How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  15

  Somehow word had got about, and there were thousands

  of people at the docks, mostly wearing Theme purple, to

  see us off. Hodda stood up in the carriage and held the holy icon over her head, which got her the most tremendous cheer – and why not, it was a scene she was born to play. I stayed sitting down, looking miserable. No need to act for that.

  The sea wasn’t quite as calm as it had been the last time. I felt sick, just managed to keep it down. First time I’d

  been on a warship, of course; we’re a seafaring nation, salt in our veins and all that, but as far as I’m concerned you can stuff it.

  The island wasn’t what I’d been led to expect. It was closer to the mainland, for a start, and bigger. I’d got it into my head that we were headed for a rock sticking up out of the water with a little hut perched on top of it. Instead, it was bigger than the Haymarket; the biggest open space, in fact, that I’d ever seen up close. In the distance, I could make out a building. As we tramped across the grass, with great big rocks the size of your head lying about where anybody could trip over them, I figured that must be the shack everyone had been talking about. Some shack. In Old Stairs, you’d have five families living in something that size.

  He was there waiting for us, sitting on the porch steps. “I’m alone,” he called out, “it’s quite safe.”

  Here we go, I thought. The last part of the walk was a steep climb, and I arrived out of breath and sweating.

  Ogus stood up. “Come inside,” he said.

  “Here’ll do me,” I said.

  “Inside. That was the agreement.”

  True; so we went indoors. The shack was horrible; the walls were white with mould, the air was damp, and there were rat holes in the walls and rat shit on the windowsill. Hodda hates rats. As soon as we were inside, Hodda slammed the door shut and stood with her back to it. Hello, I thought.

  “Right,” Ogus said, not to me. “Who is this clown?”

  I looked at her. She was looking at him. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  “Answer the question.”

  “He’s an actor,” she said, “called Notker. Lysimachus got killed by one of your stupid catapulty things.”

  Ogus was grinning. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. Notker looks like Lysimachus—”

  “No, he doesn’t. I met Lysimachus. This idiot’s taller and stockier, and his nose is a different shape.”

  “He’s an actor,” Hodda said. “Anyway, he’s now the legitimate crowned emperor of the Robur, and that’s gospel truth.”

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Be quiet,” Hodda snapped. “I’ve brought him, here he is,” she went on, “and I’ve kept my end of the deal. All right?”

  There was a window but it was too small and narrow to get out of. The door or nothing, should you wish to leave in a hurry. “What deal?” I said. “Hodda, what’s going on?”

  Ogus turned his head and frowned at me. “Be quiet,” Hodda repeated. “Well?” she went on. “Have I or haven’t I?”

  I remembered – Ogus had reminded me – that I was a big, strong man, almost a head taller than Ogus and at least twenty years his junior. I took a long stride forward and grabbed him by the shoulder.

  You tell me what’s going on right now, I was planning to say, but I couldn’t, because by then I was on the floor in a heap, unable to breathe. My dad knew that punch, he used it a lot. You barely move at all, and the other guy’s as helpless as a baby.

  “Don’t hit him,” I heard her say.

  Ogus kicked me. Actually, it hardly registered; when you’re completely winded, you can’t feel anything. I heard her yell at him; a soft, disinterested voice in the back of my mind said, she doesn’t want to do that, he won’t like it. Sure enough, a moment later I heard a loud slap, a scream and another slap, this time no scream. “Don’t you tell me what to do,” Ogus said, not raising his voice. Three guesses who he reminded me of.

  “I’ve had enough of you,” he went on. “You’re a pain in the arse, that’s what you are. Now shut your face and get away from the door.”

  “This isn’t what we—”

  “No, I changed my mind. Shift.”

  I managed to drag some air inside me. It was like swallowing a brick. I opened my eyes. She was on the floor, in a heap, in front of the door. He was bending down, grabbing a handful of her hair. Useful stuff, hair, in my dad’s line of work. “All right,” he said, and tried to yank her to her feet.

  I’d have grinned if I’d been able to. Hodda gets her wigs and hairpieces from the Curali brothers, in Long Acre. She pays a lot of money for them. Worth every penny.

  The hair came away in Ogus’ hand, and he staggered backwards. That gave Hodda just enough time to scramble to her feet, open the door and hurl herself outside. Full marks to her, she had the wit to slam the door behind her as she left. It only took Ogus a split second to open it again, but a split second can be a very, very long time, in context. Long enough – to take an example purely at random – for me to haul myself up off the floor and smash a chair over his head.

  Didn’t actually work like that. We use fake chairs, made of some light, fragile wood. This one was heavier and clumsier to swing, so the best I managed was to clout the side of his head with one leg.

  Still, it doesn’t have to be perfect, and there was no audience to criticise or throw nuts. I’d clearly hurt him enough to stop him thinking, let alone doing anything, and that’s all you need to achieve; trust me, I know about this stuff. I had plenty of time and just enough strength left to hit him properly: a stab in the kidneys with the legs. Now that hurts. He dropped to his knees, leaving me a clear shot, at my leisure, at his head. With a nice heavy, solid chair like this one, I could finish the war at a stroke.

