The fifth volume of Zautzes’ Political Commentaries; you may remember I mentioned it earlier. A masterpiece of historical analysis, though a bit dry. I had to keep pinching myself to stay awake while I was reading it, but it was worth the effort.
Nestling in the middle third of the book is an anecdote, designed to illustrate the stupidity and credulity of the common man (a leitmotiv in all Zautzes’ works, bless him), even supposedly sophisticated people like the Perimadeians. When Auxen the Great was exiled for the second time, the story goes, he went away into the mountains, where he happened to come across a very tall, striking looking shepherd drawing water at a well. He offered the man more money than he’d ever imagined could possibly exist, and enlisted his help in a cunning subterfuge.
The Perimadeians have a legend. At the hour of the city’s greatest need, so the legend runs, when disaster stares them in the face and all seems lost, the greatest hero of all time, Breuxis the Dragonslayer, will return, in the flesh, to save them and lead them to victory. Auxen therefore dressed up the tall shepherd (he was, apparently, just shy of seven feet) as the hero Breuxis, in meticulously researched period clothing and armour, put him in an ivory chariot drawn by four milk-white horses and paraded him through the streets of Perimadeia to the shrine where the hero’s body is buried. He had the lid prised off; the tomb was empty (reasonably enough, since Auxen’s friends had broken into it a few days earlier). Wild with joy, the people clamoured for Breuxis to set them free of the cruel oppression of the Senate, whose heads shortly afterwards made a pretty display on pikes in front of the main gate of the Prefecture. Breuxis then bade them farewell, entrusting them to the care of his good friend Auxen, who shortly afterwards declared himself dictator for life and lived happily ever after.
In Perimadeia, mark you, not some rustic backwater. I heard the story years ago and assumed it wasn’t true. Zautzes must’ve thought the same, because he researched it thoroughly. He found out the shepherd’s name and what became of him; he’d used his earnings to buy a massive ranch in the Mesoge, his children married into the local landed gentry and their descendants were still there when Zautzes came hassling them; they showed him letters and title deeds and family trees (anything, presumably, to make him go away) and even the grave of their illustrious ancestor, inscribed, in typical Mesoge fashion; here lies Tamanidas, who made a great deal of money pretending to be Breuxis. He came away convinced, and Zautzes was the sort of person who wouldn’t take your word for it if you told him his name.
From what I’d seen of the Hus, I got the impression that they’d be far less likely to fall for a stunt like that than the Perimadeians, or any other urban society. Living in cities tends to breed the smarts out of people somewhat, and the Hus prided themselves on their earthy common sense, their resistance to clever speeches and charisma, their robust scepticism, their knack for the awkward question, their downright rudeness. If they’d had a heraldic crest or a Great Seal, the motto on it would’ve been No Flies On Us. Still, the harder they are, the more and smaller the pieces into which they shatter, and one can but try.
I mention this because a stranger turned up, tottering out of the desert in a hell of a state, which is perfectly normal in those parts. He told them, once he’d swallowed a few mouthfuls of water and could speak, that he was a holy man. Is that right, they said. No, he replied, he wasn’t here to convert anyone or sell anything. He was a pilgrim looking for an even holier man, a prophet, rumoured to be in those parts. We don’t get many of them, they said. I’m not surprised, he said, but this one’s easy to spot. He’s a Robur.
“You didn’t say you’re a holy man,” they pointed out, when they came to fetch me.
“No,” I said.
“Well, are you?”
“Yes.”
They were impressed. A holy man who keeps his vocation a secret rather than making a pest of himself on street corners was a new one on them, and they rather liked the idea. Why hadn’t I mention it, they asked. I only preach to the chosen people, I told them. That’s not us, then. I don’t know yet, I replied. I’ll let you know when I find out.
The less you try and sell something, as every conman knows, the more they want to buy. I was already a figure of considerable interest, the crack shot who’d taught them to make the new improved bows, the right-hand man of the Hus queen who wanted to start a war with the Echmen. It wouldn’t be long before this latest piece of the puzzle was common knowledge. A holy man; that puts a different complexion on it. A holy man. A prophet, for crying out loud. What’s he up to?
I went and saw the pilgrim. He was in a bad way. “Hello, Oio,” I said.
He called me various names until I had to urge him not to overtire himself. “You got here all right,” I said.
“No. I got here. Definitely not all right.”
“Did you bring her?”
He sighed. “Yes,” he said. “She’s cosy and snug in a tent at the oasis, painting her toenails.”
I nodded. “You shouldn’t have set out to cross the desert on foot,” I said.
“I didn’t. The horse died.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “We’re not going to do this.”
I sighed. If patience is a virtue, why do so many bad people have it? Me, for instance. “Yes, we are,” I said. “It’s all set up, and the whole thing’s going to fall to pieces if we don’t do it.”
“Good. It’s a crazy idea anyway.”
“Fine,” I said. “If you want to withdraw the Hus from the Anti-Tyranny League, that’s your prerogative. The rest of us will just have to carry on without you.”
I might as well have punched her in the solar plexus. “Don’t be stupid. It’s me they listen to, not you.”
“Not so sure about that any more. I think they’ll listen to me, even if you chicken out.”
“I’ll tell them all about you.”
“You could do that. You could tell them how you conspired with a Robur to mislead the entire Dejauzi nation. I suspect it’d be the last thing you ever did, but you could do it, yes.”
She hated me, very intensely, for about fifteen seconds. “If it wasn’t for me,” I said, “you’d be dead. Twice over.”
“It’s a really stupid idea. Something will go wrong. It won’t work.”
“There is that possibility. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll be torn to pieces and they’ll feed the scraps to the dogs. Big deal. My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I’m not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn’t carry on the way it’s been so far. Your life, which I saved twice, belongs to me. Now shut up and stop making difficulties.”
The last word. Precious, like diamonds, on account of its rarity.
When I told the Hus elders that I’d seen the Queen of Heaven, I was telling the truth. I was fourteen at the time, and my uncle took me to the theatre to see a show. It was a typical Notker farce, I don’t recall which one; it was some pot-boiler, garbage. But there was this actress.
