by K. J. Parker
She yawned. “Any eggs left?”
“No.”
“You could’ve woken me.”
He scowled at her and walked away, eating. She grinned.
Not long after that there was a storm, the sort that comes out of nowhere, threatens to tear the sky in half and then dies away into sweet serenity, as if to say “Who, me?” She was used to them; she’d already found herself a tight corner of the hold, with things to hang on to and no risk of being buried under falling cargo. She went there only to find it occupied: Oida, curled up in a ball and muttering the catechism, over and over again, very fast.
“Mind if I join you?” she yelled. He couldn’t hear her over the roaring and creaking, and he filled all the available space. She swore at him and went back on deck, where she got under the feet of the crew and was scowled at.
It was early the next day, and the Silver Spire was just visible on the skyline, when she finally realised what it was that had been bothering her. She sat down on a coil of rope, because her legs were suddenly too weak to carry her weight. Oida. Oida planning operations, formulating policy; since when? Sure, he was really high up in the lodge, twenty-third or twenty-fourth degree, something ridiculous like that. But he was neutral; that was the whole point about him, he came and went between the two empires (each one naturally assuming that he was on their side really), playing his music, making (she assumed) absurdly large sums of money, courted and feted wherever he went, and everyone upon whom his radiance happened to shine was continually asked, what’s he really like? And, yes, presumably both governments knew he was a double agent, a complete whore who’d turn a trick for anyone, impersonal, just business, no feeling; such an entity would be not just useful but vital, since even treachery is a form of communication, and otherwise the two sides couldn’t communicate at all. Yes to all that; but Oida spearheading a serious attempt to bring Blemya into the war wasn’t the same thing as a few names, pillow-talk secrets, troop movements. Was it possible that Oida had actually made up his mind at last and taken a side? If the East found out what he’d been up to, they’d be livid—
Yes, but it was stupid plan. It wasn’t going to work. A good man dead, all that risk, and nothing to show for it whatsoever. Maybe that was the idea. Maybe his true masters, in the East, had told him: we want you to go to the West and sell them on this incredibly stupid plan, and it’ll go wrong and the Blemyans will be furious and come in on our side—only that wasn’t going to be the result. There would be the most appalling trouble in Blemya for a while, and then things would carry on exactly the same. So where the hell was the point?
It had been a stupid plan. Which raised two colossal issues. One: was Oida really that stupid? Part of her yearned to say yes, of course, he’s an arrogant clown, shallow as silver plating, so full of it that he simply didn’t see how bad the plan was; a clown and a coward, curled up in a ball, whimpering to the fire god because of a silly little storm. She wanted that to be true, so she was fairly sure it wasn’t. And two: the great men of the lodge and the great men of the Western empire had given their blessing to this stupid plan, blinded by Oida’s fiery glow or just too thick to see it wouldn’t work. Now that—
“Hello, you.” She looked up. She hadn’t seen him since the storm. He’d brought her a plate of scrambled eggs. She realised she was quite hungry.
“Can’t face anything myself,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the deck beside her. “God, I hate the sea.”
She laughed. “I don’t think it likes you terribly much.” He handed her a little wooden spoon. The man who thinks of everything. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She prodded at the eggs with the spoon. “When were you last in the East?”
“Let me think.” He thought. “I came straight on from Belroch to Beloisa.”
She looked at him. “You just strolled through the front line like nothing was happening?”
“Good God, no. I had a safe passage. Not that I needed it, because the country all round there was pretty much deserted.”
“But you had a bit of paper, if you’d needed it.”
“Well, yes. Not a problem. Why do you ask?”
She smiled. “What’s it like in the East?”
