How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  I tried the other pocket, because you never know, and to my great surprise and joy I found a silk handkerchief, which I remembered picking up off the floor at a rehearsal about three weeks earlier. At the time I was in the money and had every intention of finding out whose it was and giving it back – very virtuous of me, and now my virtue was about to be rewarded. I took it to the place I usually go to, in Rose Walk, and they gave me about a quarter of what it was worth, which if you ask me was downright dishonest.

  Since I was in Rose Walk, I figured I might as well go the extra fifty yards and show my face in the Sun in Splendour. I hadn’t been in there for a while, on account of not wanting to meet certain people who’d been kind and understanding when I was down on my luck, but for all its faults it’s a useful place; and I reckoned I’d be safe, since my golden-hearted creditors were both appearing in a revival of the Two Witches at the Golden Star, and therefore would be on stage at that time of day. I deliberately trod in a muddy rut in the road before I went in. Caked mud can happen to anyone, no matter how well shod, and hides cracks and splits. Attention to detail is everything.

  The Sun never changes. They’ll tell you that’s because those are the exact same rushes on the floor that Huibert would have stood on when he was rehearsing the King in Dolcemara, and it would be sacrilege to replace them; likewise, that’s the very same soot on the back wall that Saloninus scraped a bit of to mix the ink with which he wrote Dream of Fair Ladies, sitting in that very corner, on the chair that wobbles a bit, next to the table that it doesn’t do to lean on too hard if you don’t want your drink all over the floor. Steeped in tradition, like the Empire itself.

  The usual crowd, too; mildly surprised to see me, after so long. They knew I’d been pitching to a manager – everybody knows everything – so I didn’t have to buy my own drink. Various good friends brushed the dust off me and I made a bit of a stir explaining where it had come from, though their interest in current affairs waned considerably once they were reassured that none of the theatres had been hit. They were more interested in what I’d be writing for the Rose, with particular reference to any small but lively roles for which they might just possibly be available. I promised something nice to everyone who asked me, the way everyone always does. It’s remarkable how hope breeds in this city, like rats.

  “Someone was in here looking for you,” someone told me.

  Note the grammar. If the subject of the sentence had been a proper noun, nothing out of the ordinary; A, a manager with a part for me, good; B, a creditor, bad; the two sides of life’s endlessly spinning coin. But somebody meant somebody we don’t know (and in the Sun we know everybody). My wings tensed, ready to launch me into flight, like a pigeon in a tree.

  “And?”

  My friend grinned. “Not in the business,” she said. “Wouldn’t last five minutes if they were.”

  “Ah.” I picked up the bottle and held it over her glass without actually tilting it.

  “Not very good at acting,” she explained. “We’re old friends of his, haven’t seen him in ages, got the impression he hangs out here. Like hell they were.”

  She’d earned an inch, which I duly poured. “In what sense?”

  She frowned. “Enter the Duke and his courtiers, disguised as vagabonds. Shoes and jewellery all wrong. Not a clue.”

  Unsettling. I wasn’t always an actor, believe it or not, and not everyone I’ve ever known was in the trade. “What did you tell them?”

  “Haven’t seen you for ever such a long time, no idea where you might be, thought you were dead, never heard of you.” She smiled at me. “Of course, I wasn’t the only one they asked.”

  “When was this?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  So they’d left very shortly after I arrived. Without being too obvious about it, I glanced round. Everyone who’d been in when I arrived was still there; no, I tell a lie. One face was missing. I slid the bottle – still a third full – across to her, picked up my hat and slipped out through the side door.

  I walked back up Crowngate, where I was nearly trampled to death by a half-company of heavy infantry. I stepped back into a doorway and let them pass. No prizes for guessing where they were off to in such a hurry. If I was a soldier on a mission from which I wasn’t likely to come back, I don’t think I’d stomp along quite so briskly. There you go. Presumably they all reckoned they’d be the lucky ones, or one. See above, under hope.

