Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  Talking of which; how are you off for money? It’s a bit tight right now—the Treasury’s playing silly buggers about collecting the property tax, to starve me of funds—but I’ve got Dad’s reserve and uncle Zeno’s reserve and a few other bits and pieces they don’t know anything about. Sometimes it’s good that all my family were basically a bunch of thieves and pirates. As the last man standing, I inherited their stashes.

  Sorry about the ink. I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced they put plaster in it, to stop me writing to anybody. Bastards. Anyway, the one (1) pound enclosed herewith is my unofficial homebrew, knocked up by my pal the forger. He’s a treasure, that man. He’s going to teach me how to lift seals next.

  While I think of it, a few messages from the rest of the gang. Menestheus says to stop whining; you should try doing his job. Aristaeus asked me to remind you about that time in second year when we stole the Dean’s post-chaise, dismantled it and put it back together again on the roof of the Old Library. He reckons that if we could do that and get away with it, running the Empire should be a piece of piss. Strato is looking about for a copy of The Bedchamber Dialogues for you (the seventh edition, with the full-page pictures) so at least you’ll have something to read.

  Having them here—and you there, of course—is the only thing that’s keeping me going. I really do miss Gorgias, though. He’d know what to do.

  I remember you saying to me once, when we were carrying that wardrobe up the back stairs at Chairmakers’ Street; it’s bloody hard work being your friend, Nico. Well, you were right about that. I hope I’ve never pretended otherwise. All I can say is, thanks; for the past, and for now.

  You will stay, won’t you?

  Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.

  Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that the reinforcements have arrived and are being deployed in accordance with standing orders pending new developments.

  Tell you what, this moonshine purple ink of yours is a major improvement on the official rubbish. Whatever you’re paying your pet crook, double it.

  Tell Strato thanks ever so much for the book. Tell him I especially appreciate it because it’s evidently his own personal copy. At least I assume it is. That would account for the curious stains.

  All right, I’ll stay. Actually, things are looking up, ever since you sent me those lunatics. I’ve always been scared stiff of soldiers, but these guys are real headcases. I mean that in a nice way, of course, and so far they’ve been behaving themselves, more or less. The main thing is to keep them away from garlic. It does funny things to them.

  Seriously; what I’ve got in mind is a string of rapid-response units, three hundred dragoons and a hundred Aram no Vei, right across the frontier, with the provincial regulars to stop up the gaps. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending your money like you wouldn’t believe. Contrary to what it says in the briefings, it is possible to suborn the frontier elders into actions they consider dishonourable, just so long as you suborn them a lot. As a result, I think I may be able to find out a bit more about what’s going on. The frontier villages must know something; the bad guys can’t just flit backwards and forwards across the line without anybody seeing anything. You can break the news to Menestheus; tell him that my quarterly accounts will be a masterpiece of fiction unsurpassed since the golden age of Vesani literature. While we’re on the subject; can you let me have HS 300,000 from your dad’s rainy-day fund? Well, you did offer.

  Nicephorus to Phormio; greetings

  Thanks

  Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.

  Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has engaged the enemy and won a minor victory. Despatches herewith.

  I don’t know why people make such a fuss about this soldiering thing. It’s a piece of piss.

  No, really. It’s all in the book. If you happen to have your copy handy, turn to volume II, chapter 16, paragraphs 36b to 42e, and that’s more or less what happened.

  Yes, but I’m not going to leave it there, because I want to boast about it. I was actually there, you see. I watched the whole thing.

  I’d been brooding quite bit on how the bad guys had suckered me so easily, and then it struck me. Quinctillus, I thought (to be precise, On War, ch.7, 98f-101d). Always attack your enemy at his strongest point. You remember how dumb we always thought that was; but it’s not.

  Their biggest strength, I reasoned, is my weakness. Namely, my not having a clue; that’s their greatest asset. So, all right, I thought. Use that. Because they made a monkey out of me so easily last time, they’ll happily believe I’m capable of making further and yet more catastrophic bog-ups. Only this time, I’ll make one on purpose, and be ready for them.

