How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  Nicephorus closed his eyes for a moment, asking Heaven what he’d done to deserve me. “We’ll have three lines of guards standing at the front of the box,” he said. “If you’re going to puke, duck down low.”

  “Can’t have that,” Artavasdus said firmly, “it’ll make it look like he’s scared of being assassinated. Bodyguards are a political issue. We’d be sending some very bad messages.”

  “He’s right,” Faustinus said. “It’d look awful.”

  “Not as bad as the iron man of the arena chucking his guts up at the sight of blood,” Nicephorus said angrily. “It’d be one sure way of putting doubt in people’s minds.”

  “If you’re right at the back of the East stand, you can look directly down into the Imperial box and see everything,” Faustinus pointed out. “I know, because that’s where my father and I used to sit when I was a boy.”

  “Fine.” Nicephorus held up both hands. “Forget the guards, then. He’ll just have to pull himself together and not be a big girl’s blouse about it.”

  “That,” I said, with all the strength of character I could dredge up, “might not be possible. I think I’m going to have to be ill.”

  “Lysimachus would have to be at death’s door to miss the opening days of Ascension.”

  “Then that’s where I’ll be,” I said.

  We compromised. Somehow or other I’d battle my way through one day of ghastliness, and then I’d be allowed to have a high fever and convulsions.

  Oh, and there was one other thing. The rumours about Lysimachus’ sexual proclivities showed no signs of dying down, so I’d need a red-hot female escort. Just as well we had one on the team, so to speak.

  “I’ve never been to the arena,” Hodda said to me, as we drove there in a covered coach. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Count yourself lucky. It’s revolting.”

  She loved it. Just like the very best fight scenes in the theatre, she whispered to me as some poor fool got his hand chopped off at the wrist, but with real blood. And when the reigning champion skewered one opponent then whirled round on his heel, decapitated the man creeping up behind him, then pirouetted back to disembowel a third, she was on her feet yelling and waving her scarf in the air, just like my dad used to do. I lurched onto my feet and yelled too; now that’s acting.

  “Amazing footwork,” she said, when we’d sat down again. “That’s something we never get right, we just stand there and have at it, no wonder it never looks real. We should hire one of these people to do some arranging for us.”

  “Keep your voice down,” I said.

  “God, sorry. Only, it’s so exciting. When I think what I’ve been missing all these years.”

  Of course, I know all about footwork. I learned it under my father’s heavy, accurate hand. Footwork, he’d say, is everything: if you aren’t there, you can’t get hit. And there’s a lot of truth in that. I’d taken him at his word and not been there for a long, long time. Now, it seemed, I was back, watching one man destroy another and having to act like it was a good thing. Childhood, they tell you, best days of your life. Well, that’s their opinion.

  In the seats in front of us, my three fellow conspirators were completely engrossed, caught up in the action. I think what Faustinus liked best was the fighting, which is what I’d expect from someone who hasn’t been in a fight since he was seven years old. Nicephorus was following all the moves, seeing if there was anything he could learn – a serious-minded man, with a strong sense of his own inadequacy, which circumstances made him deny utterly in public. Artavasdus was enjoying the blood. Fair enough; as Saloninus says, the man who’s tired of killing is tired of life, and at least he made no bones, no pun intended, about it. As for Hodda, I believe it was all three of the above, though I wouldn’t care to speculate on the exact proportions. She’s one hell of a fencer, by the way, in breeches parts; put a man’s eye out once, and though she swears it was an accident I think she got carried away.

  I wasn’t enjoying myself, so I decided it was time for the onset of serious illness. About the only appropriate thing I’d ever experienced myself was mountain fever – no joke, trust me – so that’s what I decided to do.

