The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

  Cinio was obviously doing as he'd been told, thinking about it. "If you say so," he said. "I can't say I agree, though. We've got plans for a day of national thanksgiving for your miraculous escape. Services in Temple, a procession--"

  "Go away," Basso said weakly. "You're making my head hurt."

  Naturally, the rumour spread. Within twelve hours of the attack, it was everywhere. But when Chancellor Licinius stood up in the House to announce that the First Citizen was indisposed owing to a tiresome but minor gastric complaint--

  Caelius Thraso, from the Optimate front bench, interrupted at this point. He was overjoyed, he said, to hear that the First Citizen's condition was relatively minor. He had heard a rather different version: that there had been a most deplorable, cowardly attempt on the First Citizen's life. Could the Chancellor categorically state...?

  The Chancellor most certainly could. Food poisoning, in all probability picked up from tainted shellfish the First Citizen had eaten at the reception for the Mavortine ambassador. Several other guests at the reception had reported similar symptoms. The rumours (it was the first the Chancellor had heard of them) were entirely untrue. In future, the Chancellor added, the noble gentleman might consider consulting official sources if he wanted to know the facts of a matter, rather than listening to idle bar-room chatter.

  Nobody believed a word of it, of course; not for the first twenty-four hours. After that, they still didn't quite believe it, but they lost faith with the assassination story as well. Nobody, the argument ran, could try and cover up something as big as an attempt on the life of the head of state. Furthermore, why would anybody want to? Accordingly, simple logic required that there couldn't have been one. Therefore, whatever it was that was keeping Citizen Basso from doing his job, it wasn't the running shits and it wasn't multiple stab wounds either. Various theories, more or less lurid depending on the source, floated about for a day or so. Then Basso was seen riding in his chair from his home to the House, which was taken as an indication that the story, whatever the truth of it may have been, was now over.

  Basso paid the compensation--ten thousand nomismata to the families of the guards, the bearers, the torchbearers and the dead civilians--out of his own pocket, and a further ten thousand to each of the men who'd stopped the assassin with the hunting sword from killing him. He handed the money over personally, just him and the recipient alone in a room together.

  ("How did it go?" Sentio asked him afterwards.

  "Not well," Basso replied. "They were grateful." And that was all he had to say about the matter.)

  By an extraordinary coincidence, it later emerged that two junior secretaries from the Chamber of Trade had indeed suffered food poisoning after the Mavortine reception, as a consequence of over-indulgence in marinaded cuttlefish. For a while they were eagerly courted by senior Optimate figures, who wanted to know if they'd seen the First Citizen actually eating the stuff himself. They replied that they couldn't say for sure but they imagined he would have done, since marinaded cuttlefish was a Mavortine delicacy and it'd have been impolite to refuse it. They, on the other hand, had each had four helpings, though they wouldn't be making that mistake again in a hurry. Shortly afterwards, there was a major reshuffle on the Optimate front bench; Caelius Thraso stepped down as deputy shadow chancellor, and the balance of power shifted a little towards the centre. Since support for the Optimates was at its lowest level for forty years, however, it hardly seemed to matter very much.

  Seven

  "No, I'm not just feeling lonely," Basso snapped. "And it's a matter of the utmost urgency. Go and bloody well do as you're told."

  It hadn't been his idea to hire a social secretary. But he needed someone to do it. Antigonus had flatly refused; Scaevola, from the Protocol Office, had volunteered but was useless at everything; in desperation, he'd told Sentio to find him someone. He hadn't expected a woman ("It's not right," he objected. "How can I shout at her when she does something wrong?"). But, according to Sentio, there were quite a few female clerks in Protocol these days, and they did a fine job; and really, so long as they weren't citizens, where was the harm in it?

  Melsuntha (her name was longer than that; you had to break a bit off if you were to stand any chance of saying it) turned out all right. She was thirty-one years old, free-born, a Mavortine but with only the faintest trace of an accent, and he found he could shout at her just fine. She didn't seem to notice. She just stood or sat there till he'd finished, and then went on with what she was saying. Within the first hour of their acquaintance he'd nearly fired her three times. Two months later, he'd got used to her being there. When he heard she'd caught the plague, he was surprised by the slight lurch of fear he'd felt, and the pleasure when he heard she'd recovered.

