Mightier than the Sword Read online

  “Like hell we will. And don’t walk away when I’m talking to you.”

  NOW, THEN. CONCERNING the Land and Sea Raiders. I guess we were so very scared of them because we had no idea who they were, where they came from, how many of them there were, what (beyond anything not nailed to the floor) they wanted. They showed up about a hundred and thirty years ago, during the reign of that old fire-eater Vindex II. Our first experience of them was seventy long, high-castled warships suddenly appearing off Vica Bay. The governor, a civilised man with several well-received volumes of theological essays to his name, sent a message to their leader inviting him to lunch. He came, and brought some friends; it was sixty years before Vica was rebuilt, by which time the harbour had silted up and all the channels had to be dredged out.

  Next they manifested themselves as a long column of ox-carts trundling over the Horns. They looked like refugees; skeletal cows and horses, sad women and threadbare children plodding along behind the wagons. The prefect of Garania went out to meet them with relief supplies, food, tents, blankets. They cut his head off and stuck it on their standard, before marching on Beal Epoir and burning it to the ground. That, of course, was about the time when General Maxen was at the height of his incredible career. He caught up with them a week later and hit them so hard that we were sure we’d never hear about them again.

  Maxen lasted rather longer than most of our great generals; about six years, and then his head got nailed to the lintel of Traitors’ Gate, along with all the others, so that when the Raiders came back there was nobody to deal with them. The next caravan of carts looked like it was here to stay and settle; they hung around for a couple of years, camped beside the ashes of Fort Narisso, dug wells and built sheep-pens and then suddenly disappeared, and where they went to nobody knows to this day. Then fifty years went by and not a sight or sound of them, and people started saying they must’ve been a myth or an allegory for the plague. And then the ships started appearing right across the northern seaboard, and we gradually came to realise that the ships and the carts were the same people.

  Vindex’ grandson Florian fought three great battles against them; one by land and two by sea. All three were victories, on a grand scale. After Mount Cortis, they counted the enemy dead by cutting a finger off each corpse, then weighing the filled baskets; half a ton of fingers. It was the Straits of Pallene that led to the growth of the shrimp fishery there, enough food to cause a population explosion. It made no difference at all. Two years later they were back; a hundred ships, a thousand carts. We got the impression that these people, whoever they were, grew like coppice-wood, the more you prune them, the stronger they grow back. Their resources of manpower and materiel were infinite, apparently; ours, of course, were not. It was Ultor’s predecessor, Valens IV, who came up with the idea of defence-in-depth; forget trying to turn them back at the border, let them come and do their worst, then hit them on the way back. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t now, but you’re not supposed to say that.

  We knew nothing about them then, except that if you hit them just right they died, and we’re not much the wiser now. Just goes to show; you can be really intimate with people (what’s more intimate than killing?) and still not really know them.

  I WAS ISSUED with a commission and letters patent, eight hundred Cassite archers, one million hyperpyra (in cash, bless her), a pair of fur-lined boots and a letter of introduction to her Serenity the abbess of Cort Doce, who happened to be my aunt’s oldest and dearest friend. Thus furnished, I set out to save civilisation as we know it.

  It was a bleachingly hot morning, and we were all in our Northern gear, because we wouldn’t be needing southern-theatre kit where we were going, so we weren’t issued with any. I don’t know if you’ve had much to do with Cassites. They’re splendid people, smart, resourceful, imaginative, artistic, individualistic, compassionate, articulate, absolutely useless soldiers. The one thing that marks them out from all the other nations of the empire is their exceptional sensitivity to temperature. In the hall of the prefect’s lodgings at Corcina there’s a remarkable gadget that tells you what the weather’s going to be—there’s a dial and a needle that points to wet, windy, sunny, hot, rain, thunderstorm and so forth. Obsolete and redundant, if there’s a Cassite in town. You can tell precisely what the weather’s going to be just by listening to two Cassites whining. Eight hundred Cassites boiling to death in thick woollen cloaks make a distinctive noise you can hear half a mile away, like roosting rooks or an approaching swarm of locusts.

