How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  “You leave him alone.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him. Personally,” she went on, “I think it was the senators. Of all the people who hate you, I think they hate you the most.”

  “People don’t hate me. You heard them. I’m really popular.”

  The you-halfwit look. “I told the army people I thought it must be the senators and they said they’d look into it, but I don’t suppose they’ll actually do anything. Which is a pity. We could get rid of the whole lot of them, after something like this.”

  “I’m very tired,” I said. “Please go away.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m your devoted empress. I have to stay here. And this chair’s murder and I’ve got cramp in my leg.”

  2

  While I was lying there drifting in and out of sleep, Captain Very and Usuthus had a difference of opinion, which by all accounts you could hear right down the hall. The captain said no more standing waving on balconies, period. Usuthus said he’s got to do that, if he starts skulking around behind a bunch of guards they’ll think he’s scared. He should be scared, said the captain, people are trying to kill him. What about a mail shirt, suggested Usuthus, or one of those metal-lined coats, a brigantine? A brigantine is a type of ship, the captain said. You know what I mean, said Usuthus.

  So, in addition to all that horrible, hot, heavy stuff I had to wear concealed armour, which weighed a ton and made me sweat like a pig. That, however, was the least of my concerns.

  As soon as I was up and about again, I sent for the military. I got a representative sample: General Aineas, commander-in-chief, General Pertinax, officer commanding the City garrison, and the idiot in charge of the engineers, who I’d already met. Yes, they told me, the enemy were continuing to bombard us with fire-pots, but not to worry because now the Themes were cooperating with the City fire brigade, everything was under control. Yes, there were fires in various parts of Poor Town practically every day, but the engineers had drawn up a scheme of wholesale demolition for the shanty districts, which were by far the most flammable parts of town, and once those had been cleared away there really shouldn’t be a problem. Yes, the bombardment was having an effect on morale, but since the worst affected areas were mostly slum neighbourhoods—

  I stopped them there. How come, I asked, the enemy could now shoot fire-pots over the wall? Ah, said the engineer, that’s because they’ve solved, or at any rate partially solved, the problem of the mass-versus-velocity trade-off, basically the reason why you can throw a stone further than a feather, with their latest generation of trebuchets; it was either a modification to the throwing arm or a new type of clay for making the pots out of, they weren’t quite sure which—

  “And that means they can lob a pot over the wall?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How high over the wall?”

  He didn’t know. “Quite some way, I assume,” he said, “or they wouldn’t reach so far inland, so to speak.”

  “What I want you to do,” I said, as quietly and calmly as I could, “is get a load of very tall poles, and a load of nets. Do you see where this is going?”

  “With respect,” said the engineer, “it’d take an awful lot of nets and poles to protect the whole circumference of the walls.”

  “Then that’s how many nets and poles we’ll need.”

  “Yes, but how will we know if we’ve got the nets up high enough?”

  Colonel of engineers. By definition, one of the smartest men in the empire. “I’d have thought you could work it out by the angles the pots come over at. You know where the trebuchets are, roughly. You know where the pots are landing. And if the nets turn out not to be high enough, use longer poles.”

  (The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people’s lives.)

  The nets worked, for a while. Then they didn’t; the pots came sailing over the top of them. So we put up longer poles, and the bombardment stopped.

  “That’s all very well and good,” said General Aineas, when he reported that fact; I’d insisted on meeting him at least once a week for a regular briefing, and he was gradually getting used to me. “But we can’t just react to that sort of thing, we’ve got to start making the running. We need to hit them. Hard.”

  I nodded. “Such as?”

  “A full-scale strike against their artillery.”

  “I see,” I said. “So when you get stung by a bee, you think it’s a good idea to go and kick over the hive.”

  “Excuse me, Your Majesty, I don’t quite—”

  “No full-scale strike,” I said. “If we fail, we lose hundreds of men we can’t replace. If we succeed, we make Ogus look stupid, so he finds some other way to hurt us, to save face. I thought it had been decided long ago, we can’t achieve anything worthwhile by fighting them, at least not on land. By sea, maybe, except they haven’t got any ships.”

  The general looked at me as if I was babbling. Maybe I was.

  “We’ve got ships,” I said. “Tell you what. If you really feel we ought to give Ogus a bloody nose, why not put some of your men on board some ships, sail off somewhere where Ogus’ people think they’re safe, and make life miserable for them? Moral: if you hit us, we’ll hit you back, only we can do far more damage.”

  I gathered I’d suggested something faintly obscene. “I would need to discuss that with Admiral Sisinna.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Do it. Write him a letter. I want a list of potential targets. Make them places where we can go in and out with minimal risk, where we can do a lot of damage and be well away long before Ogus can get his soldiers there. Also, for choice, places that supply stuff he needs for the war effort. Not just food but other stuff: clothes, rope, tools, barrels. Barrels are a good thing, actually; you can’t fight a war without barrels. Where does Ogus get his barrels from?”

  Pause. “I’d have to look that up.”

  “If we do this right,” I said, “we can make life really hot for him, and there’s nothing he can do about it. Not unless he wants to pull lots of soldiers away from the siege to defend every town and city in his empire that happens to be on the coast. Which an awful lot of them are, by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  I was getting on his nerves. “It would mean committing our naval reserve,” he said, “possibly to a dangerous extent.”

