by Simon Morden
She suddenly wondered if she should consider directly employing craftsmen at standard guild rates – as set before the crisis. It would be substantially cheaper, but she also thought of the nightmare that would ensue if she directly challenged the guilds.
“I need to talk to the guildmasters. We all need to eat, and prices that keep on rising are going to hurt the widows and the orphans harder than a master or a journeyman. Especially those whose husbands and fathers have died most recently.”
There, that was magnanimous. The bodies laid out in the main square hadn’t all been men, but the lion’s share of them had. They were all burnt now, ashes on a pyre, but some of them would certainly have been guild members, whose guilds now had a responsibility to look after their destitute families. Higher charges from the guilds meant higher costs for the guilds.
From the look of some of them, the lesson had hit home. They didn’t want to see their own wealth destroyed.
“But what about the money we’ve already laid out?” called someone.
“I’ll pay guild rates,” she said, and left the rest unspoken. If they’d been foolish enough to get caught holding an excessive bill, then they were twice as foolish thinking they could simply pass it on. Neither would she countenance any surreptitious redrafting of their promissory notes. “Hand everything to me. Tomorrow, I’ll pay what they’re worth.”
She called on the library ushers to help her, easy enough as they were already looking her way, and they made sure that the merchants and craftsmen handed their papers over. The bills made a tidy pile, and she wasn’t going to be able to both sleep and enter all the items in her ledger. Perhaps it was time to co-opt a librarian or two, ones that were numerate as well as literate.
She shooed everyone away. They had work to be getting on with. Now, of course, so did she. Clutching her bundle of notes and laws, she walked around the scaffolding and the wheeling barrows to the long table, where books were being catalogued at a furious rate.
Thaler was in position at the head of the long line of readers, muttering comments to a scribbling librarian as he inspected the manuscript in front of him. A square of paper had been pinned to each book, each piece of parchment or vellum beforehand. By the end of the cataloguing process, Latin numbers written on the square told the shelvers where the book needed to go.
She didn’t disturb the master librarian. He was so absorbed in his task that he hadn’t even noticed her presence, so she turned instead to Mr Wess, who was receiving a book and opening it to inspect the frontispiece.
“Good morning, Mr Wess.”
“Ah, Mistress Morgenstern.” He leant back in his chair. “Thank you. This is much better than handing out lanterns.”
“I’d save your thanks, Mr Wess,” she said, and his smile slipped a fraction. “I suddenly find myself overwhelmed not just with paperwork that needs to be copied and distributed, but with adding and subtracting too.”
Wess frowned. “A clerk?”
“No. Yes. A dozen clerks, and someone to oversee them.”
“A dozen?” Wess closed the book cover with weary resignation. “My lady, we are running out of men who can read and write sufficiently competently to carry out even the most basic tasks.”
“Then we need a school in every town.” Yeshivas. Her people had done it for centuries, and there was no reason for the Germans not to. “And school teachers in every town.”
“And until then?”
“Mr Wess, I’m aware that if the Jews run everything, it would cause some comment, and not a little disquiet. Please save me from that.”
Wess sighed. “Mistress.” He pushed himself away from the table, and made his excuses. “Gentlemen, my apologies. It seems my duties lie elsewhere.”
The others at the table barely looked up. Perhaps they thought he’d be back in a little while. Sophia knew that if he returned it would be as a master in his own right, and that it would take years, if not decades, for him to get back to the library.
“I’m sorry, Mr Wess. We’re all having to think on our feet, and having agreed to oversee the library alterations, I failed to notice that I was also agreeing to restructure the entire economy of the palatinate.”
“You’re what?”
“Nothing costs the same as it did before. And the craftsmen are all adjusting their prices in one direction only.” She pressed the stack of receipts onto Wess. “We need to control prices or we’ll run out of coin and the people will starve. I’ve already asked for a meeting with the guildmasters, but until then, we pay what we would have done previously.”
Wess looked at the first bill in his hand. “Mr Gluckner, master mason, for removal of stone and disposal of same. Work for a master and two journeymen … how much? Gods!”
“Quite, Mr Wess. Your first job is to find out how much I should be paying, then to rewrite all those notes we have in hand. Prompt payment will allow these good gentlemen to eat: I will not, however, be taken advantage of. After that, I have plenty to keep you busy.”
“Where are we to work?” Wess continued to scan the bills, peering at the amounts requested and wincing. “Is there anywhere in the fortress that’s suitable?”
It was something she hadn’t planned for, but inspiration came: “The Town Hall. We don’t have a mayor, and Master Messinger’s old room is large and bright. If a dozen men are too many for now, pick half a dozen. Tell me by the end of the day how much treasure we’ve spent so far, and I’ll have it delivered to you in the morning.”
Just as Wess left to scour the library for personnel, her father walked in.
He didn’t see her at first. He looked up at the light streaming down from the oculus, at the men working high above, then at the industry going on around the long table, the barrows of books and the bowed heads of the librarians.
He even looked at her, his own daughter, who he’d shared a house with for twenty-four years and who had looked after him for all her adult life. The slow turn of his head took her in, and passed on.
