9

I woke up. A man was standing over me.

I remember when I was a little kid, and I went for a walk with my father. As noted above, walking doesn’t agree with me; never did. We walked for a long time. Are we there yet? I asked. No. When will we get there? Soon. We walked on for an eternity, and I asked, Is it soon yet?

Define yet… I could feel those fiery letters dispersing on my forehead. The man was big and strong and he had a sword in an ivory scabbard stuck through his belt. He’d caught me. Well, fair enough.

“I say,” he said. “You’re in a real mess.”

I looked at him again. I was feeling particularly stupid at that moment, but even so I could recognise a number of things that made no sense. The first one was the ivory scabbard. The second was the man’s dark skin, curly shoulder-length black hair, brown eyes and long, plaited beard. The third was his purple coat embroidered with gold thread. This man, I realised, wasn’t Hetsuan.

He was talking Sashan, but not with that ghastly singsong accent; it was perfect upper-class diction, clear as rainwater and sharp as a razor. Not only wasn’t he Hetsuan, he was definitely and positively something else. “You’re Sashan,” I thought aloud, and he grinned.

He was leaning forward with his hands resting on his knees. “Bit of a moot point, actually,” he said, then he frowned. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

By which he meant I wasn’t Hetsuan; that cracked me up, and I laughed. For some reason, laughing hurt. “I’m not from around here,” I said. “Neither are you.”

He was looking worried. “You shouldn’t really be here, you know,” he said. “It’s against the law.”

“Is that right?”

He nodded. “Properly speaking I ought to turn you in to the authorities, but if I did that—” He gazed at me. I was causing him trouble, not that he blamed me, but, nevertheless, I’d put him in an awkward spot and he didn’t like it. “The thing is,” he said, “I’m a guest in this country. Here on sufferance, to be absolutely—” He stopped to think. I could see thinking was a skill he’d attained by long and diligent training, rather than something that came naturally. “Oh, buggery,” he said. “Come on. Can you stand up?”

It turned out that I could, though not at the first or second attempt. Apparently there was something wrong with my feet. “What the devil happened to you?” the nice man asked.

I shrugged. “Walking,” I said.

I was a conundrum, and no mistake. “It’s all right,” he said, “I’m not going to turn you in. We’d better go back to my place and think what we’re going to do with you.”

Behind him – I hadn’t seen it because he was in the way and he wasn’t exactly small – was a chariot. I kid you not, a chariot. Of course nobody uses them any more, except in Sashan, for very special occasions. But a chariot was what it was; not a trap or a fly or a chaise or a buggy. Four magnificent milk-white horses were harnessed to a coachbuilder’s dream of lightweight rigidity sitting on top of two insubstantial wheels you could’ve built a city on. “That’s a chariot,” I said.

He roared with laughter. “Yes,” he said, “it is. Built it myself, as it happens, just to pass the time. Silly, really. My only indulgence.”

This from a man in a purple robe embroidered with gold thread. “Hop in,” he said, but I was about a mile and a half past hopping, and he had to help me. “Who the devil are you, by the way?” he said, grasping the reins as the horses surged into wind-swift, silk-smooth motion. “My name’s Vistam.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said, gripping the handrail like grim death.

“Not my real name,” he went on, as the moor flashed past. “Well, it is but it isn’t, if you follow me; it’s complicated. Who did you say you were?”

“Florian,” I said. “My real name,” I added. “But nobody calls me that.”

He laughed. I was clearly a bundle of fun, one way or another. “The thing is,” he said – we bounced over a large stone, but the chariot’s suspension was flawless – “the only foreigners supposed to be in Hetsuan are me and the missus and the kid. They give us a certain degree of leeway, but one doesn’t like to take the piss, if you follow me. What happened to your hair?”

“Shaved it off.”

That puzzled him, so he did a bit more thinking. “Smart,” he said. “They can’t see it’s the wrong colour if you haven’t got any. Did you know that in Hetsuan men with shaved heads are always government officials?”

“Yes,” I said. “No. I thought they didn’t have a government.”

