General Shardana had been a fighting soldier for thirty years. Then he had a nasty fall from a horse and broke his leg, so the Great King put him in charge of Intelligence. His leg was better now (really) so he could ride without too much agonising pain, and he was the man I needed to talk to. So he volunteered.
Yes, General Shardana told me on the third evening out, he’d tried to get as much information as he could about the catastrophe that had wiped out the Robur, but it hadn’t been easy. Information had been hard to come by, and what little he’d managed to gather didn’t make sense. He was pretty sure that there was a man called Ogus, some savage from some unimportant place a very long way away. Somehow or other, Ogus had put together a massive coalition of many diverse nations, apparently by sheer force of personality –
Here he looked at me without speaking for a moment, then went on:
– Sheer force of personality, because all they appeared to have in common was a burning desire to wipe the Robur off the face of the earth. This they’d succeeded in doing, in unbelievably short order. It had helped that sixty per cent of the Robur armed forces were foreign auxiliaries recruited from (as Shardana put it) the slave races. Magnificently trained and superbly equipped, they’d changed sides and slaughtered their blueskin comrades in arms in their beds, and that was the end of the mighty Robur empire. You had it coming, he didn’t say. He was a great one for not stating the obvious.
After that, he went on, it got stranger and harder to believe. The entire garrison of the City −
“What’s it called, by the way?” he asked. “I’m ashamed to say I don’t actually know.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your capital city,” he said. “What’s its name?”
“We call it the City,” I said.
“Ah.”
The entire garrison of the City had been lured out by a trick and massacred, leaving the place open and defenceless. But – and here was where everything clouded up – it hadn’t fallen. Some accounts said that a small but sufficient number of regular troops somehow appeared in the City and organised a defence. Other accounts mentioned some local sports hero called Lysimachus, who rallied the ordinary working people. Anyway, the City didn’t fall, and Ogus laid siege to it for a number of years, with no success. Then – and here it got really weird – the population of the City seemed to have slipped out quietly in the night and gone away, led by this character Lysimachus, who then either died or disappeared without trace, depending on who you believe.
“So where did they go?”
He shrugged. “That I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I think they didn’t want to be found, understandably enough. The last reliable information I had was that most of them died of hunger or plague, and the few that survived sailed off up the top of the Friendly Sea somewhere. We don’t have much in the way of intelligence assets in that region, so that’s all I know. I’ve sent my best men to find out what they can, and they’ll report back as soon as they’ve got anything.”
“Thank you,” I said. “What about Ogus and his army?”
He frowned. “Nobody’s seen or heard anything about Ogus himself for a while now,” he said. “His empire didn’t last long. Large parts of it broke away, either shortly before or shortly after the Robur did their flit and the siege ended, we aren’t sure which. Last we heard, the coalition still controls the heart of the old Robur empire, the coastal provinces on the east coast of the Middle and Friendly Seas. But they never seem to have had a fleet to talk of, so they’ll have their work cut out keeping any sort of order with only land communications. It’s a bit odd that they’ve been so quiet, but, frankly, we aren’t particularly interested. By all accounts they’re a rabble of savages, no possible threat to our interests and too far away to be worth conquering. We miss the trade, naturally, but it’s no big deal in the grand scheme of things.”
I wanted to be angry with him but I couldn’t think of a reason why. Besides, he wasn’t a believer, which was a good thing as far as I was concerned. “Find out everything you possibly can,” I told him. “And where are those maps I sent for? They should have reached us by now.”
We made record time, so they assured me, through Sashan territory, but once we were across the border, inevitably we slowed up considerably. It wasn’t hostile country exactly, because nobody in their right mind would pick a fight with the Sashan unless they absolutely had to, and we tried not to make nuisances of ourselves, but it wasn’t exactly friendly either.
First we came down off the Shordovan Heights, the foot of which marks the frontier, into the densely wooded uplands which the Sashan call the Vincul Forest; what the locals call it, nobody seems to know or care. General Shardana had profound and entirely valid reservations about taking ten thousand lancers through a forest, but we pressed on and came out the other side without any trouble, emerging into a broad valley cut by the Siaxar River. The Siaxar is the longest river in the world. It starts way up north in a mountain range where the snow never melts, and winds down in the creases between lots of other mountains until it comes out into the Friendly Sea. All we had to do was follow it. Piece of cake.
