by K. J. Parker
I made a show of orienting myself, though of course the map hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know. “So right now we’re standing on the grey.”
He nodded. “One big solid blob of it,” he said.
“Which they’ll be running into,” I said, “any minute now. That’ll spoil their day, for sure.”
I think he may have guessed that his map hadn’t come as a complete surprise. “That’s why you’re not worried,” he said.
“I admit, I knew that lot was there.”
He gave me the might-have-told-me look, then prodded the map again. “What I can’t make out,” he said, “is what this line here means.”
“Oh, that.”
28
Some people have a talent for treachery. I’m not one of them, which surprises me, given how dishonest I fundamentally am. I think nothing of cheating, stealing, forgery, lies and deception. As I think I’ve already pointed out, I owed my promotion in the Imperial service almost entirely to my gift for getting hold of stores and supplies by any means necessary. Let’s not beat about the bush: I’m as crooked as a mountain path. But treachery, no. I draw the line. Loyalty matters to me.
Which raises the question: loyal, but who to?
My emperor, my city, my people or my friend? What a choice to have to make.
The emperor was a vegetable; to all intents and purposes, practically speaking, I was the emperor. That is, I had his Seal. So we can forget about him, for now.
My city; not mine at all. There are substantial parts of it which I’m not allowed to go to; no milkfaces allowed. There are temples I can’t go in, parks I can’t enter, drinking fountains that would be polluted by the touch of my lips. I wasn’t born here, and I’m not allowed to own a house or any real estate.
My people. My people are the Alauz, and if the truth be told I can barely remember them. Redefine people, therefore. My people are the Corps of Engineers and a few select friends, most of them blueskins. Or my people are those I have most in common with: the excluded, the oppressed, the have-nots and the not-allowed-to-haves, the worms of the earth (diggers, as Artavasdus pointed out, of exceptionally fine tunnels). But the Blues and the Greens resent me because I won’t let them rip each other to shreds, and, besides, they don’t care much for milkfaces either. Which leaves the other earthworms, such as the ones fifty feet under the soles of my boots, right now hacking into a massive ridge of sandstone with tools and resources I didn’t have.
My friend. Well. That’s my business.
“That,” I told him, “is the River Tace.”
“The what?”
“The River Tace. It’s all right, you won’t have heard of it. It’s, what’s the word, subterranean. It rises in the mountains on the east coast, runs directly through the middle of the hill under Hill Street, down across here, look, and eventually drains into Lake Patera, away down there somewhere. A hundred years or so back, it ate through all this clay here, flooded one of the subsidiary drains and undermined a large chunk of this part of town. The only thing holding it back, in fact, is that big lump of sandstone we’re standing on. If it wasn’t for that—”
He stared at me, then burst out laughing. I didn’t laugh with him.
I saw it all happen, in the bowls of water.
First, a frantic shuddering, which I could feel through my boots, and water actually slopped out of the bowls onto the ground. Then steady rippling, all the way from Key Street to Porters Yard. Then nothing. Still, flat, motionless. All over.
If you’re obliged to do something unpleasant, such as betray your people and your friend, you might as well get any collateral benefits that happen to be going while you’re at it. So; when Ogus’s men broke through the sandstone and unleashed the river, and it flooded their sap and drowned them all in probably less than a minute, the following good things came about.
One, I’d killed off my enemy’s best sappers—skilled men, rare as hens’ teeth among the less favoured races, because the Robur don’t teach savages key skills like deep-level mining. The only way he’d be able to take the City would be by undermining the walls, for which he’d need trained, experienced miners, which he no longer had. No doubt he’d be able to replace them, but not quickly.
Two, an unlimited supply of fresh water, previously inaccessible because it was too far down, was now ours for the well-sinking. I’d known practically from the moment I took command that when, not if, the enemy broke down the aqueduct, we’d be in desperate trouble unless an alternative could be found. The Tace would do admirably, except that there was this impenetrable mass of sandstone in the way. To clear solid rock underground you need skills and equipment that we hadn’t got. Wasn’t it lucky that Ogus had both.
Goes to show, doesn’t it, how clever I am—and how worthless. Oh, and let’s not forget stupid. Nothing had changed. There were still a hundred and nineteen thousand enemy soldiers outside the wall; they wouldn’t be digging their way in any time soon, but inevitably they would come, and they would win, and we would all die. I’d achieved precisely nothing. That’s me all over.
“Right,” I said, “there’s nothing more for us here. Pack up all the crockery, I’m going back to the Palace.”
Genseric looked at me. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What just happened?”
I looked at him, as if at a mirror. “Put it somewhere safe,” I told him, “we’ll be needing it again.”
I was right about one thing. Next morning, all the pumps and fountains in the City ran dry. The enemy had cut the aqueduct. Panic.
Fortunately, the Corps of Engineers was on hand to save the day. Miraculously, the colonel of the regiment happened to have by him a map of the City showing where and how deep to sink wells; no trial boreholes or fooling about with hazel twigs, probably just as well since I can’t ever remember seeing a hazel tree anywhere inside the walls. Eighteen hours after the pumps ran dry, the first bucket of water was winched up out of a well in Monksgate. It was an offputting sort of brown colour, but I gather they’re used to that in Poor Town.
