by K. J. Parker
“I see,” Sechimer said. “Do you know if they share the Cosseilhatz’ antipathy to siege warfare?”
“No idea. I doubt it, though. Of the two, I’d say the Selbst are the more dangerous, actually. The Cosseilhatz are better at wiping out armies to the last man, but I have an idea the Selbst might actually want to prise open a few cities and help themselves to the contents. And I wouldn’t put it past them to figure out how to go about it. They’re a resourceful lot, quick learners.”
“Then we’re screwed.” Sechimer sounded calm, almost relieved. “It’s all over, isn’t it?”
Calojan looked at him. “I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Sechimer was squeezing his improvised bandage. “Very soon, the cities will fall; either they’ll starve or there’ll be a plague—inevitable, I should think, all those people crammed into a tiny space—and that’ll be the end of them. Then the Selbst will come for us. We’ll probably kill tens of thousands of them, but we might as well not bother. We’re finished, Calojan. The great enemy of all mankind has been destroyed.” He grinned. “Bloody good prophesy, that. Wish I’d known of it earlier, I could’ve emigrated.”
Calojan frowned at him. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “Come on, you used to be the admiral of the fleet. You know better than anyone that with the sea at our back, and the fleet intact, we aren’t going to starve any time soon. We’ll live by trade, like the Vesani, or the Mezentines. It doesn’t matter if the only land we control is what we can see from the walls. No enemy has ever—”
“Breached Florian’s wall by force, I know. Not yet.” He shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. But I think the Selbst want to see us got rid of. It’s because of what we did to them, their people here, when we flooded their homes. I knew at the time we’d done something really, really bad. I believe they won’t rest till the City’s an empty ruin. If I was their king, that’s how I’d feel.”
“Yes, well.” Calojan didn’t want to listen to any of that. “You’re forgetting, we still have one advantage. One thing in our favour that’ll make them keep their distance.”
“Really? What?”
Calojan said, “Me.”
Sechimer opened his mouth, then paused, then smiled. “True,” he said.
“Thank you,” Calojan replied. “They all think I’m still trapped in Moisin with the remnants of the army. When they find out I’m here, ready to command the defence of the City, I imagine they’ll have serious problems persuading their people to attack Florian’s wall. And quite right, too,” he added. “With ten thousand men, I could hold this city for ever against the whole world.”
Sechimer looked at him, as though expecting to see true or false written on his forehead. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “I take it you’re planning on living for ever?”
“No,” Calojan said, “just a very, very long time. And by then, everything will have changed. That’s one thing you can bet on.”
Sechimer sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve just lost getting on for three quarters of the land area of the empire in the course of a few weeks, and here you are talking about the future like there’s going to be one, like you know what it’ll be. I can’t actually fault your logic, but it still seems all a bit too hopeful for me.”
Calojan shrugged. “At the risk of sounding like something carved over a door, hope is all we have left. Well, hope, the walls, control of the sea and three hundred state-of-the-art warships.”
“And you.”
“Let’s not forget me,” Calojan agreed. “It’s still an appalling mess, but it’s better than nothing.”
“True.” Sechimer nodded decisively. “It’s better than nothing. Which is just as well. Gesel’s expecting a baby.”
Calojan had never found a way of reacting to those words without appearing hopelessly gauche, even in the best of circumstances. He tried, “Congratulations.” It sounded all wrong.
“Thank you. Well, if you’re right, the poor little devil may have something to rule over by the time he comes of age. I guess we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?”
A little later, Calojan made his excuses and left. Instead of using the chaise that was waiting for him in the palace courtyard, he slipped out through the east postern and walked down the Barbican stairs into Cooperstown. In the past, he’d found it a good place for judging the mood of the City. When people were happy and confident, the narrow streets tended to be busy. Women with baskets in their hands or children in their arms processed slowly from stall to stall in the Pannier market, where country people from as far away as the Panoge gathered to sell their wares at ridiculously high prices, while men with no obvious legal livelihood sat on the grey oak benches outside the Integrity or the Orthodox Virtues, endlessly formulating complex schemes that would make them rich for ever. It was the sort of place where you could buy almost anything, where the flawless apples fetched in that morning from the orchard suburbs shone blood-red under a thin skin of skilfully-applied wax, where you might just get the bargain of a lifetime, and at least half of the change you were given could be relied on to be genuine. They said that Florian himself used to go down there with a hood pulled low over his eyes, to catch the mood and buy pancakes from a specially favoured stall—unlikely, since Cooperstown was open fields until the reign of Lusomer II, but people chose to believe it nonetheless. The pancake stall was still there, of course, with a giant gilded wooden Florian presiding over the griddle, while across the way and down a bit was the cobbler who made boots for Genseric IV-disguised-as-a-beggar, next door but one to the inn out of which Teudebert I was thrown for fighting while he was still the crown prince. All lies, of course, but they supported the City like the great oak tree-trunks driven into the sea-bed on which they’d built the West quay.
On a good day, you had to wait in line for a pancake from Florian’s Choice. Today, there was no queue. The man asked Calojan, did he want honey with that? Five trachy extra.
“Five trachy? Get lost.”
