by K. J. Parker
The news, said Secretary Spado, was that there was no news. No riots, no looting, no angry mobs, no mobs of any sort. This might be because the Senate, either before or shortly after making its move against Gelimer, had ordered its sympathetic senior officers in the military to arrest and detain the hierarchies of both Themes, right down to divisional level. Shrewd move, smarter than I’d have given them credit for (or maybe they’d actually been listening to what I said). No riots, because nobody ranked high enough to organise a riot. The junior officers of both Themes weren’t going to make a move on their own initiative, because they’d been taught from infancy that it takes a divisional rep or higher to authorise any kind of militant action, and unauthorised action would earn its instigator a street kicking at the very least. In the past, in my dad’s day, it had never been possible to paralyse the Themes in this way because the authorities never knew who all the Theme bosses were; one or two in each quarter, maybe, but not all of them. It was only because the Themes had won their long, bitter fight to be recognised and given a share in government that it was now possible to kill them off.
Army officers unswervingly loyal to the Senate were listed in Schedule B, and the clerk who’d compiled the list had helpfully written next to each entry the name of a suitable replacement, so all I had to do was initial the bottom of each page. Loyalist civil service officials were Schedule C, and I’d have to rely on Spado to come up with substitutes, but that wasn’t quite so urgent, and, besides, there were only a couple of dozen of them and they were in relatively lowly positions –
“Hang on,” I said. “What about all the youngest sons of senatorial families? There must be hundreds of them.”
Spado gave me look, half-scorn, half-pity, appropriate for someone trying to deal with something he can never hope to understand. “The service is institutionally loyal to the emperor,” he said. “The Senate is an irrelevant relic.”
“But it’s their own fathers and brothers.”
“That’s how things work. The service runs the empire. The emperor allows them to do so. The Senate only gets in the way.” He gave me his you-just-don’t-get-it look, which I was to come to know well. “Yes, we feel a degree of loyalty to our families and our class, that’s only natural. But there’s a supervening loyalty to the service.”
You mean the empire, I almost interrupted but fortuitously didn’t.
“It’s a bit like when a woman marries,” he went on. “She leaves her father for her husband. When you join the service, you become part of the greatest institution in the world.”
Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Still, my father felt that way about the Greens. “What about policy?” I said. “I thought you weren’t supposed to interfere with that.”
Bless the child, said the look in his eyes, how sweet. “We don’t concern ourselves with abstract issues, if that’s what you mean. The Senate, of course, thinks about nothing else. That explains why it’s gradually dwindled away over the last three hundred years. And the emperor is mostly preoccupied with ceremony and protocol, except when there’s a crisis, of course.”
“And then?”
“We advise him of his options and carry out his instructions.”
I nodded. “The siege is a crisis.”
“Of course.”
“So you’ll do what I tell you.”
“Naturally,” he said, face of stone, “in all matters pertaining to the crisis. As to ordinary everyday administration, we wouldn’t dream of bothering you with trivia.”
Such as raising money or organising labour or procuring and distributing essential materials. Quite. It occurred to me to wonder whether Nicephorus and Artavasdus and Faustinus had ever bothered to talk to this man, and whether they’d still be alive if they had. And the Themes; now I could see why the Blues and Greens had to go. Because there was a third Theme we hadn’t known about when I was a kid, and the town wasn’t big enough for the three of them.
All my life I’ve found it useful to pretend to be slightly more stupid than I am. “Thanks,” I said. “That sounds like a very sensible arrangement.”
“It’s worked pretty well for a thousand years.”
“And if it ain’t broke,” I said. “Get me the names for Schedule C as soon as you can. Oh, and I’d like a secretary. Not your sort of secretary, someone who writes letters. A clerk.”
“You mentioned that before,” Spado said. “I have someone in mind. When will it be convenient for you to see him?”
8
Enter Usuthus.