For one thing she was very tall; six feet one, I later discovered. And she had this knack of staying perfectly still in such a way that you ignored everybody else on stage and just sat there gazing. She didn’t have many lines, and what she did have to say was tripe, but that voice: you could hear every syllable right at the back of the hall, even when she was whispering. She didn’t do all that swooping and thrilling you get nowadays; when she spoke it was ordinary human speech, no chanting, cooing or declaiming. But no matter what she said, the finest blank verse in Saloninus or pass the mustard, it sounded marvellous; it was a beautiful voice, and every word that came out of her mouth was beautiful. So was she, even though she was a plain woman, ordinary looking, you’d be hard put to it to describe her to the police. Her features were plain enough that they didn’t get in the way of her beauty, which came from deep inside, like a demon.
When I first saw her, she was just starting out. She went on to be the second most famous actress in the City. My brother officers and I used to ride down from Scoira Limen whenever we had the chance and see whatever show she happened to be in. We all adored her, it goes without saying. Maybe not quite as much as we adored the first most famous actress in the City, the divine Andronica, but anyone who tells you it’s impossible to be madly in love with two people at the same time clearly doesn’t go to the theatre.
I was thinking about her as I sat in the Imperial library – Hodda, her name was – and it occurred to me that I was probably the only human being still alive who’d seen her, or Andronica, or any of them; that the extraordinary branch of commercial magic they’d specialised in existed only inside my head, and that when I died it’d be gone for ever; like the names of great-grandparents or the history of a nation or a language. It wasn’t like someone would come along a thousand years in the future, dig it up with a spade and soak off the verdigris in vinegar. Nobody on earth apart from me knew what it was like to hear Hodda say the opening soliloquy from Leucas and Galatea, and nobody would ever know again. Now that’s more than sad. That’s unbearable, like watching God die in your arms.
Then I sat down at my usual seat in the library one day, and someone had left a piece of paper there, a playbill. I ought to mention that the Echmen have theatres, very fine ones. But they don’t have plays. They have opera. At least I suppose you could call it that, because all the dialogue is sung, not spoken; there aren’t any tunes, though, nothing you can hum. And the Echmen are mad on it, from the highbrow stuff they put on at the Imperial court down to the rather more coarsely accessible variety that working people pay good money to see; all sung rather than spoken, and I gather they don’t move about a lot, just stand rooted to the spot warbling at each other until the curtain falls. It’s what you’re used to, I suppose. Besides, I’ve never actually seen an Echmen opera in an actual theatre, so what would I know?
You know what’s on at which theatre by means of playbills, which are bits of paper stuck up on walls; one of the benefits of a society with the highest level of literacy in the world. This one was interesting.
Echmen theatregoers like value for their money. You turn up at the theatre in the late afternoon and you come out again in the early hours of the morning, having seen two curtain raisers, the main event, a melodrama and a farce. The big deal about this show, according to the playbill, was the main event. Entirely new and original foreign drama without music, it said, the implication being: be there or be square.
Only two societies on earth have traditions of theatrical drama, the Echmen and the Robur. This show-without-music clearly wasn’t Echmen. Therefore −
I asked around. Oh yes, people told me, it’s the latest thing. There’s this mad woman, about seven feet tall and black as your hat – sorry, no offence – and she stands there and talks, with no music. Everyone’s going to see her, but it’ll never catch on. I mean to say, no music −
Everyone (except me) went to see her, but it didn’t catch on. Apparently the mad woman had blown into town with a ridiculous amount of money, all of which she’d invested in the show to end all shows. It ran for a long time, but not nearly long enough to cover its costs. Then she put on another show, but nobody went. They’d already seen what a tall black woman looks like talking with no music, they didn’t need to see it again.
“This mad woman,” I asked. “Does she have a name?”
“Hudda,” they told me. Close enough for government work.
How she’d got there and what she thought she was doing I had no idea, but she existed. A bit like God, you might say. Or the Queen of Heaven.
It was Oio who arranged for the playbill to land on my desk, it goes without saying, and he knew I was going to ask him a favour before I put my head round his door. He had her traced. Yes, her name was Hodda and she was Robur and she’d spent all her money and nobody would lend her any, so she was living in a fleapit in the Old City trying to figure out what she was going to do next.
Could he, I asked, possibly get a letter to her? And I might need some money.
Oio didn’t have any money and neither did I, but the Imperial Treasury had any amount of the stuff, so that was all right. The letter was a bit harder, but Oio managed it somehow. I waited anxiously for Hodda’s reply. It came. No way, she said.
I wrote another letter. How would it be, I suggested, if you got money and a free pardon? But I’m not in any trouble, I haven’t done anything, she replied. Leave that to us, I said, and, sure enough, a few days later Oio had secured a warrant for her arrest, all perfectly genuine and legal and sealed with the double entwined dragons of the Department of Justice.
Once she was in jail, of course, she needed a translator. She was a trifle steamed to begin with, but I was in a hurry. “What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“Trying to interest a load of barbarians in classical Robur drama,” she said. “How stupid can you get?”
I explained about the singing. “I can sing,” she said bitterly. “I can sing a damn sight better than they can. Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
“Possibly you forgot to ask. How the hell did you get out of the City? What happened?”
So she told me. I found it hard to believe, but she was there, so she ought to know. Apparently, the huge army of savages lured the City garrison out into a forest and annihilated them, leaving the City defenceless. But a gladiator by the name of Lysimachus organised the people and kept the savages at bay until eventually the navy turned up and saved the day. Lysimachus got himself made emperor and kept things running for several years, but it was obvious the City was going to fall sooner or later, so he evacuated the entire population in barges, leaving the empty bricks and mortar to the savages. Then it all went wrong. The place he led them to – he didn’t make it, unfortunately – turned out to be less than ideally suitable for a quarter of a million City folk without the faintest idea how to grow food. It ended badly – starvation, disease, that sort of thing; all that ingenuity and effort for nothing. Hodda wasn’t with them by this point. She’d lucked into a certain amount of money (she was reticent about the details) and resolved to try her luck in what was now the only place in the world that still had theatres.
