” he said with a grin.

  “Oh, people.” She scowled at him. “Let’s go and make pancakes, I’m starving. Oh please,” she added, in that voice.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve got appeals to hear.”

  She sighed, and slouched after him down the corridor like a sad dog. “You didn’t use the throne when the Westerners were here,” he said.

  “I couldn’t face it. All those diplomats and the throne. Have mercy.”

  The Great Throne of Blemya and the Golden Birds had been a gift to the founder of the dynasty from some outlandish place far away where they were probably rather too clever for their own good. Unlike the Birds, the throne still worked. As the suppliant entered the Great Hall through the North door, he was astounded to see the throne, three tons of marble, porphyry, ivory and gold, rise slowly and steadily into the air, so that by the time he reached the braided red velvet rope that marked the limit of how far he could go, the throne and its occupant was ten feet off the ground. Up there – some clever trick of the acoustics – the Royal voice took on a booming quality and reverberated off the walls, giving the visitor the impression that he was being spoken to from all sides at once. He, of course, had to raise his voice so as to be audible at a distance without committing the unforgivable faux pas of shouting.

  The works were down in the cellars, where a huge cistern of water powered a thing called a hydraulic ram. Water was laboriously pumped up into the cistern from the big rainwater tank; when the chamberlain’s people gave the signal, someone opened a tap and water flowed down a horrendously complicated system of pipes; in one of the pipes was a thing called a piston, which was linked by camshafts and crankshafts and God knew what else to a girder riveted on to the back of the throne; the weight of the water coming down made the piston ride up in its pipe, taking the throne with it. When the audience was over and the duly astounded visitor had been led away, someone turned another tap, the water drained back into the tank and the throne gradually descended; except when it got stuck, in which case the only means of escape for the Royal personage was down a ladder. But, of course, nobody ever saw that.

  The Old Man, King Tolois, had been delighted with it and thought it was great fun; his son, Dalois I, believed it had great symbolic value and devised a number of rituals based on it, which he included in his life’s work, the twelve-volume Ceremonials of the Blemyan Court. His sons had put up with it, cursing the inconvenience while tacitly acknowledging the value of the impression it made on foreigners and the lower classes. One of the first things the queen had said, on her accession to the throne, was, “Anyway, I’m not going up in that thing, and that’s final.” Since then, of course, wise men had explained, and she understood. Didn’t mean she liked it.

  “Have I got to hear appeals?” She sounded like a little girl.

  “Yes.”

  “Damn.” The hem of the divitision, massive with gold braid and gold thread, pearls and lapis lazuli studs, made a sort of rasping noise as it trailed along the flagstones. Tolois had been a tall man. “How long till?”

  He grinned at her. “You might get some lunch,” he said, “or you might not.”

  She groaned, and gave the divitision a mighty hitch, making it skip like a breaking wave. “And I hate this stupid thing, too. Why can’t I just wear a frock?”

  They walked through the South cloister, the best short cut from the Great Hall to the Council Chamber. Access to it was forbidden to everybody except the queen, the Lord Privy Seal, the Count of the Stables, the Grand Logothete and a little bald man who swept it once a month; no courtiers, servants, equerries, no guards, even. The Count and Privy Seal were only allowed in by express invitation. It was his favourite place in the world.

  She said, “After I’ve done the appeals, can we play chess?”

  He shook his head. “Afternoon council, then state dinner, and then you’ve got a mountain of things to read and sign. Sorry.”

  She sighed. They’d reached the end of the cloister. A thin shaft of light from a high slit window pooled at their feet. “See you tomorrow, then.”

  “Mind you read the brief from the Navy treasury committee,” he said. “You’ve got to make a decision on that tomorrow.”

  She pulled a sad face. “Can’t you do it?”

  “I’ve done you a two-page summary,” he said, “but you must read the full brief. Got that?”

  “Bully.”

  “You’ve got to make these decisions yourself,” he said gravely. “We talked about it, remember?”

  “All right.” She was drooping, the wilted-flower pose. Then she did that shrug of the shoulders, settling the lorus, dalmatic and lesser chlamys back into position, like a carthorse applying its strength to the collar; everything was back in place, her back was straight and her head was high. “But there’d better be almond biscuits when I get back, or someone’s going to be in real trouble. Got that?”

  “Your Majesty.”

  He opened the door for her and she gave him a regal nod, then stuck her tongue out at the last moment, before the last three inches of the divitision flicked over the threshold and she was gone. He closed the door almost reverently, then hurried back down the cloister to the Great Hall, which was empty apart from a few domestic staff, dusting and polishing. Two of them, allies from the old days, smiled at him as he passed and he grinned back.

