How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  All my adult life I’ve been working my fingers to the bone for the public. And what have I been trying to do, and what do I want from them? I want them to find me entertaining – not such a big thing to ask, for you to have a good time, enjoy yourself; give it a go one of these days, you might even like it.

  So maybe we should explore the other extreme, rather like my dad used to do. Out there in the streets and alleys are a hundred thousand head of cattle, and most of them have got some money, even if it’s just a few trachy, and they can be made to do what you want if you know the trick. Fleece them, flay them, sell them to the savages on the other side of the wall for anything you can get for them, what does it matter? You don’t owe them anything, and what the hell did they ever do for you?

  I told her I would think about it and here I am, still thinking about it, I guess. The Public, my fellow citizens, the City. Make ’em laugh, make ’em pay, make ’em bleed, so what? Nicephorus and Artavasdus and Faustinus could’ve filled the pockets of their coats with small items of great value and hopped it halfway across the world; instead, they stayed on stage, playing their hearts out – because they were born into noble families with traditions of service to the state, for whom high public office is the only way of keeping score, like money is in our game. Not, I venture to suggest, because they liked the dirty, scruffy, ungrateful people, but because – because they never stopped to think about it, I guess. If you stopped to think about it you’d never do it, so don’t stop and think.

  I think that, when I stand on a stage and look in front of me at that sea of faces, I’m looking at a mirror, maybe the only mirror in the City where I can catch a glimpse of myself. I also think that from time to time I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  15

  “Don’t give me that,” Nicephorus said. “You did something. We told you not to interfere, and you did something.”

  “You don’t know the Themes,” I replied. “I do. They got wind of what Sisinna had in mind, they weighed up the costs and the benefits and made a business decision. Regardless of what you may have read, they’re not savages and they’re not stupid.”

  Artavasdus grinned at me. “Well, you’d know more about that than us. But I always thought they were stubborn as hell. Worried sick about backing down and losing face.”

  “Which is why they decided not to pick a fight with the Fleet,” I told him. “Isn’t that what it says in the Art of War? The best way to win a fight is not to fight at all.”

  That got me the grin redoubled. Interesting man, Artavasdus, in his way. Grins at you when he despises you, grins at you when he likes you, and always the same grin.

  “People are saying we give in to the Themes all the time,” Faustinus said. “It’s causing a lot of bad feeling.”

  “Really?” Nicephorus looked at him over his shoulder. “Who from?”

  “Well, the House for one.”

  “Don’t think I’ll lose too much sleep over that.”

  “We ought to close that place down,” Artavasdus yawned. “We don’t need them and they’re no good for anything.”

  “Technically,” Faustinus said, “they have to approve all new legislation.”

  “Except for measures passed under the Imperial prerogative and the emergency powers,” Artavasdus replied. “So, screw them.”

  “People like to know they’re there,” Nicephorus said mildly.

  “You both keep saying people, but I don’t think you know what you mean by it. What people?”

  The Public, I thought. “The citizens of this city,” Nicephorus said, in his sleepy-lion voice, which isn’t nearly as effective as he thinks it is. “Ordinary decent, right-thinking—”

  “Balls,” Artavasdus said. “Purely mythical creatures, like elves and gryphons. No, things have changed and you know it. Time was, the old families ruled the Empire, and then along came the siege, and now it’s the provisional government, meaning the military. Us.”

  “I’m not military,” Faustinus pointed out.

  “And Admiral Sisinna,” Nicephorus said. “The Fleet’s got more men and more money than the army, and Sisinna swore an oath to uphold the constitution, same as we did. How seriously he takes it I really wouldn’t care to say.”

  “He’s never here,” Artavasdus replied. “Besides, he’s a realist, and he’s got far too much on his plate to bother about politics. Whatever we decide, he’ll be fine with that, so long as he gets his new ships.”

  Faustinus was getting uncomfortable. “You really ought to think before you speak, Arta.”

  “I do.”