  I was fumbling with my helmet-straps when the message came; looking good, no sign of infection, she’s sitting up and demanding to be let out, called you all sorts of rude names. I thanked the messenger and gave him a thaler.

  NOBODY WALKS NORTH if they can help it. The roads are appalling. They used to be wonderful, of course, but that was a long time ago, since when generations of canny farmers have prised up the stone paving-slabs to build pigsties and dug out the rubble and scree for hard standing. Harmodius II tried to do something about it. He decreed the death penalty for anyone found in possession of roadmaking materials. Since enforcing the law would’ve meant hanging every head of household from here to the coast, nobody was ever prosecuted. If you want to get anywhere, you go by boat.

  Four stone-barges carried us down the Sanuse. At Boc Sanis we found wagons waiting for us, which came as a complete and very pleasant surprise. They’d been laid on by the Count of the Northern Shore, a thrice-removed cousin of mine I’d never met by the name of Trabea. He was a big man with a small head, one tiny chin and quite a few large ones, the sort of man you can’t help liking and know you shouldn’t trust. I’d amused myself on the boat-trip down the river by glancing through his accounts. A child could’ve seen what he’d been up to, so I took the view that he was confident enough about his position not to give a damn. None of my business anyway, except insofar as I needed to use him.

  He filled me in on recent activity over a remarkably fine dinner at the prefecture at Boc. The pirates, he told me, had stepped up their activity over the last eighteen months. During that time they’d stormed three monasteries and seven priories. There had been no survivors. It was hard to tell what they’d stolen, since they’d been to great pains to burn everything.

  “What about fittings?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “What?”

  “Iron fittings,” I said. “Hinges, bolts, knockers, nails, all that sort of thing. Stuff that doesn’t burn. Did they take them or leave them behind?”

  “Oh, I see. No, they left all that.”

  I nodded. As I told you just now, pirates aren’t a new phenomenon. Four centuries ago in the south, there was a wave of similar attacks, only they took everything; they sieved the ashes for roofing-nails. Turned out that what they were after was iron. Hyrcanus III found out where they lived and sent trading-ships, iron for whatever they had a lot of and didn’t want—which proved to be ebony, nutmeg, diamonds and lapis lazulae, which is why Hyrcanus is always depicted in portraits wearing a blue cloak. Why strangle a cat when you can drown it in cream?

  “How about the people?” I said. “Did they kill them all, or take any?”

  He shook his head. “They aren’t slavers,” he said. “They killed all the monks and nuns and didn’t bother the villagers at all. But when we sifted the ashes we didn’t find any blobs of melted gold or charred scraps of silk. They’re here for the good stuff, I’m sure of it.”

  All information is useful, even when it confirms what you’ve already assumed. “There wouldn’t be a letter waiting for me, would there?” I asked him.

  He looked blank. “No. Should there be?”

  Well, no. Civilian mail is carried on the stage, which takes forever to cross the moors. “If something comes for me,” I said, “be a pal and send it on, would you?”

  He grinned. “Love-letters?”

  “I doubt it. Probably the exact opposite.”

  THE LIFE CENOBITIC; from time to time it app
eals to me, though never for very long.

  March into a monastery and pick out ten monks. You’ll find you have five religious zealots, two younger sons of good but impoverished families, two political exiles and a retired soldier. Now go next door and round up ten nuns. You’ll have six younger daughters of good but impoverished families, three discarded wives and one religious zealot.

  I’m talking, of course, about the ones who pray and copy out books. If you extend your sample to the brothers and sisters pastoral—the ones who shear the sheep, make the bread, dig the gardens and wash the bedlinen—you’re likely to encounter a fairly homogeneous bunch, farmers and their wives and daughters who’ve defaulted on monastery mortgages or been sold up for unpaid tithes. It’s a viable system, harsh but compassionate; the monastery taketh away and the monastery giveth. Everybody’s poor, nobody starves, there’s a doctor on hand when they’re sick (show me a farmer who can afford a doctor and I’ll show you a smuggler or a horse thief) and there’s so much veal and lamb that everybody gets some, some of the time. Yes, it’s a hard way to treat people. But life is hard, or so they tell me.