Piece of cake in the Sashan sense. In practice there was more to it than that. There are large stretches of the Siaxar where you can float along comfortably in boats, but there are also large stretches where you can’t, and the hundred-odd miles from the Vincul to the Blue Falls is one of the latter. Nor can you ride along the riverbank, because there isn’t one; it’s all ravines and steep water-cut cliffs. We had to go the long way round, through yet more bloody forests and then out onto rolling uppy-downy expanses of rocky scrub. It was all forest once, but a nation called the Murru or something like that chopped them all down and burned them for charcoal to use in their great cities, not a brick of which has anyone seen for the last two thousand or so years. The Sashan have copies of various treaties they made with the Murru before they died out, thanks to the unlimited longevity of baked clay. Without them, nobody would know they’d ever existed. Their legacy, however, is a major pain in the arse. It was just as well we’d brought the packhorses loaded with supplies or we’d have starved.
Once you’re past the Blue Falls the road gets easier and the country is flat and fertile. That makes it worse, because people can live there. They’re called the Gorsin, and they don’t give a damn. They liked jumping out at us from thickets and spinneys along the roadside, shooting arrows at us and running away; not, as far as I could tell, because they thought we were an invasion, but just for the hell of it. Status in Gorsin society is achieved by martial prowess, and the bravest man is the one with the biggest collection of heads, pickled in vinegar or brine or preserved in honey and proudly displayed in pottery jars on windowsills. Killing them doesn’t seem to discourage them, since they believe that if you die in battle you go somewhere nice. Luckily they’re not very bright, so if you send scouts ahead to burn off all the spinneys and copses you don’t get bothered too much, but that sort of thing takes time. I didn’t feel too bad about looting their villages and running off their herds for supplies. Given their mentality, they probably enjoyed it.
On the other side of Gorsin territory the ground rises, then flattens out. Then you’re into the Great Salt Plain, a series of arid, broken uplands that stretch as far as the eye can see. The salt flats are actually further east, but it’s a miserable place and nobody much lives there. The good thing was that we could make up time; if you enjoy riding fast, it’s heaven. The Sashan lancers love that sort of thing. I clung on as best I could and endured.
On the southern edge of the plain we veered east and rejoined the river. Mesembrotia isn’t exactly an earthly paradise, but it’s a wonderful change after the salt plains. Things actually grow there, and the people aren’t ferocious lunatics. We bought food with money, and when we asked them the way they told us. They were glad to see the back of us, but you can’t blame them for that.
South of Mesembrotia is the empire of Drazimene. They call it that because a long time ago they were a great nation and ruled everything from the desert down to the sea. Things have changed since then. Their city still stands, but when you ride in through the massive basalt gates, flanked with thirty-foot-high statues of eagle-headed lions, you don’t see streets and houses; it’s all little fields divided up by neat hedges and the occasional fruit orchard. The Drazimenes had a knack of making themselves unpopular, so the city was more often under siege than not, and as their population dwindled away they knocked down the empty houses, ploughed up the streets and planted barley and oats (they’re too high up for wheat). Drazimene City is now a little village about a mile and a half in from the walls, surrounded by barley and turnips. There’s still an emperor, but he can’t read or write and at harvest time he turns out and lends a hand along with everyone else.
We bought barley flour, pease porridge and oats for the horses from the Drazimene, the biggest injection of foreign exchange they’d had in two generations and probably giving rise to runaway inflation. Then we followed the river south into the territory of the Jasechite Alliance, where Shardana’s messengers finally caught up with us, bringing the maps I was so keen to see.
The Jasechites are an odd lot. You can tell as soon as you look at them that they’re Echmen stock, and how they got there nobody knows. They stoutly maintain that they’ve always been there, so I suppose it’s possible that the Echmen are descended from Jasechites with itchy feet, but their language is totally different, and if we hadn’t brought along a couple of Drazimene interpreters we’d have had no way of communicating. I dare say we wouldn’t have missed much. Nobody I talked to had heard anything about a bunch of people who looked like me, or any place called Olbia, which they couldn’t pronounce. They weren’t happy about letting us march through their country but there was absolutely nothing they could do about it apart from raise all their prices by thirty per cent.
The maps were beautiful, precise and up to date, and none of them showed any such place as Olbia. Ah well.
Down through the Jasechite Alliance and into Cataboea, affectionately known to Robur mariners as the Armpit of the Friendly Sea.
The Cataboeans are all right. They believe some truly weird stuff. They believe that they’re the only people on earth, and all the other anthropoid entities they meet are the spirits of the dead. When a Cataboean dies, they load his body onto a door and lay it down on the other side of the frontier, taking great care to keep one foot on their side at all times – the borders are clearly marked with stones, placed three yards apart and painted with limewash twice a year. Outside the white dotted circle is the land of the dead, and anyone coming from there must be a resident. There’s no way of persuading them otherwise, though I don’t suppose many people have bothered trying. They refuse to set foot (to be accurate, both feet) on alien soil, because anyone who did that would instantly die. A Robur merchant with a sense of humour captured one once and carried him across the line, counted to ten then took him back. The poor devil spent the next hour or so wandering about in a daze, ignored by everyone, then drowned himself in the sea.