  “Then that just makes it worse. There’s a world of difference between bypassing the House and overthrowing the constitution.”

  Artavasdus yawned again, this time making a performance of it. “You’re probably right,” he said. “Let them just wither away of their own accord, and nobody will notice or care.” He smiled. “Why are we having this conversation anyway? I thought we were bollocking Notker for poking his nose in where it’s got no place being.”

  I held up my hands. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “We believe you,” Nicephorus said, making believe sound like a dialect word for forgive. “And don’t do it again.”

  I expected them to put me on a shorter leash after that, but apparently they reckoned I’d been spoken to and would therefore have learned my lesson. To be honest, I don’t think I was exactly uppermost in their minds just then. There was bad news from the war – they didn’t tell me, but they were careless with their bits of paper and I can read upside down.

  We got the news from the Telpessians, a bunch of chancers who we did a lot of business with at one time. They liked us; they also liked the quicksand agglomeration of unlikely allies camped on the other side of the wall; they liked everybody, it’s their nature. Because of this overwhelming brimming over with friendliness and love, they were able to buy from us all those unique and irreplaceable things that only we can make and you can’t get anywhere else, and sell them to the hundred and one nations joined with King Ogus in the universal crusade to obliterate us. They got away with it because they weren’t too obvious about it, and they were prepared to go the extra mile – the extra nine hundred and seventy miles, to be exact; from the City across the open sea to the southern tip of the Jotrai peninsula, where they handed the stuff over to the Lanquan Lijorn, who carried it across the mountain passes to Wamey, where caravans of desert nomads picked it up and carted it across the sand dunes to Ithbine Seauton for retail distribution among the members of the Anti-Robur League.

  King Ogus wasn’t happy about it, but what could he do? The Lanquan Lijorn were too far away to hit – so far away that in their country the sun rises in the west, or so I read somewhere – and trying to punish the nomads would be like trying to swat very small flies with a claymore. Since he didn’t have a fleet, any sort of punitive expedition against Ithbine would involve going the very long way round on land and would tie up tens of thousands of men for the best part of a year, and Ithbine is no pushover, apparently. He made all sorts of roaring noises at his allies, who promised faithfully they’d do everything they could to stamp out the illicit trade inside their own jurisdictions, and then did nothing, mostly because the profits of the trade were helping them pay the ruinous expense of taking part in Ogus’ ridiculous war.

  Anyway, that’s the Telpessians for you, and I’ve never met one and probably never will. But, according to them, Ogus had done a deal with the Hus. Just in case you don’t know, the Hus live right up in the far north, where it’s bitter cold nine months of the year, and there’s a lot of them, living in flat valleys between mountain ranges. Milkfaces, naturally; in the past they had no beef with us, because our paths have never crossed, but the petty kings and chieftains who rule them have an insatiable appetite for pretty, shiny things, and honour and status can only be achieved through military prowess. So Ogus had done a deal for seventy thousand Hus mercenaries, all seven feet tall and strong as bears; bu
t that wasn’t all. About three hundred years ago the Hus conquered and enslaved the Ilse, a race of small, dark milkfaces who live just south of them, and who the Robur knew a bit about because the Ilse used to export iron ore. Their country is all barren mountains, but under the mountains there’s enough iron to plate over the Middle Sea, so quite early on they packed up farming and took to mining, and as time went on they got rather good at it, particularly in the field of cutting galleries through living rock, something we in the soft south have never really got the hang of. Ogus did another deal with the Hus bosses and bought twenty thousand Ilse miners, and three guesses what he wanted them for.

  As if that wasn’t enough, he’d also been talking to the Aelians, our nearest and biggest trading partner. The Aelians live on a big island, so as long as they and their allies control the sea they’re safe; except that, like the Ilse, they don’t do their own farming. Instead, they buy food from the milkface tribes on the other side of the Friendly Sea; and those tribes, not wanting to be exterminated by Ogus’ legions, had joined his grand alliance.