  "Fine," she said. "You want me to find you a wife. What sort of timescale did you have in mind?"

  "I told you, as soon as possible."

  She frowned. "Please be more specific. Months? Weeks? Days?"

  No use. He was going to have to explain. "My sister's blackmailing me," he said. "She's going to marry one of my worst enemies if I don't get married myself in the next couple of months. I might just possibly get away with a formal betrothal in three months and one day, but that's about all the slack I can expect her to cut me. She can be rather vindictive sometimes."

  She listened to that as if it had been the most reasonable thing in the world. "You'd better give me the criteria," she said. "I assume you want to make the best deal possible as far as political and business alliances are concerned."

  He frowned. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I suppose I ought to. After all, it's my trademark, turning disasters into opportunities."

  She looked at him. "You classify marriage as a disaster?"

  That made him laugh. "In my admittedly limited experience, yes. You know about me, do you?"

  "Everybody knows that," she said.

  They discussed criteria for a while, and she made some extremely sensible suggestions. He hadn't expected she'd be quite so well informed about politics and commerce.

  "I listen," she said. "I have excellent hearing. And people don't notice I'm in the room."

  He found that hard to believe. "Well," he said, "we've got some possibilities there, I suppose. Now there's the question of how we're going to set about it."

  "Excuse me?"

  He thought about the choice of words. "The courtship procedure," he said. "As you know, there are protocols. Unfortunately, they don't help us much. Normally, where it's a political or dynastic marriage, the negotiations are carried out between the heads of the families. But that's going to be awkward here, because I'm the head of our family, and it'd be a breach of etiquette, not to mention hideously embarrassing, for me to negotiate on my own behalf."

  She frowned. "I see," she said. "Excuse me, but that's a curious gap in the system. Surely you can't be the first head of family in history to be looking for a wife."

  "It's very rare, actually," he said. "The assumption is, a head of family's already thoroughly married. If their wives die, they're not really supposed to marry again, it messes up the existing arrangements. I imagine that was one of the reasons my sister came up with the idea; the maximum embarrassment for the minimum effort."

  She nodded. "In that case," she said, "we'll have to innovate. The simplest thing would be for me to open negotiations as your representative."

  He thought about that. "Actually," he said, "that's not a bad idea. You're completely outside the family structure, so there's no real scope for taking umbrage. Yes, all right, do that. Mind you," he added, "I wouldn't want your job."

  She didn't react to that. "I'll draft a standard letter for your approval," she said. "I expect there's a form of words in one of the books of precedents that I can adapt. Please let me know if there are more names you'd like me to add to the list."

  He felt strangely let down, as if a traumatic but exciting thing he'd been expecting to happen had been cancelled at the last moment. "Fine," he said. "Rig
ht, you get on and do that. It'll be interesting to see what reactions you'll get."

  She was gathering up her papers, putting them away in the appropriate files. "One other thing," he said.

  "Yes?"

  He frowned. "I've been calling you Melsuntha all this time. Is that actually your name?"

  She looked up. "Since you ask," she said, "no."

  "Oh."

  "It's complicated." She put the files back on the desk. "Where I come from, names serve a different purpose. They convey information."

  "Same here," he said. "I'm Bassianus Honorius Arcadius Severus; that tells you who my father and mother and paternal grandfather were, and people call me Basso for short."

  She sort-of-smiled. "That's a very simplistic way to use names," she said. "My name is Elagabil-Manzicert-Rusinholet-Melsuntha. The Melsuntha part merely tells you that I'm an unmarried woman, of good family but without a title."

  "Ah," Basso said. "Sorry," he added. "So really it's more of an adjective than a name."

