The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

"I did. And I was right." Basso scowled, and massaged the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. "The Bank lends to the Treasury, the Treasury buys war supplies, the farmers and tradesmen pay off their loans, the money goes round in a loop, and nobody ever gets to find out it isn't actually there. It's just that the timing's off by a little bit."

  "If Caecilius is a little bit late in paying, does it actually matter?"

  Basso sighed. "It shouldn't," he said. "So long as he actually does pay--which he will, because the Treasury will pay the farmers and tradesmen, eventually. What makes it a bit awkward is that Tragazes needs money now, to make good our deposits. Otherwise, he's got to report to the commission that our reserves no longer cover our exposure, and once that gets around, the markets will panic and the stock will start to slide. All quite ridiculous, of course, but that's how it works. You can make a fortune out of it if you're on the right side, but it's no fun if you're on the wrong end, like we are at the moment."

  "What can you do?"

  "Nothing I want to," Basso replied. "What I can't do is put pressure on the Treasury for any of the money we've lent them, because I'm the bloody government. So, if we need to raise money in a hurry, we'd have to go after our private customers--basically, everybody else. And if we start squeezing, that'll cause an even worse panic, and we'll wipe millions of nomismata off the value of perfectly good assets."

  "All right," Melsuntha said. "Lie to the commission."

  Basso laughed. "That's what we're doing right now," he said. "And if Antigonus was still around, we'd be fine. But Tragazes doesn't seem to get it. I practically had to sit on his head to get him to tell a little white lie. Proper grown-up lying--"

  "Get rid of him. Appoint someone else."

  Basso smiled at her. "Do you fancy being chief clerk?"

  She looked thoughtful. "Probably not," she said. "I could handle the broad sweep of policy, but not the details. I don't have the experience."

  "That's the trouble," Basso said. "Right now, the only two men in the City who know how the Bank actually works are Tragazes and me; and I just don't have the time. I'm stuck with him."

  She thought some more. "What about the twins? Haven't they been learning the business?"

  Not something that had occurred to him, and he paused for a moment to give it serious consideration. "They're not up to it," he said, "even with Tragazes advising them. They're just kids."

  "You were their age when you took over."

  "They're not me." The force behind the statement took him by surprise. "I really miss Antigonus," he said. "In my life, there've been two men I've been able to rely on, him and Aelius; I mean really rely, so I can turn my back on something and know it'll be done right, as well as I could do it or better. My fault," he added with a grin. "When I dreamed up this scheme, I was sort of assuming Antigonus would still be around. Probably I should have pulled the plug when he died. Just bad luck, really."

  "I thought you didn't believe in good and bad luck."

  That night he sat up late, even later than usual. He'd sent for the figures on the Caecilius loan. They sat on the table in front of him like a dinner going cold; the longer he left them, the more unpalatable they'd be.

  Most of all, he thought, right now I'd like to talk to my sister again, just for a few minutes; about the weather, or something that happened when we were children, Mannerist architecture or the Dulichean heresy or trends in contemporary choral music, anything at all. It did seem faintly ridiculous that the First Citizen of the Vesani Republic, richest man in the City, controller of great armies and decider of the fate of thousands, wasn't allowed to talk to his own sister about the weather. But no; she might as well be dead, except that it was worse than that.

  (Come on, Basso, you're a clever man, a remarkably fine orator, a politician. You could find the words, make the promises, arrive at a rapprochement, some kind of deal. He took a sheet of paper and reached for a pen.)

  A substantial part of his life, a major component in the mechanism that drove him, was inaccessible, as though a wall had been built right across the City, just to stop him going home. He thought about that. Finally, it occurred to him to wonder who would build such a wall. The answer came as no surprise.

  Because I love my sister more than anybody else, he realised, I had to build the wall. A man who faces opposition must either fight or accept. I refuse to fight my own sister, to defeat her by any means necessary. Because I love her, I can't refuse her anything, and what she wants is to hate me. Fight or accept. Accept.

