I got a letter.
It was from the king of the Sashan, delivered by a royal messenger wearing more red velvet than should ever be concentrated in any one place at any one time, and addressed to me personally. Hold your horses a moment and consider that. Imperial protocol requires that emperors write to emperors. You don’t send a letter to a fellow emperor’s subject, just as you don’t put your hand down the blouse of a fellow emperor’s wife. It’s not respectful.
The letter started off telling me a lot of things about myself that I already knew; I was a false prophet, a deceiver, I’d stirred up the people with a lot of lies about God and induced them to murder their rightful sovereign, I was a blasphemer and an idolater – I’m not entirely sure what an idolater is, but it’s probably safe to assume that I’m one, I’m everything else, after all – and there was an unspeakable punishment lined up for me some time real soon. That punishment, he went on, it would be both his duty and his pleasure to carry out; to which end, please note that a state of war now existed between the Sashan and the Echmen. Followed by the royal seal, love and kisses conspicuous by their absence.
Alyattes wrote back telling him to go to hell, and that was that. Game on.
Sashan names are a pain in the bum. Properly speaking, my recent correspondent was called Shekelesh son of Ahhiyawash son of Meshwesh, Brother of the Sun, Husband of the Moon, so on and so forth; you try saying all those sh’s and anyone within a yard’s radius will end up covered in spit. So inconvenient and awkward is the true authentic Sashan language that they don’t actually use it any more. They speak Apiru, which they stole from some people they conquered seven hundred years ago, and they write in Shasu, the language of the glorious and sophisticated people who flourished for thousands of years in the territories that now make up the heartland of the Empire of the Sun before the Sashan came along and exterminated them. But when the Great King writes to a brother monarch, he writes in Sashan; which means he composes his letter in Apiru in his head, dictates it in Shasu, then sends for a scholar who translates it into Sashan so it can be translated into Echmen or Vesani or Robur so that its recipient can understand it. From which it follows that skilled interpreters are esteemed and valued in Sashan society, and if my uncle had fixed it for me to be posted there instead of Echmen, the history of the world would be very different.
Nobody who doesn’t live there has any idea what ordinary Sashan are really like. It’s not a question anybody’s supposed to ask. Instead, so the orthodox view goes, the Sashan nation is a mighty oak tree alone on a mountaintop. The trunk of the tree is the king, immovable and unimaginably strong, and from him branch off the scholars and the nobility; supported by his strength, they’re able to turn their leaves to the sun and bring forth fruit, or at any rate acorns. The people, meanwhile, are the roots, extending for miles under the ground, drawing vitality and power from the good earth, and permanently out of sight.
Everything Sashan is about the beauty of strength. All Sashan men are strong, with arms like other people’s legs and necks like bulls. That’s why Sashan men go about muffled from head to foot in flowing robes, so that if by some miracle there should chance to be a weedy one somewhere, nobody would have to look at him and be appalled. All Sashan women, by the same token, are beautiful, and wear veils. The Sashan are probably the most accomplished artists in the world, and they have more painters and sculptors per capita than anyone, all earning good money. This is because every building in a Sashan city is profusely decorated with exquisite murals and sculpted reliefs, all showing the Great King smiting ten kinds of shit out of the enemy. Even private houses are practically built out of art – walls, doors, ceilings, window frames, you name it, every conceivable surface marvellously wrought to convey one transcendent message: don’t mess with the Man. Interestingly, there’s no word in Apiru or Shasu for strong. It’s just implied in everything, and having a word for it would be tautology.
Now, when you know something’s true, you don’t feel the need to go around all the time proving it. The Great King knows he’s the strongest creature on earth and in heaven, and nothing can ever possibly change that. But he’s not stupid. Harsh economic truths can’t just be waved away, and one such truth is that keeping a large standing army costs a lot of money. The Great King is no fool. Why keep a dog, he reasons, and bark yourself? Since everybody knows that the king is so strong that his sneezes flatten mountains, why spend an absolute fortune on soldiers and equipment that probably won’t ever be needed? Should the need arise, of course, the mighty Sashan nation will surge up like a river in spate and annihilate the enemy as though he’d never existed. Until then, better to keep the money in the Treasury, or spend it on a nice bit of art for the palace courtyard.
There is therefore something of a discrepancy between the Sashan army on paper and the Sashan army in the field. A bit like the Echmen, only more so, because the Sashan actually believe. If the king has an inscription carved on a wall saying THIS PROVINCE IS DEFENDED BY A HUNDRED THOUSAND MEN, it inevitably follows that it’s true. Furthermore, it always was true and it always will be, because the king says so. That notional hundred thousand is represented on the ground by twenty thousand. Note the word represent. The hundred thousand are the truth; the twenty thousand stand for them, just as the idol in the temple stands for the god, but the god is infinitely more real in any meaningful sense.
