by Tom La Farge
“But I mean to! I mean to improve my place. This campaign is my chance to rise in the service, and if I succeed, then, Kyr Root, my childrens’ lives will be fuller and sweeter than mine.”
Astounding! Was this the man who was to lead an attack against a proud city? “Delight, fullness, sweetness”? What about power, mastery, destruction? What about expanding in wealth, in influence, in connections, in useful dependents, in monopolies, in mistresses exclusively possessed, in enemies murdered and rivals thwarted, in revenge enacted and unpunished, in appetites satisfied but not satiated, in horses and robes, dinners and wines, marble and gold, payments in cash, kind, and courtesy? In personal empire?
And was he even capable of the sort of expansion he envisioned, this man of bees, this poisoner of rats, this warehouser of carousel horses? How were his forays into the crannies of the walls more “expansive” than his ancestors’ inchmeal plantings?
And as to his idea of the theater! Root had never heard anything so wonderfully naive. The grand conception, yes, that was his province, no doubt that was what he reached for; but to hope that the audience was “expanding” to that conception was the dream of a university student. The audience went to the play to escape their lives and families for a few hours. They went to display their jewels and their bosoms. They went to study what new pairings and estrangements had transpired within their circle. They went to mock the costumes, the gestures, the delivery, the verse. They went to the play to fantasize about getting into some actress’ knickers or some boy’s arse. Or about standing half-naked in a brilliant light with hundreds of eyes feasting on them. Some resumed their lifelong nap. Some sat motionless and plotted maneuvers in the only interval their lives afforded them. That was why people went to the play in the City. But now he must include the thought of Shandimus somewhere in the house, “expanding” in response to what he had his sad, sick, silly, vowel-mouthing players say. And moving his mouth in imitation, as if the grimace made the warrior. Perhaps it does.
“Till now I have done my work backstage, you might say, Kyr Root. The integrity of the walls has been my passion. But it is the City that I love. Now I am ready to live there. I’m ready to step onstage! Cunt, bring me my uniform.”
’Nna saluted smartly and stepped off through a door into the tower. Drytung roused himself. He must make a little effort, he had let Root carry all the burden of conversation while he stood in a muse shoulder to shoulder with the girl like children listening to grownups. Shandimus was looking at him now in smiling interrogation. “The walls are not the City’s limit, then, but its foundations,” blurted Drytung.
“That is very well put, Kyr Drytung,” said the Domestic. “You have expressed my thought admirably. But the walls, if they do not limit the City, do protect it by keeping out everything it does not choose to admit. Everything that contracts us when we would dilate.”
“Exclusion is the guarantee of art,” said Drytung, wondering, Am I quoting someone? Do I believe this? In gardens walls keep out thieves and the neighbors’ chickens, nothing that can fly or dig. They catch the sun’s heat and hold it, support vines and pleached trees. More, they focus the gardener’s thinking: “Here is my work.”
Shandimus spread his arms as if for an embrace, while a rapturous smile fanned his beard. Then Drytung saw slim fingers at the Domestic’s collar. The linen coat slid down his arms, leaving him in his shirt (none too fresh). The hands (’Nna was on tiptoe behind him) gently plucked the mushroom-colored hat off. A matted tod of dark hair swept across a narrow skull. Shandimus’ face organized itself around the long nose with the pendulous tip as if it all, the spread of clear olive skin, led up to that sniffer, his flair.
The hat was replaced by a blood-red bonnet, its padded tip folding right and the gold sigillum of Walls affixed to it above an eyebrow. Drytung squinted: a crenellated tower above a halberd crossed with what was that, some sort of entrenching tool? Long handle. “Mattock?” Now the tunic climbed the arms, grey-green like mossy stone, quite plain, severe: cloth-covered buttons and no gold, a purple stripe around the wrist, no more. Broad in the shoulder, nipped in the waist, flaring over what should have been athletic buttocks but in fact were baggy brown trousers folding on dusty boots. Yet the Domestic was smiling broadly with the pleasure of this virile investiture. Or costuming.
4.