“Not as such, no.” I had to shout to make myself heard over the rumble of the wheels, but his was the sort of voice that didn’t need raising for anything short of an earthquake. “Closest thing they’ve got is the cooks. You know about the cooks?”

“A bit.”

“Well, you look like one of them.” He thought some more. He was quite good at it once he got going. “I see,” he said. “You did it on purpose, to look like a cook. That way you can go about freely without looking out of place. Clever devil, aren’t you?” Then he thought some more and stopped the chariot. Being still was absolutely bliss. He pushed me out of the chariot and drew his sword. “Look here,” he said. “Are you here to kill me?”

What a question to ask. “No,” I said, “absolutely not.”

He considered me as though I was a simultaneous equation; I could be solved, but was it worth the effort? “Well,” he said after a while, “if you are, you’re in no fit state to be dangerous just yet. Get back in and keep your hands where I can see them.”

Only too delighted to oblige; both of them clamped to the handrail, the knuckles showing white. Vistam, I thought. I haven’t heard that name before, but then again, I wouldn’t have, would I?

A short digression. The Sashan, who in my opinion are probably the most marvellous people on earth except for the Echmen, wrap names up in a vast cocoon of mystique. Every Sashan male has three names; A son of B from C is the first one, and anybody’s allowed to know that. Then there’s his name-in-religion, which in theory is known only to himself, his priest and the Eternal Flame – my name-in-religion, incidentally, is Sayathiya, and how I come to be entitled to one is a long and tedious story. In practice, that’s what your family calls you and you share it with close friends. That’s who you think of yourself as being, if that makes any sense; it’s what your wife calls you in bed, and if you had a dream and an angel appeared to you, that’s the name he’d use. Then there’s a third name, which is a deadly secret between you and your father; not even your mother knows what it is. Unless, of course, you happen to be the king of the Sashan, the Great King, King of Kings – in which case, that’s what everyone calls you and it’s chiselled up in inscriptions and spelled out on the fronts of coins, and I imagine the effect must be living your entire life stark naked in public, but presumably they get used to it.

Anyhow, that’s the men. Women are A daughter of B (male) from C, and A is usually the name of a flower or a synonym for Pretty. In Sashan society, women are supposed to be meek, decorative and silent.

Note, supposed to be. That’s why I like the Sashan so much. For the Sashan there are two realities, both equally valid and equally real: the way things are, and the way things are supposed to be. They believe in both simultaneously with equally absolute faith, even when they contradict each other, which is ninety-six per cent of the time. Thus, for example, women should be seen and not heard, and in practice they run the government, most of the great landed estates and well over half of the major business organisations. The Great King is by definition seven feet tall and broad as an ox, with forearms like the trunks of thorn trees – you know this is true, because there’s pictures and sculptures of him on the money and every street corner – and he’s never lost a battle. In Sashan it never rains in summer and the sky is always blue.

I like the Sashan. I’ve seen Sashan cheerfully dying in agony who know they’re perfectly fit, because the priest has been and splashed them with holy water, and the pain is obviously just an illusion so they ignore it. Nobody can ignore an illusion like a Sashan. They are, of course, the Master Race, and because they know this is true they don’t feel obliged to go about proving it all the time, just as they don’t need to prove the existence of the moon just because there happen to be clouds. The Sashan keep the rest of humanity the way you and I keep pets. They’re kind to them, they indulge them, they spoil them – probably because if they didn’t there might be a war, which of course they’d win, but there might be an illusion of defeat. This means the Sashan are generous hosts and humane masters, when it’s absolutely convenient; they have complex and inviolable laws of hospitality, and if a Sashan saves your life in the desert, he’s lumbered with you until further notice. Whether this applies on the moor as well as the desert is a grey area, since there were no moors in Sashan territory when the rules were formulated. Vistam, however, struck me as the sort of man who’d be inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt. Besides, I had a sneaking suspicion of who he was, and if I was right, I was laughing.