Now the twenty thousand representative Sashan lancers are pretty hot stuff, never doubt that. They’re Sashan, they’re strong, they have the honour to have been chosen out of a hundred thousand ultra-real soldiers to represent the king’s right arm out on the frontier. What we were up against, in the slightly inferior level of reality in which people actually live, was the best equipped, best trained and best motivated army in the world; significantly smaller than the Echmen army, but blessed with an edge of sheer ferocity that the Echmen tend to lack. They know that the Sashan have never lost a battle; not really lost, anyway. Anything other than total victory would be unthinkable.
The thing about people who believe defeat is unthinkable is that they tend not to think. My kind of enemy.
Which brings me, inevitably, to Mecho son of Terupat. A man with a vision. A man who changed history.
When Terupat died, Mecho and his brother divided the old man’s estate between them, which is how they do things in Blemya. The brother took the land, the sheep, the house and its contents. Mecho took the camels. Both brothers reckoned Mecho had got the better part of the division, because the old man had been the foremost camel breeder in north-east Blemya, but that was all right. The brother was happy to stay home and tend the farm. Mecho wanted to conquer the world.
In commercial terms, at least. Mecho was educated. He knew that there were other countries and other races of men out there, on the other side of the desert, beyond the mountains. He’d read books and talked to travellers, and he knew about the people who lived far away to the east: the Denyen, the Tieker, the Lubu, and, beyond them, the sophisticated and fabulously wealthy Echmen. About the latter he knew one particularly important, shocking, wonderful thing. The Echmen had no camels.
Which was odd, because they had deserts all round them, to the west, north and east, and they were a trading and manufacturing nation, needing to transport goods long distances through the desert. But no camels. Instead they used mules and a network of wells and oases, which worked fine but which meant you had to cross the desert in a sort of meandering stagger, hopping from water to water and taking three times as long as you would if you could go in a straight line. Which you could do, if you had camels. Which they didn’t. Very odd.
So Mecho set out with the seven hundred pedigree camels he’d inherited from his father. It can’t have been an easy journey. First he had to cross the endless white sand of the Blemyan Ocha. Then he faced the rampart of the Ganz Mountains, the ascent of which took him from the blistering heat of the plains to the murderous cold of the high passes. The other side of the Ganz was Denyen territory; he was wounded three times in skirmishes with raiders, and seventy-two of his herders were killed, but he battled through, only to find himself confronted with the River Cobryas, in full spate. These days there are bridges over the Cobryas, built by Robur engineers. Back then, you had two choices. You could sit on the west bank until the flow subsided and get picked off and harried to death by the Denyen, or you could try and cross. Mecho tried, and succeeded; it cost him another seventeen men and fifty camels, but he made it, and the altar he built to give thanks to heaven is still there to this day.
Crossing the Cobryas brought him into the rocky, hostile lands of the Tieker, where for centuries rival clans in mountaintop strongholds had conducted their incredibly bitter feuds with their neighbours. The Tieker pay lip service to the sacred laws of hospitality, but in practice there’s never enough food to feed the Tieker, let alone strangers. The Tieker despise money. Their only legal tender is arrowheads. Forty of them bought a sheep or a quarter of oats. Mecho knew this and had brought three hogsheads of arrowheads with him, but one hogshead had been washed away crossing the Cobryas and the other two turned out to be the wrong sort; he’d brought broadheads for hunting, but the Tieker wanted bodkins for punching through armour. It was lucky for him that he’d lost so many men and therefore had fewer mouths to feed, or he’d have been in serious trouble.
The Tieker, of course, were a walk in the park compared to the Lubu. They live on the wide, bleak treeless plains of the plateau the Echmen call the Roof of the World. It rains for two days every week, but it might as well not bother. The howling winds scrubbed away the topsoil a long time ago. There are books in the Echmen library that talk about the vast forests of Lubu, which goes to show how old they are. There were vast forests there once, but the Lubu cut them down and floated the lumber down the Gold River to fuel the charcoal pits of Echmen. It’ll be fine, the Echmen promised them; once you’ve cleared the land you’ll have pasture for a million million goats, you’ll live like kings. And so they did, for a while, until the goats ate all the roots of the heather and gorse that held the soil together, and the wind and the rain carried it away to form the fertile silt pans of the Valley of Joy in the north-west province of the empire. These days the most valuable resource the Lubu have is a species of large white hawk, greatly prized by discerning falconers. They snare them, train them and sell them, travelling thousands of miles on foot with the hawks sitting on their hands, because the Lubu have nothing to make baskets out of.
