Savages

by K. J. Parker

  Rather more systematically than the last time, he started opening doors. The first six he tried had no windows at all. The next two had windows, but they were firmly shuttered and bolted, the bolts secured by massive, crude antique padlocks, so rusted that they’d probably never open again. Three more without windows; all store-rooms for gold and silver plate. He’d heard that the Studium had voluntarily handed over its reserves of accumulated wealth to be cut up and minted into coin; maybe not quite all of it. The next room was another windowless store, this one so densely crammed with swords, shields, spears and helmets that he had trouble getting the door to close again. The next one—

  Somebody hit him. His head swam, his knees started to fold and he nearly threw up. He wasn’t sure where the blow had landed, too dizzy. He saw a blurred shape in front of him, one fuzzy arm drawn back. Without any real idea of what he was doing, he aimed himself at the shape and lunged forward. He crashed into something, and then he was on the floor; he was doing something, but he wasn’t sure what. Hands were clamped on his wrists, trying to pull them apart. He realised he’d got his own hands around a man’s throat and was causing him considerable distress. He nearly let go, then remembered that this was probably the man who’d hit him; if he let go now, it might not be safe. The man was making a horrible rasping, bubbling noise. He couldn’t make up his mind what to do. Then he noticed that the man’s eyes were bulging alarmingly, as if they were about to pop out of his head; that scared him, and he let go and shuffled backwards on his bottom towards the door.

  The man wasn’t moving; he was trying to breathe in, but finding it very difficult. He was making a noise like a cross-cut saw in seasoned wood. Raffen stayed where he was, trying to decide whether he should help him or finish him off. Slowly, the noise grew less harsh and the man started to breathe more normally. Well, Raffen thought, he shouldn’t have hit me, should he?

  On the floor, he saw three broad gold dishes, but this room wasn’t a store; it was empty apart from half a dozen wooden buckets and a stack of brooms. It also had a window, with a thin filigree of silver light between frame and sash. He tried to get up; his legs ached horribly, but he made it.

  He edged across to the man, stood over him and said, “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Actually, the dishes answered that question. He nudged one with his toe. It clattered as it scraped across the floor. “Here,” he said, reaching out a hand. “Let me help you up. I was just leaving.”

  The man gave him a foul look, grabbed his hand and hauled himself upright; he looked down at the plates, but Raffen put his foot on the nearest one (I’m not a thief, someone said once). The man hesitated, but then his legs started to give way. Raffen grabbed him and they both swayed together for a moment, until Raffen got his balance back and pulled them both up straight again. “You’d better go,” he said.

  The man looked at him, feeling behind him with his hands for the window. Raffen reached past him and lifted it. The man twisted from the waist, stuck his upper half through the window, then sort of fell backwards. Raffen counted to ten, to let him get clear, then scrambled through the window, letting it slam shut behind him. Nobody in the alley, which was lucky. Is everyone in this city a thief, he wondered. It must be a stressful place to live.

  Aimeric de Peguilhan, he remembered, had offered him a job. He shrugged, looked back at the window just in case, and started to walk.

  Aimeric de Peguilhan to Orsella Cantacusena, greetings.

  Well, here I am, back in the old country again. Sorry not to have written earlier. Actually, things have been rather strange for me since I saw you last. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you.

  Which, I very sincerely hope, will be soon. There’s a job, right up your street. You can do it standing on your head, it pays really good money, and best of all, it’s legal. Well, sort of.

  Too good to be true, I hear you say. I guess that depends. All the above is perfectly true, but you’d have to come here, to the City—all expenses paid, of course, and you’ll travel in the Imperial diplomatic coach; fastest ride anywhere, finest coaches money can buy, stay at Imperial post houses, you’ll love it. You do the job, you get paid, that’s it. And get this; materials provided free of charge, to your specification, by the library of the Lesser Studium.

  Minor snag; you’ll need to leave now, as in right away, as in yes, you’ve got time to finish your breakfast, but no, you haven’t got time to wash up. Just grab your shoes and your hat and something to read on the coach, and go.