Dead men don’t need food, so trying to get provisions from the Cataboeans isn’t easy. Don’t bother talking to them even if you know their language, and nobody does, because why would anyone want to teach a language to the dead? After a number of frustrating attempts at silent barter, during which they just stared past us, we lost our rag with them and helped ourselves. They made no effort to stop us, even though provisions for ten thousand men for a month was a nasty dent in their national economy.
About midday, our second day in Cataboea, we rode over a small hill and found ourselves looking at the sea. The sight of it made me feel like the abducted Cataboean must have felt: a dead man surrounded by the living, painfully out of place. If Olbia was anywhere, it ought to be in Cataboea, close to the mouth of the Siaxar, whose course we’d been following closely. If the colony had retreated into the back country, inevitably they’d have followed the river, just as we’d been doing, because apart from the river there is no fresh water for miles on either side.
“Why have you brought us here, prophet?” a young subaltern asked me, head reverently bowed. “Is this a holy place?”
I wasn’t in the mood. “Piss off,” I said.
Just when I thought I was never going to drop off to sleep, I had a dream.
It was a new dream, same as the old dream – except that when it got to the Queen of Heaven she wasn’t Hodda, she was She Stamps Them Flat, dressed in the full regalia of the Great King and holding a knife. It was the same knife my friend Carloman used to cut me open. Believe me, I’d know that thing anywhere. She looked at me but this time she didn’t speak, and a voice came from heaven. It said: this is my beloved wife, with whom I am well pleased. Then she stuck the knife in me and I woke up.
I lay on my back staring at the tent fabric, which I could just make out because the dawn light was starting to glow through the weave, and the oddest thing came into my mind. A snippet of comparative theology, which I’d read in some Echmen commentary on scripture. The Dejauzi Queen of Heaven, it said, was originally a moon goddess, before her aspect as intercessor and intermediary came to dominate the belief systems of the faithful. Well, I remember thinking, with that cockeyed logic you go in for when you’ve only just woken up, that explains that, then.
What had in fact woken me up was raised voices. The Massani sect believe that human life is God dreaming, and when you wake up, it means that God has fallen asleep. I yawned and rubbed my eyes. For crying out loud, I thought, keep the noise down. I threw some clothes on and went outside.
The noise, I soon realised, was coming from at least two, possibly three Meshtuns. Which was odd, since the Meshtuns live a very long way away and never show up east of Beloisa. I closed in on the source and found about a dozen soldiers in a ring around three thin, battered-looking men in rags, who were demanding to talk to the manager.
Meshtun is easy; it’s basically just colonial Vesani with a lisp. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
They looked at me and shut up like clams. They were terrified.
“They jumped out at the sentries and started jabbering,” explained a hassled-looking young lieutenant. “We can’t understand a word of it.”
“That’s fine,” I said, “I can,” and the lieutenant nodded and stepped back, mightily relieved. The prophet, of course, has the gift of tongues. He can even understand the birds in the trees and the soft mutterings of worms deep inside the earth.
It wasn’t at all fine with the Meshtuns. Something about me clearly bothered them a lot. I’ve seen happier birds sticking out of the mouths of cats. “Gentlemen,” I said. “What seems to be the problem?”
I like the Meshtuns. They’re one of those put-upon, kicked-around nations that turn up everywhere and nobody seems to notice, but once upon a time they were great navigators and traders, opening up the first island-hopping trade routes across the Middle Sea. Then the Robur came, and the survivors ended up scattered all over the place, doing odd jobs for rubbish money. They’re smart, resourceful, articulate and generous, and they complain about everything all the time. These Meshtuns, however, clearly didn’t like me.
“We’re not going back,” one of them said. “You’ll have to kill us first.”
A tiny sun rose in the back of my mind. “You don’t have to go back,” I said. “I promise you on my honour, and I’m in charge here. Back where, exactly?”
They told me all about it. Unfortunately, they insisted on beginning at the beginning. Meshtuns are born narrators and hate leaving anything out.
They were fishermen, they told me, with a sideline in pearls. One day they were pearl-diving off the coast of Lysembatene (which is out west, a very long way away) and they got nabbed by a boatload of Sherden pirates. The Sherden took them to a town on the east coast, about eighty miles south of the City, and sold them to a milkface, claiming they were skilled shipwrights. It didn’t take long for the milkface to find out that they were no such thing, and he sold them on to another milkface as field hands. They didn’t like being field hands much. Luckily they were only about five miles from the coast, so one night they broke out and legged it, found a boat and cast off. There followed a long and harrowing account of five men in an open boat, the long and the short of which was that three surviving men were wrecked by a squall and landed up on a beach. They were just about to thank the Heavenly Twins for their deliverance when it proved to be no such thing. A bunch of blueskins with weapons showed up and dragged them away by their hair −
“Blueskins,” I said.
