There used to be inns and roadhouses all along the last hundred miles of the Military Express, but most of them have gone now, apart from the Poverty & Compassion at Spets. The Poverty survives because it’s the last change of horses for the government mail before the coast. They know me there, so I wasn’t too keen about stopping. “The hell with it,” she said. “By the time they’ve sent word to anybody, we’ll be over the sea in Sashan. That’s the nice thing about a war. It screws up communications.”
Fair enough; so we had a proper room with a bed instead of sleeping under the cart, and Stauracia managed to kid the landlord into taking her note of hand on the Sisters in Coram for seven staurata, truly an achievement worthy to be enshrined in song and story. “Why didn’t you tell me you had money in the Sisters?” I asked her. “We could’ve—”
“I haven’t.”
In which case, more remarkable still. Five staurata for a ship across the Friendly Sea; two for living a life of riotous dissipation between Spets and the coast, provided we could find anywhere to spend it. “Fuck it,” she said, when we woke up next morning, “let’s have bacon, and some proper wheat bread. I haven’t had decent food for as long as I can remember.”
But they didn’t have any bacon or wheat bread, so we made do with porridge, which wasn’t so bad after weeks of dry biscuit. I’d been doing a variant of the geometry in my head: how long would it take a message to reach my father from Sunelonti, then back again with instructions, and by the time the instructions came back, how far would we be from the coast, at the rate we were going? I allowed for exceptionally fast ships and fast horses, and it still worked out fine, even if the bad people were reporting to my father’s steward on Scona rather than dragging all the way out to the house itself. Hooray for geography: for once in my life, it was turning out to be on my side.
“And that’s assuming they can track us,” she pointed out. “Which I can’t see for one minute, because we’ve been sleeping rough, not stopping at inns, and the road’s been nice and empty. I couldn’t find us right now, and I’m bloody good.”
Also – she didn’t point it out, but she didn’t need to – we were going to Toris to see her friend the corrupt official, not to any of the obvious ports which would be the logical places for us to make for, if we were taking the quickest way to the east. So even if my father had forked out for a fast yacht, and the winds were just right, the chances of there being anyone to meet us when we reached the coast were slender enough to allow me to sleep at night. Normally, getting a ship at Toris would be a serious problem, but not if we had Sashan passes. Toris is officially neutral, an independent mercantile republic, though in reality it’s about as independent as your hand is from your brain. “About bribing your pal,” I said. “What are we going to use for money?”
She gave me a sweet smile. “We won’t need any money,” she said.
Nor we did. He took one look at her and sagged, as though some joker had stolen his spine. “It’s all right,” she told him, “really. This time I’m going away and I’m never coming back.”
Two passes, coming right up. He looked up at me as he wrote. “Do I know you?” he said.
“Not if you’ve got any sense.”
He looked past me, at her. “Does he—?”
“He’s not coming back either,” she said. “Stop worrying, you’ll give yourself crow’s feet.”
He finished writing out the passes. She examined them carefully, then gave them to me to check. I nodded. Good as the real thing, because they were the real thing. “What happened to your face?” he asked her.
“Walked into a door,” she said.
“It’s a shame,” he said. “You used to be really pretty.”
She still is, I told him, but not where you can see. He ignored me. He wasn’t the sort of man who pays attention to sidekicks.
According to the passes, we were Umbyses and Gordoula, deacon and deaconess of the Eternal Flame at Suda, returning from a goodwill mission to the Invincible Sun at His temple at Auge. I wasn’t exactly keen about anything identifying me with the Sashan priesthood after the business on Sirupat, but it wasn’t as though I had any say in the matter. Take it or leave it. We took it.
“You look Sashan,” she said, as we walked along the seafront. “Or at least you can if you try. I don’t.”
“No big deal,” I said. “Your family was originally from somewhere up in the Olbian delta. When the Sashan invaded, your lot got deported wholesale to Colmessus, on the Echmen border. Thanks to your exceptional piety and purity of spirit, you’ve worked your way up through the church hierarchy and transcended your lowly origins. That accounts for the way you look and your dreadful accent. But I wouldn’t worry about it. In the habit you’re practically invisible.”
She nodded; a concession, actually that’s not bad. I felt rather pleased with myself. “Is the Sashan clergy celibate?”
“Nominally. In practice—”
“Fine.” Then she frowned. “Do you mind?” she asked. “About the scar.”
“What scar?”
Not in the way she meant; but I could see it being a problem, because once seen, never forgotten, and the last thing I wanted was for us to be memorable. I know a bit about make-up, because of my time in the profession, but it was far beyond anything even Andronica could have fixed. When it healed, it lifted the corner of her mouth, so she looked like she was grinning all the time. I didn’t actually mind that. It made her look like she was happy. That took some getting used to, but I rather liked it. “And are you?” I asked her.
“Piss off.”
Me, too, I didn’t add. At least, I assumed that was what it was, rather than a bad cold or the symptoms of some rare disease. I wouldn’t know, not having been in that state for a long time.