  (And it occurred to him that in his life he'd done many things that other people considered admirable, brilliant, wonderful; all of which he placed little value on, just as a conjuror knows he hasn't really performed magic, no matter what the audience may think. There was just one admirable thing he'd done--one honest thing--and the only other person who'd ever know about it hated him enough to want to see him dead. And therein, it pleased him to think, lies the true magnificence of Basso the Magnificent; his one honest thing, his only failure, the one thing he wanted and told himself he couldn't have. Basso the Wall-Builder.)

  Instead of writing the letter, he dealt with the Caecilius loan. Eventually he managed to tack something together that'd mess up the audit commission just long enough to buy him the time he needed, all things being equal, which they seldom were.

  Meeting of the House Treasury sub-committee:

  "In the light of General Aelius' recommendations," Basso heard himself say (but he felt far away, as though he was watching himself from the gallery), "I believe we need a fresh look at the currency situation."

  Percennius Macer (old-style Optimate, furious with him for agreeing to the war, back in favour after a long time in the cold) raised a hand to interrupt. "Your inspired currency reforms have worked exceptionally well," he said. "Surely the last thing we want to do is mess about with them."

  "I'm not proposing any change to the nomisma," Basso said. "What I have in mind is a short-term measure designed to help with procurement of military supplies and war materiel."

  Percennius raised an eyebrow (he practises, Basso reckoned, in front of a mirror). "Is there a problem? We haven't heard anything about it before."

  "Not yet," Basso said. "And I'd like to keep it that way. But yes, I do see a problem coming." He turned his head and made eye contact with Lollius Vipsanius, Caecilius' uncle. "At the moment, whenever we buy something or order something, payment is--nominally at least--in gold coin. Now, because we've got better things to do than drive cartloads of heavy, stealable money across two continents, when we buy something in Scleria, say, we don't send them actual cash. We write a letter to someone in Scleria who holds money for us, or who owes us money, or who's contracted to pay us money for something they've had from us, and we ask the Sclerian to pay what we owe on our behalf. That, in a nutshell, is the letter-of-credit system, and in peacetime, for everyday commercial transactions between businessmen, it works just fine. Right now, though, in places like Scleria and Auxentia we're paying out a lot more than we're getting paid, so it's getting hard to arrange letters of credit. Result: important war-supplies deals are getting jammed up, suppliers whose good will we need aren't getting paid on time; it's bad for the army, and it's bad for our good name as a commercial nation. Fairly soon, we'll find that if we want to raise letters of credit, we'll have to do it through foreign banks, who'll charge us for the privilege, or else treat the transactions as loans and screw us for interest. Hands up anybody who wants to see that happen."

  He used the rhetorical pause to examine key faces. They didn't appear to know what was likely to come next. He sucked in some air and went on: "How'd it be if, instead of letters of credit, we used something else, some other kind of currency; not physical gold, or a promise of gold, or a complex system of balancing debts in gold, but something quite other; as good as gold, but not quite so heavy or so bulky? Good idea?"

  Clodius Faber: on his side when it suited him. "What do you have in mind?"
r />   Basso grinned. "Paper," he said. "Actually, it's not a new idea. We considered it just after the Treasury robbery, when we didn't have any gold. I believe the technical term is assignats. Paper notes," he went on, as the faces frowned or looked blank, "bearing a promise to pay, in gold money, on demand; backed by solid assets, such as government land. A man on a fast horse can carry a sackful of them and still be in Tavia or Gonessus in sixty hours. Also," he pressed on, before anyone had a chance to speak, "there's the small matter of money supply. The fact is, we have more wealth than gold. There isn't enough shiny yellow metal in the City, quite possibly in the West, to represent the value of our assets. Right now, we need to draw on the value of our assets to pay for stuff we're actually using, like wheat and wool and timber; but we're hampered by the fact that we don't have enough metal tokens. To get more tokens, we have to buy and import gold, melt it down, hammer it into thin sheets, stamp out a load of small flat discs and bash them between two dies. It takes time, it costs money. We can't afford to waste either. So, instead, we write paper notes. Assignats. People who get paid with them know they're good; it says on them, the Vesani Republic promises to pay, and in the wildly unlikely event that it doesn't, this piece of paper you're holding is as good as a mortgage on the most valuable real estate in the civilised world. What's in it for us? We can spend money that we've got, that we can afford to spend, but which is currently locked up and useless because we haven't got quite enough shiny yellow discs. Think about it. Liquidity problems solved at a stroke. No need to mess with letters of credit, no more relying on foreign intermediaries, so we pay our bills on the nail. If you're worried about hundreds of foreigners turning up on the Treasury steps waving bits of paper and clamouring for gold coin, don't be. Our assignats will be as good as money; in no time flat, they'll be money, a whole new circulating medium--better than gold coin, for the reasons stated, almost certainly changing hands at a premium; a handy windfall for us, just like what happened when we purified the nomisma. Honestly, gentlemen, if there's a drawback I can't see it. Well? Anybody?"