If you’re not interested in buying hawks the Lubu don’t want to know you. They won’t actively harm you, but they won’t sell you food, since they have none to spare, and their past experience with foreigners has left them surly and suspicious, so your chances of a roof for the night to keep out the wind and the rain are fairly poor. Lubu territory is immense. It takes three months to cross it under ideal conditions, and conditions there are never ideal. Also, screaming gales and driving rain aren’t good for camels. Twenty of Mecho’s precious stock in trade died of a pernicious variety of footrot before he eventually reached the eastern edge of the plateau and began the long, slow descent into the empire.
On the frontier there’s a castle, built long ago to collect tolls and keep out bandits. It spans the road, which is blocked by the castle’s enormously wide bronze gates. When Mecho got there, he was greeted by a hundred archers drawn up across the width of the road, with bows strung and arrows nocked. News of his arrival had preceded him.
The officer commanding the castle garrison walked out to meet him. “Go back,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” Mecho said.
“Piss off,” said the officer, “and take those fucking animals with you.”
There was a reason, it turned out, why they don’t have camels in Echmen. It’s because horses can’t stand the way they smell. One whiff of camel is enough to drive even the best trained and seasoned warhorse mad. They buck, rear, throw their riders, barge into each other and stampede, injuring themselves and anything stupid enough to stand in their way as they race to get away from the intolerable stench. When the first ever camels appeared in Echmen, three hundred years earlier, they caused such havoc with a detachment of Imperial lancers sent to escort them through the Lubu country that the emperor issued a decree. Bringing a camel into the empire was a capital offence, and any camel seen within the borders was to be shot on sight.
It was no use Mecho pointing out that horses quickly get used to the smell – a week or ten days at the most and then they’re good as gold. The archers raised their bows and the garrison commander started counting to ten. It was obviously no use trying to sneak across the border at some unguarded spot. All Mecho could do was turn round and head back the way he’d come.
Going home turned out to be even harder than getting there. By this point Mecho had no food, money or trade goods, most of his drivers were dead and so were most of his camels. It was either pure serendipity or the mercy of heaven that led Mecho to run into a convoy of salt miners at a crossroads in the Tieker Mountains. Every year the miners made the long and arduous journey from their base of operations just north of the Tieker country across the desert to Beloisa, where they sold to Robur merchants. They’d never seen camels before. What, they asked, are those extraordinary creatures?
Mecho explained, and sold his remaining hundred and six camels for just enough money to get home with. Legend has it that when he arrived at the gate of his old home, his brother came running out to meet him, burst into tears of joy and gave him half the farm, and they lived happily ever after. Anything’s possible.
The salt miners, meanwhile, found camels were ideal for their transport needs. The breed derived from Mecho’s original hundred and six are shorter and sturdier than the true Blemyan camel, apparently. They don’t carry quite as much freight and they have a reputation for foul temper, but since they’re the only camels anywhere east of the Cobryas, nobody worries about it very much.
She found me mending my boots with strips of parchment snipped from Olybrius’ Commentaries and a rather clever sort of glue the Maudit make from the sap of a certain sort of lime tree. “You arsehole,” she said.
I looked at her. “Now what have I done?”
She sat down on a log and glared at me. “You’ve inspired eight thousand Dejauzi to volunteer to fight the Sashan. That’s obscene.”
I could see her point. Dejauzi don’t fight unless they have to, it’s one of the things I like most about them. They swear and threaten and bluster, if they think it’s an efficient method of getting their own way, and tempers occasionally flare to the point of blows and even weapons, though not very often. But they don’t see any merit in fighting. To them, it’s a bit like peeing. You do it when you have to, but you don’t make a song and dance about it, or pretend you enjoy it, or that your peeing skills make you a superior human being. Rather, they feel it’s somehow distasteful and dirty, to be ashamed of.
“They volunteered,” I pointed out. “Nobody twisted their arms. They want to go.”
“Exactly. That’s what’s so gross. Dejauzi wanting to fight, in a war that’s got nothing to do with them. You realise, you’ve turned my people into a race of murderers.”