  Ogus was too far away to bully the Lanquan Lijorn, but the Friendly Coast savages who supplied corn to the Aelians were right in his back yard, a few days’ ride for light cavalry. So he gave the Aelians an ultimatum: stop trading with the Robur, or you get no more grain shipments.

  The Aelians are milkfaces, but a different sort to Ogus and his lot; and we’ve tried to push them around in the past, but every time we sent an army or a fleet they wiped the floor with us, so they bear us no ill will. They’re a bumptious lot, full of themselves and inclined to be snotty with anyone who tells them what to do. They slapped us down when we tried it, and they weren’t any more impressed by Ogus and his feather-clad savages. Fine, they said; we’ll buy our food from the Harpagenes instead, which is no big deal to us, and you can explain to your new allies why they no longer have a lucrative market for their agricultural surplus.

  Fine words; but Harpagene is quite a bit further from Aelia than the Friendly Coast, and a lot of it is open sea, which nobody in his right mind likes crossing. My guess is, the Aelians were bluffing and didn’t expect to be called on it. So far they’d been as good as gold as far as we were concerned, but they were starting to make little noises; seeing as how they’d been put to a lot of expense and inconvenience on our part, how about lower prices at the dockside, low or no customs charges, tariffs for their competitors, that sort of thing? Under the circumstances it would’ve been churlish of us not to agree, but it put a strain on our finances at a time when things weren’t going quite so well for us commercially as we’d have liked.

  None of this was the conspirators’ fault, it goes without saying. But as soon as word got about, a lot of people in the City started feeling unhappy about it. The Hus mercenaries didn’t scare anybody, because when the enemy campfires beneath your walls are more numerous than the stars, what’s a few more here or there? But the Ilse miners were another matter. I gather that the main reason why Ogus hadn’t tried to sap his way into the City recently was that most of his skilled sappers were wiped out in a botched attempt to undermine the walls shortly after the siege began, and he had no way of replacing them.

  Rather more serious in political terms was the Aelian problem. Most of our end of the Aelian trade was controlled by a hard core of old families, big noises in the House, who’d been doing business with Aelia since long before the war and who’d kept up their contacts – to everybody’s benefit, let’s not forget, but if we found ourselves cut off from Aelia and forced to trade with other people, they’d lose a fortune, something they were reluctant to do. Even if the Aelians stuck by us, the lower prices would eat into their profits considerably; and, since their taxes paid a substantial proportion of the cost of guarding the City and manning the Fleet, they couldn’t just be brushed aside as whining parasites. Hence, I realised, Faustinus’ concern with the views of the House and Artavasdus’ sudden interest in constitutional reform.

  All of which was food for thought for someone who was spending a lot of his time thinking, and I wished I understood more about it than I did. As far as the sappers were concerned, I knew we’d beaten them once, so presumably we could beat them again, unless there was something about the previous occasion that had made our victory hard to repeat. I looked in the glass and discovered that I wasn’t too bothered about the sappers. The Aelians, though, were another matter. The City was surviving because, for the time being, life wasn’t just as good as it had been but better, and that was what made it possible for people, the Public, to turn a wilfully blind eye to the monster crouching under the walls and not wake up in the night screaming. Also, if trade dried up and money dried up, the provisional government wouldn’t be able to afford to drown the Theme cats in cream; whereupon the temporary ceasefire between Themes and government and Blues and Greens would crumble away, and there’d be no need for Ilsen sappers and Hus mercenaries. They’d dig under the wall and burst into the streets and find we’d all slaughtered each other.