“You’re him,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Buggery.” He didn’t do anything, but the horses picked up speed. They’d know to do that, because the Great King is master of all living things, human and animal.

Except that Vistam wasn’t the Great King. At least he was, but he wasn’t; very Sashan. About forty years ago, the Great King died – he was immortal, but he died – leaving a three-month-old baby as his rightful heir. This posed a problem, since the Great King is seven feet tall and as strong as a bear, which is difficult when you’re only three months old. The finest minds in the empire gave the problem a great deal of thought and realised that the baby wasn’t the Great King after all; that was just an illusion. The Great King was really the late Great King’s nephew, who happened to be seven feet tall and strong as a bear, or close enough as made no odds, and the baby was just a figment of the imagination. Since he was imaginary it wouldn’t matter if he died, but on the other hand there was no need to do anything drastic, since he didn’t actually exist; he and his mother were packed off to a castle in Cisbataan, which by coincidence housed a Guards regiment, and the dubious alternative reality faded away like ripples in water after the fall of a dead sparrow.

But although the new Great King won all his battles and stamped the enemy flat until the earth knew them no more, he also lost a major campaign against the Echmen, one which I’d have given both ears to have had the rights to, and failed to put down a rebellion in the unimportant north-western provinces, where so much of the wheat comes from, and certain deluded people with long memories wondered if these particular illusions might somehow be connected with the illusory hiccup with the succession. If the Great King wasn’t really the Great King, undoubtedly heaven would mark its displeasure with significant events, such as military reverses, and although nothing of the sort had actually happened, it bore thinking about, which they did. There were even a few minor scuffles between the Army of the East and the Army of the West, after which the baby (who was now twenty-seven) left the castle in Cisbataan in a laundry basket and was never seen or heard of again. He didn’t die, because if he had his head would’ve been displayed on a pike in the palace forecourt; it was, of course, but a great many people who ought to know better suffered an illusion that it wasn’t the baby’s head and didn’t even look like him. It goes without saying that all the resources of the empire were deployed to find him, even though he’d never existed; the fact that he was never found proved beyond doubt that he’d never been anything but an illusion. Then the genuine Great King gave the Echmen a hammering they’d never forget, proving that Heaven was satisfied and everything was fine, and the point became moot.

Now then; given the efficiency and power of the Sashan covert intelligence division, which really is the best in the world – if they looked for a certain person and couldn’t find him, where could he possibly be? It would have to be somewhere nobody could go; eighty feet down inside an active volcano, or the bottom of the deepest trench in the ocean, or Hetsuan.

The illusory Great King’s name had been Balas, but of course nobody but his father and every single human being in the world would’ve called him that. He’d have had another name, A son of B from C. Vistam, maybe? Apparently, yes.

“You came here to escape,” I said. “To be safe.”

“Too bloody right.” We were slowing down, from unthinkably fast to merely terrifying. Ahead I could see a wall. Behind it, dim on the horizon, three rounded hills. “My cousin, God bless him, would have my liver for a pincushion if I ever stuck my nose over the border. Here I’m all right, because our lot are scared stiff of the savages. Who aren’t so bad, actually, provided you have absolutely nothing to do with them.”

The wall was in fact a compound, like an army fort. Belay that; the place was a fort, built on the time-honoured Sashan pattern, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it for the past thousand years.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of the things all along the frontiers of the empire, as near identical as such things can be. You’ve got your gatehouse, with a heavy-duty double gate, the tower above serving as the main accommodation block; a yard enclosed by the wall, which is sixteen feet high, crenellated and backed by a wooden catwalk on solid brackets; the back wall is a casemate with rooms for storage and barracks for the twenty or so soldiers of the garrison. The yard itself, just over half an acre, is supposed to be a parade ground, therefore is a parade ground, this being a Sashan installation; it’s also a meticulously tended walled garden where the soldiers grow cabbages, onions, leeks, carrots, peas, beans, lentils and vines trained up the north-facing wall, the south and east walls being reserved for espaliered apples, cherries and pears. There’s stabling for eighteen horses along the west wall, ensuring a strong cavalry presence for defence in depth and plenty of manure for the strawberries.