  "Oh no." She shook her head. "It's a name all right, or part of one. Lotheir-Melsuntha's the heroine of one of our oldest verse dramas, and she happens to be an unmarried woman of good family but without a title. There are several other heroines of literature whose names are used in the same way. I could just as easily have been called Kerimheltha or Berineld; they'd have meant the same thing. But my name," she went on, "is Elagabil."

  "Ah." He pursed his lips. "And the other bits?"

  She smiled properly this time. "Manzicert is an obscure folk heroine associated with the region where my family originated; not where they live now, of course, but where they came from. Rusinholet is the patron goddess of the clan with whom our clan, the Gabil, have traditionally been allied. Ela signifies that my mother wasn't from the Gabil clan. Because Rusinholet comes after Manzicert, that means that we as a family no longer live where we used to. The fact that Manzicert was chosen as the regional identifier rather than one of the better-known folk heroines from our area--there are at least a dozen--tells you that our family occupies a rather junior role in the clan hierarchy. One of my people would be able to interpret the nuances quite precisely." She folded her arms. "There's rather more to it than that," she said, "but I won't bore you with the more abstruse elements. I just wanted to give you an overview."

  "I see," Basso said. "Thanks. So, what should I call you?"

  She stood up. "Melsuntha will do fine," she said. "We're both used to it by now. Is that everything for today?"

  The refusals were, for the most part, perfectly polite; she was still rather young to be thinking about marriage, or she was already as good as betrothed to someone else, or they were deeply flattered and honoured that the First Citizen should consider their daughter in that light, but perhaps the difference in ages--

  "The hell with that," Basso growled. "She's three years younger than me. You'd have thought they'd have done anything to get her off their hands."

  Melsuntha didn't seem to have heard him. "There's also a list of seventeen character flaws."

  "Hers or mine?"

  "Hers. She's frivolous, easily bored, and she bites her fingernails."

  "That's a bad habit," Basso pointed out, "not a character flaw."

  "But possibly symptomatic of a deep-seated neurosis," she replied. "Anyway, they feel she's entirely unsuitable, and therefore feel obliged to decline."

  Basso sighed. "Just as well," he said. "I remember her as a child. She used to pick the petals off flowers. I always thought that was a stupid thing to do."

  "That's all so far," Melsuntha said. "We're still waiting to hear from the Quintillii, the Metelli and the Sulpicii, though I can't say I hold out much hope. If they were at all interested--"

  "I'm not surprised," Basso said, looking away. "After all, I killed my first wife. Who the hell's going to make their daughter marry me?"

  She looked at him. "In my country," she said, "you would have incurred social stigma if you hadn't killed them."

  "Really." He looked right back at her. "Then I'm very glad I don't live there."

  He'd offended her, in so far as that was possible. He felt slightly ashamed. "Private justice is frowned on here," he said. "What I should have done is sue for a divorce, claiming her dowry as forfeit for gross misconduct, and sued my brother-in-law for seducing my wife, for which I'd have got substantial damages. But he came at me with a knife, so what could I do?"

  She didn't point out the flaw in that argument; she didn't need to, just as she wouldn't need to point out the sun on a cloudless day. "Even so," she said, "I fail to see why your unhappy past should stand in the way of a second marriage. You aren't the same man you were then."

  He raised an eyebrow at her. "How would you know?"

  "I don't believe you would act the same way were the situation to arise again."

  He frowned at her. "Congratulations," he said, "on your mastery of the subjunctive. Seems to me, the only people who know how to use it properly these days are foreigners. Also, you're talking rubbish. You don't know the first thing about me."

  She stood up to leave. "Thank you," she said, "for the compliment. I am quite proud of my competence in your language. For example, I can tell the difference in nuance between 'I believe there's nothing you can't do' and 'I believe you're capable of anything'. Both of which," she added, "are true. Good afternoon."

  After she'd gone, he smiled.

