by K. J. Parker
The Lord Chamberlain looks at us. “Don’t I know you?” he says.
My pal shakes his head and says, “I don’t think so,” but he’s lying. There’s a memory—third shelf up, seventh ledger from the right—of something inside the Lord Chamberlain’s head that shouldn’t be there, and for the first time I see one of us the way my pal sees us. It’s horrible. It’s a sort of monstrous crustacean, with scales and claws, round black eyes, a perfect circle for a mouth, two concentric irises of razor-sharp chitin for teeth. Is that how he sees me? It makes my flesh creep.
* * *
(It’s a brief memory. The Lord Chamberlain is about seventeen, and he’s vaguely aware that he’s been acting funny lately. He’s had fits in the street, he shouts a lot, in a language he doesn’t understand. There’s something lodged in his mind, like a stray fiber of bacon wedged between your teeth, and it shouldn’t be there; most of the time it just itches unbearably, but sometimes it stings and sometimes it burns, and when he’s doing the weird shouting, there’s a pain like someone standing on your broken arm—I sympathize—and the only way to make the pain stop is to shout louder, except that it doesn’t, it makes it worse. My pal scoops all of this out of his mind like a dredger as he confronts the intruder, a very junior officer I haven’t seen in ages.
“Get out,” my pal says.
“Just going,” replies the junior officer. He gets up to leave.
“One moment.” My pal bars his way. Here we go, I say to myself. “That crazy lingo you had him spouting.”
“Ancient Luvian,” says the junior officer.
“It’s a real language?”
“Oh yes. Extinct now, of course. I made him recite the Benediction backwards in it.”
“Why?”
The junior officer shrugs. “Orders,” he says. “I just do as I’m told. Can I go now?”
My pal draws aside the hem of his metaphorical garment to let him pass. He doesn’t even rabbit-punch him on the way out. Very efficient, very civilized. Just another day at the office.)
* * *
“I’m sure we’ve met before,” the Lord Chamberlain says.
“Anything’s possible,” my pal replies. “But if it were anything important, I’d remember.”
And so into the presence. I didn’t exactly get my hopes up, which is just as well. The throne room, absolute pinnacle of magnificence in Antecyra, is about two-thirds of the size of the small cloister at the Third Horn, with plain brown and white tiles on the floor, two rows of six skinny columns holding up the featureless ceiling, plain whitewashed walls, and, at the far end, a throne; that is to say, a fancy-looking armchair in a sort of dark wood, decorated with crudely carved panels that were probably sold to the King’s grandfather as ivory but which are in fact walrus tusk.
On either side of the throne stand soldiers with spears and shields but no helmets or breastplates, which cost money; behind it and to the left, an elderly man in a plain white gown, presumably the Grand Vizier. On the throne is Ekkehard VI, the man who’s derailed the sublime Plan and made all this trouble and extra work for the hosts of heaven and the Princes of Darkness. He looks like a tradesman; if asked, I’d have said a carter, possibly a night soil collector, definitely someone who works with horses. His hair is combed over a bald patch, and he has a front tooth missing—top row, middle.
He looks at my pal and sees the merchant’s red silk gown with the fur tippet, the poulaine-toe shoes, the broad-brimmed beaver hat. He could never afford to dress like that himself. “What do you want?” he says.
My pal digs me in the metaphorical ribs. “I’m going, I’m going,” I say.
—And a fraction of a second later, I’m there when Ekkehard loses that tooth. It’s in a friendly scrap with the stable boy, who’s bigger and stronger and much faster, but who tries to pull his punches because his opponent is the Duke’s son. He does his best, but young Ekkehard has never got the point about keeping your guard up; the stable boy throws a fairly anemic left hook, designed to miss, and the future father of his country walks straight into it. Down he goes, and he contrives to land just so on the cobbled yard, and he picks something up, and it’s one of his own teeth.
