How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  I think the envoy had had enough by that stage, too. “You’ll all just have to get wet,” he said.

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  “Don’t be bloody ridiculous,” I told her. “I’ll need Usuthus, or Captain Very.”

  “You can have both of them. They can row a boat, I assume.”

  “It’s dangerous,” I said. “It’s almost certainly a trap.”

  “I doubt it,” she said sweetly, “you’ve been awfully thorough. And I don’t get seasick. Remember, I’ve done loads of tours of the provinces. I’m a good sailor.”

  “You’re not coming. Why would you want to, anyway?”

  “You idiot. This is our chance.”

  “I agree,” I said. “If Ogus really wants to negotiate—”

  “You clown,” she said. “You really don’t get it, do you? He’ll be expecting me.”

  I do have a brain, though for most of my life the only part of it I ever used was the memory. “You what?”

  “Keep your voice down, you moron. He’ll be expecting me. Both of us. Don’t you remember?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do. We agreed. We decided we needed to do a deal with Ogus so we could get out of the City safely. You said, there’s no way we can get in touch with him. I said, leave it to me. So I arranged it.”

  Various things jostled in my throat trying to get said. What came out was, “That was ages ago.”

  “These things take time.”

  “What things?”

  She explained (I use the term loosely). A few years ago she toured the Dosmoi peninsula with a travelling production of – I can’t remember, some hack show. While she was out there she met some rich traders – what a surprise – and got to know them quite well. So, when she wanted to get a message to Ogus, she found a Fremmer captain, gave him a certain amount of money and told him he’d get twice as much from So-and-so in the Dosmoi when he handed him a certain letter. The Dosmorines, we know for a fact, have a virtual monopoly on the supply of vinegar to Ogus’ army. Simple, she had the nerve to conclude, as that.

  “But that’s crazy,” I said. “What on earth made you think Ogus would want to meet you?”

  “Because he’d know I was Lysimachus’ mistress,” she said. “Only now I’m the empress, so the original scheme’s been overtaken by events. Not to worry, the end result’s the same.”

  “I don’t think your hare-brained scheme’s got anything to do with it,” I said. “I think Ogus wants to talk peace because we’ve been wiping the floor with him lately.”

  “Do you? That’s so sweet. I know he wants to see us because of me, because my Fremmer pal told me so.”

  “Bullshit. You haven’t met any sea captains.”

  “He got a letter to me curled up inside a perfume bottle. See for yourself.” She unstoppered one of the million trillion little bottles on her dressing table and handed it to me. Inside was a tiny scrap of rose-scented paper. I could just make out the writing on it.

  “He wants his money,” I said.

  “Because the Dosmorine wouldn’t pay him his bonus. Also, if you look there, he says the meeting is all arranged and we’ll hear about it shortly. That was two days before the envoy showed up. So, you see, I did all that.”

  “A letter in a random bottle of perfume. What are the odds you’d open that particular one?”

  “Attar of roses. My Dosmorine friend knows I happen to like that particular scent very much.”

  I could see the weathervane swinging round from Plausible to Likely. “All right, that covers How,” I said. “I’m rather more interested in Why.”

  “You know why. Or weren’t you listening? We can’t get out of the palace. This is our only chance.”

  “You want to jump off the boat and swim for the shore. In the full regalia. You’ll drown.”

  “No. Listen.”

  11

  Everything changes, see above. Nothing changes more often, more rapidly or more radically than the past. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Yesterday’s eternal truths are today’s exploded myths. Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely.

  Which is odd, since the past has already happened; it’s done, complete, finished, signed off, sealed, delivered; dead. But, then, dead things change a hell of a lot, as the smell testifies. I tend to think of the past as compost; drifts of dead yesterdays rotting down into a fine mulch, in which all sorts of weeds germinate, sprout and flourish. Of course, the past changes, it can’t not change, and what was true yesterday—

  See above, passim. Change and decay in all around I see; everything changes, except for me. And that’s what I told her. I’d made up my mind, I said to her, to get the hell out of this doomed city while I had the chance, as soon as I had the chance, and I intended to stick to that, come what may.