He took a moment to reply. “Different,” he said, “but more or less the same. They have women priests there, for one thing. And grace comes at the end of the meal, not the beginning. And they celebrate Ascension on the three-quarter moon, not the full, and the jam is poured over your pancakes, not served separately in a little dish. And if two people are shown to have conspired to kill someone but you can’t prove which of them actually struck the fatal blow, they’re both acquitted of murder but convicted of attempt, but they’re both hanged just the same anyway; and they can try you up to three times for same crime, which I can’t say I approve of. On the other hand, a son can’t be forced to testify against his mother, and vice versa, which is quite civilised. Oh, and the country people use tanned bulls’ scrotums for putting their money in, and in town they carry their small change in their mouths, which is pretty startling the first time you buy something from a street trader. You lift your head up for yes, and nod down for no, it’s quite important to remember that. Summer solstice used to be a big festival where all the servants and apprentices went home to their families in the country and they used to burn a straw lion at sunrise and give each other presents, but that’s terribly old-fashioned now. And only prostitutes carry handkerchiefs stuffed up their sleeves. That’s the same in Blemya, by the way, which is why you kept getting all those funny looks.” He shrugged. “That sort of thing, anyway. Otherwise, they’re more or less like the West. About what you’d expect; five hundred years as all one big happy family, then ninety years apart hating each other to death. Why the sudden interest? Thinking of going there?”
“Just interested,” she said. “As in, if they’re really not all that different from us, what are we slaughtering each other for?”
He sighed. “Honour,” he said. “Moral imperatives, to defend our country and our way of life. Money, of course, and eternal glory, and to defend our trading interests. Because we’re right and they’re wrong. Because evil must be resisted, and sooner or later there comes a time when men of principle have to make a stand. Because war is good for business and it’s better to die on our feet than live on our knees. Because the fire god is on our side, and it’s our duty to Him. Because they started it. But at this stage in the proceedings,” he added, with a slightly lopsided grin, “mostly from force of habit.”
4
Virtue
From behind the gilded screen he watched the throne come down, then gathered up his papers and put them in order. She joined him a moment later.
“I hate that thing,” she said. “It’s worse than camels.”
“People will hear you,” he said with a grin.
“Oh, people.” She scowled at him. “Let’s go and make pancakes, I’m starving. Oh please,” she added, in that voice.
“No,” he said. “You’ve got appeals to hear.”
She sighed, and slouched after him down the corridor like a sad dog. “You didn’t use the throne when the Westerners were here,” he said.
“I couldn’t face it. All those diplomats and the throne. Have mercy.”
The Great Throne of Blemya and the Golden Birds had been a gift to the founder of the dynasty from some outlandish place far away where they were probably rather too clever for their own good. Unlike the Birds, the throne still worked. As the suppliant entered the Great Hall through the North door, he was astounded to see the throne, three tons of marble, porphyry, ivory and gold, rise slowly and steadily into the air, so that by the time he reached the braided red velvet rope that marked the limit of how far he could go, the throne and its occupant was ten feet off the ground. Up there—some clever trick of the acoustics—the Royal voice took on a booming quality and reverberated off the walls, giving the visitor the impression that he was
being spoken to from all sides at once. He, of course, had to raise his voice so as to be audible at a distance without committing the unforgivable faux pas of shouting.
The works were down in the cellars, where a huge cistern of water powered a thing called a hydraulic ram. Water was laboriously pumped up into the cistern from the big rainwater tank; when the chamberlain’s people gave the signal, someone opened a tap and water flowed down a horrendously complicated system of pipes; in one of the pipes was a thing called a piston, which was linked by camshafts and crankshafts and God knew what else to a girder riveted on to the back of the throne; the weight of the water coming down made the piston ride up in its pipe, taking the throne with it. When the audience was over and the duly astounded visitor had been led away, someone turned another tap, the water drained back into the tank and the throne gradually descended; except when it got stuck, in which case the only means of escape for the Royal personage was down a ladder. But, of course, nobody ever saw that.
