How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  “Jolly good,” I said.

  The holy icons, according to the best medical opinions, had saved me from at least one broken rib. Which proved, according to expert theologians, that icons really do work. Meanwhile, as soon as the news of the cowardly, treacherous attempt reached the poor bastards in the mines, they launched a counter-attack that drove Ogus’ sappers right back to the second breach, and gave Hrabanus time to finish his undermining in peace and quiet.

  “You’re not talking to me,” she said. “That’s childish.”

  “What the hell is there to say?” I told her. “If you can think of anything that won’t make things worse, I’d love to hear it.”

  “Childish,” she repeated.

  “For God’s sake, Hodda.” When she makes me shout, she knows she’s won. I lowered my voice, but by then it was too late. “You know what you’ve done. I don’t see talking about it’s going to make it any better.”

  “I see. That’s the thanks I get for saving your stupid life.”

  I could feel history changing all around me. “Let’s forget it, shall we?”

  “I know you,” she said. “You’ll keep banging on and on about it until I want to scream.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What next?”

  She cast her eyes up at the ceiling in silent prayer for strength. “I don’t know,” she said. “All my plans have gone the way of yesterday’s piss, thanks to—”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I’m stuck here,” she said. “Stranded, until Ogus smashes his way in and murders the lot of us. All thanks,” she added, “to you. If it wasn’t for you, I could get on a ship and sail away. I’d be broke, but at least I’d be alive.”

  “Was that what you wanted from Ogus? Money?”

  “Ever such a lot of it, yes. And I could see the war could only end one way.”

  “You really think that.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

  “I agree with you,” I said.

  Not just intuition, in my case. Latest from the mines; since our unfortunate meeting, Ogus had opened up six new saps. His miners now knew everything there was to know about breaking through a granite shelf, so it wouldn’t be long before we were fighting on six fronts, at least, down there in the pitch dark. Hrabanus’ men were still fighting like lions for every inch of tunnel, killing Ogus’ men at a ratio of over ten to one, but it was getting harder and harder to replace the experienced men we lost.

  He can’t keep it up, my wise advisers told me. Sooner or later the provinces will rebel, especially if we step up the pressure with the Fleet. He can’t keep on conscripting whole cities. Already there were entire regions where nobody lived and the land was drifting back into a jungle of briars and thistles, because all the men had been marched away to the war and never come home. People won’t stand for that sort of thing. They just won’t.

  I’d have agreed with him, except for a book I’d read. Apparently in north Blemya there’s a desert, thousands upon thousands of square miles of sand. Hundreds of years ago, that was all wheatfields, the breadbasket of the First Blemyan Empire. But then there was a civil war, two nephews scrapping over who was to succeed their uncle. Both of them were brilliant generals, and they fought many remarkable battles, wonderful displays of military science, in each of which tens of thousands of men died but with no clear result. So more and more men were recruited, and the war went on; one of the rivals died and was replaced by his equally brilliant son; the other rival married his only daughter to the finest general in the world, Robur it goes without saying, who in due course inherited his father-in-law’s claim. The war only ended when the whole of Blemya was overrun by nomads – simple people, no match for civilised armies, but by then there was practically nobody left to fight them, and they burned down the empty cities and grazed their goats on the weedy, overgrown fields. Now goats will eat anything and everything, and before long the high winds they have in those parts blew away all the overgrazed topsoil, leaving nothing but the sand underneath. Moral: it’s amazing what people will stand for, if the government tell them to.

  17

  So I started to read about granite.

  I had plenty of time for reading, since I refused to spend my evenings stuffing my face with indigestible luxury foods in the company of stupid, boring aristocrats. The Imperial palace library has a copy of every book ever written; all I had to do was tell Usuthus what I wanted, and armies of dedicated librarians scrabbled around like moles till they found it for me. There is in fact a ridiculously large literature on the subject of granite, but the librarians winnowed out the irrelevant stuff and only brought me what I needed to see.

  All sorts of useful information: what it’s used for, where it comes from, the different sorts of granite, how much a square foot of it weighs, what volume a ton of it occupies. Granite, I realised, held the key to all our difficulties, if only I could make people do what I wanted. Compared to people, of course, granite is easy as pie to work with. Of all the components that go towards building a city, human beings are the most intractable, unreliable, expensive and dangerous. Didn’t need a book to tell me that. I learned that lesson at my father’s knee, or, properly speaking, his toecap.

  Relevant, in its way. I had a team of (relatively) good, knowledgeable men to advise me about the stones and bricks of the City and how to keep them from being torn down; where to reinforce the battlements, the importance of mamelons and ravelins and the mysterious science of the flying buttress, just how much pounding a wall can take, all the minutiae of digging over, under, round and through the many and various kinds of dirt, gravel, clay and rock. As far as brick and stone went, I was reasonably confident that we had it covered.