  Honestly, it’s all for real, guaranteed by me. Incidentally, I now work for the government. In fact, I’m one-thirteenth of the government; so, if I promise something, you can take it to the bank. And if that doesn’t make you come out of sheer raw curiosity, I don’t know what will.

  See you soon. Do please come. It’ll be fun.

  “Well?” she said, as he closed the door quietly and sat down. “Did you get it?”

  “No,” Teudel replied. He poured himself some water and drank it painfully.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean I didn’t get it. I got in there just fine through the window, like you showed me, and you’re right, the place is stuffed to bursting. Never seen so much fine metal in my life.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Teudel said wearily, “some bastard caught me.” A tapping sound startled him. He realised it was a drip of rain, from a leak in the roof. “A guard or something. He half killed me. I only just managed to get away.”

  “You clown.”

  Not the most sensitive of men, Teudel; but there was something in the way she said it that told him that their love, once so flamboyantly incandescent, had just died. “Not my fault,” he said instinctively. “I was really quiet. Besides, I’m not a thief. I’m an artist.”

  “You’ll have to go back.”

  Teudel massaged his neck. “Absolutely no chance,” he said. “Breaking and entering is a totally different discipline, and I take a pretty Mezentine view of professional demarcation. Thieves don’t strike coins, I don’t rob buildings. You can go if you like. Not me.”

  For a moment he was sure she was going to hit him. He’d never been hit by a woman before, and wasn’t quite sure what you’re supposed to do. But she made an effort, reset her voice and said, “Sorry, but you’ve got to. We promised them, one thousand solidi, in ten days. If we don’t give them what they want, they’re going to be very angry.”

  He’d always been fascinated by the female use of pronouns. We promised them. If we don’t give them what they want. He’d never met them, didn’t even know their names. Not that he wanted to. “You go,” he repeated. “Wear your waif-and-stray outfit. If you get caught, you can be a poor homeless soldier’s widow seeking sanctuary in the Temple.”

  “People know me,” she said bitterly.

  True; once seen, she was terribly hard to forget. Ah well, he thought. But I still have the use of my hands. “I’ll go back, then. Don’t wait up.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  It was still raining. He pulled his coat up round his face and bundled out into the drip from the eaves, hurried across the street and round the corner, and stood for a while under the shelter of a butcher’s awning. Farewell, he muttered under his breath, to his twenty-seven beautiful solidi (too beautiful, that was the problem), not to mention the quite superb set of dies he’d sweated blood making—his finest work to date, no question about it. Presumably she’d use them to buy off the wrath of the syndicate; a bloody good deal, from their point of view. Farewell also to his one true love, but what the hell. Plenty more sharks in the sea.

  He felt in his pocket and identified, by feel and long practice, one solidus and twenty-nine trachy. He grinned. Careless of him; he was sure he’d given her all the money, like she’d told him to, but here nevertheless was one gold coin. Never mind.

  It doesn’t do to stand too long in one place in the Tannerie
s, even in the driving rain. He shuffled down the street, keeping in close to the buildings, wishing he hadn’t lost his hat back at the Golden Spire. The question was; where next? All in all, he’d had enough of the City. Make that the Empire as a whole. For one thing, it was just too poor; you need a prosperous society with a vibrant economy for passing off false coin, plenty of places where it’s no big deal to walk in somewhere off the street and pay for something rich and rare with a fistful of solidi. It just wasn’t like that any more, what with the war and the austerity and all that; if you showed up somewhere with money, people were inclined to wonder where you’d got it from. The hell with all that.