Yes. Sorry, Robur, no disrespect. Anyway, these blueskins set them to work chopping down trees and hauling logs, which they didn’t enjoy at all, until eventually they’d had about as much of it as they could take and decided to −
“How many blueskins?” I asked.
Loads of them, they said. Decided to make a run for it, so one dark night −
“How many blueskins? Dozens? Hundreds?”
They didn’t honestly know. Could have been hundreds, maybe more. A thousand, for all they knew. Anyway, they ran away and got here and saw soldiers who palpably weren’t blueskins, so they decided to claim asylum, only to find −
“Where?”
The man I was talking to looked at me. “You said you wouldn’t send us back.”
“I won’t. It so happens that I’m the ruler of the known world, and I give you my solemn oath that you’re free men. But if you show me where to find these blueskins, I’ll give each of you a thousand gold nomismata and a city to govern. How about it?”
I took fifty men with me, on foot, since we were going up into the mountains. Sashan lancers don’t like walking. They regard it as something of an admission of failure, as if the age-old symbiosis of man and horse had turned out to be a lie. But they were believers, and if the prophet ordained that they should get blisters which turned septic and they all died, so be it.
We were going deeper and deeper into the Cataboean heartland, the main characteristic of which is, the higher up you go, the fewer people you meet. It occurred to me that a whole bunch of foreigners could show up and settle down here and the Cataboeans wouldn’t notice them, on account of them being dead. I couldn’t stand how slowly the Sashan lancers were walking. I wanted to run.
Not far now, the Meshtuns told me, for the fifth time in as many hours. The lancers, of course, were still in full armour. I’d have told them to take it off and throw it away, but that would be like telling them to cut off their own legs. I was vaguely aware that my feet were killing me, but it didn’t really matter, like vague reports of a drought in a faraway country. At the top of a steep rise I saw a thin line of smoke rising straight up in the air. I felt like I’d just swallowed a very big stone.
“Over there,” said the Meshtun, pointing at the smoke. “Look, would it be all right if we went back now?”
“Fine,” I said.
“And you meant it, about the cities?”
“My word of honour as the messiah,” I said. “Scoot.”
They scooted. The Sashan had taken advantage of the pause to sit down and start taking their boots off. “Come on,” I said. They looked very sad, but they were true believers.
It was no more than half a mile to where the smoke was coming from. As we came down the hill we saw hundreds and hundreds of freshly cut tree stumps, some of them still oozing sap. The first thing a Robur would do in a place like this was chop down trees to make charcoal to forge iron to make weapons. I don’t think I ever saw a more beautiful sight in all my life.
We were about a quarter of a mile from the smoke when we came upon people: a dozen or so Cataboeans, chained together, slowly brashing a felled tree. Their backs were bleeding. The second thing a Robur would do in a place like this would be to use his newly forged weapons to enslave the locals. I smiled at them. They didn’t see me.
Sure enough, the smoke was coming from a charcoal kiln; the blue smoke that means it’s time to close up the vents. I could see men with shovels digging. I tried to call out to them, but my voice didn’t work. I couldn’t run because the ground was covered in the brash from the felled trees. It was like one of those dreams where what you want is so very close but you can never get there. I wanted to thank God, just as those Meshtuns had done when they got washed up on the beach, but I didn’t believe in Him, so how could I?
There was a man, a blueskin, ten yards in front of me. He’d been kneeling, so I hadn’t seen him, and now he stood up. He hadn’t seen me. Maybe I was dead, like the Cataboeans believe. I opened my mouth, but I had no idea what to say.
I must’ve trodden on a stick or something. He looked round and saw me. “Hello,” he said, in Robur. “Who the hell are you?”
Take me to your leader, or words to that effect. Sure, he replied, and who are all those soldiers? Never mind about them, they’re with me. He gave me a funny look. You’d better talk to the boss, he said.
There was a tent. Rather a fine one; those finely woven textiles came from the mills of the old country. I held my breath. I had no breath to hold. “Hey, boss,” he shouted, “you’d better come out here.”
The tent flap opened. A man came out. I recognised him. He recognised me.
“You,” said my old friend Carloman, with all the hate in the world. Then he pulled a knife and stabbed me.
Two minutes later, there wasn’t enough of him left to bury, more a sort of mulch. So ended Carloman, brother of the only woman I ever loved and one of my dearest friends; sort of a pattern there, don’t you think?
One of the Sashan lancers saved my life with some pretty nifty pressure-applying and bandaging. I had just enough strength left to stop a general massacre. Then I went to sleep.
