by K. J. Parker
She smiled at me. I love her so much. “It was you asked me a question,” she said. “Well, you made it into an order, but you know I never do what you tell me to.”
I couldn’t speak. She waited, then went on, “Well, I thought about it a lot, and I decided that probably this—” she pointed “—was a hint that I ought to retire, and that begs the question, what do I do now? And most of us in the trade try and sucker some poor fool into marriage. And I thought, I know a poor fool who’ll do. So here I am.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Strange how you react sometimes. Several times I’d tried to imagine the moment when she said she’d marry me, and always, in my imagination, I whooped with joy and ran through the streets yelling at the top of my voice. Wasn’t like that. I just stood there, still as a rock, while the completely changed and utterly transformed glorious new world enveloped me. “Good,” I said. “And now my aunt really is going to kill me.”
She changed instantly to a serious face. “I don’t think so,” she said. “You’re following precedent, the best possible precedent in the world, from her point of view. Of course, you’re going to have to change your name.”
Turned over two—no, make that three—pages at once. “You what?”
“To Ultor. Then you’ll be Ultor the Third. Continuity,” she said. “At the moment, it’s what the empire needs more than anything else. But no, your aunt will be fine. You don’t seriously believe I’d be here if I didn’t think so.”
“Yes, but—”
“This is something you need to do. Politically,” she added quickly. “Politics is all gestures, and you don’t have a clue when it comes to gestures. But this is a good one, which is why I’ve agreed. Politically—”
“Will you shut the fuck up about politics,” I said, and kissed her.
A moment later she yelped with pain and I let go. “What did the doctor say?” I asked.
She hesitated, just a little. “No permanent damage,” she said. “An inch to the left, I’d have been dead. I think they always say that.”
I’ve heard it myself a few times. “You shouldn’t have come,” I said. “What if you’d burst the stitches? It was a ridiculous risk to take.”
She gave me her you’re-impossible look. “It was a gesture, stupid,” she said. Then that serious look again. “Are you happy?”
“Yes,” I said. “For the first time in my life, there’ll be someone I know is on my side. You have no idea what that means.”
She nodded gravely. “No matter what,” she said. “And don’t worry about your aunt. When she looks at me, it’ll be like looking in a mirror. And no woman can resist doing that.”
I HAD TO send the chaise back, but we had a stroke of luck. One of the merchants at the inn agreed to sell us his luxury coach—for a ludicrous sum of money, and only after I’d threatened to requisition it. It wasn’t as sleekly efficient as the government chaise, but speed was no longer of the essence, and it was damnably comfortable.
“I won’t be able to go in it, naturally,” I said mournfully.
“No?”
“Of course not. I’ve got to ride at the head of the damn column, it’s expected of me.”
“Poor baby.” She pulled a wonderfully soft-looking rug over her knees and plumped up the cushions. “And will you have to eat barley porridge and drink horse-piss, just like the men?”
“Not the horse-piss. That’s only in the desert.”
She raised her eyebrows. “They packed me a hamper at the inn,” she said. “There’s smoked lamb sausage with truffles.”
“I don’t love you any more.”
She smiled. “Gestures,” she said. “See? You can do them if you want to. Look, I’ll sneak you out some goat’s cheese with chives. Your favourite. Nobody will know.”
I shook my head. “Can’t risk it,” I said. “Anyway, it’s no big deal. I’ve been eating Beloisa porridge since I was fifteen, and sleeping in ditches.”
She sighed. “Spoiled rotten, that’s what you are. All you rich kids are the same.”
