by K. J. Parker
“Is Nico—?”
He shrugged. “Let’s hope so.”
The Blue House door was shut, all the windows were shuttered. Inside there, I hoped, Genseric and the Blues were ready to repel the first assault. Of course, the mission statement as I’d heard it had been to burn the place down, not bust it open and sack it. But it’s much easier to torch a building from inside, and, as far as Lysimachus knew, there was nobody home apart from a senile old caretaker.
I’ve never been much of a one for waiting around. I fidget, I can’t get comfortable crouching in doorways. “Keep still,” Artavasdus had to hiss at me more than once (me, the supreme commander, like I was twelve years old.) I’d made up my mind that the whole thing had been a mistake, trick, diversion because the real attack was happening right now on the other side of town, when I heard a familiar noise, the creaking of handcart wheels. I looked up, and suddenly it was a whole lot lighter—I’d been staring at the ground, and missed the sunrise, typical. Nothing to see, just creaking wheels. Then they came round the corner of Rose Street; about twenty-five, thirty abreast, with carts in the middle of the line, loaded down with timber. I recognised it as rafters we’d stripped out of the chapel in the Gardens of Pacatian; absolutely prime seasoned timber we desperately needed for catapult crossbars, and they were proposing to use it as firewood. I think that made me angrier than anything else.
Longinus wasn’t hard to identify; taller than everyone else, middle of the front rank, leading in every sense of the word. He had his very best arena armour on, so he sort of glowed gold in the dawn sunbeams. On either side of him, men with whom I’d been doing a lot of business lately, men I trusted, convinced they’d got the message and were on our side. I admit it, I was shocked, let down, like I’d just caught my wife with my best friend. Stupid of me; because I’d really been kidding myself I understood the Themes and what they mean to people—me, from out of town, the milkface, presuming. I’d been filling my head with worms and lions to the point where I’d forgotten what the Themes are for, and what they came out of. Not us against them but us against us, because that’s what people are really like, that’s what they actually want.
Well, it was out of my hands now. I wished I hadn’t come.
Remember me telling you about the old Engineers’ game of Throwing the Road Pin? Nico kicked off with a volley, from the balconies of the houses on either side. First the poor devils knew about it was men dropping to their knees, slumping backwards, dead men’s heads banging the heads of their friends in the rank behind; yelling and screaming, and nobody knowing where it was coming from or what was happening. Then up jumped the Watch and the Parks and Gardens, yelling, clashing swords against shields, not moving an inch. Somewhere out back where I couldn’t see, Nico and fifty of my best lads would be creeping into position, to cut off their retreat. Now the door of the Blue House swings open, and the Blues inside launch their volley—arrows, slingshots, javelins, road pins. Longinus is standing there perfectly stunned, realising he’s surrounded out in the open, not knowing who’s against him or how many. He’s exactly where I want him, where he’s supposed to be.
A shrill voice, a woman’s voice, behind the rear of the Green column. I’m ashamed of myself. I closed my eyes.
The woman was Sawdust, up on the wall, and what she yelled was the order to loose. Twelve catapults, trajectories racked right down; twelve bouncing stone balls, looping over the roofs of the buildings of Horsefair and Rosemount, pitching in the back two ranks of the Greens, bouncing and rolling through solidly packed ranks of my fellow citizens, whose fragile bodies took so much way off those obscenities that they rolled up to the Blue House wall, sort of nuzzled the stonework like friendly sheep, and came to a gentle stop.
I’d ordered just one volley, but you know what it’s like, at night, with inexperienced crews and everyone a bit on edge. For the second volley they shifted the point of aim two minutes left, so the balls wouldn’t waste their mayhem on dead bodies. Standard procedure, the two-minute shift had become, as Sawdust had noticed the tendency of a formation under bombardment to bunch up out of the way of the fall of shot, like the furrow cast up by the plough, thereby presenting an even juicier target if you came over just a tad…
And that was that. The clattering of dropped weapons was like rain on a roof. They were all howling, we surrender, don’t shoot, hands in the air like the canopy of a birch forest grabbing at the light. And up close, the bodies, the crushed, squashed, smeared, popped, every-bone-broken bags of seeping mince; what had Nico called it, the greatest single advance in the science of land warfare, or something like that?
