by K. J. Parker
‘Bardas Loredan?’
‘Yes, that’s me,’ Loredan admitted, bewildered. ‘What…?’
‘We’ve been looking for you,’ the corporal said grimly. ‘You’ve got to come with us.’
‘But I didn’t – I was asleep the whole time.’ He took a step backwards. ‘Look, what is this?’
‘Orders,’ the Corporal said. ‘Come on, look lively.’
Although he felt strongly that looking lively was probably way beyond his limited capabilities this morning, Loredan did as he was told, and shortly afterwards found himself standing outside the gates of the Patriarch’s lodgings. He was about to protest when the door opened and a splendidly dressed officer in gilded armour who came up to round about his shoulder brusquely ordered him to step this way. He followed, up several flights of stairs and along about a mile of corridors, until he was brought to a halt outside a small door in a covered cloister surrounding a rather charming green with a fountain in the middle. The splendid officer knocked on the door, and pushed Loredan into the room.
It was pleasantly cool and dark inside. He’d never been inside the building before, but from what he’d heard he guessed this was one of the chapter houses. Once his eyes became accustomed to the dim light, he saw that there were fifteen or so people there, some of them sitting on the stone benches that ran all the way round the circular room, while others were standing in the middle, talking in low voices. He recognised the City Prefect, a short elderly man with fuzzy white hair, and a couple of officers from the Lord Lieutenant’s staff; and there, at the back, on a white marble throne, was Patriarch Alexius, talking to a long, thin man sitting on his right. Alexius looked up, noticed him and waved to him to join them. Before he could do so, however, another even more splendid officer swept him up and marched him over to see the Prefect.
‘You Loredan?’ the Prefect demanded.
Loredan nodded.
‘Thank heaven for that,’ the Prefect replied. ‘All right, I’ll get straight to the point. The rumours about an attack from the plains are true.’
‘Ah,’ Loredan said.
‘More to the point,’ the Prefect went on, frowning slightly as if to suggest that Loredan somehow failed to meet the required specifications, ‘it seems they’ve got hold of a lot of heavy equipment from somewhere. Siege engines, catapults, we don’t know exactly what, or who’s supplying them with the stuff. The point is, we’re taking this threat seriously, and we’ve decided to launch a pre-emptive strike.’
‘Excuse me,’ Loredan interrupted. ‘Who’s we, exactly?’
The Prefect paused, as if he’d just been asked a question he didn’t know the answer to. ‘The civil authorities,’ he replied. ‘Myself, the Lord Lieutenant, the various heads of offices, the Patriarch, naturally.’ He scowled, and then went on. ‘Our problem is that, as you well know, we don’t have a suitable force of heavy cavalry immediately available to make the strike with. Now, you were the last man to command the heavy cavalry, so it seems logical to involve you at the outset. I’ve already assigned you a basic staff-’
‘Excuse me-’
‘And you can work from one of the rooms we’ve taken here until you’re assigned a permanent office. My people will be doing the bulk of the actual recruiting, but you’ll be able to have a certain amount of direct input at the selection stage, and we’ll be looking to you to be quite heavily involved in training and materiel procurement, although of course control of the procurement budget will rest with the appropriate civil-’
Loredan held up his hand. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Slow down, please. Are you seriously suggesting that I join in this expedition of yours?’
‘Don’t be stupid, man. You’re an officer in the Perimadeian army. It’s your duty-’
It was a mistake for Loredan to shake his head, given the state it was in. ‘No. Sorry, but absolutely not. You can’t make me do that. I retired, remember?’
The Prefect looked as if he was about to explode. ‘Colonel Loredan,’ he said, and he would have sounded tremendously soldierly and authoritative if his voice hadn’t been quite so high-pitched, ‘you don’t seem to understand. I’m ordering you-’
‘Go to hell,’ Loredan snapped. Startled, the Prefect stepped backwards, treading on the toes of someone immediately behind him. ‘And don’t call me Colonel. I’m going home, before I lose my temper.’
