How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  I nodded. “But you can talk to them,” I said. “Correction: I can talk to them. You can’t.”

  He laughed. “Not sure that I’d want to. But if you make them listen, you’d be doing me a great favour, believe me. Are there any more of those honey-cakes, do you think? They’re really rather good.”

  13

  “Now you’ve gone too far,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “listen.”

  Sisinna’s chaise had rattled away into the night, and we were alone in the house. I didn’t have much time and she wasn’t inclined to listen to me. Like the old days, really.

  “It can be done,” I said. “It’s basically a lighting problem.”

  She thought about that and gave me a grunt of reluctant agreement. “No, it isn’t,” she added. “We’ve got to get them here first. If your keepers find out you’re having secret talks with Theme bosses, they’ll rip your lungs out.”

  Curiously enough, that thought had occurred to me. “They won’t find out,” I said. “And before you say it, yes, we can talk to the Theme bosses easy as pie.”

  She sighed. “I can, you mean.”

  God bless the theatre. Among other reasons, because it’s a great gatherer-up of beautiful women; and once it’s got all these gorgeous creatures, it doesn’t pay them enough. Which means they need to supplement their incomes from other sources. It’s not an ideal system, because contrary to popular belief not all actresses are as easy as the five-times table, and the ones who aren’t have a rough time of it sometimes. That said, any means of earning a living in this man’s town is likely to be nasty and unpleasant more often than not, and until they bring about Saloninus’ ideal republic I don’t see it changing any time soon. The point being: every self-respecting Theme boss has a popular actress as a fashion accessory. Therefore, we could talk to them anytime we wanted to. And the rest was, as I’d so acutely pointed out, just a matter of stage lighting.

  “You’re not ready for something like this,” she said, as we waited in the dim light of a single small lamp for the Theme bosses to arrive.

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” I told her. “And all this is your idea.”

  “You mean you’re done thinking it over.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But if we can impress Sisinna—”

  “This isn’t going to work. These people know you.”

  Which was true. The Blue boss, obviously not; but Parzenio the Green boss (properly speaking, the father-of-chapel for the Merchant Seamens’ Guild) had fought in the arena with Lysimachus – alongside him, not actually with him, or he’d be dead – and shared a kennel with him, so she was quite right, it was a terrifying risk, if you stopped to think about it. But, like the lady said, the answer is, don’t stop and think. Besides, we had the home advantage.

  If I hadn’t been a mediocre actor, I could’ve been a terrific lights man. Always been interested in what you can achieve, by way of light, shadow and the million degrees in between, with just candles, hoods and bits of coloured parchment. Take shadow, for example. You can stretch it, bend it, layer it, cast another shadow across it. Nobody ever notices it – why would you take any notice of what is, after all, basically only an absence – but it shapes and twists the way we perceive, you can mess with people’s heads with it. As for light, don’t get me started on light. You think you can trust it, but in the right hands there’s nothing trickier, believe me.

  The Blue boss was called Ascer, and he turned up first. “Why’s it so dark in here?” he said, hesitating on the threshold.

  “Get in here,” I snapped back, in a hoarse stage whisper.

  Yes, it was dark, but not so dark I couldn’t see the knife on his belt. Ascer hadn’t done time on the sand, but he’d been a Blue enforcer, same sort of job my dad used to do but higher profile. A wolf by the ears, I thought. But at some point in the past someone realised you could train wolves to fetch and carry and round up sheep.

  “Elegaica was supposed to have explained to you,” I said. Elegaica was the rising young tragedienne who looked after about half a dozen prominent Blues. “If anyone finds out about this, we’re dogmeat.”

  A thump at the door they must’ve heard in Hill Street. “Get that for me, will you?” Well, Lysimachus wouldn’t stir himself if he could send someone else.

  Ascer glared at me, got up and opened the door. I couldn’t see the expressions on their faces as the Blue boss opened the door for the Green boss, so I missed a treat, but never mind.

  “Close that door, for fuck’s sake, and keep your voices down. Over here. Mind out, there’s a table by the window.”

  Two enormous men steered themselves successfully past the table in the dark and felt their way into chairs they could barely see. “What’s all this in aid of?” Parzenio demanded. “Why couldn’t we have met up at the palace or somewhere?”

  “What this is in aid of,” I said, same hoarse whisper, “is saving your arses. Is that worth it? You tell me.”

  I had a feeling I was overdoing it. Pull yourself together, I urged myself; keep your eye on that mirror. “I heard it was to do with the Fleet,” Parzenio said, “that’s all I was told.”

  “Then listen,” I said. “Sisinna’s asked the council to let him bring back the press. We told him yes.”

  That got me stony silence. I gave it three beats. “I take it you’re not happy about that.”

  “No, we’re not. The lads won’t stand for it.”

  Not sure which one of them said that; not important. “Quite right, too,” I said. “I don’t like the idea much either.”

  “But you said—”

  “Sisinna asked, we agreed. Rule one, you don’t piss off the admiral of the Fleet. And that was just fine with my sugar-plum colleagues, because they don’t know spit about the Themes and could care less.”