I put the memory back where I got it from and look around. Don’t tell anyone, for crying out loud, but I have a problem with confined spaces, which is why Ekkehard’s mind gives me the shivers. It’s very confined in here: narrow, cramped, no room to breathe. Easy, tiger, I whisper to myself. If I start panicking, he’ll notice, and all hell will break loose.
Ekkehard is talking to my pal about something. I’m not really listening, but I catch the odd phrase about excise duty and premium-grade pickled herring FOB Scona and there not being much call back home for that sort of thing. I never knew my pal could act. He’s doing a very creditable impersonation of a Boc Bohec merchant, probably based on someone whose head he’s been inside at some point. The Duke is paying attention, fondly believing that there could be money in this somewhere. I leave them to it.
* * *
I distinctly remember telling them all, back in the day. It’ll all end in tears, I told them.
But they wouldn’t listen, and they went ahead, and the rest is theology. The memories are sharp as razors in my mind: razors that I carelessly leave lying about and cut myself on, fumbling in the dark cupboards of my memory for some recollection temporarily mislaid. I remember our ridiculously complicated attempts at security—how do you conspire against the Omniscient?—passwords and coded messages and passing secret information in plain sight. We were clowns. We deserved to lose.
What never occurred to us, the Firstborn of Light and Sons of the Morning, was that we were supposed to rebel, right from the Word go; it was part and parcel of the Plan, right from day one. We only figured it out later, after we’d been lined up in the exercise yard with our hands tied behind our backs and numbers hung round our necks, being counted by the camp commandant.
Even you mortal humans can grasp the simple truth that went over our heads like a flock of migrating geese. What was the first thing He did? Let there be light. And as soon as you have light, you have its inevitable opposite: the absence of light, the places where the sun don’t shine. Not being stupid, He knew precisely what the consequence would be, but He went ahead and did it anyway. He didn’t actually say, Let there be darkness, but it was very strongly implied, you bet.
Hence the need for what I think I’ve already described as His loyal opposition—us. He faced a quandary, the first of so many rocks He’s made that are so heavy He can’t lift them—not without a lever, or cheating. He couldn’t turn to a contingent of the heavenly host and say to them, Go away and be evil. But the job had to be done, and someone had to do it.
There was always an undercurrent of dissent, of course, right from the beginning. Never, it goes without saying, Should we be doing this? Unthinkable. But Should we be doing it this way? Rather more thinkable, and some of us began to think it. Again, not Should He be doing it this way? Perish the thought. Pronouns matter. No, it was in the delegated tasks, the actions performed through the agency of deputies and ministers—a billion percent loyal to Him personally, you understand, but with certain reservations about whether what some of His agents were doing truly represented His will.
I well remember the first time one of us (no names, no pack drill; up till that point, he’d been a respected and trusted member of the upper echelon) stood up in the middle of a team meeting and started to criticize the actions of a fellow officer. He’d barely started his remarks when he glanced up and saw the look on His face, whereupon he got a fit of the stammers, turned a funny color, and sat down again.
Nothing was said, of course, but shortly afterwards, he was reassigned to work of equal value, and a sort of chill went through the rest of us. Could’ve been me, we said to ourselves; I’ve often thought the same thing, exactly what he was trying to say, and look what happened to him. This isn’t—
We searched for a word to define what this wa
sn’t, and very reluctantly were forced to the conclusion that only one word would cut it. This isn’t right, we said to ourselves.
Is it cheating to use a lever to lift a rock? I guess it depends on the circumstances.
* * *
I’ve been inside a lot of heads, of all descriptions and classes of people, but kings don’t come my way every day of the week. There are, let’s say, points of interest. There are similarities, which are interesting, and differences, also interesting. Uneasy, according to Saloninus, lies the head that wears a crown, and it’s not hard to see why. For a start, it’s crammed to bursting.
For one thing, there’s generally a whole lot of education. His Royal Majesty’s royal father, who started out as a goatherd in the Telmessus before joining the army, working his way through the ranks and leading a military coup, wants his son to have all the advantages he never had. Or, if His Majesty was born in the purple, no sooner is the screaming newborn out in the fresh air than they’re on him like vultures—tutors in language and literature, history, geography and philosophy, the arts of war and the arts of peace—because that’s the way it has to be and that’s the way it’s always been done. Normal kids don’t get stuffed with all that junk.