  So. He turned down Broadgate, then left into Goosefair. The Vesani Republic; fitted all the requirements, except their medium of exchange was silver, not gold. He wasn’t sure he could be bothered with cutting dies for those huge silver cartwheels, all that scrollwork and salad, and banging out enough of the smaller denominations would be too much like hard work. Forging solidi in the Republic was out of the question; the moneychangers there had the loathsome habit of touchstoning one coin in five, because of the unfortunate prevalence of false coin due to the activities of a few dishonest men. They used gold in Mezentia, but nothing on earth would induce him to go there. The Sashan empire no longer existed, which was a nuisance. Scona? Perimadeia? Suddenly the world had got very small.

  Still, he couldn’t stay here, he realised that now. He’d have left as soon as he escaped from the ship, if it hadn’t been for running into Her again. Well out of that. The Vesani Republic it’d have to be, he decided. And why not? After all, through some official oversight he wasn’t a wanted criminal in the Republic, so that’d be one less thing to worry about. Also, he had friends there. Well, a friend. He thought of her and smiled. Sometimes, one is all you need.

  When a Great Prince of the Aram Cosseilhatz dies in battle, or afterwards of wounds sustained in combat, the clan assembles beside the nearest river; the men on one bank, the women and children on the other. On the men’s side, elaborate funeral games are staged. The events consist of the foot race, the long and high jump, throwing the hunting spear, wrestling on foot and on horseback, foot and mounted archery, fencing with sword, palache, sabre and halberd, throwing the weight, lifting the anvil, the catching game and, as a grand finale, the all-comers horse race. Prizes are awarded out of the dead man’s share of plunder from his most recent campaign, ranging from armour and weapons for the running and jumping to horses, gold and silver plate and cattle for the major events. The games take up the whole of the first day, and the evening is spent in total silence. On the second day, prisoners of war are executed, one for each year of the dead man’s life, and his most valuable personal possessions are ritually killed and thrown into the river. Then the men build a dam across the river. In the exposed riverbed they dig a pit fifteen feet deep. In this pit they lay the coffin—traditionally gold lined with silver lined with lead—and fill the rest of the space with treasures contributed by each family of the clan. Then the top of the pit is roofed over with sheet lead and heavy stone slabs. The dam is then removed, so that the river resumes its course.

  Once this ceremony has been performed, the dead man’s name is considered to be consecrated, and should not be spoken again for a hundred years; instead, he is referred to by a series of conventional periphrases; the old man, the other man, or simply he or him, said with a specific intonation. This rule is not inflexible or enforced with penalties, but a breach is regarded as boorish and reprehensible unless there’s a very good reason; even then, it’s considered polite for the offender to apologise personally to the dead man’s heir at the earliest opportunity.

  “Why?” Chauzida asked his grandmother.

  She thought for a moment before answering. “Mostly to spare your feelings,” she said. “So you won’t be reminded of him.”

  “But I wouldn’t mind that,” Chauzida replied. “He was a good man, wasn’t he?”

  “Very good. He was a good prince and a good man.”

  “So why wouldn’t I want to remember him?”

  She smiled. “Remembering him’s one thing. It’s something you do inside. Being reminded of him’s different. It might make you sad.”

  Chauzida considered that. “But when they say the other one I know exactly who they’re talking about, so it doesn’t work, does it?”

  “No,” his grandmother replied. “It doesn’t, does it?”

  “But that’s—”

  “Yes,” she said gravely. “And so are a lot of other things that people have to do. But they’ve still got to do them, all the same.”

  “Oh.” Chauzida frowned. “Can’t I change all that, now I’m the Great Prince?”

  “No.”

  He knew that tone of voice, so he took the issue no further. It didn’t affect him anyway, since he’d never called or spoken of his father by his name; it had been dad or father instead. He was sad that they’d had to bury the beautiful white folding bed, but his grandmother explained that the other one would need it to sleep on, in his pit under the river, so he decided he didn’t mind too much. Then he did as he’d been told and put the whole matter out of his mind.

