How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  I looked back at the City. Everyone says the best way to view it is from the sea. They’re right. From the sea, on a sunny day, you don’t see the dirt and the squalor and the people, just towers and gilded roofs and white domes against a blue sky. A thing of beauty, pretty as a picture. I’d never seen it before, of course. It looked curiously small.

  “He’s alone,” she said.

  “No,” I corrected her. “The agreement was, we could each bring three aides.”

  “He’s alone.”

  She was right, as always. Half a mile of jetty – first, you drive poles thick as a man’s waist into the seabed, using special drop hammers mounted on barges; then you plank them over and add railings; then, if you’re desperately keen to show off, you paint the railings crocus yellow – and just one man, right at the end, sitting on a folding stool. Now that’s how to do arrogance.

  We stopped about a hundred yards away, so Captain Very could talk to me. He couldn’t turn round, so I was talking to the back of his head. “Is he really alone?” the captain said.

  “Yes.”

  “He hasn’t got men hidden anywhere?”

  “You couldn’t hide anyone on that thing.”

  “He could have divers underwater, holding their breath.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “In that case.” Captain Very lowered his voice, which was silly, if you think about it. “In that case, we could kill him. No, listen. You engage him in conversation, I slip over the side, swarm up one of the piles—”

  “No,” Hodda said.

  “We could end this war at a stroke,” the captain said urgently. “No Ogus, it all falls to pieces. I can take him, I know I can. We’d be back in the boat and out of bowshot long before his men could reach us.”

  “No,” Hodda repeated. “If you try it’ll all go wrong, and there’s our one chance of peace out the window. I absolutely forbid you to do anything of the sort.”

  “Majesty?”

  Meaning me.

  Just think. At a stroke. The sort of brave, impulsive seizing of the moment that changes history. Lysimachus the Great saves the Robur nation. “She’s right,” I said. “Nice idea, but better not.”

  Captain Very nudged Usuthus in the ribs, and they lifted their oars; a moment later, we were under way again. Nice idea, I thought. Exactly what Lysimachus would have done – hero, arena champion, best fighting man of his generation, he’d have pulled it off, too. I wished he was there in the boat, and I wasn’t.

  “Take us in to about five yards,” I said.

  “We can’t see,” Usuthus said. “You’ll have to say when.”

  The closer we came, the higher up Ogus was. As soon as I saw him, I knew him; the type, I mean. I’d grown up with it. He was the typical Theme bruiser who’s made his pile and taken to indulging himself; pot belly, double chin, fleshy face, bags under the eyes, but all sort of added on, like modern additions to an old house, and under it you could see the man who made the pile, by hurting and scaring people and being more than usually smart. He was about the same age my dad would have been, had he lived.

  I stood up. The boat rocked horribly. I sat down. Ogus laughed.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Lysimachus. The emperor.”

  “No, you’re not,” Ogus said. “I’ve met Lysimachus, and you’re not him.”

  Then I noticed Hodda glaring at him, same as she’d done at me a moment ago, only about five times fiercer. “No matter,” Ogus said. “You’re the emperor.”

  “Yes.”

  He got up, came to the edge of the jetty and squatted on his heels. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.

  “Sure,” I replied. “What can we do for you?”

  Grin. “We ought to talk,” he said. “But not like this, it’s ridiculous.”

  “Agreed.”

  “There’s an island,” he said, “about six miles up the coast, Lapizaria. Tiny scrap of rock with one croft and a dozen sheep. We’ll meet there. Your men clear it out, including the sheep. My men row over and make sure it’s empty, then your men and my men pull out. You row over in a boat, so do I. We meet in the crofter’s hut, one aide each. Deal?”

  I turned to confer with Usuthus and the captain, but Hodda scowled at me. “That sounds fine,” I said. “When?”

  “Noon, day after tomorrow. When your boys have cleared the island, raise a white flag and my boys’ll come over. When we’re all done, I row back, and you don’t signal to your warship to come in until I’m back on shore.” He paused and grinned. “Got that, or do you need your clerk to write it down for you?”