My state of happiness (if that’s what it was) lasted about an hour into our sea journey. Then it fizzled away like the water you pour round the edges of the forge fire to keep it in shape.
“For God’s sake stop making that ridiculous noise,” she said. “People are looking at you.”
My reply took the form of groans. She rolled her eyes at me and went for a walk on deck. When she came back, she had a thoughtful look. “Dead yet?”
“Yes.”
“Mphm. I was talking to a couple of men,” she went on, sitting beside me with her back to a barrel. “One of them’s a factor for a big outfit shipping bulk fruit—”
“Don’t,” I told her, “mention any kind of foodstuff.”
“Bulk fruit,” she repeated, “and he’s heading back home, because of the war and stuff, and he’s been hearing things from his home office.” She paused. “Interesting stuff.”
I swallowed a mouthful of volcanic lava. “Let me guess,” I croaked. “The Sashan are winning. Poised for complete victory. Any minute now, the Great King will grind his enemies to dust under his heel. They always say that.”
“No,” she said, “and that’s what’s interesting. That’s not what he said at all.”
Interesting, to put it mildly; interesting enough to make me forget about the apocalypse going on in my colon. Apparently, the fruit man had heard from his people at home that the enemy fleet had won a battle, sunk a great many Sashan ships and hadn’t been sent gurgling to the bottom. In fact, it was still very much in existence, which was more than could be said for the Sashan navy, and when last heard of was cruising along the south coast, possibly looking for somewhere to land and disembark troops.
“A Sashan told you that.”
The Sashan are remarkable people. They can believe two contradictory things at once – the evidence of their own eyes, and what the king tells them, mutually exclusive but equally valid. One of the reasons why Sashan can justly pride itself on the outstanding excellence of its intelligence and communications is that everybody knows what the news will be, long before the exhausted despatch rider tumbles off his horse and collapses on the paved yard of the way station. We won. The enemy were slaughtered to a man and have ceased to exist. And, if you know the news, why not post it up on the gate and have it shouted in the street without bothering to wait for the actual messenger? There may be slight discrepancies of detail, but they can be sorted out later, or quietly forgotten about. The important thing is the truth, or at least the gist of it. Over the centuries, the Sashan have figured out all manner of ways of adjusting the past where it doesn’t quite fit the present, the way you work the heels of a new pair of shoes with a broom handle. Once adjusted, the result is the truth; and, because Sashan bureaucrats were compiling lists of everything from the names of kings to the number of horseshoe nails in the reserve stock at Way Station 4,886 back when my ancestors were still skinning gazelle with scraps of flint, for most of human history the Sashan truth is all there is – and it works just fine, it makes sense, it forms a coherent narrative, and you get into the habit of assuming, if the Sashan say a thing, it must be true.
So, if they see a battlefield covered in dead Sashan soldiers and one of their cities wreathed in smoke and flames, and the king tells them that the battle was won and the city was saved, they interpret what they’ve seen in the light of what they’ve heard, and thereby arrive at the truth. The battle was hard fought, but the king personally led his bodyguard in a ferocious charge, cut his way through the enemy ranks and killed the enemy general with his own hand. Meanwhile an unfortunate fire swept through a couple of city blocks (probably started by traitors; more news on that story when we have it) but was quickly put out by the garrison. Afterwards, the king devised a cunning strategy where he could lure the enemy into a trap by pretending to abandon the city, thereby sealing their fate and setting up a final glorious victory, after which the savages would no longer exist as a nation.
It helps, of course, that the Sashan really do win nine-tenths of their wars, and have a superbly organised system of logistics that prevents food shortages when there’s a bad harvest, and libraries and a tradition of education and scholarship that makes us look like children, and an average level of prosperity that we can only dream of. Which is why I used the word truth earlier; sooner or later, what the king says becomes true, even if it wasn’t true at the precise moment he said it. Of course, they don’t use the word Truth. They say vrta, because they talk Sashan, not Robur or Aelian, and the words we use to translate vrta are necessarily crude approximations to a term with wide and subtle penumbras of meaning. But a native Sashan speaker knows perfectly well what vrta means, and the world machine of which vrta is a key component works exceptionally well, so what could there possibly be to object to?
“I know,” she said. “Scary, isn’t it?” She frowned. “Saevus,” she said, “do you think it’s possible the Sashan might actually lose this war?”
I stopped and thought about it before answering. “No,” I said. “No, that’s not possible. They’ve got five times as many men, ten times the ships, and they know things about supply and infrastructure that would make your head spin. Also they’ve got infinitely more money, and a unified chain of command, and an unbreakable political will to win. The only reason they haven’t conquered the world is because they’ve got more sense than to want to, and because we don’t have anything they need. But I guess it’s possible they could lose quite a few battles and get chased out of a fair bit of territory before they get mad enough to stop pulling their punches. Mostly it depends on the Great King. If he’s—”
“What?”
