Mightier than the Sword

by K. J. Parker

  Do you laugh, or cry, or just nod dumbly and change the subject? A magnificently appointed castle, but no defenders. Are there any weapons, I asked. They looked mildly shocked. Naturally, the copying brothers had no use for anything of the kind. What about the lay brothers? Embarrassed pause. No, we don’t let them have anything like that. People of that sort, there’s no knowing what they might do, especially when they’ve been drinking. I thanked them and rode away.

  “ALL PERFECTLY TRUE,” Count Trabea said. “But there’s no reason to suppose the pirates know about it. All they can see is a bloody great big castle. Naturally, they assume the people in it are armed to the teeth.”

  It goes to show the depths I was sinking to; I’d come to regard Count Trabea as a friend, or at least someone I could talk to, someone who thought the same way and spoke my language. “That’s a big assumption,” I said. “Bearing in mind we know nothing at all about these pirates.”

  He shrugged. “They’ve left Malestan alone, haven’t they? One thing I’m fairly sure of, they don’t have any sources of local information. All they know is what they can see. And what they can see is a double moat and huge, newly-mended walls. I don’t think you need worry unduly about Malestan.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Oh, by the way, any letters come for me while I was away?”

  He shook his head.

  THE MONKS HAD given me a present, to thank me for advising them. It was about the size of a paving-stone, wrapped in a red silk cloth; no prizes for guessing, a book. Now I’m not a great reader, but a Malestan folio is a gift fit for a king. I waited till I was alone in my tent, and unwrapped it.

  The cover was the sort of rich dark brown leather they make the very finest boots from; split calf, if I’m not mistaken, oak-tanned with eggs rather than brains, skived into three and worked for a whole day on the stretchers to get it beautifully supple. It was embossed with a falconry scene; four men and a fine lady in a wimple have launched a goshawk, which takes a heron in mid-air; below, the dogs peer hopefully upwards, in case they’re needed to retrieve. I opened it. The title page was stunningly illuminated in gold, red, blue and green interlocking swirls and clusters, each colour bordered in black. Follow one line, then switch to another and the perspective shifts vertiginously, making your head swim; blue dives under red and over gold, branches out to enfilade and encircle green, explodes into a delta of tendrils, interlaced but never tangled, each one a clear narrative—but where each colour ends and where it begins is impossible to determine, until eventually it dawns on you that each thread isn’t a line but a loop, perpetually circulating, like blood or the circuit of the stars. In the centre of all this was a miniature of the Invincible Sun orans, palms uplifted and facing, His head encircled in a glowing gold halo, his eyes dark, compassionate, disturbing; at the corner of the left eye, a single unexplained teardrop. I went to turn the page, but I didn’t want to break the eye contact; I sat quite still, looking at Him as He looked into me, until my heart was perfectly empty. Then I closed the book and wrapped it up in its sheet.

  I forget what the book was; the Sermons of Perceptuus or something like that.

  CORT DOCE WAS next. I handed over my letter of introduction.

  I could see why Abbess Svangerd and my aunt had always got on so well; also why they’d chosen to live so far apart. Two somewhat forthright women who value a friendship too much to risk damaging it by close proximity; don’t have two flints rattling around in a small box if you don’t want sparks.

  You could tell Svangerd had been a raging beauty once, just as she wasn’t one now. Old age had parched her, where it had swollen my aunt; she had bones you could’ve shaved with. Even now she was tall, probably an inch taller than me and I’m six foot; I couldn’t judge properly because she stayed sitting all the time I was with her. She wore a plain black gown with a single thin line of silver thread at the neck and cuffs; somehow she made it look almost wickedly elegant. She nodded at me to sit down on a rickety little stool with three spindly legs. It took my weight with a few creaks of protest. Then she read the letter.

