I went to the library. Luckily, Concerning the Savages is on the open shelves; also the authoritative Echmen reference, Ways to Defeat the Barbarians, the Sashan diplomatic bible On the Inferiority of the Lesser Races, the Fremden Mirror of Geography and Saloninus’ Geographical Speculations and On the Genealogy of Morals. The last one doesn’t have much about geography in it, but an idea was tapping its shell in the back of my mind.
On a corner of the flyleaf of Erzen’s Humans and Semi-Humans Beyond the Frontier I scribbled a brief note. The punishment for defacing a library book is death, but fortunately no one was looking. I tore it off and tucked it in my sleeve; then, after the library closed, I sneaked down a lot of lesser used corridors and passageways and slipped the note under Oio’s door.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” he told me the next day, after he’d called me names for disturbing him yet again. “The Echmen are going to build a wall, from Mount Gana to the sea, to keep the savages out. They need the Hus to build it for them. The Hus and a lot of other people, naturally.”
That made sense. It was an old idea. The Sapphire emperor gave orders for it to be done when the empire was first founded, but it had to go through committee first. “Slave labour,” I said.
He gave me a pained look. “The technical term, I believe, is corvée,” he said. “Blemyan word for a Blemyan idea. Basically, the people remain legally free but they’re treated as slaves until the job’s done. In this case, I should imagine, around a thousand years. You can see why you wouldn’t want to conscript your own people for something like that. They wouldn’t be paying any taxes, and you’d have to feed them.”
“Is it true,” I said, “about the royal family?”
“The Hus? It’s standard Imperial operating procedure, so I imagine it is, yes. No great loss, from what I’ve heard.” He paused and looked at me. “So now you want me to get you out, presumably.”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly. “Thought you might. Listen, I can get you out of the palace. After that, you’re on your own.”
“Maybe not quite yet.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Are you mad?”
“I’ve been offered translating work by a senior official.”
He whistled. “Jammy sod,” he said. “You know how many exams an Echmen’s got to take to get a job like that? Plus about fifteen thousand in sweeteners.”
“I don’t think I get paid,” I said mildly. “Anyway, that’s not the point.”
Frown. “Are you taking the job or aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to go.”
“True. But staying here would probably be a bad idea, once you’re no longer needed. Of course you might be able to worm your way in, show them how useful and reliable you are. But you’re the wrong colour entirely, so if I were you I wouldn’t bank on it. The Echmen are wonderfully open-minded, but you know how the entire human race feels about your lot.”
I was wrong. I did get paid. The Echmen are punctilious about that sort of thing. When I got to my usual desk in the library, there was a little paper packet waiting for me, containing a warrant for seventy-six dael for an hour’s work and a docket for temporary accommodation; West Building, Block 3, Room 2117. When the library closed I went and looked at it. Slightly bigger than a barn back home, the walls done in eggshell-blue plaster with moulded cornices and a fresco of leopards and pheasants; a plain plank bed with ropes instead of a mattress; one chair, slightly broken. Oio, and about ten million people in other parts of the world, would reckon I’d fallen on my feet. I had a job with the Echmen government.
I cashed in the warrant and slept in the bed but left my bow where it was. Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.
Ask most people to tell you precisely when and where their life went down the toilet and they’d have to think about it, weighing one event against another, tracing chains of consequence down through the spiralling years. I can answer that question easily, without notes or hesitation; the upper room of a house in Scoira Limen on the afternoon of the fifth Monday after Ascension, auc 2173. It’s something I prefer not to dwell on so we’ll leave it for now. But she could answer the same question just as promptly. Something we have in common, I guess.
It was about ten days before I saw her again. A different official this time: a nondescript man in a sky-blue gown, wearing an elaborate black lacquer sort-of-hat that presumably went with the profoundly exalted job, whatever it was. He had me fetched from the library. “This way,” he said. I didn’t have to carry anything, which was nice.
“Tell her she’ll be pleased to hear that the situation in her country is vastly improved,” he said. “Law and order have been re-established, and the criminals responsible have been firmly dealt with.”