The Old Man, King Tolois, had been delighted with it and thought it was great fun; his son, Dalois I, believed it had great symbolic value and devised a number of rituals based on it, which he included in his life’s work, the twelve-volume Ceremonials of the Blemyan Court. His sons had put up with it, cursing the inconvenience while tacitly acknowledging the value of the impression it made on foreigners and the lower classes. One of the first things the queen had said, on her accession to the throne, was, “Anyway, I’m not going up in that thing, and that’s final.” Since then, of course, wise men had explained, and she understood. Didn’t mean she liked it.
“Have I got to hear appeals?” She sounded like a little girl.
“Yes.”
“Damn.” The hem of the divitision, massive with gold braid and gold thread, pearls and lapis lazuli studs, made a sort of rasping noise as it trailed along the flagstones. Tolois had been a tall man. “How long till?”
He grinned at her. “You might get some lunch,” he said, “or you might not.”
She groaned, and gave the divitision a mighty hitch, making it skip like a breaking wave. “And I hate this stupid thing, too. Why can’t I just wear a frock?”
They walked through the South cloister, the best short cut from the Great Hall to the Council Chamber. Access to it was forbidden to everybody except the queen, the Lord Privy Seal, the Count of the Stables, the Grand Logothete and a little bald man who swept it once a month; no courtiers, servants, equerries, no guards, even. The Count and Privy Seal were only allowed in by express invitation. It was his favourite place in the world.
She said, “After I’ve done the appeals, can we play chess?”
He shook his head. “Afternoon council, then state dinner, and then you’ve got a mountain of things to read and sign. Sorry.”
She sighed. They’d reached the end of the cloister. A thin shaft of light from a high slit window pooled at their feet. “See you tomorrow, then.”
“Mind you read the brief from the Navy treasury committee,” he said. “You’ve got to make a decision on that tomorrow.”
She pulled a sad face. “Can’t you do it?”
“I’ve done you a two-page summary,” he said, “but you must read the full brief. Got that?”
“Bully.”
“You’ve got to make these decisions yourself,” he said gravely. “We talked about it, remember?”
“All right.” She was drooping, the wilted-flower pose. Then she did that shrug of the shoulders, settling the lorus, dalmatic and lesser chlamys back into position, like a carthorse applying its strength to the collar; everything was back in place, her back was straight and her head was high. “But there’d better be almond biscuits when I get back, or someone’s going to be in real trouble. Got that?”
“Your Majesty.”
He opened the door for her and she gave him a regal nod, then stuck her tongue out at the last moment, before the last three inches of the divitision flicked over the threshold and she was gone. He closed the door almost reverently, then hurried back down the cloister to the Great Hall, which was empty apart from a few domestic staff, dusting and polishing. Two of them, allies from the old days, smiled at him as he passed and he grinned back.
Too much to do, far too little time to do it in: job description of the Grand Logothete of the Kingdom of Blemya. Actually, neither of them knew what a logothete was; she’d seen the word in a book, years ago, and it had stuck in her mind, and when (the afternoon of the king’s funeral) she’d turned to him in the one quiet moment they’d had together and whispered, “You will help me, won’t you? I can’t do this on my own,” he’d tried to say no and it had come out as “Yes, of course.” “We’ve got to think of something to call you,” she said later, after the ferocious council meeting, when she’d refused to back down. “What?” he’d asked. She’d looked at him. Chief Secretary and Grand Vizier were the only suggestions he’d been able to come up with; she’d just looked at him, and he’d nodded and said, quite. Then, out of the blue, she’d remembered Grand Logothete; and suddenly there was one, and it was him, and here he was doing it.
He glanced down at his crib sheet and his heart sank. Ordnance Committee; that was fortifications and siege engines and things, about which he knew nothing, and the committee was a bunch of fire-breathing old steelnecks who thought nobody under the age of forty-five should be allowed to speak. They scared the hell out of Daxin Paracoemenus, but the Grand Logothete was afraid of nothing. Well, then.