  Svangerd and my aunt were from the same village, somewhere up in the north-eastern mountains—I don’t know where, and nobody wants to find out. They both lost their families to the plague when they were kids; nothing left for them in the village, so they walked down the mountain to the nearest city, looking for work. Is that the right word? I guess it is; work is what you do to make a living. If your work happens to be someone else’s pleasure, it’s still work, isn’t it? Anyway, they both turned out to be extremely good at it. Word quickly spread, and they graduated from the provinces to the big city, from a high-class cathouse in the Goosefair to their own exclusive establishment on Temple Hill. Reliable accounts of that era in their lives are hard to come by, since nearly all their regular clients either died or received a sudden, urgent vocation to the monastic life, not long after my aunt married general Ultor, as he then was. When Ultor was called to the Purple, Svangerd announced that she was quitting the business and wanted a monastery, preferably a big, rich one, a long way from Town. It was a graceful thing to do (and it’s always better to volunteer than be dragged away by the hair), and they’ve maintained their friendship ever since.

  She lifted her head and looked at me. “She says you’re here about the pirates,” she said, as though I was the man come to fix the weathervane. “Well? Have you got a strategy?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I don’t know enough about the situation.”

  A good answer, apparently. She nodded. “I can help you,” she said. She picked up a brass tube and handed it to me. “That’s everything I’ve been able to find out about them,” she said. “It’s not very much, but it’ll give you somewhere to start. Kremild says you’re quite bright.”

  Stunned isn’t the word. “Does she?”

  A faint smile. “Reading between the lines,” she said. “But you know what she wrote, surely.” I looked blank. She frowned. “You read the letter, didn’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “It was sealed. And anyway, I don’t—”

  “My God.” She raised both eyebrows. “Before you leave,” she said, “I’ll teach you how to lift a seal so that nobody will ever know.” She looked at me for a moment, as though I was something brought back by travellers from a distant land. “A word of advice, if I may presume. If a superior gives you a letter to be delivered unopened, always open it. One time in a hundred it’ll say something like the bearer of this letter is to be put to death immediately.” She picked up a little brass bottle, showed it to me and put it away in the handsome walrus-ivory box on the table. “Won’t be needing that now,” she said. “So is that all you are? A good soldier?”

  “I’m not a soldier,” I said. That fleeting glance of a small brass bottle—it was like when you inadvertently look straight at the sun, and when you look away, there’s a big raw red patch in the middle of your vision. “I’m an Imperial legate.”

  She grinned at me. “I knew your father,” she said. “He was much younger than Kremild and me, of course. When the plague killed his parents, the neighbours took him in. A boy, you see, he’d be useful on the farm. We sent for him as soon as we could, and Kremild got him a commission in the Guards. You’re a lot like him. Solid. I expect you’ll be the next emperor.”

  I stared at her. “I sincerely hope not,” I said.

  She laughed. “I believe you,” she said. “Now, I’ve given orders for your men to be quartered on the lay brethren. They won’t like that, but they’ll just have to put up with it. You can use the library, obviously. I have good couriers, they can be in Town in three days. Naturally, you’ll use this as your headquarters.”

  “Actually—”

  “Splendid. Don’t trust Count Trabea any further than you can kick him. I don’t know what enemies you may have at home, but he’ll definitely be out to get you. Poison, almost certainly, but not in your food, he’s smarter than that. If you get a cut or a scratch, don’t hav
e a local doctor see to it. And don’t sleep in a tent with a charcoal stove. It’s amazing the number of people who’ve asphyxiated in their sleep since Trabea took office.”

  I was feeling a bit dizzy. “Why would Trabea—?”

  “Because he hasn’t been doing his job properly, or you wouldn’t be here. And it’s not a difficult job, and Trabea’s a very competent man, so you have to ask yourself, why has he failed?” She smiled at me. “I’m forgetting my manners,” she said. “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No thank you.”

