How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  “What’s your name?”

  “Apsimar, Majesty.”

  I knew him, of course, though I’d never set eyes on him before. At least, I knew his type intimately. They’re the ones who hang around the back door of the theatre, waiting for the chorus girls to come out.

  “Take this,” I said, giving him the bit of paper Usuthus had just written out for me, “to the colonel. It’s a – what’s it called, Usuthus?”

  “Mandate.”

  “Mandate,” I said, “relieving the colonel of command and putting you in charge instead. Get those tunnels dug as soon as you possibly can.”

  Colonel Apsimar – twenty-one years old, according to his docket; looked and sounded four years younger – led the raiding party himself. It was, of course, pitch dark in the saps and there wasn’t room to stand upright, let alone swing a sword or use a spear; and armour clinks when you move, so they didn’t wear any. It was, as Apsimar had said, knife-fighting in the dark, with a sulphur-fume garnish to add a touch of piquancy. After they’d killed forty-six of Ogus’ best sappers, Apsimar’s boys dragged the pile of brushwood they’d brought with them about sixty yards down the enemy tunnel and set fire to it. The props burned through and the roof came down, after which the Tanagenes set about backfilling with rocks and baskets of rubble. We lost twenty-eight men, all regular infantry.

  “Trouble is,” Apsimar told me, when he’d stopped shaking enough to be spoken to, “every clever wheeze we think of, they get to use against us next time. I think we’ve probably seen the last of the sulphur, because once you’ve let it loose you can’t really control who breathes it in, if you see what I mean. I think from now on it’ll be sapping and counter-sapping and – well, that sort of thing.”

  He had a bandage wrapped round his left arm, and the blood was starting to seep through it. “Can we keep it up?” I said.

  “If they can, so can we,” he said, “but it’s a hell of a way to earn a living.” He glanced at me, suddenly scared he’d offended against protocol by the use of mild bad language. I grinned at him; he grinned back. “For one thing,” he said, “in the dark you can’t tell the good guys from the baddies.”

  Hadn’t thought of that, and it made me shudder.

  “Years ago,” he went on, “they used to daub themselves with scent, so you could tell each other apart by the smell. But that only works up to a point. Our lads go down stinking of roses, their boys start splashing it on, too, and you’re back where you started. In theory you’re supposed to have a picture of the tunnels in your mind and know exactly where your own people are, but that doesn’t actually work when you’re down there. It’s so easy to get turned round, you see, specially after a bit of a scrimmage, and next thing you know—”

  He didn’t want to finish that sentence. “Do the best you can,” I said and sent him away, feeling like I’d just stamped on his face.

  9

  In case you’ve been wondering, I no longer slept in the chair. It was making my neck hurt. Instead, I used to heap up cushions on the floor, which was fine. I’ve slept on worse, believe me. As for the snoring, it hadn’t bothered me back when we were an item, and it didn’t bother me now.

  “Did Lysimachus snore?” I asked her.

  “Like a sawmill. Almost as bad as you.”

  “I do not snore.”

  “My God. It’s a miracle the roof doesn’t cave in.”

  “You’re just saying that to be spiteful. I do not snore.”

  “How would you know? You’re always asleep when you do it.”

  “I have it on good authority,” I said.

  She gave me a pitying smile. “It’s so sweet that you believed her.”

  “Actually, it was the male chorus of Astonished by Joy at the Sceptre. It was the start of the siege and we slept at the theatre because of the bombardment. And if I’d snored, you can bet they’d have mentioned it.”

  Her can’t-be-bothered-to-argue look. “You snore,” she said. “Get over it.”

  That from a woman who could scare rooks off laid barley. Still (in case you were wondering) we were back on speaking terms, shortly after I’d told her about the Callicrates icons.

  “The Chamberlain’s department’s the most efficient part of the service,” I told her. “Usuthus says so, and he should know. They’ve got where everything is written down in a file or an inventory. And they can find it in no time flat.”

  “They’ll be in the vault,” she objected. “They’re worth a fortune.”

