How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  The speech ran out on me, and I stopped. My throat was sore as hell and my head hurt so much I couldn’t bear it. Oh, and I was scared as well. They were looking at me, as if I was a bill they were splitting three ways, and they couldn’t decide who’d had the turbot.

  “I still don’t know,” Artavasdus said. “I can see what you mean, but I’m still not sure.”

  “He’s trying too hard,” Faustinus said. “Probably nervous.” He leaned over me, smiled horribly. “Relax,” he said.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Faustinus,” Nicephorus said, “you’ll only make him worse.”

  Faustinus looked at him. “Well?”

  Nicephorus sighed. “I think he’ll do,” he said. “Arta?”

  Artavasdus shrugged. “Like you said,” he replied wearily. “If we think we’ve got a choice, we’re kidding ourselves. I just have this terrible feeling it’s all going to end very badly.”

  “You’re not helping,” Nicephorus said. “All right, I’ll take that as carried unanimously. You two had better get back out there. I’ll brief our reluctant hero.”

  Artavasdus stood up, shaking his head ruefully, and walked out of my field of vision. Faustinus started to follow him, stopped, turned back as if he was going to say something, thought better of it, went. Which left me alone with the second most powerful man in the City. What joy.

  He untied the ropes that were holding me down to the sort of cot thing I’d been lying on. He was clumsy or his hands were shaking; he had trouble with the knots. Personally I’d have cut the ropes and have done with it. “All right,” he said, “let’s see how smart you are. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Extrapolate.” He paused. “It means, use what you know to make a guess about what you don’t.”

  I decided I didn’t like him very much. “You want me to impersonate Lysimachus.”

  “Genius. All right, why do we want that?”

  I think I mentioned that my head was hurting. Wasn’t getting any better, either. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’s sick, and there’s a big occasion coming up.” I waited for a reaction. None. “Maybe he’s lost his voice, and there’s a speech he needs to make.”

  Nicephorus shook his head. “We’d just postpone it.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “Why don’t you do as you’re damn well told?”

  Funny, the little things that bug you into doing something stupid. That had been a favourite phrase of my dad’s. “Fine,” I said. “Maybe you’re planning a coup. Maybe you’ve already done it, and Lysimachus is locked up in a cellar. And you want me—”

  He laughed. “Obviously,” he said, “we found out all about you. No, Lysimachus isn’t downstairs in a cell. Your mother is. And if you don’t do as we tell you, we’ll make her wish she’d never been born.”

  You know what? I rather like melodrama, as a genre. It’s easy to write and good fun to act, and it fills theatres even in the hot weather. But I don’t like it much in real life. And the way he’d said that, about my mother, could have been my father talking, when he was bullying someone. “You know your trouble,” I said. “You have problems taking yes for an answer.”

  That shocked him, and he laughed. “Fair enough,” he said. “Yes, we need you to pretend to be Lysimachus.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s dead.”

  My head felt as though there was a wedge in it, and someone had struck the last blow that cleaves down the grain. “A rock fell on him.”

  “You heard the rumour.”

  “I was supposed to be there that night. I was the entertainment.”

  Nicephorus looked at me, shocked and steady. “Just as well for us you weren’t,” he said. “All right, then. Can you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He was starting to lose patience with me. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose you do. There’s a difference, taking people off for laughs in a burlesque and actually pretending you’re them. For one thing, on the stage you exaggerate. You daren’t do that if it’s for real. You can do the voice when you’re declaiming, but conversation’s another matter, and I don’t suppose you ever heard him just chatting with people.”

  “No,” I said. He looked at me. “But I can extrapolate.”

  His face cracked into a grin. “Go on, then.”

  All right. Here’s how I do it.

  It’s not exactly difficult. If it was, I wouldn’t be able to. All I do is, I imagine I’m standing in front of a mirror, but the reflection I’m looking at isn’t me, it’s him – the target, the victim, the subject. I watch his face as I talk to him, observe how his lips move, his eyes, the intonations and where he puts the stresses on words; I hear his voice in my head, though I’m doing the talking. And then, for all intents and purposes, I’m him. I open my eyes and face the audience, and that’s all there is to it.

  I’m kidding, right? No, actually, I’m not. I’m definitely not thinking out every word and every gesture, because that’s suicide. I’m being him, which I can do as easily as I am me – which isn’t exactly easy in any realistic sense of the word. Because being me has never been easy. And on balance I’d far rather be anybody else but me.

  True. If we were talking to each other right now, face to face, the voice you’d be hearing wouldn’t be my voice – not the one I was born and brought up with, in the alleys round the Old Flower Market. I had to work like mad to get rid of that voice, with its sharp, whining vowels, its devil-may-care slovenly aspirates and its smothered, bitten-off consonants. And the words would be all different, if it was really me talking: different vocabulary, different syntax. I had to learn to shape my sentences in a completely alien way when I got out of that horrible place, and that made me change the way I think. And now it sort of comes naturally, but it’s also constantly there, a nagging worry in the back of my mind, just in case I let slip a glottal stop or a dislocated conditional clause or an atavistic verb ending. No, being me is hard work, all the time. Being politicians is a walk in the park in comparison.