Then there’s a vast assemblage of other people’s problems. It’s a universal human belief (which our lot on both sides of the fence have probably not done enough to counteract, if truth be known) that everything that happens must be somebody’s fault. In a monarchy, ultimately that somebody is the King. It’s his fault because he did it; or he ordered it to be done; or he allowed it to be done; or he neglected to forbid it to be done; or he failed to envisage that it might be done; or he didn’t do it, order it done, or allow it to be done; or forbade that it should be done; or never knew about it in the first place.
Nine times out of ten, of course, it really is his fault, but one time in ten is still a lot of times, when you add them up over the years. And sooner or later, every problem there is, whether domestic or foreign, ends up with the King. He may not give a damn. He may tell his ministers to clear all those people out from outside his door and get all that stupid paperwork off his desk, because it’s a sunny day and he’s going fishing. It’s still all there, on the edges of his vision, in the back of his mind, like mosquitoes or toothache or one of us.
Then there’s his own problems, many of which are just like yours and mine—will it ever stop raining, am I starting to go thin on top, is my wife having an affair, where did I go wrong bringing up my children, is that recurring pain just heartburn or am I going to die?—and others of which are job-specific and go with the territory: Is X plotting against me? Will Y invade? How the hell are we going to make people believe we can fix the balance of payments deficit? Above all, how do I know if what I’m planning to do is sensible or incredibly stupid when nobody I ask dares give me a straight answer?
A mind like that is too busy to notice something like me. It recognizes that something’s very wrong, but so what, something’s always very wrong around here. Having a mind like that would be like walking through a snake pit barefoot and blindfold—there’s nowhere safe to put your feet. Too many things you might bump into: the realization that one day, inevitably, it’ll all go to hell and the enemy will invade or the people will rebel, and when it happens, there’ll be nothing you can do; the look in your mother’s eyes as she puts down her spoon and stares at you, having detected the unfamiliar taste in her soup; sealing the docket for the execution of your most trusted friend, who was prepared to murder you for not all that much money. Inside a head like that, everything hurts, so what’s one more little thing, like me? I could live somewhere like that indefinitely; I could live, so to speak, like a king. The danger would be that I’d grow so fat I’d get stuck on my way out, like the bear in the children’s story.
But I’m here with a job to do, and we’re on a schedule. I’m here to gnaw my way into the brain stem and send this poor fool writhing and frothing at the mouth, preferably at the most solemn moment in an important public occasion, an all-too-visible demonstration of what happens to you if you apostasize and say nasty things about the one true faith. For obvious reasons connected with free will, the good guys can’t do this. It would be the ultimate betrayal of the bargain sealed with an apple pip, back when the world was young. But if a demon happens, in the ordinary course of business, to possess a man who happens to be an apostate duke (now, there’s a coincidence), and a holy man happens to be passing and simply does his job, with the unintended consequence that the apostate forsakes his foolish ways and returns to the faith—then good work all round, no rules broken or even visibly creased, everyone’s a winner. Furthermore, no risk whatsoever of anything going wrong, because the demon in question is so demoralized and terrified of the holy man that he wouldn’t dare pull any funny business, even if he was minded to, for fear of what would happen to him once he came out again. That, I think, was what sold the idea to their equivalent of Division. This guy, the pitch ran, is completely tame. Practically a pet.