  Lysimachus, the way I read it, had been suffering from the early symptoms all day, but being a man of iron he’d shrugged them off, ignored them, treated them with the contempt they deserved. Ideal for my purposes. I closed my eyes and remembered the pain, which wasn’t difficult to do. Then I remembered the shivering, which starts in your knees and spreads upwards; then the muscle spasms, and I realised I was actually sweating, I don’t know why but it saved me having to dab my face surreptitiously with spit. Then I stood up, fighting to keep my balance, lost the fight and toppled slowly forward, like a felled tree.

  The trick is, if you want to fall convincingly, aim at something soft to fall on. I chose Artavasdus. He was entirely wrapped up in the sword fighting, so he had no idea what was going on until I fell on him, pushing him forward out of his seat and nearly braining him on the rail of the box. He let out a howl they must’ve heard down on the sand, and I’m guessing a few people must’ve looked round, then a whole lot more, because a second or so later the whole stadium was so quiet. All I could hear was swords clanging away down on the sand, where those poor fools were still battling furiously for their lives, with nobody watching.

  Someone grabbed me and I was lifted up in the air, and all hell broke loose.

  I ought to explain that I hadn’t entirely abided by the terms of my agreement with my co-conspirators. Under the agreement, I was supposed to pass out tomorrow, not today. Later I explained to them that if we’d done it the way we’d agreed, they’d have known what was coming, and they’d have been thoroughly unconvincing. As it was, the spontaneity of genuine shock carried us all through. They gave me a hard time about it, but eventually conceded that it had gone down very well, and therefore, by implication, I’d been right.

  By this point, of course, we were having trouble hearing ourselves think. There was a mob under the window, singing hymns to the Invincible Sun for my recovery. Artavasdus said he put the number at roughly forty thousand, though I think he was exaggerating. Nicephorus, rather more plausibly, reckoned the whole of Sunrise Square was packed solid. If so, that was a lot of people, and all begging the Invincible to spare my life. Which is probably the weirdest experience I’ve ever had, in a somewhat unorthodox life.

  Artavasdus reckoned I’d nearly broken his collarbone. I told him not to be such a girl.

  16

  I said I ought to see a doctor. It’d look really strange if I didn’t, and someone would be bound to notice; leading medical practitioners wanting to know why the father of the country was dangerously ill and they hadn’t been consulted. Nicephorus told me I was getting above myself, and not to be so stupid.

  “You see?” Hodda was sitting by my bedside; I daren’t get up just in case a servant came in. “They love you. It’s pathetic, but they really do.”

  They’d been there all night, apparently, praying and chanting; how not being able to get any sleep was supposed to aid my recovery wasn’t entirely clear to me, but that’s the public for you.

  “Why do I get the feeling you want to use that to make me do something stupid?”

  “I remember when Mostellaria was dying,” she said, “and ten thousand people stood under her window all night holding lighted candles. And she staggered to the balcony and took one last bow.”

  “Were you one of them?”

  “Was I hell as like. I never liked her. But it was beautiful.”

  “You do realise,” I said, “we’re this close to getting our necks pulled. And I seem to be the only one of us talking this thing seriously.”

  She looked at me. “You’re doing fine,” she said, “relax. You’re well into your stride now. Follow your instincts and everything will be just swell.”

  Smart as paint, but not all the time. “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Sell out the City to Ogus, y
es, but how? We can’t just write him a letter and give a kid five trachy to drop it round to him.”

  She frowned. “You’d have to set up a private meeting,” she said. “Just you and him.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Be quiet and let me think. The invitation would have to come from him.”

  I was about to say something clever, but I didn’t. “Go on.”

  “He would need to say that he’s willing to talk peace, but he’ll only talk to you, one on one.”

  “That would get those three idiots off my back, granted.”

  “Someone must know someone,” she said, looking past me with her dreamy face on. “This city’s crawling with spies, if you believe half what you hear.”

  In my case, about a tenth; which meant I believed the City was crawling with spies. Obviously, with foreigners dropping in and out on merchant ships every day of the week. I was starting to feel nervous.

  “Leave it with me,” she said. “I’ll arrange it.”