“Suit yourself.”
He sat under the ancient plane tree (or the very old tree grown from a seedling of the ancient plane tree; it amounted to the same thing) and scowled across the deserted square at the empty benches outside the Integrity. Talking to Sechimer he’d almost managed to convince himself, but it wasn’t quite so easy to believe, outside in the empty open air. Trade, yes, they could live by making and selling things; who to? The Vesani, the Mezentines, or maybe there were great islands out in the far sea where all the guttering was solid silver but they’d never seen an olive. I’m no good at peace, he thought, trying to picture himself leading a trade delegation, in tight new boots and clean fingernails, being polite to people. Here lies general Calojan, who won all his battles and lost the empire, dead from uselessness at forty-five.
A man was staring at him, and he winced. Just occasionally, he was recognised in public, usually by veterans. He never knew what to say. He stood up, and the man shot across at him like an arrow.
“Here,” he said. “You want to earn a trachy?”
“One single trachy? Not really.”
“You want to earn some money,” the man explained patiently. “Well?”
Calojan shrugged. “Doing what?”
The man looked at him again, as though making sure. “Dunno if anyone’s ever told you this,” he said, “but you look a bit like him.”
“Him?”
“Yeah, him. You know. General Calojan.”
He pronounced it wrong; the O long, as in low, rather than short, as in ox. Calojan shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s taller than me.”
“Yes,” the man agreed, “but who’s to know if you’re sitting down? And you could wear a wig.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
The man gave him an impatient look. “We do this show,” he said. “Four nights a week in the Integrity. Topical satire.”
“Ah.”
“You could do Ca
lojan,” the man said. “We tie you over a barrel and stick carrots up your arse—only pretend, of course—then we empty a pisspot over your head and chuck you in the sewer. The punters’ll lap it up. Forty trachy.”
Topical satire. “I don’t know,” Calojan said. “I’m sort of busy right now.”
“Work nights, do you?”
“Sometimes. Days mostly, though.”
The man smiled. “Well, there you go,” he said. “You do your day job in the daytime, right, and four nights a week you pick up an extra forty-five trachy, cash in hand, yours to spend. These hard times, you’d be mad to refuse.”
“Forty-five trachy.”
“All right, fifty. But that’s it.”
“And people will come to see that.”
“Are you kidding? They got a Calojan lookalike down the Orthodox Virtues, they string him up by his balls and throw rocks at him, packing ’em in every night, and he doesn’t look a bit like bloody Calojan. Not a patch on you,” he added, “in a wig.”
“Have you got a Sechimer as well? Only I know this man—”
The man looked horrified. “Don’t talk daft, son. Look, that’s my offer, take it or leave it. You’ll be sorry.”
Calojan frowned. “Four nights?”
“For starters. If it takes off, we could be looking at daily.”
“Would it be all right if I thought about it?”
The man looked pained. “All right,” he said. “But don’t take too long about it. There’s other Calojans, you know, be glad of the job.”
Sechimer fell ill. A cut on his right hand (he couldn’t remember how he’d done it) went bad. His jaw started twitching; it was in the middle of a Treasury meeting, and nobody dared say anything, but he went straight to the court physician, who dosed him with archer’s root to stop the spasms, and confined him to bed. The twitch moved into his neck, then down his back; sometimes the convulsions were so severe that he bent backwards, just like a drawn bow. His face was burning hot, but anything he drank seemed to go straight through and out onto the mattress. It got harder and harder for him to breathe. The physician doubled the dose of archer’s root; it helped a little, but he knew that if he kept up the treatment at that level for too long, his patient would die anyway; they called it archer’s root because its juice was used to poison arrowheads. Two days into the sickness, he started to sweat profusely. On the fifth day, he sent Gesel out of the room and told her he needed to speak to Calojan.
“Well,” he said (each word had to be shaped, turned and finished, like a work of the finest craftsmanship) “what do you make of all this, then?”
“Lockjaw,” Calojan replied. “Didn’t they tell you?”
A spasm arched Sechimer’s back into a hoop. Eventually, when he could talk again, he said, “Look what it’s doing to me. My back is a bow, and I’m flooding the place out. Don’t tell me it’s a coincidence.”
Calojan shookn his head. “Your trouble is,” he said, “you’re too damn slovenly when it comes to interpreting omens. Now me, I read a book about it, so I know about this stuff.”
Sechimer breathed in and out, shallow and fast, four times. On the fifth breath, he whispered, “Enlighten me.”
“Well,” Calojan said, “I assume you’re taking the back-bent-like-a-bow thing to mean the Cosseilhatz, right? And all the sweating and peeing is a somewhat far-fetched reference to when they flooded out the Selbst migrant workers. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry,” Calojan said, “but it just doesn’t work like that. I refer you to Stauracius Hrabanus on the interpretation of portents, book three, I think it’s somewhere around chapter seventeen. You’re trying to read a causative portent and a portent of agency simultaneously into the same phenomenon.” He shook his head. “Uh-huh. That’s against all the rules. Therefore, it’s not a portent at all, therefore you’re just ill, with no supernatural overtones at all, therefore you stand a pretty good chance of recovery, providing you don’t scare yourself to death with a load of self-inflicted mystical garbage. You know what? You want to pull yourself together, before you make yourself really ill.”