Around three hundred and sixty years ago, the Robur planted a colony, one of many, on the bleak shores of the Friendly Sea. For some reason it got forgotten about – clerical error, probably, left off a list, confused with somewhere else with a similar name – and so it was left to its own devices for a century and a half. About two-thirds of the colonists died in the first five years; those who survived did so because they threw themselves on the mercy of the local savages, who patiently explained to them how to grow food, how to build wattle-and-daub huts, how to cure animal hides, how to smelt copper and knap flint, useful stuff like that. When the Mother City finally remembered them and sent out a governor to collect a hundred and fifty years of back taxes, he found a tribe of barbarians, distinguishable from their neighbours only by the colour of their skins. The Coribands, as they’d taken to calling themselves, were quickly reabsorbed into the Robur nation and taught to be civilised and properly ashamed of themselves, to the point where exceptionally bright Coribands were allowed to settle in the City and do the sort of jobs the pure-blood Robur didn’t fancy. Usuthus was one of these. His father, he told me, had been a district chieftain – uSutu is the name of the Coriband royal house – with sixteen wives and four thousand sheep; he slept in a hut we wouldn’t keep pigs in, and his most precious possession was a pair of military-issue boots.
Note the past tense. The Coribands were wiped out by Ogus. The hundred or so of them living in the City were all that was left.
As soon as I saw Usuthus, I realised – with joy, with great joy – that Spado had made a mistake. He’d underestimated me, just as I’d hoped he would. I’d asked for a personal clerk: fine. Spado had hand-picked a smart young man debarred from any hope of ambition by accident of birth, someone who owed everything to the service, who could be relied on to run and manage me as directed by his true superiors and faithfully report back every relevant word I said. He’d stitched me up and tamed me, and everything would be grand.
Usuthus was a short, broad lad with an oversized head and hands as big as frying pans, light-skinned (a touch of the limewash, as they charmingly put it in the service) with a wonderfully extravagant tattoo of stylised peacocks fighting all over his face and the visible parts of his neck. The peacocks, he told me, signified noble birth. I knew all about that, having carried a supernumerary spear in Auronia, or The Princess of Coriband more years ago than I care to remember. Eudoxia (remember her? Best Lady Fleta ever) came on in Act 2 with the most amazing peacock painted right down her back. It was pointed out to her that actually the Coribands only tattoo the face. Yes, but if we did that, they wouldn’t be able to see it up in the gallery. Anyway, Usuthus’ peacocks weren’t nearly as good, being merely the real thing, but they were pretty impressive nonetheless, and he didn’t have to come in an hour early every night to draw them on; they were permanent.
“You don’t mind them?” he said, mildly stunned.
“What’s to mind?” I said.
“Everyone says I ought to wear a veil,” he said. “Master,” he added quickly, having forgotten who he was talking to. “But I think a veil would look even worse.”
“I agree. You’d look like an idiot. Tell yourself, in ten years’ time everybody’s going to be getting tattoos, just so they’ll look like me.”
He laughed. Then it occurred to him that the Brother of the Invincible Sun was going out of his way to be nice to him, a thought that shut him up like a door. Like I said, smart.
&nbs
p; “Sit down,” I said. “No, over here where I can hear you. I want to ask you something.”
“Master.”
I poured myself a drink. Nearly offered him one, but that would’ve been weird, even for Lysimachus. “How well do you know the service?”
“Like the back of my hand. Master.”
“Well, you would do,” I said. “Your family’s dead, your people have been exterminated, the service is all you’ve got left.”
He hadn’t learned the granite face yet, though he was well on the way. “Yes, Master.”
“How do you feel about that? What happened back home, I mean.”
So far out of his comfort zone, even the stars looked different. “How do I feel?”
I nodded. “Come on, it’s a simple question. Sad? Angry? Suicidal? No great loss?”
“Sad. And angry.”