  “Not really. At the moment our whole fleet’s a reserve. The enemy have no ships.”

  “Also,” he went on, “we would need to take a substantial proportion of our fighting infantry away from the City, thereby seriously weakening the garrison.”

  “You forget,” I said. “I was here when Nicephorus and Artavasdus defended this city with a few hundred engineers and a bunch of armed gardeners. I’m sorry,” I added, “didn’t mean to raise my voice. Actually, I’m agreeing with you. You said we need to hit them hard. You’re absolutely right. And this is a very good way of doing it.”

  The look on his face as it dawned on him that there was a serious risk of it turning out to have been his idea; I’d have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been an idiot.

  Usuthus brought me the list. They’d done a good job; locations (see map), together with estimated sailing times there and back (not necessarily the same, because of tides and stuff), known defences and estimated level of resistance, also value as military and economic targets. I called in Captain Very, and the three of us went over it. Captain Very wanted to hit an arrow factory a hundred miles up the Friendly Coast; not a bad idea, except they weren’t shooting a lot of arrows at us right then, on account of being out of range. Usuthus pointed out that trashing a couple of small towns just down the coast would disrupt food supplies to the enemy camp. Smart, I said, but they can just as easily bring what they need in overland, so they’d be back to normal inside a week. Instead, I suggested, what about these here? Namely, towns and small cities, practically undefended, where Ogus had established his
factories, to put us out of business by manufacturing copies of everything we had to offer.

  “Actually,” Hodda said, over my shoulder, “that’s not a bad idea.”

  I hadn’t heard her come in. “It’s got to be worth a try,” I said. “They’ve been there for seven years, and all that time nothing we’ve done has really hurt them. All we’ve managed to do is try their patience. If we can show that this war isn’t necessarily all one-sided, maybe we can change a few minds. Not his, obviously, he’s obsessed. But he must have people he relies on, supporters, allies. If they get it into their heads that maybe the game isn’t worth the candle, we might just get somewhere. At the very least, it’ll give the generals something to do. I worry they’ll get bored and try something stupid.”

  So we attacked Locaria. Locaria is, or was, a small city on the south-western coast of the Friendly Sea. Until about seven years ago, it was a loyal member of the empire, paying its taxes, sending men to serve in the auxiliary forces, desperately keen on the latest City fashions in clothes, food and popular music; I vaguely remember someone taking a touring company out there years ago, in the off season, playing some worn-out old melodrama. They’d always been good metalworkers, because of the rich ore deposits in the nearby hills, and when Ogus told them they were free of us and working for him, it meant hard times for a while, since we’d always been their best customers. But then Ogus set up a big factory in Locaria, making cooking pots, trivets, door hinges, nails, firedogs, all the stuff we do so well, and life was just starting to get back to normal when we turned up.

  I read the reports, which were terse and to the point: mission accomplished, basically. Forty ships carrying three thousand heavy infantry suddenly appeared off the coast early one morning. I imagine the Locarians were able to recognise Imperial warships from a long way off; only seven years ago, everybody made money when the Fleet was in. Quite likely they assumed that the ships had come to liberate them from the oppressor, which would explain why the Locarians stayed in their city weaving garlands of flowers instead of running like hell.

  I didn’t order the soldiers to slaughter unarmed civilians. Then again, I didn’t order them not to, and you know what soldiers are like, apt to get carried away, like a fox in a hen coop. These things happen in war, so they tell me. I wouldn’t know. Also they told me that it was necessary, in order to strike terror into the enemy, which had been my idea. Define enemy; seven years ago, they were our friends, they were us. But there; identities change, don’t they, and we aren’t necessarily the same people we were seven years ago, or seven weeks, even. Seven weeks or thereabouts (I lost track of time as soon as I set foot in this bloody palace) I was someone completely different. We evolve (I think that’s the word), like caterpillars turning into butterflies, and the truth evolves with us. And, as the dear old saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

  3

  Applause takes different forms, depending on context. In the theatre, people laugh, clap, cheer, throw flowers. In war, your enemy expresses his appreciation for a particularly clever move on your part by doing his best to rip your throat out. His way of showing affection, I guess.

  Ogus’ version of a bunch of roses and a big hug was an all-out assault on the wall, the first time he’d done that since the early days of the siege. He kicked off in the middle of the night with a furious artillery barrage, which ripped up the nets and made the walls shake but achieved nothing of any real use. At first light our artillery opened up and made kindling out of the trebuchets and mangonels he’d brought in close during the night. Round one to us.

  I didn’t know that, though. I was woken up by Usuthus and the City prefect, bundled into my loathsome armour and that bloody coat and hustled out of the palace into a covered coach. “Where are we going?” I remember asking, but nobody gave me a satisfactory answer.