‘Now you listen to me,’ the Prefect squeaked. People were turning round and staring. Loredan started to walk towards the door, but there was one of those splendid officers in the way. Loredan decided he really wasn’t up to a fist-fight, and subsided.
‘Really,’ he said, ‘you don’t want me. It’s been twelve years, and look at me, I’m a mess. There must be hundreds of your men-’
As he spoke, he caught the splendid one’s eye, and the truth dawned on him. There aren’t, though; just these peacocks and the part-timers. Oh, hell…
‘Hang on, though,’ he said. ‘What about the Emperor’s guard? Come to that, what about the Emperor? Shouldn’t he be doing something about-?’
Everyone around him had gone suddenly quiet, as if he’d just said something incredibly foolish. They’re doing their best not to laugh, he realised. What did I say?
‘Colonel Loredan,’ said the Prefect with a sigh, ‘there is no Emperor. Didn’t you know?’
Infuriating…
But it had to be done, and nobody else could be trusted to do it properly. With a deep sigh, Gannadius kicked off his too-tight slippers, trimmed the wick of the lamp and sat down to do the accounts.
Confounded jack-in-office auditors… Briefly he was tempted to do a little cursing on his own account. A broken leg or a fit of temporary blindness, just enough to keep them at bay without actually causing loss of life or permanent mutilation – no, maybe not. If he’d learnt anything from this sorry business, it was that the Principle wasn’t a cost-effective weapon.
He opened the cedarwood box that held his reckoning counters, pulled out the velvet bag and poured the shining counters out in a pile. It was an old and valuable set which had belonged to his grandfather, who had been a substantial wool-merchant; the counters were fine silver, rather worn now but still legible, little white pools of moonlight on the dark wood of the table. On the obverse of each counter was an allegorical female figure representing Commerce, seated on a throne with a pair of scales in one hand and a horn of plenty in the other; a stout lady in a revealing dress, her face worn away by three generations of painstaking arithmetic. The reverse was the traditional ship and castle crest of the city, with PRUDENT DEALINGS AUGMENT PROSPERITY in grandiose lettering around the edge. Gannadius picked one out and studied it for a while; there was something reassuringly solid and respectable about grandfather’s counters that somehow took the sting out of an otherwise loathsome chore.
With a lump of chalk he drew the lines on the table top; five horizontal lines like the rungs of a ladder right across the board. Although he wouldn’t have liked it to be widely known, Gannadius was only really comfortable with the basic lines-and-spaces method of accounting, as used by traders, innkeepers, farmers and the like. Scribes, scholars and clerks used a far more elegant and complex system, involving not only lines and spaces but different coloured squares on a permanent board (usually a work of art in itself), stationary counters with abstruse technical names, and a truly fiendish concept called the Tree of Numeration which he had never been able to make the slightest sense of. As far as he was concerned, arithmetic was bad enough without garnishing it with gratuitous mysticism.
In comparison, the common accounting was child’s play. Each rung of the ladder represented a multiple of ten; the bottom line was units, the second line tens, the third line hundreds and so on. The spaces between the lines were multiples of five; five, fifty, five hundred, five thousand. You laid out the first number to be added along the rungs, and then chalked a verticle line down the right hand side and laid out the next number; then you did the calculation, drew another l
ine and laid out the next number. It took rather longer than the professional method, but it was reasonably foolproof, and the longer you stuck at it, the easier it seemed to get.