Definitely a snake pit, and such big, plump, jittery snakes. When the time comes—I’m thinking the moment in the Ceremony of Keys where the Duke is surrounded by all the nobility of the kingdom, kneeling to do obeisance—I’ll be able to whip up a real tornado in here, with all this stuff. I can’t say I enjoy my work as a rule, but even a reluctant craftsman is hard put to it not to feel a certain satisfaction when he does his job really well, judged by the most exacting criteria of his peers. Should I make him break his own bones, or pluck out one of his own eyes? The latter would be symbolically resonant—his eye offended him, so he plucked it out—but I think my pal might be upset if I damaged the hardware significantly. It would reflect badly on him, he would be inclined to think, so I’d catch it from him later. So, froth, scream, writhe, speak in tongues, maybe assault a few of the landed gentry, and then on my way rejoicing, back (with any luck) to the Third Horn for some more cozy chats with Brother Eusebius. All stuff I can do standing on my metaphorical head.
I pause. Something’s wrong.
Surely not. But, as Saloninus says, once you’ve eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I freeze and listen. Absolute silence.
You can hide and hold your breath, but you can’t ever do anything about the smell. The stink, or odor or fragrance, is always a dead giveaway: sulfur and brimstone and all things nice, it’s how you people know we’re there, or so I’m told. Naturally, my metaphorical nose has long since tuned out my own smell, so the faint perfume of rotten eggs in vinegar isn’t me. I analyze it further.
“Lofty?” I say.
“Keep your voice down, for crying out loud,” Lofty hisses, loud enough to wake the dead.
“Lofty?”
A metaphorical hand shoots out from the shadows, grabs me, and pulls me into a dark corner, a crevice formed by the junction of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. It holds me in a grip of iron. “Go away.”
“I can’t, you’re holding on to me.”
The grip relaxes, but I stay where I am. “You shouldn’t be here,” I say.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
One thing’s for sure. If we both stay there hissing at each other, it won’t be long before the host becomes aware of us, and a moment or so later, he’ll be bringing the roof down. If that happens, too early and fatally disrupting the schedule, my pal out there will flay me alive and Division will be seriously annoyed. If, on the other hand, I abandon my post and leave, my pal out there will flay me alive and Division will be seriously annoyed. Unless, of course, I break the habits of an everlasting lifetime and do something intelligent.
“Fuck you, Lofty,” I whisper, and leave.
* * *
Oh, the Plan. Always the Plan. Ask any of us what we truly believe in; the Plan, we say. Of course there’s a plan, whole and indivisible, immortal, eternal, infinitely complex and wise. Only, I have my doubts.
I first wondered about the Plan wa
y back when, in the old days, before you-know-what. At the time, I’m on special duty, seconded to the Tempter’s office. Nice work if you can get it for someone of my temperament—it’s out of the office, and it allows a certain degree of unsupervised action, a chance to use a little initiative.
So there I am, walking to and fro in the earth, and I get wind of a certain mortal human, a true believer. Everything this character does is right and in accordance with the Law, in spite of or because of which, he’s rich, healthy, happy, and content. His charity knows no bounds, and everyone who comes into contact with him benefits as a result, but this doesn’t in any way decrease our friend’s bankroll; in fact, it increases it, because he’s such a wonderful guy to do business with. This is the sort of man priests point to and say: Told you so, it really works.
So I go back upstairs, and it’s time for the weekly staff meeting, during the course of which He happens to mention His servant whatsisname, the happy rich guy, the poster boy. My most faithful servant, He says, casting a sideways glance at certain members of the heavenly host who may not have been pulling their weight lately.
“Of course he is,” I pipe up. “Why wouldn’t he be? You’ve given him everything he could possibly want.”
He frowns. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“Absolutely,” I agree. “All I’m saying is, take away the goodies, and see how faithful this clown is then.”
You could hear a pin drop. The divine countenance darkens. “You think so.”
“Human nature,” I say.
“Fine,” he snaps. “Let’s try it and find out.”
I won’t bore you with the whole story, which is long and discreditable to all concerned (except for me, as I’m only doing my job). It ends with the poor believer confronting Him and asking: Why? To which He can find no better answer than, Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Which is no better than a parent saying to a kid, Because I say so. It’s a mess. He tells the agonized, boil-covered human that all his suffering is because of the Plan. Of course, there is no plan. Instead there’s me, doing my day’s work in the Tempter’s office and doing it exceptionally well—so well that I tempted Him and won.