There were several things I wanted to do at that moment. Standing up and talking wasn’t one of them. But it had to be done. Had to be me, nobody else. A natural-born leader would’ve been on his feet and shooting off well-chosen phrases like a rat up a pipe. Me? Standing up was like being a tooth pulled from a jaw.
So I stood up, and I don’t suppose anybody saw me, and I was wondering how the hell I was going to make myself heard above all that screaming and yelling. I tried shouting, but I couldn’t hear myself, it was as though my mouth was working but nothing was coming out. Ludicrous.
Just as well that thug Lysimachus was with me; he knew what to do. He jumped up, grabbed a couple of Parks and Gardens men—literally, by the scruff, lifted them single-handed off the ground, brought them over to me like a cat with a kitten in its mouth. He told them something, I couldn’t hear what it was. They took hold of a shield between them; then Lysimachus put his arm under my shoulders and hoisted me like I was five years old onto the shield, and the two Parks men lifted it shoulder high.
A moment later, you could’ve heard a pin drop. Explanation, if you don’t happen to be Robur: lifting a man on a shield is an incredibly symbolic, meaningful thing. Back in the distant heroic past, it was basically an act of coronation. After the battle, the winner’s soldiers lifted him on a shield, and that’s how everybody knew he was now the king. Things have blurred a bit since then, of course, and we’ve got two thousand years’ worth of the most arcane and impenetrable court ritual the world has ever seen. Even so; couldn’t say who was more shocked and stunned, me or everybody else—Greens, Blues, Watch, my lads, the artillery crews on the wall. It was one of those moments that change everything, a man standing on a shield, something that grabs and monopolises your attention even if you’ve just had your leg ripped off by a bouncing stone ball.
(I asked Lysimachus later; why did you do it, what the hell were you thinking of? To which he replied; you wanted them to look at you. His mind works that way. Achieve the objective, and the hell with collateral damage.)
And then I felt myself wobble a bit. Note: the shields we’d issued to the Parks crowd were slightly curved, not the easiest thing to keep your footing on. I swear to you, if the shield had been flat and I’d felt just a tad more secure, I’d have jumped off, believe me. But I couldn’t, not without slipping and coming down on my nose or my arse, the worst possible omen, as various would-be emperors found out the hard way over the centuries; fall off the shield and, trust me, you don’t live long afterwards. No, the moment had passed, there was no way off that shield, I was stuck, as surely as if I was cut off by the tide. And everybody was dead quiet, staring at me as though I had three heads.
A voice in my head said, can’t be helped. Why do I listen to those voices? Common sense dictates that any voice you hear inside your head must be just you, thinking; so, if you know it’s just you and you know you’re basically an idiot, what possesses you to do what the stupid voice tells you?
Anyway. I opened my face and this is what came out. “Wounded,” I said, “stay where you are, don’t try and move, we’ll get doctors to you as soon as we can. Greens, go home, right now. Longinus is dead, this never happened. Be at work as usual first thing in the morning if you know what’s good for you. Blues, go home. Soldiers, to me.”
21
That was it. Oratory’s not my thing. It worked, though.
>
Goes without saying, there weren’t enough doctors. Faustinus had managed to rustle up a dozen, and the Blues had fifteen or so in the Blue House; not enough to do very much, though most of the bloody messes on the ground there were past help anyhow. Nobody said anything out loud, but the ones who were too badly smashed up had their veins opened, and what else could you do? But there were a couple of hundred we did manage to save, which under the circumstances wasn’t bad at all.
“Soldiers, to me” was the only way I could think of to get down off that fucking shield. Once my lads were crowded round me, screening me from sight, I hopped, not giving a stuff about how I landed. As it happens, Nico caught me and lowered me gently until my feet touched the ground. “Are you out of your mind?” he asked me.
“Not my idea,” I told him. “Really.”
