How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  In case you don’t know, Tanage is a peninsula on the Lerosian coast, nominally inside Sashan territory, but what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over. Once upon a time the Tanagenes exported copper and tin all across the world, but the seams are almost completely worked out now, leaving Tanage with thousands of trained miners with nothing to do. Nicephorus had bribed the Duke of Tanage, at eyewatering expense, and in return we could call on up to six thousand Tanagene miners, at a moment’s notice, provided we paid them a ridiculous sum of money. Personally, I always feel that survival is cheap at any price and it puzzles me that so many men in authority don’t seem to see it that way.

  Nevertheless, the cost of hiring the Tanagenes was rather more than we had on hand in the Treasury. The finance ministers proposed a forced loan on all registered citizens, plus increased tariffs at the docks. I figured that since Ogus had made us incur all this expense, he really ought to pay for it. So when the Fleet got back from Timaressa, I sent them straight off to loot the cities of the Osmala delta.

  Maybe you’re old enough to have been there. It was a popular destination for affluent City dwellers before the war – beautiful scenery, elegant dining in luxurious seaside villas, sophisticated ladies employed in the hospitality and leisure sector, everything a man could ask for. No sea walls, no defences of any kind, and we were in and out of each one of the five main cities in less than a day, taking with us a fortune in second-hand luxury goods and leaving behind a heap of rubble and cinders. A squadron of Iasolite merchants rendezvoused with the Fleet just off Sear Point and gave us a sensible price for the entire haul sight unseen. A pleasure doing business with you, they said, let’s do this again soon.

  “You realise,” she said, on one of the rare occasions when she was speaking to me, “this is exactly the sort of thing that made Ogus decide to get rid of the Robur for ever.”

  “I didn’t start it,” I said.

  “Civilian targets,” she said. “People who’ve never done a single thing to hurt us, not even trying to make vases cheaper than we can. You’re no better than pirates. It’s disgusting.”

  “So’s wiping out a whole city.”

  “You should know.”

  I pride myself that I bring out the best in her sometimes.

  7

  “It’s working really well, according to our sources,” General Aineas told me. “His allies are starting to complain that nowhere’s safe, and of course they can’t prepare in advance because they have no idea where we’ll turn up next.”

  “That’s significant,” said some official from the war department whose name I didn’t catch. “Not so long ago, none of the allies would have dared complain about anything Ogus did. Now they’re whining like mad and he hasn’t had their heads cut off. Which shows he’s worried.”

  “The allies all signed up on a promise that he’d finish us off once and for all,” Aineas went on. “And it’s seven years later and he’s signally failed to do that, and now we’re fighting back. And it’s no secret that he’s a hard master, far worse than we used to be when it was all Imperial territory. All we need to do is keep it up for long enough, and cracks are bound to show. And the way Ogus’ regime is put together, once it starts to go it’ll all come tumbling down, you mark my words.”

  “If he pulls men away from the siege to defend the provinces,” said someone else I didn’t know, “which, incidentally, he’s sworn he’ll never do, his opponents can point to that and say he’s going back on his original promise. If he stays put and does nothing for the provinces, he’s a heartless monster and high time he was got rid of. He can’t win.”

  “Talking of things tumbling down,” I said, “what do we know about the mining operations?”

  By this time, the Tanages had arrived and were settled in and spending freely in the downtown bars. Ogus’ men had started work, but the best guess was that they’d hit the annoying seam of granite that runs from the Bluehorn right across the City’s front lawn to the South Road. Last time, Ogus hadn’t had to bother about it, because he’d been able to start substantially closer to the walls.

  “My scouts have been keeping an eye on the amount of spoil coming up at the pithead,” said General Aineas. “It seems to have slowed down considerably over the last couple of days, which would seem to indicate that they haven’t got through the granite yet. Which means this would be a good time for a pre-emptive strike. I could send out two regiments, under cover of darkness. We could breach their main gate, and then one regiment could secure and destroy the pithead while the other staged a diversionary attack on the main camp. With any luck we could set their operations back a month, with losses well within acceptable parameters.”