  “And you went along with it.”

  “To their faces, yes. I have to work with those idiots.”

  I could feel the character slipping away out of my hands like an eel; but amazingly the voice was still just right. It was Lysimachus saying words he’d never have said in his life, but it was Lysimachus, you’d bet your life on it. “So they’re bringing back the press. There’ll be trouble.”

  “Not if I can help it.” Pause to let it sink in. Lucky for me Lysimachus was a slow talker at the best of times. “We’re all here to make sure the press doesn’t start up again.”

  Ascer said, “We’re listening.”

  “You’ve got to let merchantmen join the Fleet,” I said. “If you do that, I can get Sisinna to forget about the press, because he won’t need it.”

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” Parzenio said. “You got any idea how much money that’d cost us?”

  I named a figure. “Well?”

  Pause. “About that,” Ascer said.

  “Glad we agree. And, yes, that’s a lot of money out of your pockets, which means the pockets of widows and orphans in Poor Town, so we can’t have that.”

  “Well, then.”

  “And we can’t have the press-gang snatching any poor bastards they can lay their hands on, and we can’t have fighting in the street, Greens and Blues against the marines. Something’s got to give somewhere.”

  All this time I was trying to keep my eye on Parzenio without being obvious about it. He was angry, I could see that, but that was all. He was furiously angry because his old arena buddy was selling the Greens down the river. My heart was like the proverbial singing bird, but his wouldn’t have been, so I kept it to myself.

  “Like what?” Parzenio said. “Either there’s press-gangs or there isn’t.”

  “No press-gangs,” I said. “And merchantmen can join the Fleet, because it’s the patriotic thing to do and everybody knows the Themes are a hundred per cent behind the war effort every step of the way, plus the fact that your boys are itching to join up so they don’t have to give you lot a tenth of their pay. And Theme funds won’t lose a bent trachy, because I’ll make it up to
you somewhere else.”

  There comes a moment when you have to lay them down and see if the other guy has aces to your kings. I’m not a gambling man, as you’d probably have guessed.

  “Somewhere else where?” Parzenio said cautiously.

  Offstage, choirs of angels. “That’d be telling,” I said. “Do we have agreement in principle or don’t we?”

  We had agreement in principle. So I told them about a few – a half-dozen, no more – of the gaping loopholes I’d noticed in the Imperial accounting procedures, when I glanced through all that stuff up in my tower cell, waiting to go on. At the time I was stunned that nobody had seen them and plugged them; a week or so with those three knuckleheads and I reckoned I could see why. Uptown and Poor Town don’t think the same way. Poor Town, Green, the son of a boss, it had been in the air I breathed and the water and the food, because everything back there and then was about the scam, the angle, the crack you could get the tip of your penknife into. Uptown, all they could see was doing a job efficiently and cost-effectively.

  “Anyhow,” I concluded, “I think that’ll more than cover your losses, if your boys are anything like the fixers in the neighbourhood I grew up in. Yes, I know, nothing in it for the Sailors’ Guild, which is your pitch, so you might want to see about spreading your interests a bit before anyone else finds out where the new pickings are coming from. But I think I can safely leave all that to you.”

  I could practically hear the little wheels going round. “Isn’t anybody going to notice? At the Treasury end?”

  “Eventually,” I said. “And probably we’ll tighten a few loopholes, by which time you’ll have picked open a few more. That’s tomorrow; I’m talking about today. We have an agreement.”

  Statement, not query. They confirmed it. Good, I told them; oh, and one other thing. If anybody outside of this room ever found out that this idea had come from me, I’d have the two of them killed. On that, as on the other matters we’d been discussing, they had my word of honour.

  I’d told Hodda to make herself scarce, but naturally she hadn’t. She’d been next door the whole time, with a cup held against the wall. “You were born lucky,” she told me.

  “Funny, I never noticed.”

  “You must’ve been. You realise you lost it completely at least twice.”

  I nodded. “I know I did,” I said. “And still they didn’t suspect anything. I think that must’ve been the Invincible Sun giving me a second chance.”

  She glared at me. She doesn’t like people to know, but she’s religious. “It’s like you’ve got a death wish or something. You were hamming it up.”

  “Yes, I know.” Hadn’t meant to shout. “I couldn’t help it. I lost him for a minute or so. But I found my way back, and it was all right. I got away with it.”

  “Yes, you did.” A hard look crossed her face, just for a moment. “I’ll give you that. By the way, did you ever get round to making up your mind?”

  “I told you. If we get Sisinna on our side—”

  “We could rule this city. We could own it.”

  One time I was crossing the stage and some fool had opened the trapdoor. I went through it, still saying my line, and suddenly I was in a crumpled heap in the cellar. “Hodda. I thought you said this city’s finished.”

  “Oh, don’t be stupid. It’s the City. They’ll never take the City.”

  “You said—”

  “Never mind what I said. You fooled that ape, and he’s known you for years.”

  “In the dark,” I said. “And just for ten minutes.”

  “Then we’ll get rid of him. All your old pals, gradually, one at a time.”