Having prepared his board, he opened the account book at the page headed Receipts and started to set out the counters-
Item: received on account of rents, the following sums:
Ducas Falerin; 2,659
Leras Beron; 8,342
Two thousand, six hundred and fifty-nine. Gannadius took a handful of counters and laid them out; four on the bottom line, one in the first space, nothing on the second line, one in the second space, one each on the third line and the third space, and finally two on the thousand line; then double-check, draw the line and lay the next number to be added down in the next column. When he’d laid out the second number he set about the rather simpler task of merging the two – four units plus two units makes six, no more than four allowed on a line so carry one up to the five space, leave one, sweep the rest away; that makes two in the first space, no more than one allowed in a space, makes one to carry up to the ten line, one to sweep away; carry across four and one on the ten line makes five, no more than four on a line makes one to carry up to the fifty space, none to sweep away; that makes two in the fifty space, no more than one allowed in a space…
He chanted the workings under his breath like a superstitious blacksmith reciting luck charms as he hammers a horseshoe; gradually he stopped having to think, his eyes and fingers doing the work, the counters keeping the score. Before he knew it he’d finished the page of rents and had moved on to tariffs and tithes, while his mind gently disengaged and wandered into a pleasantly soporific trance.
A wretched business, to be sure. He’d allowed himself to be drawn into it by the prospect of advancement; he had never allowed himself to be ruthlessly ambitious, largely because ruthless ambition tended to be counterproductive in the long run. A man who scrambles to the top of the ladder before he’s forty has nothing to look forward to except thirty years of fending off a succession of equally ruthless younger men, and Gannadius could never see the point in that. Far better to move slowly and securely, cultivating lasting alliances and making as few enemies as possible, doing good work that would be remembered rather than playing politics and thereby inviting the cloister conspiracy and the secret coup. By helping the Patriarch to clean up a rather unseemly mess, he’d be laying up a solid foundation of gratitude and obligation on which he could build the next stage of his progress with a reasonable degree of confidence. A thoroughly sound career move; the mark of a mature and seasoned campaigner.
Well; that was why he’d got involved at the start. He’d certainly achieved that objective, but none of that seemed to matter quite as much as it did. No doubt about it, on one level there was an intellectual fascination to the business that intrigued him enormously; at times he’d rediscovered the fierce excitement he’d felt as an enthusiastic young student, revelling in strange and bewitching concepts. And no false modesty, please; he and Alexius had stumbled on a whole new aspect of the Principle, an area that hadn’t been tamed and trampled flat by generations of meticulous scholars intent on scratching out every last flake of significance. Rather, they were like two men shipwrecked on an entirely unknown continent; everything they came across was new and unknown, which they could spend a lifetime studying if they weren’t so entirely preoccupied with staying alive and somehow getting home again.
That was the point, Gannadius admitted to himself; most of all, he wanted it to be over and done with, because deep down he was afraid. He was luckier than his colleague, because he wasn’t the one directly threatened. It was Alexius who had fallen ill and now could hardly walk, and despite his best endeavours Gannadius desperately wanted to save him, if he could. He could rationalise it by arguing that if Alexius died too soon, he’d never have an opportunity to cash in all that goodwill and obligation, he wouldn’t be guaranteed the succession. That was still part of it, he supposed, because he did still want to be Patriarch, one day, in the fullness of time.
Maybe it’s just because I like the man. Well, I do. But that’s still not all of it. There’s something important in all this, and I need to know what it is.
Which made it more than usually aggravating to be stuck behind a table pushing a pile of counters around when he wanted to be in the chapter house, listening to the news and trying to work out what the connection between the Alexius-Loredan business and this new threat to the city might be. There was one; there had to be one, although for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it might be. There was something, some spitefully oblique clue, in that strange dream of Alexius’ he’d inadvertently wandered into; the clouds of dust becoming sails, that confounded pest of an Island girl and something about Loredan having a brother. Alexius hadn’t been able to get anything useful out of him (I should have gone with him and asked the man myself; Alexius is too emotionally involved with all this to be left to investigate on his own), but his description of the advocate’s manner when the subject was raised convinced him that the brother had something important to do with all this. Writing it all down to coincidence would be thoroughly poor book-keeping.