  “No, for crying out loud, don’t do that.” I was about to jump out of bed, but I remembered I was sick. “You’ll go blundering in and give the whole show away.”

  “Give me credit for a little common sense,” she said, cool as a mountain stream. “I’ll ask around, discreet enquiries; nobody’ll know it’s me asking. Obviously you think I’m stupid or something.”

  As soon as the Games were safely over, I made a miraculous recovery, for which thanks were duly given in the form of a huge outdoor Blessing of the Sacrament and Transfiguration of the Host in the Hippodrome, with all the top priests up there doing their stuff. I was back in the Imperial box but I didn’t mind that, since nobody was getting killed. What I wasn’t so keen on was the three-times-life-size statue of me they put up right in the middle of the arena, where the Bronze Tripod used to be before it got struck by lightning. Apparently it had been paid for by popular subscription, which meant the Public dropping their handfuls of trachy into hats on street corners, either voluntarily or by order of the Theme bosses, and of the two I don’t know which would be worse; I didn’t ask and nobody told me. It was a horrible statue, of me – I do beg your pardon – of Lysimachus in his glory days as a sand fighter, finishing off a sprawling foe with a huge spear.

  “It’s all fixed,” she said. “I’ve arranged it.”

  What counts as a virtue in one context isn’t necessarily a good thing in another. In the theatre it’s a tremendous asset if your voice can be heard right up at the back of the gallery, even when you’re supposed to be whispering. “For God’s sake, Hodda,” I hissed at her. “Keep your voice down.”

  “You don’t need to know the details,” she carried on blithely, “but an invitation will be issued; just you and him, face to face, time and place to be agreed. Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”

  “What have you done?”

  “What we agreed. Or had you forgotten?”

  I didn’t want to talk to her any more, but she was full of it, the buzz. “Of course, we need to figure out exactly how we’re going to do it,” she went on, “but there’s plenty of time for that. You need to keep your ears and eyes open. I’ve been thinking. Opening the gates is probably going to be too difficult, but what if you take the entire garrison out on a night raid and lead them straight into a trap?”

  Just when you think you understand, something always happens to prove that you don’t. Forty thousand people had prayed for me under my window, and then somebody tried to kill me.

  I was on my way back from that singularly annoying interview with Hodda. We always did the journey back and forth the same way: a closed carriage, always the same driver, always the same two palace guards, one inside with me, the other up on the box. You can’t see where you’re going in a closed carriage, but I fancy we were somewhere around Coppergate, because we’d just been going downhill a long way and were starting to climb. I remember thinking, “Hello, why are we stopping?”, and the guard, who always sat opposite me looking like he’d been stuffed and frozen, leaned forward a little; and then there was this terrific thump on the roof, and then something smashed through the carriage door.

  The guard wasn’t moving. “What’s happening?” I shouted at him, then I saw that the thing that had punched through the door was a big wooden fence post, and as well as the door it had gone right through the guard

  I thought it must be some sort of bizarre accident. I stood up to bang on the roof, to get the driver’s attention. Then the other door was wrenched open, I saw the frame splinter and someone climbed in. I assumed it was the driver or the other guard. “He’s hurt,” I started to say. I couldn’t see the man’s face because it was dark. “I’m all right but he’s—”

  He had a knife. The penny dropped.

  There was a voice in my head, faint but perfectly clear: The way you go about taking a knife off someone is this. My dad, when I was eleven or twelve. We practised it over and over again. You’ll be glad I taught you this one day, he’d say.

  I took the knife away from him. He tried to take it back. I stuck it in his eye, as far as it would go.

  First time I’d ever done anything like that. Let’s not go there.

  They were foreigners, Faustinus told me later: four Jazygites. No papers on them, but the Jazygite resident made a list of all the ships they could have come in on. We do a lot of business with them; they’re nice people, friendly, on our side. We’re guessing, Faustinus said, that someone hired them to do it. And for that they pay him the big bucks.

  “What we don’t know,” Nicephorus said, “is whether they were hired by the enemy or someone in the City. Could be either, there’s no way of telling.”