He didn’t believe me. Nor did Artavasdus, Genseric, or any of the others. I could read them like the golden letters on the Arch of Maxentius; you planned this, and you didn’t tell us because you knew we’d try and stop you. Fuck them, I thought. Then Artavasdus said, “Orders?” I looked round for Lysimachus; I wanted to stick a knife under his chin and make him tell them, it was his idea, not mine. But he wasn’t there, the bastard. Always there when not wanted, but when I actually needed him, nowhere to be found. Typical.
What’s done is done, said the stupid little voice. “Right,” I said, trying to do an impersonation of me and making a hash of it. “What’s happening? I can’t see.”
“They’re going home,” someone said. “Greens and Blues.”
Success. The disaster averted, albeit at unspeakable cost. You could almost say, triumph. Except that, at the crucial moment, some idiot gladiator had done one small thing that made that unthinkable triumph barely relevant, a sideshow, a footnote. “I want discreet patrols,” I said. “Make sure they don’t hang about anywhere. And I want the names of any Greens who don’t show up for work.”
Someone pointed out that there were about three hundred dead Greens who’d never clock in ever again, but since we didn’t know their names yet, my order would be hard to put into effect. I hadn’t thought of that, naturally. Do it anyway, I said, and get those bodies identified.
Nico was looking at me, like I was some sort of monster. “What do we do about the Greens?” he said.
“Nothing,” I told him. “But I want you to go to the Green House later today, find out who’s in charge, tell them I want a new Green boss elected and in place in the next forty-eight hours. Tell them it’s their business entirely who they choose, so long as they choose someone. And then I want to see him, whoever he is. Got that?”
Nico hesitated. I knew why. He wasn’t sure how to talk to me, now I’d proclaimed myself emperor. To someone like Nico, formalities matter. So, was I Sir or Your Majesty or Your Imperial Highness, or what the fuck? “Nico,” I said, “don’t stand there goggling, move.” He gave me a startled look, then the faintest, most perfunctory of salutes (he’s never ever saluted me, only once, when I forbade him ever to do it again) and marched stiffly away, back as straight as a set square.
“You did the right thing,” Aichma told me.
I don’t like swearing at women, so I didn’t reply.
“You did,” she said. “If the Greens had burned down the Blue House, the whole city’d be a war zone right now. Thousands of people would be dead, and the savages—”
“Leave it,” I said. “Please.”
“You had to stop it,” she continued. “And you simply didn’t have enough men to do it any other way. Actually, it was quite brilliant.”
She was feeling better, I could tell. I’d flatly refused to let her go back to the Dogs. So far, no reports of any trouble in the streets, but it was too early to be sure; besides, there was a real risk that someone might figure out how I’d learned about the Greens’ plans, in which case she couldn’t go back to the Dogs ever again. No point trying to explain that to her, of course. She wouldn’t listen.
“Also the coronation thing,” she said. “Now that was smart.”
I shut my eyes. She wasn’t being ironic. You know when Aichma deploys irony, just as you know when a volcano erupts. “It wasn’t my idea,” I told her.
“Of course it wasn’t.” Now that was irony; red streams of lava tumbling down the shattered mountainside. “Stroke of genius. No, really, I mean it. Suddenly, nobody’s going to be talking about anything else. You actually managed to upstage a major riot. That’s class.”
“It was Lysimachus,” I said. “And when I lay my hands on him—”
“Risky, of course,” she went on, over me, like a cartwheel over a hedgehog, “but you judged it just right. It’s what everybody wanted, though I don’t suppose they knew it till it happened. No, I take my hat off to you, it was exactly what was needed. Of course, it changes everything.”
“Aichma,” I said. “Will you please shut the fuck up?”
Nico was still speaking to me, though he was jumpy as a cat. Artavasdus kept looking sideways at me, as if expecting me to turn back into a dragon at any moment. Faustinus took me to one side and said he’d thought long and hard about it and he was on my side, no matter what, but even so, he felt he ought to protest, in the strongest possible terms. Oh, and crowds started cheering me in the street, which was just bizarre.
