My Beautiful Life Read online

  I’VE DONE some truly appalling things in my life. I’m bitterly ashamed of them now. Saying I did them all for the best—and saying, those things weren’t my idea, other people made me do them, is just as bad; admitting that I’m a spineless coward as well as morally bankrupt. I’m a mess, and no good nohow.

  I can say all that and get away with it; you can’t. Don't even think about it. If you were to repeat what I’ve just told you word for word, let alone paraphrase it or add a few rhetorical flourishes of your own, they’d have you up for high treason and stretch your neck. Speaking ill of me is slandering the Crown, therefore by implication the Empire, therefore by implication the eight million people who live in it. Quite probably, Bemba—that’s the poor devil I’m dictating this to—is guilty of a Capital crime just because he’s writing down what I told him to—though of course, if he’d refused, that would’ve been treason too.

  It's treason because the Law assumes that anything nasty or bad about the Emperor can’t possibly be true; which says an awful lot about the Law and laws in general, if you ask me. I'd write it all out myself and avoid the risk of yet another innocent man going to the gallows for my sake, only I never learned to write, and it’s far too late now.

  ONCE UPON A time—

  Bemba's shaking his head at me; you can’t start a history, even an unofficial one, with once upon a time. Screw him—sorry, Bemba, I didn't mean that. But once upon a time it’s going to have to be, because that’s the only way I know to start a story, never having had any education to speak of. You can fiddle with it later if you like.

  Once upon a time, there were three brothers.

  WHERE WAS I?

  I’ve really had enough of the pain. It’s always there. You think you’ve got used to it, up to a point, and then it suddenly flares up and reduces you to a snivelling heap. For crying out loud, says the little voice inside me, pull yourself together, try and preserve the little dignity you’ve got left, there are people watching you. And besides, adds the little voice, perfectly correctly, you brought all this on yourself, it’s all your own fault, like everything else . And whatever you do, don’t you dare ask for sympathy.

  Fine. But it’s a real pest, because it snaps my train of thought like a carrot and I can’t concentrate worth a damn, and when I get one of the bad attacks it wipes my

  All right, let’s start again. This is the story of my life, which is shortly going to end, and about time too. I guess you could call it a confession. There’s a difference of opinion among the leading theologians on this point. Some of them say you can confess your sins silently, without actually moving your lips, while others maintain that in order to be valid, a confession must be made out loud, to someone, or it doesn’t count. A third school maintains that that someone has to be a priest, but I have my doubts about that, mostly because priests get paid for hearing confessions. My brother Nico, when he was High Precentor, charged four hundred thousand solidi just for bless me, father, for I have sinned, and if you wanted to give him chapter and verse it was extra, fifty thousand solidi per hundred words. I remember saying to him, Nico, you can’t charge that much, nobody’s going to pay that when a friar’ll give you absolution for a solidus fifty. He laughed at me. He was right, too. He got so much business that towards the end, he was actually turning people away.

  My brother Nico was a bad man, perhaps the most evil human being I’ve ever met. He loved me more than anyone or anything in the world. I miss him.

  ONCE UPON A time there were three brothers.

  The Empire functions on the basis that heredity is everything. Eldest sons inherit from eldest sons. All of us inherit the fruits of the wisdom and valour of our ancestors, who by definition were a hundred times better and smarter than we could ever hope to be. We live in enlightened comfort because our forefathers conquered the world and then made sense of it; we in turn are entitled to enjoy our legacy, because we are the end product of live thousand years of thoughtful, selective breeeding [sic], we’re the distilled essence of our ancestors, which must mean we're pretty damn near perfect—none of our doing, of course, it’s just a fact. We are what we were bred to be.

  But the three brothers weren’t born inside the Empire, nor were they citizens. Their mother was beautiful, charming and friendly for a living, and if she knew who their fathers were, she neglected to mention it. There’s a remote possibility that one of them was a nobleman in disguise, a prince of the Blood Royal, or maybe even the Invincible Sun Himself, in mortal guise, like in the fairy tales. It’d be nice if that was true, because then the fact that one of the three brothers became Emperor wouldn’t be a glaring insult to everything we believe in, but I’m inclined to doubt it.