  “God, I’m relieved to hear you say that,” she said. “I was starting to worry about you.”

  “That’s so sweet.”

  “I was afraid you’d started believing your own bullshit.”

  I smiled at her. “I do a lot of really stupid things,” I said. “But that, never.”

  Usuthus had to learn to row a boat.

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” I told him. “Look at the sort of people who spend their lives rowing boats. If they can do it, so can you.”

  Usuthus is terrified of water. So I asked Rear Admiral Gainas to find someone to teach him, and off they went in a little dinghy. Usuthus came back shaking like a leaf. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’m not strong enough and I’m scared stiff.”

  “That’s what I thought when they made me emperor, and now look at me,” I said. “Now pull yourself together and get on with it.”

  I felt sorry for him, I really did. Also for Captain Very, who came from a landlocked country surrounded by mountains. He didn’t like the sea much either, but he was determined not to let it beat him; die, you bastard, you could almost hear him say every time he thrust an oar into the water. It was me who suggested they really ought to practise rowing together, since teamwork is the cornerstone of oarsmanship. Funniest thing I’ve seen since Chalco played the Archduke in Love’s Alchemy.

  The envoy came back and said the conditions we’d asked for were acceptable, except for one. Let me guess, I said; and I was right. I’d asked that Ogus suspend the mining operations, as a gesture of good faith. No chance.

  So, while Ogus’ carpenters built a half-mile jetty, the horrible war in the tunnels continued. I’d insisted on Colonel Apsimar taking a break from leading the attacks on their positions himself, with the result that we’d lost ground and been pushed back a hundred yards, at horrific cost to both us and them. So Apsimar resumed personal command, took back the lost hundred yards in a single desperate night, and carried on driving them back, one step at a time, until they reached the granite ridge. That was what Ogus had been anxious to avoid. It had cost him an infinity of effort, materiel and lives to breach the ridge. If we managed to capture and block the breach, he’d have to start all over again.

  “It’s all a matter of timing,” General Pertinax told me at the next staff meeting. “If we can block the hole in the granite before you meet with Ogus, obviously you’ll have a much better position to bargain from. Of course, it works both ways. If we make an all-out attempt to capture the breach and we get beaten off, it’ll weaken your hand tremendously.”

  Thank you so much for that, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Apsimar face-to-face, so I chickened out and sent him a written order; you have five days to capture the breach, failure isn’t an option. “Not that we give a damn really,” Hodda said, when I explained why I was looking so miserable. “But you’re right, we’ve got to make a show of taking it seriously or someone may get suspicious.”

  Defending the breach was much easier than fighting in the open tunnels. They brought out the sulphur
and the bellows and killed seventy-six of our most experienced tunnel-fighters in a couple of minutes. Apsimar retaliated by building a bellows of his own; only this one didn’t blow, it sucked. As fast as they puffed out poison smoke, Apsimar pumped it out into a side-tunnel left over from a previous stage in the action. Meanwhile, our sappers dug yet another tunnel, parallel to the one everyone was fighting over; then, when they came up against the granite, they turned ninety degrees, following the line of the ridge until they came out right next to the breach. Ogus’ men managed to turn the nozzle of the bellows just in time and snuffed out forty men like a beekeeper smoking bees; that was when Apsimar led his main assault, up the original tunnel, before they had a chance to turn the nozzle back to where it had been. After about five minutes of the bloodiest fighting of the entire siege we broke through, slaughtered about three hundred of their engineers and barricaded the tunnel on their side while our stonemasons dragged up twelve solid basalt blocks, carefully designed in advance to block the hole. They were made so they interlocked, with no need of mortar, and when they were in position they were more solid than the original granite. Our men scrambled through before the last block dropped into position. Job done, with two days to spare.

