Mightier than the Sword

by K. J. Parker

  “Hold on a minute,” Trabea said. “No disrespect, but how many officers do you think I’ve got? For a start, I’m going to need ships. I’ve got three customs sloops and a ceremonial barge.”

  I wrote him a chit. “Twelve warships,” I said. “That’ll have to do.”

  He stared at me. “I think we ought to be able to manage with that,” he said quietly. “How about soldiers?”

  Not quite so easy. The twelve galleys weren’t a problem, since I happened to have twelve galleys at my disposal at that particular moment. They’d been assigned to me for sabre-rattling purposes in my negotiations with the Sashan, and I’d sort of neglected to give them back. Soldiers are different. For entirely sound historical reasons, individual commanders don’t get to keep soldiers once they’ve finished with them. If I wanted more than fifty men, I’d have to write to my aunt and say Please nicely. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Meanwhile, though, I suggest you improvise. You’ve got a hell of a lot of non-military manpower—road-menders, clerks, grooms, all those men on your payroll that feature so prominently in your accounts. Give them a spear and a shield each and tell them to look warlike. They’re not going to have to fight anyone, so who’ll know the difference?”

  I WROTE TO my aunt; to my great surprise, she promised me a thousand regular steelnecks, due back from the Mesoge any day now. I was stunned. Steelnecks are gold dust, and not entrusted to just anyone; they have a nasty habit of choosing who’ll be the next emperor, even when there isn’t an immediate vacancy. At least that answered one question I hadn’t dared ask. She couldn’t have heard about my wedding. If she’d done so, steelnecks would have been sent, but not for me to command. As it was, as and when one of those fast chaises showed up to take me home, a thousand regular heavy infantry would give me the option of not going, if I really didn’t want to.

  Interesting times.

  SHE INSISTED ON coming with me to Cort Maerus. I told her I was deeply touched but it was a tough journey and she really wasn’t well enough yet. Patiently she explained that it’d be much easier to murder her if I wasn’t there, should anyone wish to do so. I had one of those moments where your guts turn to water, and said yes, of course she was coming. In fact, I wasn’t going to let her out of my sight.

  Cort Maerus is a long way north. Snow lies on the mountains all year round, though you can grow grapes and figs in the valley; the monks used to have extensive orchards and vineyards a hundred years ago. Now they’re just nettles and briar entanglements, and nobody seems to know why. Sheep graze where barley once grew, and every half-mile or so you come across ruined cottages and farmsteads, and nobody could even be bothered to steal the stone. I read everything I could find (there isn’t very much) and asked everyone who might know, but there’s no memory of any raiders or invasion, no plague, no specific disaster. Once there were a lot of people in those parts, making a good living, and now there are very few, quietly starving. My own theory, for which I have no real evidence, is that their well-earned prosperity was their downfall. Sturdy, well-fed peasants are proverbially the best recruits for the heavy infantry, and we’ve had ever so many wars in the last two hundred years. I think all those strong, self-reliant farmers’ sons went off to war and didn’t come back, and without them the place just died. If so, does it say something about the nature of the beast called Empire? The idea is that Empire protects the towns and villages and little farms from the enemy, and in order to do so recruits soldiers, so that the towns and villages and little farms won’t be laid waste, and grass won’t grow in abandoned streets and good productive land won’t be smothered in weeds and briars. But if the act of protection brings about the destruction it was designed to prevent—well. I’m not a trained philosopher, so I’m not qualified to comment.

  Unlike most of its sister houses, Cort Maerus isn’t built on a hilltop. It squats comfortably in a valley, where the rainwater comes tumbling down the mountains in a broad river and splays out in a dozen useful little rivers across the flat valley floor. My abiding memory of it is a hundred subtly different shades of green; from the pale green of new shoots of bracken, which grows so well where there’s been extensive burning, to the dark, waxy green of well-established ash and willow, quick and efficient colonists of abandoned pasture. There was a narrow road between head-high tangles of briar and dead brushwood, out of which spindly trees shot up gasping for daylight. One of my tribunes, a keen sportsman, had brought along his beautiful new Aelian bow, hoping to pot a few deer, or at the very least the odd rabbit. He never got the chance. We saw any amount of little twittery birds but nothing living at ground level. No animal bigger than a mouse could live in that horrible tangled mess.