Talking of which-He double-checked, dipped his pen in the ink and wrote in the total receipts: twenty-nine thousand and ninety-seven gold units, a disturbingly large sum to have to account for. (And what possible justification can there be for a contemplative order raking in thirty thousand smilers, let alone spending them…?) Then he braced himself for the expenditure accounts, which were fiddly, awkwardly recorded and most likely wrong, not to mention being written up in Brother Pelagius’ unspeakable handwriting. It was enough to put a man off positions of authority for life.
Twelve and three-quarters on smoked fish for a week; he was going to get asked about that, sure as anything, and he didn’t even like smoked fish. And if the auditors didn’t raise hell over seven and three-quarters for three napkin rings, he would. It was high time his brothers in science were made to understand that membership of the Order wasn’t to be construed as a licence to ape the follies of the nobility. It’d be different if they were his napkin rings, but they weren’t. He splodged a dot in the margin and made a note to shout at somebody when he had a moment to spare.
That was rather more like it, unless of course it was simply Pelagius’ mistake for boots. He tried to recall what the brother provisioner wore on his feet; he’d noticed more than one of the brothers hobbling around the place in the latest long-toed, brightly coloured fashion footwear. If they had any sense they’d stick to sandals until the audit was well and truly finished with for the year.
He carried on down the page, right hand tracing the column of figures, left hand laying out the counters. Most of these small, fiddling entries he could do in his head, only bothering to carry forward the subtotals for each week to the main calculation on the counting board. Some of the entries he could clearly remember; for example-
– which commemorated the nasty bout of food poisoning when the cook experimented with those devilishly expensive imported mushrooms; closely followed by-
– an entry which might just be taken as evidence that Pelagius had a sense of humour. Gannadius groaned softly, remembering the mushrooms, and moved on down the page.
Arrowheads? What in blazes did they want with five smilers’ worth of arrowheads? Frowning, he looked across at the date of the entry. Last week. Well, yes. It did make some sort of sense. The City Academy, like most of the city’s institutions, was responsible for the payment and outfitting of a company of the guard. So; arrowheads. Just so long as nobody expected him to dress up in steel knitting and tramp up and down the walls in the pouring rain.
Gannadius shivered, wondering what was going on in the chapter house, where he ought to have been instead of crouching here doing sums. Yesterday the Prefect had announced that Bardas Loredan’s expeditionary force would be ready in three days’ time, and that he felt sure that firm pre-emptive action would see an end to the m
atter. The Prefect had sounded confident; but then, he always did. Loredan himself had looked depressed, rebellious, embarrassed and scared. Being entirely ignorant of such things, Gannadius didn’t know how to interpret that; for all he knew, that was exactly how a responsible commander should look on the eve of a major expedition. It stood to reason, Gannadius argued to himself, that anybody who wanted to lead an army probably shouldn’t be allowed to for that very reason.
These and similar reflections occupied his mind so effectively that he was through the expenditures almost before he knew it. Now all he had to do was subtract the expenditure total from the receipts total and be left with the figure for cash in hand, and he could call the job done and go to bed. He swept off the counters, re-drew the lines an set out the numbers. It would be so immensely gratifying if, just for once in his life, the blasted thing worked out first time.
It didn’t, needless to say; and for the next two and a half hours Gannadius forgot all about the Patriarch, Bardas Loredan and the army, the barbarian hordes and the antisocial by-products of philosophy while he ground his way through both sets of figures and compelled them to agree, like a mother forcibly reconciling her warring children. As he pinched out the lamp and rolled into bed, he spared one last thought for his sadly afflicted colleague and fellow-discoverer; then a great surge of weariness swept over him, he yawned and fell asleep.
The scouts found Temrai supervising the packing up of the first consignment of trebuchet parts. The trebuchets had proved easier to build than the torsion engines, but their sheer size and weight was causing an entirely new class of problems, to which Temrai was too tired and drained to find immediate solutions.