by K. J. Parker
Recently, I had to sign a death warrant; my first. They put it on my desk along with a load of other stuff—minor charters, land grants, proceedings of the House for my approval, and this other bit of paper, that said a man had to be killed. I sat there staring at it, with my pen dribbling ink up my sleeve. A clerk asked me if anything was wrong and I just turned and looked at him, and he backed away and left me to it.
Of course, the man in question had to be executed. He was a nasty piece of work—murder, rape, armed robbery—but he was a nobleman’s son, so it needed my signature. I simply couldn’t do it. My arm wouldn’t move. I thought, scribbling my name on this bit of paper will kill someone; well, don’t do it, then, that’s obvious enough. But it had to be done, and eventually I did it. Believe it or not, I closed my eyes as I signed. I went around the rest of the day in a daze; people had to repeat everything they said to me, and I couldn’t grasp the simplest thing I was told.
So what? It’s like the old argument about eating meat; if all the city people had to kill and skin their own food, everybody’d be a vegetarian. But that’s not true. A few weeks of living on nothing but greens, and they’d find it in themselves to get the job done. They’d do what I did; they’d make an effort of will and do it. I felt afterwards like I’d cut out a part of myself, or blinded a third eye. I felt smaller, less smart, reduced. But the next time, I won’t make such a meal out of it. Probably I’ll shudder and feel bad, but I’ll just sign the bloody thing and have done with it. That’s what we do, and it’s amazing what you can accustom yourself to. Like the very first time you taste wine or beer, and it’s revolting, and you think, people drink this stuff for fun?
I’ve made damned sure everybody everywhere’s heard about your success. I even considered raising a statue or having a special issue of coins minted, but I suppose that’d be premature. But a least it’s shut the mouths of the Bringas in the House, and I’m sleeping a great deal easier. It goes without saying, I’m so grateful. I knew I could rely on you.
Neatly done, too; the stuff with the wire was pure Charisticus; exactly what Xanthus the Fox would’ve done (is that where you got the idea from? Go on, you can tell me.) And to think you were talking about packing it in and coming home. You idiot.
Now, to business. We’ve learned a lot from that armour and stuff, though I can’t see that it gets us anywhere, at least not yet. You were right about the commercial stuff. It was made in Rhangabe, at the Strength & Honour factory, the second biggest armoury in the city. They’re a perfectly legitimate concern; in fact, I’m their biggest customer. They make basic equipment which we ship to the buffer states in the East as military aid. Once it gets there, of course, anything can happen; the local chieftains give it away as presents to their retainers, or the grand vizier intercepts it, tells his boss the ship sank, and then sells the stuff through intermediaries, or it’s used to fit out mercenary companies, who neglect to give it back or keep it against arrears of pay. That’s before it gets used, of course. Most of the armour in the trade is, of course, battlefield pickups. I didn’t know this, but one of the biggest companies quoted on the Exchange is the Philargyrus Brothers; they employ fifteen thousand free men and eight thousand slaves, as at close of business yesterday their ordinary shares stood at HS 70, and their main business is going round battlefields stripping the dead. Where they can’t get their own people in, they buy the stuff from local freelances—usually grim old women and orphan kids; it’s one of the few ways you can make a living if you haven’t got land in the North-East and the South. The Philargyrus company’s the biggest dealer, but there’s a dozen other major players, plus a whole crowd of small independents. A lot of the stuff they pick up just goes for scrap, but anything that’s serviceable or can be cost-effectively repaired goes straight back on the open market. The Philargyrus aren’t too bad, actually; in return for the plunder concession (which they negotiate with both sides in advance) they undertake to look after the wounded and bury the dead, and they do a pretty good job. The local freelances are much more likely to cut the throats of anybody they find still alive, just because it’s easier to strip a body if it’s not wriggling about.
Anyhow; we’ve been in touch with the Strength & Honour people, and they tell us that the stuff you recovered wasn’t just one big order. They mark their work with batch numbers and ordnance marks, and your stuff came from at least a dozen different batches, ranging in date from two years ago to twenty. There were fifteen helmets from the same batch, so they looked up their records; apparently, those helmets were part of a consignment that went, through the War Department, to the Principality of Chosroene; which, before you ask, is a mountain with three goats on it the other side of Tazrat, and what Uncle Zeno thought he was playing at, giving those clowns military aid, I can’t begin to imagine. Anyway, the stuff’s forty years old, and there’s no way of tracing how it got from Chosroene to Tremissis in the meantime. Sorry.
Slightly better luck with the Imperial issue stuff. It was all made at the state ordnance factory at Chloe, just down the road, in fact, seventeen years ago, and issued to the 276th Regiment five years later. As you will doubtless remember, the 276th sided with my Uncle Vatatzes in the late unpleasantness, and got wiped out by my unspeakable brother on the Field of Magpies. Looking at the stuff itself, in particular the mailshirts, I believe they were battlefield retrievals. The Philargyrus had the contract for that battle, and they’re checking their records now to see how long they had the proceeds from that battle in inventory, and what became of it.
