by K. J. Parker
Her head was turned away.
“And you know what,” I went on. “That’s all me, that is. Nobody but me could’ve done it. Not the old emperor, because he didn’t have the brains. Not Nicephorus, because he didn’t have the power; he’d have had to talk other people into it, and they would’ve told him it’d never work. Not the House or the civil service, because they can’t do anything, only stop things being done. Not even the real Lysimachus, because he’d never have got the Themes together and made them work for him; he was a Green through and through, just like Dad, and the Blues would rather die than do all that stuff for a Green, even if it’d save the City. The engineers couldn’t have done it, the soldiers and the politicians couldn’t have done it, the Themes wouldn’t have bothered trying. It was me, a stupid two-bit song-and-dance man, your son. I did it. I lied and I cheated and I pretended to be a great hero and I told people I was doing one thing when I was doing something else, I bullied and stole and twisted people’s arms, I did everything you’re not supposed to do, all the stuff I’m good at, and as a result the City will not fall, and we’ll all be here this time next year, and the year after that. So don’t you dare say I’m no good, because it’s not true.”
I looked at her. She’d fallen asleep.
20
Why Ascension Day, I hear you ask? Because that’s when the weather begins to change, according to the Admiralty manual. Horrible fierce winds start to blow from the west thirty days after Ascension Day, and sailing eastwards across open sea is bound to end in tears. Also, Ascension is the second biggest festival in the calendar, and the emperor traditionally delivers his state-of-the-empire address to the people on the last day of the festival. And, more to the point, Major Cotkel had given it as his considered opinion that after Ascension he couldn’t guarantee to keep Ogus from coming up through the floor, like the devil in a pantomime, and slaughtering the lot of us.
Open sea, because if you draw a straight line across the chart instead of hugging the coast all the way to the Sashan border, you shave a whole two months off the trip. Most freighters can’t handle the wind and the waves that far out, but I knew for a fact that the Sashan stone barges (I told you about them; biggest ships ever built) could do it and survive, because that was the route they used to take in the old days. I was gambling that the same ships would still be in service – a fair bet, given that they’d cost an obscene amount of money to build, so you’d need to operate them for about a hundred years before you got your money back, let alone showed a profit. I’d read the specification they were built to in one of the old books and I was deeply impressed, even though I didn’t understand a word of it.
Meanwhile, we ripped down the Senate House and prised the architraves off the Golden Feather temple, we dismantled half of Hill Street; best part of a quarter of a million granite blocks, each weighing half a ton. The engineers and the Stonemasons’ Guild and the carters and the artillerymen told me it couldn’t be done, certainly not in the time available, probably not at all. But I’d closed all the factories and workshops, the shops and the market stalls, even (God forgive me) the theatres; if you wanted to earn money, you came and worked for me. Not real money, of course. Nothing I do is real. But my pretend money was good all over town; you could buy bread with it. All you had to do was suspend your disbelief, like the audience at a play, and everything went smooth as ironed silk. It was a pretty paradox – let’s save the City by taking it apart stone by stone and burying it in the ground – but paradox is the gatehouse of truth, in my opinion. I have no idea what that means, by the way, but I bet you it means something.
I was paying them silly money and they had no choice; even so, I don’t for one minute think they’d have done it but for one extraordinary thing. The people believed in me. The people loved me. You mean Lysimachus, she said, but actually no, I don’t. Take the humble caterpillar, which changes its name and puts on a fancy silk costume, and instead of crawling along the ground, it flies. Two entirely different creatures, one a worm, one a sort of very small bird, you couldn’t possibly mistake the one for the other, they bear each other no resemblance at all. Same creature, though, inside. And maybe I wasn’t Lysimachus, but for most of my life I hadn’t been Notker, or at least not when I was working. I’d been me. For a long time I crawled along the ground, and then I spread my wings. And ask yourself this: when you go to a show and see Olethria play Queen Eudicia, who do you clap and cheer for? Lysimachus was a good part, but I flatter myself I’d played it pretty well. Because of which, we dug the ditch, pulled down the buildings and laid the stones, and all with two days to spare before Ascension Eve.
Smug bugger, aren’t I?
Hope breeds in this city, like rats. Forgive me for repeating myself; it’s a good line, and nobody will notice that I used it before. Not that I really understand what people have against rats. They’re small and furry, with cute whiskers, and all they want to do is make a living, raise their very large families in peace and quiet and not get exterminated by huge monsters whose motivation they can’t begin to understand. But: you move into a new place and the first thing you say is, Yuck, rats, they’ll have to go.