“You live here?” I said, a singularly pointless question.

“Yup,” he said. “The savages built it for me, part of the deal. They allowed me a staff of twenty, all Hetsuan, obviously. Down in the dip on the other side I’ve got seventy acres, piss-poor soil but we’re gradually making something of it. And that’s my lot, I’m afraid. It’s not much, but it’ll do me.”

Seventy acres and your own castle: not much, if you’re the rightful King of Kings. And if that not-much will do you, you’re a wiser man than any Great King who ever sat on the Rainbow Throne. “You’ve got twenty Hetsuan working for you? Really?”

He nodded. “It was all a bit tense to start with,” he said, “what with me being an abomination in the sight of heaven and all that, but we’ve sort of got used to each other and now we get along famously. Splendid chaps, the lot of ’em. Can’t do enough for you.” The chariot rolled to a halt in the shadow of the gatehouse. The gate was shut. “How they’ll react when they see you I just don’t know,” he said. “No visitors is something of a condition of the deal. Of course, they’ll see you aren’t one of them in two shakes.”

Comforting. “In that case,” I said, “maybe I shouldn’t come in. I don’t want to make trouble for you.”

That laugh again. “Bullshit,” he said. “You’re my guest. I found you starving in the desert, so I’m stuck with you. What did you say your name was?”

“Florian.”

“Florian. Like that chap on Sirupat a while back.”

“Yes.”

“Heard about that. One of my revered cousin’s less idiotic decisions.” He advanced to the gate and booted it with a colossal left foot, making the massive timbers shudder. “I’m allowed letters,” he said. “One in, one out, every month. Benhart, you idiot, what took you so long?” he added, as a tall, dignified looking Hetsuan in a white robe opened the gate. “Put the cart away and see to the horses, there’s a good chap.”

The Hetsuan looked at me. He saw the shaved head and the filthy, tattered coat. “Who’s he?”

“Guest.”

It wasn’t that long a silence, objectively speaking, but it was plenty long enough for me. “Right,” Benhart said. “I’ll see to the cart.”

Inside the gate, a garden. Things to eat on the west side, flowers and stuff on the east. If there’s a more beautiful thing in the world, I haven’t seen it and I’d have trouble imagining it. Dead centre was a fountain, spouting and chattering. The Echmen have this concept they call Paradise, which is where you’re supposed to go when you die if you’ve been very good. They envisage it as a beautiful garden. I’d be able to tell the next Echmen I met that they’d been right about that all along.

“What you need,” Vistam was saying, striding through Paradise as though it wasn’t there, “is some grub and a change of clothes. I think we can run to that. Betriz! Eloiz! Visitor,” he said, as two women in long white dresses appeared from a doorway. “Brioche and honeycakes and cranberry juice in the arbour, quick as you like.” The women stared at me, then went away. “And a bath,” he added firmly. “Sorry to mention it, but you stink to high heaven.”

I said he was probably right. He pointed to a bench next to a stone table under an arch of trellis, messy with trailing honeysuckle. I sat down, a shabby monster in heaven with scraps of cloth glued to his feet by clotted blood. “Got to ask,” he said. “What’s a foreigner like you doing in the middle of Hetsuan?”

“I’m trying to reach a place called Midons,” I said.

“Well, you’re in luck, it’s just over the hill there.” He nodded his head vaguely north-east. “What’s in Midons?”

“My wife.”

“Ah.”

“And my daughter,” I said, “who I’ve never seen.”

He looked at me, thinking, little white mice scrambling round inside ponderous wheels. “You married a Hetsuan.”

“No,” I said.

“Interesting. Excuse me if I’m being rude, but what’s your wife’s name?”

“Apoina.”

I have good reflexes, honed by a lifetime of bad experiences. Usually I see it coming. Maybe I was too tired and run down, or maybe Paradise had got to me. I didn’t see it coming. He was on his feet and his fist was slamming into my face before I realised what was happening.