  Oh God, I thought. “Let’s not do that,” I said. “No good ever came of fooling about in the dark, and I need a full brigade for the cities in the Bay of Mahec. That’s a week’s sailing each way, so while they’re out of town we’ll need everyone we’ve got up on the wall, just in case he fancies another assault.”

  A stroke of bad luck for the three cities that nestle in the warm water of the Mahec estuary; they were the first places that sprang to mind, and I had to think quickly before the others started agreeing with him. That’s how bad things tend to happen, I guess, only we don’t usually find out about it.

  Be that as it may. Aineas was perfectly satisfied with my reasoning and agreed to shelve the pre-emptive strike, so for every fifty Mahec civilians whose lives I took with my arbitrary spur-of-the-moment choice, I saved the life of one Robur soldier. I know; usually it’s the other way round, but I was pushed for time.

  “The Mahec,” I explained to her, once she’d paused to draw breath, “is where Ogus has been recruiting lately. So; all the men go off to war in a faraway country of which they know little, and while they’re away the enemy swoops down on their defenceless home and razes it to the ground. Suddenly Ogus’ grand alliance doesn’t seem such a good idea.”

  She told me what she thought about that. She had a point, which she didn’t hesitate to drive home up to the hilt. Leading me to ask myself, would she make me feel more guilty if she didn’t give me such a hammering over everything I did? The more she sticks the knife in, the more I resent it, the less I actually think about what she’s been saying. That, of course, presupposes that the object of the exercise from her point of view is to change my mind about what I’m doing, as opposed to beating me to a pulp.

  Lysimachus probably wouldn’t have listened at all. More likely, he’d have smacked her across the face. Funny, really. I could unleash violence and death on women and children in Mahec, but I could no more hit a woman than fly in the air; because I’m civilised, I suppose. I guess the difference is between what happens offstage and on. A manager once told me, you can have your hero butcher entire nations in a messenger’s report, but for God’s sake don’t have him hit a woman or a child on stage. You’d lose all sympathy.

  8

  Funny old stuff, granite. Way out east in the Sashan country, I gather there are mountains of it, literally; huge spiky towers, like a castle, or the backdrop in an old melodrama. You see them on imported porcelain – people say it’s the best way to tell if it’s genuine Sashan or not, because artists who’ve never seen those mountains can’t possibly imagine them clearly enough to paint them, because they’re so utterly unlike anything else on earth.

  Our granite is the pink stuff. Years ago, we did a roaring trade in it, mostly to the Echmen royal court. They built great temples and palaces out of our pink granite, while we imported equal amounts of their bluey-grey granite (which you don’t get west of the Friendly Sea) to build our temples and palaces out of; go figure. The barges they built to cart the stuff backwards and forwards across a thousand miles of treacherous sea were the biggest ships anywhere ever, and at one time there were hundreds of them. In recent years the quarries next to the City have all closed down, because the deposits close to the surface are all worked out, and all that’s left is the thick underground
ribbon that crosses the plain, more or less precisely underneath where Ogus had drawn his siege line, before our improved trebuchets forced him to draw it back.

  Cutting through solid rock is a bitch, they tell me. You have to bank up huge underground fires, which heat the stone white hot. Then you pour buckets of vinegar on it, which cracks and splits it enough so your miners can get in there with wedges and picks. We saw the smoke and the steam, and an endless column of wagons carrying logs and charcoal to the pit head. All that went on for days, and then it stopped.

  “We beat them before and we can do it again,” said the idiot engineer cheerfully. “My predecessor managed it and he was a milkface, so it can’t be all that difficult.”

  A clown; except that I’ve known some very wise, shrewd clowns over the years. He wasn’t one of them. Also, he wasn’t remotely funny. “Didn’t he flood their tunnels out?” General Aineas said.

