The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

  Two

  As a wedding present, his father gave him one million shares in the Bank of Charity & Social Justice, and appointed him a general executive trustee. He wasn't sure what that meant. Fairly soon, he found out. It meant he had to go to work.

  Work consisted of sitting in the exchequer room. He'd been in there often enough as a child, when he'd been sent to call his father in for dinner. He quite liked it. For one thing, it was quiet, as befitted a place where serious men needed to concentrate. When you first came in, it looked dark, with only one small window, but there were lamps, candles and an open fire, even at midday in summer. One wall was covered from floor to ceiling with ledgers; on the opposite wall hung a huge silver-gilt icon of the Revelation, the tiny smoke-blackened faces of the Elect peering out from under the heavy foil like the noses of rats (Father claimed to like it, but the more likely explanation was that it had ended up there because it had nowhere else to go). Most of all there was the exchequer table itself: a solid square of oak covered with black and white mosaic tiles, like a giant chessboard, piled with heaps of brass and silver counters. He was taught how to use it to make calculations by the chief clerk, a short, elderly Jazygite eunuch by the name of Antigonus Poliorcetes, who'd been given the task of teaching him the basics of his new profession. The clerk was generally considered to be a difficult man, fussy and short-tempered, only kept on because he was indispensable. Basso rather liked him, and tried hard to be a good student. He felt he was making good progress. He quickly got the hang of the exchequer, double-entry bookkeeping, currency conversion and elementary accounting procedures. It was boring, but no more so than literature or philosophy, and unlike those two annoyances of his youth, he could see there was a point to it.

  At the end of the second week, Antigonus closed the ledger they'd been working through together, capped the inkwells, washed his hands in the rather fine silver bowl he kept specially for the purpose, dried them on a towel and said, "So, how do you think you're doing?"

  It wasn't for Basso to say, surely. "Not bad," he replied.

  "You think so." Antigonus frowned. "Let me put it this way. You have a choice. We can go through the motions, like we've been doing, and at the end of the month I can tell your father you've learned everything you need to know, and then you can get out of here back into the sunshine and go hunting or partying or whatever it is you want to do, and everybody will be happy. Or you can make a serious effort to learn what I can teach you. It's entirely up to you, but it'd be helpful if you could decide now. I have a lot of work to do, and this isn't achieving anything."

  "Oh," Basso said. "I thought I was doing quite well."

  Antigonus shook his head and smiled. "Listen," he said. "When I was five years old, soldiers came to our village. They burned down the houses, separated the men from the women and children, and marched us onto a ship. Later, they cut my bollocks off and taught me to read and write and do arithmetic, and your grandfather bought me and made me a junior clerk." He paused for a moment, looking out of the tiny window behind Basso's head. "Well, you know what they say. What you never had, you never miss. If the soldiers hadn't taken me, I'd be a goatherd. More likely, I'd be dead, because people don't live long enough to get old where I come from, so I'm not complaining. But I got here because I made an effort. Do you understand?"

  Basso nodded slowly. "And I'm not."

  "Correct." Antigonus got up, crossed the room and shook charcoal from the scuttle onto the fire. Basso was sweating; it was a warm day. "As I said, the choice is yours. Do you want to do this, or not?"

  He realised that he didn't know the answer to that question. He also knew that "I'm not sure" would be construed as "No". Later, when he reflected on how he'd come to reach his decision, he realised it was mostly because he liked Antigonus more than most of the other people he knew, though why that should be he wasn't quite sure. Maybe it was because the old man pointed out his mistakes.

  "Yes," he said.

  The next question was difficult. "Why?"

  He took a moment, then said, "Because one day I'll own the Bank, assuming Father doesn't run it into the ground first, and I'd like to know how to manage it." Fortunately, Antigonus believed him, or at any rate accepted the answer, and he wasn't called upon to show how he'd arrived at it, like in a mathematical problem.