Shut up a minute, I’m trying to think, because a thought had just struck me.
Did I ever mention that I met the Great King once? Not the man who sits on the throne, the real one – in the Sashan sense, naturally. He’d been deposed by a palace coup and escaped into exile, after which the truth quickly healed over, and it turned out that he wasn’t the real king after all; but he was the king all right, I knew that the moment he spoke to me. When I met him, he was living in a palace in a desert surrounded by murderous spiritually minded cannibals, who had guaranteed his safety in return for various things I don’t need to bother you with right now. He wasn’t the real king so he didn’t matter one bit; but while he was still alive, there would always be a remote possibility that the truth would change, or evolve, or emerge shining from the shadows, and he’d be back where he started from, Father of his People, Brother of the Sun and Moon; the old truth, same as the new truth apart from the subtle differences. But if he was dead – really dead dead – the result could easily be a sudden hole right in the middle of the web, the point where all the strands reach out from. And until new strands were woven and the replacement truth was resolved and hardened off ready for use, it was just remotely possible that the great and invincible Sashan Empire was momentarily paralysed—
It was a moment of brilliant insight, though I do say so myself, but all I could think about was the man I’d met, in the desert, when I was dying of thirst and he saved me. I’d gone there to kill him and steal his wife, but (being the king) he didn’t hold that against me. I liked him, a lot. If he was dead, that was a bad thing and a reason to be sad. While I was explaining my flash of intuition to Stauracia, I kept remembering his voice and the sparkle in his eyes. A considerate, kind-hearted man who forgave his enemies. The nicest man I ever met, though of course that’s not really saying a great deal, given the company I’ve always kept.
“You know what,” she said, after a long pause. “You could be right.”
I hadn’t wanted her to say that. I wanted her to point out the flaw in my reasoning, which would mean he was still alive. “Maybe,” I said. “But if the Sashan really did lose a battle, it’d be because something’s wrong in the centre. You know how they work. Don’t move until you can be certain of bringing overwhelming force to bear on the enemy. If they lost the battle, it’s because either they hadn’t got all their ducks in a row, or else we’ve suddenly come up with a new Carnufex and nobody thought fit to mention it. And you and I are in the trade; we’d have heard about it.”
She gave me a look. “Don’t say we,” she said. “We’re good Sashan now, remember?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Force of habit. It’s just, the Sashan have been them for as long as I can remember. You should’ve heard what my dad had to say about them.”
“You told me you like them.”
“I do.” I shrugged. “Anyhow,” I said, “to answer your question, yes, it’s possible that we may have lost a battle, and your pal the fruit factor may be telling the truth. I don’t see how it affects us particularly.”
“An enemy fleet cruising up and down the south coast, and you think it’s none of our business.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re talking about Suda. We may have lost one battle, but Suda. It’s the most heavily fortified city on earth.”
She considered that. “You’re right,” she said, “I’m just being silly. Probably something to do with having a million darics in a bank there. Makes me antsy.”
The world, according to the Prophet, is in haste and rushes to its end. I can see where he’s coming from, but I can’t say I’ve ever let it bother me too much. Clearing up battlefields for a living has taught me one thing. There’s always a war, and the war is never over. Even when the great lions are lying down with the great sabre-toothed lambs and you can flit to and fro across the Friendly Sea with nothing to worry about apart from death by drowning, there’s still a war going on somewhere. And for the people caught up in that war, it’s just as bad as Aelia and the Sashan with their teeth locked in each other’s throats. I guess I’ve grown used to it, like all the other things I live with daily but you don’t have to, and that makes me – what? Insensitive, I guess, or you may choose to call it something else. After all, I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, and the way your mind works is probably a total mystery to me.
Still, the Sashan were now at war with a loose coalition of the main Western powers, and an Aelian fleet was operating off the south coast, where we were headed. Awkward, to say the least.
“We get off the ship at Nouris,” she said, “and we head north, up as far as Sangra, somewhere up there. Then we work our way down. The passes will be good enough for that, we could just as easily be going home via the west coast. We take it nice and easy, keeping our ears open. We’ll be fine.”
She was thinking aloud. She’s got a knack of making an option she hasn’t made her mind up about yet sound like a commandment from out of a burning bush, so you agree with her and she snaps at you for being stupid: why would anyone want to do a dumb thing like that? “Whatever you decide,” I said. “I’ll be guided by you.”
“If you don’t like it, say so. Or you might just possibly consider contributing something, instead of picking holes in every damn thing I say.”
We didn’t get off at Nouris. Instead, we were still on board the ship when it made an unscheduled stop at Pasanda, in the mouth of the Gulf. I asked the first mate what was going on.
“We’re stopping here, Father,” he said, and it was a split second before I remembered that I was some kind of priest. “Sorry. You’ll have to make your own way.”
“Why are we stopping?”
He pointed to some flags flying from the harbourmaster’s tower. Oh, I thought.
