by K. J. Parker
Calojan frowned. “The Great King,” he repeated.
“We have heard so much about him,” the spokesman replied eagerly. “His great power, his noble bearing, his generosity to those who serve him well. We will fight to the death to defend his people against the Empire.”
Calojan counted to five under his breath, then said, “We’re the Empire.”
“You?”
“That’s right. We wiped out the Sashan a few months ago. The Great King is dead.”
The spokesman looked at him warily. “It would be an even greater honour,” he said, “to serve the illustrious emperor. We have heard such wonderful things about him. In our country, we think he must be like a god.”
Calojan sighed. “I’ll tell him you said that,” he said. “He’s called Sechimer, by the way.”
“Sechimer.” The spokesman repeated it carefully. “We will serve him well.”
They came, it turned out, from the far north-east, where they’d been pushed out of their ancestral homeland by a race of wandering horsemen called the Goida. They’d moved to the foothills of some mountains Calojan had never heard of, but the land was poor there, not nearly good enough to support the whole nation. There had been a brief, nasty civil war, and these men were the losing side. It wasn’t the best recommendation—fought two, lost two—but they were good fighters; they’d probably have smashed the Imperials if they hadn’t had the bad luck to come up against a lunatic prepared to back his own cleverness against certain death. A thousand trachy a month sounded like unimaginable wealth to them; later, Calojan found out that they didn’t use money back home, and a thousand of anything had to be much, much better than nothing at all. The spokesman’s name was Ohtar; it meant “little cat”, for what that was worth. Calojan appointed him commander-in-chief of his unit, and sent to the City for a suit of shiny armour.
“Aimeric doesn’t like you very much,” she said.
Teudel grinned and wriggled onto his back. “Hardly surprising,” he said. “I’m sleeping with the girl he loves, who foisted me onto him even though I’m a convicted criminal. You keep telling him I’m essential for the grand plan but he’s yet to see any real evidence of it. That too is hardly surprising, since all I’ve done since I’ve been here is—”
Orsella put her finger on his lower lip. “Learn,” she said. “And you’re coming on really well. Didn’t I say you’d be a natural?”
Teudel lifted his right hand and held it out. “I’m not sure I want to be,” he said. “Look at it, will you? It’s so cramped and sore I can barely make a fist. I used to be able to do fine detail with that hand.”
“Better yours than mine,” she replied with a sweet smile. “It’ll heal, you’ll see.”
Teudel wasn’t so sure about that. He’d spent a week rubbing down old parchment with brick dust, to scour the writing off five hundred year old property deeds and household accounts. It had occurred to him that parchment was just a form of skin, and so was his hand. What scoured one was inevitably bound to scour the other. The worst part of it was probably the flakes of old ink, which lodged in the cracks in his skin and stung mercilessly. He dreaded to think what horrible noxious substances were in ancient ink. “A whole week, and all I’ve done is two sheets. How many are you going to need?”
She shrugged. “A dozen.”
“My God.”
“It’s easier once you’ve got the hang of it.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“That’s fine, then. You can go back to forging coins and they’ll catch you and stick your head up on a pole. Assuming,” she added pleasantly, “they can find a pole strong enough to bear the weight of something that big. Do try not to be so ungrateful, Teu. When I rescued you, you were one step away from sleeping in hedgerows.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just feel a bit useless, that’s all. Also, my hands hurt.”
“Poor darling. Let mummy lick them better.”
Some time later, Orsella said, “I think it’s high time Sechimer got married. Don’t you?”
Teudel was just drifting off to sleep. “I suppose so. None of my business, of course.”
“He’s the emperor. It’s his duty to ensure the succession. What the empire needs most right now is stability, or it’ll never get a chance to rebuild on a solid foundation. The economy—”
“Orsella. What are you going on about?”
“Sechimer has to marry,” she said, propping herself up on one elbow. “The only question is, who?”