  Things were different after that. To begin with, they were seriously, horribly worse. Why he'd ever imagined he liked the cruel, sarcastic, hectoring, petty-minded old fool he had no idea. Nothing he did was ever right. Furthermore the work, which had seemed so straightforward not so long ago, turned out to be unbelievably difficult. Everything needed thinking about, and either he didn't understand at all or else he thought he understood and was proved wrong, usually with the maximum possible humiliation. For the first time in his life, he was made painfully aware of the monstrous scope of his ignorance of the world. Everything had to be explained to him: the price of a ton of wheat, and the relation it bore to the price of a loaf of bread; how long it took a ship to sail from the City to the Periplus, and how much shipping cost per mile and per day; what ordinary people did for a living and how much money they had to spend and what they tended to spend it on; how the government worked, in theory and in practice; the difference between one-week credit, three-month credit, a mortgage and a debenture; the advantages and drawbacks of the five main types of joint-venture company; the basic elements of commercial law, and why going to law was almost always a waste of time and money; the principal exports of the Republic and its competitors; mental long division; recent trends in finance and the difference between real money and money of account--

  "Why on earth do you need to know all that stuff?" Cilia asked him, as he tried to unravel a tangle in his bootlaces. "That's clerks' stuff, surely. You're there to make major policy decisions, not waste your time on trivia."

  He tugged at the knot and made it worse. "Antigonus says--"

  "Oh, him."

  "Antigonus says I need to know everything about the business, or else I'll be at the mercy of my employees and servants," he said firmly, like a child reciting. "Also, you can't make informed decisions unless you know all the background. You need to know how the system works."

  "Fine," she said, nudging him gently out of the way so she could see in the mirror to comb her hair. "If that's what Antigonus says, then obviously that's how it's got to be. Of course, my father's managed perfectly well all these years without having to bother with all that rubbish. I suppose he's just been lucky."

  Basso grinned. "My father's never done mental arithmetic in his life and he hasn't got a clue what you'd pay for a quart of anchovies in the market," he said. "And he's nearly ruined this family more times than I care to think about. I sort of get the impression that following his example wouldn't be such a good idea."

  "Good point." There was a gentle crack, and she took the comb out of her hair and examined it. "Stupid thing's broken," she said, and he could see where three of the ivory teeth had snapped off. "Get me a proper silver one. I'm always breaking this sort."

  He looked away. Cilia was always asking for things, and he didn't have any money. So far the idea of paying him for his work hadn't been discussed; he'd tried to raise the subject with his father, who'd ignored the question, and Antigonus had just laughed. That meant he'd have to talk to Mother, or see if his sister would make him a loan out of her dress allowance. Of course, Cilia wouldn't keep breaking things if she handled them a bit more gently.

  "Another thing," she said. "I don't see why you've got to spend all day in that stupid room with that stupid old man. Surely you could at least have afternoons off."

  "It's only till I've learned the basics."

  Maybe deafness was catching, because quite often she didn't seem to hear things he said. "The whole point of being married," she said, "is not having to stay cooped up indoors all the time. So, how do I spend my days? Cooped up all the time, doing needlework. Playing chess with my halfwit maid. Reading books. F
or all the good it's done me I might as well have stayed at home."

  Maybe she hadn't really meant that. "Once I've finished my lessons with Antigonus there'll be plenty of time," he said. "And then..."