  It’s awkward keeping your head down and staying clear of people who are looking for you if you’re an actor, so I decided it was a stroke of luck that I didn’t have anything on at present. Correction: I had a play to write for the Rose, something I could do anywhere. It irked me that I wouldn’t be able to go back home but I’d still have to pay the rent, which would eat horribly into my capital. I resolved to channel my righteous indignation at the unfairness of it all into my writing, which I’m sure is what Saloninus or Aimo would have done in my shoes.

  If you want to lie low in this man’s town, the closer you can get to the docks the better. Ever since the siege began, and we won back control of the sea even though the whole of the land empire had gone down the drain, there’s been an awful lot of foreigners living in and around the docks, where rents are cheap. Nobody knows them, they don’t belong to a Theme, and their money is as good as anybody else’s. They’re traders, factors, agents, sailors discharged from foreign ships, and a lot of them can’t even speak Robur; and you know what we’re like with anyone we can’t understand. I figured that if I pretended I was foreign and replied in gibberish, if anyone spoke to me I’d be left blissfully alone. I could write my play, get paid for it and stay out of sight until whoever was looking for me decided I must be dead or overseas, and all that at a price I could afford. Magic.

  So I wandered around for a bit – it was dark as a bag by then – until I reckoned I’d found somewhere suitably anonymous, but where I could bear to live for a week or so, and knocked on the door. Long wait; then a panel in the door shot back and a little round bloodshot eye glared at me.

  “Room,” I said, with my very best Aelian accent. I’d wrapped my scarf round my head to hide the colour of my skin.

  The panel snapped shut and the door opened. The man with the eye saw what he expected to see. “Forty trachy a night,” he said. “Meals not included.”

  I held out my gloved hand palm upward, with a silver quarter-thaler gleaming in the middle of it. “Room,” I said.

  “Sure.” He stood aside to let me pass. “Heard you the first time.”

  The skin-colour thing would be a problem, of course. As it happens, I have a genius for makeup, but all my stuff, goes without saying, was back home, and I couldn’t afford to go out and buy any more. Just as well I know how to improvise. I learned how to do a really effective whiteface with chalk, brick dust and goose fat back when I was in the chorus of The Girl with the Red Umbrella. For chalk, substitute flour, and I was able to find the whole caboodle later that night in somebody’s kitchen.

  The room wasn’t bad. It had four walls, a tiny, tiny window and a door that shut if you slammed it.

  3

  My business requires me to keep fully abreast of current events. Talking of which, I’d like to protest in the strongest possible terms about the public’s – that means you – deplorable lack of loyalty and patience. Just because the minister for this or the secretary of state for that is no bloody good and couldn’t find his own arse with both hands, that’s no valid reason for turning him out of office and replacing him with someone else, almost certainly with an entirely forgettable face, a squeaky little voice that won’t carry to the back of the hall and no known mannerisms. It’s bad enough when a general gets killed leading from the front; desperate waste of my time and trouble learning him like a book, but I do understand, these things happen in war. But getting shot of a perfectly good politician just because he’s useless strikes me as downright perverse.

  It wasn’t like that in the old days, of c
ourse, before the siege. High officials were appointed, not elected, and you knew you could spend the necessary time and trouble on them with a reasonable prospect of seeing a return on your investment. But when the emergency government deposed the last emperor, sidelined the House and set up direct elections – I don’t suppose they deliberately set out to make my life hell. The unfortunate consequences to me personally probably never crossed their minds; which makes it worse somehow, in my opinion.

  Following the news when you’re effectively confined to a fifth-storey saltbox isn’t the easiest thing in the world, particularly if you’re playing the part of an ignorant foreigner who knows nothing about City politics and cares less. Some news, however, gets everywhere, the way sand gets under your collar on the beach.