Teudel wrenched his head round to look at her. “Now just a minute,” he said. “You’re not suggesting—”
She smiled at him. “Not me, silly. Not that I wouldn’t make a perfectly divine empress, but I suspect it’d be more trouble than it’s worth to arrange. So we’ll have to make do with second best.”
Teudel could feel one of those headaches coming on. “Orsella,” he said. “faking coins and old manuscripts is one thing. I really don’t think we can forge a queen.”
She smiled at him, and for a moment he’d have agreed to anything. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
He stood in front of the blackened ruin of the barn and looked towards where he knew the well must be, hidden under a waist-high growth of nettles. He wanted to ask if anyone had thought to bury the bodies; but asking would constitute a level of involvement for which he wasn’t quite sure he was ready. There’s that story, where the prince is abducted by the Queen of the Dead, and she lays out a banquet, all his favourite things to eat and drink, and he’s so hungry and thirsty; but one mouthful of anything would mean he’d never be able to go back. Lately a little voice in his head had kept urging him, never accept. He wasn’t sure if it was particularly good advice, but he’d been following it anyway.
“I want all this cleared away,” he said. “Level it off flat and plant trees or something. We’ll build the new hall over there, where the pear orchard—”
He tailed off. His father had felled the pear orchard twenty-seven years ago.
“Over there,” Cari said. “Right, we’ll do that. It’s a good location, as a matter of fact. Good communications with all four districts.”
“That’s why I chose it,” Raffen replied. He’d chosen it simply because he didn’t think it was fair to build his new house on someone else’s land. “Tell Sighvat I’ll pay for it. You’ll need a jury of seven neighbours to decide a fair price. That’s how it’s always been done around here.”
Cari knew that, of course. “Are you absolutely sure about Sighvat?” he said. “In your shoes—”
Raffen laughed. “Private joke,” he explained. “And yes, I have no quarrel with Sighvat. I want everybody to know that. Nothing bad is going to happen to him, is that clear?”
The seven neighbours weren’t told who the purchaser was, in case it clouded their judgement. In the event, Raffen insisted on paying four marks more than the price they decided on. Anything less, he said, would be a slight on his late father’s husbandry.
It took a hundred and twenty men six days to build the house; forty-one cartloads of lumber, nine cartloads each of clay and cow-dung just to lay the floor, another six of each to make daub for the walls; an acre of turf for the roof. Eighty men in heavy boots jumped up and down for a day to get the floor compacted and level. They brought the royal roof-boards seventy miles over the hills, packed in a ton of straw so the carvings wouldn’t get chipped or split. Regrettably, the wall-hangings from the old king’s hall had been looted during the fighting, and nobody had owned up to having them; Cari, Torcetil and Sitry lent him their own hangings while new ones were being woven. The carpenters made him tables and benches, and Eyvind of Gulsness sent him a chair; it was Mezentine, some very heavy black wood, carved in the shape of a hand—you sat on the palm, and the curled fingers made up a back and arms. Eyvind said it was hundreds of years old and had belonged to his great-grandfather, who brought it back from Permia. It was rather more comfortable than it looked. They told him the ha
ll was the biggest house ever built in the whole of the country. It was about half as long and a third as wide as the de Peguilhan factory shed. The hangings were too short, but they plugged up most of the draughts with handfuls of coarse felt.
Standing inside it for the first time, Raffen looked up and studied the roof. “There’s no chimney,” he said.
“No what?”
He realised he’d used the Imperial word without thinking. “It’s like a sort of square hollow brick column,” he said. “The smoke goes up through it, so you don’t have that thick blue fug eighteen inches over the top of your head.”
They looked at him as if he was mad. Eventually, Sitry said, “That’s silly. Every time it rains, you’d get a great big puddle on the floor.”
Fair point. He tried to remember how they’d built them in the City, but he hadn’t paid enough attention. “Not to worry,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
You could seat four hundred in the hall, and there was a private room at the back, just for him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Except for his time in the forest, he’d never slept on his own before; it seemed unfriendly, somehow. In the old house, the other one and his wife had had a curtain they could pull across, but they rarely bothered with it.