  And then. It was just as well he didn't have to finish the sentence. And then what? He wasn't quite sure about that. For some time, he'd suspected that he was falling in love with his wife (which was how it was supposed to be, after all; but he wasn't quite sure he was going about it the right way). At the same time, she was getting on his nerves. There were times, when they were apart, when all he could see was her face and body, and the urge to leave what he was doing and run to find her was almost more than he could bear. When he was with her, though, it wasn't quite the same. It was, he decided, a bit like literature. In literature--epic poems and classic drama and the like--gods and goddesses disguised themselves as mortals, and evil spirits took over people's bodies; and maybe, he rationalised, that's what had happened to her. He found it infuriatingly difficult to reconcile the way she looked with some of the things she said and did. She could be spiteful, petty-minded, incredibly insensitive. No big deal. What he found hardest to cope with was that she was boring to be with. When they were alone together and not making love (the euphemism was particularly inappropriate in this instance), he felt the way he used to feel when his least favourite relatives came to call, the restless, aching boredom that can only be kept in check by playing word games in your head, counting the tiles on the floor, imagining a game of chess, or picturing the inflicter of the boredom being torn apart by wolves. That wasn't love. He was prepared to believe that, in extreme cases, it was marriage, but only after half a century of egregious incompatibility. It's because we're both young, he told himself, immature and self-centred as a pair of drill-chucks. Also, when he tried to be objective, he found it hard to blame her. Her average day consisted of a late breakfast alone, a morning spent sewing or trying on clothes with her maid, lunch with her mother-in-law, followed by more sewing, reading, sketching, practising the lute and harp or exercising some other fatuous accomplishment held suitable for young noblewomen, concluding with family dinner at the long table, an hour sitting with the other women of the household, knowing her place, and finally bed with him, where he expected fiery passion and romantic love. He couldn't help thinking there had to be a better way for a person to live; especially for the wife and daughter of leading citizens of the Republic, and therefore one of the most privileged and fortunate women alive.

  He could see all that. Any fool could. The problem was, there wasn't anything he could do about it. If they had a house of their own, of course; or if they could run away together and live in the woods--no, she'd hate that. Spiders, for one thing. If it was just the two of them, without all the other people. He thought about that and shuddered. At least other people meant someone you could talk to.

  We'll grow out of it, he told himself. People do. Or they grow into it, the way your foot adapts if you spend twenty years wearing shoes that are three sizes too small. In any case, it would resolve itself (because if it didn't, society couldn't function), and in the mean time, at least he had his work to occupy his mind.

  Three days before the twins were born, Antigonus came in late. Instead of sitting down and reading through the morning reports in silence, he solemnly placed a small wicker basket in the centre of the exchequer table and took away the napkin that covered the contents.

  "What's this?" Basso asked.

  Antigonus looked at him gravely. "We're celebrating," he said.

  Amazing behaviour. "Celebrating what?" Basso asked. "The baby hasn't come yet, if that's what..."

  The old man lifted a large round simnel cake out of the basket and looked round for something to put it down on. "We're celebrating," he said, "the end of the war. King Moemfasia surrendered last night."

  What war? He had to think about it. "The Metanni," he said. "The dispute about the Strait of Neanousa."

  "Correct." Basso felt as though he'd just earned a bonus mark. "We now control the whole of the east coast as far as the Soter Peninsula." He paused. "Well?"

  It was as though someone had knocked a hole through into a walled-up room in the back of his mind. "Which means," Basso said, "that we can shave two days each way off the grain run to the Euoptic..."

  "Very good."

  "Which means we can undercut Ousa on bulk grain to the southern market and put them out of the game altogether..."

  "And?"

  "And," Basso chanted triumphantly, "that explains why you insisted that we buy seven thousand shares in the Asinarii shipping line, the day after they announced a massive loss and the price dropped sixty per cent..."

  "Because?"

  "Because the Asinarii bought the east coast route when it was worthless, and nobody believed we could beat Moemfasia at sea." He stopped and frowned. "But it was impossible. Well, you know what I mean. Highly unlikely. What made you think...?"

  Antigonus actually smiled. "Hint," he said. "Barrel staves."

  "Oh." The hole in the wall became a huge breach. In fact, there wasn't any wall left. "That report from our agent in Soter City about the large consignment of barrel staves that went down in a storm."

  "Excellent." The smile broadened. "And?"

  "And without seasoned barrel staves you can't make barrels, and without barrels you can't carry water, and without water, you can't keep a fleet at sea for more than a day at a time, which meant Moemfasia..."

  Antigonus nodded slowly. "Exactly so," he said. "I deduced that the King would try and find an alternative source of supply, but he would fail, because..."

  Basso laughed. "Because four months ago you ordered our man in Artouche to buy up all the seasoned planked oak he could find, which you then sold to the government at five per cent mark-up." Basso nodded furiously. "And at the time I wondered why you were going to so much trouble over a deal that barely broke even after costs."

