How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It

by K. J. Parker

  After that, all I had to do was send for the captain of the fastest ship in the fleet and give him his orders.

  “All that money, Majesty.”

  “Nowhere safer than the hold of an Imperial warship,” I said. “Besides, nobody except you and me will know what you’re carrying.”

  He looked straight at me. “You trust me with all that money?”

  I nodded. “You have a wife, a mother, two sons and a daughter,” I said. “Get back here with a sealed receipt before Ascension Day and they’ll be released.”

  “Ascension Day.” He stared at me. “That’s not—”

  “Bet you it is,” I said gently. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  (Hodda said: “You don’t really mean that, do you? That poor man’s family—”

  I shrugged. “Probably not,” I said. “If this doesn’t work, it isn’t going to matter very much.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “This is our last chance,” I said, “don’t you understand that? If it doesn’t work, we’re out of time, and money, and soldiers, options, everything.”

  “But it’s a stupid idea. It won’t work.”)

  And then I’d done all I could; it was up to other people. The word went round: double the going rate for digging a bloody great big hole, picks and spades provided if you haven’t got your own. Naturally, people wanted to know what it was for. Drains, we told them. Of course, nobody believed a word of it.

  Two more Synaean ships showed up, flying that horrible flag that only means one thing. That got me worried. I had the harbourmaster trawl through his records, every Synaean ship that had landed for the last three months. There had been fifty-nine of them, and their crews had done the usual tours of the bars and brothels. No sign of plague anywhere. But three plague ships in such a short time; I sent for Gainas and told him to turn back all Synaean vessels at the five-mile line. “But don’t go on board,” I told him. “And if one of them refuses to go back, ram it. And the ship that does the ramming had better go off somewhere for a month, just in case.”

  “What about the two quarantine ships?” he asked. “Sink them, like last time?”

  “That seems a bit heartless,” I said. “Tell you what. That island, where I met Ogus. Escort them there. At least the poor bastards can die on dry land, and there’s no chance of their ships drifting into the harbour once they’re all dead.”

  He looked at me. “You’re hoping Ogus will send soldiers over there, and they’ll take the plague back to his camp. Actually, that’s not a bad—”

  I shook my head. “They’re not that stupid,” I said. “Also, I wouldn’t do that to anyone, not even him.”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Hodda said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a horrible idea, and I’m not doing it.”

  “You could end the war at a—”

  “We tried that, remember?” She scowled at me. I went on: “Anyway, I’ve been reading a book about it. Pacatian’s account of the plague at Coseilha.”

  “Where?”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. “There was a siege. Plague broke out in the besiegers’ camp. Five thousand men died in a week.”

  “That’s not bad.”

  “So what the besiegers did,” I went on, “they loaded corpses onto catapults and tried to chuck them over the wall into the city. But their catapults weren’t strong enough and they fell short.”

  “There you are, then.”

  “So they cut the bodies into bits. A bit of a plague corpse does just as well, they found. Six weeks later, they rammed open the gate and found they had the place to themselves. Everybody inside was dead. Moral: you don’t mess with Mister Plague. He is not your friend.”

  She shrugged. It’s a beautiful thing to watch when she does that. “You do read a lot of books,” she said.

  “Full of good ideas, some of them.”

  She got up to leave the room. It was time for her to go and sit doing nothing in the company of the flower of Robur womanhood for the rest of the day. “Just a moment,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Sit down.”

  “I can’t be long, they’ll be waiting for me.”

  “Do you care?”

  “I hate them,” she said simply. “Forty-six simpering rich women, aged between seventeen and sixty-nine. Each one wearing enough diamonds and pearls to fill a bucket. There’s this fat woman.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I mean fat,” Hodda said. “Melt her down, you could make enough candles to light the Gallery for a month. And she’s got this ruby and sapphire ring.”

  “Nice?”

  “Horrible. It’s so horrible I can’t help staring at it. And it must be worth – I don’t know how much it’d be worth. I long to stab her in the neck and rip it off her finger.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said gently. “It’s against the law.”