I woke up to find I’d started a war. The Sashan had cleared and fortified a defensible space. They’d shooed away the Robur, piled up logs to form a pretty effective redoubt and found a stash of bows and arrows, with which they were able to keep my Robur brothers at bay, barely. The Robur had left enough men to keep them pinned down and withdrawn to gather reinforcements for a frontal assault. Marvellous.
“Let me talk to them,” I said, because, of course, none of the Sashan spoke Robur and none of the Robur spoke Apiru, but they said I was too weak and I should just lie there and do nothing while my Robur brothers and my Sashan disciples killed each other. They were right. I was too weak. Life is like that sometimes.
I was reflecting on the irony of it all when I heard shouting in the distance. I’d grown so used to thinking in Apiru that it took me a moment to realise that that was what the shouting was in. One of the lancers who’d been kneeling beside me deep in bloody prayer jumped up and went to see what was going on. He came back to say that the cavalry had arrived, literally.
Later I found out that the Meshtuns, distrustful of the Robur and anxious to make sure nothing came between them and their promised cities, had hurried back to the camp and somehow communicated by signs, gestures and non-verbal nagging that the holy prophet had reached the camp of people who weren’t very nice, and they were worried about him. The army saddled up and rode out straight away. It shows what good horsemen the Sashan are; I wouldn’t have thought you could’ve got horses along that trail, but they managed it, and here they were. A miracle, you might say.
Unfortunately, I chose to use this stage in the sequence of events as an opportunity for more sleeping, so I missed all the excitement. When I came round, the first face I saw was General Shardana’s. He had a deep cut running from his left eye to the corner of his mouth, and he was grinning; because, it surprised me to discover, he was pleased to see me alive.
“We thought you’d had it,” he said. “We should have known better, of course. You can’t be killed, can you?”
I decided not to answer that. “What’s happening?”
“We got the blueskins surrounded and they’ve surrendered,” he said, with a certain satisfaction. “We had to kill about a dozen of them, and one of my men’s got a bad concussion, but he should be fine. You shouldn’t be alive with a hole in you like that, but the quack says you’re going to make it.”
I glanced down and saw a long line of very near stitches. We’d brought along an Echmen-trained doctor, just for luck. He’d done good work.
(“The hardest part,” he told me later, “was all those idiots wanting to dip bits of cloth in your blood, for holy relics. I can’t operate under those conditions. How anyone could get a knife in that deep without hitting anything important, I really don’t know. I couldn’t do it, and I’m a surgeon.”)
That wasn’t the end of the war, not by a long chalk. What we’d captured was only the lumber camp, under the command of the First Citizen, the late Prince Carloman. The rest of the Robur nation, about five thousand of them, were safe inside the palisades of their log city, provisionally named Lysimachea.
As soon as I could move – rather earlier than that according to the quack, who was worried about his beautiful needlework – I had myself carried to the main gate of the stockade. The Robur shot a few arrows at us, but I told the men carrying me that they were safe so long as they were with me, and the idiots believed me. Luckily the Robur were bad shots or not really trying.
The gate opened and a man came out. I recognised him as one of Carloman’s friends. On the day in question he’d had his arm across my windpipe. “You,” he said.
“Yes, me.”
“Your towelheads killed Carloman.”
Towelheads. There are times, believe it or not, when I wonder why I bother. “He tried to kill me,” I explained.
“Don’t blame him. We should’ve finished the job back at Scoira Limen.”
Suddenly I felt weary. I really didn’t want to talk to this idiot. Unfortunately, I was the only man on our side who could speak Robur. I suppose I could’ve sent for General Shardana to conduct the negotiations and translated for him, but that would’ve been silly.
“Shut up,” I said, “and listen. These Sashan aren’t your enemy. They’re your friends. They’re the advance guard of a great army that has come to drive out Ogus and his savages and restore you to your homeland, so that you can take back everything that was stolen from you. Why anybody would want to do that for a bunch of poisonous shits like you I really couldn’t say, but there it is. If you don’t want the City back, that’s fine, we’ll all leave you here and go home. Entirely up to you. Personally, if I never see another black face as long as I live, I’ll be overjoyed about it.”
He stared at me. “Seriously?”
“No, I’m making the whole thing up. Seriously.”
“A great army?”
“Yes. Forty thousand Sashan, eighty thousand Echmen and around sixty thousand Dejauzi if we need them. That’s not counting auxiliaries and people to do the laundry.”
“Why?”
I felt sleep coming on. “Don’t ask,” I said, and passed out.
By some miracle there was a Robur who could speak Meriot. Meriot is a bit like Tarsi, and there was a Sashan lancer who knew just enough Tarsi to make himself understood. By the time I woke up, General Shardana and two interpreters had reassured the new First Citizen that I was telling the truth. The war was over.