A Map of the Hook
“Gentlemen, I welcome you,” the Domestic said. “You have been seconded to my staff to write the true history of my campaign against the refractory subjects of Rhem.” Look how he bites off his words all crisp, thought Root. “It was wise of the Sacellary to enlist more than one such officer. I can send one out into the field, while the other remains near me to hear my thoughts and note the reports and dispatches I receive and the directives I issue. You will keep copies of these.
“In keeping with this policy I will now develop my strategy for this campaign. I do not need to emphasize the need for secrecy. Cunt, the books and maps.” The girl had them ready and was already stepping forward with a book in either hand. Root took one, a quarto volume bound in soft but tough black cowhide, fat and yielding like a comfortable boot. His had “ROOTS BOOK” stamped on the spine in gold. Inside, the pages were blank, thick, and creamy. “The pens.” Thin, matt black, with a silver clip; his fingers felt spiraling ridges for a good grip. Root unscrewed the top and viewed the fine silver nib, tried it on the skin of his hand. Ink flowed in a spidery sepia line. Now the girl was offering him a square metal canister and a bandolier, but his hands were full, so he ducked his head, and she slung the bandolier around his neck. Then with a smile she pressed a catch on the box. The lid flipped back, and Root stared down at the rounded ends of cartridges, four dozen of them. More cartridges were inserted in pockets all down the bandolier. “Ink, Kyr Root, in replaceable containers. Our own patent, invented by the Stationers’ Bandum. We don’t want you fussing with inkwells in the middle of a battle. Live rounds, I trust they’ll be,” laughed Shandimus.
Stationery always excited Root. He glanced up smiling and saw the girl ’Nna with her hands clasped behind her, staring pointedly over to his left where old Drytung sat on the gun-carriage, book spread open on his lap, pen poised over the first page. His expression was all intelligent attention, and he had already written something, hadn’t he, the prick. Root craned: “The Domestic’s Strategy.” Ah. Quickly he too sat and, juggling, got the canister closed round back of him, his book and pen in position, while the girl spread a map on the stones between his feet and Drytung’s, then stepped back, and the Domestic cleared his throat and stretched his scrawny neck right out of his collar.
Drytung adored maps. They were hard to get hold of, though, true maps. Sailors’ charts showing channels, depths, reefs and shoals, points to steer by on an otherwise unfigured coast, these you could still find in the ship-chandlers’ stores, worn and stained. Nothing much had changed in seventy years, nothing to make it worth a printer’s while to rework the old plates or even to strike off fresh printings. As for travel-maps, people made their way around the Despotate without them. Usually they knew where they were going, they never went far. There was hardly a paved road outside the city to drive your car or truck down, if it worked and you could find fuel and tires, and even then you’d hardly need a map. Just stay on the road, there wouldn’t be forks. Most people rode their donkeys along familiar tracks, using the beetle’s view, landmark to landmark.
He had seen the old pilgrimage scrolls. Drytung’s devout friend Lady Fayte had a collection of them. On the scrolls every way was a landscape (ink and brush) with the pilgrims at the several stages of their journey, always headed for the rising sun of religion, with Fna, the world-encircling mountain, ever visible. Drytung read the scrolls like stories; they all had the same ending, and they all took the traveler past gardens.
Once when his other friend Eastover, the thinker (as he became), was working in the Archives, Drytung had spent the better part of a day turning the leaves
of the table-wide superfolio containing the Imperial Tax Atlas. The maps were three hundred and fifty years out of date and lacking in geographical detail, but every habitation, from city to farmstead, was marked on them with great precision, down to the names of long-dead ratepayers and how much they owed annually. He had found his own family name (spelled slightly different) near the provincial hightown where his ancestors had served as burgesses and sheriffs till the town was sacked by heretics, in his father’s day. The modest manory had been confiscated owing to his father’s having chosen an inopportune moment to turn his coat. Drytung had never seen it; had always lived in the City, never well. A prosperous region, three centuries ago, to judge by the serry of names answerable to the Fisc.
