by K. J. Parker
Venart sat down, and there was a brief silence, apparently made up of equal parts of pity and embarrassment. Eventually, someone got up in the middle of the eleventh row. Venart didn’t recognise him.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the last speaker – I’m afraid I didn’t catch his name – does have a valid point, or at least he’s raised one; I’m not sure it’s the point he intended to make. In fact, I’m quite sure it isn’t, but it’s a good one nevertheless. Anyway, it’s this. We’re traders, businessmen, that’s what we do. And one of the reasons why we do it so exceptionally well is that we all live here together on this island in the middle of the sea, with nobody from the outside daring to bother us because we’ve got more and better ships than anyone else, and nobody here on the Island trying to tell us what to do because we’ve proved over the last two hundred years or so that a society like ours neither wants nor needs a government of any sort. And it’s wonderful,’ the speaker went on cheerfully. ‘If we all had the whole world to live in and we could do whatever the hell we wanted to, we’d still all want to be traders living here on the Island, because nothing and nowhere even comes close. Think about that, neighbours. Think carefully.’
He paused for a moment. There was no sound of any kind.
‘Now then,’ he went on, ‘our friends here who hold the Shastel Bank franchise have come along today and offered us large sums of money for the hire of our ships. That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? I tell you, when I heard the rumour I was up here like a squirrel up a tree; I’ve got two ships, a damn great timber freighter that’ll make a wonderful insurance claim one day when I can find a big enough rock to sail it onto but otherwise isn’t good for anything much, and a sweet little cutter that skips along like skimming a flat stone on a rock-pool and carries about as much cargo as I could comfortably fit in my pockets; and these kind people here are prepared to pay me more for a month’s work than I usually make in a season. But then I got to thinking, and this is what I want to share with you. The point is, Shastel wants to hire my ships for a war.
‘Now don’t get me wrong, if Shastel and Scona want to beat up on each other, they’re more than welcome to do so, and if while they’re at it they need to buy any stuff, such as food or timber or iron ore or any damn thing, I’ll be more than happy to sell it to either of them, or both, for choice. Taking a slightly longer-term view, I’d be delighted to see Scona getting a bloody good hiding, simply because it’s a stated policy of the Loredan Bank to diversify and expand – I’ll translate that for you, friends, it means barging in on our business, making stuff cheaper than we can buy it, supplying only their own trading syndicate and generally cutting us wherever we go. I really don’t like the sound of that, a government getting involved in business; it’s like a fox going in for chicken farming. So, if they come to a bad end, you can expect to see me walking around with a sprig of heather in my cap and a big grin on my face.’
There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd. The speaker let it die down before continuing.
‘But,’ he said, making his voice a little harder and sterner, ‘here’s the problem as I see it. Suppose we get involved in this war, and Shastel loses. Good for business? I don’t think so. I can’t see any of us being welcome on Scona ever again. All right, you say, not much chance of that happening, so what’s your worry? Fair enough; but suppose we get involved in this war and Shastel wins? Is that going to be any better? Come on, everyone, think about it. How’s it going to look everywhere else we go? It’s going to look like we, the people of the Island, formed an alliance with Shastel to make war on Scona. Put it another way: up till now we’ve always been individuals wherever we go, and as a result nobody bothers us. We’re good people to trade with, we deal fairly and by and large our prices are the best; there’s no advantage in turning us over, because all that means is that they’ll lose our repeat business, which is pretty much like putting money in a sack and chucking it in the sea. Now imagine what it’s going to be like if we start acting like a nation, a government. The Island joins Shastel against Scona. The Island demands the return of the hostage. I’m not going to spell it out for you, neighbours, I imagine you can see what I’m getting at perfectly well without me having to hammer the point into the ground.