The Sashan – did I mention that they’re a marvellous people? – have a language of flags. Such a simple idea, odd nobody else ever thought of it. For example, a yellow flag means plague; go away. A blue flag means help! while green and white vertical stripes mean stand by to be boarded for customs inspection, while blue and yellow horizontal stripes are just there to let you know which direction the wind is blowing in. A red flag, of course, means mortal peril ahead; go no further. There were three flags on the harbour tower, all red.
“We’ll find out once we get ashore,” I told her. “We can’t stay on the boat. I don’t think the crew know any more than we do.”
She was extremely reluctant to get off the ship, but we didn’t really have a choice. “We could steal a lifeboat,” she said. “We could row out until we hit the current, and then it’ll take us all the way to the point.”
“In full view of everybody on the dock,” I said. “Not sure what that’s designed to achieve.”
She scowled at me, as though I was the one who’d made the idiotic suggestion. “I have a very strong feeling,” she said, in that explaining-to-idiots-and-children voice of hers, “that the reason they’re stopping all the ships is us. Probably you. I think that if we go ashore, there’ll be steelnecks waiting for us. And you know what, I’m not in the mood for all that right now.”
She gets these flashes of intuition, which prove to be valid some of the time. She says about two-thirds; in my experience, about a third. Intuition, of course, is just a patronising way of saying she picks up on little strands of evidence without realising she’s doing it. “No,” I said, “the geometry’s all wrong. If we want a lifeboat we’ll have to beat some people up to get it, and that’s probably the best way of making ourselves conspicuous I can think of. Forget it,” I said. “My father hasn’t got the clout to have all the shipping stopped east of the Gulf.”
“Fine.” I think she’d taken my point about the geometry, an area in which she recognises my expertise. “On your head be it, then.”
“We can handle a few soldiers,” I said. “Probably much better geometry on the quay.”
So we scrambled aboard the tender, which took us to the dock, where there were no soldiers to be seen, only a lot of very confused and angry people. “What we need,” she said, “is the place where the locals drink.”
My thought exactly. Not hard to find. It went dead quiet when a priest and a nun walked in, but when they realised we weren’t there to confiscate their souls they forgave us and carried on. Stauracia’s ears are sharper than mine, so I let her do the eavesdropping.
“We want to get out of here,” she said. “There’s going to be a fight in a minute.”
Good call. A fight would be inevitable in the circumstances; half the clientele insisting that what they’d heard was true, the other half knowing for a fact that it couldn’t be, because the king always wins, the enemy always lose, and Suda is the most strongly fortified city in the world—
“It’s just a rumour,” I tried to tell her. “You know what people are like in wartime. It’s probably just the usual garbage.”
She looked at me. She was terrified. “We need to find out,” she said. “Right now.”
Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one. I thought about it for a moment. “We’re priests, right?”
“Yes. I think so. What are we again, exactly?”
Not like her to lose focus, especially when things turn sour. “We’re a deacon and deaconess of the Eternal Flame at Suda, returning from a diplomatic jolly in the West. In practice, we’re spies, so that means we’re something quite high up in intelligence and can have people’s wives and children taken away if they give us any trouble. We’re big enough and ugly enough to hear the truth, and in situations like this we’re part of the procedure for deciding what the truth is.”
She looked mildly stunned. “Really?”
I nodded. “Your man did us proud,” I said. “I thought you knew that.”
“No, not really. He must be really scared of me,” she added, with a slight frown. “That’s—”
“Useful,” I told her. “But he’s not nearly as scared of you as the precentor of the local fire temple will be, when we come banging on his door and show him the passes. Cheer up,” I said. “Thanks to your pal, we’re two very scary people. What more could you ask for?”
Very scary indeed. At least, the precentor thought so, as soon as he saw what was written on the little clay tablets. “How can I help you?” he said.
I’d told her to leave the talking to me. “We need to know what’s really going on,” she said.
The precentor closed his eyes for a moment. He was a big man with a high voice and short white hair. My guess was that he’d got his job because he could be relied on to do nothing and do it exquisitely well. “The reports are, of course, unconfirmed,” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
“Suda has definitely fallen,” he went on. “The enemy fleet that sank our ships turns out to be one of two. The other fleet suddenly appeared out of nowhere, off Cape Ongyle. Nobody can offer any explanation of how it got there, it’s simply impossible—” He screwed up his eyes again. “Since there was nobody to oppose them, they were able to land a large army, with artillery and siege towers. The garrison at Suda was taken completely by surprise. And, of course, there are rumours of treachery.”
Of course. If the Sashan lose a city, it’s always treachery. “Go on,” I said.
He really didn’t want to. “They broke into the city in the middle of the night,” he said. “The witnesses say it was unbelievably savage. Essentially, they closed all the gates so nobody could get out, then burned it to the ground.”
Nobody said anything for a while. “And?” I said.
