by K. J. Parker
It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t been found out after all. “The others,” I said. “Nicephorus and Artavasdus and Faustinus. Are they all right?”
Gelimer beamed at me. “Would you like to see them?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, stood up, walked to the window, opened it, pointed. I looked where he was pointing. I saw the door of the inner courtyard, into which someone had hammered two big iron staples. Hanging from the staples by their hair were two heads.
“Faustinus wasn’t at home when we called,” Gelimer went on, “but he won’t get far. We’ve got men down at the docks, and he’ll probably try and get on a ship. He’s not very bright. My third cousin, as it happens.”
I moved away from the window. Severed heads are a real pain in the backside in the theatre. No matter how hard you try, they always look comic and someone in the back row is bound to snigger. Weird thing is, real ones look just as grotesque and improbable as the fakes do.
“You’ve got a choice,” Gelimer went on. “Join us, or we were too late to save you and you were cruelly murdered by the traitors before we had a chance to get to them. No skin off our noses either way.”
“I’m not Lysimachus,” I said.
There was a dead quiet moment. “You what?”
“I’m not Lysimachus,” I told them, in my own voice. “I’m an actor, called Notker. Lysimachus was killed by a trebuchet shot, weeks ago. Nicephorus and his lot made me pretend to be him. They told me if I didn’t, they’d kill my mother. It’s true. Everybody knows me in the theatres, they’ll confirm it.”
Utter silence. Then Gelimer laughed.
“You know,” he said, “you had me going there for a moment. Trouble is, you don’t know your history.”
“It’s true,” I yelled at him. “I’m an impressionist, I do impersonations. I tried to do you once, in a burlesque at the Rose.”
I don’t think he was listening. “After the fall of Mistragon in AUC 447,” he said, “King Pausanias escaped from his pursuers by claiming he was the king’s body double, and they believed him. Then he raised an army, tried to take back the City and was killed. Don’t kid a kidder, son, you’re Lysimachus all right. Isn’t he, Totila?”
The fat man who liked to watch the sand-fighting nodded. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said, and stood up. “That one,” he said, prodding one of the scars Nicephorus had carved into my face, “I saw him get that, fighting Atucca in the New Years, ten years ago. He got that one from Pleusius the year after that; the judges called it a draw, but the fix must’ve been in, he won that fair and square. Take your shirt off. There,” he went on, “that’s where Ogus’ goons stabbed him in the back when he rescued the milkface engineer.”
Gelimer came up close and picked at one of the scars on my face with his fingernail. “That’s not sealing wax and greasepaint,” he said. “You’re Lysimachus.”
“Nicephorus did that with a razor,” I said.
Totila shook his head. “That’s an old scar,” he said.
“We aged them, with saltpetre.”
“Can’t be done. Everyone knows that. You can’t make a new scar look old.”
“For crying out loud,” I said. “Do I sound like Lysimachus?”
“Don’t know, never met you before. I imagine you sound like Lysimachus, because that’s who you bloody well are.”
“Now then,” Gelimer said, “that’ll do. You had a good crack at it, fair play to you, but it didn’t work. So let’s get back to business, shall we?”
My mother used to say, don’t pull faces or you’ll stick like it. And did I listen? “Fine,” I said. “What do you want?”
Gelimer leaned back in his chair. “Just now I offered you a choice,” he said. “Cooperate with the legitimate government of this city or we’ll kill you and bury you in a dung heap. We know you’ve only ever been just a figurehead, and during the early days of the siege you did absolutely nothing; you were just a bodyguard who happened to catch the public imagination. Fine, we have no problem with that. You can be our figurehead, and it’ll make life easier for us. Otherwise we say you were murdered by Nicephorus, and the people will be very angry and terribly sad, but sooner or later they’ll get over it. In case you were wondering,” he went on, “the army’s right behind us, and Sisinna’s one of us, so don’t expect anything out of him. All we want from you is to look pretty and wave, and not to do anything at all unless we say so. I imagine you can manage that, can’t you? It’s what you’ve been doing for the last seven years, after all.”
Suddenly I had to know. “Was it you who tried to kill me?”