“All of them?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I can’t imagine any of them survived. I heard there are diseases there which the locals were all immune to. And besides, you know City people. Food comes from shops. No shops, no food. I heard a rumour that some of them left the colony before the end to try and find Olbia, but even if that’s true, what possible chance would they have had? Nobody even knows where Olbia is.”
I’d accepted the extermination of my people once already. Having to accept it a second time was much harder. The tiny annoying part of you that harbours hope had been insisting all the while that the City hadn’t fallen, that a great leader had sprung up out of nowhere, fought off the savages and led the people to safety. That had turned out – incredible miracle – to be true. But they’d all died anyway. No, wait, said the tiny annoying part, the intolerable plague that was too smart to climb out of the box with the other plagues, some of them are still alive and they found Olbia. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I happen to know where Olbia is. It’s on a creek that flows down from snow-capped mountains into the armpit of the Friendly Sea, and many years ago the Robur set up a colony there, which reported back for a while and then was never heard of again. But I know where it is because it’s marked on Sashan military maps, copied by Echmen spies at the risk of their lives and smuggled back to the Imperial library sewn into the backings of carpets. A few desperate Robur survivors wouldn’t have known that. Nor would they have seen the Sashan geographical survey report, which describes the faint traces of ruins that are all that’s left of the Robur colony. That was an old survey, hope whispers, you know what the Sashan are like, they copy out stuff that’s two centuries old and serve it up as new data. Or it’s a different Olbia, or they had the map upside down and the ruins they found weren’t the Robur city at all.
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“I neither know nor care,” she replied. “If there’s any of them still alive they’re no good to me, not until they start building theatres again. All I know is, my life’s turned to shit and landed me in prison when I haven’t even done anything. I don’t have any sympathy to spare for anyone else.”
“If you cared,” I rephrased, “what would you think?”
“Well.” She thought about it for a moment, possibly for the first time. “The rumour I heard said that the expedition to find Olbia was being organised by someone called Sisinna. I’m guessing that would be Admiral Sisinna, who was head of the navy and about a million times smarter than anyone else in authority. And Olbia’s supposed to be on the sea, and navy people have loads of maps. So if the navy were running the show and Sisinna was in charge, then, yes, it’s possible that they found Olbia. It’s even possible they’re still alive. Who the hell cares?”
“I do.”
“Really.” She was looking at me. “What did you say your name was?”
“Felix.”
“Aemilius Felix Boioannes the younger.”
Five words I was sure I’d never hear again. “Yes, as it happens.”
“Thought so. I remember hearing about you. Carloman Ahenna was a friend of a friend of mine.” She grinned. “Got in a spot of trouble, I seem to recall.”
“There was a degree of unpleasantness.”
The grin widened. “So much for you and me being the parents of a new Robur race. Not,” she added, “that I’d have been interested under any circumstances whatsoever. So why all this interest in the last of our people? You’d never be able to show your face among Robur again.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Or just possibly, nobody would care any more.”
“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “If there’s still anyone alive, it’ll be because the military are running things. And so long as there’s one Robur officer left, you wouldn’t be welcome. Come on, you know those people. Forgive and forget isn’t their way.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
“And the last thing I’d ever want to do,” she went on, “is that whole pioneer thing, hoeing turnips and carrying firewood and sleeping in a tent. Screw it. Life without a certain level of comfort and refinement isn’t worth living. Talking of which,” she added, “will you please get me out of here? The food’s actually not bad and the architecture is amazing, but there’s other things I should be doing.”
“I’ll be happy to,” I said. “And I’ll give you money. Provided you do one little thing for me.”
She gave me a look that really ought to have turned me to stone. “How little?”
“Acting job,” I said. “Right up your alley, believe me.”
“Singing?”
“No singing,” I said. “And not in a theatre, but definitely acting. The part you were born to play. In fact, there’s nobody else in the whole world who could do it, apart from you. That’s assuming Andronica didn’t make it, of course.”
“Who?”
“Exactly. A few hours of your time, and you can go on your way rejoicing. Or you can stay here. Indefinitely.”
“Bastard. What harm did I ever do you?”
“None whatsoever.”
Perhaps it’s time I came back to some of things I said I’d come back to later.
Olbia, for crying out loud. It’s a place, a sad case history of Robur administrative incompetence, an article of faith. When I left the City there were people who’d vaguely heard of Olbia, had studied the pathology of what went wrong at Olbia, who earnestly believed in Olbia; the latter two categories being scholars and lunatics respectively. What went wrong at Olbia is actually quite simple. Something like this.
Head up the coast from the City, past the straits, and you come out into the large patch of water we call the Friendly Sea. If it wasn’t for all the salt you’d call it a lake, since it’s surrounded by land on all sides, apart from the tiny little bottleneck at the straits; which is why the City was built there, of course, and how it came to rule a vast and unhappy empire. Everything on the shores of the Friendly Sea was our turf. Originally we came from the steppes right up at the top, and worked our way down, taking the land as of right and killing anyone who objected. Later we conquered other places and deported the people who lived there to work the empty land we’d depopulated. They were only milkfaces, so the argument ran, and it was nice to think that someone had finally found a use for them.
Centuries later, when the City had outgrown its original footprint and overcrowding had led to catastrophic fires, plague, riots and all manner of aggravation, someone in authority decided to export the surplus urban population to some place a long way away; a colony. The idea was that our tired, our poor, our huddled masses yearning to breathe free would be much better off living as simple, self-sufficient yeomen farmers. They’d be surrounded by fresh air and open countryside, every man sitting under his own vine and his own fig tree instead of kettled up in narrow, unsanitary alleys choking on the smog from foundries and tanners’ yards. It was a nice thought, a genuine desire to do good. The road to Olbia was paved with the very best of intentions.
The City proletariat weren’t farmers. Even the government knew that. Naturally they could learn farming (if country people can do it, the logic ran, it can’t be difficult) but it would take a while, several years maybe. During that time, the colonists wouldn’t be able to feed themselves, so their loving mother the state would have to feed them. Mighty grain freighters were commissioned to carry huge cargoes of flour, beans and dried fish, everything anybody could possibly want. The government asked for quotes to supply ploughs, harrows, picks, shovels, hoes, saws, axes, buckets, carts, yokes, big hammers, little hammers, crowbars, scythe blades, rakes, pruning hooks, every damn thing you could think of, and a thousand contractors responded with yelps of delight. For five years practically everybody in the City was busy and money flowed like a river in spate.