  It was just as well he'd thought it through beforehand. But he had, and none of the objections fired at him found him unprepared. Forgery: there was a new kind of paper, the Bank's trading arm had bought the formula and technique for making it direct from the inventor, so the Republic would have a total world monopoly, and forgery would be impossible. What about the debts the Treasury had already incurred; in particular, the huge debts it owed to the Charity & Social Justice? Would the Bank allow the Treasury to buy back those loans, using the new paper? Of course it would, Basso replied, no problem at all. He'd even waive the early-repayment penalties written in to the loan agreements--

  "Which means," Basso said (he was exhausted, more tired than he could ever remember being), "that once the Treasury's repaid a couple of the smaller loans, we'll have plenty of cash in hand to cover our deposit requirements, and the problem just melts away."

  "I see," Melsuntha said, massaging between his shoulder blades. As always, he found the strength in her fingers disconcerting. "Or at least, I think I see. Won't you lose money?"

  Basso shook his head. "We'll only repay a few of the loans," he said, "I'll see to that. It's more a gesture of good faith than anything. And we raise enough to secure our deposit, which means Tragazes won't have to lie to the banking commission."

  "How on earth did you manage to get it through?"

  Basso laughed. "I needed two enemy votes," he replied. "Lollius Vipsanius was easy; I sent him a note telling him that if he voted in favour, I'd let his nephew off the hook over the payment he's due to make us--you know, the one that caused all this mess in the first place."

  "That's one. Who was the other?"

  "Laelius Priscus," Basso replied. "Two years ago, he poisoned his wife's lover. Small piece of insurance I've been keeping for a rainy day. I pinned a copy of the poisoner's confession to his copy of the order sheet. He went ever such a funny colour when he saw it."

  From Bassano;

  ... Victory. Sort of.

  I'm writing this in the back of a cart, under a tree, somewhere in the foothills of the Big Pointy Mountains (marked brown on your map; they fill the middle of Mavortis). We've just been round picking up bales of captured enemy shields. Of course, we don't use them as shields. They're just sheets of limewood, the fancy ones with a copper rim. We smash them up and use them for kindling. I say we. The soldiers smash them up. I watch.

  Anyway, these shields need collecting because we just fought a pitched battle, against the last major tribe this side of the Big Pointies. We demolished them, of course; same old drill. They broke and ran before we even reached them, and the rest was just butcher's work. God help me, I was deeply annoyed I wasn't allowed to join in. They're running away, I said, there's no danger, they aren't even trying to fight back; but no, not allowed. I was livid. I might not get another chance, I told them; all the hassle we've had drawing these people into a pitched battle, I don't want to go home and admit I'm the only soldier in the Vesani army who never got to kill even one Mavortine. But you're not a soldier, they pointed out.

  There wasn't time to explain. So I sulked instead.

  Statistics. By my estimate, there were about seven thousand of them, to start with. Five hundred or so pulled out before the lines were drawn up. They must've taken one look at us and refused to come out to play; just turned round and walked off the battlefield. Killed: two thousand, give or take. We tend to work on the number of shields we recover (another reason for gathering them); of course, more men drop shields than die, but at least a fifth of the poor bastards don't have shields to start with, so it sort of balances out. So, say two thousand dead. We caught and spared another seven hundred. That leaves three and a half thousand still at large. Mind, I'm not saying I'd have killed them all. Just some.