This by his shoes was a military map. He’d never seen one of those before. Here was the Hook in its true spatial character. This map too was not new (the colors had faded, the linen backing showed through at the folds), but it was complete, down to the underground lakes and streams that flow only in summer, the shore at every seasonal state of tide, the exact outlines of villages. It had been kept up to date in indelible inks with jotted commentary alongside. Most of the map was blank blue: the great bay wrapped around by the curve of the Hook, bending to the Point of Rhem. There was Rhem and there was the City, the only two cities on the map, with a gap of blue dividing them. There was the pharos. There was the Palace. Shandimus was expounding strategy, and Drytung’s pen (noble instrument) was flying over the leaves of DRYTUNGS BOOK, but his eye kept tracing that penannular form. The Hook grew thin here and thick there, swampy here and sandy there, farmed here and forested there. In one place it was almost bisected by rivers, in another almost reduced to a chain of mountains.
There, winding down the length of it, crossing the rivers and dodging the mountains, was the Pike, which as he learned the Company was going to pave. Too bad. He had walked the length of it, from Rhem to the City, two summers before. A long dusty lane shaded by umbrella pines, live oaks, olives in the hills. Along it lay little villages, markets where no one lived; if you came there on the wrong day, the place was deserted, the stalls locked up tight, but on market day they were thronged. Two loaves, two bottles, some cheese, olives, figs, sausage, and he was on his way, provisioned for four or five days. Sunken, rutted lanes led to the farmsteads where he slept, and sometimes to the villas of the Hook sevastoi with their old gardens and orchards.
Most of the hereditary aristocracy owned estates there, the very lands from which their titles derived. For though these families had assembled vast latifundia elsewhere, swallowing up the small freeholders, and now lived on richer manories or in the City during the Season, yet these older estates lay very near their hearts, and most of these families made it a custom to spend the summer on the Hook. Here sevastoi put on shabby clothes and silly hats, struggled to fix a garden among dunes or pine-barrens, smoked out wasps’ nests or angled in the saltmarsh. Yet “the old place on the Hook” had in times past launched fierce little bands of brigands to pillage the heartland. Trophies of claymores and muskets still hung above the mantel in many of these old keeps.
Drytung had spent three weeks in one of them. He’d met an unshaven old fellow straddling a tiny ass and asked him for a night’s lodging, but the peasant turned out to be Kyr V’Arro, the Postal Logothete. Kyr V’Arro invited him to spend the night and then, when he’d found out Drytung was a schoolmaster, hired him to stay on as a tutor for his sons. The two boys had been sullen scholars enough till he gave them their lessons outdoors in all the corners of the property, teaching them grammar by means of thrown rocks, overturned logs, plucked plants, animals trapped and released, and stars. But a daughter came home from the convent where she was being finished and at once developed a rather pro forma yen for him. Drytung had not been especially tempted. She was just fourteen, with a large jaw, boiled pink complexion and hair so fair and fine it looked like pondweed. But she’d pulled his hand inside her shirt, one time they were alone, and then her father had walked into the room. The old boy had bellowed with laughter and sent Drytung on his way with an extra week’s pay that had allowed him to spend some rainy nights in inns, on those long stretches of upland moor that the Pike must cross in mid-Hook. Drytung, still writing, cocked an eye to search out the V’Arro place on the map. There, near that saltmarsh.
Dunes and barrier strands protected the Hook from the ocean’s surge, while all along the bay shore there clustered thousands of islands. Drytung studied these enticing specks of irregular outline, all with coves and points and inlets, some with beaches, some with bluffs, a few with a fort, a blockhouse, or a battery. A few were mantled in mangroves, some embraced lagoons. Some were ringed with still tinier islands or flung those away in a spray.
Perhaps one day he would buy an island. Quite a small one would do for him, just offshore, nothing the Hook sevastoi on their ancient estates would need to notice, unless they liked to. He would build a simple villa, patio with urns, small fountain and pool, one tower, upper room to write in. And turn the rest of the island into a garden so famous that travelers would be delivered to his jetty by the local oarsmen, to walk the paths with him, and wonder and take notes (as he was doing now), and then eat something with him (bread, his own olives), and linger over wine (his own vintage) beneath an arbor (or pergola). And a rough dory one calm day would set down upon his coasts, one day, an aristocratic virgin and her duenna, better yet her brother, someone he’d got to know in the City, or no, in the Army, for Drytung was a soldier now, a Protostrator in a Politic corps! Going on campaign! He would show them his mimosas and his mosses.
As soon as Shandimus had finished the briefing and gone off with the girl to change his trousers, Root studied the map. From time to time he glanced at his notes, scrawled jottings of the main points of strategy. Now let the concept grow around the points.