“Talking of which,” Sitry said briskly, “you’ll need to get married again. The sooner you produce an heir, the quicker things’ll settle down.”
He looked at her. “Fine,” he said. “You’re not married, are you?”
“Me? You know I’m not. What’s that got to do with anything?”
After a brief discussion, they decided to combine the wedding with the coronation; it would save people having to make two journeys, and cut down on the expense. Then she looked sideways at him and said, “Are you sure?”
“I think so. How about you?”
“Well.” She hesitated. “My sister never had any complaints, so I guess not. But shouldn’t you think about it some more? It’s a big step.”
He smiled at her. “I’m counting on picking it up as I go along. I’m quite good at that.”
Cari and the new Court agreed that it was a sensible thing to do; it’d save making new alliances, which might offend disappointed candidates, and since Sitry was theoretically now sixth in line to succeed if anything happened to the king, it forestalled the risk of someone else marrying her to support a claim of his own. Dynastically speaking—
“Yes,” Raffen said, “thank you, I take it we’re all agreed.” He looked down the table at them. They were watching him as though he was a falling tree; would he land on them, or simply crash in a tangled mess of broken branches? “Let’s move on.”
Gulbrand of Brendale (his third cousin; heard of him, never met him before; tall man with long grey hair and a button nose) stood up and said, “We’d like to ask you a bit about the City and the empire. So many of our people have been going there lately. Are they doing well?”
Raffen nodded to him to sit down. “Well,” he said, “it’s an extraordinary place. Imagine a triangle jutting out into the sea. On the land side, they’ve got walls a hundred and fifty feet high and wide enough that two carts can pass comfortably on the top walkway. There are square towers at intervals along the wall, so close together that a sentry can throw an apple underarm to his friend on the next tower along. On each tower there’s a machine that can hurl a rock so big that it takes two men to lift it; I saw them doing target practice with these things, and they can shoot over two hundred yards, and they’ve got white posts set out in the plain below to mark the various distances. The sea walls aren’t quite so tall and thick, but they’ve got just as many towers and machines. You couldn’t get in close with a ship, you’d be sunk. So long as they control the sea, they can’t be starved out, and there are wells and great big cisterns, so they’ll never run short of water. They say that the City’s been there for more than a thousand years, it’s been attacked seventy-three times and never been taken by storm.”
He watched them as he spoke. I was right, he decided; the thought had crossed their minds. “What about the people?” Eyvind asked. “Are they all as rich as people say?”
“Yes, by and large,” Raffen replied. “Of course, if you went up to someone in the street and asked him, are you rich or poor, he’d groan and pull a face and say how desperately poor he is, what with the war and the taxes and foreigners coming in and taking all the jobs. But at least three-quarters of the families have a house all to themselves; three rooms, a table and three or four chairs, a couple of beds, pewter cups and plates. They eat bread twice a day, porridge and soup and vegetables in the evening—not much meat, but a lot of fish, which is so cheap the rich won’t touch it. Everybody’s got two coats and two pairs of shoes, most of the women and some of the men wear jewellery, even if it’s only bronze. The majority of the men can read and write, a lot of the women too. I should say that most of the people in the City live better than you chieftains do, even the ones who say they’re so poor. And if anyone’s starving hungry, they can stand outside one of the temples on the day when they go to prayers, and the priests hand out bread and dried beans, though it’s surprising how few people turn up to take any. They’re too proud, apparently. If you take the priests’ food, it means you’re nobody and your neighbours look down on you. If you walk down the street and look in through the windows of the houses, you’ll see brass lamps and wicker baskets for keeping the charcoal in, and nearly every house has got a little painting hanging on the wall, the Ascent of the Invincible Sun or something like that, in a brass frame. The houses all have strong doors with locks on, because the whole City is full of thieves. Oh, and they make their roofs with baked clay tiles, not turf or thatch.”
“You’re joking,” someone said.