I was too sick to move, they told me. I liked the way they said sick, like I’d caught malaria. What they should have said was, I’d been carved up by my own people too badly to move. But that’s me; I like to choose precisely the right words. A hazard of the profession, I guess.
The Robur were in two minds about me. On the one hand, they were thrilled to be going home again, with the entrancing hope that some day soon things would be back as they were before the late unpleasantness, which was exactly how things should be in a properly ordered universe. On the other hand, I was a man of proven bad character and their First Citizen was dead because of my henchmen. Also, I gave every appearance of having thrown in my lot with the Sashan, the Echmen and some savages they’d never even heard of. There was a word for that. Not a nice word, begins with T. As for this religion I’d concocted, they wanted no part of it, even though large chunks of its scripture were either looted word for word or closely paraphrased from orthodox Robur liturgy. No matter. It was blasphemy or idolatry or heresy or all three rolled up into a ball, and it was only the fact that I was taking them home that stopped them from nailing me to the nearest tree.
One of them condescended to talk to me, though, and from him I learned the weird tale of how one Lysimachus, an arena gladiator, had organised the defence of the City, usurped the throne and evacuated the entire population in the nick of time, just as the walls had finally been breached, using large barges fortuitously available for the purpose. Lysimachus had died of dysentery before they reached Olbia, which was probably why things had gone so badly. Admiral Sisinna? Oh, him. He brought them to Olbia in the fleet but shortly afterwards scratched the back of his hand on a thorn, got blood poisoning and died. One damn thing after another, really.
No, they had no idea what had happened back home after they left. Given that the prime objective of Ogus and his savages was to exterminate the Robur race, they’d thought it wise to avoid contact with anyone who might tell Ogus where they were. They’d given no news and received none. Presumably the bastards were still there, in which case they were in for a nasty shock, weren’t they?
He also told me that last time anyone counted, the invincible Robur nation now consisted of nine thousand four hundred individuals, slightly more women than men. All the rest were dead. He didn’t say it, but I think he blamed me for not getting there earlier.
The question then arose as to how we were going to get home. Practically the entire fleet had brought them to Olbia, together with two hundred enormous barges. But the first winter had been bitter cold and there wasn’t much in the way of firewood at the original site, so they’d broken up a lot of the ships for fuel, and shortly afterwards most of the rest of them were blown adrift in a violent storm and smashed to bits on the rocks. No matter, I said; the Sashan had plenty of ships and so had the Echmen. Alternatively, if they didn’t fancy waiting for them to arrive, we could go overland, reconquering former Robur provinces along the way. My man went away and took instructions from Theudomer, the new First Citizen, who said he’d wait for the ships. His people, he said, had had enough to contend with recently without dragging all that way across country. The provinces could wait to be liberated until the Robur were back home and settled in. Rough on them, of course, but they’d just have to be patient.
I’d prefer not to dwell on the next few weeks, if it’s all right with you. The Robur ignored me, the Sashan fawned on me, even General Shardana, to whom faith had come in a blinding moment of revelation when he saw me weltering in my own blood, like (as he so vividly put it) a duck in raspberry sauce. The more the Sashan fawned on me, the more the Robur shunned me. They were getting decidedly tense about having to feed an extra five hundred hungry mouths. Providing food for nine thousand Robur with nothing except exceptionally deep, rich soil and abundant wild game to work with was a constant headache for First Citizen Theudomer and his ruling council of old army buddies, and we most certainly weren’t helping. Meanwhile, I was plagued in my convalescence by an unending stream of earnest young Sashan who just wanted to stand there and gaze, knowing that the sight of me would be enough to wash away their sins and make paradise a dead certainty. I don’t know if any special spiritual merit accrued from getting sworn at by the prophet; if so, quite a few Sashan lancers were profoundly blessed. A prophet, says Saloninus, is not without honour, save in his own country. What he said, in spades.
Then the ships came. Before we left, I’d gently hinted to the Great King that it might be nice if he could arrange for the Fifth Fleet to come and loaf about in the safe anchorage at the northern end of the Friendly Sea, and he’d been good enough to oblige. The Fifth Fleet is mostly galleys, monstrous vehicles with five banks of oars one on top of another, plus three enormous square sails. The oarsmen double as marines, and a single galley can accommodate four hundred passengers and a surprising amount of cargo. We got everyone on board with room to spare and didn’t have to wait for a favourable wind. We were off.
Admiral Peleshet was a bit concerned about the enemy having a fleet, even though there was no evidence to suggest that such a thing existed. Better safe than sorry, however, so we followed the coast down the eastern shore of the Friendly Sea rather than making a straight dash for the City. What we saw as we cruised along was unexpected, to say the least. Last time any of us had been there, Sashan or Robur, the eastern seaboard was one thriving coastal city after another. Instead, we saw no ships, big or small, no livestock grazing on the hillsides, no crops growing in the fields. When we stopped at harbours big enough to accommodate us we found dense thickets of brambles. Your bramble loves to grow in ash and climb over tumbledown masonry. At some point, somebody or something had made a lot of brambles very happy.