  I’d have liked to have been able to congratulate Apsimar personally, in front of the entire City, but it wasn’t possible. I spoke to the men who were with him at the end, but it wasn’t clear what had happened. The young subaltern who’d been the last man to speak to him said they’d been together on our side of the breach, just after the big push; Apsimar had led the attack, but had come back to our side of the hole to bring up reinforcements, since we’d lost more men than he’d expected. Then the subaltern told me he’d smelled roses and panicked—

  “What do you mean, smelled roses?” I asked.

  “Lately the bad guys’ve taken to wearing rose scent,” he told me, “so they can tell their own people apart from ours. It’s an old trick.”

  “I know. It doesn’t work.”

  “Exactly. But they’re stupid.”

  Anyway, the subaltern thought he could smell roses, got the wind up and refused to go any further. Apsimar said that was perfectly all right, sent him back down the tunnel to fetch the reinforcements and went back into the breach, and that was the last anyone knew.

  But he was definitely dead. We knew that, because Ogus had his body tied to a buggy and dragged up and down in front of the wall, just out of bowshot, until eventually it broke up and fell to bits.

  I think I know what happened, for what it’s worth. By all accounts, when Apsimar went back through the breach the enemy had all been cleared out, temporarily, though they rallied for one last unsuccessful push; but one of our side must have heard someone coming through, and smelt a very faint scent of roses, and stabbed him, thinking he was a bad guy. The mistake arose because Hodda is particularly fond of attar of roses and soaks her handkerchiefs in the stuff till they stink the place out.

  12

  Still, never mind. We’d secured the breach, and that was what mattered. General Aineas, Rear Admiral Gainas and the City prefect told me we had Ogus on the run and I shouldn’t settle for anything less than a complete withdrawal of enemy forces; I should also press for some of our territory back and at least a hundred million angels in war reparations; if I couldn’t get that, I must absolutely insist on Ogus closing his factories, or at the very least agreeing to pay some sort of royalty.

  The boat they’d built specially was a thing of beauty: painted purple, with the details picked out in gold leaf; the hull was oak, guaranteed arrowproof, so if they started shooting all I had to do was duck; they’d even listened when I asked what if it rained, because there was a huge purple umbrella, spring-loaded so it would fly open at the touch of a lever. “Let’s hope it does rain,” the new colonel of engineers said, “so you’ll be nice and dry and he’ll get sopping wet.” He told me Apsimar had designed it himself; he had a flair for silly gadgets, apparently.

  Hodda had a new frock for the occasion. The Chamberlain had wanted us both in the full getup. I said, show me where it says in the book that the emperor and empress shall wear complete regalia when negotiating in person with the enemy from a rowing boat. Besides, Hodda said, the Imperial regalia were holy symbols of the Imperial dignity, and if they got ruined by saltwater or fell overboard, it’d be a national disaster. So Hodda embarked in a gown of flowing white silk, curiously reminiscent of the one she’d worn in The Storyteller and the Slave, while I wore the uniform of the Imperial brigade of cuirassiers, minus the stupid cuirass.

  “God, it’s wonderful to be back in real clothes again,” she yelled in my ear as we rowed out into the bay.

  I was scanning the horizon for ships, small boats, swimmers with knives clamped between their teeth. “That’s your idea of real clothes, is it?”

  When I said that I was wearing a red knee-length tunic edged with a key pattern in gold thread, under a quilted red velvet habergeon embroidered with the double-headed boar emblem of the cuirassiers in gold and silver wire, red cross-gartered stockings and red suede boots. She had the grace not to say anything, although she really didn’t need to.

  Usuthus and Captain Very were making a pretty good job of rowing the boat, even though it was much bigger and heavier than the one they’d been practising with. The sea was calm and flat and Hodda and I had silk cushions to sit on. I didn’t feel sick at all. Then we were far enough out to see the jetty, and I felt my insides squirm.