Even though a moment later he snapped back, finally registering who it was in that heavy, ornate dress, she felt more lost than she’d ever done. While he – of course – held that instance lightly, joking at her clothing, how he hadn’t recognised her, it was nothing but noise and confusion to her.
When she came to again, she was standing to one side of the reading room, with two folded pieces of parchment in her hands, with her father standing in front of her with a quizzical expression on his lined face.
“Sophia?”
She shook herself out like a dog emerging from a cold lake. “I’m all right. You can take Mr Wess’s place at the table. And you have to follow instructions, Father; if you make a mistake, a book might be lost forever in the wrong place.”
“Yes, yes.” He glanced up at her. “Have you been back to the house?”
“I … might have,” she ventured.
“Did you go into the room. The one upstairs?”
It was about his secret library. She steeled herself. “Yes.”
“Did you …?”
“For heaven’s sake, Father, yes. They weren’t yours. They were stolen and you had to give them back.”
“I paid good money for those books,” he said, making a poor attempt to speak quietly,
“Then go and get your money back off Mr Thomm.” She scowled hard and raised her voice. “And while you’re at it, get him back in here and put him to work. Tell him that, if he does, Master Thaler will consider not having him pressed. It’s not like we’re deluged with Latin and Greek readers. We’ll even pay him.”
Morgenstern took a step back. “Calm, daughter, calm.”
“No,” she said. “I will not. I’m fed up already. I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to do, and none of it is good enough. The last thing I need is my crook of a father arrested for fencing. Which reminds me. That book you got instead of On the Balance?”
“Yes?”
“I took that, too. To apologise.”
; “Sophia!”
“Well, you didn’t want it, and it turns out it might be very important. So when Master Thaler—”
“Oh, it’s Master Thaler now, is it?”
“Yes, and you’d do well to remember that – when Master Thaler gives you a break from your catalogue work, you can start translating it from the Persian.”
Her father pressed his lips together and tugged at his beard. “Did I raise you to be this ungrateful?”
“Clearly.” She gave him Felix’s new laws. “Read them.”
He took the papers from her and scanned the first. “That’ll be difficult to enforce,” he said. He opened the second, and his eyebrows threatened to crawl completely off his forehead they were raised so high.
“Well?” she said. “Any other comments about how you raised me?”
“Perhaps, I didn’t do such a bad job after all,” he conceded.
He presented his cheek, and she kissed his whiskery face. He gave a grunt of contentment, and took his seat at the table. It took him a while to get comfortable, then a little longer to open the book in front of him. He crouched forward, running his finger along the text, then looked up to consult the large painted board on which Thaler’s classification scheme had been chalked.
She smiled to herself. At least one of them was happy again. She went to inspect how work on the glass covering for the oculus was progressing. A solution would present itself, eventually.
57
Ullmann strode through the town, aware of his newly elevated status but even more conscious of the effect it had on other people. He had been quietly invisible before, hiding under his black usher’s robe. Now that same robe marked him out as being associated with both the prince and the library.
Moreover, the town’s rumour-mongers were hard at work, associating Ullmann’s name with something dark and secret: that he’d been collecting together some very rough characters and sending them up to the fortress, that Ullmann was in charge of something important, that he was now a prince’s man.
He needed neither to confirm nor deny a single thing. He only had to smile and leave the rest to their imagination.
The latest letter he carried would, no doubt, surprise and shock even the most dedicated fantasist. Yet the ruthless logic of its contents couldn’t be denied. Thaler, of course, only saw one side of it, but he could see the other: you kept your friends close, and your enemies closer. Felix had taken some convincing, mainly because my lady had set her face against the matter from the outset.
She trusted Thaler though, and he’d talked her around while Ullmann looked thoughtful and waited to the very end to tip her over the edge. It was well done, and he hadn’t had to show his hand at all. Even Thaler thought the idea was his own.
All that was left to do was for Wess to copy the proclamation and for his spies to carry it across Carinthia and beyond. He stood for a moment on the quayside, looking at the tied-up barges and considering both the necessity of getting them moving again and the problems arising from having the bargees idle and increasingly destitute within Juvavum’s walls.
Then he looked up, up at Goat Mountain and the White Tower. His heart beat a little faster, and he was glad Büber had not only gone to see the dwarves, but seemed determined never to return.
He turned towards the Town Hall, walked up the steps, and climbed the stairs to the mayor’s old office. As he entered, he saw Wess as just another of the clerks seated at a half-circle of desks, writing steadily. Paper was piled at each man’s left, and again on his right. Wess himself was scratching out numbers from a bill and writing in new figures underneath, his calculations – marked on a piece of broken roof slate – propped up in front of him.
Ullmann cleared his throat, and Wess put his pen down deliberately, almost violently. His sigh of exasperation was clear.
“Disturbed, Master Wess?”
“Continually, Master Ullmann. There’s too much work for us as it is, and” – he eyed the contents of Ullmann’s hands – “it looks like you’ve brought us even more.”