“General Alyattes and twenty thousand men arrived too late to save the city,” he went on, “but he immediately engaged the enemy. He was outnumbered two to one. He allowed himself to be encircled. As far as we know, there were only a handful of survivors.” He paused, then went on: “The nearest army is Marshal Bardiya’s, with eighteen thousand men, at the Orrhynthian Gates. But it would be suicide to try and engage the enemy with a such a disparity in numbers in what is now hostile territory. His lines of supply would be hopelessly overextended. I’m not a soldier, but I don’t think you have to be to see how bad it is. Effectively, the enemy now control half of the south coast and inland as far as the Conessus river, as well as the lower half of the Friendly Sea.”
She was staring at him, which was rather inconsiderate. He saw the look on her face and I could see the sudden wave of fear sweep over him. He’d just made a disloyal report. Worse still, he’d stated a load of facts that couldn’t possibly be true.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s most reassuring.”
He turned and gazed at me. “Father?”
“Naturally I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “But you can rest assured, the king’s plan is going well. The enemy have taken the bait, the sacrifice won’t have been in vain. Suda—” I left the name hanging and gave him a brave smile.
“A quarter of a million people,” he said. “My sister.”
“We know who the traitors are,” I said. “It’s a tragedy we had to pay so much for the information, but the king knows what he’s doing. It was necessary.”
He nodded, and I got the impression that I’d just done the kindest thing I’d ever done in my life.
“Now then,” she said. “We’ll need your help with a few things.”
“Fuck,” she said.
A suitable epitaph for a quarter of a million people. “Yes,” I said.
“All that money.” She took a deep breath and let it go, blowing a million darics into the warm night air. “Fuck it,” she said. “Still, I never wanted to live in Sashan anyway.”
“I’ve still got eighty thousand in the bank in Auxentia City,” I said. “Let’s go there instead.”
“And walk straight into the arms of your dad’s goons.” She forgave me, and went on, “No, it just means we’re going to have to carry on earning our living, that’s all. Pity, but there it is. After all, it’s not like that money was honestly come by.”
A marvellous woman, by any standards. Everything she’d worked and fought and murdered for, gone just like that, and she could let it go with a single sigh. “Now what?”
I thought about it. “We could stay here,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid.”
“We could. We’re deacons, it says so on the clay tablets. Being a deacon’s not so bad. Better than work.”
“We aren’t really—”
“Yes,” I said, “we are. Because the only documentation that could prove we aren’t would have been in the archive at Suda, and Suda’s gone for ever. Therefore we’re deacons. Really and truly. Sashan truly, anyhow. Think about it. There’s a war on, we could make out like bandits.”
Her eyes widened a little. “Who would we report to?”
“Anybody we liked. Sashan logic,” I told her. “When no evidence exists to disprove it, what you assert is genuinely the truth. We go north, a long way into safe territory, we show up at the first temple we come to and report for duty. They find us something to do, and we’re in.”
She thought about it for several seconds, which I found rather flattering. “No,” she said. “Sorry, but the Sashan are the enemy. Being here makes my skin crawl.”
“It didn’t when you had a million darics.”
“That was different.” She looked at me. “You stay here if you like.”
I shook my head. No words needed or conceivably suitable for purpose.
“Right,” she said. “In that case—”
I think the truth is why I like the Sashan. Because, in Sashan logic, I didn’t murder my brother. Not unless what Fan wrote in her letter was true.
Stauracia’s bright idea was that we should head for Anticonessus. No, shut up for a moment and listen. We’ve been there, it’s empty, not a living thing anywhere. So we go north to Anticonessus, then cross the river and we’re back home. Then she would think about how we were going to get my money out of the bank in Auxentia City, or something else equally helpful. Anyway, that was what we were going to do.
I didn’t really mind. The things you do for love don’t have to be accounted for in the usual way.
If I’d known the difference being a deacon makes, I’d have gone into the church when I was twelve.
A deacon – a black deacon, duly accredited and attached to a serious order like the Holy Flame of Suda – doesn’t need to worry about the trivialities of life. If he wants to go somewhere, nobody asks him why, or tells him you can’t get there from here, or asks him for money. At a stroke, the vast and bramble-like complexity of Sashan bureaucracy is his friend, not his enemy. You want to go to Anticonessus? Fine. We can arrange a special mailcoach for you, or, if you’d rather ride, we can find you good horses, which you can exchange at way stations as soon as they get tired, and would you like a cavalry escort or would that just slow you down? If you don’t want to bother with money, here’s a warrant to requisition anything you feel you might need, better than money, actually, because the sight of it will terrify innkeepers and shopkeepers so much they won’t dare to try and screw you. On balance, we recommend against the cavalry escort. You won’t need it. Robbers will occasionally pull down soldiers if they’re desperate enough, but one look at the black habit will send them scampering the hell out of your way, because they know what happens to anyone who messes with the clergy. Besides, there are no robbers in the king’s country. Likewise the roads are always perfectly maintained, but if they aren’t and you break an axle or a horse goes lame, the first passer-by will run, not walk, to fetch a blacksmith or fetch you his own horse so you won’t be delayed. The only downside to being a deacon is the abject terror of everyone you meet. Of course, not everybody would consider that a disadvantage.