“Scared?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Me, too,” I said. “And I’ll tell you for why. While we’re all sitting here playing musical chairs with the governance of the City, Ogus and a half-million savages are getting ready to do to my people what they did to yours. Does that worry you?”
“Yes, Master.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. Sorry, where was I? It worries me, too. People in this city seem to have forgotten about it. There’s this feeling that because we’re still alive and life is going on just about as normal, somehow we’ve won. We haven’t, though. Rather the reverse.”
“Majesty?”
“Actually, that’s worse. Forget I spoke.” I leaned back in my chair and picked up a sheaf of papers. I’d found them on Gelimer’s desk, which he hardly ever used now. “See these?”
“Master.”
“Reports,” I said. “Foreign affairs committee of the House, about nine months old. Very, very boring. But if you manage to wade through all the diplomatic shit, they’re scarier than werewolves.” I handed them to him. “Read them,” I said. “Let’s see how smart you are.”
Next time I saw him he handed them back. “Well?” I said.
“I see what you mean,” he said.
“Tell me what you make of them.”
“Ogus is tightening the noose,” he said. “He’s overcommitted militarily, so he’s using diplomacy to cut us off from our food supply.”
I nodded. “Just diplomacy?”
“No, Master. He’s smart. He’s started building factories.”
I clapped my hands slowly. “I was right,” I said, “you’re smart.”
“He’s not doing it himself,” Usuthus went on, “but he’s behind it. All the money that’s going into setting up factories and buying or hiring skilled craftsmen, right across the East and the North; there’s only one place it can have come from. Nobody else has got that much money, not even the Sashan or the Echmen.”
“Who are at war, and therefore have no spare cash. Go on. Why’s he doing this?”
“At the moment, we’re indispensable. We make things people abroad want and can’t get anywhere else. Also, City-made’s got the most amazing prestige. If you’re a chief of some savage tribe somewhere, and you’ve got a lamp or a wine cooler made right here in the City, even if you don’t drink wine—”
“Like your dad and his army boots,” I said.
He smiled. “About a year ago Ogus bought a hundred thousand prisoners from the Sashan. The prisoners were Echmen, from a city way out East, where they used to make fine porcelain, textiles, fancy metalwork, before the Sashan captured it and burned it down. We make fine porcelain, textiles and fancy metalwork.”
“In a totally different style.”
“People can learn. But what else would Ogus want with a city full of craftsmen? His people aren’t interested in that sort of thing. Well, some of them are, but it’s not advisable to let on about it if you know what’s good for you. Ogus is planning to put us out of business. And then we starve.”
I nodded.
“Or, rather,” Usuthus went on, “we dig our own graves first. When people abroad stop buying our goods, we send out the Fleet and try and take over their cities, to protect our trade. We’ve got to do this; we have no choice. The foreigners won’t like that, not one bit. So they’ll turn to their mighty neighbours for protection, the Sashan and the Echmen.”
“Who are at war, so they’re too busy.”
“A land war,” Usuthus said. “Both empires have substantial fleets, presently standing idle. In a long, nasty war you’re always looking for new allies. It won’t be long before our fleet comes up against theirs; one or the other, quite possibly both. Now the Robur fleet is the best in the world, but it’s left over from when we had an empire almost as big as the Sashan, or the Echmen. If we sink sixty of their ships, they can replace them in a month. If they sink twenty of ours, we’d be lucky if we could build new ones inside six months. More likely a year, assuming we can get the materials. All the timber and stuff has to come in from abroad by sea. If we’ve got ourselves into a war with the Sashan—”
I raised my hand. I hadn’t thought of that; not beyond the putting-us-out-of-business stage. “That’ll do,” I said. “Where did you get all that stuff? About the Sashan and so on.”
“It’s obvious,” he said. “When you think about it.”
“Absolutely,” I said, having thought about it and not found it obvious. “So presumably the service has a range of contingency plans drawn up.”