I don’t know what I’d do without her, really I don’t. The exact same point had been bothering me somewhat; did I really like the idea of being the man who made war-in-a-good-cause an acceptable idea for an otherwise enlightened nation? No, not really. But with her blustering in my face and calling me an arsehole, I was able to muster all sorts of good arguments for why it was a good thing really, simply in order to refute her, simply in order to win the next round of our perpetual battle. The good arguments then allowed me to kid myself that I was right, when I knew in my heart I wasn’t. And I really couldn’t have performed that miracle of ethical acrobatics without her help. Bless her. Like a sort of counter-productive conscience, giving me an excuse to do the really bad thing. “It’s purely temporary,” I said. “Once this war’s over, they’ll go back to being how they’ve always been. It’s their nature.”
“Says you.”
“We need them,” I said. “In case the fighting turns bad. The combination of pikes and horn and sinew bows is unbeatable.”
“Fine,” she said. “Why do we have to do it? You could teach it to some of your pet Echmen, and then we could stay home in peace.”
“Oh, sure. You want me to tell the Echmen how to be invincible. This, ten minutes after we used those same tactics to beat the shit out of them. How sensible.”
“They’re our friends now. You keep telling me that.”
“They’re our friends because we’ve got an extra-special unbeatable knife at their throats. You don’t want to give them that knife, trust me. So,” I went on, before she could argue, “we keep the secret to ourselves. We don’t give it to our worst-enemy-turned-best-friend. But we need those archers and pikemen for the war. Therefore, some Dejauzi have got to go. And it’s only eight thousand.”
“You should listen to yourself.”
“No, thank you. All right, since I’m saying bad things, let’s add in a few more. The sort of man who volunteers for a job like this probably isn’t the sort of man who makes a model citizen in the Great Society. So it’s probably better to have him out on the frontier doing a useful job than back home making trouble.”
“And then the enemy kill him, and he’s not a problem any more.”
“Since you put it like that, yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t give a damn, do you? You read books and make plans and shake the world like an earthquake—” She stopped and looked at me. “Of course you do. How stupid of me, I’m sorry. It’s just, I always assumed the messiah would be one of the good guys.”
I did a big fake yawn. “That joke’s getting a bit old, if you ask me.”
“You make me sick sometimes.”
“In which case,” I said, “obviously I’m not the messiah. The chosen one inspires love and loyalty, not nausea. Therefore—”
“How can you be so blind?” she said, and stomped off in a huff.
As it happened, I’d figured out a way of beating the bows and pikes combination, purely out of academic interest, just in case it might come in handy one day; lighter mobile versions of the stone-throwing artillery used for bashing down city walls, to smash the pikemen from a safe distance, protected from the archers by a screen of heavy infantry with pavises. But the Sashan don’t think like that, and even if they did, it’d take them at least six months to design and build the artillery.
I got an even bigger surprise when I asked her to lead the army and she said yes. “That’s great,” I said. “Thank you.”
“I’m not doing it as a favour to you,” she said. “I know why you asked me and I think it’s a good idea.”
Somehow I doubted that. “You might want to expand on that.”
“You figure that if this turns into a bloodbath, it looks better if I’m in command. You’re expected to perform miracles every time you go out of the house. So, if it all screws up, it’s better for it to be my fault than yours. And if it all goes to plan, everyone will think it was really your doing anyway.” She grinned. “That’s what they want to think. So, why not? It’s a good idea.”
“Thank you.”
“Besides,” she went on, “if I stay here without someone to keep me from doing something violent, by the time you get back there’ll be four new kings of the Dejauzi. I’m sick to death of their incessant bloody whining.”
I frowned. “What are they whining about?”
It occurred to me that I had no idea what she looked like under all that chalk makeup and egg-white-stiffened hairdo. Not that it had the slightest relevance to anything. “They’re tired of hanging about,” she said. “They want to get settled into their new land. I keep telling them it’ll still be there tomorrow, land is like that, it stays there. But they just snarl and look pathetic.”
“Who’s stopping them?” I said.
Her turn to frown. “What, just let them go? What’s the soldiery word, demobilise.”
“Why not?” I said. “The sooner they’re settled in, the better. If they get a move on, they can probably get a wheat crop in the ground for next season. Probably a bit late for barley, but I’m no expert. No wonder they’re itching to get on. I wouldn’t want to be sitting on my arse doing nothing if it meant losing a whole growing season.”
“But we need them.”
She nodded slowly. “So you’ve finished with us, have you?” she said. “That’s interesting.”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’ve finished with us. The hoe goes back in the tool shed because now you’re going to use the rake. That’s fair enough.” She stood up. “I’ll tell them, they’ll be pleased.”
“It’s not up to me,” I said. “What your people choose to do,” I added. “It was never up to me. I made suggestions, which they chose to follow.”