  “For now, yes,” I said. “And then, when we’re ready to go, I announce that Her Majesty wants them hung up in her private dressing room. An hour later, that’s where they’ll be.”

  Her eyes glowed with fierce longing. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course. They’re our bloody pictures.”

  She frowned. “I suppose they are. Yes, they are,” she decided. “Let’s send for them right now.”

  I shook my head. “We still haven’t got a way out of here,” I said.

  And then she grinned at me. “We’ll see about that,” she said. And then Captain Very came to escort me to my next meeting.

  “We’ve driven them back at least a hundred yards,” General Aineas said. “At this rate, quite soon we’ll have them pinned up against the granite, and then we can really lay into them.”

  Colonel Apsimar wasn’t at the staff meeting. He was leading a sortie, down there in the dark. So far, we’d lost about five hundred men; meanwhile, we’d recovered about eight hundred of Ogus’ dead from the tunnels we’d captured – we threw the bodies over the wall every morning, and let them come and collect them; Apsimar’s idea, to give their colleagues something to think about – and there were plenty more we hadn’t picked up. No prisoners on either side, of course; too much trouble to go to, under the circumstances.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why aren’t they driving us back by sheer weight of numbers?”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Aineas said blithely, as though it had been him down there killing men by feel. “More than exactly the right number and they just get in the way. And they make a racket and we can hear them, and they can’t hear us. No trouble at all to bring the roof down on ’em before they even know you’re there. No, it only goes to show what I’ve said all along. In a tight corner, milkfaces simply don’t have the stomach for it.”

  After the meeting, which was a complete waste of time, a young engineer subaltern popped up out of nowhere and tried to intercept me. Fortunately, I was able to stop Captain Very from killing him. “What is it?” I said.

  The young subaltern explained that he was a friend of the colonel’s; actually, they’d been to school and military academy together, and their families had always been close. The thing was, he went on, so embarrassed he could barely breathe, before all this lot kicked off, the colonel, who would flay him alive if he ever found out he was doing this – well, he went to the theatre a lot and he’d always had the most tremendous admiration for, well, back then she was just Hodda, of course, in fact he’d sent her heaps of notes asking her to have dinner with him after the show, she hadn’t replied, of course, not being that sort of, um, lady, but what he was getting at was, the colonel had been feeling a bit blue lately, what with having to go down the mines all the time and really, it’s not a lot of fun down there, and it would buck him up most awfully if Her Majesty sent him a note or something, just two words on a bit of paper saying good stuff, keep at it, it’d mean ever so much to him if it could be arranged somehow, and if it couldn’t, of course he understood and he hoped he hadn’t given offence by asking.

  Hodda laughed like a drain when I told her. But I nagged her and she wrote For a true hero on a scrap of parchment and signed it, and sent it to him along with a handkerchief. “He’ll wear it next to his heart, bless him,” she said. “They always do.”

  There’s a stall in the market where the actresses buy handkerchiefs; ten trachy a dozen, or a gross for a quarter-thaler. Rose- or
lavender-scented, two trachy extra. But Hodda had hers delivered on a cart, in bales. Still, it’s the perceived thought that counts.

  10

  Lots of ships come and go at the docks, but let me draw your attention to two in particular.

  The first one didn’t actually make it to the dockside. It anchored about half a mile out and raised a certain very distinctive flag. Everybody knows what that flag means. Plague.

  “We ought to send a warship and sink it,” said the City prefect.

  “Counterproductive,” said Rear Admiral Gainas, who spoke for the navy at staff meetings when Sisinna was out of town. “In order to sink it, our ship would have to come into physical contact with it. That’s the last thing we want to do. No, just leave it alone and let nature take its course.”

  “That’s completely irresponsible,” the prefect said, and he never raises his voice or gets upset, ever. “What if there’s a storm and it gets blown into harbour? Or some fool coming in might feel sorry for them and drop them off some food or water. You can’t tell what might happen. You’ve got to sink it, right now.”