I turned to her. “They’ve enslaved the Hus to build a wall,” I said. “Oio reckons the first batch of deportees will be arriving soon, but he hasn’t found out anything definite. It’s not the department he works in.”
“What wall?” she said.
“She thanks you for your government’s efforts on her behalf,” I said.
He nodded. “Tell her that because of the rebels’ mismanagement of the economy and the damage to agriculture and trade resulting from the suppression of the attempted coup, her people are in grave danger of famine if they stay where they are. Accordingly, in consideration of the long and friendly relationship between our two great nations, the emperor has graciously agreed to allow the Hus people to relocate to Imperial territory until conditions improve.”
“A wall to keep your lot out, I gather. Savages in general, anyway. It’s a very big project, so I’m guessing this is meant to be long-term, probably permanent. Why they’re doing it now I couldn’t tell you. I don’t think they need a reason, it’s just something that’s gradually worked its way up their to-do list.”
She looked at me for a moment. “Why didn’t they kill me, too?”
“Her Majesty is eternally grateful,” I said.
He smiled. “The empire looks after its friends,” he said.
“Because they need a puppet ruler, and you’re a girl, so you won’t be a nuisance,” I translated.
“Can you get me some poison? Or a knife?”
“Her Majesty will be delighted to help in any way she can.”
He made a stately bow. “Tell her her co-operation is appreciated.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I told her. “I’ve got an idea.”
Another hour’s work, another seventy-six dael. Outside the palace, a hundred and fifty-two dael would pay my rent and feed me for a month, but I wasn’t outside, I was inside. Getting into the palace requires either diplomatic credentials or a letter of introduction from a level six official or above (countersigned by a magistrate, commissioned military officer or chief of regional police), a considerable amount of money, persistence and a soupçon of dumb luck. To get out again, you need either a warrant of absence or a warrant of departure, sealed by the Grand Domestic. The third way (in Echmen there’s always a third way for everything) involves a door negligently left unbolted at a specified time by a junior member of the domestic staff caught out in some minor scam. I knew Oio could arrange that for me; but, as I’d told him, where would I go?
There’s a story about a young palace clerk who’d had word that his childhood sweetheart back in his home village was being courted by the local tanner. He couldn’t afford the bribe for a warrant of absence, so he forged despatches from military intelligence, which misled the joint chiefs of the defence staff into thinking the Hasrut were planning to invade. The joint chiefs went to the emperor and persuaded him to levy the biggest conscript army the empire had ever seen, in order to deal with the Hasrut once and for all. The young clerk wangled a posting as a deputy assistant quartermaster with the expeditionary force, which he accompanied just as far as the turning off the Great Military Road that led to his village, two miles away. The army, meanwhile, continued on into Hasrut territory, was ambushed at the Two Horns and wiped out to the last man, leading in turn to the fall of the Nineteenth Dynasty and thirty years of civil war. Moral: even the humblest of us can make a difference, and it’s love that makes the world go round, or at least wobble horribly.
Two days later, they let her go. At least, they unlocked her cell and took her upstairs to a spacious, beautifully furnished apartment overlooking the river, where two maids and an Imperial hairdresser were waiting to transform her from a hideous mess into the living image of authority and power as perceived by the Hus. You’ll want to look your best, they told me to tell her, when you give your first audience to your new ministers of state.
Say what you like about the Echmen, but they know how to throw a party. Picture a chamber with a tad under half an acre of floorspace, said floor being tiled in a chequerboard pattern with alternating plain white and blue and white geometric-patterned glazed tiles. The chamber is perfectly circular, and the walls swoop up, like a tent caught by the wind, into the cupola of a colossal dome, the inside of which blazes with a gold-leaf background, across which silver hounds at full stretch snap perpetually at the heels of fleeing milk-white unicorns. Light enters this space through long, narrow floor-to-ceiling slits, the sunbeams slicing into the thin fog of incense from over two hundred free-standing brass burners. The walls are plain white, and up them grow a riot of painted vines, twisting in and out of each other in intricate but distinct patterns and exploding at mathematically ordained intervals into red and blue flowers more gloriously exquisite than anything that ever came up out of the ground. In the dead centre of the chamber is a single chair, ivory, that looks like it was carved with scenes of idealised country life by a million incredibly talented and artistic termites; tiny detail, utterly perfect, as you’d confirm if you got down on your hands and knees and pressed your nose against it. No other furniture, but facing the chair a semicircle of plump silk cushions, that being what nomads prefer to sit on.