I THOUGHT ABOUT what she’d said as we rode on to Auzon, and it didn’t take me long to realise she was right, as usual. I went back through all the marriages in the various Imperial families for the last few generations, as far back as I could remember, which isn’t very far, and there haven’t been many of them, because of all the civil wars and usurpations and such. Fact; in the last two hundred years there have been thirty-six emperors, of whom nine died in their beds (and three of them were probably poisoned). Of the thirty-six, only ten were born in the purple and only six of them lived long enough to marry. Of those six, five married commoners; the rationale being that whereas the petty kings of lesser nations have to choose their queens for politics and diplomacy, the Emperor of the Robur is so incredibly far above any other mortal that nobody could possibly be his equal, and no other nation could conceivably aspire to a marriage alliance; so, logically, the emperor is free (almost uniquely among humanity) to marry for love. It’s the only argument in favour of having the rotten job I’ve ever come across, and presumably that’s why emperors and crown princes are so often the heroes of soppy romances. Anyway, the same principle applies to sons, nephews and first cousins of the Dragon Signet—put it another way, if tradition was to be observed and the prestige of the purple maintained, I really had no choice but to marry out of the gutter. My duty, in fact. Oh well. Guess I have no alternative but to comply. I still wasn’t looking forward to telling my aunt, though. She’s a bit like that. If you brought her the severed head of the Great King of the Sashan, she’d moan at you for dripping blood on the carpet.
IT'S PROBABLY THE soldier in me; once I’ve identified an objective, I want to crack on and achieve it—get there first with the most, Sechimer’s lightning strike across the frozen river at Three Bridges, all the great cavalry commanders you’ve ever read about. So I’d made up my mind that we’d get married at Auzon, with the abbot officiating and presumably my Cassite archers as bridesmaids. It didn’t quite work out like that. When we got to Auzon, Auzon wasn’t there.
Rather a melodramatic way to record a horribly sober fact. By way of background, if by some chance you aren’t reading this with the map on the desk beside you, the monastery at Auzon is—was—barely half a mile from the sea. The monks, at one time great traders and seafarers, built a harbour in a superb natural location; necessary, because that stretch of the coast is murder, with sudden squalls, hidden rocks and that ghastly white wall of mist that comes down out of nowhere and cuts visibility to the point where you can’t see your hand at arm’s length, half an hour after a clear blue sky. Of course, you’d have to be mad to use that mist deliberately, to mask your arrival from the watch towers on Carason Point and Alsingey. But that, it turned out, was precisely what they’d done, or so the handful of survivors from the village told us. Apparently there’s these tiny skerries about ten miles out, where ships piloted by suicidal lunatics could lie up until the fog rolled in. Mist means no wind, so they must have rowed across, ten miles completely blind and somehow avoiding the Devil’s Teeth and that vicious rip-tide. Then say five hours to reduce the monastery to rubble and ash, and back out to sea again before the fog thinned.
Speaking as a military man, I despise fighting against lunatics. I’ve done it once or twice, and it sets your teeth on edge. You can’t predict what they’ll do, you don’t share the same frame of reference regarding the definitions of victory, defeat, surrender or acceptable losses; if they lose, you find yourself staring at a battlefield piled obscenely high with their smashed, slashed bodies, and if they win, they’ll probably burn you alive in a wicker cage. Really, they shouldn’t be allowed to make war. It’s bad enough as it is without all that sort of thing.
This time, as well as slaughtering the monks they’d butchered nearly all the villagers as well, and burnt the farms and barns. Call me a sissy, but I don’t hold with all that. Also, it made dreadful problems for us, since we’d bee
n relying on the monastery and the village for provisions for the Cassites and, most of all, fodder for the horses. The best we could do was hobble them and turn them off to graze on what they could pick out from the heather and the gorse. That’s no way to treat good livestock if you want them to give of their best.
“Aren’t you going to bury them?” she asked me.
“No point,” I said. “Burnt bones aren’t a health risk, and the rain’ll wash the ashes away in a day or so. It’s unburnt bodies that cause the plague.”
“Yes, but—” She shrugged. “You can’t leave people’s skulls and bones just lying around. It’s not decent.”
“No,” I said, “it’s horrible. But if we stay here and collect them all up and dig a big hole, we won’t have enough food to get back to Sambic, let alone press on to Cort Varon. It’ll have to go on the big list of things to be done later by someone else.”