  “It’s a Synaean ship,” Gainas said calmly, “they’re allies of the Sashan. If we sink one of their ships, it’s an act of war.”

  “Under the circumstances, I hardly think—”

  “We tell the Sashan ambassador there was plague on board,” Gainas said, “but what if he chooses not to believe us?”

  “It’s flying the green flag, for crying out loud.”

  “The Sashan ambassador doesn’t know that. He’d only have our word for it. And like I said, if he chooses not to believe us—”

  “Have you any idea how quickly plague can spread in a city this size?”

  “Depends,” put in someone else I didn’t know. “There’s three or four different types of plague, and they spread differently. Of course, we don’t know what kind they’ve got on the ship.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said, and they all shut up and looked at me. Then I turned to Usuthus, on my left. “Find someone who knows about the different sorts of plague, and get him here stat.” Usuthus nodded and got up. “Our first and only priority is to make sure the plague doesn’t come here. The prefect’s point about the ship getting blown in here is a valid one, and so’s yours, about having to get in close enough to ram them. Remote chances both, but plausible, so the hell with that. How about sinking the poor devils with a catapult?”

  Gainas frowned. “We could do that,” he said. “But sinking her in any fashion is dangerous. I’m thinking about the tides. If we sank her where she’s riding right now, there’s a danger the bodies might wash ashore.”

  “Fine. Tow them out into the middle of the sea and do it.”

  “Which would involve even more contact.”

  The prefect made a soft moaning noise. “We can’t just leave it out there. Have you read Anser’s account of the plague at Antecyra? It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  Some navy type sitting on Gainas’ right muttered something about towing the ship thirty miles down the coast, where Ogus had a big supply depot. “Absolutely not,” the prefect shouted, “what if it’s airborne? It’s that kind of reckless attitude—”

  “I don’t think that was a serious suggestion,” I said firmly. “Gentlemen, we’re trying to make a decision without any facts to go on. Let’s hear what the expert has to say and then decide.”

  Enter the expert: an Echmen doctor with thirty years’ experience with plague epidemics, which are an everyday fact of life out there. It all depends, he said. Some kinds of plague, you’re fairly safe touching the patient, so long as you wash your hands afterwards. Other kinds are carried on a kind of miasma of poisonous air and can strike you down fifty yards away. If he knew which sort we were dealing with, he’d be able to advise accordingly. But the green flag just meant plague; and for all we knew it could simply be that the ship’s captain was a hysterical type misdiagnosing a bad cold.

  The City prefect changed his mind. Sinking the ship was clearly out of the question; if the plague could be contagious at fifty yards, we couldn’t take the risk. Gainas changed his mind, too; leaving it there would be madness. What if another ship came in off course and blundered into it at night, in the dark? How would it be, I suggested, if we sent a warship to sink it, and then quarantined that warship out in the middle of the Friendly Sea for a month? Gainas explained that no warship could stay out at sea long enough to sit out the maximum incubation period; they’d have to put in to land for food and water, and the only places they could do that were used regularly by the navy; if anything went wrong, it could spread through the Fleet like wildfire.

  “We need a decision,” the prefect said. “The longer it sits out there, the more danger we’re in.”

  I looked at Gainas. “Can your ships’ artillery hit something a hundred yards away, guaranteed?”

  He thought for a moment. “I’ll have to say no,” he said. “But you’ve got artillerymen on the wall here who could do it.”

  “Find them,” I said. “Use at least a dozen fire-pots and burn the bloody thing right down to the waterline.”

  The other ship was a Fremmer cog. We get about three dozen of them a day; short-haul traders who work their way up the Blemyan Gulf, trading dates for raisins, raisins for olives, olives for rye flour, so on and so forth, a small profit each step of the way; by the time they get to us, they have a hold full of either wheat or lumber, dirt cheap everywhere else but valuable to us. The Fremmer live on an archipelago off the coast of Blemya and are the best of friends with everybody, to the point where, like starlings, you barely notice them.