  Which, incidentally, is why I get so few low comedy parts. Your accent’s just not convincing, they say, you’re laying it on with a trowel. Have you ever actually been east of the Black Cross in your life? And I shrug, and think: small price to pay.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, sounding just like Lysimachus. “But don’t expect miracles.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “That’s not bad,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” I said. He laughed.

  “Actually, screw you would be better,” he said. “Lysimachus didn’t actually swear very much, not after he turned into a big hero. Of course, he wouldn’t have thought of screw you as swearing.”

  “Screw you, then.”

  “Much better. Only then he’d laugh, after he’d been horribly rude to you, to show it was all right.”

  “Noted,” I said, as myself.

  “Try it again.”

  “Cue.”

  “What? Oh, sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Actually, that’s not bad.”

  “Screw you,” I said, then grinned; not a laugh, because he wouldn’t just then, not out loud. I knew that, even though I’d never met him. I just knew, a laugh wouldn’t be right.

  “That’s much better. You’re sure you never met him?”

  “Me and a big man like that? Talk sense.”

  He pursed his lips. “Not big man,” he said. “Actually, I’m not quite sure what he’d have said, but I never heard him use big man in that context.”

  “Boss,” I said.

  “Yes, you’re right.” He looked at me. “How’d you—?”

  “He came from the Themes, right? Boss, or boss-man, or big boss man. Sort of a technical meaning in Poor Town.”

  “Yes, well, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you? You know, you’re really very good.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I gave him the look. In Paradise it means you’re asking for trouble
. It made him laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “Listen to me. I’m apologising to you; you really have got the hang of this. All right, you can stop it now. Truth is, I never could stand the fellow.”

  For a moment I forgot my headache. “Is that right?”

  “Stop it, I told you. No, I never did like him much.” He stopped and looked at me. “What do you know about him, exactly?”

  Strange question. “What everybody knows. He was the man. He saved the City.”

  “Like hell he did.” It was sudden, and very bitter. “Let me tell you about Lysimachus. He was a bodyguard. He started as a fighter in the arena; he was a champion; he was very good at killing people. Then the siege happened, and a very great man needed a bodyguard, so we chose the best for him. And, yes, he was a very good bodyguard, and he loved the great man: he was devoted to him, like a dog. But then the great man died, after he’d saved the City, and the people of this town weren’t ready to hear that their saviour was dead, so we changed the truth. We told them, Lysimachus was the great man, Lysimachus saved the City; because he looked like a hero, and he was big and strong and he could tear a man to bits with his bare hands in fifteen seconds flat, and people like that. We told them: the man you thought was a great man was really just a geek, an engineer, he tinkered with stuff, but he wasn’t a leader. It was Lysimachus who did it all; he really saved your lives when we were this close to getting slaughtered.” He stopped for a while; he was feeling uncomfortable. “It was my idea,” he said. “We had to do something, quickly. So I said, this is what we’ll do, because people have to have someone to believe in or they give up.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “And here I am, doing the same thing all over again, serves me right, I guess. But it worked the last time, and it’s going to work again. This city is not going to fall just because its people are—”

  He didn’t tell me what its people are. He assumed I already knew.

  “I didn’t know about Lysimachus,” I said.

  “Of course you didn’t, nobody did, that was the point.” He took a moment to collect himself. “But it worked,” he said. “And it worked in spite of the fact that they’d been there at the time, they knew who the real hero was, they cheered him in the streets, when they weren’t blaming him for every damn thing. But then we told them, it was Lysimachus really. And they believed us, because he looks like a hero, and he’s one of them, scum of the earth made good, and because his skin’s the right colour.”

  Ah, I thought, I was right. And the name was still on the tip of my tongue.

  “So,” he went on, “if we could sell them that muscle-bound thug in place of a real hero, we can sell them you in place of the thug. Just long enough till we can find someone else for them to worship and adore, and then you’ll be free to go. Rest of the day’s your own, and all that.”

  I decided he’d forgotten something. I waited for a moment, then said, “Excuse me.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry to bother you, but what’s in it for me?”

  He turned his head and gave me a look I won’t ever forget. “Staying alive,” he said. “You want to do that, don’t you?”

  8

  He gave me a book to read: a history of the siege, it said on the spine, which wasn’t strictly accurate, since it only went down to where the colonel of engineers (Nicephorus’ old boss) got killed. It was quite hard going but I struggled through it.

  From it I gathered that at one point things had been very bad indeed. Apparently, the enemy lured the entire City garrison out into the woods and slaughtered them like sheep, at the same time fixing things so that the Fleet was marooned a thousand miles away and couldn’t come back to save us. The only thing standing between us and annihilation was a few companies of engineers, who happened to come back to town after they’d finished a job somewhere. Their commander pulled off a series of tricks and scams that made the enemy think we were better prepared than we were, and that bought some time. And then there was a whole load of stuff about the engineer commander having known the enemy leader when they were kids, which I must admit I took with a pinch of salt, because how plausible is that? I guess Nicephorus had it put in the book because he needed something to explain how we managed to survive apart from plain old-fashioned amazingly good luck, which happens more often than you’d think but which no audience ever believes in.