  “And they talk,” Hodda went on, “all the damn time. And don’t ask me what about, because I really don’t know. People I’ve never heard of, mostly, doing stuff that bores me stiff. Who went to dinner with who and who else was there and what they were wearing. It’s stupid.”

  “It’s called Society.”

  “It’s what we do plays about,” Hodda said bitterly, “only in the plays we all know it’s ridiculous. But they don’t seem to realise that. They seem to think it’s real life.”

  “Real life. Haven’t heard that expression in a while.”

  She sat down, elbows on knees, head slumped forward. “It’s killing me, Notker. I can feel my brain turning to cheese. I’ve got to get out of here or I’ll die.”

  If she was acting, she was playing herself. I put my arm round her shoulders. “But that’s the life every actress dreams of,” I said. “Respectable and rich. Every chorus girl from Old Stairs who ever fluttered her eyelashes at a senator’s son—”

  She glared at me. “Got what she deserved,” she said. “Didn’t someone say once, the punishment for wanting something too much is getting it?”

  “Depends what you want, I guess.”

  “I want to manage a theatre,” she said, so loud they must have heard her through the door. “I want to choose plays, hire and fire actors, yell at the painters and the costume designers, drill the chorus like they’re a Guards regiment and make a great deal of money. Not to spend,” she added quickly, “just to have, to prove I’m a success. That’s what I want, Notker. And you know what? I used to have it, till you came along.”

  I took my arm away. “Just one thing,” I said. “You and Ogus.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “That,” I said. “You went out of your way to seduce our mortal enemy, with a view to selling him the City. For, presumably, a great deal of money.”

  She looked at me. “He’s going to win,” she said. “You know he is.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve known that for a long time.”

  “That’s why I did it,” she said. “I thought, everything I know and love is going to go up in smoke and everybody I know and love is going to die. Well, not me. I’m getting out, and I’m going to make damn sure I get a lot of money out of it to take with me.” She stopped and looked at me. “You can’t blame me for that, can you?” she said. “If they’re all going to die anyway.”

  “Everybody’s going to die,” I said gently, “it’s a medical fact. Not everybody helps murder a whole city.”

  “True.” She gave me her ingenue look, the one a thousand men in this city would gladly die for; the one she pulls five times a night, for money. You know it’s completely fake, of course, but like the man said, what is Truth? To which I answer without a moment’s hesitation: overrated. “Just as well I didn’t get away with it, really.”

  “Probably just as well,” I said. “It was a bloody stupid idea, you know.”

  “No, it wasn’t. You screwed it up.”

  “Probably just as well,” I repeated.

  She nodded; perfectly done, but
I wasn’t convinced. Nor did I care. “Notker,” she said, looking straight at me, “what are we going to do?”

  I looked directly ahead, so I couldn’t see her. “I asked my mother that,” I said. “She gave me some really good advice.”

  “Go on.”

  “She said, tell lies and run away. She knows me so well.”

  “Notker, I’m serious. What are we going to do?”

  I thought about that for a moment. Then I made up my mind.

  “If I can get us out of this,” I said, “alive and in one piece and maybe even obscenely rich, though that’s not guaranteed, will you marry me?”

  It was as though she’d asked me for bread and I’d given her a slug. “You what?”

  “You heard.”

  “But we’re already married,” she said. “And you don’t like me very much.”

  “True,” I said. “But that wedding was just acting. And, yes, there’s things about you that make me want to jump down a well just to escape. But you’re very pretty.”

  I’d said that to annoy her. “Notker.”

  “And,” I said, “you’re smarter than anyone I’ve ever met, and you can run a theatre like nobody else in history, and you were an amazing Princess Toto.”

  “I don’t love you, Notker.”

  I nodded. “I don’t think you’re capable of loving anyone,” I said. “And why should you? It’d be such a waste. I think of you as a goddess.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I do,” I said, “really. Spiteful, selfish, utterly self-centred, addicted to worship, callous, unfeeling and incapable of loving anyone but yourself. What do you say?”