  The abbot of Cort Maerus was a big, jolly man, who was overjoyed to see us, because he rarely set eyes on anyone he hadn’t known for twenty years. He wasn’t quite so cheerful when we explained that we hadn’t brought much food with us, imagining that he’d be able to feed us; six hundred archers, seventy general staff, my wife and me. He recovered well from the shock. One of the principal duties of the monasteries, he said, was to provide hospitality for hungry travellers, and if that meant that he and his monks would have to tighten their belts a bit that winter, the pleasure of our company would be more than sufficient recompense. In any case, they had plenty of dried beans, and the villagers could be prevailed upon to spare oats for our horses, and a little bacon goes a long way in a nourishing soup. Also, if we hadn’t tried the local speciality—nettle soup with tiny bits of diced sausage—we had a real treat in store.

  There were forty monks at Maerus, all over fifty. Mostly they worked in the ten-acre walled garden, of which the abbot was enormously proud—fresh cabbage all year round, and heavy crops of roots, which store so well for the hungry months. He showed me a great long gallery above the main dormitory, crammed to the rafters with shelf upon shelf of dull, waxy-skinned apples; he thought it was once the scriptorium, where they used to copy out books, but he couldn’t be sure. The old library had been gutted and was now a splendidly dry wood store; a place this size took a lot of heating and it could be bitter in winter, but his people were hard workers and skilled foresters; they coppiced the willow-brakes and the overgrown hazel, and made trips up the mountain with a big old cart to fell the huge pines and firs that grew on the side-of-a-house slopes. Good honest work, he told me, is the closest way of achieving communion with the Creator of All Things, the universal gardener who grew us all from seed. He had short, dirty fingernails and forearms like a blacksmith, and it made me feel tired just listening to him.

  “I heard about that,” he said, when I mentioned the raiders. He made it sound like interesting gossip from a faraway country of which we know little. “But I can’t imagine they’ll want to come here. We don’t have any gold or silver, we sold all that stuff years ago.”

  We were sitting in the main chamber of the abbot’s lodgings. It was bitter cold, so we sat practically nose to nose on either side of a small brass brazier. It had been there a long time, because its smoke had blackened a wide patch of the ceiling, blotting out the Invincible Sun orans, flanked by grubby cherubim with tar-smudged halos. It was too dark to see the rest of the mosaic—I’m woefully ignorant about art, but my guess is, it’s early Figurative, probably complete under all the soot and congealed fat from the tallow candles, because the damp didn’t seem to have penetrated that far. “Anyway,” he said, “if they come, we’ll be ready. We’ve got a plan worked out. There are shepherds’ huts up on the mountain, we can gather our tools and supplies for a month at the drop of a hat, and nobody can get into this valley without us seeing them. As you probably noticed, there’s only one path through the furze.”

  I stooped, and shot out a hand instinctively to stop him. “What are you doing?”

  He looked at me blankly, then understood. He’d lifted the lid of a big wooden chest and taken out a book. He’d been about to put it on the brazier. “Would you like it?” he asked.

  I couldn’t read
the lettering on the spine, it was too faded. “Thank you,” I said, and took it from him. He opened the box, took out another one and threw it on the stove. I didn’t try and stop him.

  “Nobody reads them any more,” he explained. “And books aren’t the way to salvation, we realised that a long time ago. Waste not, want not, that’s our philosophy here.”

  The book had thick wooden covers, which burned long after the paper had flared away. It produced a surprising amount of heat. You’ve got to be practical, the abbot told me gravely. The book I’d rescued turned out to be Frontinus’ commentary on Annius, of which there are tens of thousands of copies in every major city in the empire. I’ve never read it; not my sort of thing.

  We didn’t stay long at Maerus. They were very pleasant to us, but we didn’t want to be a burden. On, instead, to Cort Neva, three days’ trudge inland, though mostly downhill, thank God.