  "Actually, we made money," Antigonus reproved him, "but you're quite right, it wasn't worth the candle as a deal for its own sake; though we did impress the War Office with our patriotism, which will stand us in good stead when the next round of supply contracts comes along."

  Basso laughed. "But actually, you won the war."

  "I suppose so." Antigonus shrugged. "I knew we would eventually, so that's beside the point. What mattered was the timing. That was what I had to control precisely."

  "Oh come on," Basso said. "You must admit, there was a bit of luck involved."

  "Not really," Antigonus replied quietly. "At the same time as I was negotiating the sale of the stave lumber to the War Office, I was corresponding with the King through the Soter City office. As long as the King thought there was a chance of getting the staves, which he knew I had, he'd leave his fleet where it was, in the bay. Naturally I had no intention of selling to him, but I was able to keep the war going until the Asinarii announced their results, at which point I broke off negotiations with the King, which left him with no alternative but to try to beat us once and for all in a major pitched battle. On my advice, your father persuaded the Senate to recall Admiral Carausius, which meant our navy was temporarily leaderless and unable to engage the enemy. At that point, the King's time ran out and he had to surrender. No," he added, wiping a penknife on his handkerchief and cutting into the cake, "luck didn't really have much to do with it. Not," he added, "that luck isn't an important factor in business. Your father, for example, has no commercially valuable qualities apart from luck; but he has a remarkably consistent record of being quite ridiculously lucky when it really matters." He balanced a slice of cake on the blade of the knife and conveyed it into Basso's hands. "So consistent, in fact, that I was prepared to accept it as valid and valuable collateral when I decided to come and work for him. I," he added solemnly, cutting another slice, "have no luck at all, just intelligence, shrewdness and a degree of intuition. You're not eating your cake."

  "Actually, I don't like simnel cake."

  "Eat
it anyway," Antigonus said, making it clear that he was giving a direct order. "In my country, there are certain occasions that must be celebrated with simnel cake. For example, the successful conclusion of an apprenticeship."

  Very slowly and quietly, Basso said: "What does that mean?"

  "Surely that's obvious," Antigonus said, with his mouth full. "It's my professional opinion that you're fit to be allowed out on your own without a wet-nurse or a keeper. If you try and cross the road, there's a better than even chance you'll make it to the other side in one piece. Given time, you could probably tie your own bootlaces. In other words, you've come a very long way in a very short time, and I'm sending you back to your father. Well done," he added, as Basso looked at him. "You passed."

  "Oh," Basso said. "What does that mean?"

  Antigonus sighed. "I was given the job of teaching you the basics of the banking trade. I consider that I have done so. I can now go back to my own office in the Exchange, which is considerably larger and warmer than this, and catch up on my own work. You," he added kindly, "stay here. This is your office now."

  Basso blinked. "My...?"

  Antigonus stood up slowly. "Well," he said, "nominally it's your father's, but if I were you I'd try and keep him out of it as much as possible. You'd be amazed how much damage a man like him can do in a relatively short time."

  "Yes," Basso said, with a slight edge of desperation to his voice, "but what am I supposed to do?"

  "Run the Bank," Antigonus said. He was loading things into the cake-basket; his silver hand-washing bowl, his inkwell, his special silver-handled penknife that nobody else was allowed to use. "Decide what you're going to do, then write it down, call a runner and send me my instructions at the Exchange, and I'll carry them out. I am, after all, your slave, your chattel, with no free will of my own." He lifted Basso's elbow off a book of mathematical tables, which he put in the basket. "I haven't done today's morning reports, they're there in the tray, same as usual. You may want to reply to the Trebonianus letter first, and you'd better chase up the Sulpicii over the seven per cent debenture stock revaluation. It's been..." He paused, as if reconsidering a rash start, then said, "Much to my surprise, it's been a pleasure. You have the makings of an intellect, Bassianus Arcadius. You'll make a ghastly hash of things for about six months, and then I predict you'll do just fine. With your permission." He opened the door and stood there, until Basso realised he was waiting to be dismissed.