My Beautiful Life Read online

Page 2


  It wasn’t long before we wished our big brother was in Hell. Where we lived—don’t get me wrong, we worshipped the Invincible Sun same as everybody else does except the heathens, but let’s say we didn’t get many theologians and professors of divinity in those parts; most of what we believed in we'd made up our selves, or vaguely remembered some missionary telling our great-great-grandfathers. And one of the things we vaguely remembered was the Book of Abominations; all those long lists of things you mustn’t eat and mustn’t touch. You’ll remember, of course, that men with missing or deformed sexual organs are right up there with shellfish and yellow-spotted mushrooms—but of course, nobody takes any of that stuff seriously any more, not since the Erbafresc came up with langoustines in mushroom and white wine sauce. But we did. Just the sort of thing we loved to hear; because it was a reason, an explanation. Every time the crops failed or the plague came round or the free Companies stole our sheep or the Imperial army marched off a whole village in wooden collars, we knew exactly what had gone wrong, some selfish bastard had been eating raw fish or buggering chickens, and we were all being punished for it. It made sense, which it simply wouldn’t do without the abominations and the tribulation and the wrath of God. So, when word got around about what Nico had done (himself, with a rusty knife, for money) and then our mother had died, call that a coincidence because I don’t—let’s just say Edax and I weren't popular. Everyone knows that an abominator’s family are just as filthy as he is himself. Properly speaking they should have boarded us up in our house and set fire to it, except my mother had Cousins down in the valley, and they’d have been morally obliged to make a row about it, even though they’d disowned her.

  Letting us live was one thing. Giving either of us a job was something quite other. We had the house; we didn’t own it, of course, but nobody else would have dreamed of living there, so the owner left us alone. That was all. There wasn’t enough ground out back to grow a row of carrots. Neither of us had a trade, and if we'd been the finest blacksmiths or wheelwrights in the country, nobody would have wanted anything we made. We were useless. I had—well, my advantage, even then, but Edax was a scrawny, evil-looking little runt, looking just the way you’d expect an abomination to look. We had no money, and even if we’d had plenty, nobody would’ve sold us a sack of mouldy oats. We were a problem that would solve itself, given time, and not much time, at that.

  (My advantage. I was a tall, thin, skinny kid, but around the time we lost Nico, I started filing out. People say that—for a while—I was the best-looking man in the Empire. I don't believe that, not for one moment. But I was handsome, or pretty, or somewhere between the two. Not that I knew it. We didn’t have mirrors where I come from, and how often do you stop and gaze into a bucket of water?)

  I remember Edax looking at me, the day we realised there was nothing left to eat in the house, and I looked at him back; and then he said, Fine, if we’re evil and damned already, why not? Not usually given to saying clever or perceptive things, my kid brother, but—well, it made me feel a whole lot better about the idea. So we waited till it was dark, and walked out over the back pad dock, through the orchard, out onto the lane, up the hill, through the hunting gate, short cut across the four acres to our nearest neighbour’s barn. Nothing was locked or barred, needless to say, so we simply helped ourselves.

  Then we went home, stopping to rest a few times along the way because of the weight of what we were carrying, and gorged ourselves silly on barley porridge, roots and store apples. And we waited. I think we both expected the neighbours to come crashing in through the door with dungforks and a noose; but morning came, and then afternoon and evening. They can’t have noticed yet, we said to each other, how often do people check their barns to see if the stuff's still all there? Days passed, nobody came by. We finished up the last of what we’d stolen, so we went back for some more.

  To find new two-inch-board shutters on the windows and a new door, all fastened with padlocks, the Mezentine pattern with a key that looks like a comb. So they knew we’d been there. Somehow, I think that was what disturbed me most. We were so unclean, they couldn't bring themselves to lynch us for fear of defilement. We smashed a shutter with a big rock and climbed in over the splintered panels.

  A week passed; no retribution. But the next time we went there, it was empty, cleaned out. So we trudged on over the other side of the ridge and robbed the priest’s tithe barn.