  “Diverted an underground river,” said the City prefect. “Wiped out the enemy miners and cleared up bad flooding in Poor Town all in one go. Pity we can’t do that again.”

  “Can’t we?” I asked.

  The prefect shook his head. “Ogus has diverted the river of which our underground river is a tributary,” he said. “He did it to form a reservoir so his camp always has plenty of drinking water, but it means we can’t use the same trick twice. Still, it doesn’t matter. We’re ready for them. We’ve got the Tanagenes.”

  “Oh, them,” said one of General Aineas’ yes-men. “More trouble than they’re worth if you ask me. Have you heard the latest? They’re demanding more money.”

  “Give it to them,” I said.

  “None of them’s done a stroke of work yet, and they’re already getting twice what a cavalry trooper gets. I say, send them home and be damned to them.”

  “Not much call for cavalry in a siege,” I said. “But we need miners. Give them what they’re asking for.”

  After the meeting I sent for Usuthus.

  “Have a look through the files,” I said, “and see if anyone’s ever drawn up contingency plans for evacuating the City.”

  He gave me a sad look. “Is it that bad?”

  “No,” I said, “not yet. But it’s a possibility we need to consider.”

  “I don’t need to check the files,” Usuthus said. “I can tell you without looking, the answer’s no. There’s never been a plan, because it can’t be done.”

  “Ah.” I waited, but Usuthus seemed to think the conversation was over. “Why not?”

  “Loads of reasons,” he said. “Even if you could get a hundred and fifty thousand people onto ships, where would they go? Ogus controls a third of the known world. Also, merchantmen aren’t like warships. Ships big enough to carry a lot of passengers have to stay close to shore, and all the coasts round here belong to Ogus. They wouldn’t be able to put in for fresh water, let alone taking on food. Remember, you’d need to be providing three hundred thousand rations of food and water a day. It’s bad enough keeping the City fed and watered on dry land. You’d need supply depots set up at sixty-mile intervals all the way to where you’re going. Those depots would need to be established beforehand, on enemy soil, then fortified and garrisoned and held until they’d fulfilled their function. We simply don’t have the manpower for that.”

  “We control the sea,” I said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “Not really, no. Not unless we all grow fins and learn to live off seaweed. The successful formula is control of the sea plus an impregnable city wall. One without the other just won’t do. Believe me, if it was possible to get everybody out, we’d have done it years ago.”

  Art is such a subjective thing, don’t you think? Personally, I think all those Neo-Primitive and Mannerist icons are hideous and indescribably vulgar, particularly the ones with all the gold and jewels stuck on all over them. But they’re extremely popular, especially abroad, where people pay silly money for them. A genuine Callicrates, for example; one of those would set you up for life, even if your favourite hobby was breeding pedigree racing elephants. Ridiculous, if you ask me. For one thing, they’re so small. You could fit five of them into a coat pocket.

  There were seventy-two Callicrates icons on one wall in the palace; twelve sequences of the Six Stations of the Passion. I gather that complete sequences are worth about double what you’d get for six individual pieces. Fools and their money, as the saying goes.

  “I’m sick of the sight of those horrible things,” I said to the Chamberlain, as I walked down the corridor where the Callicrateses were hung. “I’ve got to walk up and down this passage three times a day, and every time I look at them they make me feel depressed. Get rid of them, for crying out loud, and put up something cheerful.”

  Next time I walked that way, the icons had gone and in their place were selections from Apsimar IV’s monumental collection of erotic ivories. Of course, people pay a lot of money for that sort of thing, too.

  I sent for the Chamberlain. “Good joke,” I said. “Congratulate yourself on having scored a point off me. Now get rid of the horrible things and put up something nice.”

  “Majesty.”

  “Actually,” I said, stopping him as he turned to leave, “we may have stumbled onto something useful here. Do we have a lot of artwork in store in the palace?”

  “Yes, Majesty.”

  “Safely under lock and key?”

  “The vaults are the most secure location in the City, Majesty. It’s inconceivable that anyone would ever be able to break into them.”