In the chair, dressed in a new floor-length Echmen gown of white silk embroidered with perfectly rendered Hus peacocks facing the wrong way, sits the unhappiest seventeen-year-old in the world. Awkwardly on the cushions – most Dejauzi are nomads; the Hus aren’t – squat a dozen men in dirty brown robes with mud-encrusted hems. They look almost as sad as she does, but not quite. Behind the throne stand three Echmen officials in sky-blue silk gowns. Behind them but towering self-consciously over them is a single shabbily dressed Robur, trying to pretend he isn’t there. He mutters a running translation into the ear of the shortest and most important official, who neither moves nor makes a sound.
The left-hand official nods to one of the bedraggled men, who stands up, then bows low to the girl in the chair. It’s not a very good bow, because Hus don’t. But the Echmen think they should, so he’s been having bowing lessons. The girl in the chair stares at him as if he’s got three ears.
The bedraggled man starts by pledging his undying loyalty, and that of the whole Hus nation, to their rightful queen, who carries on staring. Then he expresses his sincere sympathy for the loss of her entire family, regretting that she should have been caused so much distress by their reckless and selfish ingratitude. But never mind; ninety-seven thousand Hus families are now on their way to the Echmen border fort at Red River Ford and will soon be tucked up safe and sound in a string of labour camps on the scarp side of the river valley. The Echmen have graciously permitted them to bring with them their flocks and herds, which they’re at perfect liberty to graze anywhere on the Echmen side of the valley, and all the valuable portable items in the kingdom, which the Echmen have very generously agreed to place in safekeeping in the provincial governor’s treasury at Tin Chirra. If it pleases Her Majesty, the bedraggled man says, looking at his shoes, he is prepared to carry on as acting temporary grand vizier until further notice, ably assisted by his eleven department heads, representing between them the twelve clans. He pauses and waits. If it pleases Her Majesty, he repeats.
Dead silence. After what feels like a very long time, the shortest official digs me in the rib with his elbow. “She needs to say yes,” he whispers.
I walk round the back of the three officials, across a long stretch of very loud floor, and stand directly behind the throne. “You need to say yes,” I whisper.
“Tell them to go fuck themselves.”
“Don’t scowl,” I say. “It spoils the effect. We’re pleased and happy to co-operate, remember?
“Fuck you. What’s this idea of yours? I insist you tell me, right now.”
“Later. There isn’t time now and they’re staring. Smile happily and say something.”
She smiles, rather beautifully. “Stick it up your arse,” she says.
I nod and report back. “Her Majesty must first receive a sign from the spirits of her ancestors,” I improvise. “Would you happen to have such a thing as a white dove anywhere?”
Silly question. Within minutes, someone’s fetched a white dove, scrambled up on a ladder and shooed the wretched thing in through one of the narrow windows, nearly breaking its wings in the process. It flutters round in a circle three times. To my lasting regret, it doesn’t shit on anyone’s head. Then it pitches on the floor and tries to peck the diamond-hard tiles.
The chief bedraggled man looks at the shortest official, who nods. The ancestors are deemed to have spoken. The chief bedraggled man must be either well-informed or naturally quite bright, because white doves don’t figure at all in Hus mythology, not being native to the region. But they’re a big deal to the Echmen, and that’s all that matters. The chief bedraggled man reprises his painful bow, the other eleven bedraggled men stand up, and they file out of the room, looking very pleased to be getting out of there alive.
The shortest official elbows me again. “Tell her it all went very well,” he says.
Possibly the easiest seventy-six dael I’ve ever earned, in terms of work done and energy expended, but I had my misgivings. As far as I could tell, as far as the Echmen were concerned, the ceremony was sufficient to transfer executive power from the queen to the council of ministers. That done, did they need the queen any more? An interesting point of Hus constitutional law, which my studies in the library failed to resolve, since there aren’t any books about it.