  The House, of its own motion, voted Basso the titles "Saviour of the People" and "Father of His Country", in recognition of his actions during the plague emergency. He wrote a formal letter of thanks, which was read in his absence, but politely refused to allow a service of investiture and thanksgiving in Temple. The remark attributed to him on hearing of these honours--"If I'm the father of the country, no wonder people abroad say all Vesani are bastards"--is probably apocryphal; the earliest mention of it is to be found in Sertorius' Commentaries, written seventy years after the event.

  "It bothers me, though," he said, at the end of a long and rather fraught cabinet meeting, during which tempers had frayed and been patched up two or three times. "Saviour of the people, for crying out loud. We now know that everything we did was useless."

  "True," Sentio said. "But at least you did something."

  "Something useless."

  "You did something, though," Sentio insisted. "You did a lot. People appreciate that."

  "Think of the last major dose of plague we had," Cinio pointed out. "They were dropping like flies in the streets, you couldn't get a cart up Cornmarket for the piles of dead bodies, and all First Citizen Macrianus could think about was making sure nobody came within five hundred yards of his front door. He had the army out shooting arrows at people."

  Basso shrugged. "So as long as I do things, it doesn't matter if they're a waste of time and money. That's--"

  "That's what people expect of you," Cinio said. "It helps if it doesn't actually make things worse, of course, but what counts is action. As you well know," he added. "Just as you know that you've got to be gracious about fancy titles when you're given them, or they'll say you're arrogant."

  Basso sighed. "The stupid thing is," he said, "I actually would quite like to be called something. You know, like Hanno the Great or Meo the Wise. It's fatuous and really rather pathetic, but there it is. I'd even settle for Basso the Deaf, so long as people thought of it for themselves."

  Lanio, the trade commissioner, raised an eyebrow. "You surprise me," he said. "I've always assumed the line was, 'I do what I believe is right and I don't give a damn what people think.' I've always assumed that's why you're so popular. People like that sort of attitude."

  "It cuts both ways, remember," put in Dorico, the chief agent. "Take your man Aelius, for instance. He'll be Cowshit to the end of his days, long after everyone's forgotten that a victory went with it."

  "Let's talk about something else," Basso said.

  "All right," Cinio replied. "How about the labour shortage? We still haven't d
ecided anything," he went on, raising his voice above the groans of his colleagues. "And unless we do something now--"

  "Like you were saying just now," Sentio interrupted. "Do something, even if it's pointless. The phantom of achievement, swathed in the illusion of activity."

  Cinio turned to look at him. "Yours?"

  Sentio shook his head. "Marcianus," he replied, "On Citizenship. I'd have thought you'd have recognised it."

  "I'm sorry," Cinio said, "I don't read that sort of thing."

  "You quoted from it," Sentio replied. "Last month, in the--"

  Basso cleared his throat. "Let me see if I've got this straight." They turned to look at him. "We all agree that the labour shortage caused by the plague can't be allowed to continue much longer. Cinio and Tullio and their friends want us to buy in slaves and either sell them on to businesses and private citizens at cost, or hire them out at sensible rates. Sentio, Dorico and the pump-house lobby" (Sentio frowned at this description) "object that the ratio of slaves and foreigners is already too high, and this'd tip it just a bit too far. Is that about it, or have I missed something?"

  Sentio muttered something about gross oversimplification, but Basso ignored him. "You've been on at me all day to say what I think," he said, "and I've avoided the issue, which is why we're all still here instead of where we want to be. All right. I agree with both of you."

  There was a short pause; then Dorico muttered, "That's a great help, I must say." Basso smiled at him.

  "Sentio," he said, "doesn't object to the buying-in plan per se. He's just worried about the balance. Cinio's turning a blind eye to a perfectly valid point, but I think his approach is basically sound, though I'd disagree with one aspect of it." He hesitated, as though he wasn't quite sure he wanted to continue. Then he said: "I don't think we should bring in slaves. There are far too many as it is, and I think we're laying up trouble for the future. In fact, I believe we should be looking towards getting rid of slavery altogether; but" (he had to raise his voice a little at that point) "that's another bitter argument for another long and tiresome day. I think we should recruit free labour abroad and hire it out--Cinio's plan, but with a slight tweak."