  Front and centre with a nice little snippet of theology, exactly the sort of thing you need to know when considering a career in theft. All mortal things, according to the Book of Abominations, are susceptible to defilement, a condition so unspeakable that you put up with crippling loss rather than lay hands on an unclean thief. But the Invincible Sun can’t be defiled, any more than you can spoil the sea by pissing in it. And a priest, even a poxy little village Brother, is His agent and minister, by virtue of the principle of apostolic association, therefore undefilable; and the same goes for his duly appointed agents and ministers, their dungforks, their nooses and everything else appertaining to them, under a general license of devolved absolution. They came for us just before dawn the next day, kicked us awake, smacked us around a bit, snapped collars on our necks and marched us, barefoot and stumbling, down to the village, where we saw two ropes waiting for us on the low branch of the hanging tree.

  They’d stuck wads of sheep’s wool in our mouths, so all Edax could so was mumble and bleat; I didn’t bother. We’d done wrong, we’d been caught, and it wasn’t as though I’d enjoyed being alive very much, so what the hell. If they’d taken the wad out of my mouth I’d have felt constrained to tell them Edax was completely innocent, I’d done all the thieving on my own; but they didn’t, so I never got the chance to redeem myself by penitent sacrifice, probably just as well. They hauled us under the tree, and a couple of men I knew by sight, old friends of my mother’s as it happens, came up holding milking stools, and I had a pretty good idea what they were for.

  Edax was sobbing his heart out, and that bothered me. I can’t say I ever liked him much, there’s not really anything about him that anyone could possibly like, but he’s my brother. So I prayed; Father in Heaven, please. Now there are learned men who’ll tell you a prayer won’t work unless it’s said aloud, and I had a face full of wool at the time. I can only assume He has a discretion to make exceptions, because just then the Brother came out of his house. He had a scarf wrapped round his face, so only the tip of his nose was sticking out, and he made a special point of not looking at us; we couldn't be hung today, he told them, because it was the old moon before Ascension.

  Dead silence. Then someone piped up and said, No, you're wrong there, old moon's not till tonight; and there was a bit of a discussion, until the Brother pointed out that in orthodox doctrine, old moon Starts at noon, not sunset—a certain amount of grumbling about that, but you can’t really tell a priest he’s wrong about theology, not unless you're a priest yourself. So then one of the parish wardens, trying hard to keep his temper, said, All right, but what are we supposed to do with them in the meantime? I'm not having them at my place, that’s for sure. Apparently theology didn’t have an answer to that, and nobody was in any hurry to volunteer, and there was a long silence, until the priest sighed and said he had a woodshed out back, but someone would have to put a lock on it.

  I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT about that. I prayed; and my prayers were answered. But how, exactly? The schedule of festivals and holidays is set out in Scripture, written down about a thousand years ago. The phases of the Moon were, presumably, ordained way back at the moment of Creation, when He set the stars and heavenly bodies in motion. Is it possible that, ten thousand years ago, when He had all sorts of important concerns and difficult calculations on His mind, He spared a moment to factor in the requirement for noon of the old moon of that particular month of that particular year... I find that hard to believe. But even so, I believe it. I believe that from the very Beginning, He so ordered the cosmos an
d the gearing of the celestial machine to accommodate Edax and me, at that precise moment the most worthless, least valuable articles of livestock in the whole of His illimitable estates. I have to believe it, since the fact is there and irrefutable. I prayed, and we were spared the noose. It happened. Try all you can, wriggle as much as you like, you can’t get round it. It’s a fact.

  No, you fool, you’re saying, it’s a coincidence. And I forgive you, because I’ve preached my fatuous little sermon before giving you the other fact; namely, that just after midnight, when Edax and I were lying on an excruciatingly uncomfortable pile of big logs in the Brothers woodshed, there was an earthquake.

  We do get earthquakes in those parts; about once every ninety years, as far as anyone can make out, and there’d been one eighteen months earlier, bad enough to shake the half-ripe pears off the trees, misery for the farmers but a source of great joy to their pigs. This earthquake was different. I remember Edax squealing and suddenly shutting up—a huge round of green oak bounced and hit him a glancing blow on the head as it sailed past me and smashed the woodshed door into splinters. Then the shaking stopped, and we sat there, looking at stars through the open doorway.