  The three brothers lived with their mother in a wattle-and-daub hut in a village in the mountains. They didn’t have any land of their own, not even a scrap of garden to grow cabbages in, so life was something of a struggle when they were growing up. By the time the eldest boy was twelve, their mother was still charming and friendly but no longer beautiful enough to be worth money, so she made her sons sit down one evening and talked to them seriously. Because we’re so poor, she said, one of you three will have to be sold. I love you all very much, so I can’t possibly decide, you'll have to sort it out among yourselves.

  The middle and younger brothers burst into tears, but the eldest brother didn’t hesitate. Don’t worry, he said, I’ll go. I’m the oldest, it’s my duty.

  The other two agreed. They were very upset, because they loved their brother, and he was big and Strong, and protected them from the other kids, and stole things for them to eat when they were hungry. But they didn’t want to be sold, so apart from crying a lot they raised no objections.

  If you wanted to be sold, you had to go to the fair at Kalenda Maia. Buyers came to the fair from all over, Scheria and the Vesani republic as well as the Empire. A week before it was time to leave for the fair, the eldest brother went out early and didn’t come back. The other two were very sad; they figured he’d changed his mind and made a run for it. They didn’t blame him—it was exactly what they’d have done if they’d been chosen— but it meant one of them would have to be sold instead, which they didn’t fancy at all. They would have tossed a coin for it, but they didn’t have a coin. They asked their mother to choose, but she’d recently been paid for her friendliness with a small barrel of brandy and wasn’t up to making decisions.

  I know, I said. Let’s get the Invincible Sun to choose for us.

  My brother Edax didn’t believe in the Invincible Sun. At least, he didn’t deny that He exists—he was a peasant, his mind simply couldn't conceive of something like that, we're alone in the universe and there’s nobody up there at all, just clouds—but he figured that Heaven didn't give a shit about us. He said as much, so I picked up a rock and hit him. It’s very important to nip blasphemy in the bud. You bloody fool, he said, look what you've done. It’ll heal up, I assured him (and I was right, up to a point, but the scar makes people wince when they see it, even now) and don’t you dare talk like that ever again. He looked at me, then grinned. It’ll have to be you now, he said. Who’s going to pay good money for a kid with only one eye?

  He was exaggerating, of course, but the point was a valid one. I couldn't argue, and he started to laugh. I wanted to hit him again, but I was too scared by what I’d already done. So I patched him up as best I could with plantain boiled in water and a needle and thread. He whined like hell. I didn’t do a very good job, because he kept wriggling and flinching.

  The next evening, the day before the fair, Nico came back. He was white as a sheet and his clothes were brown with dried blood. Where the hell have you been, we asked him.

  He explained. He’d been told that eunuc
hs fetch twice as much as whole kids at Kalenda fair, and he figured, if he was going to be sold, why not get the best possible price? So he went to see the stockman at the next door farm, who told him he was crazy and chased him away. So, being Nico, he sat down under a tree somewhere quiet and thought about it, figured out what to do, from first principles. Then he sharpened his knife—call it a knife; it was three inches of broken blade he’d found in a hedge when he was six—and lit a small fire, and threw a couple of biggish stones on it to heat up. Then he cut off his dick, as far up the shaft as he could manage.

  He said he hadn’t imagined there'd be that much blood. It gushed out like water from a split pipe, he told me later, and for a moment he was really scared. The idea was to cauterise the cut with one of the hot stones, but he tried to pick the stone out of the fire using two sticks and it kept slipping out again, and by this time there was blood everywhere and he could feel himself draining away, a bit like being drunk, a bit like feeling very, very sleepy; so he grabbed the stone out of the red embers, but he couldn’t hold it, and it fell out of his hand, and then he passed out.