  But Saloninus says, it’s not bricks and stones that make a city, it’s men and women. And concerning them, who the hell could I ask or trust? Thousands of years of history and the actions of great men, inspiring leaders, wise statesmen – they were all the funnel down which we’d slid to find ourselves in this ghastly, appalling mess. The great-great-grandsons of those wise leaders made up the House, and as far as I could tell they’d all inherited their ancestors’ way of thinking along with the money and the gold dinner services. Professional soldiers, who’d lost us the empire more or less overnight; no, I can’t say I put a lot of stock in what they thought about things, specially since I’d got to know them. The Themes, sorry, Theme; the voice of the people, united we stand and divided we fall, and until very recently there had been two of them, do the maths. I grew up in the Themes, as I may just possibly have mentioned, and my father was so much a part of his Theme that even now I find it impossible to evaluate the one without the other. As you’ll have observed, I owe a vast deal to my father and the Theme; my instincts, the ability to think on my feet; nothing less than my life, on countless occasions. He taught me to think as if every moment of my life could turn into a fight, and I can’t imagine any more valuable gift. In comparison, the inheritances of the great senatorial families are so much trash. But the Themes can’t run a city, no more than maggots can bring what they’re feeding on back to life. No; we may have sorted bricks and stones, but as far as people go we don’t understand them and I don’t see that we’ve ever seriously tried to.

  Stones and people; what they call a symbiosis. Stones piled up into a wall keep you safe. Stones lobbed over a wall squash you flat. Why does everything in life have to be so ambivalent?

  There was a bit of a scuffle in the street as I processed, in all the horrible gear, to the Annunciation Day service in the Red Heart temple. “Nothing to worry about,” Captain Very assured me, “just some mad woman.” He laughed. “Reckoned she was your mother.”

  After the service, I told the captain we were going to the Watch house. Which one? The one where they’d taken the poor unfortunate mad woman who made the disturbance in the street. The emperor, I pointed out, is the fount of all clemency, and people like that sort of thing.


  “If you insist,” he said. “You’ll be late for the Privy Council.”

  “Fuck the Privy Council.”

  Just so happened I knew that Watch house quite well. I spent eight hours locked up in it once, on an entirely baseless and malicious charge of disorderly conduct after a wrap party. The cell they took me to was bigger than mine, but without a street view.

  “Hello, Mother,” I said.

  “Notker? What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”

  “Not so loud, please.”

  “It is you,” she said, “I knew it was. I saw you up on the steps at the Old and New Festival. What the hell—?”

  So I told her. She listened in stony silence. Nobody, not even Hodda, does silent disapproval better than my mother. Of course, she’s had so much practice.

  “You’re mad,” she said.

  “What else could I do?” I complained. “At every point there’s been people with weapons threatening to kill me if I don’t do as I’m told. I didn’t ask for any of this. It just happened.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  “Yes, it—” Deep breath. “I got picked up and swept along on a wave,” I said. “Yes, as it’s gone along I’ve tried to make the best of it, with the result that I’m still alive. If I could’ve got out of it at any point, I’d have done just that. But I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me.”

  “Rubbish,” she said. “It’s all just you telling lies. You always were a liar, Notker. You tell lies even when you don’t have to. Half the time, I think you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Suppose you’re right. You’re my mother. Tell me what I should do.”

  She gave me that look, the sort that turns grapes into raisins. “Putting your own mother in prison,” she said. “Never been in a jail cell in all my life, until you put me in one.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  She looked at me, without the shrivel effect. “You’re a fool, Notker. All you’ve ever done your whole life is lie and run away. You broke your poor father’s heart.”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t. He was proud of me.”

  Shrug. “He wanted you to have a better life than he did. And now look at you.”

  Well, I thought, yes and no. “What do you think I should do?”

  She thought about it, for what seemed like a long time. “Get out,” she said. “Get away from here, as far as you can possibly go, where nobody knows you and you can start again, with a proper job.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “I told you, I’m trapped.”

  “You’ll have to find a way, that’s all,” she said. “Tell a lie or two. You’re good at that.”

  “I wish I was,” I said.

  “Don’t ever wish that,” she snapped at me. “It’s lies got you into this mess. No good ever came of lying.”

  I wanted to explain to her; I really am the emperor. Doesn’t matter how I got there. Half the emperors in the list had no right to the job until they actually got it. What about Tisander the Liberator, conqueror of Ballene and friend of the poor? He was a clerk who worked his way up to head of department. When the old emperor died, he was in charge of the arrangements for the coronation. He was supposed to help the crown prince on with all the gear – lorus and dalmatic and divitision and all that shit – but, instead, he climbed into it himself, dashed out into the Great Hall, plonked his arse down on the throne and proclaimed himself emperor; only the emperor could wear the regalia, he explained, he was wearing the regalia, therefore he was the emperor. And he got away with it; in spite of the fact that he’d got the dalmatic on inside out and the buskins on the wrong feet. I really am the emperor, so how dare you say I’ve been a disappointment to you, even if it’s true?

  Couldn’t say that, of course. “So that’s your advice, is it? Lie and run away.”