“Deception—equivocal.” It was not to look like a military expedition, not at first. Move the gear out this spring. “Establish bases at intervals” down the Hook. Here: a hightown just beyond the Cut, the canal that had let ocean shipping into the bay before the City’s harbor silted up. And here, a government kastron. Root poked it with his finger, then slid the finger along the map till he’d found the third base, and the fourth. That last one, a wildlife refuge, wasn’t far from Rhem. No materiel for combat, not at first. Tractors, graders, steamshovels, that sort of thing. Lots of picks and shovels. The expedition was to take on the character of a public works program, an army of roadmenders advancing down the Hook, draining, shoring, laying pipe, madacamizing the Pike. Repairing bridges and throwing up new ones. Work for thousands of hands, all summer long, highly inconvenient to the Hook families, make it tough to get around in any sort of vehicle, but they’d get their odd jobs done by crews quartered on their estates: many a driveway repaved, many a parapet set true, many a lawn rolled or redug.
And then, around August, bring out the artillery. Bring out the crates of rifles, the machine-guns, the ammunition. “For maneuvers.” Let the idea grow in Rhem, bit by bit, that this was an armed force. Then let them notice how the military stuff was moving out to Base Four, the Wildlife Refuge. How the men were gathering there, still working, fixing things up nice for the wildlife, but drilling, marching, maneuvering in their spare time. Rifle-ranges: rows of targets on the dunes. Mules backing fieldpieces into line to shell, just for practice, the disused prison on this rocky eyot, here, clearly visible from the ramparts of Rhem. And then, come the fall, the headquarters starts to move, from Base One to Base Two, then from Base Two to Base Three; in late autumn from Base Three, “repossessed monastery,” to the Wildlife Refuge. Pennants snapping from the staff cars, lots of gunning of motorbikes. “As if,” Shandimus had said, “the City were a body in epitome, its governing genius, and could extend that body’s entire strength and cunning to command its most rebellious extremity.” Ha! And he’d gone off with the girl to get out of his trousers! But Root liked the plan. It was theater.
There
was the City, a stage if ever there was one, eyes all around you wherever you stepped, every other citizen a spectator of your performance, and a critic. The whole polis showing off to the rest of the country, the rest of the world. Flash gold from roofs, rings, teeth, give itself Imperial airs still, demand universal attention, reverence, applause—love. And then here, Root pushed his finger over to Rhem, as if he could see its character better by touching its place on a chart, here in the cheap seats, rather far from the stage but with an unobstructed view of it, here were the Rhemots. Root did not know what Rhemots were like; he had never been to Rhem. Proud provincials, probably. The siting of their town was suggestive. They had built it all the way out on the end of the Hook. His finger traveled a good three hundred miles of map to get there by land, three hundred miles from the City as the dog runs. About as far as you could go and still stay inside the borders. Now this argued stubborn independence. But spectators all the same of the City’s glory across those, what, twenty miles, no more, of water blank as the darkness in the well of the Roohaneeya theater. Every evening at sunset the light falling on that imposing pile, golden roofs and domes, would fill the eastern sky with a radiance, winking at you as you knocked off work and washed your hands for dinner.
Root imagined them irritated. But what is irritation? Just a lower level of excitement. In a town like Rhem the people go around saying, “We are not like that, exhibiting ourselves, painting and perfuming, mincing and grimacing. We work; we are real people. There on all sides surrounding us is the sea, the great strong shapeless sea. There is the unforgiving weather over our heads. We deal with those, governing our course by self-forgetful ingenuity, courage, and strength. We have no time to attend to spectacle and actors’ antics.” Ho ho, wrong, dear Rhemots, said Root. That’s where you are wrong. The City’s antics must be attended to. You cannot turn your back upon the stage. We know you’re secretly watching us, over your shoulder as you coil your ropes and mend your nets. Little fascinated glances followed by a snort as you turn away. You really must see the whole show. We’re on the road with it, my dears, bringing it to you, as the theater always must, always must lob the bomb with meticulously calculated timing and trajectory (there’s our work) to blow up in the recalcitrant spectator’s face, no matter where he’s sitting or how he’s facing.