  Being the Great Prince didn’t change very much, he discovered. He still had to do what people told him, and he couldn’t order them about. There were occasions when he had to sit on the uncomfortable golden saddle; sitting perfectly still for a very long time, while people talked about things he didn’t understand. It was boring, and he hated being bored, so he decided to learn about all that stuff, so he could follow the discussions. His grandmother was a woman and not allowed to know that sort of thing—he knew perfectly well that she did, more so than most of the men, but it was a sort of a secret—so he went to see his uncle Joiauz.

  He found him mending harness by the end wagon. “Uncle.”

  Joiauz was concentrating, trying to thread a needle. Concentrating made him grumpy. “What?”

  “Can you explain the stuff they talk about at council meetings?”

  Joiauz pulled that funny face of his. “Has it got to be now?”

  He knew that Uncle had trouble seeing small things these days. “Shall I thread the needle for you?”

  “What? Oh, yes, right. That’d be a great help, actually. For some reason I can’t get the stupid thing to go through.”

  So Chauzida took the needle, threaded it and handed it back. Uncle looked at him, a bit oddly. “So,” he said. “You want to know about politics.”

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  “That’s one word for it. Or you can say affairs of state, or clan business, or strategy and tactics. Really it’s all the same thing.”

  “I see,” Chauzida said. “Go on, then.”

  Joiauz thought for a moment. “I guess we’d better start with you,” he said. “Now that the old man’s gone, you’re what’s known as the Great Prince of the Aram Cosseilhatz. That’s the name of our nation. There are five nations; the Cosseilhatz, the Chantat, the no Vei, the Senhor and the Rosinholet. Just to be confusing, you talk about the first four as the Aram Cosseilhatz, the Aram Chantat, the Aram no Vei and the Aram Senhor, but the Rosinholet are just the Rosinholet. No Aram.” He paused and grinned. “Got that?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  Joiauz nodded. “Now then,” he said. “Each nation is split up into about two dozen clans. A clan is like a big family; actually, it’s hundreds of families all distantly related to each other a long way back. Each clan has a leader; he’s usually the oldest and cleverest man in the clan, though it doesn’t always work out quite like that. Anyway, when they have the meetings where you have to sit still on the golden saddle, all those old men are clan leaders. They meet together to figure out what the nation ought to do, when there’s a problem. And sometimes,” he added, “when there isn’t.”

  “Sorry. I don’t—”

  “Forget it,” Joiauz said quickly, and he knew his uncle had just made a joke, the sort he wasn’t supposed to un
derstand. “Anyhow, that’s what the meetings are for. You’ve got to be there because you’re the Great Prince, even though you’re too young to do or say anything. When you’re fifteen—”

  “That’s in two years.”

  “Quite right,” Joiauz said solemnly. “When you’re fifteen, you’ll be old enough, and then you’ll have to understand what’s going on, because you’ll be making the decisions. You’ll listen carefully to what the old men say, but you’ll have to decide. Often—make that usually—they won’t agree about what’s the right thing to do. They’re all wise, clever men, but it’s your decision that matters.”

  “Oh,” Chauzida said.

  “Yes. Until then, there’s what we call a regent. Actually, that’s me, because I’m the old man’s brother. It’s my job to do the deciding. I’m supposed to make the decisions you’d be making, if you were old enough.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither. Sorry, joke.” Joiuaz pulled his thinking face. “What it means is, I’m not supposed to do what I think is the right thing. I’ve got to pretend I’m you, only older. It’s complicated,” he added, “and in practice, it’s all about doing the thing that’ll upset the fewest people while still getting done the things that need doing.” He paused. “That bit’s quite important,” he said. “Do you want me to say it again?”

  “No thanks, I think I’ve got it.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  Chauzida took a moment to find the right words. “All the old men at the meeting are important people,” he said, “so we don’t want to upset them. But some things have got to be done, for everybody’s good. What we’ve got to do is choose the right thing and make everyone feel they’re still important and clever, even if we don’t do what they said.” He smiled. “How’s that?”

  “Not bad.” Joiauz had stopped trying to sew. He hated sewing anyway, so that was all right. “Just bear that in mind and you’ll do all right. Anyway, that’s all about you.”