  Those three and a half thousand will not, however, escape to the safety of the Big Pointies. We fought with the mountains at our backs. The ones that got away now have nowhere to go except back into territory we've already thoroughly subdued. No villages to feed and harbour them; they'll wander around till they're starving hungry, then they'll turn themselves in and take advantage of our justifiably celebrated clemency. A clean surrender buys a place in a work gang: food, shelter, new shoes, and so much work they're too tired to think about patriotism and the freedom of Mavortis. Six months on the gang and they earn their discharge; they can go home (if it's still standing) to their wives and their thin, cold children and the empty space where their herds and flocks used to be. Then they're back, begging for work so they can feed those hungry, whining mouths. Every chance the forts will be completed way ahead of schedule. We have eager, motivated men working on building them.

  All through, Aelius' strategy has been to keep the hostiles from getting into the mountains and the forest. That's all he's been concerned about. So, we've blasted a way through, got here as quickly as we can, and sealed off the loathsome, inaccessible middle of the country. Job done. From now on, it's a matter of building forts. We've had the devil's own job provoking the hostiles into the field; for good reason, they always lose, we always slaughter them. The most we expect out of them from now on is feeble little attacks on the forts, which will fail. At this rate, won't be long before there's one fort for every twenty square miles. Basically, the forts are nails, to pin them to the ground so they can't move.

  We're using the new recruits you sent us to garrison the forts. It means most of them haven't yet seen a Mavortine armed with anything more lethal than a shovel or a bucket. If all goes to plan, they never will.

  Sure, some of them are going to slip through and make it into the forest. Fine. Let them stay there and eat squirrels. When they get sick of that, they can come out and get a job working for us, in the mines or on the new farms, just like everyone else. Pretty soon, the Mavortines will wonder how the hell they ever managed to survive by the old ways, before we came along to look after them. It'll be as though they'd come to the
City and got rubbish-wage jobs on building sites or in sweatshops, which has been the dream of every Mavortine male for generations; only they won't have to leave their motherland or their families to do it. Perfect solution; everybody happy. So nice when things turn out that way.

  I used to worry about what being here was doing to me. I don't worry any more. I guess that's what's worrying me. I guess, if the value you put on human beings sinks low enough, you stand a fair chance of establishing universal peace and prosperity. Bring those values down, and everybody can afford to be happy. It's only when you start packing out the shopping basket with luxury goods such as freedom and dignity and the right to self-determination that you price poor folks out of the market.

  It makes sense, once you've seen it for yourself. If you've never seen it, of course, it must sound barbaric.

  I had a chance to discuss this very issue with Segimerus; Aelius has finished with him, so he's back with us for a while. He agrees with me. He says our traditional views are parochial and limited, the result of cultural influences. But the time he spent in the Empire convinced him that truth depends on where you are. Truths universally acknowledged in the City are meaningless in a place like this, and vice versa. Truth is a product of geography and history; you have to reset your conscience, like resetting your watch when you get off the boat in a foreign port.

  Question is: will Mavortine truths still be true once I get home? I'm worried about that.

  Cordially,

  Bassano

  "I hope I'm wrong," Basso said, "but you look depressingly like a deputation. Come in, close the door and for crying out loud stop looking so damn solemn."

  If they'd been the enemy, he could have handled them easily--blend good humour and sudden grim determination, informality, bluster, gentle threats and sweet reason; disconcert, worry, confuse. Few better at it in the history of the Republic. But they were supposed to be on his side.

  "Let me get this straight," he said, when they'd made their nervous case. "You're proposing that we abandon a war in which we've yet to lose a single battle, in which we've pacified three-quarters of the country, in which we've done all the hard work and are poised to start mining operations that are guaranteed to pay back the large sum of money we've already spent, and which, if you have your way, we'll have to write off. Well?"