  I was very glad I’d brought my wife with me, because otherwise the abbess of Neva would have been a problem. I recognised her straight away; hard not to. Seven years earlier, she’d caused havoc at Court. Rumour has it my aunt tried to have her poisoned; if that’s true and she failed, it’s a striking tribute to Abbess Honoria’s intelligence and resourcefulness, because when my aunt wants something done, it generally happens. I could see why my aunt would have wanted rid of her. Intelligent, beautiful aristocratic young widows with money and ambition are about as welcome at Court as locusts in a vineyard. She’s a distant cousin, apparently. I wouldn’t have been her food-taster for all the gold in Blemya.

  Seven years in the frosty north had tightened the skin of her face, and the backs of her hands were a dead giveaway, but she’d still have been a force to be reckoned with if I hadn’t had the woman I loved by my side more or less constantly. Tell me everything that’s been happening at Court, were practically her first words to me, and I don’t think she meant hemlines or whether hair was off the shoulder this season, though that was what I told her about. She pretended to be frightfully interested, and I promised to send her a couple of bolts of Priene silk, as soon as there was room on a courier’s coach.

  “We’re terribly worried about these raids,” she said, inviting the big, strong man to take care of her. In fact, she’d taken the precaution of hiring seventy Vesani mercenaries, practically as good as steelnecks and much cheaper to maintain. She could afford to, since she’d just sold a Ctesippus altarpiece for two million hyperpyra, to an anonymous buyer from the East. Seventy good men could hold those walls against a thousand regulars. She’d quartered them in the stables, which she’d had made over into a big, comfortable barracks. She still had two Ctesippus icons and a Frontinus triptych of the Ascension, for which she was considering a number of serious offers. As good as a cellarful of arrows and catapult bolts, she told me with a grin, and I agreed with her. You couldn’t sell a Ctesippus without a provenance, even in the remote East. But a legitimate one would man your walls and fill your armoury for ten years. She always was smart, that one.

  If she was mildly surprised when I asked to see the library, she recovered well, though she summoned the librarian to give the actual commentary. The library building was spotlessly clean, no dust on any of the surfaces and the slate floor gleaming. It had all the standard works in uniform modern bindings, every book numbered and in its proper place at all times, the chains drooping like ripe beans off the vine. There was no-one else in there when we went round., I suspect casual readers weren’t encouraged. They’d have made the place look untidy. Sister Librarian was obviously very proud of her charges. I saw pots of lanolin, for greasing the spines so they wouldn’t dry out and crack. That would make the book sticky and awkward to hold, but I got the impression that wasn’t much of a problem.

  “It’s a tremendous privilege to be here, of course,” abbess Honoria told me, for the fifth time, “and I’m enormously proud to head up such an important institution. I don’t miss the old days at all, and it’s wonderful to be doing His work in this sublimely peaceful place.” On the other hand, she didn’t say, and didn’t have to. I’ve only ever seen that sort of hunger in the eyes of neglected dogs; rescue me, please, before I wither away and die. A wicked thought crossed my mind; if I wrote my aunt and told her I’d married Honoria, she’d be so relieved when she found out the truth that she’d strew our marriage bed with flowers. But I could be wrong, and the food in the North tastes so strong, you wouldn’t notice an out-of-the-ordinary flavour until it was too late, and I was a married man now, with responsibilities.

  CORT BEALFOIR WAS my idea of how a monastery should be. The buildings were small and very old, with a high wall and a strong gatehouse. Inside there was one long dormitory with a refectory over it and a functional reredorter out back; the rest of the site consisted of a magnificent Archaic chapel, a beautifully decorated chapter-house and a huge library/scriptorium, with floor-to-ceiling glazed east-facing windows. Sixty brothers worked there, nearly all of them copying books, under the less-than-rigorous command of Abbot Gennasius, author of the famous Twelve Questions.