By go you mean die, of course; so you make war against them with every means at your command. You borrow someone’s terrier. You mix poison with a handful of wheat chaff. You set traps, cunning, ingenious traps with mechanisms whose intricate workings are a delight to behold, taken out of context. If you’re really determined, you stop up all the holes but one and puff sulphur smoke down it with a bellows. Maybe, if you’re as soft as butter, you feel a trifle guilty, because all life is precious, even the enemy; but you know in your heart that they’ve got to go, because they’re rats. There’s a line in one of the poets:
… In ruined churches, where the bees
And rats and mice build monasteries.
It’s a good line, though the rhyme’s a bit dubious. Actually, it’s ants and mice, but not to worry. Nobody likes sharing with an ants’ nest, either.
Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush.
Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.
And then the ships came. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. At first they thought it was a mist blowing in from the sea. No, it was sails, hundreds and hundreds of sails, covering the sea in a line so long it curved; and some of them were warships, the Fleet coming home, but most of them were huge black-hulled things with ridiculously high forecastles, impossibly big and square and flat, with best part of a quarter of an acr
e of canvas towing them steadily through the choppy water as though it wasn’t relevant. It was as though the giants had come to visit; people expected to see men twelve feet tall in their rigging, and rats the size of horses.
Those were the Sashan stone barges, on whose existence I’d gambled every trachy in the Exchequer, and here they were, a dream come true, deliverance swooping down on wires at the end of Act 3. I went down to the docks to see them put in, along with the joint chiefs of staff, the department heads of the service, the entire House and the chief officers of the Theme. I’d read about them, every detail, precisely how many nails and dowels there were in each one, but I’d never imagined they could be so big; and yet they strolled demurely into the harbour and snuggled up to the quays like kittens.
I knew they could do that, because they’d done it before. Because, according to the books, the whole of the docks were knocked down and rebuilt three hundred years ago to accommodate those monsters; a hundred of them at a time, with room to unload comfortably, turn and go out again.
But there weren’t a hundred of them, there were two hundred and sixty-two; sixteen more than it said in the books, which sort of proves my point about history. I’d asked them to send the lot, and they had.
The cranes we’d built to handle the blocks were all there ready and waiting, and once the blocks were on the quay the teams took over, rollers and levers and ropes, because it’d be quicker to manhandle them from the docks to the wall than to lift them up onto carts and then lift them down again. I climbed up onto one of the observation towers, and from up there it was like a granite river running through the streets, like rainwater, or the lava from an erupting volcano. Ah, volcano imagery; how useful it’s been to me in telling this story. Maybe this was the point where the lava starts flowing back up the hill, to fill in the fiery hole and make sure it never bursts out again.
21
She joined me on the tower. We watched as Purple Theme did the impossible: a whole city on the move, working together, doing what actually needed to be done. Which is a hell of a lot more unlikely than lava flowing uphill, I can tell you.
“Fine,” she said, after a while. “You win.”
“Really?”
“I know when I’m beaten,” she said. “You did this. It’s amazing, and we’re going to beat Ogus. I can’t believe I said that, but it’s true.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
That oh-for-pity’s-sake look. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “They’re doing exactly what you told them to, and it’s going to work. The City is safe. No power on earth—”
I took a good look, enough to last me the rest of my life. “Actually,” I said, “no. It won’t work. Not if Ogus can read. Or if he’s got someone to read to him.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I wanted to break it to her gently, but she’s a big girl, she could handle it. “It won’t work,” I said. “I know it won’t.”
“You’re talking drivel again. I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
Sigh. “You don’t honestly believe I thought of this myself, do you?”
“Didn’t you?”
“God, no,” I said. “I found it in a book. Elements of Military Architecture, by Deodatus. And he didn’t think of it, he only wrote about it.”
She shrugged. “What the hell,” she said. “Originality’s overrated, if you ask me.”
“Deodatus,” I went on, in my plonking, boring voice, “wrote about the siege of Oppa, where the Echmen spent five years trying to beat the greatest military engineer of all time, a man called Posidonius. All this was his idea. It’s not in any of his books, however, because he never lived to write about it. Posidonius did all this at Oppa – the trench, the underground wall – and it didn’t fucking work.”
She looked at me, eyes very round. “You’re kidding.”