“I don’t think so.” He looked puzzled. “For a start, I don’t know which department it would come under.”
God almighty. “So in the whole of the City there’s just two men clever enough to recognise something so obvious: you and me.”
“I didn’t say that,” Usuthus said. “Probably it’s occurred to a lot of people, especially in the higher grades. But not officially.”
“Ah.”
“Officially, there’s not a problem. And wild speculation isn’t encouraged.”
“I bet it isn’t,” I said. “Well, that’s about to change. What do you think we ought to do about it?”
He looked at me. “About Ogus and the factories?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. It’s a problem. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious easy answer.”
“Ah.”
He looked down at his hands. “That’s why the higher grades don’t want to think about it,” he said. “They’ve thought about it, privately, like this, and decided there’s nothing that can be done.”
“A bit like death,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“We all die,” I said. “Now you’d have thought an intelligent species like us, faced with something like that, we’d devote all our energy and our cleverness and all our money and spare time to finding a cure for death. But we don’t. We accept it. By the time we’re thirteen years old we just don’t think about it. We put it out of our minds and turn our attention to other things. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to function. And that’s what the Senate and the service have done.”
“I suppose so,” Usuthus said. He didn’t seem very happy about it. “But that’s how it is, surely. Some problems can’t be solved.”
I stood up. “Actually,” I said, “that’s not true.”
“Majesty.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. I know, I sound like an idiot. But actually, you’d be amazed what can be done, if you’ve got absolutely no choice. Like, an alley rat from the Themes can become emperor. How unlikely is that?”
He laughed. Fair enough. It was a good line, and I did it just right. “True,” he said.
“And half of that,” I told him, “was luck, and the other half was the thought of what would happen to me if I didn’t make the most of the luck. That’s why the Invincible Sun gave us fear. It makes us smart. Show me someone who’s afraid of nothing because he’s got nothing to be afraid of, and I’ll show you a cow. Humans are at their very best when they’re scared shitless.”
That was my exit line, only I h
ad nowhere to go, so I sat down again. Usuthus looked at me. Then he said, “You have something in mind.”
“No,” I admitted. “Right now I’m staring up at the sky waiting for luck to drop at my feet. But when it does, I want to be ready for it. And that’s where you come in.”
9
“What are you up to?” she asked me.
I hadn’t seen very much of her for a few days, and she was clearly bored out of her mind. Of course. No job on earth as boring as being empress, if you let it. What you’re supposed to do is loll about in gorgeous splendour surrounded by a hundred ladies-in-waiting, all of noble birth, so with very little conversation. A woman who’s been used to managing a theatre would obviously go mad after a few hours of that, so she’d chased the noble ladies away and found a quiet room at the top of a tower where she could put her feet up and read poetry, which she quite likes. But two days of that had been more than enough. Right now, she was ready to start breaking things.
“I’m stealing the civil service,” I said.
She nodded approvingly. “That extraordinary little man with the chickens on his face.”
“Peacocks.”
“I stand corrected. He’s part of it, I imagine.”
“He’s the key,” I told her. “Right now, we’re banjaxing all the official channels so that everything’s got to go through him.”
“Like the main sewer.”
“Good analogy. In order to be valid, every order in this man’s town has to be sealed with the Imperial seal. Not the Great Seal, of which there’s only one, it’s sort of the next seal down. And at the moment there’s, what, thirty of them, all identical: one for each major department of state.”
“With you so far,” she yawned.
“By this time tomorrow,” I said, “with luck, there’ll be five, and all in one room.”
Her eyes widened a little. “Clever.”
“I thought so. There’s six Coriband clerks working in the service. My pal Usuthus is one of them. The other five are sitting in a little room somewhere waiting for the seals to arrive. Usuthus is arranging for all the departmental seals to be called in, for an audit or something; then twenty-five of them will mysteriously vanish, and the Coribands take charge of the remaining five. Once they do, they’re going to be very, very busy.”