  It wasn’t long before the noise told me everything I needed to know. I’ll never forget the early days of the siege, when it felt like there was a heavy bombardment every other day. The ground really does shake, you feel and hear the noise simultaneously, and after a while it gets so that you can’t stand it any more, but it goes on and on and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. I remember we were playing Acis and Philostratus at the Crown to a good house and the bombardment started. People knew the score by then, how to clear a building without trampling each other to death; Olethria was Acis and she was doing the big speech, and by the time she got to the end the building was completely empty, just a dozen of us standing like idiots on an empty stage, which bounced under our feet every time a rock pitched nearby.

  At Fourways we transferred from the closed coach to an open one. “People need to see you,” Usuthus said.

  The streets were, of course, deserted. “What people?”

  “The soldiers, on the wall.”

  “I’m not going up there, you lunatic. The air’s full of rocks.”

  “Near the wall,” the prefect amended. “That’s where all the work’s going on right now. We’ve got artillerymen setting up, carters bringing ammunition, masons, carpenters. Once they’ve seen you, word’ll get around. It’ll be great for morale.”

  Well, I thought, fair enough. Being seen is what I’m there for. “Then can I go home?”

  “There’s a meeting of the joint chiefs of staff at the war ministry,” Usuthus said. “Then we’ll need you to talk to the Theme leaders; we need volunteers, lots of them.”

  “Then?”

  “I think that depends what happens next,” the prefect said.

  What happened next was Ogus bringing up more artillery – basically, everything he’d got, and as fast as our boys trashed a row of his machines, he brought up another two rows. Once he had a couple of full batteries in place, he opened up on our artillery. Every one of machines he took out cost him a dozen of his own, but it didn’t matter; if things went how he wanted them to, this time tomorrow he wouldn’t need them, so what the hell. We had spares, of course, dozens of them, all ready to be winched up, assembled and installed in the blink of an eye. But he smashed them, too.

  In the event, he ran out of artillery before we did, but it was a close-run thing, and what we had left wasn’t enough to rake the open space in front of the walls with enough shot to stop Ogus bringing up his scaling ladders and siege towers. He’d been banking on shutting down our artillery, so his towers didn’t get very far; we killed them all long before they got in range. Also, three of his five covered rams, and the other two we managed to catch with grappling hooks and overturn, like woodlice. Not to worry. Ogus had half a million men, as against our twenty thousand.

  Of those twenty thousand, nine thousand were archers. I think it was Nicephorus who instituted the archery prizes: gold medals and large sums of money for the best shots in the army, organised into leagues and running four competitions a year. If it was him, he was a genius. The soldiers spent hours of their free time practising, and so did a great many civilians, so we had an extra three thousand-odd trained bowmen on the wall just when we needed them most. Of course Ogus’ men advanced behind great big shields and horse-drawn pavises, but by that point the flat ground out front was liberally scattered with spent artillery shot – big boulders to you and me, and no troop of soldiers, however well drilled, can advance across that sort of terrain and keep in perfect step. So gaps started to appear, and once that happened they unravelled like a laddered sock. They shot back, of course, but mostly they shot wild – short or over the top, and the rising sun was in their eyes, which really puts you off your aim. We killed fifty or so of them for every one of us they hit, and the heaps of their own dead and dying made holding a straight line that bit more awkward, and still they came. All this time, of course, our mangonels and scorpions were pounding them with round stone balls, at a low trajectory with the springs partly relaxed, so the balls bounced and rolled instead of just hitting the ground and burying themselves in the dirt. They couldn’t reach the front, archery range, but they
made a horrible mess of the fresh troops coming up. We had artillerymen who could drop a ball so precisely that it pitched at the front of a column of men and didn’t stop until it had reached the back, taking roughly a third of the poor bastards with it. Now that’s skill.

  “He’s proving our point,” said some high-ranking army type as we watched from a relatively safe tower. “This is precisely why he hasn’t tried something like this for years. We’re wiping the floor with him.”

  “I’m guessing he’s overestimated the number of men we sent to Locaria,” someone else said. “He thought there’d be nobody home to mind the store.”

  Curious he should say that, because originally the idea had been to send ten thousand men on the raid, until Captain Very advised me that three thousand would be plenty, and I told the joint chiefs to trim it down accordingly. Two things Ogus had got wrong, then: he’d expected he’d be able to knock out our artillery and use his siege towers, and he’d anticipated fewer archers. On that basis, he might well have been in with a chance. As it was—

  “Why’s he doing this?” I said. “He must know it’s not working.”

  “I think he’s good and angry,” said the prefect. “And with the manpower at his disposal, I guess he can afford to indulge the occasional tantrum.”

  He kept it up for the rest of the day; then, as night fell, he broke off abruptly and pulled back his forces to their original position, leaving nothing but mess behind him. We spent a sleepless night on the walls. All I did, all I could do was walk up and down being shown things, saying well done in a patronising tone of voice to men and women who’d saved us all by some of the most extraordinary acts of stupid courage you could possibly imagine; for this I was cheered hysterically everywhere I went, which made me feel strange. Shortly before midnight Hodda joined me, in full costume, escorted by nine ladies-in-waiting. Remember what I told you about taking bows, and the volume increasing? Of course a lot of people recognised her from the theatre. She did the patronising smiles and nods much better than I did, so maybe she deserved the applause. For once in my life, I didn’t resent it. More than enough to go round, in any case.