She frowned. “Do you have to make a lot of decisions like that? I suppose you must do.”
“All the time,” I said. “And each one is truly bad. All that can be said for them is that the alternatives are even worse.”
But she’d made me think, and I compromised. I sent the Cassites back to Sambic, under the command of my senior tribune, and I made her go with them. The other eight tribunes, the six lancers of her escort and I stayed there until we’d picked up all the skulls—the hell with arms and legs—dug a big hole and buried them. By then it had started to rain. I recited something or other from the Long Catechism, and then we wriggled into our oilskins and made a dash for it. I had ash on my hands all the way back to Sambic. It ran in the rain and turned into little black muddy rivers, all down my trousers.
DECISIONS; AH, DECISIONS. I signed my first death warrant the day before my sixteenth birthday. The poor bastard I condemned was guilty of cowardice in the face of the enemy. Imagine it. You know what a Sashan phalanx looks like, a thousand men wide and fifty deep, but all you see as they come towards you is those terrible long spears, like a forest sideways—a forest that was planted by some optimist who lost interest and never got around to thinning the saplings, so the trees are far too close together, so they shoot straight up to get to the light. Actually, it’s not the sight that gets to you, it’s the sound, fifty thousand hobnailed boots hitting the deck at exactly the same moment, and the ground really does shake, it goes in through the soles of your feet like a tapeworm and strangles your heart. For two seconds you can’t think of anything at all; the third second, all you can think about is how you’re going to run away with all these people blocking your path. I signed the warrant six hours after the captain of my personal guard grabbed hold of my horse’s bridle to stop me hauling right round and bolting like a rabbit. I felt so utterly ashamed, for nearly running and for killing a man who did what I tried to do. My tears splodged the ink. They had to copy it out again, and I had to sign it again. Then I was sick, all over the tribune’s shiny boots.
It gets easier with time, but not because you develop into a better person.
On the successful completion of my first campaign, uncle had me made a Companion and awarded me the headless spear, which is the highest honour a soldier can receive. Looking back on it, eighteen years later, I recognise that, yes, I fought a damn good war. I broke a Sashan phalanx with intelligent use of terrain, light infantry and field artillery. I followed up well but resisted the temptation to pursue too closely, which so often leads to last-minute disaster. I had two old steelnecks to advise me, but the overall strategy and the detailed battlefield tactics were my own (well, taken from the Art of War, volume six, chapter three; but their man must’ve read the same books). We stopped an invasion of the Eastern mountains dead in its tracks, and as a result were able to negotiate a peace that lasted for five years, which was the record until quite recently. I was sixteen, for crying out loud, and what I remember most vividly was pissing my trousers. My uncle was thirty-three—my age now—before he got his first command, and he lost three battles and eight thousand men. I think I coped all right. I shouldn’t have had to.
I know that I beat the Sashan because their general was an idiot. They had an idiot for a general because they execute all the good ones, in case they try and seize the throne. My uncle was a good general. He seized the throne, burned down half the City and slaughtered his predecessor’s family like sheep. What can you do?
STACHEL WAS APPALLED when I told him what had happened. The library, he kept saying, my God, the library. When eventually he pulled himself together, I got him to give me his very best maps of the North coast, the old ones that bothered to show all the islands. Also, I said, I needed him to perform a wedding.
He stared at me. “You must be out of your tiny mind,” he said.
“It’s an emotion often compared to madness, but only in poetry. Come on, you’re a priest. It’s what priests do.”
“Not on your life,” he said, and he actually backed away a couple of steps. “You they’ll exile. They’ll kill me. That’s what happens to witnesses.”
“It’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’m just following precedent. Politically—”
“I’ve already been in one condemned cell,” he said. “Two in one lifetime is too many. Look, we were friends once. Don’t spoil it.”
I balled my fist so he could see the signet ring. Actually it was the fake, which I wear because I’m scared I’ll lose the real one. “I’m giving you a direct order,” I said.