  MY FIRST CALL was at Cort Malestan. To get there, you go up the coast road until you reach the Red River. It’s called that because—well, it’s red. The hills above Malestan are full of iron; that’s why the monks went there, to dig it out and sell it. The Red River is really quite extraordinary. The water is poisonous. There are no fish, no plants grow in it, a few misguided willows trail their roots in it but they don’t live long. It’s crystal clear and blood red, if that makes any sense. Local legends say that Hell is under the mountain, and that the monks are there to keep the gates shut with their prayers, but even they can’t do anything about the blood of the damned, which seeps out into every rill and stream. The monks have been there for centuries, and they’ve long since scarfed up all the loose ore lying on the surface or accessible from open pits. These days they drive long galleries into the mountainside. To break up the rock they stuff chambers full of charcoal and burn it till the rock glows red. Then someone opens a sluice on a diverted stream and water floods in; the rock shatters into chunks the size of your fist or your head, which the miners scrabble out into carts. You can see plumes of smoke and steam from miles away, gushing up through dozens of vents. It’s not an attractive landscape. But the iron mine is an example of practical alchemy, they turn stone into gold through the application of sweat, and the wealth it produces pays for five hundred copying monks. The Malestan library houses something like eight thousand books, and they send copies of them all over the empire.

  In charge of all this is my aunt Thelegund. I say aunt; actually, she’s one of my mother’s father’s nine half-sisters. I chose Malestan as my first call because of her. Before her appointment, she lived at court—that is, before she took rather more interest in politics than was good for her, a classic weakness in our family—and I remembered her from my boyhood as a short, round, jolly old lady who didn’t treat me as a child even though I was one. When she got sent to Malestan I wrote her a few letters. It was many years before I found out why she never wrote back—because conducting a secret correspondence with an exiled malignant would’ve landed me in no end of trouble; try explaining that to a nine-year-old. I was looking forward to seeing her again. So very, very few of my relatives are non-toxic, it’d be a shame to lose contact with one I could actually bear to be in the same room with.

  I’d never actually been to a Northern monastery before, so I was expecting something along the lines of what we have back home. I was, therefore, mildly stunned to find that I was approaching, along a wide and beautifully maintained paved road, what appeared to be a castle. It was built on the only bit of flat for miles. Around it was a patchwork of cultivated land—wheat-stubbles at that time of year—out of which it rose like an artificial mountain, as though God had made a toy mountain for his kid to play with, a miniature version of the real thing looming over it on the skyline. Closer up, I admired the quality of the military architecture. Someone had read the right books, and angled the bastions to give enfilading fire from two sides on every conceivable line of approach. The double moat was a nice piece of work. I think it was based on the one at Ap’ Escatoy. To fill it, they’d dug a spur off the river, so the moat was blood red and warranted poisonous to all living things; a garish but effective touch. Water for the monastery, I later found out, came from the only sweet-water well in the neighbourhood, which was safely enclosed by the walls.

  If you’re someone like me, you learn not to take offence easily. Offence, if you’re the Empress’ nephew, is something that has to be taken seriously and avenged in blood; accordingly, I’m the easiest-going individual you’re ever likely to meet. Spit in my face, I’ll do everything I possibly can to interpret it as an accident, a joke, a quaint local custom or a back-handed expression of esteem. But being kept waiting annoys me. It’s rude. I was, therefore, not in the best of moods after an hour kicking my heels in an ante-room, even though it was one of the most gorgeous and fascinating spaces I’ve ever been in. For a start, it was floor-to-ceiling with breathtaking frescoes. Heaven forfend that I should ever be mistaken for a man of culture, an aesthete. Those are fighting words at the court of the Emperor Ultor. But even I can recognise the composition, brushwork and light-and-shade effects of the immortal Laiso, the half-blind, cripple-handed divine madman who painted the sort of thing that normally only the gods can see. The whole of the north wall of that ante-room was one huge, heart-stopping Apotheosis. In the bottom left-hand corner cowered Men—pathetic little creatures, ploughmen, foresters, laundrywomen, milkmaids, bare-legged and crumple-faced, shielding their eyes from the radiance of the Invincible Sun as He presents Himself to the world, arms and legs spread wide, head uplifted, the heart of the glowing fire that seemed to fill the whole room—there was no stove or anything in there, but I felt warm just looking at the artwork. Appropriate décor for a room where you wait to see the Sun’s temporal representative. But when the Sun’s earthly brother is your uncle, with bunches of white hair like asparagus fronds growing out of his ears—well, the effect isn’t quite the same.