The back of my head went bump on the granite paving slabs and my head swam. He was standing over me, blurred, bright sunshine blazing on the blade of his sword, the very tip of which was pricking my throat like a bramble. “What did you say your name was?”

“Florian.” Saying the word moved my throat against the sword point, dangerously.

“Sure about that?”

Something in my face or eyes or body language told him I wasn’t a threat just then; he reduced the pressure on the sword-point just a little. “I also go by Saevus,” I said. “Saevus Corax.”

I think he’d already figured that for himself. “Fucking God almighty,” he said. And then he bellowed a name. “Get up,” he said. “But if you try anything, guest or no fucking guest I’ll cut you in half.”

I sat on the bench beside the stone table, in Paradise. “She’s here,” is all I could say.

“Yes,” he said. “My wife, you arsehole.”

I realised I wasn’t doing the geometry. It’s automatic with me, I can’t help it. When I’m in trouble and there’s guards or soldiers or hitmen or whatever, instinctively and without thinking I do the geometry. It runs something like: I move there, he moves to intercept, is there time for me to get to there before he gets to there, what if I take a long circling step to the right, in which case by the time he’s there, I’ll be there – all in a fraction of a second. I can see it as if there were fiery lines hovering in the air; it’s second nature, just like breathing. But this time, I simply couldn’t be bothered. All beside the point. I heard myself say something like, I can explain. The look on his face told me no, I couldn’t.

A door opened and there she was. My wife, in Paradise.

She looked at me and screamed. “It’s all right,” Vistam said quickly, “I’ve got him. He can’t hurt you.”

“Kill him,” she said. “For God’s sake, Vistam, kill him. You don’t know what he’s like.”

“He’s a guest,” Vistam said. “Look, it’s fine, really. Go back inside and lock the doors. It’ll be fine.”

Dear, sweet, clever Praeclara. I hadn’t realised she hated me so much. The thought of all that malice sobered me up like nothing else could have. “She thinks I want to hurt her,” I said. “I don’t. Really.”

He looked at me. The Great King can read men’s minds like a book, and from his eyes no secret can be hidden. “That’s not what I heard,” he said.

“I take it you’ve met my mother-in-law.”

That gave him pause for thought. “Poisonous woman,” he said. “Can’t say I liked her very much. But that’s neither here nor there.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t suppose it is. Praeclara told you I want to kill Apoina. It’s not true. I love her.”

Not the most tactful thing to say, maybe, but I think he believed me. The Great King trusts his own judgement, because he’s the wisest man in the world. “Maybe you do,” he said. “Which would explain why you went to so much trouble to get here. Jealousy. She dumps you; you kill her.”

“No,” I said. “Praeclara was telling lies. All lies.”

He was considering me as a proposition, something that could be solved. I hoped he was right. But, I thought, this is the Great King, the wisest man in the world, in the Sashan sense. It was all up to him, and he knew it. But the Great King makes decisions like that a thousand times every day. “Oh, for crying out loud,” he said, and he sat down and laid the sword across his knees. “You don’t want to murder my wife.”

“No.”

He nodded. “Can’t see why anybody would want to; she’s a doll. Mind you, I’m biased.” Small grin. “Well,” he said, “I’m sorry, but you’ve had a wasted journey. That Praeclara,” he added. “A real piece of work. Never liked the woman.”

“Me neither.”

“Well, there you go.” His eyes were upon me, and I felt the power of twenty-six generations of Sashan kings. “Sorry,” he said, “but that’s how it goes. She may have cared for you once – my wife, I mean – but that was then and this is now. We’re happy together. We both have everything we want. And – well, I believe you, but I don’t think she ever would. Dearest mother-in-law’s stitched you up good and proper, and there’s nothing you can do about it, unless you’d consider cutting her throat. But I won’t encourage you to do that, because after all, she’s Poina’s mother and she’s fond of the old viper, God only knows how but she is, and if ever she found out, I’d be in shit up to my earlobes. Sorry,” he repeated, “but that’s that.”