The geographers, meanwhile, had had a look at a map and found what looked like the ideal spot, a point on the northern coast of the Friendly Sea where a river rolled down from the mountains across a flat plain into an estuary. It didn’t have a name, or not one anyone could pronounce, so they called it Olbia − the City of the Blessed.
In due course, the First Fleet sailed, led by a retired general with years of experience in commissariat, construction and supply. It was pity that he died before the fleet made landfall, but his second in command, by some strange coincidence his nephew, made a pretty good fist of things, all things considered, and soon the saws, axes and hammers were busy as bees turning limitless forests into neat rows of identical huts. Oxen were unloaded from gigantic livestock barges and yoked to the plough. The great experiment was underway.
It takes three weeks to sail up the coast from the City to Olbia. But, for technical reasons I don’t understand, tides or prevailing winds or something, it takes four months to come back. Six months later, the first news reached the City. It wasn’t wonderful.
Olbia would be a great place to live, the reports said, if it wasn’t for the insects. There was a certain sort of fly that bit the cattle and a certain sort of mosquito that bit the people. Nearly all the oxen were dead, and a third of the settlers. Not to worry, though; relocating half a dozen miles or so down the coast would make everything right as ninepence, and what was one extra year in the grand scheme of things? Meanwhile, please send more food, more oxen and, of course, more people.
So they did that. Six months went by, during which harvests failed, rebellions in the provinces severely hampered trade and the collection of revenues, war with the Sashan ate up ridiculous amounts of money and conscription drew men away from the plough and the workbench, leading to economic depression and famine. Then news came from Olbia. The new site was much better than the old site, but there were problems. For a start, there were bands of local savages, under the impression that they owned the place. They’d been slaughtered like sheep, naturally, but not before they’d killed about a fifth of the settlers, annoyingly mostly women. Furthermore, the bean and pulse seeds sent out from the City wouldn’t germinate there – too cold or too hot or something – and there was a certain sort of mite or bug that had killed off all the poultry. The wheat and barley had ripened in record time and would’ve produced a grand harvest if the disgruntled savages hadn’t set fire to it, just before running off most of the oxen, just before being wiped out. Now that the natives were dead, clearly those problems would not recur and it ought to be plain sailing from now on. In the meantime, please send more food, more oxen and, of course, more people.
At any other time the emperor would have been only too happy to oblige. But with food riots in the City and all available shipping tied up with supplying the army on the Sashan frontier, his hands were tied. As soon as the situation eased, the reply went, everything the colonists needed would be despatched, maximum priority. Until then, do the best you can.
The Sashan war didn’t go too well. That was the occasion on which twelve successive assaults with heavy equipment failed to breach the City wall – something to be very proud of indeed, but we wouldn’t have had anything to be proud of if the Sashan hadn’t been camped under the City walls for eight months, until plague and supply problems forced them to give up and go home. By the time all that was sorted out, the economy was in such a terrible mess that it was touch and go whether the empire would survive at all. It did, and eventually the situation was sufficiently eased that someone remembered about Olbia, and sent a fleet of freighters.
When they got there, they found the place deserted. The rows of huts were still there, but when you pushed open the doors you couldn’t go inside because they’d filled up with brambles and cow parsley. There weren’t any bones lying about, animal or human, and no signs of destruction by fire. Instead, the relief party found a big stone in the middle of what would have been the town square, on which someone had chiselled a brief note. Site uninhabitable, the note said, survivors have moved upstream to where the red apple trees grow; please find us and take us home.
The relief party followed the river right up into the mountains, but found no apple trees and no settlers. Nor did they find skeletons, abandoned equipment or anything else. It was getting late in the sailing season; if they stayed much longer they’d be stuck there all winter until the really nasty winds stopped blowing. They gave up and came home.
So much for Olbia. It had achieved its main purpose, getting rid of troublesome surplus citizens, and its undeclared secondary purpose, generating enough blame to justify a thorough cleanout of the middle and upper-middle levels of the Imperial bureaucracy (there were just as many bureaucrats in office a year later, but they were different bureaucrats; Robur definition of progress) The eye-watering cost in money and lives was a drop in the ocean compared to the losses suffered during the Sashan war, so that was all right. An unintended third objective, providing employment to scholars and historians, was in full swing by the time I left the City. And the fourth objective, giving dreamers and lunatics something to believe in –
Dreamers and lunatics like me. And, just possibly, Admiral Sisinna, generally reckoned to be the shrewdest man in the empire; had he really led the survivors of the City exodus to Olbia, sincerely believing it was really there somewhere? Was it possible that somewhere, among the mountains and the non-existent red apple orchards, there were Robur ready and willing to take in their destitute countrymen, feed and clothe and protect them until the situation at home had eased?
Anything’s possible.
“You lied to us,” her father’s friend said.
Glue is wonderful stuff. You slap it on and go away, and a few hours or days later, two separate objects have turned into one object. But it can be a bit like a big, friendly dog; all over you, wet and annoying. I was setting a newly assembled bow into a jig, which would give the limbs the shape I wanted. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“You told us—” He stopped and lowered his voice. “You told us, if we came here, she’d be here to meet us.”
“You mean the Queen of—”
“Don’t say the name.”
“Sorry. But that’s who you mean?”
“Who else?”
I nodded. “My fault,” I said. “I must’ve phrased it badly. You think you know a language, but that doesn’t stop you making the occasional mistake. What I meant to say was, once you get here, she’ll come.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“Soon. When she’s ready. I don’t know, do I? I’m just passing on the message.”
He glared at me furiously. “We did what you said. Exactly what you told us to do. People died. And now you’ve got us all sitting around making stupid bows for some war we never agreed to.” He stopped himself with an effort. “They’re saying you’re a holy man. A prophet.”
“I can’t help what people say.”
“How can you be a prophet? We’ve never had prophets before. What do you do, tell fortunes?”
“I never said I was anything of the sort.”
“You didn’t deny it, either.”
“There’s lots of things I haven’t denied. Doesn’t mean I did them.”