The bottom line is; it looks like your bad guys bought all their gear through the trade. That tells us something, at least; it implies they’ve got money, because it’s been a seller’s market for decades and good stuff is expensive, and they can’t just be bandits and hooligans if they’re placed so they can conduct large-scale arms deals with reputable firms, even indirectly. I’ve asked Menestheus to get his Treasury snoops to look around and see if they can follow the money trail, but I’m not holding my breath. The weapons business isn’t like crockery or carpets or bulk grain; I think the people who take part in it must actually enjoy being furtive and cloak-and-dagger, because everything’s done through agents and shell companies using bills drawn on banks in Perimadeia and private letters of credit and all that sort of crap. We’ll see.
I was reading Stesimachus last night, and I opened a page at random and there was Gorgias’ handwriting in the margin. He’d written some smart-arse comments, and drawn one of his trademark cows. I suppose I must’ve lent him the book at some point; I can’t remember. Anyway, I just sat there, staring at it for I don’t know how long, until my valet came in and asked me why I’d been crying. I felt so stupid. But hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about him. I’ve told the War Records people to go back through the lists, just to check his name isn’t on them. If we knew for certain he was killed, at least that’d be better than knowing nothing at all.
I like your idea of building a barrier. It’s so military.
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has succeeded in capturing a number of insurgents, and is interrogating them.
Well, it had to happen. Eventually, I had to get lucky.
Which is precisely what Antimachus Voutzes did. You won’t know the name. He’s about nineteen years old, his father’s a purveyor of high-class sausages here in Tremissis City (he does particularly good black pudding, if that’s not a contradiction in terms). He went to school, decided he wanted to be a scholar, tried to get in to the Order but they wouldn’t have him because his clothes smelt of blood; got mightily pissed off at the Order, what he calls the Establishment and the world in general, and wandered off into the mountains looking for trouble. Which he found, in the shape of the insurgency. They took him on—pity, maybe, or desperation, or more likely b
ecause he can read and write and do sums—and made him a supply officer. So far, so good, but after a while he decided that counting jars of salt herring and getting yelled at because the officer’s mess had run out of vinegar wasn’t his idea of overthrowing a corrupt and decadent society, and so he demanded a transfer to active service. I guess someone must’ve taken pity on him, or else wanted rid of a nuisance. They assigned him to a forward unit just the other side of the frontier (yes, I’ll get on with the proper military stuff in a minute; just let me do the human interest first), where he spent six weeks shivering his nuts off in a threadbare tent out on the mountainside, and occasionally sneaking down into Limes to steal food.
Which is how he got lucky, as previously advised. He met this girl. Apparently he was burgling her house, and their eyes met, and the rest you can extrapolate. Anyhow, he told her he was a desperate freedom fighter, which naturally she thought was just too romantic for words, and for a while she was feeding him and giving him cast-off clothes, not to mention aid, comfort and spiritual guidance, until her parents noticed that the larder was emptier that it should have been and Dad’s best overcoat had gone missing; to cut it short, they found out what their daughter was up to, got really, really frightened and ratted on her to the guard. Naturally, we scooped him up without further delay, and suddenly we’ve got a genuine, hundred-percent captive insurgent. Ain’t love grand.
I looked up interrogation in the book, and it said that many prisoners break down when merely shown the instruments of torture. Fine, I thought; the only drawback being, we have no instruments of torture. So I had young Voutzes taken round to the millhouse and shown the back end of the countershaft mechanism, and we told him that was the instruments of torture; and of course he didn’t know any better, and to anybody with even the shreds of an imagination all those cogs and wheels and ratchets look absolutely shit-yourself terrifying; and he burst into tears and said he’d tell us everything.
That’s about the high point of the story, since everything in his case turned out to be not much. Translated from the pathetic, it goes like this. It was pure fluke he bumped into the insurgents, who happened to be on their way back from a reconnaissance mission. He couldn’t tell us anything useful about where the main camp is; he simply has no sense of direction, and they blindfolded him on the way up there, and when they brought him back down to the frontier. He said it was a long ride in the back of a cart—somewhere between four and six hours, he thinks, but he’s got no sense of time. And that’s it. I scared him as much as I could. I even dragged him up into the Barracks bell tower and showed him the insides of the clock. That was when he started making stuff up, hoping to please me.
We had rather more luck with the forward post, where he’d been living. He was shamefully eager to take us up there and betray his comrades; we got seventeen of them. They’re made of rather better material than Voutzes. I tried the same trick on one of them; I took him up the mill and showed him the bit where the big reciprocating arm goes backwards and forwards, and I said, “Well, are you scared?” And he gave me a look and said, “Not really, but the camshaft bearings need oiling.” He used to work there. Great. Actually, it’s fairly clear they don’t know a great deal more than my boy Voutzes. Whoever the bad guys are, they’re good at this.