  “I think we can remember that, between the four of us.”

  He stood up. They’d been right: he was a tall man, about my height, though not quite as broad across the shoulders. He looked at me, frowned, turned and walked away down the jetty. He had a sort of a swagger and a roll, which brought back memories.

  Eight hours later, they told me, the jetty was gone, as if it had never been. A team of engineers came out and dismantled it, packed the planks and beams onto carts and rattled away. All that timber would come in useful for building tunnels.

  13

  One question I wanted an answer to, but couldn’t face asking, so I didn’t. Meanwhile, preparations to make, for the summit conference.

  “We want you to wear your armour,” the City prefect said. “We didn’t last time, because of you being in a small boat, and if it capsized you’d sink. But this time we’ll take you right to the island in a warship, and fetch you off in one, so you’ll be able to wear it safely.”

  “No,” I said.

  A certain amount of dialogue followed, in which the words stupid and pig-headed weren’t spoken aloud, but for once I put my buskinned foot down. There’s two basic schools of defence: armour, and not being there. My dad was a firm believer in the latter. All that ironmongery is strictly for the military, he used to say; on the street you don’t want it, just slows you down. If the other bastard looks like he’s about to have a go at you, get out of the way. If you aren’t there, you can’t get hit.

  Words to live by. Dad and I differ on the precise meaning of out of the way; for him it meant a quick step back and/or sideways, then nip in smartly while he’s off balance and punch him in the kidneys, whereas I interpret it as running away and not stopping until you’re sure you’re safe. In any event, no armour for me. I was sick to death of the bloody thing anyway.

  “We’ve already been over the island,” General Pertinax told me. “Nobody’s lived there since the siege started. Some farmer puts a few sheep there during the summer and a shepherd uses the hut, that’s all. We’ve patched up the roof and rehung the door, and put in a table and some chairs.” He lowered his voice and leaned forward. “The floor’s covered with flagstones,” he said. “We could lever one up and hide a weapon under it.”

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  “Think about it,” the general hissed in my ear. “Your aide could distract him, you make a show of dropping something on the floor, you stoop down, lift the slab, get the knife; your aide grabs his arms, you stick him in the guts. You could end the war at a stroke.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s a stupid idea and we’re trying not to do stupid any more. We’re doing smart instead.”

  “We’ve got time; we could rehearse it beforehand, so you’d know exactly what to do. Amazing what a difference that makes, you know.”

  So true. “Something always goes wrong,” I told him. “Read your history. Assassinations always screw up somehow. His aide will be watching me like a hawk. And what if Ogus is wearing armour under his shirt? No, we do this properly. Probably best if you clear out the flagstones and put down a nice rug or something. If I was Ogus’ chief of security, I’d suspect a trick like that.”

  Still, it was worth thinking about. “Hairpins,” I said to her.

  “What about them?”

  “A nice long hairpin,” I said, “with poison on it. Someone told
me once about some stuff they brew out of white hellebore roots: prick your finger and you’re a goner. While we’re talking, you’re fooling about with your hair; women do it all the time, nobody even notices. Then you pull out the hairpin and stick it in his arm, I smash his aide in the face, we run for it. Well?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It’s worth thinking about.”

  “No,” she said, “it isn’t. And white hellebore only grows in the mountains of Permia; there wouldn’t be time.”

  “There’s probably something else just as good.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “It’s a really stupid idea.”

  I nodded. “I thought so, too. Only—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It’s the sort of thing Lysimachus would’ve—”

  “You’re not Lysimachus.”

  At which, something woke up in the back of my head. I told it to go back to sleep. “Agreed,” I said. “Just thought I’d run it past you, that’s all.”

  Interesting that she knew so much about poisons and where to find them. Still, she’s a very well-informed woman. “You’re still thinking about staying here, aren’t you?” she said.

  “If there’s no Ogus, there’s no reason to leave.”