“You are a prophet, aren’t you? Admit it.”
“This is pointless,” I said. “If I told you I’m a prophet, you wouldn’t believe me. You don’t even know what a prophet is.”
He breathed out loudly through his nose. “You’d better be right, that’s all. Otherwise—”
I waited for the rest of the sentence. He scowled at me and left.
Things that interest me don’t interest other people, and vice versa, so I’ll spare you the technical details of the bow-building project. There were problems. We sorted them out. Getting hold of materials was difficult. We managed. Persuading the Hus to stick at it and persevere was harder still. I managed that as well. The breakthrough came when the assembled kings of the Dejauzi watched me giving a demonstration of the new-style bow in action. I’d managed to track down an Echmen lancer’s cuirass – it had been given to her grandfather by someone or other and sat at the bottom of a trunk ever since – which I tied round a sack tightly stuffed with hay and shot at from thirty yards. Six arrows in one minute. An Echmen cuirass is made out of about a thousand D-shaped steel scales, tinned to stop them from rusting and sewn onto a jerkin so that they overlap. Generations of Dejauzi had been taught that Echmen armour is proof against anything, up to and including dragons. All six of my arrows went straight through. One of them went through and out the other side. Dead silence; not even birdsong. Then the king of the Maudit asked me in a rather shaky voice if I was interested in selling those things.
Needless to say, if the Maudit had them, all the other Dejauzi had to have them, too. I explained that it wasn’t up to me, all I’d done was teach the Hus how to make the things, mostly to give them something to do. If anyone wanted bows made, they’d have to talk to the queen of the Hus, who no doubt would be happy to oblige, in return for good-quality raw materials and a generous supply of food and clothing for her starving, homeless people.
It made no difference, however. Even with bows that could shoot through Echmen scale −
“At thirty yards,” someone pointed out. “We went back to seventy-five and the arrows just bounced off.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s why you don’t shoot at the men, you shoot at the horses. Not until they get up really close. Sorry, unless they get up really close. But they won’t get that far. And if they do, you’ll slaughter them.”
“Sorry,” they said. “Not interested.”
Well, now. I’d found useful paying work for the Hus menfolk, but not the women. Fortuitously, I’d read a book; Aechmalotus’ Elements of Botany. In the section about flax – you have no idea how much there is to say about flax – Aechmalotus describes how the Blemyans used to make armour out of linen cloth, about a thousand years ago. Sixteen layers ought to do it, he says, laminated together with flax-seed glue, doesn’t even have to be new cloth, you can use old clothes, sheets, worn-out sails, anything you like. Of course, he adds, he’d never tried it himself, but the Blemyans swore by it, a thousand years ago.
I’d come across a bunch of men starting a bonfire. What’s that you’re burning. I asked. Old tents, they told me. Old canvas tents? Yes, what about it? I smiled. Tell you what, I said. Give me those useless stinking old canvas tents you were about to set fire to, and I’ll give each of you a beautiful new horn and sinew bow. How about it?
Glue we had, bucketfuls. Sixteen layers did just fine, and in that heat it set like a rock. This time, I had no trouble getting the kings of the Dejauzi to spare me five minutes. I handed the king of the Rosinholet a spear. “If you can stick it right through so it comes out the other side and pierces the sack,” I told him, “you can have all the bows you want for free.”
He looked at me. “Seriously?”
“Go ahead,” I said. “It’s just a few bits of old tent.”
I’m sorry to say he hurt his arm trying, and all to no avail. Needless to say, if the Rosinholet had linen armour, all the other Dejauzi had to have it, too. Back to the glue kettles. Over the course of the next few days, the Hus became the stickiest nation the world had ever seen.
Why can’t human beings be more like chemicals? In an alchemical experiment you add X scruples of A to Y drams of B and stir slowly over a gentle heat, next thing you know you’ve got what you want, predictably and reliably. Into the crucible I’d placed the weapons, the armour and the manpower, and even the most exacting critic couldn’t fault me on my gentle, persistent stirring. Even so. Sorry, they still said, not interested.
When all else fails, they tell you, pray. Time to do just that.
Just when I was starting to wonder where the hell Oio had got to, he came back.
Maybe I should tell you about me and Oio. What did I ever do, you’ve probably been asking yourself, to deserve such a loyal, devoted friend? To answer that, let me take you back a few years, to shortly after I first arrived at the Echmen court. Oio is, as I think I mentioned, a Lystragonian, and he and I were the only Robur-speakers, below senior administrative level, in the palace. I don’t think he liked me much. I was, therefore, mildly surprise when he pounced on me as I was walking through the cloisters one morning and dragged me behind a pillar.
“If anyone asks,” he said, “I was with you all last night.”
I thought about that. “Doing what?”
“I don’t know. Playing backgammon.”
“Chess,” I said. “Where?”
“Your quarters.”
“Have you got a chessboard?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because I haven’t. But that’s all right, because you brought yours and we used that. What’s it made out of?”
He had to stop and think. “The board’s sycamore and ebony and the pieces are bone. One set is dyed black.”
“What does the rook look like?”
“The what?”
Lystragonian, I forgot. “The castle.”
“A man with a pointed helmet carrying a sword. Pointing up.”
I nodded. “One of the chessmen wouldn’t happen to have a chip or a scratch or something like that.”
“One of the fleurets of the white queen’s crown is missing.”
“Of course it is,” I said, “I remember now.”
He looked at me. “From after third watch till the call to prayer.”
“That’s right. I won quite a lot of money, I seem to remember, which you didn’t have with you. But that’s all right. You can pay me when you see me next.”
He was about to say something, but a captain of the guard and two sergeants in full armour came along and arrested him. Later that day they came to see me. “You’re sure about that,” they said.
“Yes. Why? Is he in any trouble?”
The captain was looking round my room. “You were playing chess.”
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t seem to be a chess set here.”
“He brought his.”
“Describe it.”
So I did that. “It must’ve cost a lot of money,” I said. “Actually, I feel guilty about that.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “I dropped the white queen and broke one of the little points off her crown. I had a look for it after he’d gone but I couldn’t find it.”
Housekeeping had swept my room that morning. Would the captain know that? “When did he leave?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Call to prayer, or not long before that. To be honest with you, I was half asleep by that point.”