  She laughed again; silvery, like a young girl. “It’s all right,” she said, “you can trust me, Kremild’s told me to look after you. It’s everybody else you should be terrified of. Have some wine, it’ll put colour in your cheeks. We make a passable white, even this far north. It’s quite dry but with a rather pleasant flowery aftertaste.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.” She gave me a stern look. “Now, then. Getting rid of these wretched pirates is important,” she said, “so I’ll expect you to put some effort into it. Clearly Kremild thinks so too, or she wouldn’t have sent you.” She studied me for a moment, the way I’ve seen butchers look at carcases. “I imagine you think the monasteries are just irrelevant monks and inconvenient royal women. You’re wrong. Actually, they’re the only justification I’ve ever managed to come up with for the empire. Did your aunt ever tell you how the plague came to our village? There was an outbreak among some auxiliary cavalry just arrived from Sembrotia. As soon as the symptoms were confirmed, the governor had them driven out of the city, with no food or water. They went looking for something to eat; they found us. We didn’t know about plague, of course, what the symptoms are or anything like that. We took them in and tried to look after them.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. But it takes an empire to hire nomads in Sembrotia and bring them all the way to the Western mountains. That’s what empires do, they bring people together, make connections.” She opened the ivory box and put away a small penknife and a stick of sealing wax. “They make it possible to build great libraries, places like this, that endure. The same plague that killed my village wiped out all the monks at Cort Valence. They all died, but the books remained intact. One of the first things I did when I came to this house was send two dozen carts and have them brought here, where they’re safe. In the end, you see, books are all that matter. How did Saloninus put it, the past speaking to the future? It’s what survives, you see. When those carts arrived from Valence, I found all three books of Licinius’ Eternal Crown. The third book’s been lost for centuries, and it’s the only record of the Seventh Dynasty. Just a few sheets of parchment, that’s all, but in it is all that’s left of four hundred years of people’s lives. And there was Pacatian’s Mechanics, and four completely unknown dialogues of Constans. That’s what we are here, we’re beachcombers finding little scraps and fragments of wrecks on the beach. It’s only scraps, but it’s everything.” She shrugged. “And the pirates will just burn it all, if we let them. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I think so,” I said awkwardly. “And yes, obviously—”

  “This is no good.” She stood up, a little stiffly. “I’ll have to show you. Follow me.”

  I’ll say this for her, she was quicker up and down those stairs than I was. We went all the way down, then across a courtyard and a stable yard, through a doorway and down a very long stair until we reached a big oak door. She took a lantern down off the wall. On the other side of the room there was nothing; just an empty cellar, that’s all.

  “Over here,” she said.

  She held up the lantern, and I looked into its pool of light. “It’s a wall,” I said.

  “There’s half a million people in this room. Look closely.”

  I looked, and I believe I could just make out some marks on the wall. “What’s that?”

  “Writing,” she said. “Very old writing.”

  “Ah. What does it say?”

  “I have no idea.” She’d been holding the lantern at arm’s length; tiring. She lowered it, and its light was confined to a square yard of floor. “That’s the point. That bit of wall is all that’s left of the building that was here before we came. We don’t know how old it is, or who built it, or what the writing says. That’s the point. Calyx’s Chronicles give us the history of this region for the past thousand years, but he doesn’t say anything about anybody living here. Whoever they were, they’ve gone for ever, as though they’d never existed. That’s all that’s left of them, those letters on a stone slab, and we can’t read them.” She raised the lantern again. “Do you understand now?”

  I nodded. I don’t like dark rooms underground, and I wanted to get out of there. “Yes,” I said. Actually, I’d have agreed with anything for a chance to get back into the open air. Half a million people in one room; she’d made her point. From where I was standing—maybe it’s a morbid dread of ending up in a cell for the rest of my life, cell being an ambiguous term; such a fear being understandable, given our family history—it felt more like half a million prisoners, yearning to be free.

  YOU'RE SAFE IN a prison. They bring you your food, regular as clockwork. Most cells are a bit damp, but nothing compared to the sort of houses most people in the north-west have to live in. And there are armed guards on every door, so your chances of being cut down by hordes of vicious marauders are practically nil.