  So if a man was thinking about going abroad to try his luck, this might be a good time. You won’t be surprised to learn that the thought had crossed my mind a few times before all this Lysimachus business kicked off, just as it must have occurred to every single one of my fellow citizens at one time or another. Most of them resolved to stay because life had actually improved, see above, and the fields on the slopes of the volcano were beautifully fertile and grew fat crops of grapes and strawberries. Also, we were well aware (the government had seen to that) of the fact that Ogus and the milkfaces had sworn to annihilate the Robur race, which meant that as and when the City fell, he wouldn’t be leaving it at that; furthermore, he was offering cash money for every overseas Robur anyone cared to bring him. Not everyone can work miracles with whiteface like I can; in the cold, hard world across the sea, how far would we have to go to be safe, and was there any realistic prospect of getting there? Chances were that if the enemy took the City, they’d capture at least some of the Fleet as well; even if they didn’t, without Sisinna’s men ruling the waves, it wouldn’t be long before Ogus built or acquired warships of his own, at which point Aelia wouldn’t want to shelter us, thank you very much, and neither would any of our other tried and trusted friends this side of the Sashan Empire. Add to that, in my own circumstances, the sad truth that the theatre as I know it is entirely a Robur phenomenon, so I had no skills to earn a living with over the wide blue yonder, and on balance I’d rather die by the sword than starve.

  “Do you know what day it is today?” Artavasdus asked me.

  I don’t have hackles, but if I’d had some they’d have shot up like ducks off a pond. “Enlighten me,” I said.

  “It’s the Old and New Moon.”

  “Ah.”

  Now I could see what he was grinning about. The Old and New Moon marks the start of the Absolution Day festival, which to ninety-nine per cent of my brother Robur means only one thing: the beginning of the new season in the arena.

  Brief digression on opinion, prejudice and morality. There are a few things, a very few things, that I don’t hold with. Some of them, like war and cholera, are pretty unpopular with most people, so no real issue arises. One or two of them are things I disapprove of but other people don’t.

  Might as well come straight out with it: I disapprove of arena fighting. I believe it’s barbaric and horrible, it brutalises and corrupts the people who watch it, and there’s nothing good to be said about it. To my credit, I also believe that my opinion is precisely that, an opinion, of interest and concern to me and nobody else; and a lot of people would say about the theatre what I say about the arena, and maybe they’re right. And, since the arena doesn’t affect me directly, I don’t have and shouldn’t have any say in the matter. One man’s opinion is another man’s prejudice is another man’s bigotry. Have opinions, by all means, but keep the nasty things to yourself.

  That said, I don’t like watching the sand-fighting. My dad loved it, and, being who he was
, we always had really good seats; in the North stand mostly, second tier, where you can see absolutely every damn thing that goes on. I would sit beside him and he’d do this running commentary, in a loud and carrying voice – bet you they could hear it out in the middle, not that he’d have cared about that. People used to come up to him afterwards and thank him, which was fair enough, I suppose, because he was very knowledgeable and well informed. If he ever caught me closing my eyes, he’d give me a clip round the ear that made my head spin. I don’t know, maybe that’s why I’ve never liked watching that stuff, though I can’t honestly say watching strangers die ever really did it for me. Mind you, there’s more sword fighting and more bodies on the ground at the end of the third act of Scaphio and Phantis than you get in the whole of Festival Week in the Hippodrome, and I regard that as high art. See above, under exactly what my opinions are worth.

  Anyway, the point being Lysimachus would, of course, be the President of the Games; he’d lead the opening ceremony and be there in the Imperial box right through all five days, taking a keen professional interest and awarding the prizes.

  “I can’t do it,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” said Artavasdus. “Of course you can. Just sit there and enjoy yourself. Wish I could afford the time.”

  “They won’t be able to see you,” Nicephorus said. “They’ll be facing the sand, same as you. And they’ll all be glued to the fighting.”

  “If I have to watch all that killing, I’ll probably throw up.”

  The conspirators were hard men to shock, but I’d managed it. There was a stunned silence, then Nicephorus said, “You’ll do no such thing.”

  “You were Green champion,” Faustinus said. “Undefeated. Fought forty-six, won forty-two, drew four.”

  God help us, a fan. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but it’s like seasickness, it’s not something I can help.”