Around this time, I started thinking a lot about home.
Define home; where you live, obviously. Now let’s try and apply that to the history of my life. We’ll go backwards, because it’ll be easier that way.
For six years out of the twenty-six, home has been the Echmen Imperial palace. Before that, for four years, the army base at Scoira Limen. That leaves sixteen years growing up in a smallish manor house a few miles outside Ennea Crounoe, which you won’t have heard of; it’s a minor provincial town about eighty miles north-east of the City, to which I’ve never been.
The Sashan report about the annihilation of the Robur didn’t mention Ennea Crounoe but it did refer to Stratopedon, the provincial capital, which is twelve miles further down the Southern Trunk Road. To get to Stratopedon from practically anywhere, you pass within a mile or so of Ennea Crounoe. Stratopedon, according to the Sashan intelligence corps, had been so comprehensively flattened that you’d never know it had ever been there. Without being unduly pessimistic, therefore, I could probably assume that my old home no longer existed. Scoira Limen had probably gone the same way, being a military installation, not that I minded its loss one little bit. The palace – the palace is many wonderful things, homely it isn’t. Therefore, I had no home; unless, because I’m Robur, you count the City.
Which is where we all mean when we use the H word. Partly it’s a religious thing. In theory at least, the temple of the Invincible Sun in Hill Street is the only place on earth where He can hear you when you pray. All Robur are supposed to go there once a year to confess their sins and receive absolution. We get round that by means of what we call embassy theory; an embassy is supposed to be the native soil of its country, even though it patently isn’t. Very well, then. Robur who can’t get to the City pray in a building containing a bit of the City temple – a roof tile, a scrap of plaster from the last redecoration, a splinter of obsolete floorboard; every time they have the builders in, there’s a waiting list for the trash. The principle, however, is clearly understood by all Robur. There’s only one temple, and it’s in the City.
Likewise the ward system. We all belong to a City ward, even if we were born a thousand miles away and have never been there. It’s built into our names, even; X son of Y of Z ward. I’m Old Gate, and from that you know everything you need to know about me; a minor offshoot or sucker of a subordinate branch of a noble house, titles but no money, therefore almost certainly a military family, therefore a soldier’s son and probably a soldier myself. All that, from the fact that my lot were originally registered in what used to be the garrison quarter, about six hundred years ago.
And then there’s the themes. They started off as packs of fans at the chariot races in the Hippodrome; four teams, each with its own colour. Over the course of time two colours dropped out, leaving the Blues and the Greens. Gradually, which colour you were didn’t just signify who you wanted to win the Spring Crown. It governed and decided where you lived, what job you did, which gang boss you took orders from, which theme treasury you paid your dues to and received your dole money from when you were sick or out of a job. Posh people like me aren’t supposed to be in themes, but in the army you can’t help it. I joined a Blue regiment, so I’m Blue, till I die.
Home, therefore, must be the City, by default. The last anyone heard it was still standing, but an army of a quarter of a million savages was on its way to storm it. Now then, what happens to cities when they’re taken by an enemy? As with so many things, it depends on geography. The Sashan, who’ve taken more cities than any other race in the world, invariably reduce the places they capture to ashes and dust, then build new cities on top of the ruins. The Echmen, by contrast, generally only take a city when they actually want it for something, and they go to great lengths to minimise damage to the actual bricks and mortar; they deport the inhabitants and resettle them somewhere a thousand miles away, but the buildings are sacrosanct, and if they get knocked around in the course of the assault, they’re lovingly restored to the way they were. The Rosinholet and the Aram no Vei tend to set fire to anything that’ll burn and leave it at that. The Vesani prefer to capture cities by bribing someone to leave a gate open; what they want is a going concern with the goodwill uncompromised. The Robur are, sorry, were smashers and burners, but unlike the Sashan they didn’t tend to rebuild, preferring to sow the levelled site with brambles so that even the subsoil would never be any good to anyone ever again. You can see why people didn’t like us very much.