  “Yes, there is. Of course there is. I can’t stay here the rest of my life, in these stupid clothes, locked up with a load of stupid women. We need to get out of here, with money, lots of it. You agreed to that. Well, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve changed your mind. You like pretending to be the emperor.”

  “I am the bloody emperor,” I snapped. Then: “But you’re right, of course. I can’t live like this, any more than you can. Long runs are great, but not a lifetime. We’ve got to get out.”

  “Yes. As soon as we can. Tomorrow.”

  I stared at her. “You’re kidding.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding? No, when Ogus goes back to the mainland, we go with him. That’s the plan. Are you in or not?”

  “It won’t work. It’s too soon. We can’t just rush into anything.”

  “Tomorrow or not at all. I’ve got it all figured out. You just leave all the talking to me. Keep your mouth tight shut, and everything will be just fine.”

  Around the time Hodda and I were having that conversation, Ogus’ miners broke through the granite shelf, about five hundred yards south of the previous breach.

  We picked it up on our pans-of-water mining detectors, and there was no doubt about it. If at first you don’t succeed; patience, perseverance, an admirably strong work ethic.

  “Chances are,” said the new colonel of engineers, a fifteen-year veteran who’d got the job because everyone better qualified was now dead, “it’s just a blind, and he’ll be putting his main effort into the old workings. But we can’t just ignore it, obviously, or he’ll make the new breach his main assault and play around with the old one as a diversion.”

  “We’ve got the resources to counter him, haven’t we?” I said.

  He nodded. “I’ve got the Tanagenes digging a countersap right now,” he said, “and we’ve got nine sets of burners and bellows. I imagine he’ll have something new up his sleeve after getting beat the last time. No guessing what it could be, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Hrabanus, his name was; I’d read his record and he seemed quite bright, though a plodder rather than an inspirational hero in shining armour. “Have you read Posidonius on siegecraft?” I said.

  “Been meaning to get around to it for ages,” he replied. “But you know how it is.”

  “Posidonius,” I said, “says that if a besieger has sufficient resources, a besieged city attacked by sapping and undermining will inevitably fall. It’s just a matter of time, expense and political will. The defenders’ job is to make it more trouble than it’s worth, and four times out of ten they succeed; the besieger runs out of time or money, or the government changes at home and wants peace, or plague breaks out in the besieger’s camp – that happens a lot – or something happens that stops him pressing on to the bitter and otherwise inevitable end. But in purely technical terms, assuming the besieger has the resources, it’s impossible to defend a city against undermining indefinitely. That’s what Posidonius reckons, anyway.”

  “Haven’t read him,” said Hrabanus. “Sorry.”

  Once I’d got rid of Colonel Hrabanus I had time to think. Posidonius lived three hundred years ago; he was the chief engineer for the Vesani empire, on whose behalf he besieged and captured no less than twenty-six cities; still a record, apparently. He wrote his book in a city under siege, in the intervals of defending it with all the skill and experience at his command, and died bravely when the city was undermined and sacked by the enemy. But that was two hundred years ago, history, the past; and, as we’ve seen, nothing changes like the past. Take your eye off it for a split second and it’s unrecognisably different. You can set too much store by precedent, if you ask me.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” I said to her. “Let’s do something. Let’s go to a theatre.”

  She looked at me. “What, and watch?” she said. She made it sound indecent. “We can’t do that. It takes three days to organise if we set foot outside the palace.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll have a royal command performance. We can do that. We can send out for any show we want.”

  “If you insist,” she said.

  “One thing’s for sure,” I told her. “Where we’re going, wherever we end up, there won’t be theatres there. Not what we know as theatres, anyhow. This is our last chance.”

  She shrugged. “Can’t say the thought bothers me much,” she said. “But if that’s what you want.”

  I sent for the Chamberlain. “We’re out of touch,” I explained. “What’s the best show in town?”

  He didn’t know, but he’d find out. Half an hour later, he came back. The consensus of the younger clerks, he said, was that you couldn’t beat The Girl from Emarus at the Sword, with Olethria in the title role and Psaolus as a comic doctor. The senior clerks recommended The Liar’s Tragedy at the Sceptre, with Einhard as the king.