  I’d killed one, the guard on the roof got two more and the fourth ran away, got chased down half the alleys in Old Stairs and dropped down dead, would you believe, of heart failure. In case you’re interested, they blocked the road with a donkey cart, then rammed the side of the coach with the fence post, hoping to take out everyone inside. “Amateurs,” Artavasdus said, and I agreed with him. Not the way my dad would’ve gone about it. “From which it seems likely,” he went on, “that someone went down to the docks and asked around for some out-of-towners who wanted to pick up some quick money. Rather than sending to the old country for the cream of the profession. Which doesn’t get us any further trying to figure out who was behind it.”

  I pointed out that whoever it was had known I was in that particular coach in that particular street at that particular time. Artavasdus said that didn’t help much either; the City was crawling with enemy spies, who probably knew more about what went on than we did. “Though if I were you,” he added, “I’d think carefully about that girlfriend of yours. She knows all the arrangements, obviously.”

  “She would never—” I began, and then remembered why I could vouch for her absolutely, and why I couldn’t tell them about it.

  “We’re keeping a lid on this,” Nicephorus said. “We don’t want riots, or all the Jazygites in the City torn limb from limb. If word got out someone tried to kill you, it could get very nasty indeed.”

  Keeping a lid on it; bless his naïve soul. And, yes, there were riots, twenty dead and whole rows of shops burned and looted; and roughly forty completely innocent Jazygite sailors and traders were killed in one night, and we had to lock the rest of them up in the Guards’ barracks for their own safety. Nice to know that people care, but I’d have preferred it if they’d sent flowers.

  Act 2

  1

  I woke up and there were six men standing over me: five soldiers and a fat man. “On your feet,” the fat man said.

  The soldiers had drawn swords in their hands. I got out of bed, looked for my slippers; they’d got kicked under the bed, presumably by the soldiers. I didn’t bother with my slippers.

  The fat man led the way down the long, narrow spiral staircase to the room where I spent most of my time, talking to the conspirators or reading or just lying on a couch. There were four more fat me
n there waiting for us. Four chairs, incidentally, in that room, plus the couch. I stood.

  “That him?” asked one of the four. My escort nodded.

  “Funny,” said another. “He’s not as tall as I thought he’d be.”

  “Oh, that’s him all right,” said a third. “I used to watch him in the arena. I’d know him anywhere.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  One of the fat men hadn’t spoken yet. He wasn’t the fattest, or the tallest, or even the best dressed, though they were all pretty damn smart, in an austere sort of way. But he was clearly the boss. “Do you know me?” he said.

  No, I was about to reply, but then something clicked into place in my mind. Yes, I’d seen him, even tried to impersonate him a few times, with pillows shoved up my front; but nobody in the audience knew who he was supposed to be, so we cut him out of the act. “You’re Gelimer,” I said.

  He smiled. “Senator Gelimer to you,” he said. “Leader of the House. Unlike you, you see, I have a real job in this town.”

  All over, then. I’d been found out. Ah well.

  Before I could say anything, Gelimer went on: “These gentlemen are representatives of the four main parties in the House. They’ve formed a coalition to provide a government of national unity.”

  He paused. That’s nice, I didn’t say. Couldn’t really see what business it was of mine, if I’d been found out.

  “There’s been a change of management,” he went on. “The military junta is out, and the House is back in charge.” He grinned. “Thanks to you, incidentally. Probably the most valuable contribution you ever made to the wellbeing of this city, and you didn’t actually do anything.”

  “Steady on,” said one of the other fat men. Gelimer turned his head, nodded, turned back to me. “The attempt on your life,” he said, “has given us the pretext we needed. Obviously there was a conspiracy, to overthrow the state and deliver the City into the hands of Ogus and his barbarian hordes. But there’s no need to panic. The conspirators have been apprehended and are in custody, and the Senate is in charge, making sure everything runs smoothly.”