As for these milkfaces who’d banded together to exterminate my nation, what would they do with the City? Nobody knew anything about them, so it was anybody’s guess. Either they’d given us a taste of our own medicine and raised the world’s most expensive thistle nursery, or they’d taken one look at the magnificent, gorgeous City, compared it with what they’d got at home, and moved in.
By this time, I said to myself, someone must know what’s happened. Unless you’re in the direct stream, so to speak, news of events in distant lands percolates through the Echmen Imperial court like water through limestone; even so. After three years snooping round the place, I now had certain resources. I decided I’d quite like to find out.
Another meeting of the Hus council of ministers; in a different room this time, much smaller but floored, walled and roofed in polished, figured porphyry; no windows, so lit to dazzling brightness by seventy-seven gilded bronze lamps in the form of lotus flowers. Just one official, a man I hadn’t seen before in a saffron yellow silk gown and the weirdest hat of office you ever set eyes on. He wasn’t that much older than me, but smoother and harder than marble.
“You want to be careful,” he hissed in my ear as the councillors, no longer bedraggled but just as sad looking as last time, filed in and sat down on the uncomfortable cushions.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You and the queen,” he said. “Naturally, we don’t give a damn what you get up to. But these people—” The tiniest possible nod in the direction of the councillors. “Death by crucifixion, isn’t it, a commoner screwing a royal?”
“You’re thinking of the Maudit,” I told him. “With the Hus, it’s being buried alive.”
“I stand corrected,” he said graciously. “Anyway, be careful.”
“There’s nothing like that,” I said.
“Of course not. She asks for you specifically when we offer her an Echmen translator because she admires your sibilants.” The tiniest possible shrug. “No skin off our noses what they do to you, but we’d really rather avoid bloodshed inside the palace precincts. So probably better all round if you give it up completely.”
Here we go again, I thought, and then she came in and the meeting started. She was wearing the same outfit and the same look on her face. The new grand vizier waited for the nod from the official, then did his bow (he’d been practising) and cleared his throat.
His loyalty to the royal house, he said, was as true as steel and would last until the sun itself went cold and all the stars went out. However, certain facts had been brought to his attention, and he regretted to have to announce that Her Majesty was not, in fact, her father’s daughter. The perpetrator, her real father, had been found and had confessed. Accordingly, though it broke his heart to say this, he had no alternative but to declare Her Majesty deposed forthwith. Since the royal line was now completely extinct, he had asked the Echmen emperor to accept the role of emergency acting regent until the council was in a position to call a general assembly of the entire Hus nation and elect a new king. He was overjoyed to be able to announce that the emperor had graciously agreed to shoulder this burden. From now on, therefore, all the royal powers, privileges, estates, herds and property would vest in the emperor, who he sincerely wished would live forever. Then, knowing a good exit line when he saw one, he sat down again.
“Now just a—” she said. The official cleared his throat.
“Tell them,” he told me, “that since the female She Stamps Them Flat is not a member of the royal house she has no official standing to address the council, and must therefore stay silent or be removed from the chamber.”
I started to translate. She stood up and walked out.
It was a long time before I was able to get away, and then I had to find Oio; but the selfish, inconsiderate bastard was out of his office, doing the work he was supposed to be doing instead of being there to bend the rules for me. When eventually he showed up I was so angry with him I could barely speak. I need to know which room she’s in, I shouted.
“I don’t know, do I?”
“Find out.”
He stared at me. “What’s got into you?”
“Now,” I said. “It’s important.”
It took him several hours. I ran halfway across the palace and arrived sweating and gasping for breath, to find half a dozen maids cleaning an empty room.
I should have known. Since she was no longer the queen, she was no longer an accredited diplomat, therefore she didn’t qualify for accommodation. “Where is she?” I yelled at those poor inoffensive women. “Where did you take her stuff?”
They didn’t know, and couldn’t suggest anyone I could ask. The furious energy drained out of me, like wine from a punctured skin. I thanked them as politely as I could and left them alone.
I went back to my room. On the chair was a warrant for seventy-six dael. I went to the paymaster’s office and cashed it. All of a sudden it was raining money.
I realised that, with no conscious decision on my part, I was heading for the library. I stopped dead in my tracks. Idiot, I thought. I started walking again. Somehow I managed not to run.