“Thirty-six cities can’t just disappear,” the admiral said. “They’re marked on the map. They should be here.”
Eventually one of the Robur condescended to explain. He’d heard that during the latter stages of the siege, Emperor Lysimachus had sent the fleet to sack and burn the enemy’s coastal cities, with a view to weakening his resolve and disaffecting his allies. The scale of the initiative hadn’t been widely known since it was an active operation and there were security issues. Presumably what we were looking at was the result, in which case the emperor had done a better job than anyone had ever given him credit for.
“But they were Robur cities,” Peleshet said. “You burned down your own cities.”
“No,” the Robur said, offended. “They’d fallen into the hands of the enemy. They were enemy assets. So we destroyed them.”
Well, they were the brambles’ cities now. We didn’t get to take on supplies, but we’d brought plenty from home, so it didn’t matter. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that in spite of desperate cutthroat competition for the title from practically every nation on earth, the Robur were still, as they’d always been, their own worst enemies.
It’s always widely been accepted that the best way to see the City for the first time is from the sea. The classic description is in Teuderic’s Elegiacs. At first, he says, there’s only a blur, a smudge on the flat, blue horizon. Then, as you draw closer, you begin to make out landmarks: the columns of the saints, the blazing gold domes of the temples, the forest of masts in the Great Harbour. If you come in from the landward side, the City doesn’t want to know you. The Walls of Florian rear up in front of you like a hand, palm outward – go back, thus far and no further. But if you approach by sea, the harbour is the City’s arms thrown wide to receive you and draw you in, so that you’re instantly at home.
I hadn’t come in by sea before, so I was looking forward to it. There was a risk, Peleshet said, that the enemy might have raised the great bronze chain to block the harbour mouth, but he’d prepared for that. He’d had a specialist crew of engineers working on the problem, and they’d figured out a method using a giant crosscut hacksaw running between two longboats, while six galleys broadside on provided covering fire from ship-mounted artillery.
There wasn’t a chain. Nor were there warships or barges loaded down with enemy soldiers snapping at our throats. There wasn’t anything. We rowed into the harbour on a clear, still morning and there was nobody to meet us except seagulls.
And a notice, flaking paint on a weather-beaten board. Nobody could read it, so they lifted me into a boat packed with cushions and rowed me ashore. I could read it just fine. It was in Sherden, the lingua franca of pirates everywhere, and it said: QUARANTINE WARNING. PLAGUE. DO NOT LAND UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
We had Echmen doctors with the fleet. Three of them went ashore, swathed in silk gauze from head to foot, and poked around until they found some bodies. Then they wrote us a letter, which was read out to us, because the boat crew couldn’t come back on board, not ever.
It was, they said, plague all right; the nastiest possible form of plague, which meant they were staying ashore and we should get the hell out of there as soon as possible. The bodies they’d examined had been dead for over a year, but that didn’t matter. This form of plague stayed fresh and virulent for at least eighty years, in some cases up to two hundred. We could forget about the city, us and our children and our children’s children. It was one big killing bottle, and the best thing we could do was forget about it entirely.
We put a lot of food in a boat, set its sail and pointed it towards the shore. Then we sailed away, back the way we’d come. Nothing else we could do. A pity about that, but there it is.
The Robur insisted on renaming the colony Carloman City, in memory of their martyred founder. For obvious reasons, I wasn’t welcome there. Fuck them, I thought, and asked Admiral Peleshet to take me home.
Home: I used the word when I spoke to him, but what did it mean? I’d spoken instinctively, so I guess that deep inside I knew what I meant by it. Take me back to Sashan, or Echmen, or the Dejauzi territories; anywhere but here. Home defined as everywhere on earth except for one place, the place I originally came from.
We sailed in a long loop, taking it easy. At that time of year you can go all the way from the Friendly Sea through the Straits into the Sashan Ocean. I spent the time talking with General Shardana, who believed, and Admiral Peleshet, who originally didn’t but was gradually coming around. I didn’t try and talk them out of it. They were both extremely intelligent men, educated and well-read, much more so than I was. I kept trying to steer the conversation round to other matters, but with no great success.
The fleet put in at Kurosh, a huge trading city on an estuary. Official estimates put the size of the crowd gathered to greet me at four hundred thousand. They wanted to carry me ashore in a litter but I felt that walking on my own two feet was the least I could do. I managed two hundred yards and then something tore or split. They carried me into the newly consecrated temple and put me down at the feet of my own statue, a vast thing with an outstretched right arm and a beard. I do have a right arm, so it wasn’t all that inaccurate.