He waited in the little anteroom until the water clock told him he was five minutes late, then breezed in, slammed his papers down on the table, dropped into the only empty chair and said, “Gentlemen,” in the loud braying voice his uncle Faras used for shouting at his bailiff. The steelnecks glowered at him, rose resentfully to their feet and bowed. “Sorry to have kept you, let’s see, what have we got today?” He made a show of consulting the agenda, though he’d memorised it while he was waiting. When he was nervous in a meeting, his eyes got blurry and he couldn’t read. “Procurement.” He lifted his head, found the right steelneck and fixed his eyes on a spot on the wall two inches to the right of him. “General Auxin,” he said. “I think you’ve got some explaining to do.”
Which he had, of course; the old fool was behind schedule and well over budget on the refurbishment of the Bronze Gate, and even Daxin knew that the Gate was the only weak spot in the Land Walls, and its present deplorable state directly jeopardised the security of the City. The steelnecks sat down, and Auxin began turning the pages of some brief or other. “No,” Daxin said, “don’t read me your notes; you should know this. When are you going to start work on the second phase, and how much is it going to cost?”
It was a painful meeting. By the end of it, Daxin was more or less convinced that Auxin was fiddling (after all, his brother-in-law had the masonry contract, and Auxin’s eldest son had lost a lot of money at the track lately) and that the rest of the committee knew about it and were helping him cover it up. Stupid. All the stupid fiddling and cheating that went on, everywhere you looked; ridiculously rich men who still managed to find ways of desperately needing money, or who were simply greedy, or regarded wealth as the only way of keeping score in the endless social and political warfare of court life. When he’d told her about it, she’d looked at him and said, “What shall we do?” and he’d had to explain: there is no we, there’s just you, you’ve got to decide, and she’d accused him of being deliberately unhelpful and given him that yearning look: please deal with it and make it go away, I don’t want to. She understood, of course, perfectly well. But just occasionally, he knew, the desperate urge to be twenty-two and not responsible for the fate of a million people was almost too strong for her, and because she daren’t tempt herself, she tempted him.
So he’d thought about it, and decided that since the rules were no help, and she couldn’t break the rules, it was up to him, on his own. And then, while he was trying to figure out a plan of action, he’d met that unbelievably helpful a
nd sympathetic man Oida, the musician—
After the Ordnance, he had the Bank governors, followed by a delegation from the mine owners, followed by an unspeakably annoying man from the lodge gabbling away about the preferments list; and now, just to round it all off, the High Priest and some professor from the Royal Academy of Music were demanding to see him about an urgent matter of national security. One of those days. By now, of course, he was running late, so any hope of sneaking off to the Sun Tower and making himself a stack of pancakes had evaporated like water off a hot stove.
Actually, incredibly, he liked the High Priest. The old devil reminded him of his father; the same solemn, baleful stare and total deadpan delivery, so that there was a delay of five or so seconds before the joke exploded inside your head and made you laugh painfully through your nose; and the same reproachful glare to rebuke you for your unseemly outburst. The man was a total menace, and could cheer up an otherwise desperate day like no one else. The professor, on the other hand, was a completely unknown quantity—boring or difficult or both, and how in God’s name could a music professor be an urgent matter of national security?
He sent her a note about it.
The notes were her idea. Officially, he could only send her formal documents—minutes of meetings, memoranda of audiences, petitions, factual summaries, all of them documents of public record which would end up in the Great Cartulary, for ever and ever, along with the foreign treaties and the pipe rolls. But formal documents were sent in a despatch case, the original case that Tolois had used at the Battle of Luxansia; and the case was pigskin lined with velvet, and there was a tear in the lining, which it would be sacrilege to mend, and you could wedge a little scrap of parchment in the tear and nobody would know.
This time the note said, Before matins, south cloister, will bring honeycakes. When the case came back, with countersigned orders in council and a refused petition from the Board of Works, there was a scrap cut off his scrap that read, All right but why so early? He grinned at that, and sent down to the kitchens.