  I’d ventured out, well wrapped up and in full whiteface, to buy a loaf and a bit of cheese – which I didn’t actually need straight away, but when you’ve been banged up for three days with nobody but characters of your own creation for company, any excuse will do. The stallholders in the little market in the square opposite the dock gates are used to foreigners, though they tend not to look at them when they’re taking their money; all to the good, as far as I was concerned. Anyway, there was this fat woman, and she was talking to the woman on the next stall down, who I couldn’t see. I wasn’t really listening, but then I caught: “All lies, of course.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” offstage, behind me.

  “Lies,” the fat woman repeated, inadvertently spraying my cheese with spit. “They’ll say anything, the damned Opties.”

  “It’s true,” asserted the voice off. “They were talking about it in the King of Beasts last night, my brother heard them. They were saying, he’s dead.”

  “Bullshit,” said the fat woman.

  “It’s true. Lysimachus is dead. He was at a party and a stone fell on him. Squashed flat, like a beetle.”

  That got my attention. It’s a cliché, but icy fingers touched my heart. It’s only when it happens to you that you realise just what a top-flight metaphor it actually is.

  Let me make one thing clear up front. I don’t care. I couldn’t give a damn. I don’t regard myself as involved.

  Accordingly, the death of Lysimachus – if true – was a devastating blow to me personally, purely because imitating him accounted for something like forty per cent of my income. Sure, you can still imitate people after they’re dead, but there just isn’t the same demand. Also, in bread-and-butter burlesque work, once someone’s dead he’s only ever going to be a supporting character, not the lead, a cameo at best: and even if you stop the show every night you don’t generally get paid extra.

  On the other hand – so my train of thought ran as I wandered back to my room, devastated, hardly aware of where I was or what I was doing – on the other hand, Lysimachus isn’t, sorry, wasn’t just anybody. He was the man. At the darkest hour in the City’s history – five hundred thousand bloodthirsty milkfaces camped outside the walls, the regular army all dead or scattered and the Fleet still trapped on the far side of the Ocean; with a garrison of a few hundred untrained men, he held the line against the darkness; his determination, his dauntless courage, et cetera. If he hadn’t been there, we’d all be dead. Not opinion, fact. Therefore – I consoled myself – there’s always going to be a demand for a really first-class Lysimachus impersonator, and more so now he’s dead (if he’s dead), because he’ll become the ultimate symbol of hope, and what’s the theatre about if not peddling hope to people who ought to know better? In fact – all false modesty aside, by the time I got back to my room I already had a plot and rough outlines of acts one and three, in which the Invincible Sun sends the spirit of Lysimachus back from the Elysian Fields to save the City in its darkest hour. And there’d be a siege in it, you bet, and surely someone with my incredibly fertile imagination ought to be able to figure out a way to shoehorn in a strong female lead –

  Turning it over in my mind as I ground my way through the last scene of Act 2 of the Rose piece, I tried to think about it logically. What had actually happened? I’d overheard two market women sharing a rumour; and one of them swore blind that it wasn’t true, just a pack of lies put about by the Optimates. Hardly proof beyond reasonable doubt. I felt an urge to go out and listen some more, maybe in places where they might be even better informed than my two current witnesses. But then I thought, what the hell. If Lysimachus was dead, he’d still be dead tomorrow, possibly even the next day. Death is like real estate; it’s different from everything else in its category because of its permanence. Meanwhile, I had work to finish, and people I didn’t know were looking for me. Perspective is everything.

  Act 2 is always a grind. With the exception of Acts 1 and 3, it’s the hardest part of your standard three-act play. So I tend to write fat – scribble down any old thing, just so long as it moves the action forward and gets you to the bits you know and give a damn about; edit and rewrite later if you absolutely have to. That way you don’t have to think too hard, which was just as well in this case, because my mind kept wandering. He was at a party and a stone fell on him. Indeed. Common knowledge by now that a trebuchet shot flattened a house in the Crescent the other day; and rumour is the ultimate oyster, building layer upon layer of glittering shiny stuff round a tiny speck of fact. Cue the venerable rumour-monger’s syllogism; somebody got killed that night; Lysimachus is somebody; therefore Lysimachus got killed.