“Oh, this?” He stepped forward and slid the parchment square onto Wess’s desk. “I need these today, as many copies as you can manage.”
“There has to be an easier way than doing it all by hand.” Wess ground his teeth, noted the seal, unfolded the sheet, and read the words. Then he read them again, just to make sure he’d completely understood what was being asked of him.
“This … this is the prince’s will?”
“It is, Master Wess. You’ve read it to the end?”
“Yes. Gods. This won’t go down well.” Wess saw that the other clerks had all stopped working and weren’t even pretending not to listen in. “Your duties, gentlemen.”
The sound of nib on parchment resumed, and Wess looked again at Ullmann’s note, written in Sophia Morgenstern’s neat hand. He appeared to be all but speechless, so Ullmann chose to explain.
“Former members of the Order can all read and write, some of them languages that the librarians can’t even pronounce, let alone translate,” said Ullmann. “My lord has asked Master Thaler to keep an eye on them, and he said he would with my help: to be honest, it’s probably the best they can hope for. Their tattoos are permanent. They’re marked for life, Master Wess, and they’ll never be able to pass as ordinary folk. It’s a kindness, of sorts.”
Wess threw the letter down in front of him. “It’ll cause all sorts of disquiet, but my lord commands,” he said. “We live in a world where magic still works, but the only way to raise it is so demonstrably evil that we have to ban it. We’ve just spent our blood ridding ourselves of the Order, and now we’re asking for them back.” He shook his head.
“Where would you rather have them?” asked Ullmann. “In a torture chamber belonging to one of our enemies, or in the library of one of our friends?”
The clerk picked up the paper again and studied its words.
“What with you, the impending paper crisis and the Bavarians, it’s a wonder I’ll get anything done today. These accounts…”
“Bavarians?” Ullmann’s eyes narrowed. “What have Bavarians to do with this?”
“A Mr Wiel and his companion came from Simbach to enquire about the possibility of a new bridge. I sent them on their way. In your direction, in fact. Have they seen you yet?”
Wess tried to turn his attention back to the pile of bills, but Ullmann moved right up to the desk: no Bavarians had been to see him, and he’d rather no Bavarians knew of his existence at all.
“What did you tell this Wiel?” asked Ullmann. “Exactly.”
“I …” Wess’s mouth had gone inexplicably dry, and his throat had started to close. “The truth?”
“The truth?” Ullmann didn’t like the sound of that. “What sort of truth? Not the actual truth that the Order couldn’t put the bridge back because we have no Order?”
Wess nodded.
“Anything else?”
Wess nodded again.
“Everything that’s happened in the last two weeks?” Ullmann’s demeanour changed from affable to coldly furious in a moment. “Where did this Wiel and his friend go?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did he look like?”
“He looked like …” – and Ullmann realised Wess was actually scared of him – “…he looked like a man who’d been travelling for a couple of days. Dusty. Battered. A hat – he had a wide-brimmed hat.”
“Tall or short? Dark haired or blond or bald? Old or young? Thin or broad?”
“I can’t remember.”
Ullmann leant over the desk. “Try, Master Wess. Try very hard.”
One of the other clerks came to his rescue. “Taller than you, Master, shorter than Master Wess, short blond hair starting to go at the temples, a few lines around his eyes and mouth, thin under his long riding coat. Definitely a Bavarian accent.”
“Thank you. At least someone pays attention.” He straightened up. “In case I need to spell it out, don’t tell our busine
ss to everyone who asks: they’re going to find out eventually for certain, but let’s not make it easy for them.”
He fixed Wess with a stare that made the older man shrink down into his seat. Then he was gone, door banging firmly behind him. He left the Town Hall fuming. His face felt hot and dry, and his heart beat hard and fast in his chest. Stupid, naïve Wess, giving away all their secrets at once.
And stupid, naïve Ullmann, for thinking that Bavaria – slow, backward land of farmers and mad kings – wouldn’t get into the spying game before Carinthia. He’d shown himself to less competent than Felix believed, and he wasn’t about to compound the error. He was a quick learner – everybody said so – and he didn’t need a teacher to tell him what he’d done wrong.
First things first. He ran to the bridge, and to the Jewish guards on duty.
“Master Ullmann,” said the man with the sergeant’s coat.
“Two Bavarian spies have entered town. Don’t let anyone pass until we’ve caught them.”
“No one?” The sergeant leant on his spear. “People aren’t going to like that.”
“When the Bavarians overrun us, they’ll like it a lot less. And don’t say why you’re stopping them. The less warning these bastards get, the better.”
“As you wish, Master Ullmann. We’ll wait for your orders.” He touched his hand to his helmet. “Orders coming only from you, of course.”
“Right then.” He turned on his heel, and spotted two children walking by, a younger boy and an older girl. “You two. Here.”
They looked at each other, and stopped. Were they biddable? Ullmann wondered. Could they take a message? He could have done so at their age, he decided, so he trotted across to them, crouched down and tipped out the contents of his purse into the palm of his hand. Flipping two shilling pieces between his fingers, he held them out. The boy went to take them, but Ullmann held them higher and gave them to the girl.