  But not, you can bet your life, for very long. Edax is scrawny, but back then he was fast, and I have long legs. We went sprawling a few times, either aftershocks or we tripped over things, but we picked ourselves up and kept going, didn’t stop until the sun rose; at which point it occurred to both of us without the need for words that we didn’t want to be seen, so we dived in under a briar hedge and lay there gasping, until I realised (it hit me like a hammer) exactly what had happened, and Edax started whining about being hungry.

  THIS MAY COME as a surprise, but nobody seems to know you’re an abomination just by looking at you. We made it to Chastel, fifty miles barefoot, walking all night and hiding up during the day, at which point we sort of gave up; either they were looking for us or they weren’t, we’d find out quickly enough, but we couldn’t go on like that. Turned out they weren’t looking for us. In fact, nobody gave a damn about us. And nobody wanted to give us work, either.

  So Edax and I had a discussion. We tried stealing, I told him, and it very nearly got us hung. Yes, he said, because we were careless, also it was in the village, where everybody knows everybody and everything. In a city— I suppose I should have explained to him, about praying and being delivered; sort of an implied condition that you don't do it again. But I couldn't bring myself to tell him about that and have him laugh in my face, so I had no valid argument to oppose him with, and as he pointed out, stealing is a two-man job if you want to get away with it, one of you steals, the other keeps a look out. If I abandoned him and he was forced to work alone and got caught, his blood would be on my hands.

  But we weren’t caught. Not for a long time.

  NICO WASN’T CLERK of the Works for very long. There was one of those power-struggles in the civil Service, the sort where you get two incredibly powerful and influential ministers who can’t stand the sight of each other. To give you an idea; a man I used to know told me about one time when he was out hunting, bow and stable, and he came across two stags fighting. Normally you can’t get within a hundred yards, he told me, but these two idiots were so preoccupied with smashing each other to bits that he was able to walk right up close, twenty yards, and shoot them both with consecutive arrows. I don’t know if the hunting story is true, but that’s exactly how it happens in the civil Service. The two mighty stags were so busy clashing horns and gouging each others’ flanks, they didn’t notice the real enemy until it was all over, and they were sitting in mail coaches on their way to deputy assistant postmasterships in the Perioeca.

  Now the man who won the power struggle was a shrewd judge of character and a marvellous Operator in the confined spaces of the Chancery corridors; he wasn’t quite so hot on which form to use for which application, and when the quarterly appropriations were due in by. Just as well he’d noticed my brother Nico. Stick with me, he'd whispered in his ear, and I’ll see you right; and Nico left the Clerk’s office and moved into the offices of the Count of the Stables.

  Goes without saying, the Count of the Stables doesn’t have anything to do with hay, oats or fresh straw. Once upon a time; but that was many years ago. The story goes that Tryphon IV, realising that the nest of vipers who ran the Treasury were out to get him, set up a parallel Underground treasury routed through the royal stables, and put the chief groom in charge of the whole thing because he was the only man in the City he could trust. And the chief groom did such a good job that within two years the budget deficit was just a memory and the soldiers were paid on time and twelve billion in taxes that had sort of trickled away into the pockets of the Treasury bosses found its way back into the Exchequer; where upon the chief groom had Tryphon quietly stabbed and in due course assumed the purple under the name of Basiliscus II. Nice story; quite possibly true. Anyhow, the Count of the Stables does a great many things, but none of them with a pitchfork.

  Nor, if you want to borrow a horse, is the Stables a good place to look for one. It's a huge building out back of the Red Palace, with a hundred and sixteen windows and just the one door. Getting round inside it is a nightmare until you’ve been there a year; and don’t bother asking anyone the way, because they'll lie to you. The theory being; if you need to ask, you must be new, and novelty is a terrible sin in the Stables. If you’re new, chances are you’re either a spy for the Exchequer or a pushy young cutthroat after somebody’s job.