Over the years I’ve got used to thinking I’m smart. It’s hard to accept just how stupid I can be. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. Fire away.”

“How did you two—?”

He laughed. “Dearest mother-in-law,” he said. “She brokered the deal with the Hetsuan, so I could come here. I don’t know to this day how she managed it.”

I told him. It made him angry, I could see. “Like I said, a real piece of work. Anyway, me marrying Poina was a condition: marry her and take her with you; it’s the only place on earth she’ll ever be safe. Which I was only too pleased to do, once I’d met her. Like I said, she’s a doll.” He paused. “You know that, of course.”

“Yes.”

“Fair enough. We hit it off right from the start. And Eudocia—” He stopped. “That’s your daughter,” he said.

“Eudocia,” I repeated. “Nice name.”

He nodded. “Great kid,” he said. “I couldn’t love her more if she was my own.” He stopped again. “Sorry,” he said, yet again, “but things have moved on. Even if she were to believe you—”

Imagine you’re lying flat on your back on a table while surgeons cut out your internal organs, and on the ceiling there’s a mirror, so you can see the whole thing, the view from above, as though you were simultaneously you and God. A bit like that. “I get the picture,” I said.

“Good lad.” Praise from the Great King is praise indeed. “I’ll get Poina out here again in a bit and you can hear it from her if you like. I mean, like I said, I’m biased. But I know she’ll say the same as me. To be honest with you, I wouldn’t have lasted a day out here without her. She’s—”

“A doll, yes. You told me.” He let me have that one, which was generous of him, in the circumstances. “You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been wasting my time.”

“You have rather. All that bloody woman’s fault, I’m sorry for you, really.” He paused, as another thought began seeping through his mind, like water through limestone. “Hang on,” he said. “Who told you she was here?”

“Praeclara.”

His eyebrows rose. “Did she, by God? That’s interesting.”

It was my turn. He’d figure it out eventually, of course, being the wisest man in the world, but it was only polite to save him the effort. “Quite clever, really,” I said. “I’m guessing here, of course, but I don’t suppose I’m all that wide of the mark. The situation in Sashan has changed and now they want you dead. I imagine they’re offering money, or something else Praeclara wants. So she fixes things so she can tell me that Apoina is here, knowing that I’ll go through hell to get to her, and that I’m smart enough and dangerous enough to get halfway across Hetsuan without being killed and eaten. Under other circumstances I’d take that as a compliment, but I don’t think I will, somehow. I get here, I find she’s married to you, so I kill you. That’s how she reads me,” I added. “And of course it has the added benefit of torturing me more than anything else possibly could. Good plan.”

“A real piece of work.”

“Quite.” I shook my head. It didn’t help one bit. “She was wrong, of course, so the plan was fundamentally flawed. Her prejudices clouded her judgement. She thought I’d kill you, thinking that if you were dead I’d get Apoina back. But I’m not that stupid. That’s where she misjudged me.”

He nodded. “Figuring,” he said, “that you’d kill me and then Poina would hate you even more. I could see why she’d want to believe it of you. From her point of view, it’s pretty well perfect. It just needed you to be how she wants you to be, and it’d work.”

“Wishful thinking,” I said. “Clouds the judgement, even for the best of us. I really thought, if only I could see her again—” I shrugged. “Wishful thinking.”

“Yes,” he said. “Really, someone ought to shred that woman into little bits with a cheese grater. But not me, I’m afraid, because Poina would never forgive me. You can, though. After all, you’ve got nothing to lose.”

Maybe the one quality the Great King lacks is tact. “I can’t be bothered,” I said. “Besides, I don’t kill people, not unless I absolutely have to.”

“Good lad. Anyhow, being Praeclara’s the worst punishment I can think of. Changing the subject somewhat, have you given any thought about how you’re going to get home?”

“No,” I said. “Somehow I didn’t anticipate that happening. Not that I’ve thought about it. I’ve had other things on my mind.”