Bewildered silence, just for a moment. “Good God, no,” Gelimer said. “Why would we want to do that? Like I just told you,” he went on, “it worked out very well for us, marvellously convenient, but it wasn’t us.”
“We assumed it was Nicephorus and the junta,” put in one of the fat men whose name I didn’t know. “That’s what gave us the idea. They’ve overstepped the mark this time, we thought; we can have them for that.”
“He hasn’t told us what he wants to do yet,” Totila pointed out. “I think we need a decision, don’t you?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Between doing what you tell me to and having my neck twisted?”
“Yes.”
I pulled a big, cracked smile. “I’m with you,” I said, “body and soul. Long live the revolution.”
Totila gave me a weary look. “Don’t call it that,” he said, “there’s a good fellow.”
In the theatre there’s a legend, or a ghost story, that we all know; it’s called the haunted play. There’s this play, so the story goes, and it’s one of the best plays ever written. It has it all: great speeches, fantastic leads, wonderful can’t-miss cameos, the best comic relief ever, but it never gets revived, and do you know why? It’s haunted. There’s the all-time greatest strong kick-ass female lead in this play, and nobody will ever play it again.
The story goes that the actress who won the part in the original production was poisoned by her understudy on the opening night; and with her dying breath she put a curse on the play. Anybody who played that part thereafter would be taken over by her, become her; see with her eyes, remember her memories, play the part exactly how she’d have played it if only she’d had the chance; die as she died, just as the curtain falls. Great story. For years I’ve been pitching it as an idea for a play, but for some reason nobody wants to touch it.
Do you think you could get trapped in a part that would never let you go? There was one old boy who’d done nothing all his life except the herald in the Cuckold’s Tragedy. It’s not a big part but it’s got the best speech in the play, which is a classic; and he made such a hit with it when he was thirty-odd that every time it got put on after that, they said, get whatsisname for the herald, until the public wouldn’t stand for anyone else. So: forty years saying the same sixty-eight lines of rhyming couplets every night: don’t knock it, at least you’re working. They say that towards the end he forgot his own name and would only answer to Vesanio, which is what the herald is called in the play. How sad, people say, what a waste of a life. Only I talked to his brother once, and apparently in real life he was the most boring, objectionable, obnoxious piece of work who ever emptied a room by walking into it – and he knew it, but he’d been born that way and couldn’t do anything about it; but when he was being the herald everybody liked him, sat through the big speeches waiting for him to come on, paid money to see him. When he was up there, his brother told me, he was somebody. Out of costume, he was just another piece of shit.
2
The Senate, better known as the House, dates right back to the earliest years of the Robur empire, or the commonwealth as it was called back then, and the same one hundred and sixteen families have had the monopoly on it all that time. Good story about that. When Andronicus the Great became the first emperor, back in the year dot, he had the senators dragged in front of him in chains, the way you do, and one of them,
head of the oldest and proudest of the hundred and sixteen, told him he was nobody, human garbage, didn’t even know who his own father was. Quite true, Andronicus said. But my family begins with me; yours ends with you. Then, to show his magnanimity, he spared all their lives, and fifteen years later they had him stabbed to death in his bath; moral, don’t neglect an opportunity to get rid of your enemy for the sake of a great one-liner.
The name of the snotty senator is not recorded, but bet you anything you like he was an ancestor of Gelimer. Quite a safe bet, actually, since the House families are hopelessly and inextricably interbred, like bindweed growing up through a honeysuckle, so everyone is everyone else’s cousin, uncle, nephew, often all three at the same time. Whoever that senator was, he and Gelimer definitely had a lot of qualities in common: pride, enough arrogance to poison the Middle Sea, and a big fat chunk of raw courage.
There was more to Gelimer than that, however, as I found out fairly quickly. He sent for me. I’d spent a troubled couple of hours up in my tower, with guards on the locked-from-the-outside door, and I’d come to the conclusion that my only chance of staying alive was to find a way to make myself useful. How I was supposed to do that, I had no idea.