  She knows me all too well. No matter what I become or who I turn into, she knows me. Everything changes, but not that. “I don’t see what else you can do,” she said. “Not after the mess you’ve made.”

  “Lie and run away,” I repeated. “All right, then.”

  I released an official statement, to be read out in every marketplace and temple in the City; you know the sort of thing, there’s two or three of them every day about something or other. This one said that the emperor had taken pity on the poor mad woman who tried to assault him in the street. On enquiry, it turned out that the woman had lost her reason after her son was killed in action against the enemy; her tragic loss had addled her wits, so it was impossible to believe a word she said about anything. Nevertheless, she was therefore a heroine of the commonwealth, and as a mark of respect to her and others like her, the emperor had graciously awarded her a substantial pension for life and free accommodation in a grace-and-favour apartment, together with the purely honorary title of Mother of Her Country. Just as you’d expect, it was wildly popular with the people, and Usuthus said he wished he’d thought of it.

  Lie and run away, two things I’m good at. Well, I thought, marking my place in yet another book about granite with my handkerchief, why the hell not?

  18

  In which case, there wasn’t a moment to lose. I sent for the First Lord of the Treasury. “How much money have we got?” I asked him.

  He looked at me. “Majesty?”

  “In actual coins,” I said. “How much?”

  He gave me a respectful scowl. “I really couldn’t say, Majesty. The specie reserves fluctuate from day to day, depending on a wide range of factors.”

  “At a guess.”

  I think he’d have liked me better if I’d asked him to eat a turd salad. “Really, it’s impossible to make a meaningful estimate. I can find out for you, if you’d like me to.”

  “Do that.”

  “Of course, Majesty, it will take several days. And by the time I have a consolidated figure, the situation may have changed substantially, rendering the stated total meaningless.”

  “You’ve got till this evening,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if the figures aren’t accurate.”

  I got my answer, on time and guaranteed bang-on right. Based on my thumb-and-fingers estimate, it wasn’t enough. So I sent for the president of the central bank. “How much money have we got?” I asked him.

  Same rigmarole. Result: ready cash added to the value of loans already agreed, mortgages on future revenues and other concrete intangibles (I kid you not; that’s what he called them) would be just about enough. So I sent for Colonel Hrabanus and Rear Admiral Gainas.

  I told them what I wanted them to do. There was one of those silences.

  “You don’t think it’ll work,” I said.

  “Far be it from me,” said the colonel, “but it’s a bit—”

  “Radical,” I said. “Yes, I know. But let me tell you something. We’re way, way past the point where anything that’s been done before can possibly help us. Did you read Posidonius, like I told you?”

  “Yes, Majesty. However—”

  I glared at him, but he carried on regardless.

  “Things have changed since Posidonius’ time,” he said. “Defensive techniques have come a long way since then. We’ve made great strides in earth-moving and tunnel construction.”

  “I know. So has the enemy.”

  “I refuse to acknowledge that it’s a foregone conclusion.” He stopped short, desperately ashamed of himself for yelling. “I firmly believe that a conventional defence will be effective. It’s got to,” he added.

  I shook my head. “It’s not a conventional attack,” I said. “Against us we’ve got a lunatic who rules a third of the known world, and he doesn’t care what it costs, in money or lives. That’s pretty unconventional, if you ask me.”

  “Even so—” He raised his hands, that old words-fail-me gesture. “If you give the order, I’ll do my very best to carry it out. But I have strong reservations—”

  “Noted,” I said. “Admiral, what about t
he ships? Do you see a problem?”

  He shook his head. “Not if the ships exist,” he said.

  “Oh, I imagine they do,” I said airily. “They were built out of oak and tarred and caulked within an inch of their lives. I know it’s a long time ago, but I bet they’re still around.”

  “In that case,” he said, “yes, it’s entirely feasible, if that’s what you really want to do.”

  “And the escort side of it? That’s very important.”

  “We can do that, certainly,” he said. Which was all I needed to hear.

  So I sent for the senior officers of the Purple Theme; not the dummies I’d installed to appease the House, the real ones, leftovers from the old days who’d wisely decided to play ball with me. “I need a hole dug,” I said.

  They didn’t like the sound of that. “Sapping and counter-sapping are skilled trades,” one of them said. “We don’t have anyone experienced enough to—”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, “I’m not asking you to send Themesmen down the mines. Not yet, anyway,” I added, just as he was beginning to relax. “No, this is a strictly civilian hole. Big, but civilian.”

  They looked at each other. My not yet hadn’t been wasted on them. “Consider it done,” they said.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” I said as they got up to leave. “We haven’t had a proper census for years. I think we ought to have one.”

  “With respect, there was a census the year before last.”

  “That was a government census,” I pointed out. “Naturally, people lie to a government census, it’s expected of you. I mean a Theme census. A true one, done by us. How many people there really are and where they really live. I think I ought to have that information, if I’ve got to plan for emergencies. Otherwise, people might end up with no food and nowhere to sleep, just because I didn’t know they existed. See to it, would you? No rush, this time next week will do.”