  Her exasperated face. “All right,” she said. “On the strict understanding that it’ll never happen, because there’s no way out of this. If there was one, I’d have thought of it.”

  “I want to hear you say yes.”

  “Fuck off. Oh, all right then, yes. If it makes you feel happy.”

  Something I needed to ask. “The hairpin,” I said. “Did you really just happen to have it by you?”

  “What? Oh, that. Yes, I’ve had it for years. It lives in this little silver tube, look. Well, you never know, do you?”

  “I could do with something like that. A brooch, maybe.”

  “I’ll give you the recipe.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re going to kick yourself when you hear what I’ve got in mind,” I said. “It’s like this.”

  19

  I’d said a hole, but really it was a ditch. It ran parallel to the walls, thirty yards distance between them, all the way round the City, sixty feet deep. The spoil was piled up in the gap between the walls and the ditch, forming a bank that completely filled the space, so we had to build towers on our side, and a walkway, so the sentries could get to the watchtowers and the artillery bays.

  Sixty feet deep, because that’s as far down as you can go before you hit bedrock. We had all sorts of problems, as you can imagine. We hit four underground springs, which flooded the trench and turned everything into revolting sticky mud. They had to be located and diverted, a massive undertaking in itself. There was no money at all, so the workforce – basically every able-bodied member of the Purple Theme – was paid in scrip, which didn’t go down wonderfully well to start with, until everyone got used to money being little bits of sealed clay rather than shiny metal. If it hadn’t been for the Theme organisation, we’d never have got people to do it. But with the government paying silly money on one side and the Theme bosses explaining what would happen to them if they didn’t show up for work on the other; two sides of the same coin, almost certainly counterfeit.

  And on a schedule, too. It had to be done by Ascension Day. Actually, I was desperately worried that Ascension would be leaving it too late; Ogus had opened three more saps and was pouring men into the mines. Colonel Hrabanus was keeping him at bay with undermining. For the time being at least, we could dig down deeper than they could, thanks to an ingenious idea Hrabanus’ people had come up with for pumping air down to the lowest levels, using the monster bellows we’d built for the sulphur and pipes made from hollowed-out birch logs. Ogus’ men tried to copy it, but we found out, dug sideways, found his pipe, bored a hole in it and pumped in sulphur smoke; my guess is, when a thousand men went down that tunnel and didn’t come back, Ogus’ engineers didn’t realise we’d sabotaged the ventilation system, and concluded that it simply didn’t work.

  Hrabanus was no longer leading the war in the mines. I put him in charge of digging the ditch and promoted one of his junior officers, a half-milkface called Cotkel. He was the one who’d come up with the birch pipes, and who blew the smoke into Ogus’ copy of same. He was a disagreeable little man with a dreadful record of insubordination and striking superior officers, and he’d killed more enemy engineers with a knife or his bare hands than anyone else in the regiment of engineers, so I figured he’d be perfect for the job, and I wasn’t disappointed. Hrabanus, on the other hand, was college-educated and knew all about maths and military architecture and stuff, and drew a whole load of exquisitely neat plans of the ditch, heavily annotated with numbers and figures. I don’t know if they helped at all, but they were very pretty to look at.

  “I thought you ought to know,” I said. “I’m going to get married.”

  It was wonderful, people said. The emperor, busiest man in the City, still made time to go and visit the poor old mad woman who’d lost her son. I think the only person who wasn’t impressed was the poor old mad woman, who bitterly resented being called mad when she wasn’t. Fortunately, nobody took any notice of a word she said. Except me.

  “I don’t know why you bother telling me,” she said. “It’s a stupid time to get married, anyway. Haven’t you got other things you ought to be thinking about, beside chasing after girls?”

  “You’ll like her,” I said. “She’s smart.”

  “Can’t be all that smart if she’s marrying you.”

  I smiled. “She took some persuading,” I said.

  She frowned. “Planning for the future, then.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think there’s going to be one, after all.”

  “You’re a fool. You can’t win this war.”

  “Everybody tells me that.” I stood up, then sat down again. The cushions were so soft they hurt my back. “Are you comfortable here?”

