A Practical Guide to Conquering the World Read online

  My friend pulled a face. “What’s her name?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “No, I don’t. And I can’t pull the file if I don’t know the name.”

  I explained. The Dejauzida (including, in this instance, the Hus) have all sorts of weird taboos about names. You can’t, for example, say the name of someone who’s died; you have to use an elaborate periphrasis. Nor can you ask someone their name; nor can you tell someone yours. If you really want to know, you have to ask a member of the family (and not just any member; there’s a rigid protocol, governed by family status and the name owner’s position in the family hierarchy). Asking a princess her name would constitute an insult that could only be avenged in blood. “So I didn’t ask.”

  “Fine,” said my friend. “Only, like I said, that could make it difficult.”

  “Do you really think there’s more than one Hus hostage in here at the moment?”

  He scowled at me. “The list isn’t cross-referenced by nationality,” he said. “No name, I can’t help you. Sorry.”

  Another apology for my collection. I shrugged. “Never mind,” I said. “If I got it wrong, I’ll find out soon enough when they throw me out of the service. Of course, I’ll have to walk home, because they’ll revoke my pass for the mail, but it’s only a couple of thousand miles, and there’s plenty of wear left in these sandals.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

  “Just as well you don’t have any real work to do.”

  “Drop dead, blueskin.”

  I glanced up at the water clock; I was on duty. I gave him my big smile and hurried up to our department, on the fifth floor of the North tower.

  Our department consisted of the ambassador, his airhead nephew, someone else’s airhead nephew and me; just as well there was never anything for us to do, or it wouldn’t have got done. Usually the ambassador didn’t put in an appearance until the middle of the afternoon, so I was a bit taken aback to find him sitting behind the desk (we only had one) with a roll of parchment in his hands.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said, and started telling him about my recent adventure. He wasn’t listening. “Read this,” he said, and handed me the parchment.

  It was in Sashan; later, the ambassador told me his Sashan opposite number had given it to him to read, although strictly speaking it was classified, et cetera. It was a copy of a report from the Sashan embassy in Aelia – one of the milkface republics on the bottom edge of the Middle Sea that we never got round to conquering. It described how an army, so far unidentified, had lured the City garrison out into some forest and annihilated it, leaving the City itself completely defenceless; by the time you read this, the report said, the City will have fallen. Furthermore, the Sashan ambassador had heard reports, so far unconfirmed but from absolutely reliable sources, of an unknown but extremely powerful and well-equipped confederacy against the Robur, which was conquering and absorbing the provinces of our overseas empire at an extraordinary rate. Their declared intention was to exterminate the Robur down to the last man. If they continued their progress, said the report, it could only be a matter of weeks before the Robur empire and incidentally the Robur nation ceased to exist.

  I glanced at the date on the top. The report was two months old.

  I looked at the ambassador. His face was expressionless.

  “It can’t be true,” I said.

  He looked up at me. “When was the last time we heard from home?” he said.

  “About two months. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I get a despatch every week,” he said. “Or I’m supposed to. I’ve been writing home every day for the last month, asking what the hell’s going on.”

  “The City can’t fall,” I said.

  “It can if there’s no one to defend it.”

  I looked at the report, but I couldn’t make out the words; something in my eye. “It can’t be true.”

  “You already said that.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  He laughed. “I’m claiming political asylum,” he said. “If that thing’s true, I don’t suppose I’ll get it. If I were you, I’d make myself scarce. Get as far away as you can, and stay there.” He jerked his head towards the door that connected the outer office to the cubbyhole where the nephews worked. “They’re long gone,” he said. “Don’t tell me where you’re going, I told them, that way I can’t tell anyone else.”

  I stared at him. “Who are these people?”

  He shrugged. “You know as much as I do,” he said. “The Sashan don’t know anything either. But they believe it. That’s their man’s idea of sportsmanship. Giving us a head start.”

  I put the parchment on the desk. “Who hates us that much?”

  That got me a big grin. “Everybody,” he said. “Don’t you follow current affairs?”

  I ran down the stairs and along the passages to the clerks’ room. My friend the Lystragonian was at his desk, with his feet up, reading The Mirror of Earthly Passion.

  “Her name,” he yawned, “is She Stamps Them Flat. And, yes, she’s Hus all right. You owe me.”

  I told him what I’d just heard. He stared at me. “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “You haven’t heard anything?”

  He closed the book and put it down. “No, but I wouldn’t have.”

  “Can you ask around?”

  “Nobody talks to me, you know that. Still,” he added, looking at me, “I’ll see what I can do. Where will you be?”

  Good question. Like I said, the Echmen are red hot on diplomatic immunity. Query, though; if a nation no longer exists, can it have diplomats? “The White Garden,” I said. “They like me there.”

  So I went to the White Garden, though I didn’t sit at my usual table. I chose a dark corner, next to the fire. There I spent possibly the worst hour of my life. And then the soldiers came for me.

  “Nothing personal,” the sergeant said, as he tied my hands behind my back. Not the same sergeant, probably just as well. “Try and hold still, we don’t want any broken bones.”