  “That’s good to know. More to the point, though, all that stuff must be worth a lot of money.”

  I’d offended his delicate sensibilities. Ah well. “I should imagine so, Majesty. Although a considerable amount of the finest material has been sold since the start of the siege.”

  I nodded. “And a good thing, too. I mean, if it’s all down there locked away, what’s the point in keeping it? I want a complete inventory made, with valuations. At times like these, we really ought to have some idea of what we’ve got.”

  That afternoon, on my way back from meeting the Lords of the Treasury, my eye was caught by a series of the ghastliest landscapes, oils on wooden board, that it’s ever been my misfortune to set eyes on. I asked, and was told that they were the work of his late Majesty’s mother.

  The Tanagenes set to work. They started off by digging a series of tunnels parallel to the wall, one on top of another. The idea was that as soon as the enemy came close to the wall, they’d be able to detect the vibrations they made – all you do is put lots of bowls of water on the tunnel floor and wait till the surface of one of them starts shaking – and locate fairly precisely where the enemy were coming from. Then they’d be able to dig their own countersap (I think that’s the proper word) and take the appropriate measures.

  There are quite a lot of those. The one the Tanagenes favoured was sulphur and a big double-action bellows. You punch a hole in the wall of your enemy’s tunnel, set light to the sulphur and use the bellows to blow in the sulphur fumes, which are guaranteed to kill pretty much anything. From which you’ll gather that it wasn’t in the Tanagenes’ nature to muck about.

  Will it work? I asked. Of course it will, everybody told me. It’s a time-honoured method of dealing with enemy sappers, in all the standard books on the subject. Works like a charm every time.

  The trouble with books is, however, that there’s a danger that someone on the other side has read them, too. When the first enemy sap was located, the Tanagenes were ready: sulphur lit, bellows standing by, sledgehammers and drills poised to smash a hole through. At which point, they heard a tapping, about fifteen yards behind them down the tunnel. It was the enemy, breaking a hole.

  The sulphur fumes worked like a charm, sure enough. Seventeen Tanagene sappers were killed by it, blasted through the breach by Ogus’ own double-action bellows. The rest of the Tanagenes fell back double quick and broke down the supports of their own tunnel, to stop the enemy po
uring out into the City streets. As soon as they were safely above ground, they asked for their pay and said they were going home.

  I think they probably meant it, and about a third of them actually went; those that stayed grudgingly agreed to double pay, plus a substantial death-in-service benefit. Meanwhile, we had an enemy sap about fifty yards from the wall. It was obvious, the colonel of engineers told me, what had happened. Ogus’ men had their own pails of water on their floor, and had guessed what our countermeasure would be.

  “So if we try and break into their saps, they’ll smoke us out.”

  He shrugged. “It’s what I’d do, in their shoes,” he said.

  “How long will it take them to undermine the wall?”

  “Hard to say,” he said. “One to three days, at a guess.”

  I waited for him to suggest something. He didn’t.

  Luckily, while I’d been talking to the colonel, Usuthus had been chatting in the anteroom to a couple of junior captains who’d come along to carry the colonel’s papers. What we might try, said one of the captains, a tall, skinny youth with a ridiculous plummy voice and the faintest wisp of hair on his top lip, is dig seven or eight countersaps, intercepting the enemy sap at decent intervals, and break through all of them simultaneously. Chances were, he explained, that they only had one bellows, two or three at the most; even if they accurately located all eight countersaps they’d only be able to smoke out a few of them; we’d be able to rush men through the ones that weren’t flooded with deadly fumes, and then it’d be good old-fashioned knife-fighting in the dark. Not an inviting prospect, he was prepared to concede, but probably better than the alternative.

  Usuthus grabbed him by the arm, put him in a little room and locked the door. When I’d got rid of the colonel, he took me to see him.

  “I’m sorry, Majesty,” he said, when he’d stuttered through it all again. “It was only a suggestion.”