So now we know a little bit more. They aren’t foreigners. All the men Voutzes met were from this area. True, some of them came from villages a few miles the other side of the border, but that doesn’t mean a great deal. It’s never been a closed frontier as such, and people tend to come and go quite freely. Prices are generally lower on our side, so we’ve never had a smuggling problem (there’s a certain amount of it going the other way, of course, but that’s none of our business). Most of the prisoners I spoke to got involved because they had nothing better to do; men who’d lost their land, by foreclosure or in lawsuits or just because they were no good; artisans and apprentices who’d been sacked for laziness or stealing; tradesmen and shopkeepers who’d gone bust. Not the most likely material, you’ll agree, from which to forge a successful guerilla army. Think about what they’ve been able to do. They move very fast, very efficiently, they fight extremely well and they’ve got this honour code thing that means they don’t surrender and they don’t leave their wounded or their dead. We only got the ones we caught because we took them by surprise when they were asleep—couldn’t run for it or get to their weapons in time.
This suggests, doesn’t it, that they’ve been very well trained by someone who’s very good indeed at training soldiers. Consider also the infrastructure and administration that Voutzes told us about; a well organised supply system, a properly structured chain of command, the right support services to back up the front-line units. Everything, in fact, done right and by the book.
And not just any book, if you ask me. I think whoever’s running the insurgency is reading the same book I am; which suggests we’re dealing with Imperial career military. One of ours.
You can see where I’m leading. There can’t be that many Imperial soldiers with the necessary skills and experience who aren’t accounted for. I would guess we’re looking for a colonel at least, possibly a brigadier-general, with a pretty solid career behind him, including training experience and combat. How many men can there be who fit that description?
I watched two old men fighting a duel yesterday. I should’ve stopped it, of course, but I was fascinated. They were both well into their seventies; one was tall and bald and skinny, with a stoop, and the other one was short and fat, with a limp. I have no idea what it was all about, but they were going about it very formally—seconds, a doctor, a roped-off ring in a meadow at dawn. It was sheer luck I happened to be passing (I was on my way to do a surprise inspection at the Stymon garrison). They fought with swords and bucklers, and my guess is that thirty years ago they were both accomplished fencers; they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn’t quite do it. Even so, they kept going for about five minutes, until they were both ash-white and stumbling about with exhaustion. Then the skinny one tripped and fell badly, and the short one tried to stab him on the ground but missed and overbalanced and went sprawling. Neither of them could get to their feet, so they sat up and shuffled towards each other on their bottoms, and started hacking at each other like that. Then the skinny man managed to connect with the fat man’s kneecap—I don’t suppose that’s what he was trying to hit; in fact, it looked like an accident to me, and it only goes to show what happens if you play with sharp objects. To make matters worse, I think it was the fat man’s bad knee. Anyway, he dropped his sword and started howling and hugging his leg and rocking backwards and forwards—he’d forgotten all about the duel and the other man, who just sat there looking bewildered. Then the seconds helped them both up, and the doctor got busy, and I came on.
Why do people insist on trying to hurt each other, Nico? Beats me.
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty acknowledges Phormio’s report and encloses detailed information relating to the current investigation.
We’re amateurs, Phormio, obviously. I was never meant to be the Emperor. It was made abundantly clear to me when I was ten years old; Nico, you’re never going to be the Emperor, you’re never going to be anything. Find something to do with your life and stay out of trouble Which came as a great relief, let me tell you. Even when I was ten, I could read. I read how, in the past hundred years, there had been seventy-seven emperors, five of whom died of natural causes (and one of them was apoplexy brought on by news that his brother was rebelling against him). Seventy-two emperors murdered by their families, their soldiers, their friends, their household servants, or torn apart by the mob, or overthrown by armed revolts and executed, usually in a very nasty way. Who the hell would want to get involved in that business, I thought.
So I went to Anassus (they waived t
he entrance exam, for some reason) and there I met you and the others, and we read books and talked (sober, some of the time). I tried to put who I was completely out of my mind. I was just tall, skinny Nico with the stammer and the long, pointy nose, and by and large people were pleased to see me. It helped that I was in with Menestheus and Gorgias, the coolest of the cool. But they accepted me because I was, on balance, an asset to the community rather than a liability, because of what was in my head and what came out of my mouth (and because, unlike the rest of you, I still had the price of a round of drinks at mid-term? Well, maybe. That’s something I’ll never know).
So; I’m an amateur, and so are we all. That said, we aren’t doing all that badly. In fact (bearing in mind that we’re a bunch of political, economic and military virgins who couldn’t wipe our arses in the dark) we’re doing pretty well.
Take land reform. Second reading of Aristaeus’ Community Freeholds Bill in the House yesterday; and we got it through without me having to intervene. Law reform; three days ago, Strato pulled off an astounding dawn raid, and we impeached the twenty most corrupt and bigoted judges on the circuit; they never knew what hit them, they went so quietly I could hardly believe it—and, more to the point, we did it within the rules, instead of me sending soldiers round at three o’clock in the morning. Menestheus has actually made sense of the Treasury accounts, so for the first time in nearly forty years we know how much money there really is, how much we owe and how much is coming in. He’s cancelled sixty-six illegal or oppressive taxes, while at the same time he’s cut out so much graft and corruption and inefficiency and waste that we can cover expenses and maybe even start paying back some of the debt. Not bad for a bunch of unworldly, ivory-tower academics.