  It took a bit of setting up, of course. The bait had to be money, the pay convoy. It’s become fairly obvious that they’ve got sources of information here in the governor’s office. They always seem to know what I’m going to do, usually before I do it. So, use that too.

  So; I told my senior clerks that I’d asked you to send me the HS 300,000. I left it at that; let the information trickle down to the spies, it’s more natural. The next step was the clever bit.

  You remember Clearchus? Tall, thin, miserable kid in the year above us. Always being ragged about his dad being in trade. Well, I happened to remember that among other things, his dad supplied ironmongery to the military; nails, bolts, hinges. So I wrote to Clearchus, nice chatty letter, asking him what his best possible price was for forty barrels of sixteen-gauge hot drawn wire might be, COD Tremissis City. He wrote back, typical snotty attitude; he wasn’t anything to do with the family business, he was a successful and highly sought-after lawyer specialising in religious law (I knew that already), but he’d passed on my letter to his father, who’d be in touch. Dad wrote back—much more friendly—quoting a price. We haggled; in fact, I got one hell of a deal, I surprised myself; who’d have thought I’d be good at trade? Anyhow, we agreed terms and I confirmed the order and sent him a money warrant, and we fixed up a delivery date.

  Which was, of course, the whole object of the exercise. You see, I told Clearchus’ dad a whole load of lies about the main roads being liable to get blocked by snow this time of year, and the subsidiary roads being iffy on account of bandits; basically, I gave him a delivery route that’d take his carts within spitting distance of the frontier, very close to where I’d had very promising reports of enemy activity (your bribe money at work). Then I told my clerks, as casually as anything, that I’d arranged a convoy of military supplies, coming in on such and such a date via the Leuca Pass.

  Now, because I never do anything like that, sully my hands with the irksome business of day-to-day materiel procurement, that put the spies on notice that I was up to something. Forty barrels of something heavy, loaded on eight carts; hardly catapult science to figure out what that something heavy was likely to be, given that I was known to be expecting a huge sum of money from central government.

  This is where your dad’s lunatic dragoons were so important. I had to take the chance that the bad guys’ infiltration network hasn’t been able to get to them yet. To be on the safe side, I waited till we had a routine staff meeting, at the end of which I told the dragoon colonel to stay behind, because I wanted to discuss some disciplinary issues (plausible enough, right?). Instead, I told him exactly what I’d got planned. He was to be on hand with a whole division, plus half the Aram no Vei. I left it up to him to figure out how he’d manage that without letting the cat out of the bag. As it turned out, he had no trouble; simply didn’t tell them about it until an hour before departure time; told them to get three days’ rations and saddle up; didn’t tell them where they were going until they were practically there. Apparently, dragoons will stand for that kind
of shit.

  I wasn’t going to go along, but in the end I couldn’t resist. It was sheer impulse. I saw the dragoons forming up in the barracks square, I grabbed my hat, the Art of War and a pair of boots and ran out after them. They were very kind; lent me a horse (horrible creature; foul temper, mad as a tanner; when I kicked up a fuss about it later, they said they’d chosen it for me because it was white, and a commander-in-chief should always ride a white stallion. Bastards.) and off I went.

  This is supposed to be a happy story, so we’ll pass over the torments and miseries of getting there. Suffice it to say, I’ve been paying well over the odds for really good quality goose-down cushions lately. Anyhow, we got there, very fast indeed. I left the map-reading to the colonel and his people, so we didn’t get lost. Actually, I tried to leave everything to them, but they weren’t having that. Protocol. If the commander-in-chief’s present, he’s got to command; junior officers can only advise. So, the first thing I said when we stopped and got off our horses was, “Advise me.” Which, your second cousin be praised, they did.

