Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  And Zanipulus; well, he was in fact our star performer. Zanipulus’ father was a seriously wealthy and respectable man; councilman for a fashionable City ward, followed by a seat in the House, followed by the tribunate and two terms as assistant prefect for roads and waterways. How he found time, with all that on his plate, to indulge in the study of arcane and forbidden arts, I simply don’t know; but he did, and they found him out, and that was the end of him and the family fortune, which was confiscated and awarded to the informer who nailed him. What he’d been doing, it turned out, was researching and inventing new medicines, building on the work of the Mezentines (it’s perfectly legal over there). Zanipulus didn’t get on very well with his father when he was young; it was the old man’s brilliant idea that they should work together on the research, so as to have something in common which would draw them closer together. It didn’t, as it happened; but Zanipulus found the alchemy stuff quite fascinating, and the fact that it was illegal appealed to the perverse side of his nature, so that when they carted the old man off to the scaffold, Zanipulus resolved to continue his work as a gesture of defiance against the authorities, and because he reckoned he was really close to some breakthrough or other, and couldn’t bear to see all that work go to waste.

  Since we seem to be doing biographies, I might as well append mine. My great-grandfather was a shipowner on Scona. He made a good deal of money shipping tar and bitumen, which just sort of bubbles up out of the ground out there—you go along with barrels and just scoop it up, and suddenly you’ve got a valuable commodity for which foreigners will pay money. Anyway, his son, my grandfather, wasn’t keen on the bitumen trade—brought him out in a rash, my father told me—so he branched out into general trading, did so well at it that he moved here, to the City, and quickly became significantly rich. Sadly, my father had two unfortunate defects when it came to commerce; he was no good at it, and he didn’t realise he was no good at it. The truth only finally sank in when the bailiffs came round and took away our remaining furniture in a small cart, about six months before this story begins. My father died in debtors’ prison two months after the business failed. I have no idea where my mother is; when the bailiffs came she announced that she’d had enough and was going home to Scona. I imagine she’s still there, and good luck to her.

  Anyway, that was us. Between us, we had what Teuta got paid by the lawyers, plus what we could get by begging and very small-scale confidence tricks. We hadn’t been caught yet, but we knew it was just a matter of time. Accordingly, when the Invincible Sun called us to His ministry, we had no hesitation. That or poverty and starvation, followed by a long career in rock-splitting in the slate quarries. Hallelujah.

  I know it sounds really horrible, but the outbreak of mountain fever was a real slice of luck. Even back then, it wasn’t necessarily a death sentence. About four victims in ten made it—not wonderful odds, but good enough to keep you from simply turning your face to the wall as soon as the symptoms became unambiguous. At the time, though, we thought it was a damned nuisance, possibly enough to put us out of business if we couldn’t cure it, which of course we couldn’t.

  The epidemic started when we’d been going for about six weeks, about a fortnight after the victory at Ciota got us noticed. By then we had premises; actually, a derelict lime kiln on the edge of town, where the North Road branches off from Underway. Not a bad place, in fact; the acoustics in a lime kiln are really rather good, and we got it for practically nothing. Anyway, the fever hadn’t been on for more than a day or two when people started turning up on our doorstep, visibly sick, expecting us to cure them. Razo took one look at them and bolted into the back room with his face muffled up in the hem of his cloak. Zanipulus told him not to be so stupid, you don’t catch mountain fever like that, but Razo wasn’t taking any chances. The pitiful moaning was starting to get on our nerves, so I went outside and did my best.

  I felt awful. It’s one thing handing out imaginary absolution in return for a sprinkling of low-value copper; quite another confronting a dying man and pretending that you can make him well again. People knew us by then, so they had their money ready. They were lying there, where their families had left them, reaching out to me with hands clenched around fistfuls of coins. I couldn’t bring myself to take them. This surprised and annoyed the customers—sorry, the sick and the dying; not customers, not in that state—they wanted to know why I wasn’t prepared to intercede for them, as we were always promising to do. Some of them managed to struggle to their feet and lunge at me, trying to stuff money into my pockets or down my shirt. I managed not to panic. I said, of course I’ll intercede for you, and this time no payment is necessary. They didn’t like that. I guess I’d done my job too well. It was a fundamental tenet of the faith, as I’d been preaching it, that no prayer is audible to Him unless accompanied by clinking money. When I contradicted myself so blatantly, they didn’t believe me. Take the money, Father, please (I don’t know where father came from; they started calling me that at some point, and it sort of stuck)—what could I do? I had the feeling that if I didn’t take money off them, I’d be lucky to get out of there in one piece. What made it worse was the amounts. Typical. For their immortal souls, the most they were usually prepared to give was ten trachy, fifteen if they were being eaten alive by guilt and remorse. For their bodies, they were desperate to give me forty, fifty, sixty; fat pouches the size of cooking apples, and there was a terrified old woman who pleaded with me to accept a whole tremissis, your actual silver. I said the usual garbage—I have asked the Invincible Sun to consider your case; if you have truly repented and your sins have been forgiven, your prayers will be answered—then backed away, clanking slightly under the weight of all that coinage, and bolted.