  I’d read his book when I was fourteen and had no idea he was still alive. I wanted to ask him about it, but he fended me off politely with answers polished smooth from decades of use, and we talked about the raids instead. Faced with the terrifying unknown, he’d fought back with the full armoury of scholarship; he’d collated every reference in the Early Fathers to swarms of unidentified savages, and was able to prove to me conclusively that this lot weren’t any of them. He’d had copies made of every Art of War and Soldier’s Mirror in the catalogue, ready to be sent to anyone who needed them; I was presented with bound copies, and was too embarrassed to mention that I’d got them all already. He also had chapter and verse ready to justify the use of deadly weapons by contemplative monks in defence of their books and lives. He didn’t have any deadly weapons to go with them and I promised him fifty longbows and twenty suits of armour of an obsolete pattern, which I’d noticed in Trabea’s inventory. He was as pleased as a cat with two tails, and promised to drill his monks as rigorously as a steelneck sergeant. I’d have loved to have seen that, but I never got the chance. I imagine he’d have used the Institutions of Florian rather than the Manual of Military Practice, which is later and prone to textual corruption, due to an uncertain manuscript tradition.

  From Bealfoir to Cort Erys, down the horrible North Road, which needs a lot of money spending on it before it could count as a goat-track, let alone an artery of empire. Talking of goats; plenty of wild ones in the combes and valleys, and the Cassites were good shots, so we had plenty to eat, if you like goat, which I can’t say I do. So we took our time—four days to Erys, and I blame myself. If we’d taken just a few hours longer, I hate to think what the result would have been.

  The noise was the first sign of trouble. It was a perfectly still day, and sound travels in the mountains when there’s no wind. At first we thought it was a foundry or an arms factory, except there aren’t any in the North any more, but monks can be very enterprising, maybe they’d built a steel mill or a mine. It was definitely a clashing, thumping noise, and when we got closer we could hear yelling as well. At that point we knew exactly what we were listening to; once heard, never forgotten, believe me.

  It’s one of the weird things about this world and human life generally. Two miles from a full-scale battle, where men are being hacked to pieces with sharp tools, you’ll see sheep grazing and rooks lining up on the branches of trees overhanging the ripening corn, as if they were the subject of the picture and the confused human events nearby are merely a minor detail in a corner of the background. I’ve never run away from a battle in my life—too scared to, if the truth were known—but suppose you did, and when you stopped to catch your breath, all around you there’s ordinary everyday life, the sun shining, the river flowing. You’d have to stop and ask yourself, which is real, this or the hideous unnatural mess going on where I just came from? It has to be one or the other, it can’t be both; because if the two c
an co-exist, separated only by a little bit of geography, why would anyone in his right mind be down there when he could be up here?

  I HAVE MANY sterling qualities. Moving silently and avoiding observation aren’t two of them. I sent scouts, who reported that a large body of men, at last fifteen hundred, were attacking the monastery with ladders and a battering-ram. I got that helpless feeling that always hits me when I know I’ve got to fight. I’m not sure how to describe it, because there’s nothing else like it. I’m terrified, I know it’s all going to end very badly, but I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever about what I’m going to do. It’s like I’m looking down a tube or a tunnel at the future, a point in time when I’ve done it all and I’m watching the result, almost like I’m suddenly living my life backwards. I know that I’ve got to lead with a weakened centre to draw them in, while looping round the left flank to take them by surprise when they burst through, because I’ve already seen it happen. It doesn’t always work, of course. Sometimes it goes spectacularly wrong, and then I’m back to making it up as I go along, a skill at which I do not excel.

  The situation in a nutshell. Cort Erys; a modest foundation, on top of a steep hill, a wall all round it, with one gate, protected by a three-storey gatehouse. The bad people—ant-sized, but occasionally flashing in the sun, suggesting at least some armour—seemed to have given up on the ladders and were concentrating their efforts on the gate. The regular thumping noise we’d heard a mile away was the ram. The monks were doing something to annoy them; twinkles in the air told me the raiders were shooting arrows at them to keep their heads down, but clearly with indifferent success. The scouts’ estimate of fifteen hundred struck me as being on the conservative side. I had six hundred archers, and to reach the enemy I’d have to descend a steep slope and cross four hundred yards of open ground. The Cassite bow is a marvellous thing, capable of shooting two hundred yards at maximum elevation, but how many shots would they get before the enemy reached us and swept us away? That was assuming the Cassites hung around long enough to be reached, a big and unwarranted assumption. Conclusion; this was a fight I couldn’t expect to win.