“Go fuck yourself,” said my friend.
WELL; A PRIEST is a priest is a priest, and even the most weasel-faced administrator from the Clerk of the Works’ office is pervaded by and marinaded in the Holy Spirit, provided he’s passed the relevant exams. After six refusals I found an ordained minister who was prepared to marry us, in return for a cash sum and a sinecure on the Eastern frontier. The job took six minutes, and as soon as we were done, the Holy Father jumped on a cavalry horse, slung clinking saddlebags over the pommel of his saddle and thundered out of the main gate in a cloud of dust. If he yelled a blessing over his shoulder as he left, it was drowned by the thunder of hooves on the planks of the drawbridge.
For medical reasons we postponed the traditional wedding-night activities; instead, I sat up into the small hours reading reports that had just reached me from Cort Acuila, where the six-hundred-year-old monastery had been burnt to ashes by raiders who rode down out of the morning mist on small, stocky ponies.
“FORTUITOUSLY,” COUNT TRABEA said, “we had a routine patrol out that way. They picked them up the day before and followed them in, so they were able to see what happened.”
The Count had rushed to my side, which was nice of him. He’d brought five hundred local militia; also, rather more usefully, two dozen very competent clerks and a big folder of maps. “Fine,” I said. “It didn’t occur to your men to intervene?”
“There were twelve of them,” he said. Well, fair enough.
After the massacre, the raiders had loaded their plunder onto pack-horses. I questioned the patrol myself; what did the raiders take? They were very sorry, but they didn’t dare get close enough to see. Whatever it was, the raiders put it in sacks, which they appeared to have brought with them. Heavy sacks or big bulky ones? Just sacks, the patrol leader said. We were six hundred yards away. All right, how many sacks on each horse? Two on some, four on others. Anyway, after that they trailed the raiders across the moor. They made straight for the coast, to a little cove much used by the local smuggling community, where five ships were waiting for them. They turned the ponies loose before they sailed away, and the patrol caught some of them and looked for brands, but there weren’t any. So they brought a few back with them, and one of the locals, a bit of a trader when he wasn’t mending pots and pans, reckoned he’d seen ponies like them in the Fleyja Islands, which he’d visited once when he was a boy. Nobody else had ever seen anything like them. The local horseflesh is squat and stocky but taller at the shoulder and with a much bigger head.
“So these pir
ates come from the Fleyja islands,” I said. “Does that sound likely to you?”
Trabea thought before answering. “I’d be very surprised,” he said. “Of course, I’ve never been there, and I don’t know a lot about them, nobody does. But the impression I’ve formed over the years is that they’re just a bunch of small-time crofters, dead keen to trade with us, because we seem to want all manner of garbage they’ve got no use for, like beaver-skins and amber, and picking up trash off the beach and trapping vermin is a much easier way of getting food than growing it yourself.”
“Stealing’s even easier,” I said.
He shrugged. “Maybe. And maybe we come across as soft, leaving all those valuable things lying around with just men in dresses to guard them. But they’re not stealing food, they’re stealing gold and silver and works of art. As far as we know, the only people they trade with is us.”
I remembered something I’d seen; affluent City merchants roughing it at the Hope of Redemption. Now one of the defining characteristics of the Empire is that it’s very big; also, it contains a good number of rich, cultured men who value fine art and beautiful objects rather more than conventional morality. Would a wealthy banker in, say, Procopia worry too much about the provenance of a magnificent Mannerist icon, if he was offered it at the right price? And who would ever recognise a specific piece from the other side of the world, with enough certainty to identify it as stolen property? And plain gold and silver can be melted down into bullion, which tells no tales.
“I’ve got some orders for you,” I said.
“Gosh,” Count Trabea said politely. “Just bear with me while I get something to write on.”
An immediate embargo on ships from the Fleyja Islands. Spot checks on the goods of merchants. A full investigation to ascertain whether items stolen from the monasteries were turning up on the market anywhere inside the Empire. “And when you’ve done that—”