‘All right, you say; what are you suggesting we should do? Boycott the offer? Turn down this highly lucrative new business on account of some vague fears about how the rest of the world’s going to feel about us? Doesn’t sound like a desperately smart move, does it? And suppose you’re a good boy and don’t take up the offer; how’re you going to feel when the man next door decides he can’t be doing with all this political bull getting in the way of business, and signs up with Shastel for the duration?
‘Here’s the deal. A big thank you to Athli what’s-her-name – Zeuxis, that’s right; Athli Zeuxis – and the rest of the Shastel Bank consortium, and anybody who wants to sign up with them should go right ahead and do so. That’s fine. But I’d like this meeting to send back a big fat raspberry to the Foundation, with the message, we don’t take sides, we don’t give or ask for either help or treaties with the outside world, because we aren’t a nation; we’re just a lot of people who happen to live in the same place, and most of us do the same kind of work. And whatever we do, we don’t mention this man’s sister at all; not one word. Especially we don’t interfere by making demands on the governments of other countries. Sorry, neighbour, and you really do have my sincerest sympathies, but that’s the way I see it. No foreign adventures, no taking sides, no moral support, nothing. None of our business.’
Venart left the meeting feeling angry and confused. At the start of the proceedings, it looked like everybody was in favour of the Shastel deal except for the small number of traders who did substantial business with Scona (later he found out that the speaker was one of this group, thereby learning as fact something that every other man in the Meeting House had guessed immediately after he’d started talking). The upshot had been that the Shastel agents had been given a rather insulting little homily to pass on to Head Office, along with a large number of signed contracts for the hire of ships. As the speaker had urged, there was no reference whatsoever in the homily or the contracts to a girl by the name of Vetriz Auzeil.
Venart went home, slammed the door behind him and went through into the counting house, where his clerks were copying letters and doing chequer-board calculations. He was in a foul mood by this stage; he swore at one clerk for lighting a lamp when there was still the last knockings of daylight left, and at another for taking a new pen from the pot when a bit of careful sharpening would have got another hour or so out of the old one, and the room was extremely quiet and tense when the doorkeeper came in and announced that Athli Zeuxis had called and was waiting to see the boss.
‘Rest assured,’ she said, as Venart poured her a drink of warm wine and honey with mint and grated cinnamon, ‘I’ll be doing whatever I can. Have you any idea what Niessa Loredan’s up to?’
Venart shook his head. ‘Well,’ he amended, ‘I’ve got a vague notion it’s all to do with that magic stuff we got mixed up in that time in the City, with old Alexius and Bardas Loredan. Which means,’ he added with a long sigh, ‘that even if someone told me what was going on, I wouldn’t understand a word of it.’
Athli nodded. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure I believe in it, even. Well, be certain that I’ll be doing whatever I can to get Vetriz out of there. It shouldn’t be beyond me to spin Head Office a report dropping great big heavy hints about things they can do that would go a long way towards getting the Island firmly on their side. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they took the bait; they simply can’t get their heads around the idea of the Island not having a government of any kind; they much prefer inventing some extremely secretive and well-hidden ruling class manipulating everything from behind the scenes and being incredibly devious about it all. The idea of a secret agenda of freeing hostages concealed behind a public declaration of
neutrality is just the sort of twisted scheme they’d really go for. But,’ Athli went on, ‘even if they do go for it, I’m not making any promises about getting anywhere. The plain fact is, as far as I can tell, they want this to be an all-out war to the death; the idea behind it is to get rid of Scona for good and all, and nobody’s going to be all that interested in peace negotiations or making deals; not unless Gorgas Loredan manages to give them a couple of damn good hidings. Sorry to sound negative about it, but it’d be cruel to get your hopes up.’
‘Please do what you can,’ Venart replied, pouring himself another long drink. ‘I really can’t think of anything else I can do, short of tripping over some vital piece of military intelligence about Shastel war plans that I could trade for her with Niessa Loredan. And the chances of finding out something she doesn’t know already are pretty slim, to say the least. That’s one tough woman, Athli. I don’t think there’s much she wouldn’t do if it suited her.’