  “You aren’t taking money off them, are you?” Accila said. “That’s sick.”

  “They’re insisting,” I tried to explain, but he just gave me that look.

  “I guess we brought it on ourselves,” Teuta said, helping me with the money before it burst its banks and flooded the building. “We made the poor devils believe, so what did we expect?”

  “I guess this is the end of the line,” Razo said gloomily. “Soon as they realise we can’t cure them, that’ll be it, we’ll be out of business. Just our bloody luck.”

  I noticed that Zanipulus wasn’t there. “Anyway,” I said. “I’m not going out there again. It’s definitely someone else’s turn.”

  Nobody was prepared to face the devoted mob, so we shot the bolts and hunkered down, from time to time peering out of the narrow slit of a street-front window to see if they were still there. Oh yes. In fact, the numbers grew, until the kettlehats came and moved them on for obstructing the traffic. An hour later they were back; in the meantime, I’d scribbled a note to the effect that we were engaged in holy rituals of intercession and were not to be disturbed, and nailed it to the door. I hoped that’d induce them to go away, but no chance. They settled down, in heartbreaking silence, and waited.

  About mid-afternoon, Teuta went to peer through the slit and called out, “There’s someone out there, walking up and down.”

  “There’s about six hundred people out there,” I told him. “Come away from the window before they see you.”

  “It’s Zanipulus. He’s giving them soup.”

  I shrugged. Guilt takes people different ways. “Fine,” I said. “So long as he’s paying for it, let him.”

  “That’s a really bad precedent.” Accila was sorting the coins into little towers. “Give them soup once, they’ll come to expect it.”

  “Those poor bastards will all be dead inside a week,” I growled. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Accila was all set to give Zanipulus a piece of his mind when he saw him next, but Zan didn’t show up next morning. Probably just as well; we still hadn’t opened the door. When I peeked out just before dawn, there was a huge mob of them out there. Different ones, though; yesterday’s crowd had gone home and been replaced by an even larger one. I wasn�
��t sure what to make of that.

  Just before midday, Zanipulus arrived and started doling out yet more soup. I watched him carefully. He had a big copper basin and a brass ladle, and everybody got two mouthfuls. If that was supposed to be a meal, it was a pretty sparse one. Then I realised. Not soup; medicine.

  Teuta was livid. “He can’t go trying out his stupid potions on real people,” he said, “even if they are sick. Suppose he poisons someone and they die. That could mean our necks.”

  I was watching the crowd. “Fine,” I said. “You go out there and tell him.”

  “You go. You’re the figurehead.”

  “No chance. They’d tear me to pieces. Whatever Zan thinks he’s doing, it’s going down really well.”

  There was, it turned out, a reason for that. The stuff he gave them worked. Later he explained that mountain fever was one of the family of diseases his father had been studying; as soon as he saw a crowd of victims assembled in one place, he’d scooted home, cooked up a big batch of the recipe (he had all the ingredients—mouldy bread, for crying out loud, and garlic juice—ready for just such an eventuality) and rushed over to try it out. He’d told them it was a gift from the Invincible Sun that would purge away their sins and leave them whole, and they swallowed it, literally and figuratively. And, would you believe, it actually worked. Twelve hours later, the symptoms started to fade; six doses of the stuff and you were right as ninepence. It was, Razo said, a miracle.

  “No it bloody well wasn’t,” Zanipulus replied angrily. “It was thirty years of painstaking research by a better man than you’ll ever be, so shut your face before I shut it for you.”

  Accila cleared his throat meaningfully—he’s six feet six and built like a carthorse, so he was our Justice of the Peace. “Actually, Zan,” he said, “you want to be a bit careful, bearing in mind what happened to your dad. If word gets about that his son’s handing out miracle cures for the fever, you’ll have the kettlehats after you. One martyr in the family is quite enough, I’ve always thought. Two in two generations is just showing off.”

  I guess that must’ve sunk in, because after a medium-length sulk, Zanipulus came sidling round us and asked if we wouldn’t mind handing out the rest of the magic goo, spiced up with some religious stuff to distract attention from the medicine side of things. Well, we couldn’t refuse, because there were thousands of the poor devils out there by then; so we let him out the back way, to go down to the bakers’ scrounging for mouldy bread, while we knocked up a quick liturgy for the healing of the sick.

  Muggins here got elected to perform it. Luckily I’m a quick learner. I was word perfect by the time we opened the door and processed out in our vestments (three tremisses for a big wicker hamper of surplus costumes from the Theatre; stank of moth and mildew, but washed up well). I did the words, the other three did the soup. We ran out twice, but fortunately Zan was back with all the stale bread he could carry, and was cooking up a storm in the back room. By nightfall we were all absolutely shattered, and we’d burnt a month’s charcoal in a day. We also took three hundred tremisses, nearly all in small change—we had to take it to the moneychangers in herring-barrels. Oh, and we cured the fever epidemic and saved something like two thousand lives. Just us.