  Too much to do, far too little time to do it in: job description of the Grand Logothete of the Kingdom of Blemya. Actually, neither of them knew what a logothete was; she’d seen the word in a book, years ago, and it had stuck in her mind, and when (the afternoon of the king’s funeral) she’d turned to him in the one quiet moment they’d had together and whispered, “You will help me, won’t you? I can’t do this on my own,” he’d tried to say no and it had come out as “Yes, of course.” “We’ve got to think of something to call you,” she said later, after the ferocious council meeting, when she’d refused to back down. “What?” he’d asked. She’d looked at him. Chief Secretary and Grand Vizier were the only suggestions he’d been able to come up with; she’d just looked at him, and he’d nodded and said, quite. Then, out of the blue, she’d remembered Grand Logothete; and suddenly there was one, and it was him, and here he was doing it.

  He glanced down at his crib sheet and his heart sank. Ordnance Committee; that was fortifications and siege engines and things, about which he knew nothing, and the committee was a bunch of fire-breathing old steelnecks who thought nobody under the age of forty-five should be allowed to speak. They scared the hell out of Daxin Paracoemenus, but the Grand Logothete was afraid of nothing. Well, then.

  He waited in the little ante-room until the water clock told him he wa
s five minutes late, then breezed in, slammed his papers down on the table, dropped into the only empty chair and said, “Gentlemen,” in the loud braying voice his uncle Faras used for shouting at his bailiff. The steelnecks glowered at him, rose resentfully to their feet and bowed. “Sorry to have kept you, let’s see, what have we got today?” He made a show of consulting the agenda, though he’d memorised it while he was waiting. When he was nervous in a meeting, his eyes got blurry and he couldn’t read. “Procurement.” He lifted his head, found the right steelneck and fixed his eyes on a spot on the wall two inches to the right of him. “General Auxin,” he said. “I think you’ve got some explaining to do.”

  Which he had, of course; the old fool was behind schedule and well over budget on the refurbishment of the Bronze Gate, and even Daxin knew that the Gate was the only weak spot in the Land Walls, and its present deplorable state directly jeopardised the security of the City. The steelnecks sat down, and Auxin began turning the pages of some brief or other. “No,” Daxin said, “don’t read me your notes; you should know this. When are you going to start work on the second phase, and how much is it going to cost?”

  It was a painful meeting. By the end of it, Daxin was more or less convinced that Auxin was fiddling (after all, his brother-in-law had the masonry contract, and Auxin’s eldest son had lost a lot of money at the track lately) and that the rest of the committee knew about it and were helping him cover it up. Stupid. All the stupid fiddling and cheating that went on, everywhere you looked; ridiculously rich men who still managed to find ways of desperately needing money, or who were simply greedy, or regarded wealth as the only way of keeping score in the endless social and political warfare of court life. When he’d told her about it, she’d looked at him and said, “What shall we do?” and he’d had to explain: there is no we, there’s just you, you’ve got to decide, and she’d accused him of being deliberately unhelpful and given him that yearning look: please deal with it and make it go away, I don’t want to. She understood, of course, perfectly well. But just occasionally, he knew, the desperate urge to be twenty-two and not responsible for the fate of a million people was almost too strong for her, and because she daren’t tempt herself, she tempted him.

  So he’d thought about it, and decided that since the rules were no help, and she couldn’t break the rules, it was up to him, on his own. And then, while he was trying to figure out a plan of action, he’d met that unbelievably helpful and sympathetic man Oida, the musician—

  After the Ordnance, he had the Bank governors, followed by a delegation from the mine owners, followed by an unspeakably annoying man from the lodge gabbling away about the preferments list; and now, just to round it all off, the High Priest and some professor from the Royal Academy of Music were demanding to see him about an urgent matter of national security. One of those days. By now, of course, he was running late, so any hope of sneaking off to the Sun Tower and making himself a stack of pancakes had evaporated like water off a hot stove.

  Actually, incredibly, he liked the High Priest. The old devil reminded him of his father; the same solemn, baleful stare and total deadpan delivery, so that there was a delay of five or so seconds before the joke exploded inside your head and made you laugh painfully through your nose; and the same reproachful glare to rebuke you for your unseemly outburst. The man was a total menace, and could cheer up an otherwise desperate day like no one else. The professor, on the other hand, was a completely unknown quantity – boring or difficult or both, and how in God’s name could a music professor be an urgent matter of national security?

  He sent her a note about it.

  The notes were her idea. Officially, he could only send her formal documents – minutes of meetings, memoranda of audiences, petitions, factual summaries, all of them documents of public record which would end up in the Great Cartulary, for ever and ever, along with the foreign treaties and the pipe rolls. But formal documents were sent in a despatch case, the original case that Tolois had used at the Battle of Luxansia; and the case was pigskin lined with velvet, and there was a tear in the lining, which it would be sacrilege to mend, and you could wedge a little scrap of parchment in the tear and nobody would know.