‘I promise I’ll do my best,’ Athli replied, refusing a refill. ‘At the very least, I ought to be able to find some way of getting a message through to Vetriz, if that’s any use to you.’
Venart smiled, for the first time in a while. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll write something tonight and send it over to you first thing tomorrow. At least I can let her know she hasn’t been entirely forgotten. Anyway,’ he said with an effort, ‘that’s enough about that. What do you make of this war, then? Is it a foregone conclusion like everybody says?’
Athli made a vague gesture with her hands. ‘If you do the arithmetic, it’s got to be,’ she said. ‘Six thousand halberdiers against – what, seven hundred regular archers and whatever conscripts Gorgas can chase up. You don’t need to be a treasury clerk to figure that one out. On the other hand,’ she continued, looking out of the window, ‘take a look at the run-up to this situation and maybe the numbers aren’t so important after all. We were getting close to the stage where Gorgas was running out of floors to wipe with Shastel raiding parties; not that he’s some kind of military genius, it’s just that the raiders made such bad mistakes.’ She smiled thinly. ‘We had a saying back in Perimadeia – it was attributed to General Maxen, Bardas’ uncle – that ninety-nine out of a hundred decisive battles are lost by the losers rather than won by the victors, and the art of strategy was little more than giving the other side rope to hang themselves with while trying not to make too many stupid mistakes of your own. Basically, that’s what Gorgas has been doing so far, and it’s worked pretty well; unless you count winning so often you provoke a full-scale war as a mistake, which is an arguable case. No, I could see Gorgas winning one or two very impressive victories and killing an awful lot of halberdiers; and my guess is that all he’d achieve that way would be an even bigger number of halberdiers assigned to catching him.’ She shook her head. ‘It’ll be interesting to watch,’ she said. ‘I’d say his only hope would be a big victory resulting in a major blow-up in Shastel faction politics; but it could just as easily be his own death warrant.’
The ink was full of dust again, and the pen was worn out and spluttering; the scraps of parchment had been scraped down so many times there were holes in them, and the ink just soaked away in places, making the letters look like trees grown shaggy and shapeless with moss and ivy; and the lamp needed a new wick. But Machaera kept on writing, because calligraphy was seventy marks (seventy marks just for the writing, regardless of what she wrote) and a good score would go a long way towards offsetting the inevitable disaster of Applied Geometry, and she had to do well in Moderations if she wanted to get into the top stream of Third Year…
There was a nick in the shaft of the pen, and it had worn a raw patch on her middle finger between the top knuckle and the side of her fingernail, and it hurt… There had to be some way to harden her skin up before the exam, something she could put on it to stop it rubbing away. Hadn’t she read somewhere that raw grain spirit did the trick? Not that that would be a lot of help, since she didn’t happen to have any raw grain spirit; although she had an idea they used the stuff in the Natural Philosophy workshops, and wasn’t that moon-faced boy who kept oh-so-accidentally bumping into her in the Buttery (Name? Can’t remember) a Nat. Phil. second-year?
She narrowed her eyes and squinted at the page she was copying from. The main text was clear enough; it was the bold, cursive script of about a hundred and twenty years ago, written in Perimadeia in a commercial copying shop by someone who understood how to lay out a legible page of text. Her problem was with the commentary, scrawled between the lines and crammed into the margins, running right to left as often as left to right, contorted with scholarly space-saving abbreviations and written with a pen shaved down to the thickness of a hair. Mcrb thnks th Passg prob corrupt, cf Euseb On Philos chp 23 ll.34 to 60 but cf opp Comm on Silen Gen Summary chp 9 ll.17ff wh var readings pref; all squashed into the gap above one line, with the last few words bulging out into the margin and marching upside down along the underside of the end of the line, like a column of ants on the stem of a flower. It could, of course, have been worse; there could be three or four generations of commentary squeezed in there, rendering the main text as illegible as the subsidiaries and making reading the thing as slow and painful as a child picking its way through its first horn-book.