  The Echmen have this wooden collar for putting round prisoners’ necks. It’s about the size of an infantry shield, with a hole in the middle for your neck, and hinges, and a padlock. It presses directly on your collarbone, and when you’re wearing it you can’t see your own feet. Wonderfully practical design, like everything the Echmen make. The sergeant wasn’t inclined to chat, for which I was grateful.

  The Echmen official I eventually got to see was an elderly man with a sad face. Yes, he said, as far as anyone knew the report was true. An Echmen agent had personally seen the ruins of five Robur cities on the east coast of the Friendly Sea, which was as far west as the Echmen were prepared to go, and his sources confirmed the Sashan account in every detail. As far as the Echmen were concerned, the Robur no longer existed.

  “Apart from you,” he added.

  I looked at him.

  “Your ambassador,” he said, “applied for political asylum, which we felt unable to grant. He took his own life. Your two colleagues in the Robur mission are also dead. They made the mistake of letting themselves be seen in the streets. I gather that news of what happened has reached the public at large, and the Robur—” He gave me a sad smile. “They were never very popular with our people at the best of times.”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

  “I have received,” he went on, “an official application from one of the other embassies, asking for you to be transferred to their staff as a translator. If you accept the post, you will of course enjoy full diplomatic privileges. I have absolutely no idea why they would want to do this. However, I should point out that if your diplomatic status lapses, you will class as an unregistered alien, and you will no longer enjoy the protection of the law.” He paused and gave me the sort of look you really don’t want, ever. “Do you want the job or not?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded to the s
ergeant, who came forward and unlocked that horrible collar and untied my hands. “In that case,” he said, “I suggest you report to your new masters, before they change their minds.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Who—?”

  He told me. One damn thing after another.

  “We have this really stupid tradition,” she told me. “If someone saves your life, your soul belongs to them for nine consecutive reincarnations, unless you can save them back. Personally I think it’s bullshit, but I guess you never know.”

  At least I knew her name, though it was more than my life was worth to say it. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it. I think I’ll give you to my uncle,” she went on, “he collects rare and unique objects. Right now, from what I gather, a Robur’s about as rare and unique as it’s possible to get.”

  Rather than live in a world without Robur, my ambassador had killed himself – by drinking poison, I later found out; not just any poison, real connoisseur stuff. It’s distilled from some incredibly scarce and valuable exotic flower, and you die entranced with the most gorgeous and wonderful visions, so that you feel yourself ascending bodily to heaven to the sound of harps and trumpets. On a translator’s salary, however, it’d take me ten years saving up to buy enough to kill a chicken.

  “I thought you wanted me as a translator,” I said.

  She nodded. “How many languages do you know?”

  “I’m fluent in twelve,” I said, “and I can get by in nine more.”

  Her eyes widened. “How many are there, for God’s sake?”

  “The official figure is seventy-six,” I said, “but I think there’s a lot more than that.”

  “And you know twenty-one of them. That’s—”

  “Twenty now, of course. I don’t suppose Robur counts any more.”

  That just sort of slipped out. It got me a scowl.

  She was short, even by Dejauzi standards; not fat exactly, more squat and stocky, with a square face and a flat, wide nose. She had big hands, almost like a man’s. Like all Dejauzi, she’d plastered every square inch of exposed skin with brilliant white stuff (basically chalk dust and lard, with other bits and pieces in it to keep it from cracking and flaking); she wore her hair in a bun on top of her head, and it was dyed a purply blue, almost lavender. The peacocks reached from just under her eyes down to the line of her jaw; we call them tattoos but really they’re scars, carved with a flake of sharp flint around the age of twelve. The scar tissue is picked out in five different colours of greasepaint and has to be done from scratch every morning, using a basin of water as a mirror. Incidentally, there are fourteen synonyms for handsome in Dejauzi, but no word meaning pretty. She was somewhere between twelve and fifteen; I’m hopeless at women’s ages.

  “We’re a bit pushed for space,” she said, “so you’ll have to sleep in here. You won’t mind that.” Statement of fact, not a query. “I know it’s not what you’re used to, but I can’t help that.”

  No chair in the room; nomads sit on the ground. The floor was covered in stupendous Echmen tiles, all the colours of the rainbow and harder than granite. “It’ll be fine,” I said.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. Partly because Her Majesty was in the room next door and she snored like someone killing pigs; partly because I had things on my mind. There was no window in the room, and just one little clay lamp, which soon burned out. It stank to high heaven of some kind of fat, so I didn’t mind that.

  I’ll spare you a report of my mental turmoil and emotional anguish, though to be honest with you I was still in that just-been-kicked-in-the-head phase when you can’t feel anything at all. I tried to make a list of all the things I’d been planning to do when I finished my tour of duty and went home, which I wouldn’t be doing now – some bad, some good, I’ll never do that or see them again versus I won’t have to do that or see them, at any rate. I remember getting up off the floor and standing upright, shoulders back, head up, chin in, like the drill sergeant taught us; I thought, I’m still the same but from now on everything else is going to be completely different. It occurred to me that this universal-except-for-me change was bound to cause me problems; the logical thing, therefore, would be for me to change, too. How, exactly? Insufficient data for an informed decision. The ambassador had killed himself rather than face the humiliation of being someone else, and I could see a certain degree of merit in that approach. On the other hand, death isn’t like the last ship east in autumn; if you miss it, you’re stuck where you are for at least three months until the weather improves. Death is prepared to wait. It’s always there for you, like your mother.