  All right, now let’s try using a tiny bit of intelligence. I was hired to perform at that party. Lysimachus is one of my best characters. Would the host have hired a Lysimachus specialist to perform at a party where Lysimachus was going to be a guest? At the very least, I’d have been told – don’t do Lysimachus, for crying out loud, unless you want to get us all hanged. Exactly. Therefore, Lysimachus wasn’t a guest at the party, therefore he wasn’t flattened by a rock, therefore he must still be alive.

  I reckoned I was on fairly solid ground there. Yes, the host might have come up to me just before I went on and murmured: by the way, don’t do Lysimachus, there’s a good fellow, he’s in the front row. People do that to me more often than I care to think, and suddenly your entire plan for the evening is lying in more pieces than a broken pot. But think about it. It’s hardly a secret that Lysimachus is my best thing. I’m very good at him, though I do say so myself. Presumably Lysimachus knows this; from what I’ve heard about him and the nature and quality of his sense of humour, he’s not likely to be amused. So, if you’ve managed to lure the most famous and important man in the City to your dinner party, are you really going to risk mortally offending him by bringing on the world’s most celebrated Lysimachus-baiter as an after-dinner turn? No, of course not. Therefore, see above, the rumour isn’t true. Worrying yourself to death over nothing at all. Pull yourself together, for crying out loud and get on with some work.

  Getting Act 3 out and down on paper was like having a tooth pulled, but I managed it somehow. By that point I was sick to death of that horrible little room and the smell of cardamoms and lavender from the warehouse three doors down subtly blended with the open drain under my window, so I slapped on my whiteface, rolled up what I’d written and crept out into the street. I felt as bad as I must have looked. For ten days, all I’d had to wash in was the piss-pot, and the nearest water was the pump, five flights of narrow, winding steps down, and loneliness had been the least of my problems, if you count tiny things that bite as company. I’m not the most fastidious of men, but I don’t like it when I turn into the sort of creature I’d cross the street to avoid.

  I’d written the bloody thing, but how was I supposed to deliver it and get paid? If the men I didn’t know were serious about finding me, they’d have found out by now that I was writing something for the Rose, so I couldn’t go there myself; therefore I had to get someone to go for me. One of those utterly depressing times when you find out who your true friends are.

  To get from the docks to the Gallery of Illustration you have to walk right
across the City, not something I really wanted to do in broad daylight, in homemade whiteface. For a start, the stuff melts, which isn’t a problem you get with proper greasepaint. I muffled myself up as best I could, which only made me more conspicuous on a hot day, and everybody knows milkfaces don’t like the heat, so which was more likely to attract attention, a walking cocoon in a heatwave or a normally dressed milkface with brown streaks? I decided to go with the muffled look, and it must have worked, because people looked away rather than stared.

  The Gallery of Illustration started off as a theatre for people who don’t like to be seen going to a theatre, of whom there are quite a few in this incurably stage-struck town. Instead of plays, therefore, the Gallery put on illustrated lectures on uplifting themes, and even though the writers and the cast were basically the same people as you’d find in the dens of iniquity ten minutes away down the hill, the high-minded types reckoned it was all right and the Gallery did a roaring trade for many years. I played there myself quite a few times on and off. Then a new manager took it over and changed it into just another second-rate playhouse, and for various reasons my face didn’t fit any more. That was the manager I was going to see.

  Her real name’s Hodda and she’s been specialising in pure unsullied girlhood for about fifteen years. She gets abducted by slavers in Act 1 and rescued just in time by her childhood sweetheart in Act 3, which is exactly what they want to see north of the river; and when she isn’t doing that, she runs a painfully tight ship and drives the hardest bargain in the City. She’s also an exceptional dancer, in spite of a stiff left leg where someone kicked her over a business disagreement ten years ago; when she’s not on stage, she walks with a stick. She is, come to think of it, the nearest thing you’re likely to find in real life to a strong kick-ass female lead, a dignity to which she’s been able to aspire by virtue of her doll face and simpering skills. She can’t sing worth spit, though.