Macrobius thinks this passage is corrupt, she wrote carefully, compare Eusebius, On Philosophy, chapter 23 lines 34 to 60; but note the opposite view in the commentary on Silentius, General Summary, chapter 9 lines 17 and following, where variant readings are preferred. Quite, she thought. And does it really matter, given that the text all this attention has been lavished on is nothing more than the trivial bickering of two scholars, both of them dead for over four hundred years, over a fine point of dogma in a theory long since discarded as quaintly primitive? Apparently it did, or else why was she crouched here copying it out on slivers of vellum scrounged from the bellows-mender’s shop in the vague hope that writing it out would somehow help fix it in her memory? It mattered because the men who set the exam thought it mattered, probably because they’d had to sit in this same library staring at this same copy of this book when they were her age, and that was the only criterion that counted for anything. Still, it would be interesting to know when this book was last read by someone who wasn’t studying for the second-year Mods; two hundred years ago? Three?
She looked at the page in front of her and considered the next line in the main text. But that same foolish and opinionated clerk, in averring that the same essence could be at one and the same time corporeal and non-corporeal, commits a grave error; indeed, his ignorance and folly are such that no scholar would pay any heed to them. In consequence-
Machaera yawned and lifted her head until she could see out of the window. Outside it was a clear, crisp day, and the menacing silhouette of Scona Island was painfully sharp against the hard blue sky. Over there, apparently, lurked the Enemy, the latest incarnation of the dark and malevolent force that waited eternally for the weak, the helpless, and bad girls who didn’t eat up their dinners. She found it extremely unsettling to think that the Enemy was so close, only the width of a narrow channel away; if she wasn’t careful, she could easily spend hours staring at the water, imagining shadowy coracles flitting over the dark water, spear-points and helmet-ridges gleaming in the thin light of a watchful star – and then she’d never get any work done, and she’d fail Mods completely and have to go home. Oh, damn Scona, for being at war and distracting her from her revision!
She didn’t look up, because she knew that the man standing beside her wasn’t real, and that she was in another of those involuntary and unfortunately extra-curricular visions (if only they counted towards the year-end continuous assessment grades – but they didn’t, and a headache right now would be so inconvenient…)
‘Machaera,’ Alexius said. ‘I’m sorry, am I disturbing you?’
‘A bit,’ she replied, trying not to let her resentment show; after all, Patriarch Alexius was one of the greatest
scholars ever, she should be proud-
‘You work too hard, you know,’ he said. ‘You aren’t getting enough sleep. Fine thing it’d be if you’re so exhausted you fall asleep in the exam. Don’t laugh; it happened to a friend of mine. He’d spent a whole year cramming for that one subject, got as far as writing his name, and the next thing he knew was the invigilator shaking him by the shoulder and taking his paper. He gave up philosophy after that and went into the wine trade, where he made a great deal of money and would have done very well for himself if he hadn’t been killed when the City fell. At least, I assume that’s what happened to him; it’s a fairly safe assumption. What’s that you’re reading?’
‘Veutses, On Obscurity,’ Machaera replied. ‘Doctor Gannadius says it’s the key to understanding the whole of neo-Tractarianism. ’
‘He’s right,’ Alexius said, ‘surprisingly enough, since I happen to know for a fact he’s never read it. Oh, he’s read the Epitome and the Digest, which contain everything you need to know; but as for sitting down and actually ploughing through the wretched thing, he told me himself, life’s too short. I did read it, once – a long time ago now, of course – and frankly I couldn’t make head or tail of it. So I went back and read the Digest entry and for the life of me I couldn’t remember any of the important points listed in the Digest article being in the original text. So I went back and read Veutses again, from beginning to end, and blow me down if I wasn’t right. All the important ground-breaking stuff was made up by whichever poor little clerk it was who did the Digest entry, not Veutses at all.’