Goes without saying, wells in that part of the City weren’t much use to respectable people. So it was handy that I’d recently made good use of an idle hour or so figuring out the shortest route for a pipe to connect up the new water to the main system, using the existing pumping stations. Took three days, during which time the honest citizens of Upper Town had to collect their water in jugs from bowsers and water carts. They took it in good part, even though they (or, rather, their servants) had to queue up in the midday heat. Look at us doing our bit, they said to each other, we’re all in this together, and you don’t smell too bad if you splash on plenty of scent.
Complicated feelings of guilt on my part. I’ve found over the years that I don’t brood nearly so much if I’m occupied—not paperwork or supervising or marching around the place giving orders, but actually doing something with my hands—so I joined the work detail digging the trench for the new pipe. Nico didn’t approve but Faustinus said that, actually, it was a good idea, leading by example, not afraid to get his hands dirty, all that; I tried to put that out of my mind in case it ruined the whole thing for me. I never was much of a one for digging, but someone had to cut and fit the timbers to prop up the sides. It was nice to find I could still saw a straight line and cut a mortice square by eye. Needless to say it came on to rain, and my clothes and boots got caked with mud. Somehow the miracle of water isn’t quite so miraculous when you’re standing up to your ankles in it, and it’s running down the back of your neck.
We hit a few snags, needless to say. The City’s been there a long time, and you never quite know what you’ll run into when you start digging. At one point, we came up against stonework, some old building or other; marble, so it must’ve been quite grand in its day: they haven’t built here in marble for six hundred years. But the sledgehammers dealt with all that quickly enough. Later I found out that we’d stumbled across the long-lost tomb of the First Emperor. It was supposed to be he
aped up knee-deep in golden chalices, but we didn’t find anything like that. My guess is, scholars and antiquaries from Poor Town had been there and discovered the site some time ago, but for some reason neglected to publish their results.
By the time we connected up with the main pipe we were worn out and filthy. The sun had come out, caking the mud into the cloth, and, for once in my life, a casual observer might have mistaken me for a Robur. The hell with the dignity of labour, I thought. Nobody was watching, so I sloped off.
Victory Park—you probably know it as Bakers’ Fields—is one of my favourite places in the City. Not many people go there during the day (don’t go there at night, whatever you do) and you can wander along the avenues of poplars and almost forget you’re in the heart of the capital of the world. I sat down on a stone block left over from some old building and tried to make sense of what I’d done, but it was all too confusing. I tried not to think of the poor devils—milkfaces—who’d been down there in the sap when the water broke through. It would’ve been quick; nobody can outrun a torrent of angry water, inside a tube, fifty feet under the ground. They’d have been scrambling, tripping, shoving and clawing at each other, but not for very long. We used to use the same method to deal with rats under the haybarn; the lions of the Earth against the worms.
I looked at my hands; they were caked with mud, practically black. For some reason, that made me laugh out loud—if you can’t beat them, and all that. But it was wrong of me to presume to an honour I could never achieve, so I wandered over to the fountain. It wasn’t running, which puzzled me, until I remembered: no water, not until someone pulls up the manhole, climbs down into a hole, primes the fountain with a dozen or so strokes of the pump. So I did that; and, behold, water.
It’s pretty stuff, and useful as well. I stood and watched it, tumbling and frothing. It can kill you, but there’s no living without it. Ambiguous, you see, like pretty much bloody everything.
I remembered why I was there, and set to washing the mud off my face and hands. When I’d done that, I realised how thirsty I was, so I cupped my hands for a drink. At which point, a Parks and Gardens man came up. He wouldn’t have recognised me, all scruffy and horrible.
“You,” he said. “Yes, you. What do you think you’re doing? Can’t you read?”
He was pointing. There was a sign, a brass plate with white lettering; Robur only.
I opened my hands and let the water drop through them as though it was burning me.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I promise, it won’t happen again.”
29
“Haven’t seen you for a few days,” she said.
She was looking better; different, but better. Something like that’s bound to change you, even if everything still works the way it’s supposed to. Henceforth her face would always be thinner, her chin narrower, her eyes deeper in her head. She didn’t look quite so much like her mother any more.
“Been busy,” I said.
“Well?” She looked round, lowered her voice. “When’s it going to happen?”
“Already has,” I told her.
She listened, without interrupting. Then, “You idiot,” she said.
I shrugged. I wasn’t in the mood.
“You bloody fool. What in God’s name possessed you? Of all the stupid, thoughtless, selfish things to do—”
“Selfish.”
“Too bloody right, selfish. You put your stupid morality ahead of saving my life. And the others, your friends. And it’s all pointless. You said so yourself.”
“Maybe,” I said mildly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I reckon I’ve improved our chances considerably,” I said. “We’ve now got water, a secure supply, as much as we need. I killed God knows how many of their engineers, so they won’t be in a position to start sapping for quite some time. So, not quite such a foregone conclusion as it might have been.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “You’ve just put it off, that’s all. And you’ve pissed off your friend, so bang goes any chance of him telling his people to let us alone when the City falls. How could you do something like that? Don’t you give a damn about anyone except yourself?”