“Which is one of the reasons,” I told her, “why I like the Sashan. Things are properly organised. It’s an ordered society.”
“Was an ordered society.” She’d been looking out of the coach window. “I think it’s all going to shit.”
She had a point. We were on the North-Western Mail, a typical Sashan road: broad, level, metalled, running along embankments and through cuttings, straight as an arrow and nearly as fast, to make sure the king’s word doesn’t go cold between his mouth and the recipient’s ear. But from time to time the coach had to slow down because of the long, straggling groups of people, walking or leading donkeys with a few sad bits and pieces precariously roped down; Sashan citizens, trying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the latest phase of the king’s infallible plan. They did their very best to get out of the way so as not to hinder the king’s mail, but even the North-Western isn’t wide enough for a coach to get past a thousand people without slowing down a little bit. They knew it was only a day or so on the road before they reached a way station, where there’d be food and shelter and someone to tell them what they had to do. But we passed the way stations, and some of them were deserted, others were already crowded out with refugees, and a couple of them had been burned to the ground. If I were a Sashan seeing all that, I reckon I might be forgiven for wondering if God had died and nobody had seen fit to tell me.
“What I’ve been trying to figure out,” she said, “is how the hell we managed to get a second fleet into the South Sea without them even noticing.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “Well, you’d need a lunatic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’d need a lunatic,” I said, “because it’d mean launching a fleet from somewhere in Blemya and sailing in a straight line across the open sea, a hundred miles out of sight of land, and trusting your own skill with a chart and a sextant to bring you out precisely where you needed to be to come in the other side of the Gulf so as to outflank the Sashan Royal Navy, at precisely the right time to win an impossible victory. You’d have to be barking to think you could do that.”
“Or a military genius.”
“Tautology,” I pointed out. “If it didn’t work, of course, and if your fleet with a third of your entire army on board got sunk in a storm out in the middle of the ocean, or overshot and ended up getting beached on the Caryoba peninsula, you’d have lost the war at a stroke and condemned your entire nation to a thousand years of slavery. But if you pull it off, you win. For the time being, at any rate. Purely temporary victory, needless to say, because you can’t beat the Sashan.”
“You really are starting to think like them,” she said. “That’s disturbing.”
“It explains,” I said, “why they chose now to start a war. They’ve found a lunatic, a second Calojan or Forza Belot.” I shook my head. “They used to say Forza Belot was worth a hundred thousand men. Probably an underestimate. He still lost, eventually.” I looked past her, out of the window, at a column of people walking slowly. “Gombryas really, really wanted a bit of Forza Belot,” I said. “But there are only six authenticated specimens, so he never stood a chance.”
The reference wasn’t lost on her, naturally. Forza Belot only failed because he ran out of men, and that’s why Simmagene is deserted to this day, to the point where nobody can say for sure where it used to be. “The bigger they are,” she said, “the harder they fall. You can see for yourself. It’s all too centralised. It only takes one reverse and the whole thing starts coming apart.”
I didn’t want to argue military strategy with her, because she knows far more about it, and she doesn’t take prisoners. Besides, maybe she was right. A truly brilliant soldier can achieve the impossible – Astyanax, or come to that, Felix or Florian the Great. In which case, one day there could well be uninhabited desert as far as the eye could see on both sides of the Friendly Sea, not just the west. I wasn’t sure I wanted to think about that. None of my business. “If those are the Sky Mountains over there,” I said, “the Conessus ought to be somewhere over there, in that dip.”
She gave me a look. “You’ve got a truly awful sense of direction,” she said. “It’s a miracle you can find your arse with both hands.”
The Conessus wasn’t anywhere near where I thought it was. I’d been looking for it out of the left-hand window, and it was on the right.
“So with you being in the trade,” she was saying, “how come there’s a military genius and you’d never heard of him?”
“It’s your trade, too,” I pointed out. “Why are we slowing down?”
Because the driver didn’t want to miss the turning, which is quite hard to see, since nobody in their right mind ever goes to Anticonessus, so the road isn’t used much. A narrower road than the Mail, not arrow-straight; well-maintained, like all Sashan roads, but nobody had bothered to clear the trees and briars and general vegetable rubbish from the verges, to forestall any possibility of an ambush by bandits (although there are, of course, no bandits in the king’s country; they’d be stamped on straight away and, besides, you only get bandits where there’s poverty; but they still clear the verges, presumably out of force of habit or respect for tradition). It slowed the coach up a little, but not significantly.
Until we came to a featureless place in the middle of nowhere. No, I tell a lie, there was a stone. Egg-shaped, about waist high, nothing written on it, or nothing that had survived the wind and the rain. The coach stopped. Why have we stopped? You’re there.