  Except I couldn’t. I maintain it’s because I was too weak, after being winded and kicked, I mean. I looked at him, on his knees, and stepped back, keeping the chair legs directly between him and me. On the floor, I saw half an icon. He must have broken one of them when he hit me.

  He put his hands on his knees and stood up slowly. “She won’t get far,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  He laughed. “You cheated,” he said, “you’re wearing armour. She said she wouldn’t let you do that.”

  I unbuttoned the coat and opened it. “What’re those?” he said. “They look like little pictures.”

  “Icons.”

  “Really. You people are pathetic, you know that?”

  He lunged at me, but I was ready for him. Even my dad grudgingly admitted that I have good footwork, when I’m expecting an attack. I sidestepped, he rushed past me and nearly collided with the wall. I swung the chair as he went past, but I’d underestimated the headroom. The legs hit a roof beam, and one of them snapped. I dropped it. He turned to face me. He had a knife in his hand. Of course, by this point so had I.

  Didn’t I mention that? My idea, not hers, for once. I’d stuck it into the lining of the coat, where my dad taught me, the place where only the most careful frisking will find it. It wasn’t a wonderful knife, but it was the only one I could get at short notice.

  “Seriously,” he said. “You’re an actor.”

  “Was.”

  “Like her.”

  “You obviously know each other.”

  “Oh yes. She’s my wife.”

  He didn’t need a chair to make my head hurt. “Your wife.”

  “Yeah, she insisted. All my wives come to a bad end. Talk of the devil,” he added, as the door opened.

  My guess is, she hadn’t got far but had put up a fight. The milkface soldier with her looked like he’d had a torrid time of it. Scratched face, that sort of thing. He pushed her inside, shut the door and stood in front of it.

  “You’re useless,” Ogus said to the soldier. “I could’ve been killed while you were larking about out there. My aide,” he added. “I don’t cheat. Well,” he added, st
icking the knife back in his belt, “no more than you do.”

  I kept mine where he could see it. “You can’t get off this island,” I said. “They’ll see you from the warship.”

  He grinned at me. “There’s a blind spot,” he said. “The shack covers a way back to our boat. Not the one we came over in, goes without saying. You people are stupid.”

  I looked past him. “Are you really married to this oaf?” I said.

  She scowled at me; on her knees, picking up her wig and putting it back on. At a time like this, I thought; still, she’s Hodda. Presumably the soldier counted as an audience. “Yes,” she said.

  “If I were you,” Ogus said to me, “I’d put that knife down, before you cut yourself. Him and me, we can take you easily, but accidents happen.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “If I do, you’ll kill me.”

  Ogus sighed. “We’re going to kill you anyway, son. Hadn’t you worked that out?”

  Then something unexpected happened. The soldier slid to the floor. He wriggled a bit and made a funny noise, then lay still. Hodda was looking at me. “Hairpin,” she said.

  Ogus swung round, took in the altered circumstances at a glance, then glowered at her. “You stupid bitch,” he said. “What did you do that for?”

  “You promised me,” she said. “You weren’t going to kill him.”

  “The hell I did.”

  “That’s when he was Lysimachus. This is Notker.”

  “I’m not interested who he is.”

  “In my last letter, I said, don’t kill him. We had a deal.”

  That’s so like her. She sets terms and assumes you’ve accepted them. “You changed it,” he said. “Anyway, why not? He’s nobody.”

  “Leave him alone.”

  “If I do that, what’s the point of the exercise? The deal I agreed was, you bring me Lysimachus, I kill him.”

  “Pretend he’s dead,” she said, “that’s just as good and we aren’t going to contradict you. We’ll go off somewhere.”

  “You and him?”

  She nodded. “I don’t think I want to be married to you any more.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ogus said. “I need a head to stick on a pike, otherwise who’ll believe me?” That grin again. “God, I wish you’d told me Lysimachus was dead. We needn’t have bothered with all this nonsense.”

  I was thinking about it. Hodda and me against him; it would probably work, assuming Hodda was really on my side. Could I count on her? Probably not, even though I was the one with all the valuable icons. What mattered, though, wasn’t the truth. It was what Ogus believed. “She’s stitched you up,” I said.

  “You be quiet,” she yelled. I ignored her.

  “You die,” I said, “the war’s over, she’s the empress of the restored Robur empire. Not to mention your widow. Would that make her empress of your lot, too?”

  “Shut up,” Hodda screamed at me.

  “Bring a knife, she told me, just in case. And if that didn’t work, there’s always her trusty poisoned hairpin.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Believe what you like.” I took a step forward. “Get behind him, Hodda, that’s a good girl.”

  Ogus took a long, graceful step back into the corner, just like I wanted him to, to where I wanted him to be. Of course, Hodda’s the experienced director, not me. Still, you pick a few things up.

  In this instance, the chair. I threw it at him and darted towards the door. It only opened halfway, of course, because the stupid dead soldier was blocking it, and in the time it took me to kick him clear, Ogus was on to me. So I stabbed him.