  Nico, of course, was both. On his first day, some old clerk took him for a long walk, the long way round so as to confuse him, and showed him his office, then walked away and left him to it. But Nico was ready. He’d been counting under his breath all the way; thirty paces, tum left, twenty-six paces, up the stairs, seventeen paces, turn right, and so on. Not many men would have bothered, but Nico was smart, he knew how much it mattered. So, the first thing he did when he was alone in his new lair was to pull a wax tablet out of his sleeve (there was no paper or pen in the office, needless to say) and wrote it all down before he forgot it. For the first three weeks he had to follow the same roundabout route, but at least he didn’t get hopelessly lost; and every night he made additions and corrections to the map he was making of the place, the only one in existence; there'd never been one before and Nico made damned sure there never was one again. By the end of his fifth week, he knew the geography of that building better than the men who’d been there twenty years, and he always reckoned that was the key to his later success. Just knowing where everything and everybody was, and who you’d have to go past on your way to talk to so-and-so, and who’d be able to overhear whose conversations—

  For his first year in the Stables, Nico was the perfect henchman. The great man whose coattails had carried him there relied on him for everything, and he was never disappointed. Also, though he'd said nothing to anyone, the great man’s key enemies in the department started retiring early, transferring to rubbish jobs in the provinces or dying. A marvellous run of good luck, he thought for a while, and then he realised that nobody’s that lucky, and he must have a guardian angel he didn’t know about; and by the time he’d figured out who the guardian angel was, it was too late. Nico didn’t say a word; he didn’t have to. All he did was leave a dossier on the great man’s desk—copy statements, excerpts from the record, letters, memoranda, no big deal on their own but taken together, proof positive that the great man had been systematically blackmailing and murdering his colleagues until there was nobody left standing.

  I didn’t do it, he protested. It wasn’t me.

  No, Nico told him, it was me. But nobody’s going to believe you didn’t tell me to.

  So the great man retired—honourably, they made him permanent secretary to the governor of the Snake Islands, and within a year he was dead from malaria— and Nico became the new Count of the Stables, on his predecessor’s vehement recommendation. The first thing he did, so he told me later
, was to burn the map. He didn’t need it any more, and (like the forty-seven high officers of state who Nico’s predecessor had murdered without even knowing it) it was too dangerous to exist.

  STEALING FOR A living is like falling off a roof. For a while, you sail along, exhilarated by the slipstream, free as a bird and twice as fast through the air, and then you hit something and it’s suddenly no good at all.

  There was this goldsmith in Roches. We’d taken it in turns to watch his shop from the Street, and as far as we could tell there was nothing to worry about; no dog, the old man lived there on his own, no family, no living relatives apart from a cousin two hundred miles away. The door was four plies of oak laid cross-grain, but there was a side window with a shutter fastened with an old-fashioned fist-and-elbow padlock, and Edax reckoned he could deal with that, no problem. He was right, too, for once. He picked it in about two minutes, his hobnailed boots on my poor shoulders, and then we were inside. And we were quite right, there wasn’t a dog—we’d have known if there was, because we’d have heard it bark, and seen someone taking it for walks. We were right about everything, as it turned out, apart from one thing.

  And here’s a bit of very good advice. If you’ve got something valuable and you don’t want it stolen, don’t bother with a dog; get a goose. It costs practically nothing to feed, you can keep it shut up in a cage all day, and doesn’t it ever make a racket if something disturbs it in the middle of the night. A goose, for crying out loud.

  First thing we knew about it was this horrible noise, and something dimly white in the moonlit room, thrashing about. First a sort of blaring noise, like someone blowing through a cow’s horn, and then hissing, like a bad play in the theatre, and the thump of the bloody thing’s wings against the bars of the cage. Fact is, we were so scared we didn’t stop to think; what’s that, oh, it’s only a goose. We scrambled for the window. I got there first but Edax elbowed me out of the way, hauled himself through, jumped and broke his ankle. A moment later I landed on top of him, and he howled so loud it set all the dogs in the street barking. I scrambled up; he just lay there. Come on, I yelled; I can’t move, he said. I grabbed his arm, and he howled even louder. It hurts, he said. So I let go his arm, which I’d contrived to break when I landed on him. Don’t leave me, he said. So I got my arms under his shoulders and started to lug him down the Street, and then the watch arrived.