  And pretty smug about it we were too, as you can imagine. It was the ascent to the next level we’d been praying for (so to speak), it was handed to us on a plate and it worked better than we could possibly have hoped for. Because of it, we made the jump from just-another-street-cult to serious mainstream religion in the course of a week. And, let’s not forget, we took a great deal of money. Vast amounts of money. Almost enough.

  Almost. None of us had said anything out loud, but the unspoken agreement had been; if this thing really takes off, we’ll run it until we’ve each got enough for a stake, the money we’d need to buy into some good, solid, reliable business, retire and be comfortable for life. That moment had very nearly come, but not quite. We counted it, and counted it again, and once more for luck. Split five ways, three hundred and twenty tremisses each. For which, in those days, you could buy a small farm or an established trade (but none of us wanted to be a cooper or a bootmaker) or four carts or a sixteenth share in a ship—a living, in other words, but lower middle class at the very best. That wasn’t quite enough, as far as we were concerned. We’d rather set our hearts on being gentlemen, for which we needed another one-seven-five each, minimum. We counted the fever takings one more time, and decide we were still in the faith business.

  We expected that, once the mountain fever was over, things would quieten down. Not so. We were now established as the go-to faith for healing the sick, and that was a real headache. Mountain fever was one thing; we had the recipe for that, but not for the million-and-one other horrible things that people waste away and die from. No way, of course, that we could explain that to the faithful; so we had to carry on, do the three services a day, and hope that in due course we’d become discredited and forgotten about (but not, hopefully, before we’d scooped in that extra one-seven-five a head).

  And wasn’t that the weirdest thing. We sang our psalms and intoned our meaningless prayers to our home-made god and ladled out our thin gruel of flour, water and rock salt, guaranteed no medicinal value whatsoever; and still they came, and still they got better. It was embarrassing. Recovered patients turned up, completely unsolicited, and told the crowd at our door that the Invincible Sun had cured them of this or that revolting disease, and that they should all have faith, give generously and believe. If I hadn’t known the truth, I’d have been convinced the whole thing was a fix and the happy beneficiaries of divine clemency were out-of-work actors we’d hired for thirty trachy a day in the Horsefair. Thousands of my fellow-citizens, however, weren’t so sceptical. They came, limping and groaning and seeping pus; they listened, they prayed; they got better.

  Zanipulus told us that such things had been known. Some Mezentine once did an experiment with a load of sick people; he gave half of them proper medicine and the rest of them some old rubbish, told them all it was the real stuff; of the half who got the rubbish, something like a fifth of them got well anyway. Well, fine; goes to show how gullible people really are. The thing was, the number of sick people apparently cured by us—by me, since the other four just handed out the wallpaper paste—was far more than in the Mezentine’s experiment. Furthermore, I’m not just talking about coughs and snuffles here. Genuine serious illnesses, the sort that kill you dead; we were curing those, with a success ratio of something like two-to-one.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Razo announced. It was the day after he’d cured a leper. The experience had left him badly shaken. “It’s getting crazy and out of hand. I vote that we quit the business, divide up the proceeds and go our separate ways.”

  Two days previously, Accila, in his capacity as treasurer, had announced that he was switching his basis of account from silver to gold. That was when there were a hundred and six silver tremisses to the gold stamen. The net, he then informed us, stood at four hundred and ninety stamina; just ten more to go and the arithmetic would be really straightforward.

  “We can’t,” Teuta replied with his mouth full. “It’s gone too far. They know our names. We’re respectable. For crying out loud, we had the Secretary of War in here yesterday.”

  “We wouldn’t be able to stay in the City, agreed,” Razo said. “So what? The world’s a big place, especially if you’ve got a hundred stamina in your pocket. We could go anywhere.”

  “I’m not sure I want to give up,” Teuta said. “Whatever the hell it is we’re doing, it seems like it’s working. And I like having Cabinet ministers calling me your Grace. It sort of makes up for some of the other stuff, if you see what I mean.” He yawned, and swung round in his chair. “Zan? What do you think?”

  Zanipulus shrugged. “I agree, it makes a pleasant change being respectable, and the money’s nice. And I don’t think for one moment it’ll last forever. Sooner or later this weird run of
luck’s going to peter out, people will stop curing themselves and saying it was us, and the whole thing will grind to a halt. Until then, I say we carry on milking it for everything we can. You only get something like this once in a lifetime. And it’s not like any of us have any other means of making a living.”

  Nobody, please note, seemed interested in what I’d got to say. My own fault, I guess. I’d spoken inadvisably a couple of times, and my opinion was no longer welcome. I gave it anyway.

  “I vote we carry on,” I said. “Yes, we’re making money. We’re also healing the sick. Don’t pull faces, Razo, you’ll stick like it. We’re healing the sick, or they’re healing themselves because of us, makes no real difference. What matters is, it’s happening. If we give up now—”

  “Don’t start,” Teuta said ominously.

  “Too late,” I shouted, and they all looked at me. “For pity’s sake,” I said, “can’t you see it? We’ve started something here. People believe in us. They believe so strongly that they’re curing themselves, like in that Mezentine’s experiment. Zan, you’re a scientist, aren’t you just the tiniest bit curious? It’s an extraordinary thing.”