“You look quite bright and breezy for a man who was up all night.”
“I’m a junior diplomat. I sleep a lot during the day.”
It was a while before I saw Oio again. “How much money did you win off me at chess?” he asked.
“Thousands,” I replied. “I don’t suppose you’ve got much money.”
“No.”
“Oh, well, in that case forget about it.” I smiled at him. “Look,” I said, “I know we spent that night together playing chess, but if we hadn’t been what might you have been doing?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I heard later that one of the other clerks in his department had been found head down in a rainwater barrel, though what killed him was probably the blow to the head. The hell with it; I didn’t kill him, so he wasn’t my fault. Oio has been very kind and helpful on many occasions, and what did truth and justice ever do for me? I did ask Oio once, though; why me?
“I couldn’t think of anyone else,” he said. Good reason.
Anyway, he came back. “Is she all right?” I asked him. “Did you bring her?”
“There’s a fallen-down old lime kiln about half a mile up the road,” he replied. “I left her there. She’s not happy.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “When it’s dark, you and she make your way to the top of that hill over there. When you see a bonfire, it’s time.”
“She wants to know about the money.”
“She’s incredibly suspicious.”
“Lie convincingly.”
He was looking very worried. I’d made him certain promises concerning his future. “It is all right about the money, isn’t it? It’s all there and everything.”
“Trust me,” I said. An exhortation, rather than a statement of fact.
I realised as I walked back to the courtyard where the kings were holding their next meeting that I’d forgotten to ask Oio about the stuff. I try so hard not to make assumptions, but from time to time I slip up. You assume that people, especially professionals, know their job and don’t have to be reminded about every single little thing. For instance, if I know I’m going to be translating in a dispute over fishing rights, it wouldn’t occur to me to turn up for work without having read something about what sort of fish people catch and how they go about it, so that at least I’d be familiar with the technical terms. Then I’d have either looked those terms up in a lexicon or asked someone who knew the language, so I’d be able to translate them as and when they came up in the talks. It’s my job to know the Permian for gurnard and the southern dialect words in demotic Vesani for the three different kinds of deep-water long series tangle nets, not to mentions the reasons why someone would want to use one of them and why someone else would want him not to. Sitting down with a bunch of busy, important people without knowing all that kind of thing would be simple incompetence, like a soldier forgetting his shield. But I’ve known translators who get caught out and blame it all on someone else. I should’ve been properly briefed, they say, someone should’ve seen to it that I was given all the materials beforehand. I can’t be expected to think of everything. And do they get fired for being useless? No, some clerk gets the blame. So; if assumptions can vary so widely within one profession, how much more likely that they’re different as between one profession and another – translating, for example, and the drama.
Nothing I could do about it now, of course, as men and women pushed past me with faggots and bundles of dried herbs, to scent the bonfire. It was the night of the Old and New festival, celebrating the return of the flocks from the mountain pastures to the valley. It’s a festival common to all the Dejauzi. There’s a truce, and a special sort of cake only baked for the occasion, music and rather dreary traditional poetry, followed by a sort of general assembly where forthcoming marriages are announced and important issues likely to arise during the next six months are discussed in very general terms and put to a pretend vote – the king votes first, then everybody agrees with him. It’s rather a tame affair compared with most Dejauzi festivals: no bloodletting, animal or human, no violent sports, not even bull-jumping or two blindfolded men trying to brain each other with sticks. The evening concludes with a hymn to the Queen of Heaven and the lighting of the bonfire. But all the Dejauzi, and the Hus especially, take it very seriously. A promise made at the Old and New can’t be broken, or that’s the theory, at least.
Properly speaking, the bonfire should be made of the desiccated bones of your vanquished enemy, or at least generously garnished therewith. In which case, the Luzir Soleth had just pulled off a spectacular victory against the king of the thorn bushes – fair enough, I suppose, nobody likes the things, especially the very tips of the thorns, which work their way into your fingers and hurt like hell for weeks. Exterminate all the brutes, say I. No mercy. Or it could be because thorns burn nicely when dry, or the king’s people had just cleared a large patch of scrub on the hill slope ready for planting olives. It’d be diplomatic to say it was probably a combination of all three.
The festival side of things was all right, I suppose. It kicked off with a choir of Luzir under-twelves singing a long hymn very slowly. Then we had a choir of Hus under-twelves singing the same hymn very slowly, followed by another hymn from a slightly older Luzir choir, followed by the same hymn from their Hus contemporaries, followed by what passes for dancing in those parts – demonstrating yet again the difficulties of my trade, given that the Robur word for dance doesn’t mean to stand on the same spot for ten minutes undulating slightly at the hips. Never mind. They seemed to enjoy it, which is what matters.
Then we had the poetry. Lots of that. The poem, which I had the opportunity to study in some detail, since I heard it once from the Luzir and once from the Hus, word-for-word identical, tells of how the great-great-great-great-grandfathers of the Dejauzi were promised a land flowing with milk and honey by the gods, on condition that they behaved themselves, which they signally failed to do. Accordingly they ended up in the land next door to the promised one, adequate but milk-and-honey-deficient, where they were periodically smitten by heaven every time they got above themselves, roughly once a generation. I didn’t think much of it to start with, but once you got into it, it’s actually rather good, particularly the inventive ways heaven found for punishing the chosen people. I’d read a rather garbled and inaccurate precis of it in an Echmen text, but not the thing itself, which has never been written down.
Then we had the cakes. They tasted odd rather than nice, and they made my head spin. Later I found out that they season the batter with funny herbs, the same sort they use to perfume the bonfire. The cakes made me thirsty. There was plenty to drink; milk or beer. I opted for the milk.
Next we had forthcoming marriages, which seemed to go on for ever. The names were called out by the respective heads of families, and each announcement was greeted with solemn foot-stomping and slow hand-clapping, neither of which mean the same to the Dejauzi as they do in the Hippodrome or the theatre. My head stopped spinning and started hurting. I was feeling jumpy, and the noise of the foot-stomping made my teeth ache.