30
“You’ve got to come right now.”
I was getting sick of hearing that, ten or twenty times a day. But there was always the chance that it might really be something important, so I went. “This had better be good,” I said.
The clerk looked at me. “It’s a ship,” he said.
Running isn’t my thing, to be honest with you, though I imagine it could be if I was ever in a battle. But a ship—“Wait for me,” I heard the clerk wailing behind me. Screw him, I thought. I ran.
Sure enough: an actual ship. It had been a long time since we’d seen one of those. It looked very strange and lonely out there on the North Quay, half a mile long, poking aggressively out into the Bay like a pointing finger.
I don’t know spit about ships, but the harbourmaster told me it was a cog: a round, podgy sort of a ship, like half a walnut shell, with a single tall mast. “Not a warship,” he explained, “a trader. This quay used to be crammed with them.”
The crew were standing about on the quay, surrounded by Watch. I pushed my way through. “Who’s in charge?” I said.
One man, no different from the rest, raised his hand. I gave him my big smile and a handshake. “Who the hell are you?” I asked. “And how did you get here?”
His name was Teldo, and he was from the island republic of Selroq, about twenty miles offshore from the Echmen border. The Selroq people aren’t Echmen; they’re too dark for milkfaces and too pale for Robur and nobody knows where they came from originally or how they ended up where they are now; nobody cares much, either. Their function in the great scheme of things is to be neutral, so that when the Robur and the Echmen are at war, which is nearly all the time, there’s a safe, legal conduit for Echmen silks, copper and spices to be exchanged for Robur wine, olive oil, iron and dried stockfish. Selroq is tiny and nothing grows there; I believe there’s one freshwater well on the island, which is plenty because everybody drinks wine. The whole island is covered with houses, shipyards and warehouses. Under normal circumstances we see a lot of the Selroquois, though we know so little about them. They bring us nice things we couldn’t otherwise get, and they keep themselves to themselves. Whether a Selroq would be allowed to drink from the fountain in Victory Park is a moot point. I don’t suppose one has ever tried. He’d have more sense.
“We didn’t plan on coming here,” Teldo said, wiping his lips with his sleeve. I poured him another drink. “The blockade, you see. Nobody’s been able to get past it for weeks.”
“There’s a blockade,” I said. “Well, we guessed it was something like that.”
“There was a blockade,” Teldo said. “But we got caught out in a freak storm out of the north-east, which blew us right down here—we were headed for Psammetica—and by the time we’d got control of the ship, we could see the Five Fingers. We were terrified.”
The Five Fingers are a bunch of rocks about ten miles outside the Bay. You can’t see them from here, because the south headland is in the way. “Go on.”
“That’s where the blockade’s supposed to be,” he said. “Forty Sherden galleasses, they’ve been stopping and sinking every merchantman that’s tried to get in here. But they weren’t there.”
I frowned. “You mean you managed to slip past them.”
He shook his head. “They weren’t there. I don’t know if the storm scattered them, or they’ve been recalled, or someone came and chased them away. It’s not a case of slipping past them, if they’d been there it couldn’t be done. Right now, for the time being at least, there is no blockade. Anybody who wants to can come and go as they please.”
Artavasdus, who was duty officer, had given express orders to keep the arrival of the ship deathly quiet. In this town, not a hope. About an hour after I got there, the docks were crowded so you c
ouldn’t move; men and women and kids and handcarts. Artavasdus shut the gates and put a double cordon of Parks and Gardens men round them; a bit of a nuisance, because although they did a bang-up job of keeping people from getting in, it meant I couldn’t get out. We made an announcement; there is no ship, go home. The crowd started to drift away around sunset.
The ship was fully laden, a hundred and twenty tons of cargo; bales of silk, barrels of cinnamon, pepper and nutmeg, crates of distilled essence of rosewater, exquisite pale blue eggshell-thin porcelain, jasmine tea, boxes and boxes of chessboards and ivory-backed mirrors and the world-famous and justly celebrated Echmen pornographic wall-hangings. Would you care to make me an offer for the lot, Teldo asked. No, I said. We don’t want it. What we want is wheat, dried fish, bacon, cooking oil, lamp oil, hemp rope and arrows. Sorry, haven’t got anything like that.
“Fine,” I said. “Go away and get some, and I guarantee I’ll make you rich. Same goes for all your friends and relations. It’s the chance of a lifetime.”
“But suppose the Sherden come back.”
“Quite,” I said. “If I were you, I’d go now. How soon can you go home, load up and get back here?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“I quite understand,” I said. “Your choice. But in that case, I’ll impound your ship.”
“You can’t do that.”
Which made me want to laugh. You can’t do that, it can’t be done. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t like it myself. But compared to some of the truly appalling things I’ve done lately, stealing your ship barely registers.”
I’d lost a friend. Story of my life. “In that case,” he said, “we’ll do as you say. We can be back here in five days, if we’re lucky with the wind.”
“Actually,” I said, “you won’t be going. You’ll be staying here. That way, I can be sure your shipmates will do what you’ve just agreed to. They will, won’t they?”