Gelimer had parked himself in the C Sharp Chapel – so-called because if you hold a C sharp for more than a few seconds there, the walls start shaking so much that bits of plaster flake off, or so the story goes. Since half the anthems and introits in the old liturgy are scored in the key of C sharp, maybe it’s not surprising that for the last six centuries or so the place has been used as a sort of office come quiet room by successive Masters of the Vestments, the men who used to run things under the emperors. The last Master had been on the first ship out of the City when news of the siege broke, and he hadn’t been missed; in the intervening seven years, I don’t think anybody had been in the room except to clean the rather fine stained-glass windows and dust the few pieces of austere, utterly magnificent furniture.
Gelimer was sitting on a narrow, high-backed, uncomfortable looking chair made from walrus ivory, which I’m given to understand is the most valuable material in the world that isn’t a metal or a stone. The only other seat in the place was – I recognised the pattern straight away as a spinner’s chair, low, wobbly and prone to fall over backwards as soon as you try and stand up. I grew up in a house where both the chairs were like that. But not like this one, because it was carved out of whalebone in the captive-ball style; you know the sort of thing, where inside one ball there’s another, and another one inside that, and some poor devil has spent years of his life picking the material away through tiny gaps with a tiny hook on a stick. Inside the legs of this chair, therefore, was a mountainside with grazing sheep and shepherds and shepherdesses dancing to the music of a double flute. My guess is that it used to belong to an empress who liked to play at spinning, no doubt in pursuit of the simple life.
He looked up at me. “Sit down,” he said.
I considered the chair. “It won’t take my weight.”
He grinned. “You’d be surprised. That chair was made for the Empress Carbonopsina. They had to widen half the doors in the palace so she could get through them.”
I sat down. Solid as a rock. “You wanted to see me.”
He contemplated me for a moment, as if I was a piece of algebra, maybe the dying genius’s last theorem that nobody’s ever been able to solve. “My colleagues and I have been talking about you,” he said. “In the end we took a vote. Three votes to two.”
Not sure I liked the sound of that. “What was the motion?”
“Is this man Lysimachus or a burlesque actor by the name of Notker?”
“Right,” I said. “Who won?”
“Three votes say you’re Lysimachus.”
“Which way did you vote?”
“But it’s largely academic,” Gelimer went on, obviously not having heard me. “Everybody outside this wing of the palace believes you’re Lysimachus, so even if you really were an impostor, it wouldn’t matter a damn in practical terms. And we don’t care because, regardless of who you are, you’re going to do exactly what we tell you to, or we kill your lady friend.”
He paused to let the threat sink in. I was supposed to wait for him to continue. “The truth is,” I said, “I am Lysimachus, and I can prove it if you want me to. And as far as Hodda’s concerned, there’s plenty more where she came from. But that’s academic, too, because I’ll be more than happy to fall in with anything you gentlemen have in mind.”
“Son,” he said, “I don’t trust you further than I could sneeze a pig.”
“Likewise.”
That made him smile. “Of course,” he said. “And between you and me and the doorposts, I trust my esteemed colleagues even less. We’ve only been allies for a month. Before that, we hated each other to death. You know, there’s a lot of bullshit spoken about trust. Actually, you don’t need it at all, you get on much better without it.”
“A bit like truth, really.”
He frowned at me. “For the time being,” he said, “we need each other, that’s all that matters. Which is why I’m making you the emperor.”
My father had a trick punch, which he loved to show off. He’d hit someone just right, and the poor sod would stand there, completely winded and stunned, until my dad gave him a gentle little prod with the tip of his finger, whereupon he’d measure his length like a felled tree.
“Haven’t we already got one?”
Gelimer shook his head. “He died about eighteen months ago. Merciful release, he’d been in a whatchacallit, coma, for four years, just lay on his back with his mouth open, couldn’t move so much as an eyelash. I gather there may be a distant cousin somewhere near Olbia. You know where Olbia is?”
“No.”
“Me neither. To all intents and purposes, there is no emperor. Not that it matters a damn, in fact we prefer it that way, but we’ve got popular opinion to think of.”
“The people love the emperor.”