The Green committee came to see me. It was all a bit awkward to start with; they stood there, with their hats in their hands and imaginary invisible nooses round their necks, until I offered them a beer. Then they all sort of shuffled backwards, leaving one Bronellus sort of stranded, like a beached whale.
I looked at him. “You’re it, then.”
Bronellus isn’t someone you look at if you can help it. He’s got this scar, cheekbone to cheekbone, no tip to his nose. He didn’t say anything, which I took to be a confirmation.
“Congratulations,” I said, and stuck out my hand. He shied back, then took it and shook it. “Right, we need to get you up to speed. Basically, these are the areas the Greens are responsible for.”
I don’t suppose he took half of it in, though I came to realise he was an intelligent man; rather more so than Longinus, rest his soul. Later I heard that nobody wanted the job at any price; there was a deathly silence in the Green chapter-house, everybody holding his breath and trying to be invisible. Eventually Bronellus stuck his paw in the air and said, “I’ll do it,” like the fifth man cast away in the open boat with water enough for four. Apparently he was the life and soul of the party when he was younger. But when he got the scar he went all quiet, and had stayed that way ever since.
I prattled about his duties and responsibilities until I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and then I smiled at him. He looked at me. “What’s going to happen to the Greens?” he said.
“How do you mean?”
“After the other night. What are you going to do?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “All right, tell you what. When you can think of some punishment that won’t make matters a whole lot worse, come and tell me and we’ll see what we can do. Otherwise, put it right out of your mind, as far as it’ll go.”
He considered me as though I was an equation, then nodded. “No more trouble,” he said.
“Plenty of trouble,” I replied. “Everyone seems to have forgotten, but we’re under siege. If they attack, and if they can stomach the losses they’ll take getting as far as the gate, I don’t think there’s very much we can do to stop them. I’d like you to think about that.”
His eyes went wide. “As bad as that.”
I nodded. “But that doesn’t leave this room. What we’ve got to do,” I went on, “you and me and Arrasc and a few others, is make sure they don’t attack. Not till the Fleet gets here.”
“You’ve heard from them.”
“No,” I said. “But out there somewhere we’ve got six hundred warships, with a full complement of marines. Sooner or later they’ll come sailing up the Bay, and then things will be easier. Then we’ll have a c
hance. Meanwhile, we hold the fort. All right?”
He nodded. “No more trouble,” he said. “I promise.”
“Good enough for me.” And I meant it. In the course of a long (feels that way, anyhow) and eventful life, I’ve learned that nothing encourages good faith, loyalty and a desire to work tirelessly for the common good like blind terror. If he was scared enough, who knows?
22
Unless you’ve spent your entire life in a cave under a mountain somewhere, you know all about the volcano that buried the mighty city of Perennis under a million tons of ash in about five minutes, roughly a thousand years ago. What you may not know is that Eugenes IV, the scholar-emperor and philosopher-king who lost half the eastern provinces and presided over plague and famine, and is therefore referred to in the histories as The Wise, sent three regiments of Guards to the site of Perennis to dig it all up. Which they duly did; it took three years and cost more than the Fifth Fleet, or enough corn to feed two provinces, but they managed it, in spite of Eugenes insisting that they remove the hardened ash with trowels and little brushes, to avoid damaging the remains.
About a hundred years before my time, of course, but I read the official report, which ended up in the Engineers’ archive, presumably because the project involved digging. What they found was weird enough to jangle the brains of the career Guards officer who wrote it all up; you can tell how deeply it got to him by the way his style deteriorates, from textbook military reportage to barely coherent ramblings. It takes something special to do that.
What they found was human shapes; not bodies, but a sort of eggshell of hardened ash enclosing where the body had once been—a bit like the lost-wax process the bronze-casters use. One smart tap and the outer shell crumbles away and there’s nothing inside, flesh and bone having long since rotted and seeped away through the porous shell. There was no chance of making out fine detail, faces and so on, because all of that information would’ve been on the inside of the shell. Instead, what remained was a sort of generic human shape; Everyman, if you like, frozen in a few minutes of crucial action, going about his supremely ordinary life just as the world exploded around him.