  I remember visiting my father in one of those places. The poor fool said he was happy. He lay on his back, arms behind his head; this is the life, he said. I can lie around all day, read when I feel like it, do a bit of exercise, and I don’t have to do any work—work being ruling and governing, issuing orders, deciding destinies, signing death warrants. And no visitors (he grinned at me when he said it); no visitors is absolute fucking bliss, after all those years with my family. Finally, he said, after a lifetime in the conflict business, I can get some peace.

  The ambiguity of the word cell; keep an eye on it.

  BEFORE I SET off for Sambic, she sent for me. There was a letter on her desk. One of my most useful survival skills is the ability to read upside-down. The letter was from my aunt; I recognised the handwriting before Svangerd could cover it up.

  “She’s worried about you,” she said.

  “Really?” The surprise was genuine. My aunt’s always given me the impression that she believes me to be immortal, invulnerable and immune to all known diseases; or else why would she keep sending me to the wars?

  “She thinks you’re on the verge of making a most unsuitable marriage.”

  Oh. “She turned me down,” I said.

  “I know.” Svangerd looked at me, just briefly. “She’s fine, by the way. Not your aunt. Whatsername. What in God’s name possessed you to spend six million on a house for a prostitute who refuses to marry you?”

  I grinned feebly. “It was the middle of the night.”

  When you’re as smart as Svangerd, I guess you get out of practice hearing things you can’t understand. She scowled. “What?”

  “She was very badly injured and I needed to find some place where the doctor could treat her. I don’t have a house of my own, and I couldn’t think of anywhere. Then I remembered the Caecilia house was for sale, which meant it’d be furnished but empty. She needed to be treated straight away. So I told them to take her there. We kicked the door down to get in.”

  She sighed. “Yes, all right,” she said. “But buying the place—”

  I shrugged. “It was simpler that way.”

  She gazed at me for an uncomfortably long time, as though she was doing complicated mental arithmetic. “Your aunt thinks you should have nothing more to do with this female,” she said. “I’m not sure I agree.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I made a sort of grunting noise. Bad habit of mine.

  “Your aunt,” she went on, “maintains that if you marry a tart, it’ll look like a declaration of intent to try for the throne.”<
br />
  I opened my mouth and closed it again.

  “Think about it. Ultor married your aunt, and three years later he was crowned. By following in his footsteps, so to speak, you’re making a loud, clear statement. You’re saying, I don’t give a damn what people think, because quite soon I’ll be emperor and I’ll do what I like. Your aunt believes you don’t yet have enough of a power base for that sort of gesture. I have to say, I beg to differ. I think that by biding your time, keeping out of the cut and thrust of politics and doing dull but worthy things out on the frontiers, you’ve lined yourself up as the obvious compromise candidate, for when the Optimates and the Populists tear each other to pieces. Also, marrying this woman will be seen as you deliberately putting yourself out of the running for the throne; so, of course, people will say, here’s a man who isn’t hell-bent on the Purple, if we make him emperor he’ll be sensible and moderate, because that’s how their minds work.” She nodded. “Svangerd won’t listen to a word I say, naturally, we’ve known each other far too long. But my advice is, go ahead. It’s a gamble, but what isn’t?”

  “I love her,” I said.

  For a long time she didn’t say anything, just considered me, in the abstract. “Have a safe trip,” she said.

  WHILE I WAS on the road from Cort Doce to Cort Sambic, the pirates attacked. They appeared out of nowhere—our lookout station on the headland at Petrobol saw nothing—and burned Cort Amic to the ground. By the time I got there, all that was left was ash.

  There’s a large, quite prosperous village at the foot of Amic Hill. The monks had a sawmill there, and a tannery, and a substantial clay pit, with a brickworks and a pottery. The first thing they knew about any attack was a bright light on the hilltop, sunrise in the middle of the night. Being sensible people, they ran into the woods and didn’t come out until their scouts promised them it was safe; about an hour before I turned up. No help from them, then.