“I remember now,” Sechimer murmured. “The only time I cut myself recently was that bottle. When we didn’t have that drink together.”
Calojan frowned. “Are you saying you think the bottle was poisoned?”
Sechimer tried to shake his head; he stirred it a little, just enough to suggest direction. “Nothing like that. It just occurred to me, I’m going to die because I took the bottle from you. That means something, but I can’t think what it is.”
“Rotten bad luck,” Calojan said. “That’s all.”
“Rotten bad luck.” Sechimer tried to smile, but a tremor shook his face, ran down his spine and twisted him into an obscene arc. It was far worse than anything Calojan had seen before. He ran out of the room and yelled for the doctor.
They bled him, and gave him as much archer’s root as they dared. When he came round, he asked for Gesel and a priest. Calojan escorted them to the door, and peered in as they sat down beside him. That’s not Sechimer, he thought. That’s some old man pretending to be him, but God knows who he thinks he’s trying to fool.
The emperor died shortly after midnight. He was one week short of his thirtieth birthday.
Aimeric stayed at the palace for a couple of days. The idea was that he would comfort his sister; in the event, they played game after game of chess, like they used to do when they were children. If he tried to raise the subject, she just looked at him, and he knew her too well.
“It’s all right,” she said, on the third day, “you can go home now. I’m going to be horribly busy with the funeral arrangements, and you’d better talk to the chancellor and the archdeacon about the regency council. Go on,” she added, “I know you’re sick to death of letting me win.”
He hadn’t been. She’d won the last seventeen games. “Will you be all right?”
“No, not for a very long time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go home.”
“Really,” he said. “Will you be all right?”
She shrugged. “I’ll pray for comfort and guidance,” she said. “I know you think it’s superstitious nonsense, but it helps me more than anything else. He was a good man, so I know it’s all for the best.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he turned away and walked home. On the way he stopped at the Silver Moon, a small and unfashionable post-Resurgence temple on the corner of Old Stairs, and said a prayer for the soul of the emperor, and for his sister and his unborn nephew. As he stood up to leave, he tried to tell himself he’d felt something. From Old Stairs he’d intended to take Broad Street up as far as the Butter Market, but the road was closed and there were soldiers everywhere; riots, they explained, as if blaming the weather.
By the time he got home his feet were sore from walking, and all he wanted to do was sit down in his chair and have a drink. No chance. As soon as he opened the door she yelled at him, invisible.
“Why is it,” she said, “that you’re incapable of understanding simple instructions? Don’t open the door when I’m working.”
He knew all about that. When the ink or the paint of the gesso was wet, apparently, opening the door let in the wrong sort of dust; modern dust, whatever that meant. “You didn’t tell me you were—”
“You haven’t been home for two days, how could I? Shut the bloody door.”
He did as he was told. “Where are you?”
“In my workshop, of course.”
Half of upstairs—formerly two reception rooms and a gentleman’s library—were now her workshop. She’d had huge holes gouged in the walls and glazed with clear glass, at six solidi a sheet, to make windows to let in the right sort of light. The doors were insulated with curtains so heavy it had taken two men to hang them, though apparently even that level of fortification wasn’t proof against evil modern dust. “Can I come in?”
An audible sigh. “Hang on.”
He heard th
e curtain rings graunch on the steel pole; then the door opened a crack and she peered at him. “What do you want?”
“I thought you might like to hear about what’s going on at the palace.”
She frowned, then opened the door a little more, enough for him to squeeze in sideways. “Well?”
There was a sheet of parchment on her desk, the corners weighted down with lumps of glass waste. Anything else left telltale marks, she’d told him. “What are you doing?”
“Saving your life. So, how’s Gesel?”
“What do you mean,” he said slowly, “saving my life?”
“And mine,” she added, “and the kid’s. Which is why,” she went on, “I don’t want you opening doors when the ink’s wet.”
It was a bit too much. He sat down. She went back to her bench, sat with her back to him. “I’ve got to get this finished,” she said, “or it’ll smudge.”
“In what way are you saving all our lives?”
Maybe she hadn’t heard him. “Did you find out,” she said, “if Sechimer made a will?”
“What?”
“Did you find out—?”
“No. I mean, no, he didn’t. I know that, because Gesel told him he ought to, and he was being stubborn about it. And once he was sick, he simply wasn’t up to it.”
“You’re wrong,” she said.
That made no sense. “No,” he said. “Gesel told me, just before he got ill, Sechimer still hasn’t made a will, he thinks it’s bad luck. That’s her exact words.”
The sun in the window made her a black shape, surrounded by a burning aura; a bit like the Invincible Sun in an old, smoke-blackened icon. “Sechimer made a will,” she said. “It’s very important that you get that into your thick skull. Now, where would he have stored it?”
“How should I know?”
“I suggest you find out. But don’t go around asking directly, for crying out loud.”
He took a deep breath, which for some reason wasn’t easy. “Orsella,” he said, “what are you doing?”
“I’m writing Sechimer’s will,” she said, “what do you think?”