  “It’s all right. I’m bored. I’ve got nothing to do.”

  Sixty years chained to a spinning wheel. Take it away from her, she’s bored; she’s got nothing to do. Everything’s always my fault. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

  She didn’t even answer. “You mean well, Notker, some of the time. But you don’t care about people. You don’t give a damn.”

  “That’s not entirely true.”

  She sighed. “I know,” she said, “it’s not your fault, it never is. You’re in trouble all the time, so you’re always thinking about yourself, of course you are. When you’re drowning, you aren’t worried about whether someone else can swim. You never have time for people, because you’re always running away from some stupid mess you’ve got yourself into.”

  “I don’t think you’re being quite fair,” I said.

  “Don’t you? And borrowing money. You’ve never got any money.”

  “Right now,” I said. Right now I’ve got plenty, I was about to say, but all the money in the Exchequer was on a warship bound for the Sashan empire.

  “It gets in the way,” she said. “You’re so busy figuring out how you’re going to kid people into lending you money, you haven’t got a chance to think about their feelings and all. When was the last time you talked to me, when you weren’t looking to borrow money?”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I said. “I’ll make it up to everybody.”

  “Sure you will. You always say that.”

  “One of these days I’ll mean it.”

  “And always the last word,” she said, with a grin. “Always a joke, and always the last
word. Who is she, anyway?”

  “Her name’s Hodda.”

  “Her.” She shrugged. “No better than a common tart.”

  “I’ve been mad about her ever since the first time I saw her,” I said. “I looked at her and I thought, that woman is a goddess.”

  She laughed. “Your father said that about me once. Didn’t last long, though. But he was a good man, your father.”

  “Yes,” I said, “he was, in his way.”

  “Better than you.”

  “That,” I said, “remains to be seen.”

  Her no-point-arguing look. “What’s all the fuss about in the street?” she asked. “People coming all hours of the day and night with scaffolding planks and wheelbarrows. What’s going on?”

  “We’re digging a ditch,” I told her.

  “What the hell for?”

  So I told her.

  I explained that Ogus’ engineers were bound to get past us sooner or later, because there were so many of them, and we couldn’t defend against them. The only thing that had kept them back so far was the granite shelf, and they’d got the hang of breaching it by now, so we couldn’t rely on it any more. But what if they got as far as the wall, undermined it and brought it crashing down, only to find a huge bank of earth? As good as a wall; better, in many respects. For a start, you can’t bash it down with rams or catapults, like you can with a stone wall. It’s soft: it gives instead of splintering. And if you drive a sap into it, as soon as you break through your sap fills up with loose dirt; as fast as you shovel it out of the way, more comes cascading down. So, you dig under the huge pile of dirt in the hopes of coming out on the other side of it, and what happens? You run into another granite shelf, twice as thick as the first one.

  Ah, you say, there’s no granite shelf on our side of the wall. True; not yet. But pretty soon there will be.

  “We’re demolishing all the temples and public buildings,” I told her, “all the ones built or faced with granite, and when the trench is finished we’ll fill it with blocks. It’ll be almost as thick as the City wall, but deep underground. There’s not enough quarried granite in the City, but I’ve sent away to the place where we used to get all our granite from, with instructions to buy up everything they’ve got. When it’s finished there’ll be a sort of mirror wall, sixty feet high and twelve feet across, only under the ground instead of over it. And when they try and sap holes in it, we’ve got a surprise in store for them. We came across four underground rivers when we were digging the ditch. A nudge of a sluice gate and all that water will go gurgling down right on top of them.” I paused for breath, then went on, “At first I didn’t think we could get it done in time, but we can. You’d be amazed what can be done if you’ve got the Theme bosses on your side and nobody arguing with you or saying there’s no money. There is no money, of course, but there’s food for the workers and everybody in the City, for now anyway, and as for later, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. We’ll just have to work flat out, that’s all, to make enough stuff to sell and pay off the cost of it all. It’ll take time, but we’ll have time, instead of all being dead.”