He nodded. “Goes to show just how stupid people are,” he said. “But, yes, they do. And they love you. But right now, you don’t have what you might call official standing. You’re not a minister or a councillor or a general or anything, so we can’t use you to actually do anything.” He paused for breath. “So, the story is, the emperor on his deathbed called for you and pressed the Great Seal into your hand and anointed your forehead with the holy oil and muttered long live Lysimachus I with his dying breath, and now you’re it. You all right with that?”
“Lysimachus II.”
“You what?”
“There’s already been a Lysimachus I,” I said. “About three hundred years ago. I was named after him, as it happens.”
He frowned. “You know what,” he said, “I do believe you’re right. Learned about him at school. Didn’t he build a bridge or something?”
“Aqueducts.”
“Same thing. Are you all right with that or aren’t you?”
There’s a very old saying: when you’re falling off a cliff, learn to fly. I’ve never flown myself, but I’ve seen it done heaps of times, and so has anyone who’s ever been to the theatre. If you look really close, of course, you’ll see a rope tied to a sort of harness thing worn under the flyer’s shirt; but so what, they’re still up there moving through the air, and that’s a pretty good working definition of flight. “That’s treason,” I said. “And sacrilege.”
He beamed at me. “Bullshit,” he said. “It’s not like anyone murdered the old fool. He died of natural causes, on my word as a gentleman. There’s no blood successor. Under such circumstances, which have never actually arisen but the principle’s there in the statute books for anyone to read, the choice of emperor lies with the House. We choose you.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. “But all those lies,” I said. “The holy oil and his dying breath.”
“Oh, that. Merely corroborative detail, as the poet says. If we say you’re the emperor, you’re the emperor. That�
�s the law.”
“Me.”
“You.”
Once upon a time there was a caterpillar who wanted to be an angel, floating through the sky on gossamer wings. And one day he woke up and found that he had gossamer wings and could fly; and he was still him, no lies, no greasepaint, no deception. And besides, there’s one’s own personal opinion, and then there’s the indisputable truth. A properly constituted committee of the House had just declared that I was Lysimachus and legally appointed me emperor in accordance with the constitution. Set against that the word of a disreputable burlesque actor, and who do you believe?
“It’s not like I’ve got much choice,” I said.
“You haven’t.”
“In that case, I accept.”
“Long live the emperor.” He yawned. “And the first thing you’re going to do once you’ve been crowned is abolish the Themes.”
Another trick of my dad’s was the left-hand feint to the jaw, inducing his opponent to lean back out of the way, thereby opening his solar plexus to a devastating right cross. “You what?”
“The Themes,” he repeated. “They’re choking the life out of this city and they’ve got to go. It was bad enough in the old days, but legalising them was a total bloody disaster. So you’re going to unlegalise them. That’s what we need you for.”
“You’re crazy. They’ll tear the City to pieces.”
“It’s possible,” Gelimer said gently. “But it’s got to be done. And I’ll tell you what, you’ve got a bloody sight better chance of getting the people to agree to it than we have, that’s for sure.”
The ground rushed towards me, flat and hard and as far as the eye could see, and I thought: if birds can do it, it can’t be all that difficult. “I’ll do whatever you want me to,” I said.
A few years ago I did a private after-dinner entertainment for the Faculty of History at the University. It went well; I did the Chancellor and a few of the senior lecturers, one of whom came up to me afterwards and actually thanked me, said it would make him ever so popular with the junior fellows. Anyway, after that I hung around for the free food, and I listened to a bunch of them, great scholars who knew everything there is to know, discussing some abstruse point, something along the lines of, was the post of Count of the Stables introduced by Cleomenes II or Strabo IV? One faction said there was good evidence (which they recited in detail) to say it was Cleomenes. The other lot adduced equally good evidence to say it was Strabo. Then someone passed round a bottle of the really good stuff, and when it was all gone, someone said, I know, let’s vote on it. So that’s what they did. Nine votes for Cleomenes, seven for Strabo, and that’s how we know, as a matter of cold scientific fact, which emperor created the post of Count of the Stables. And if you don’t believe me, look in the history books – the latest editions, of course, incorporating all the new advances in the sum of human knowledge – and you’ll see I’m right.