  The biggest laugh I got out of the whole business was when Colonel Bessas (good man, that; keep an eye on him) opened his saddlebag and took out, guess what, a very old and battered copy of The Art of War. Never left his tent without it, he told me. Snap, I said, and showed him mine. Better still, he’s only got the seventh edition. There were so many bookmarks in it, it’s practically twice the size it should be. Anyway, we looked it up and there it was, diagrams and clear instructions, so that was what we did.

  And it worked. Bugger me, Nico, it worked. It’s just like chess, only a bit more straightforward, and you have to send runners and despatch riders to make the moves. Other than that; you sit there on your horse, Nico, assuming you can persuade the loathsome thing to keep still, and you look down from a high place, like you’re a god or something (I’m sure you know the feeling), and you try and find what you’re looking at on the map. The little-kid’s-doodle trees on the parchment sort of blend into the real but tiny trees you can see in the distance. In your mind’s eye you flatten the hills down into the contour-lines; you learn the trick of ignoring one dimension. You find the river; and guess what, it’s exactly where it’s supposed to be. It’s roughly the same relationship as between fresh and dried figs; the same, but flat and neat and all the juice drained out. A map is a whole desiccated world, once you’ve learned to see it in those terms.

  It’s also a bit like the theatre; the theatre as seen from a very high place, like the cheapskates who climb the trees in Victory Avenue so they can watch the play without paying. Of course, they’re too far away to hear a word the actors are saying. A general’s a bit like that. He’s a cheapskate too (unless he’s a steelneck fighting general, in the thick of it with his men; not me). He won’t pay the ticket money, namely the risk of getting stabbed or hacked or trampled to death, so he has to perch in his tree, and he never hears the words. He has to follow the whole thing in dumb-show. But the cheapskates in the trees get to see far more. They can see backstage as well as what goes on in front of the curtain. So; I saw the carts trundling along the road, way off to the left, not a care in the world (naturally, the drivers weren’t in on the secret; security); simultaneously, I could see the bad guys, just little insect shapes moving about just inside the tree-line. And, because I knew exactly where to look, I could see our boys, keeping absolutely still, like chess-pieces, or those bizarre porcelain armies your illustrious ancestors used to be buried with, to guard them in the next world. There was a moment when they were all moving at the same time—carts going trundle up the road, bad guys sneaking through the woods, good guys creeping down the hillside; none of them could actually see any of the others, but I could see them all; they were all there because of me, because I’d brought them all there to come together in one small place at one specific time, to achieve the result I wanted. It’s the weirdest feeling, Nico. In one sense, you’re the Angel of Death. People are going to die because of you, and isn’t that the most appalling thing imaginable? On the other hand, it’s all perfectly all right, because the bad guys are the enemy, it’s like killing rats, not homicide but pesticide; and some of the good guys will have to get killed too, because that’s the price we pay. Well, not you and me personally. Just soldiers. It’s what they’re paid for.

  Way off on a mountain, of course, you don’t get to see the detail. You don’t buy a ticket, you aren’t entitled to see blood, and smashed bones, and hands and feet cut off, and dying men ignored because they’re no longer relevant. In a way, I almost admire the fighting generals; except I have a nasty feeling they enjoy it.

  Be that as it may. It worked just fine. The bad guys never knew what hit them. A double volley of arrows from the Aram no Vei, followed by a full-on heavy cavalry charge. Best estimates say there were about a hundred and fifty of them (which suggests that robbing the pay convoy was only part of their mission; some village somewhere got lucky), of whom we killed a hundred and nine. I’d told the colonel that taking live prisoners was top priority, followed by securing dead bodies. That didn’t work out. They don’t surrender. Those who were too badly hurt to run had their throats cut by their friends. According to our men, quite a few of them got killed because they stayed behind to finish off the wounded when they could easily have made their escape. I can’t understand how anybody could do that.