  Ogus, for crying out loud; himself, the most evil man in the world, the devil incarnate. Actually, I’d never thought about him much. I knew he hated all the Robur, therefore by implication he hated me. It was because for centuries the Robur had oppressed and enslaved his people, which I guess was fair enough. The only answer to the Robur problem, he said, was total extermination; until that happened, the world wasn’t safe. When the siege started I’d assumed he was a nutcase, insane, frothing at the mouth; now that I’d learned a bit about how things work and how they come to be done, I could sort of understand his reasoning. I could imagine one of those miserable, dreary meetings, with three powerful men bickering over whose deeply flawed plan to adopt; and I could picture myself saying, fine, let’s just slaughter the lot of them, and that’ll be that solved; and everybody agreeing with me so they wouldn’t have to agree with either of the other two. No, actually I couldn’t, but maybe that’s simply because my imagination isn’t strong enough. Not so different, after all, from some of the orders I’d given lately: burn down such and such a town I’d never heard of before the meeting; round up all the Green and Blue bosses and dispose of them; capture the breach, without fail. When you give the order, it makes sense. If a few people have to suffer in the process, it’s a small price to pay. Let’s get rid of this menace, once and for all.

  So, Ogus and I had both paid subscriptions to belong to the same club; I’d be able to look him in the eye and see some sort of human being, not a demon or a monster. As for being scared of him – when you’ve stood up in front of a thousand paying customers with nothing to defend yourself with but twenty lines of rhyming iambic pentameters, people don’t scare you just by being people. Unless he brought along a hundred archers dressed in invisibility cloaks, there wasn’t anything to be frightened of.

  Even so.

  My experience as an emperor has enabled me to put together a simple rule of thumb, which I’m pleased to be able to pass on to any kings, rulers, governors or members of representative assemblies who may happen to read this. Let’s get rid of this menace, once and for all is always wildly popular, because it appears to promise a solution and nobody will have to think hard about the real problem or do the things that actually need to be done; instead, just blot a few people out and move on. The crucial element is numbers. Kill several million, and inevitably you’re a monster. But if you restrict yourself to a relatively modest number, say one or two per cent of the population, fifty thousand people at the absolute maximum, you’re a statesman an
d a hero and the father of your country. And there you have it. Please feel free to refer to it as Notker’s Law, if you think it’ll help.

  But some people just don’t give a damn, do they? And one of them was waiting for us at the end of the jetty. Nobody knew what he looked like, of course. The only hard data we had to go on, handed down by someone who’d known them both, was that he was on the tall side for a milkface and that he looked a lot like his father. Apart from that, nothing at all. In which case, the man waiting for us at the end of the jetty might not be Ogus at all. For all we knew, it could have been a stunt double, or an impostor.

  The question has probably been addressed and dealt with by a scientist or a philosopher, but if so I haven’t heard about it; at what point does a tiny dot on the horizon resolve into something you can identify? First, there’s just a dot. Then you get closer, and it’s still a dot. Then it’s a shape, but still abstract. Then there comes a moment – the subject of my enquiry – when it could be a man or a horse or a dog, and then another moment when it definitely is.

  “I can see him,” Hodda sang out. She’s got ridiculously good eyesight.

  “You do realise,” I said, “this is the furthest from the City I’ve ever been in my life.”

  Hodda glared at me, then glanced at Usuthus and the captain, who had their backs to us. I realised what she meant; what was true for me wasn’t necessarily true for Lysimachus. I cursed myself under my breath, but I was fairly sure they were too busy rowing to have heard me.

  “I can see them, too,” I said.

  They’d made a beautiful job of the jetty. Dead straight and dead level, none of your rustic charm, and the pale wood blazed like pale gold in the morning sun. Hardly surprising, I guess. Their carpenters had had a lot of work lately, and the more work you do the more you hone your skills.