“Sadly, no. It took the Echmen a whole year and a lot of money and dead people, but they got through it, and then Oppa fell and everybody inside it was killed, Posidonius included.”
“But you said it would work.”
“I lied.”
I waited, but the storm didn’t come. She was too stunned to say a word. When she’d recovered enough to speak, she said, “It might work.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Bullshit.” She glared at me. “It’s all there in the book, is it?”
“Yes,” I said. “What Posidonius did, and how the Echmen got around it. Technical stuff.”
“Fine,” she said. “You know what the bad guys did then, so you can figure out a way to stop them. If you know what’s coming, you can prevent it.”
I shook my head. “We do something. Then they do something, so we do something. Trouble is, it’s not exactly a fair fight. It’s like the archer and the deer. They can lose over and over, and still try again. If we lose just once, we’re dead. It’s inevitable, Hodda. Didn’t we both agree? Sooner or later the City will fall.”
I’d made her angry. “Then what’s all this in aid of? Just to make people feel better?”
I wanted to laugh. All my working life, all the effort and skill we put into it, structures we build out of words and costumes, greasepaint and pretty scenes painted on cloth; castles in the air. Do we change the world? No. We make people feel better, for a little while. I could almost hear myself pitching it to a manager. Castles in the air, I’d say, they’ve been done to death. Now a castle under the ground; that’s something new.
Another thing we do in the theatre; we wait till the very last moment. “Not entirely,” I said.
It was a wonderful Ascension festival. I can’t remember a better one. They worked all day, dragging stone blocks and dropping them into position, until the job was finally done, a glorious wall of the hardest stone on earth, right where it needed to be. Then they moved off in solemn procession to the Hippodrome. The auditorium was built to seat sixty thousand, but you can double that if you cram them in like olives in a press; it was full. Everyone in the City who could walk was there; exhausted, happy, hopeful, proud to be Robur, waiting to hear their emperor speak.
I had a few things I had to see to, and then I was ready. For once I didn’t begrudge having to put on all the gear, including my lucky coat and my armour. Anyone in the business will tell you, once you’ve got the costume on, suddenly you aren’t you any more: you’re who you’re supposed to be. In my case, the emperor.
So: fanfare of trumpets. Everyone sits still, stops eating cashew nuts, turns and looks at me. I stand there for a moment, looking inexpressibly dignified.
Then someone taps me on the shoulder and hands me a note. I read it. Pause for effect.
Showtime.
“Citizens,” I said, “it’s bad news. The enemy have broken through the new wall.”
I’d allowed myself a count of three; enough time for it to sink in, not quite long enough for mad panic. “We have to evacuate the City,” I said. “Theme leaders, organise into wards and neighbourhoods and take your people directly to the docks. There are ships waiting. I repeat, there are enough ships. Everyone, do exactly as your Theme leaders tell you. If we panic, we’re all dead. If you panic, you’re not just killing yourself but your family and your neighbours, too. Do as your Theme boss says and you’ll be fine, you have my word. Stay in your seats till your ward is called, then get up and leave quickly and quietly. Don’t run, and it’s best if you keep quiet so you can hear the instructions. Go straight to the docks, don’t worry about the folks left at home, we’ll bring them. I’m sorry, but you can’t go back for your things, there just isn’t time. That’s all. Let’s go.”
Now that’s a scene I’ll never forget. Everyone stayed where they were. Then three rows at the back stood up and filed out, then two rows at the front, then three rows in the middle, and so on till there was nobody left in that huge space except me and my hangers-on in the royal box. Quite the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen: calm, organised, even graceful. And we had the Themes to than
k for that. Nobody else could’ve done it, and without them it wouldn’t have happened.
Take away the people, about a hundred and sixty thousand of them, and who’s left? The army and the navy had their orders and were carrying them out, too busy to think. I’d had the senators rounded up just before dawn; they were in their allotted places in one of the ships. The engineers were fully occupied flooding Ogus’ saps with the water from those beautifully timely underground springs; they were the only real piece of luck I was given, and I think I made full use of it. I had a few other people running a few small-scale errands. That was it. Leaving just me and my immediate circle, who actually knew what was going on.
This is how I’d explained it to Hodda. It’s all been a lie, I told her. The underground wall won’t work. But that’s not the point. The purpose of the exercise wasn’t building a wall. Building walls never achieves anything. The purpose was getting those ships here.