She sent a trio of excellent Echmen doctors to patch me up. Then she came to see me. “You idiot,” she said.
“Hello.”
“You couldn’t resist showing off.”
“Was that what I was doing?”
“Anu wanted to come and see you,” she said, “but I told him, don’t be so stupid. So he sends his regards.”
“That’s really sweet of him. Who the hell is Anu?”
Anu, apparently, was the private, or real, name of Shekelesh the Great King. It turned out that she and the king were getting on like a house on fire; probably an apt simile, if you think about it. He’s not like anyone I’ve ever known before, she said. He’s calm and quiet, very intelligent, nice sense of humour, he listens when I talk, there’s none of that stupid macho bluster, he’s not really like a man at all. And his whole attitude to life has changed since he found the true faith. He says he understands now.
I nodded. The Dejauzi Queen of Heaven is essentially a moon goddess, and the Great King is the brother of the Sun and the bridegroom of the Moon. I’d have figured it out a lot earlier if I wasn’t so damned stupid.
“Which leaves us with the question of what to do about you,” she said.
I looked at her. They’d tied me to the bed to stop me moving until the damage had had a chance to start knitting together. “Do we have to do something about me?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. We can’t have you running about pulling any more idiotic stunts and getting yourself killed. So we’re sending you to Chrysopolis.”
“Where?”
I like it here. Say what you like about Hodda, she has a flair for design. I guess it comes from all those years in the theatre, sets and costumes and lighting and all that. She knows what looks convincing, and Chrysopolis will be that, all right. I might even come to believe it myself, in time.
She’s building it on a grid system, which I gather is the next big thing in urban planning. All the streets are straight and equally far apart and they cross at right angles, like the ropes in a net. It’s all completely wasted on you at ground level, but suppose you’re God, looking down. Chrysopolis is being built that way to look good from His perspective. There’ll be a temple on every block, apparently, where you can pray and pay money to have your sins forgiven. The idea is for every single one of the faithful to come to Chrysopolis once a year, on pain of damnation. She’s as sharp as a knife, that Hodda.
Suppose there’s a plan you can’t see on the ground, but which makes sense when viewed from the portals of the sunset. Suppose you’ve lived inside that plan all your life and never actually twigged. When eventually the penny drops, what are you supposed to think?
I can’t begin to imagine how much money Hodda’s made out of all this, but she’s still pissed at me. How could you do such a thing, she says to me every time we meet. How could you use me like that? I point out that thanks to me she’s now the richest woman in the world, building her own city. That’s beside the point, she says. It was an unintended consequence and therefore you get no credit for it.
When the monastery’s finished, I shall live there till I die. Meanwhile, I live in a tent, though it’s not so bad. Twice a day I recite from the scriptures in front of a sea of adoring faces, and the rest of the day’s my own. The library we’re assembling here will be the biggest and best in the world, and when it’s finished that’s where you’ll find me, doing what I do second best; reading, researching, gradually putting things together into orders and patterns, figuring a way out of here, a way home. I shall be wasting my time, because the Great Queen, She Stamps Them Flat, has given strict orders that I’m never to be allowed to leave this place. I’ll be safe here, she says.
That’s a poor translation, because in Robur it can only mean one thing: here I shall not be in danger. In Apiru it’s ambiguous. It can mean either I’ll be safe from everything else, or everything else will be safe from me.
I can see her point. Still, a man can read a book, can’t he? Jot down a few notes, points of interest, that sort of thing. Maybe write his memoirs, or plan for the future.
Occasionally people bring me reports about the Robur. I don’t read them. Fuck the lot of them, I say.
Unintended consequences; unintended by who? Saloninus says that the man who attains his goal by that very act transcends it. All I ever wanted to do, since the day I heard the news about Ogus and the Robur, was to get back what had been stolen from us and take my people home. If it turns out that I’m wrong, and that God exists and I am his prophet, the first thing I’ll say to him will be: how could you do such a thing? How could you use me like that?
He will most likely answer: stop moaning. You’re a translator, nothing more or less. Your words and actions; my ideas. You don’t have to believe what you say so long as you translate accurately. To which I reply: I’m an interpreter. My job is to take the real meaning and put it into a form that can be understood and acted on. Real, I shan’t add, in the Sashan sense. I use words carefully, and between translation and interpretation there’s a sliver of difference, as thin as a knife blade. Very thin, but it’s amazing the difference a knife can make. All the intended consequences in my life have turned to shit and all the unintended ones have turned to gold. Everything I’ve touched I’ve translated, into one thing or the other.
But this conversation will never take place because he doesn’t exist. He’s not real (except, just possibly, in the Sashan sense). And when I meet him, I intend to tell him that, to his face.