He took a deep breath. “If you want,” he said, “you can see them. Poina and Eudocia, I mean. I think that’s only fair, if that’s what you want. They won’t want to see you, but I’ll try and explain.”

I took a moment to look round at the garden. There’s that bit in Saloninus’s elegies:

Thou, beside me singing in the wilderness,

O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

“Thanks,” I said. “But what would be the point?”

“No point at all,” he said. “Sorry.”

I took a deep breath and let it go. Where does dead breath go to, I wonder? “She’s got a Sashan sort of mind,” I said. “Praeclara, I mean. She can believe in me as I ought to be, in her version of the world.”

“A crazed, vengeful killer. Yes, I can see what you mean.”

“Her preconception becomes reality. Quite Sashan,” I said. “No offence intended.”

“None taken. Of course she is Sashan. On her mother’s side.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” I looked at him. A nice man. The thought made me laugh. “You’re right,” I said, “I’m in a real fix.”

“You are,” he said. “Did you have much trouble getting here?”

“A bit.”

He nodded. “Going back the way you came probably isn’t an option,” he said. “It’s fine stirring up a hornets’ nest if you’re just passing through, but going back the same way would probably end in tears.”

“And a garnish of onion rings.”

He looked startled, then diagnosed it as a joke and smiled. “Quite,” he said. “On the other hand, if you try going north, you’ll have a hell of a way to go before you get anywhere. And the south is pretty thinly populated. North of here you’ll run into the towns and big cities. I don’t think you’d last five minutes.”

“Probably not. And, of course,” I added, to save him the trouble, “I can’t stay here.”

“Not really, no. Sorry.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “But to be honest with you, I don’t really give a damn.”

He frowned, the Great King’s sympathy. “You must have loved her a lot.”

“Yes. After all, what’s not to love? She’s a doll.”

He took that one, too. “Even so,” he said, “life goes on.”

“Though not necessarily for very long. How about due west?”

He thought about due west. “Don’t know an awful lot about it, to be honest with you. It’d be a hell of a drag from here to the coast. Actually, east would be better. Also a hell of a drag, but eventually you’d reach the Antecyrene border rather than just the sea. Unless you’re a really good swimmer, I don’t suppose the sea would be a lot of use to you.”

“I hate Antecyrene,” I said. “It’s so hot.”

“Really? Never been there myself. That’s what I’d do if I was in your shoes.”

“What do you know about it, in that direction?”

“Not a lot.” He scowled in thought. “There’s about eighty miles of rather scruffy farmland,” he said, “then a couple of big towns you’d have to detour around, then a lot of sort of steppe country and then you’re into the desert. Lots of that, and then you’re in Antecyrene. It doesn’t sound very hopeful, but I guess it’s better than the alternatives.”

Not that it mattered. “I don’t suppose I could see my daughter,” I said. “Just for a moment. Through a doorway or a window.”

He shook his head. “You decided it’d be better if you didn’t, and you were quite right,” he said. “Besides, if she found out she’d be livid. I don’t think she’d ever forgive me. You’re the devil, you see. Ever since she was born, she’s been told that. The fact that I’ve let you out of here alive is going to be a very big issue for a very long time. Sorry.”

I could have pleaded. I could have gone down on my bended knee, grabbed a stone and plugged him right between the eyes. But that would have been – rude? That’s the word that popped into my mind, and it made me giggle. He frowned. “Joke?”

“Ignore me,” I said. “I’m a bit overwrought, to tell you the truth. All right, then, tell me something about her. Anything.”

He thought long and hard. “She’s a great kid,” he said. “Really.”

She’s a great kid, said the Great King. I wanted to hit him for that, just as one time I was in a crowd of people in the market square at Semivartis and some clown in a high tower started flinging sixpences from a balcony. Later I found out that that was why the crowd had gathered. But I didn’t know; and suddenly there were people barging into me and shoving me and crushing me, and then I was on the ground and someone trod on my head. I could’ve killed that man in the tower for being so viciously generous. He had all the sixpences in the world and the people down below didn’t have any, and they swarmed like goldfish being fed in a pond, and someone trod on my head, just as Vistam was doing, though he didn’t realise it. He thought he was being generous. I looked like I could use sixpence, so he tossed me a coin from his heaped sackful of moments and hours and days and years he’d get to spend with my wife and my daughter. She’s a great kid, he said, and the pressure crushing my earlobe against my skull shifted as he lifted his heel and put his weight on his instep.