  Very occasionally they carry passengers. You’d have to be determined or desperate to take a ride on a cog, unless you like sleeping on a coil of rope and being thrown around like dice. The passenger on this cog was probably both.

  He stepped off the ship onto the quay and asked the first man he saw where the harbourmaster might be. Over there, the man points. He goes to the harbourmaster. I’m an envoy, he said, from Emperor Ogus. Take me to your leader.

  Reasonably enough the harbourmaster assumed he was a lunatic and had him arrested. At the Watch house, the envoy produced his credentials; impressively illuminated in red and gold on snow-white parchment, quite a work of art, sealed in lead with a seal as big as your fist. The Watch captain decided that most lunatics don’t have access to expensive accessories like that, so he escorted him up to the palace and made him the duty officer’s problem. Thirty-six hours later – by palace standards, that’s like lightning – he was my problem. Lucky me.

  “Do I need an interpreter?” I asked.

  He looked at me. He was a short man, square shoulders, slight pot belly, thin moustache and a tuft on his chin, nearer sixty than fifty, pale brown eyes. He was plainly dressed and didn’t seem remotely scared. “No, Majesty,” he said. “I speak tolerable Robur.”

  “So you do,” I said. I picked up the work of art. “This says you’ve come from Ogus to arrange a meeting.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Ogus has never agreed to a meeting before.”

  “With respect, that’s not true. He met with Colonel Orhan several times.”

  “The man who did Apsimar’s job at the start of the siege,” Usuthus whispered in my ear. “You know, the milkface.”

  I nodded. “Wasn’t he a traitor?” I replied, loud so the envoy could hear.

  “That was never proved.”

  “So you see,” the envoy went on, “there’s a precedent. I can assure you, the emperor is very keen to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you.”

  I looked at him. He was good. Absolutely no idea what was going on in his mind. “You’re just here to make arrangements.”

  “Yes, Majesty.”

  I turned to Captain Very. “I don’t trust this jerk further than I could spit him,” I stage-whispered. “What do you think?”

  The captain pursed his lips. �
��On the other hand,” he said.

  I nodded, and turned back. “We would be happy to grant Ogus safe passage into the City,” I said.

  “That wouldn’t be acceptable, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not going over there, not for all the rice in Blemya.”

  “Understandable,” the envoy said. “What we had in mind was this.”

  I’d have assumed he was trying to be funny, except that apparently diplomats do this sort of thing all the time. Since Ogus didn’t trust us by sea and we wouldn’t trust him on land, the idea was that his men would build a jetty half a mile long and ten feet wide. I would row out in a small boat and meet Ogus at the far end of the jetty. He could bring one other, so could I. I would stay on the boat, he’d stay on the jetty. We could talk to each other, then go our separate ways.

  Then we got the maps out. I wanted a spot where there was no chance of the current running me ashore. They needed somewhere they could build a jetty that wouldn’t get washed away. Unbelievably, there was a spot on the north coast that answered all the above, but it was two miles straight across the open water from the harbour mouth. Absolutely no way, I pointed out, that I could row two miles, even if paddling a rowing boat accorded with my Imperial dignity, which it didn’t.

  Compromise. I could have two oarsmen, if Ogus could have two men on his side. I didn’t like the sound of that. They’d have to be naked, I said, so there was no chance of concealed weapons. The envoy said, if it came to concealed weapons, I could easily hide a spanned crossbow in the bottom of the boat, but Ogus was magnanimously prepared to take that risk; the least I could do was reciprocate by letting him have two clerks, and no clerk can do his job properly if he’s frozen numb to the bone.

  Fine, I said. I would turn up in a warship, with sixty archers. He could have sixty archers on the jetty. If we’re going to be stupid about this, let’s be stupid in style.

  The talks went on for a very long time and at various points in the discussion tempers frayed a bit; but eventually we reached an agreement. Me in a boat, with one aide and two oarsmen. Ogus on the jetty, with three aides. No weapons anywhere. “How about if it’s raining?” I asked.