  I remember him looking at me, then down at the blood soaking into his shirt. I pulled the knife out. “You might want to get that seen to,” I said. “Come on, Hodda, we’re leaving.”

  She didn’t want to go but I got her arm behind her back, like Dad taught me. He had a wonderful way with women, and kids, too.

  We ran about a hundred yards, which was all I could manage before I dropped to my knees, gasping like a landed fish. I managed to turn my head. We weren’t being followed.

  “Get up,” she screamed at me.

  No, I thought. What’s the point of being emperor if I can’t indulge myself in the occasional luxury, such as breathing? Hauling the air in was like dragging a cart uphill; it really didn’t want to go, and I wasn’t sure I had the strength. So she grabbed my ear and hauled me to my feet. You can’t argue with that.

  We ran, with her towing me like a tug with a grain barge, until we could see the warship. She let go of me and waved her hands over her head.

  I was back on the ground. “You killed someone,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That soldier. You killed him.”

  “Yes, I suppose I did.” She waved again. “Never done that before. Just as well I did, or you’d be a dead man right now.”

  “How could you do that?”

  “My lucky hairpin,” she said. “I’ve had it for years. Oh, you mean how could I bring myself to? Easy-bloody-peasy, in the circumstances.”

  I saw the warship lower a boat. “You set me up,” I said.

  “Not you. Lysimachus.”

  “I ought to break your neck.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Notker. If you hadn’t screwed everything up, we’d have been fine.”

  The boat was a third of the way over to the island. “Come on,” she said.

  I staggered to my feet. “What was the plan?” I said. “The one I screwed up.”

  She sighed. We started to walk. “Originally,” she said, “I was to seduce Lysimachus and talk him into a meeting, like this one. Ogus would kill him, and that’d be that. Of course, that’s when we all thought Lysimachus was the heroic genius who saved the City.”

  “In your last letter, you said to him.”

  “I wrote to him after he realised you weren’t Lysimachus,” she said. “Letter in a scent bottle. I told him, let us go and pretend you’ve killed Lysimachus. But he welched on us, the bastard.”

  “You’re really his wife?”

  She nodded. “I could’ve sworn he was nuts about me,” she said sadly. “It was when I did that tour of the Cartwheel Islands. I slipped across to the mainland on a fishing boat and went to see him. I can give you Lysimachus, I told him. We got on famously, so I thought.” She stopped, turned round and looked at me. “You stabbed him. Will he be all right?”

  “Oh, I should think so,” I said. I showed her the knife. Then, with the tip of my left index finger, I pressed the point right down into the handle.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” she said.

  Theatre knives, like theatre everything else. It’s spring-loaded, so it looks like you’re driving five inches of steel into somebody and in fact you haven’t broken the skin. And when the blade goes into the handle, fake blood squirts out through a little tube. I’d palmed it off one of the actors at our command performance. It was the only knife I could get.

  “He’ll be very confused for an hour or so,” I said, “all that blood and no hole. Other than that, he’ll be fine. I’m not a killer,” I added. “Not like some people.”

  She gave me a look of pure refined contempt. “You’re a clown, Notker.”

  “I like to think so,” I said. “We don’t get the girl, but we get all the laughs. You might have said something. I really thought we were going there to negotiate.”

  “Really? God, you’re dumb.”

  “Really. You neglected to say anything that would tend to make me think otherwise.”

  “You’re lying,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have brought the icons.”

  “They were for you, you stupid bitch.” Moment of silence. “You were desperate to get out of the City. I assumed that was the plan. You set up the meeting so he and I could talk peace, and the valuable artwork was your commission.”

  “Oh.” She was still gazing at me. “Thick as a brick,” she said. “You really thought that.” />
  “It seemed plausible,” I said. The boat had reached the shore. We were about two hundred yards away from it. “I thought he might actually want to talk. Silly me.”

  “You’d have let me go.”

  “Not up to me, is it? You want to go, you go. Why didn’t you let him kill me, by the way? That was your original deal, wasn’t it?”

  “No, that was Lysimachus.”

  “I’m Lysimachus,” I said. “Ogus seemed happy enough with it, but you said no.”

  “That wasn’t the deal,” she said. “And anyway—” She scowled at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “Come to think of it, it would’ve worked out pretty well. You wanted to go,” she added angrily, “you told me so. You said, we’ve got to get out of the City.”

  I nodded. “That was one of the things I was going to ask for,” I said. ”In the peace negotiations, which never happened. I don’t know. This is what comes of not talking to each other.”

  Captain Very was walking toward us, with two soldiers. “You’re not going to tell anyone,” she said.

  “What, not mention the fact that you tried to betray the emperor to the enemy?”

  “Notker—”

  “Keep your voice down, please.”

  Captain Very closed to within earshot. “Well?” he called out.

  “Balls-up,” I called back. “Let’s get out of here quick.”

  16

  A trap. A cowardly, treacherous attempt on the life of the emperor. It went down like free beer.

  “People are saying it’s because he’s desperate,” General Aineas told me, “because he knows he’s losing the war. It’s done wonders for morale.”