  He came round in a sort of swamp, where the blood had soaked away into the leafmould, like a pig’s wallow. He was so weak he could scarcely breathe. But he looked up and saw the sun was a lot further round that it had been, so time was getting on... And then it occurred to him that maybe he’d been out for a long time, maybe a whole day, maybe more, and for all he knew, he’d missed Kalenda fair, and one of us had had to be sold instead. So he got up and walked back to our village.

  When our mother heard what he’d done, she burst out screaming and sobbing and wouldn’t snap out of it, so she was no use for anything. Edax and I stuffed Nico full of stale cheese and dried apple, which was all there was in the house, and he said he was feeling much better, which I don’t think was strictly true, and then it was time to set off for Kalenda.

  I think I said Nico was strong. Years later, I asked a famous doctor and he said that Nico should’ve died, it was a miracle he survived—and then he paused, because miracle usually means the Invincible Sun intervening to some good purpose, and this was Nico we were talking about. It was extraordinary, the doctor went on, that Nico had survived at all, after losing a ridiculous amount of blood, not to mention the risk of infection, and lockjaw from the rusty knife. And then walking twelve miles up the mountain to Kalenda, it was—and then words failed him. Monstrous, I suggested. And he thought about it for a moment, and nodded. Monstrous, he said, quite.

  We got to Kalenda somehow, and the fair was just about to start. You want to get to a buying fair early, before the dealers have spent all their money. We hauled Nico up to the first stall we got to, and they looked at him. Five Shillings, they said.

  Then Nico explained; he’d been cut, so the price was twelve and six. Let’s have a look, then, said the dealer, and Nico pulled up his tunic, and the dealer laughed. Sorry, son, he said, that doesn’t count.

  To be a proper eunuch, he explained, you had to cut the balls off. That’s what gives the eunuch his calm, docile, pleasant disposition, which is what people pay good money for. Simply docking the cock was no good; if anything, it reduced the price, since you couldn’t breed from a docked man. Then he asked; who was the clown who did this? And Nico said, I did it myself. The dealer stared at him. Four Shillings, he said. Take it or leave it.

  We left it. Then we went round all the other dealers, but none of them were interested. He’s a big, Strong lad, they said, but obviously either very stupid or not quite right in the head; four hob, and that’s being generous.

  By this point we were feeling very sad. I was practically in tears, because obviously we couldn’t go home emptyhanded, and three or four of the dealers had looked at me quite hard, and one had offered six hob for me. Edax was sulking at Nico for being stupid, and Nico had started bleeding again, though it was just a trickle running down his leg, like a little boy taken short. Mother’s going to be so mad at us, Edax kept saying. And I knew I ought to say, it’s all right, I’ll go instead, but I couldn’t, I was too scared and too selfish, so I started snivelling, and Nico had to tell both of us to shut up.

  Then, the very last stall we came to, there was an old man with a bald head and another, very short, with a huge mane of flowing white hair, very fine, like a girl’s. By this point Nico was so tired he could barely speak, so I had to do the talking. I explained, and the bald man said the usual, let’s have a look, then; and I tugged up Nico’s hem. The bald man and the man with the silky hair looked at the mess, frowning slightly. How much do you want for him, they asked.

  Twelve and six, I said. The two old men looked at each other, and the bald man whispered something in the other man’s ear. Then he looked at me and said, the most we can give you is fourteen shillings.

  I nearly said, No, twelve, but Edax poked me in the ribs. All right, I said. And that's how we sold my brother. Simple as that.

  THIS QUESTION OF belief.

  Nico believed—and Edax too, but who cares what he thinks?—that the Invincible Sun exists, but He can only be bothered with important events and important people, which is why Nico felt justified in charging so much more for an absolution. Sure, he said, you can get one for a buck fifty, but if it comes from some red-nosed village Brother, it won’t work, it’s useless. But if the High Precentor intercedes for you personally, He will actually hear and take note, and your sins will be forgiven and your soul will be washed clean; and what else could you buy for four hundred thousand that could possibly be worth that much money?