After the marriages came the important issues. The Luzir king got to his feet. Apparently he did it exceptionally well, because he got a big round of applause for it. The Luzir and the Hus, he said, haven’t always seen eye to eye. But they’re here now and they haven’t really made nuisances of themselves, so things could be worse. The Luzir have been incredibly generous with food and shelter and everything anyone could possibly need, and likewise the Maudit, the Aram, the Rosinholet and the Cure Hardy, all giving selflessly to poor destitute unfortunates who had no right to expect such generosity, considering the awful things they’ve done in the past, but that’s the Dejauzi people for you − generous and forgiving to a fault. For their part, he went on once the cheering from half the crowd had died down, the Hus have kept themselves occupied and out from under people’s feet, and we should all be grateful to them for that. An unexpected side effect of all this industry has been lots and lots of fairly useful-looking armaments, which may well come in handy at some point in the future. But (here he paused again and peered round as if looking for someone; I have an idea it might have been me) any silly rumours anyone might’ve heard about a war, especially a war against the Echmen, are completely unfounded. He spoke for all the kings on this point. There wasn’t going to be a war. Absolutely not.
Loud applause from everyone. Oh well.
Accordingly, he went on, it was his honour and privilege to propose the usual vote: that everything should carry on pretty much the same as it is at the moment. He raised his hand in favour, then sat down.
Carried unanimously, which was the signal to light the bonfire. I felt my stomach churn and my knees go loose; just as well I was sitting down and nobody was looking at me. I wondered what it would feel like to be kicked to death. Most likely it wouldn’t last very long, but you don’t know, do you? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. I think half of the trauma of pain and injury is the fear; am I going to die, am I going to be left paralysed, how much permanent damage will there be? If you know it’s that time and the damage won’t matter, all that leaves is the pain. Regarding which, you can either fight it or scream. I’ve always found that screaming helps you cope.
Picture the scene. The towering heap of thorn branches catches and crackles. There’s a wave of heat, as physical as a shove, and a bright red light. Then a breeze makes the fire roar. It’s a sound of many voices rather than just one. A cloud of sparks, like burning rain falling up rather than down. Shouts and swearing as glowing embers light on necks and the backs of hands.
After its first flush, the fire pipes down a little and settled into the bales of that funny herb, which smoulders rather than burns, gushing out dense, sweet smoke. It wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste but the Dejauzi must really like it. They’re smiling, laughing, suddenly cheerful for no obvious reason. The glare dies down as the sides of the fire burn through and fall into the core.
Someone notices something. Others turn and look. Someone screams. At first you can’t see because there’s too many people in the way, but the crowd draws apart, falling away like water off perfectly clean metal, leaving an empty space.
Into which steps something or someone. You’ve never seen anything like it before but it’s perfectly, overwhelmingly familiar. It is or it looks like a very tall woman, taller than a man. She’s stark naked and her chalk-white skin glows; sort of green, sort of blue, you can’t make your mind up which. Her hair shines, too, piled up on top of her head like a tower, or those pointed hats the Sashan wear. In one hand she has a knife, and in the other something that looks like a short log of wood.
Dead silence except for the crackle of the fire. She stops in the exact centre of the crowd, smoke hanging round her shoulders like a cape, her glow shining through the smoke like sunrise. She turns her head, looking for someone. She finds him: the skinny Robur belonging to the Hus queen, the one who’s supposed to be some sort of prophet. She beckons. He comes forward, unsteadily, like a drunk, and drops to his knees in front of her. She points the knife in her right hand at his heart, then takes one step forward and drives the knife into his neck, right up to the hilt.
He falls sideways. She says something in a weird language you can’t understand. The dead Robur stands up; not like a wounded man with blood pumping out of a breached artery, but perfectly normally, as though what you just saw never happened. She hands him the log of wood. They talk to each other in the language you don’t know.
“When do I get the money?” she said in Robur.
“There isn’t any money,” I replied. “Keep perfectly calm,” I added, “they’re watching you.”
I took the scroll from her hand. Funny to see it again, after all that time, in such a very different context.
“Don’t piss me around,” she said, in that wonderful, amazing voice, like honey mixed with starlight. Her delivery was even better than I remembered, or else she’d improved with age. Part of me was enraptured, away with the angels, just from hearing her speak. “Seventy thousand nomismata, cash. We agreed.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No money. Look, you’ve done me a great favour, and in return I’m not going to tell all these people that you’re a fraud plastered in whiteface and luminous paint. If I did they’d tear you apart. But we don’t want that, do we?”
“Thank you so fucking much, you treacherous little shit.”
I bowed my head, dazzled by her radiance. “It’s the least I can do,” I said. “So, when you’re finished here, I suggest you go back to Echmen and forget any of this ever happened. Once you’re back there, you can say what you like. These people will just assume it’s the enemy telling lies.”
“I’ve met some real arseholes in my time,” she said, her voice soft and low but filling all the available space like floodwater, “but you’re something else, you know that? You’re so full of shit I don’t know how you live with yourself.”
“You could learn to juggle,” I said. “The Echmen love jugglers and acrobats. You could earn good money.”
“Piss off and die.”
The shining woman – who are we trying to kid? Call her by her name. The Queen of Heaven flings her arms wide. There’s a thump, like a heavy rock falling on the ground, and behind her the fire surges and blossoms, filling the air with sparks and hot cinders, then collapses. Suddenly it’s dark. She’s gone.
They look round for the Robur, who’s collapsed in a heap. He looks like he’s having some kind of a fit. They fetch some water. He swallows a mouthful, retches violently. He’s got the log the Queen gave him gripped tight in his hand, only it’s not a log. It’s parchment, like you’d cover a drum with, rolled up tight.
The Luzir king has been pushed to the front of the crowd. “What did she say to you?” he asks.
I opened my eyes. My head was swimming. I wasn’t acting the shortness of breath. “It was her,” I said.
“What did she say?”
I took a few deep breaths. The lining of my throat and mouth were raw, from bile. “Help me up,” I said. “My legs are all weak.”
They got me a stool to sit on. I had their attention.
There was going to be a war, I told them. The Echmen had sworn to wipe them off the face of the earth – not just the Hus, all the Dejauzi. But the Dejauzi were her chosen people. She would give them victory and lead them to the promised land.