She had her back to me. “Yes, I suppose you could see it that way. Everybody’s always got a choice, after all. I can choose to disobey my master’s orders and get beaten to death with a stick, or I can do what he tells me to do. Entirely up to me. Therefore, not his fault. That’s what you always say, isn’t it? Not my fault?”
“For crying out loud,” I said. “What have I done now?”
She turned and looked at me. “You know perfectly well,” she said, and walked out.
About three-quarters of the Dejauzi had chosen to move into the new territories. The remainder said, thanks but no thanks; we’ve always lived here, so we’re staying. There didn’t seem to be a problem about it. For the ones who’d decided to stay, it meant plenty of land for everyone but a great deal more work. Nearly all the Maudit decided to move, but over a third of the Rosinholet chose to stay. I suggested – just a suggestion, that was all – that if there was going to be a labour shortage, they might care to take on some of the recently freed slaves as hired hands or, better still, tenants. They didn’t belong anywhere in particular, and they were keen to work and better themselves, so why not? The suggestion met with approval on both sides, I’m pleased to say. I suggested to Alyattes that it might be a nice gesture if the Imperial Treasury helped out with the costs of the relocation and general settling down and settling in. I thought he was going to have a stroke when I first mentioned it, but he chose to agree, in the end.
I had one other suggestion to make, and at first it didn’t go down at all well. I suggested that, now that most of the Dejauzi nation was making a new start in a new and better place, it might be a good idea to forget about Maudit and Rosinholet and Luzir and Hus and concentrate on Dejauzi. It’s what we have in common that makes us strong, I suggested. Our differences make us weak, like splits and shakes in a plank of wood. Naturally, I added quickly, we wouldn’t be forgetting the great old traditions that made us what we are. But what we are, fundamentally, is Dejauzi. So why not put that front and centre, where it belongs?
What the hell are you on about, the kings asked, knowing full well. A united Dejauzi nation, I said. Of course there would still be the six nations, with their six kings, but united under one overall leader, a queen for all Dejauzi everywhere. And, since I’d been given the undeserved honour of leading the Maudit, I’d be happy to lead the way and pledge my loyalty to the new queen on behalf of the Maudit nation, both here and in the old country. It was entirely up to them whether they joined me or not, but I suggested it would be the right thing for them to do.
Stony silence. Then one of them, I forget which, asked if it was true that the queen was leading the army against the Sashan. Perfectly true, I said. So she’s going away and won’t be back for some time. Quite possibly. And you’re going to be taking on the entire Sashan army, just you and the Echmen horse-botherers. That’s right, yes. And you’re going, too? I am, yes. He looked round at his fellow kings, who nodded. We accept, he said.
I’d given up eating the yummy dumplings but I was still getting the dreams, so I consulted a doctor. Echmen medicine is so much better than anywhere else. They have cures that frequently work and doctors who sometimes make you better. Rather startling for someone brought up on Robur medical practice, which tends towards the view that the doctor’s job is to help finish what nature started. The Echmen also know a bit about what goes on inside people’s heads. I’ve been getting these weird dreams, I told the doctor.
He looked at me carefully. “You’re the prophet, aren’t you?” he said.
“People say I am. Look, can we not talk about that?”
He asked me about the dreams. I told him.
“My first instinct,” he said, “would be that you were quite right and it’s all to do with eating rich food late at night. It overheats the digestion and produces too much blood, and that’s what gives you nightmares. But you say you’ve stopped all that and you’re still getting the dreams?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “In that case,” he said, “I would think it’s probably because you’re worried about something.”
“Ah.”
He steepled his fingers. “Worry does funny things to the human brain,” he said. “There’s all that stress and tension building up inside your head and nowhere for it to go, you see. So your mind has to find a way of dealing with it, and it turns it into imagery. What sort of imagery depends on a lot of things; who you are, your past history, what your major concerns are, all that kind of nonsense. Your head’s stuffed full of prophets and God and the destiny of great empires, so naturally you choose to interpret your stress in those terms in your dreams. Probably if you were a sausage-maker by trade you’d be dreaming about sausages. Same principle.”
I nodded. I liked the way he’d chosen the word interpret. I could relate to that. “So ought I to be worried? I mean, about going mad, anything like that?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said with a smile. “Just try and get some rest and fresh air now and again and drink plenty of liquids.”
As opposed to drinking solids; yes, right. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s a great weight off my mind.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” he said. I stood up to go. “Just one thing.”
“Yes?”
He smiled awkwardly. “Forgive me,” he said, “but I’ve got to ask. You’re not really the prophet, are you?”
No, I told him. I don’t think he believed me, though.