  (Bear in mind that Nico never had a day’s theological training in his life. He got to be High Precentor because the job comes bundled up with being Count of the Stables. It was useful, Nico told me, because of benefit of clergy. He used to go to Temple regularly when he was precentor, mostly so he could get on with some work during the anthems.)

  I disagree. I believe that He watches us all, taking careful note of everything we say and everything we do, and that sooner or later He rewards us and punishes us according to our deserts. That’s not a comfortable thought. Actually, it’s wrong to say I believe. I know. Belief implies there’s some doubt or uncertainty about the matter. I know. Trust me.

  SOME YEARS LATER, Nico had the silky-haired man hunted down (the bald man was already dead), and before he had him crucified, he asked him; why did you buy me, and why did you pay so much? To which the man replied that he and his partner did a lot of business with the Imperial civil service, who were crying out for eunuchs—there was a shortage, would you believe, on account of peace with the Erbafresc, which meant no more prisoners of war—and wouldn’t care particularly about the balls so long as they could fill their quota. And why did you pay more than we asked? Well, the man said, you all looked so sad and bedraggled, we felt sorry for you. Didn’t do him any good, of course. At that point, Nico was anxious to get rid of all the witnesses to his earlier life, and the crucifixion—well, he had this mean streak. Always there, under the surface. Just the way he was, or the way the Invincible Sun made him.

  Also, Nico found out about the beautiful silky fine hair; apparently, if you have the cut before your voice breaks, you’ll never go bald and your hair will be beautiful. The dealer had been done when he was six years old, and never gave it a moment’s thought.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Nico was sold to the Commissioners of the Secretariat, who trained him as a clerk. He took to it wonderfully well. He learned his letters and figuring in no time flat, so diligent, so eager to learn, so eager to please. He always did have a tidy mind, and he always was smart. In no time flat, he was absolutely indispensible [sic] in Supply; knew where everything was, remembered everyone’s names, knew which forms had to be used for which requisitions, pretty soon he was running the place, while his superiors took long lunches. They were mad as cats when he was poached by the Household, but of course, nobody says no to the Household; and so Nico left the provinces and came to the City. Wasn’t
long before everyone was saying what a splendid Clerk of the Works he’d make, except you have to be a free man to be Clerk. It’s a rotten job, of course, though terribly important and grand, because every crumbling wall, loose roof tile and project overdue or over budget is your fault, which was why they were all happy for Nico to get it. But when Nico was Clerk, there weren’t any crumbling walls or loose tiles, and every job was finished on time, under budget.

  Now, the whole idea of eunuchs in the Service is, they don’t get distracted like normal men do. They don’t chase around after women and nobody wants to be their friend, so what else is there but work? But Nico was the extreme, prodigious, monstrous; he started work well before Prime and didn’t stop till after Compline, he slept on a bench in his office and ate his bread and cheese at his desk, washed down with water in a pottery cup. Usually the Clerk is loathed and hated by everyone who comes into contact with him, by the very nature of his job—if he wants to get something done, he’s got to yell at the man who’s supposed to be doing it, and if he doesn’t he gets yelled at by the man who’s waiting to get on with the rest of the project. But somehow Nico managed to keep everybody sweet and happy, weaving the men and their schedules and difficulties together like withies into a basket—he always could bend people, either by sweetness or force, but at this time he was all honey and smiles, a little bit extra squeezed out of the budget for a bonus here, a job for an unemployable idiot nephew there—like the jugglers who balance spinning plates on top of sticks on the tips of their noses, all done with little imperceptible wriggles and flexings of muscles, but from a distance all you see is a man standing still and relaxed, with a happy smile on his face, while a beautiful, ordered firmament circles serenely around him.

  EDAX AND I didn’t know about any of that, of course. All we knew was, those two old men put a collar on our big brother and led him away, and we took fourteen Shillings back to our mother, and three weeks later she died.