  “We’ll have the comedy,” Hodda said. “Send for them.”

  “What did you have to go and choose that for?” I said, after the Chamberlain had gone.

  “Because I’m not in the mood for three hours of Saloninus. Anywhere, Girl from Emarus is a good show.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “I wrote it.”

  “So you did,” she said, “I’d forgotten. Or at any rate you did the second act and several of the songs. Come to think of it, I still owe you money for that one.”

  Actually, it wasn’t bad. The first and third act went well, Olethria did her sword dance and someone had replaced one of my songs with a dance routine involving nine girls dressed as fish. After it was over, she went backstage to say hello to her old friends, because it would’ve seemed odd if she hadn’t, while I sent for the Chamberlain.

  “I forgot to mention it earlier,” I said, “but Her Majesty would like the paintings in her dressing room taken down and replaced with something with a bit more class. Her words.”

  “Yes, Majesty.”

  “She thought maybe the Callicrates icons.”

  “An excellent choice, Majesty.”

  “See to it, there’s a good chap.”

  14

  The most famous icon in the world is, of course, Our Lady The Averter Of Evil, which hangs above the altar in the Golden Spear temple; it’s black as coal from a thousand years of incense smoke and almost certainly not the original, which disappeared sixteen hundred years ago; it miraculously reappeared a century later, when nobody who’d ever seen it was still alive, and I suspect it of being an impostor, like someone else I could mention. But for a thousand years it’s performed regular miracles – healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, bringing victory against our enemies – so it’
s clearly doing a grand job, even if it’s a fraud.

  The second most famous icon is Our Lord Of The Bronze House, and on the first day of each month ever since the siege began the priests of the Studium had carried it in procession round the walls; which, according to about eighty per cent of the population of the City, was the only reason we were all still alive.

  We do like our icons. We have them as godparents at baptisms; they witness wills and important commercial contracts; they give the bride away at weddings if the bride’s actual father is dead or absent. A sick man would far rather have an icon than a doctor – Our Lady Of The Golden Skein is the only known cure for the bite of the black diamond spider and several sorts of poison toadstool – and the venerable series of the Transfiguration above the White Gate is practically down to bare boards, thanks to the habit of generations of soldiers of scraping a tiny scrap of paint away under a fingernail, to protect them from death on campaign. Actors and dramatists especially revere Our Lord Of The Balances; I used to have a copy of it myself, egg tempera on limewashed board, which I kissed just before going on stage.

  After all, they work, or they work every bit as well as anything else does in this life. The Emperor Corineus, according to some book I read, used to go into battle wearing armour made entirely of icons, overlapping like the scales of a fish, and once during the assault on Auxesis he was hit square on by a catapult arrow at point-blank range. The arrow bounced off, and he wasn’t even bruised.

  What was good enough for Corineus, Hodda explained to her ladies-in-waiting, is good enough for my husband; so she had them sitting up all night carefully stitching the seventy-two Callicrates icons in between two layers of red velvet to form a holy brigandine. For her own protection she sent one of the girls down to the Chapel Royal to borrow the venerable and exquisite Our Lady Of The Waterlilies, which she hung round her neck on a gold chain. Once that was done, we were good to go; so we went.

  On the way to the docks we heard the latest from the mines. We’d put out half a dozen exploratory saps, only to find (the hard way) that the enemy were much further forward than we’d thought. We’d had to fall back and fill our main sap with rubble mixed with sand and mortar, to keep the enemy from driving through it right into the City. Hrabanus was proposing to dig deep under the enemy’s main gallery and undermine it – dig a wide chamber twenty feet below it, collapse the chamber roof and bring their gallery crashing down – but that was bound to take time and he wasn’t exactly precisely sure of where the gallery actually was, so it was just possible that he was directing all our energy and resources into something that wasn’t going to work. Still, it was better than sitting around playing cards waiting to have your throat cut.