  I read the book in a small room – call it a cell, because that’s what it really was – in a tower in the Imperial palace, while I was waiting for someone to come and tell me what I was supposed to do. You’d have thought from all that intensity – we have no choice, disaster looms – that they’d be in a hurry to get on with it, whatever it might turn out to be, but apparently not. Still, it gave me time to reflect, get the horrors, overcome them, relapse into a quivering mass and gradually pull myself together again until I resembled something vaguely human. Also, my headache slowly subsided, though I was too busy scaring myself to death to feel the benefit.

  You know on the opening night whether it’s going to work or not, and sometimes you can hear the death rattle at the first rehearsal. I had a really bad feeling about the whole idea. It was the result of desperation, and that’s never good. When you get bounced into something by force of circumstance, you don’t have options, and it’s in choosing between alternatives that we get a chance to exercise wisdom, whatever the hell that is. It’s the difference between riding a horse with a bit and bridle and being tied on a galloping horse backwards. So, if it turned out that I had any say in the matter, I wasn’t planning on sticking around. If I saw a chance, I’d take it, simple as that.

  Assuming I didn’t get a chance, was there anything I could do to improve my chances of survival? Nothing immediately sprang to mind, other than giving this ridiculous job I’d been landed with my very, very best shot. Actually, the book made me feel a bit better on that score, since it purported to record examples of rational human beings believing the most atrocious garbage, on both sides of the City wall. By the same token, there’s only so much dumb luck in the world this side of the Great Meathook, and, by the look of it, the provisional government had used up all of it, leaving none for later.

  Fine. There’s an old saying; the worse the play, the harder you have to try. Which meant, among other things, that I was going to have to take this ridiculous business seriously; not just sleepwalk through it looking for an opportunity to sneak away, but actually think about it, focus, concentrate, get every last detail exactly right; not simply do enough to satisfy the management, but put everything into it, as though it mattered, because it mattered. Hard to do, given the ludicrous situation, but like the man said, it’s not like we have a choice.

  For the next five days, the conspirators – let’s call them that – worked on me to bring me up to snuff. In practice, that meant that for twenty hours out of twenty-four one of them sat with me, while the other two were off somewhere, presumably running the City, and talked to me; all I had to do was be Lysimachus back at them. If I got something wrong, I was corrected. No, he wouldn’t say that, he wouldn’t sit like that, he wouldn’t laugh at that, that doesn’t sound right, try it again. They were patient, I’ll say that for them, with the deadly calm of men wound up tight like fiddle-strings; shouting and losing your rag would be counterproductive and we can’t afford to waste a second. By the end of the third day I was shattered; that was intentional, they said, no use me only being Lysimachus when I was fresh as a daisy, I had to be him all the bloody time. That night, Artavasdus woke me up after I’d had one hour’s sleep. I remembered what was going on just in time and woke up perfectly in character; violent start, a backwards wriggle that put an arm’s length between me and him, and my hand on where the hilt of a knife should have been on the bedside table, only there wasn’t one. Not bad, though I say it myself, and from then on Artavasdus started treating me with a bit of respect.

  “We’ll practise that some more,” he said.

  “No we fucking won’t.”

&nbs
p; He grinned. “Swearing,” he pointed out.

  “Swearing’s called for,” I replied. “And if you do that to me again I’ll break your arm.”

  For a split second, he thought I meant it. For a split second, come to that, so did I.

  On the sixth day, they showed me in public. It had been a very long time, they said, since anyone but them had laid eyes on the great man, and the City had noticed; there were ugly rumours flying around – true ones, but never mind that – and something had to be done straight away. There had already been riots, which had been put down with considerable brutality, which the conspirators regretted. In consequence, they’d had to issue a statement that Lysimachus was ill, dangerously so, though the doctors were hopeful. It would therefore be in order for me to make just a fleeting appearance on a balcony, well wrapped up against the cold, even if there wasn’t any. I’d wave, then stagger back exhausted by the effort, and my faithful comrades would escort me into the palace, and everything would be just fine.

  And it was. Playing weak and feeble is harder than it sounds, but fortuitously I had the mountain fever once, and I could remember how my joints ached and how much effort it took to do anything at all. Don’t worry, they told me, you’ll be twenty feet over their heads and all muffled up. I told them, you do your job, I’ll do mine. Idiots. Didn’t they realise that it’s got to be perfect? Don’t suppose they did. You need to have served your time in the profession before you find that out, but it’s true. The people at the back of the gallery can’t actually see your face, but they know if you’re smiling or not, just as they can tell if a girl’s pretty. I have no idea how, but they do.

  So I did it my way, and it worked. I think that was when I realised exactly what Lysimachus meant to the people of the City. When they steered me out onto the balcony, I discovered I couldn’t see anything except people: no pavement, no walls, just bodies squeezed up tight against each other, a solid mass of faces, eyes all fixed on me, as though the stalls had overflowed and flooded the whole of town. And the noise. I don’t get cheers like that when I go on but some of us do. I stood there suffocating in the noise, and, God, I was jealous.