I’d been expecting melodrama, like the other frontier we’d crossed, or at least a river. Where’s the river? Down there in the dip. What dip? If you carry on a quarter of a mile there’s a dip, so they tell me. Never been past here. But the king reckons there’s a dip, or that’s what he told the Mapmaker General, and that’s the river.
She remembered that she was a deaconess. “Keep going,” she said.
The driver looked at her. “Sorry, Mother,” he said (he was old enough to be her father). “This is as far as I can go. Standing orders.”
Sashan thinking. Anywhere there’s a possibility of trouble, the king pitches his border a quarter-mile from the real border, and leaves a sort of geographical anomaly into which anyone without legitimate business is absolutely forbidden to go. You can afford to do things like that when you own a third of the known world. And standing orders come direct from the king. Even a deacon could get in real trouble if it got out that he’d questioned standing orders.
“Thanks,” I said, “we’ll walk from here. Come on,” I said to her. “It’s all downhill to the river.”
Between us, Stauracia and I know a thing or two about walking a long way in godawful places. Being deacons, we’d had our choice of the very best stuff, even though there was a war on, so we had best quality boots that actually fitted, handy knapsacks with comfortable straps that didn’t dig in or chafe, wool blankets, oilskins, water bottles and all the army biscuit we could carry. I’d never been so well prepared for a horrible journey in my entire life. “I don’t know, do I?” she replied, when I asked her how she was planning to get across the river. “Presumably there’s a bridge or a ford or something.”
I explained that it was a closed border. “Bullshit,” she said. “There’s always a bridge or a ford. There’s got to be some way for diplomats and trade attachés and people like that to go backwards and forwards. They just say it’s a closed border to put people off going there.”
“The Anticonessians think everybody this side of the river is some kind of zombie,” I said. “I don’t think there’ll be a bridge.”
“Or a ferry. Or maybe there’s a boat discreetly tied up somewhere. There’s got to be some way the Sashan and the savages talk to each other. There always is.”
Not always. We sat on the riverbank and looked out across the vast river. No animals, no birds, precious few midges. “I’m guessing,” she said, after a long silence, “that the road brings you here because this is where the river is nice and shallow and you can wade across.”
We got five yards. Then we got very wet. “Fine,” she said. “You can swim, can’t you?”
I happen to know she’s a superb swimmer. I’m not. “Not with all this gear,” I said.
“Don’t be such a girl. When I was a kid I used to swim in the Ossick, and that’s easily as wide as this.”
I sat down. Water gushed off me and pooled around my arse. “Quite a lot of cultures believe in a river dividing the land of the living from the land of the dead,” I pointed out. “The idea being, it stops you from nipping backwards and forwards over the line when you feel like it. To get across the message that death is for ever, they chose the image of a river. You know, the ultimate boundary, the final frontier. If you think I’m going to try swimming in that, you need your head examined.”
“Fine,” she said. “You stay here.”
Actually, it could have been worse. It stripped off our boots, emptied our pockets, filled our mouths and our eyes with water and bashed us against several large rocks, but eventually we crawled out and lay gasping on the shingle, a mile downstream from where we’d started. I nearly drowned, but she saved me. “The hell with you,” I said, as soon as I was up to making words. “We nearly died, and now we’re screwed.”
She looked at me. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Forget it.” I sat up. My chest hurt like broken ribs when I breathed in. “Now what?”
“Don’t know,” she said.
Me neither. No sign of life anywhere. My guess is, that part of Anticonessus was uninhabited waste even before the civil war. We had no food and no boots. If you doubt the truth of the old saying you can’t take it with you, try swimming the Conessus. Between us, we owned about as much property as a newborn baby.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “I wasn’t much better off when I ran away from home. Mind you, that was farmland. This is—” I couldn’t think of a word for what this was. “Doc Papinian told me once you can go three weeks without food, so long as you’ve got water. Twenty-one days at twenty miles a day, that’s four hundred miles. There’s got to be something within four hundred miles.”
She called me a fuckwit. We started walking.
Time passes and things change, but books are for ever, unless the mice get at them or some fool burns down the library, so by the time you read this Anticonessus might be the homeland of a vigorous, thriving civilisation. For all I know, you might be reading this in an Anticonessian translation, presumably in the hope of gleaning a few insights into what the earthly paradise was like a thousand years ago. In which case, it was horrible. Sorry about that, but at least it proves how far you and your people have come, in a relatively short space of time.
The country south-west of the Sashan border is – there’s a technical name for it which I ought to know; high up, thin soil, loads of hills and valleys but no actual mountains, no trees, nothing but miles and miles of that kind of coarse-bladed grass that not even sheep can eat. There’s no cover, so when the wind blows all you can do is crouch down until it stops. If you’re ill-advised enough to walk across it in bare feet, don’t be surprised if the edges of the grass slice you up like knives. On the positive side, you don’t need to worry about wolves, because apart from a few annoying birds that jump out just before you tread on them, there’s nothing alive up there.
We hardly said a word to each other for two days, and then she saw something in the distance. She pointed it out to me. “No idea,” I said.
“Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s take a look.”
Not a house, or a cottage or a barn. That would be too much to hope for. For a long time as we walked towards it I thought it might be a blockhouse, but it wasn’t, though it was an easy mistake to make. But much, much bigger than a blockhouse, when you got up close. It was only the perspective, in that huge empty country, that made it look small.
I think we both started thinking the same thing at about the same time, though neither of us wanted to say it for fear of sounding idiotic. But, I was thinking as it grew bigger with each step, it could be. Architecturally it had all the hallmarks of the early First Empire: straight lines, flat roof, complete absence of ornamentation. It obviously wasn’t Sashan: they couldn’t build anything so ugly if their lives depended on it, and no Anticonessian could have fitted any idea as massive as that into his tiny brain. I tried to remember what I knew about different types of stone and where they came from. This thing was basalt, for crying out loud. The nearest basalt was Olbia.
“It can’t be,” she said. “It just can’t.”
“Basalt,” I said.
“Shit and fuck and piss.” She looked at me. “You’re right, it’s basalt. Who the fucking hell—?”
We both knew the answer. Only one man, since the world began, would have had the power to organise thousands of tons of precision-cut basalt blocks, all the way from Olbia to here. And only one man would have wanted to.
“I really wish Gombryas was here,” I said. “And we weren’t.”
She looked at me. “We could get out of the wind for five minutes,” she said.
“We might as well, since we’re passing,” I said.
There had been a gate once, but even bronze corrodes eventually. The hinges were still there, and a few green wisps of foil, brittle as autumn leaves. We walked in. There was a tiny little lodge, or loggia or whatever it’s called, then a sharp right-hand turn—
I expected it to be dark in there, but there were windows, high up, just under the eaves, cunningly placed so that the light could get in but the wind and rain couldn’t. The light slanted in diagonally, if that makes any sense, and everything was a blaze of yellow gold.
“Will you look at that?” she said.
The legend was, of course, untrue. A pack of lies. The First Emperor hadn’t been buried with his ten thousand loyal soldiers. Instead, he’d had one thousand lifesize statues carved, out of basalt, and the gold armour had been wired on, because gold is for ever but leather and fabric aren’t.
She started to laugh. I let her. I didn’t feel much like laughing myself.
Some time later, when she’d stopped laughing and then crying, we sat down on a big gold box, which I’m guessing was the First Emperor’s coffin. “Well,” she said, “we did it. The big score.”
“Yup.”
She took a deep breath and let it go. “Presumably,” she said, “Gombryas was right and one of these statues is missing a cuisse. I can’t be bothered to look, can you?”
“No,” I said. “But I doubt it. I think Gombryas’s thing was a fake. After all, we only had his word for any of it. It was just a ploy to trap me. This is—” I made a vague gesture “—a coincidence.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Like it matters.”
“You want my professional opinion?”
“Go on.”
“You could mount an expedition,” I said. “You’d have to hire a lot of men, five thousand minimum, plus carts, horses, supplies. You’d have to pay a lot of officials on the Sashan side. Oh, and you’d have to build a bridge over the river. It could be done. You might just break even if you’re lucky, but my gut feeling is, it’d end up costing you money.”
“The big score.”
“Absolutely. The king might just be able to pull it off, in spite of the expense, if he wanted the prestige. But he doesn’t need it, so why bother? That’s why it’s still here. More trouble than it’s worth.”
“I think we’re the first people to come here for a thousand years.” She was looking round. “I ought to be impressed,” she said. “But it’s just sad. So he managed to figure out a way to beat the thieves. So what?”
“I think he believed in life after death.”
“I’m still having trouble coping with life before death,” she said. “Probably not for much longer, though.” She turned her head and looked at me. “I think this is probably it, Saevus. I’m sorry. I think this is as far as we go.”
Well, I thought. If you’ve got to end up in a tomb, this was quite likely the top of the line, the cutting edge, even after a thousand years of progress. Our tomb now. Monarchs of all we surveyed. And my mother said I’d never amount to anything. “Bullshit,” I said. “We keep going.”
“Why?”
Because I’ve found you, and there’s a reason for living. “Force of habit. What else is there?”
“My feet hurt,” she said. “They hurt so much I can’t think, And I’m hungry. All I can think about is food, and my feet.”
I looked up. “I think we can do something about that,” I said.
Ten thousand gold suits of armour meant ten thousand pairs of gold sabatons. That’s the bit that completely covers your feet. Mine fitted remarkably well; my life hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, but at least I’m blessed with average-size feet. We had to pack hers out with blades of grass.
As for food; that’s what had made me look up, a bird startled out of its nest. We found a dozen of them, in the corners and crevices, and in each nest two or three eggs. Tough on the birds, but as far as I was concerned it was treasure beyond my wildest dreams, the stuff of legends, Essecuivo, King Florian’s Mines, the once and future big score. Life itself. What can be more precious than that?