“Thanks for that,” I said.

“No trouble at all.” He looked at me some more, maybe hoping I’d metamorphose into the Dragon King of the West, the way flies do when princesses rescue them from drowning in a bird bath. Something like that would be just another day at the office for the Great King, who makes miracles real and the real miraculous, but maybe he was having an off day. “You’d better go,” he said. “I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do as it is.” He clapped his hands, a noise like thunder. Two Hetsuan in white gowns appeared instantly. “Saddle the strawberry roan,” he said. “Put up two big saddlebags of travelling biscuits and a couple of cheeses and a skin of last year’s sweet red. Very good year for the sweet red, last year,” he assured me. “You’ll like it. Oh, and a couple of blankets, two of the linen coats from the stable, two pair of sandals, couple of hats – anything else?” he asked me.

A coin falling from a great height and skipping off the stones as it landed. Even a coin can kill, if it falls far enough. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Oh, and a bow and two dozen bodkins and a sword. Do you prefer a Twelve or a Fifteen? We’ve got both.”

“A Fifteen,” I said.

“And a jar of pickled walnuts,” he added. “Cook does the most delicious pickled walnuts ever,” he added reverently. “Now then, money won’t do you any good because they don’t use the stuff, but this might come in handy. Besides, it’s sort of the usual drill, if you get me.”

He took a ring off his finger. It was Sashan, a signet ring. They very rarely come up in the West, so putting a value on it would be largely speculation: say a hundred thousand staurata, or half a million. But you wouldn’t sell it. They’d have to cut your finger off to get it. The Great King’s seal – well, one of them. He’d have spares, probably a sackful. Even so. The usual drill; at parting, the Great King gives his guest a gift of fabulous, unimaginable value. This probably happens several times each day, every day of the year, but the Great King can afford it. That’s how you know he’s the Great King.

“Won’t cut any ice with the Hetsuan,” he said. “Still, you never know, you might get through.” He thought for a moment. “Do me a favour?”

“Anything.”

“If you do get out and if anybody ever asks, tell them I’m dead. Really dead.” He smiled. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, really it has, but on the whole I don’t much care for visitors.”

He hadn’t mentioned it, but someone had tucked a map into the left-side saddlebag. It was only a sketch; a few scratches and dots on a wooden tile coated in beeswax, a few words in Sashan wedge-letters – mountains, river, sea, that sort of thing. Luckily I remembered that Sashan maps have east at the top, or I could’ve got myself in a right old pickle.

Not that it mattered. He’d said go east, so I went east. I started out at sunset, having memorised as much of the landscape as I could see from the top of the fort’s west wall. The horse was the sort I could never afford, and when we pick them up running loose on a battlefield I don’t let anyone ride them in case they go lame. He’d chosen a strawberry roan because they’re common as muck in Hetsuan, though anywhere else they go for silly money.

I’m guessing that Vistam had a word with his sister, the Moon, because she came out from behind the clouds and did a grand job of letting me see where I was going, that night and the following night and the night after that. I was glad I’d gone west, like he told me. If I’d gone east, no doubt it would’ve been as dark as a bag and the horse would’ve put its hoof in a rabbit hole. We have free will, you see; we can do as we’re told and everything will be fine, or we can do what we want and make a complete mess of our lives, but the choice is up to us. But he’d said go east, so I was going east. I may be stupid, but I’m not an idiot.

At daybreak on the fifth day I found a nice dense thicket of willows beside a small lake, made a nest for myself among the tall reeds and went to sleep. I woke up, and there were people standing all round me. They were Hetsuan, with spears and bows. One of them had a shaved head.