The king was staring at me as if I was a hole in the sky he might fall through. “Did she say that?”
“I think that’s what it meant, yes.”
He looked up, over my head, to his fellow kings standing behind me. They’d heard. I guess the implications of being chosen were starting to sink in. “You’re sure.”
“As sure as I can be. It wasn’t a language I know. I was sort of hearing it inside my head, if that makes any sense.”
“What’s that she gave you?” I heard the Maudit king’s voice. I looked at the scroll in my hand as though I’d never seen it before. “I don’t know,” I said. “Writing.”
“Can you read it?”
“Let me see.” I unrolled the top few inches. “I think so.”
The uncertainty was genuine. I have difficulty reading my own handwriting, even in broad daylight.
“Well?”
I looked round at him. “Do you want me to read it to you?”
“Yes, of course.”
I took a deep breath. “In the beginning,” I read out, “Skyfather created the heavens and the earth.”
If that sounds familiar, please don’t give me a hard time. I’m not exactly a master of prose style, as I’m sure you’ve discovered by now, and I needed something powerful and profound, of proven efficacy. The chances of any Dejauzi having encountered the Permian Book of the Dead in any shape or form were, I’d decided, slight. Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.
I said a few words a moment ago about the value of preparation, and I hope you’ll agree that the goings-on at the Old and New festival bear me out. It helped, of course, that I’d had the Imperial library at my disposal. It was there I cobbled together and wrote out the text of the scroll, which I entrusted to Oio once I knew we had Hodda on board. It was in the library that I solved the mystery of luminous paint and thunderflashes, which have been the most jealously guarded trade secrets of the Robur theatrical profession for two hundred years, and which had always been one of Hodda’s trademarks. Apparently, luminous paint is made from some very peculiar rocks that can only be found on a mountainside in Scona. You grind them up, cook them in a crucible with loads of charcoal, then spread out the resulting mess in the sun to soak up the light. Thunderflashes come from a recipe in one of Saloninus’ notebooks, written in code. The notebook in question is now lost or at least unavailable for inspection; rumour has it that Attalus, the greatest actor of his day, bought it at an auction and decoded it, and the secret has stayed in the profession ever since, each generation prising the formula from the cold, dead hand of its predecessor. I knew that whatever else Hodda might have lost or sold during her vicissitudes among the Echmen, she’d keep with her to the bitter end her pot of luminous paint and half a dozen thunderflashes. It was a bit of bunce that she also had one of those trick daggers where the blade slides up into the handle, but I should have remembered seeing her in the suicide scene in Marpessus and Otia, one of her best ever performances.
It’s true that when I offered her a huge sum of money I had no intention of ever paying her. Oio had embezzled me a modest down payment, but that was as much as he dared abstract all in one go, and we were on a schedule. I felt and still feel guilty about that, though I imagine the jade go-anywhere-and-get-out-of-trouble pheasant which I gave Oio to pass on to her will have fetched a tidy sum once she’d finished with it herself. I make trouble for people, I know. But, then, people (admittedly different ones) make trouble for me, so in the grand scheme of things we’re quits.
I rolled up the scroll. I was hoarse from all that reading aloud. Nobody had moved or said a word all through the performance. Not even a cough. I’d have said it was physically impossible and a violation of the laws of nature for anyone to read out anything in front of an audience without somebody coughing. Shows how much I know.
I’d had my eye on the page and my horrible spidery handwriting, barely legible by the glow of the dying fire, so I had no idea of how it had gone down with the Dejauzi people. I was afraid to look up. If they hadn’t bought it, these would be my last few moments on earth. If they had, the world was about to change, nations would be torn apart, empires would fall. All I ever wanted out of life was modest comfort and peaceful obscurity. The hell with it.
So I looked up. Every eye was fixed on me; the archer’s stare, where you concentrate every fibre of your being on the target, just before you loose. Moving my eyes only, I located her; the queen of the Hus, She Stamps Them Flat, looking daggers at me from behind the shoulder of the King of the Aram Chantat. Hers was, as far as I could tell, the only negative reaction. Everybody else just looked gobsmacked.
Being a prophet isn’t something I’d recommend to the self-conscious. You get stared at an awful lot. The thing to remember is that, having gazed into the eyes of God, you hardly notice anything else. A bit like looking straight at the sun: for a long time afterwards, everything is shiny blurs and splodges. I decided that the best way to act would be to pretend I’d just been knocked down by a runaway horse.
For the next few days, therefore, I took it very gently, only speaking when spoken to and usually having to be spoken to twice before I registered anything. Gradually I came back to life. Yes, I admitted when pressed, I’d talked to the Queen of Heaven. Yes, she killed me, I remember that now. I died, and she called me back to life. It was the weirdest feeling, I told them, and refused to go into details. The scroll? Oh, that. She gave it to me and told me it was all the Law and the prophets, whatever that means. Presumably it’s what she wants us all to do. I can’t remember any of it, I told them, what did it say?
They brought it to me. They’d found a Sashan carved ivory box, somebody’s prized heirloom, to keep it in, so they wouldn’t have to look at it. Can you still read it, they asked, or was reading it all part of the… you know? I frowned like crazy while they held their breath. Yes, I said, it’s coming back to me. I can read it.
The trick when fabricating doctrine is to keep it simple. You don’t want complex theological issues such as transubstantiation or the dual procession of the holy spirit. That can come later, when you’ve got ten thousand full-time monks looking for something to do. I’d looted the Permian stuff first because they wouldn’t know about it, second because Permian religion is so vague and open-ended, practically anybody can bend it to fit their existing beliefs, even atheists. A simple creation myth, then straight into the dos and don’ts. Love God with all your heart and soul and your neighbour as yourself; be nice to strangers and foreigners (guess why I put that in) because you yourself were once a slave in Echmen; no murder, rape, stealing or antisocial behaviour; I thought about forbidding them to eat insects and fermented food, mostly because I loathe sauerkraut, but then I thought, no, let’s keep it simple. Honour the black men, because they’re holy; make them your priests. That’s about it, really.
What about the promised land, they asked me. I don’t know, I replied. Where is it, they asked, how do we get there, what’s it like? I’m sorry, I told them, I have no idea.