“It’s the law,” Raffen replied. “They’re terrified of fire, which is understandable, since all the houses are packed in so close together. Every ten years or so there’s the most horrific fire and half the City burns down, and then they rebuild it.”
“What do they all do for a living?” asked Gunlaug of Scarpness. “Where do they grow their crops and keep their livestock?”
“They don’t,” Raffen said with a smile. “I guess you could say they’re all craftsmen, except that they don’t have workshops of their own. Nearly everyone works for someone else, in great big sheds and buildings bigger than this hall. They get paid in copper money, and they buy food in the markets—the women go there nearly every day. Nobody keeps cows or sheep, there’s a few chickens and in some streets they get together and raise a couple of pigs; nobody grows anything, except for the very rich, who have tiny little orchards behind their houses. There’s no room, you see. It’s a huge place and there are some enormous buildings, but mostly everything’s very, very small.”
“They hold a market every day?” Sitry said.
“There’s at least a dozen big paved yards,” Raffen told her, “one in each main district. Hundreds of stalls in each one. Not just food, either. Clothes, tools, furniture, crockery, anything you like. No weapons, but pretty much everything else.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Einar said. “What do they need all those things for?”
Raffen laughed. “If you’d been there, you wouldn’t need to ask. Owning things is how they keep score. We do it by our reputations, what people think of us; honour and shame, if you want to put it like that. In the City, you are what you own. I guess that’s why they need so many laws, and why they aren’t allowed to have weapons.”
Einar said, “They what?”
“Strictly forbidden,” Raffen said, “though it doesn’t quite work. The rich have fine swords hanging on the wall and the very poor all carry knives, and practically every day there’s a murder somewhere.”
“Hang on,” Cari said. “I thought they had the best army in the world. How did they beat the Sashan if they’re unarmed?”
“There are full-time soldiers,” Raffen said, “and in an emergency they round up people from the countryside
and arm them. But the soldiers who won the war for them were mercenaries, foreigners. Horse people, from far away in the east.” He smiled. “The City people don’t fight.”
“That’s insane,” Gunlaug said. “You mean to say that if an enemy came right up to the walls, all the men in the City would stay at home and not do anything?”
Raffen nodded. “It’s happened scores of times in the past,” he said, “and yes, they stay indoors and leave defending the walls to the paid men and the foreigners. Don’t look so surprised,” he added, as Gunlaug made a despairing gesture, “that’s how their minds work. They believe in specialists, you see. Every man can do just the one thing; you’re a forge-hand or a foundryman or a woodworker in a factory, or you’re a porter or a clerk for a merchant, or you work on a market stall, or you’re a bricklayer or a stonemason or a weaver. That’s all you do. More than that, you only do one very small part of a job. You roll out thin iron bars in a great big mill in a half-acre shed, and someone else cuts the bars into short lengths, and someone else bends them into chain-links, and someone else joins the links together and welds them shut. Like I said, everything in the City is very big and very, very small. So, when it comes to fighting, they have specialist fighters. The stonemasons don’t fight and the soldiers don’t cut stone into blocks. I think,” he went on, “that’s why our people find it so hard to understand it there. You see, in the City, it’s absolutely essential to know who you are, and what your place is. We don’t, of course. We’re farmers mostly, but any one of us can do a bit of carpentry or a bit of smithing, or build a wall or put up a house, or make a pair of shoes. Of course, the things they make are truly wonderful, much better than anything we can do; or else they can make you ten thousand of something, all of them practically identical, and dirt cheap, of course, compared to what it’d cost you here.” He smiled. “I have to say, I didn’t do too badly, mostly because while I was there I was sort of nobody, in my own head, which meant I could be anyone I liked. If they said, we need a foundryman, I was a foundryman. But most of our people feel so cramped, if you know what I mean. It’s like you’ve got the full use of all your limbs, but you’re only allowed to move one finger. Also, the City people don’t like us. They think we’re savages, and they’re afraid of us because we’re happy living in sheds and getting paid far less than they are for doing the same job. And we don’t fit together like they do.”