  This time the note said Before matins south cloister will bring honeycakes. When the case came back, with countersigned orders in council and a refused petition from the Board of Works, there was a scrap cut off his scrap that read all right but why so early. He grinned at that, and sent down to the kitchens.

  She was in plain clothes. The cloak and hood he recognised as the property of her maid, which bothered him. By now, at least fifty interested parties around the court would know that the queen had borrowed her maid’s cloak, and would be drawing conclusions like lunatics. He mentioned it.

  “Do I look stupid?” she said. She was annoyed because it was so early. “I stole it from her when she wasn’t looking and hid it at the bottom of the linen press. She’s been searching high and low for it ever since, the silly cow.”

  She didn’t like her maid, but was too soft-hearted to get rid of her just for that reason. He apologised. “It’s just, you can’t be too careful, all right?”

  “I know. Anyway.” She took a cake and stuck it in her mouth. “What’s so important?” she mumbled through the crumbs.

  He paused for a moment. “I don’t know if it is important,” he said, “or if it’s just weird. I mean, it’s definitely weird, but I can’t see anything more to it than meets the eye, which is weirder still. I mean, it’s such a lot of trouble to go to, if really it’s nothing but an extravagant gesture.”

  “Daxin,” she said, “you’re talking drivel.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well?”

  He sighed. “All right,” he said. “It’s good for a laugh, if nothing else. This professor from the music school came to see me.”

  “What professor?”

  “A professor. Juxia Epigennatus, if you must know. Never heard of him before.”

  “Nor me.” She took the other cake. “So?”

  “So,” he said, and hesitated again. It was just so weird. “Apparently, he got hold of that musical score the Easterners brought. You know, the new Procopius.”

  She nodded. “I flicked through it,” she said. “Not my sort of thing, really.”

  “Well,” Daxin said, “this Juxia’s done a damn sight more than flick through it. He’s been working on it day and night for a week, and he—”

  “Why?”

  Daxin shrugged. “It’s a masterpiece by one of the greatest living composers. That’s what professors do. Anyway, he made a remarkable discovery. Well, a really strange one, anyhow.”

  She did the impatient frown. It was one of the few times she ever looked genuinely pretty. “And? Oh, come on, Dax, it’s freezing out here and I’ve only got this stupid cape thing.”

  “Well,” Daxin said. “Apparently one of the things you do with a piece of music if you’re a professor is, you calculate the numerical values of the intervals of the main chromatic themes. Don’t ask me to explain that,” he added quickly, “and I could well have got the technical terms completely wrong. What it means in real life is that in every piece of formal music there’s got to be certain elements, or it’s cheating or it’s not proper music or something like that. One of the ways you analyse these things, if you’re a professor, is, you turn the music into numbers, using a universally accepted standard equivalence. All right?”

  “It all sounds incredibly silly to me,” she said. “But, yes, I think I see. Go on.”

  “The professor was doing his sums,” Daxin went on, “and there was something about the patterns of the numbers that rang a bell in his head, and he couldn’t think for the life of him what it was. He racked his brains for a day or so, and then, just for a laugh, he turned the numbers into letters, using the universally accepted—”

  “He turned the letters into—?”

  Daxin nodded. “W is one, D is two, so on and so forth. It’s a craft th
ing. Hundreds of years old. Anyway, he did that, and guess what? The letters made words, and the words made sense.”

  She blinked at him. “That’s weird.”

  “Told you so,” Daxin said. “Apparently he’s been through the whole thing five times, checking and rechecking, and it comes out the same thing every time. Turned into words and then into numbers, the Procopius thing is a poem.”

  “What?”

  “A poem,” Daxin said. “A fairly well-known one, by Corrhadi. One of the love sonnets. Do you know them?”

  She frowned, and her nose wrinkled. “I think so,” she said. “My mother made me read them. All soppy and over the top, I thought.”

  Daxin nodded. “That’s the ones,” he said. “This is the one that starts off, If love were all, what would be left to say. Book two, sonnet sixteen.”

  She was silent for about five seconds. “That’s weird,” she said.

  Daxin grinned. “I guess so,” he said. “I mean, on one level, it’s the most amazing tour de force of utterly pointless cleverness. It’s this really amazing piece of music that also happens to be a Corrhadi sonnet in code.”

  She shrugged. “Showing off.”

  “Indeed. Except, why the hell bother? Why make life so incredibly difficult for yourself? And why a Corrhadi sonnet, of all things? I mean, they’re one notch above the Mirror of True Love, but that’s about all you can say for them.”

  “Weird,” she said. “All right, but how exactly is this a threat to national security?”

  Daxin looked round. Unnecessary, since they were in the South cloister, but even so. “I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “As far as I can see, it’s just very, very strange. But I can’t help thinking. After all, Procopius is sort of in their government, or at least he’s what you’d call an establishment figure. What if this isn’t just some smartarse showing off? What if it’s, I don’t know, a coded message or something?”