  The whole performance lasted a matter of minutes. If I’d gone off into the bushes for a shit just before the carts first came into view, I’d have missed nearly all of it. It’s hard to believe so much can happen, so much really drastic stuff, in so short a space of time, in such a small area. Four hundred yards away to the east, while the fighting was fiercest, I saw two deer amiably grazing; not a clue there was anything untoward going on just over the ridge.

  Anyhow. We now have a hundred and nine dead bodies. (Our losses; six, of whom two were Aram no Vei. Oh, and the cart crews, unfortunately.) I had them unload the carts and load up the corpses, exactly as they were, and we lugged them back here for a closer look.

  You remember the story about the philosopher; the more I think about it, the harder it gets? Well, quite. The more data we get on the bad guys, the less we know about them. Their kit, for example. Seventy-four of the corpses had the same pattern of basic, entry-level scale-mail jerkins and half-onion pot helmets. I’m no expert (I’m sending examples to you so your people can make a proper analysis) but I believe that stuff’s made in Rhangabe, the big mass-production factories, for sale on the open market. It may be possible to trace the actual batch numbers from the ordnance marks, in which case you may be able to find out who the actual buyers were. The rest of them had standard government issue, just like our men except the crests, unit and rank badges had been cut off—isn’t that standard practice for decommissioned stuff sold as surplus? Again, your experts may be able to find something useful. It’s the best lead we’ve got.

  As for the men themselves; well, they aren’t foreigners. Not overseas foreigners, anyhow. I haven’t been to look at them myself, but I’m told they could be anybody; locals, Northerners from over the border, or recruited anywhere in the Empire north of Uncia. I’m getting the village headmen down to look at the bodies to see if they recognise any faces. Nobody here knows any of them.

  Well, that’s about it. I sent the carts back for the wire, by the way. I’ll need it for the wall I’m building; right the way across the Seclera valley, just in case that’s where they’ve been coming in and out. Ten-foot high earth bank with matching ditch, topped off with pallisades and post-and-wire fences, to slow up a direct assault. The idea is, forward observation patrols see the bad guys coming and send word to the nearest rapid response unit, who zoom up and man the wall before the bad guys reach it. It’ll never work, of course. The real idea is to discourage the bad guys and make them choose another entry/exit point; and we’ll see them doing it and be ready.

  Like I said; this soldiering is the proverbial slice of pudding. It’s bett
er than work any day.

  His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.

  His Majesty congratulates Phormio on his success. Preliminary results of the examination of the armour and other effects recovered from the dead insurgents herewith. The plan to construct a barrier approved and applauded.

  Years ago, before I even met you and the rest of the gang, I saw a man killed. He was one of the builders working on the roof at our old house, and the scaffolding platform he was standing on gave way. I was watching out of my window at the time, and I vividly remember seeing it happen. One moment there was this little man, standing on a platform, doing something with nails and a hammer. Then the platform shifted and broke away from the wall; and I laughed, because it looked just like one of those slapstick routines in the circus. The man was so surprised; he did an enormous double-take, just like the clowns do, and grabbed wildly and caught hold of one of the brackets holding up the guttering. Well, of course he did, I thought. That’s what happens. That’s what’s so funny. I was absolutely sure he’d clamber up the bracket, pulling a big funny face, and then he’d haul himself up onto the roof, do the big oversize dusting-himself-down gesture, and then move on to the next part of the routine. But he didn’t. He struggled and struggled to get his leg over the bracket, but then his fingers just let go, and he fell; and he wriggled in the air, like a fly caught in a web, and then he hit the ground, and he bounced just a little bit, and ended up sprawling all over the place. I didn’t understand. I stood there thinking, no, that’s not right, he was supposed to climb back up again (and then the plank he was on would shift and throw him, or a hoist full of bricks would swing round and hit him on the head, or something equally diverting). It was wrong, like the sun starting to come up and then changing its mind and setting again, in the east. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget that. It was the moment when I decided that death was a really bad, wrong thing, about as bad as it could get.