  I think I backed away a step. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “Nor can I, actually.” She blinked, as though I’d just lit a lamp in a dark room. “No, we can’t go around slaughtering people wholesale, that’s ridiculous. But the rest of it – we could do it, you know. We could run this place.”

  On the other hand, she’s always been my harshest critic. If she thought I could do it, maybe I could.

  “Hodda,” I said. “Do we really want to?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’ve seen what ruling a city involves,” I said. “It’s not exactly fun. It’s endless hard work, people mad at you, everything you do pisses somebody off, nobody listens to what you actually say—”

  She grinned at me. “Not permanently, idiot,” she said. “Just long enough to cream off a great deal of money. And then we get on our private presidential yacht and don’t come back.” She has a lovely grin. It suits that angel face of hers. “Had you going there for a minute, didn’t I?”

  Paunching rabbits. Such a graphic image. Hard to get it out of your mind once it’s found its way inside. “One step at a time,” I said. “Let’s see what the admiral does.”

  14

  The Greens made their announcement first, followed by the Blues later on the same day. It had come to their attention that guild regulations made it difficult for merchant sailors who wanted to do their bit for the war effort to sign up with the Fleet. Those regulations were withdrawn, with immediate effect.

  Admiral Sisinna came to see the three conspirators and me. Word had obviously got about, he said (he didn’t wink; I don’t think he was physically capable of it) and now there was no need for press-gangs. He didn’t look at me once during the meeting. Later I got a note from him, passed from Auxentia to Hodda and Hodda to me, because I was allowed private letters from her now, for being good. Thank you, the admiral said. Good job well done.

  My first thought was that it was a forgery, she’d faked it or had it faked, so I snuffled about among the archives until I found dispatches in Sisinna’s own handwriting. Perfect match.

  Time to think about it a whole lot more.

  Time out, while I’m thinking about it, for some tangential reflections on the Public.

  There’s a saying in our business, as old as the hills and as perpetually relevant as death; everybody loved it except the public. Exactly. You get hold of a red-hot script, and by some amazing stroke of luck the exactly perfect cast are all available. Soon as you start rehearsing, you can tell you’ve got something really special on your hands – the buzz, the thrill, taking on a life of its own. So you send out invitations to the great wise men, the arbiters of taste, men who’ve loved and studied the theatre all their lives and know what works and what doesn’t, and they all tell you, don’t worry, you’ve got a hit on your hands there. Opening night, the air is thick with cheers and flying flowers, and six nights after that, you close, having just played to an audience of five, four of them your cousins.

  I have spent my adult life trying to amuse and entertain the public, and maybe it would be worth asking the question, why? For money, yes; but there are a lot of ways of making money, many of them involving a lot less hard work and aggravation. Come to that, if money had been the one and only motivation in my life, I’d have stayed in the Greens and beaten it out of small shopkeepers.

  No; the money matters because it means you can stay in the business, and so long as you’re in the business you’re in the game, in with a chance of making the big breakthrough. And if you do make that breakthrough, what happens then? You get lots of money, granted. So what do you do? Do you retire, buy a couple of farms, a cloth mill and a half-share in a trading ship, relax into a life of leisured ease? Like hell. You keep going in the business, because now the people are paying to see you, not the stupid play. And with every massive success you notch up, you ask for and get more money, not because you want it to buy things with but because it’s the only reliable way in this business of keeping score. If you’re getting x every night but your best friend and deadliest rival is getting x+1, it’s enough to break your heart. So you try harder, and harder still.

  Try and do what, exactly? You perfect your already perfect art, only a bit more. And your art is entertaining the Public. Remember them?

  They all say it at one tim
e or another; I do it all for my public. So let’s consider them, shall we?

  I do it all for my public, they all say. Really? Let’s break the collective noun down into its component parts. You’ve got the stalls: people with money, who wouldn’t be seen with you in the street, although if you’re a pretty girl they might condescend to have sex with you. You’ve got the gallery: shopkeepers, tradesmen, clerks, Theme and guild officers, their wives and noisy children, the class of people you joined the profession to get away from, because that’s where you were born and used to live. Can you honestly lay your hand on your heart and say you do it all – the grinding hard work, the boredom, the standing around, the frustration, the failures, the humiliation, the holes in your boots, going without food for a week until you get your first wages, spending your last fifty trachy on a fake-silk scarf rather than bread because you’ve always got to look smart – to bring some joy into their dull but moderately contented lives?

  Thought not. So, do you do it because you want them to love you; you want to sway them, command them, own their hearts and minds? What, that lot? Them? The Public?

  I knew a man once. He was a rich man’s son, very rich; he thought he was untouchable. His favourite trick was walking into a dockers’ bar, striking a dramatic attitude and calling out, “Ah, the people!” He got glared at a lot but never actually thumped, not even by me, and eventually he gave it up and got married, which served him right. Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers.

  Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren’t; and here’s a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren’t, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid. Don’t know why, it’s alchemy or something like that. There’s probably a book about it somewhere that explains everything.