  Well, eventually she condescended to see me, and a monk in a long black robe escorted me up three flights of terrifyingly narrow, slippery-stepped spiral stairs to the Presence.

  I don’t know what it is about me, but everyone seems to imagine that I’m omniscient. They never tell me anything in advance. They assume I know. Just once, it’d be nice to walk into a difficult situation forearmed. A few terse words would do it—by the way, aunt Thelegund’s had a stroke—and then I’d know, and life wouldn’t keep hitting me in the face like a carelessly-slammed door.

  It didn’t help that they’d dressed her up in all the gear. The abbess of Malestan wears the epitrachelion with lorus and zone, the dalmatic, with gold and pearl claves, open at the front with the omophorion draped across the shoulders, the great cope and the two-horned mitre; she holds the globe cruciger in her left hand and the labarum in her right. She was much smaller than I remembered, a tiny little thing, as though someone had put a baby down inside a heap of bejewelled laundry; her head lolled forward, so that the mitre looked like it was going to fall off any minute.

  I don’t hunt as much as I used to, I don’t get the time. But any huntsman would recognise the look I saw in her eyes. You see it in the boar, when its back’s been broken and it can’t move, or the stag that’s been run to exhaustion, or the bird that’s been knocked down but isn’t quite dead yet. It’s the look that says, I’m through, finish me off, please.

  The monk leaned close and whispered, “She can’t talk but she can hear you.” I nodded. If she could hear me, she could hear him, reminding her, though presumably it wasn’t something she ever forgot. I cleared my throat. “Hello, aunt,” I said. She didn’t move.

  What the hell are you supposed to say? I never know. The monk stood behind me, respectfully hovering. I had absolutely no evidence to support it, but I got the strongest i
mpression that he was enjoying the sight of her like that. Didn’t take much imagination to figure out a hypothesis; she always was a bit hard on servants and subordinates, quite possibly he’d done something to annoy her and she’d had him for it—and then, one morning, like the wrath of God, this. You couldn’t resist drawing inferences, could you? You’d take every chance you got to come up here and stand in the doorway where she could see you; possibly a few well-chosen words, when you could be sure there was nobody around to hear. In the circumstances of the contemplative life, I could imagine it was his greatest pleasure and satisfaction.

  By one of those coincidences that get to you like a bit of grit in your eye, the sword I was wearing that day was the one she’d sent me for a graduation-day present. If I’d had a shred of humanity I’d have stuck it in her neck as quickly as possible, the way I’d have done without thinking for a buck or a pig. Instead I stood there grinning helplessly for a minute or so, then got out of there as fast as I could, nearly tripped on my cloak going down those horrible stairs.

  WHICH BEGGED THE question; if she wasn’t running Malestan, who was?

  The answer, much to my surprise, turned out to be; nobody. What they’d done was split up the power, like turning a great forest oak into kindling. So long as everything in every department was done exactly the way it had always been done, they reckoned, they could get along just fine—until Her Grace was feeling better, they said, and could resume her duties; or until she died, and some other inconvenient princess was found to take her place.

  WELL, I HAD a job to do there. I’m conscientious about my work, though nobody believes it.

  I made a thorough inspection of the defences and found them to be admirable—the stonework sound and properly rendered, the woodwork newly tarred, all the chains and lock and hinges in order. I made a point of telling them, if half the cities in the East took as much care over maintenance, things wouldn’t be in the state they were in. Then I asked about the garrison. They looked at me. What garrison?