  I am by nature a relatively cheerful person. I’m inherently frivolous. I like to find the humour in everything, like a mine-owner grinding up a whole mountain to extract one ounce of pure copper. In Blemya, so they tell me, there are little tiny birds which make their living picking fibres of meat out of the yawning jaws of crocodiles, and I think I’m probably one of them; the crocodiles being Life. I’m prepared to engage with the world – at any moment my head might get bitten off by it, but that’s the risk you have to take – in order to extract a minuscule shred of something worth having. The alternative would be to curl up in a ball and never speak. That has its attractions, believe me, but I’m not quite ready for it yet. Tomorrow, maybe.

  And what a laugh, what an absolute blast, life is, to be sure. Which is to say, life is a rock in which the veins of humour run deep. I’m talking about the sort of humour where somebody falls over or gets hit by something or finds a scorpion in his dish of noodles, the kind of stuff we all find hilarious. The humour-bearing quartz is the bedrock of our experience, on which we build our houses and cities, knowing full well that the ground beneath our feet is shot through with side-splitting possibilities for other people’s mirth, like a ship’s hull riddled with teredo worms. Comedy to observers, tragedy to participants; I consider myself an observer. I fly over my life like a migrating bird, and I only ever play for beans or counters, never for real money. I’m an accredited diplomat assigned to my own country, reporting back to Infinity; my embassy is a tiny patch of home soil in the middle of the alien nation where I happen to have been born and spent my entire life.

  The hell with it. They can’t hurt you unless you care, and I don’t.

  Fine words, which according to my mother butter no parsnips. In one pan of the scale, everything I’d ever known had been lost and destroyed, and I was quite possibly the only brown-skinned human being left on the face of the earth. In the other pan, a new life, scintillating new opportunities, a job (nobody had said anything about pay, but let’s not push our luck) and a powerful friend at the royal court of what would presumably henceforth be my country. If you can meet with triumph and disaster, says Saloninus in the Ballads, and treat those two imposters just the same – disaster in one pan, triumph in the other, and the bit of cord from which the scale dangles is gripped between the podgy fingers of a fourteen-year-old with peacocks tattooed all over her face. Enough, surely, to make a cat laugh.

  I don’t say what I think. I translate what other people say. That’s my job. Just as well, sometimes.

  2

  The Echmen, bless them, are a nation of early risers. They start the day off with the cheerful hammering of gongs and the raucous laughter of enormous bells, calling the faithful to prayer. At least, that’s what they do in the cities. In the rural districts, I guess it’s probably different; the head of the family staggers out of bed in the pitch dark and feebly rattles a cowbell or whacks a tin plate, I don’t know. But anywhere with more than a dozen houses, the day starts with the most appalling racket, enough to make your teeth hurt.

  Foreign diplomats aren’t required to attend morning service, in the same way as there’s no law explicitly forbidding you to fart when you’re saying grace at a state banquet. Every quite-some-time-before-dawn for three years, I’d dragged myself into my clothes and stumbled out of the door towards the chapel. The ambassador, rest his so
ul, was always in his pew when I got there, immaculately turned out, sitting bolt upright and fast asleep with his eyes open. I could never quite summon up that much class. The nephews, on the other hand, slumped in their seats like piles of dirty washing from which someone had neglected to remove the contents. I nearly headed for what used to be our pew, and then I remembered. It also occurred to me that I didn’t know where the Hus pew was. Still, I figured, a row of people with chalk-white faces tattooed with peacocks would be hard to miss. I was right.

  There were nine of them, all sitting perfectly still with their eyes tight shut. Later I discovered that this was to avoid spiritual contamination. If they couldn’t see the disgusting idols and the abominable priests in their loathsome vestments, they couldn’t be defiled by them. I dropped in at the end of the row, next to a fat man. If he knew I was there, he gave no sign of it.

  I rather like the Echmen liturgy. The music is slow and soothing. The chanted prayers are actually rather fine if you stop and listen to the words, and the actual theology is so mild and wishy-washy that you’d be hard put to it to be offended, even if you were a raving zealot. You don’t join in except to mutter “So be it” at the ends of paragraphs. The artwork on the walls is, of course, bewilderingly beautiful. Morning prayers last two and a bit hours. If you have nothing urgent you ought to be doing, and no low-level diplomatic attaché ever has, it’s a pleasant enough way to pass the time.

  My neighbours (my new fellow countrymen, God help me) didn’t seem to be enjoying it at all. It’s really bad manners to look round during the service – you’re supposed to sit there with your eyes fixed on either the altar flame or the priest’s face from the moment you arrive until it’s time to go – so I couldn’t see what they were doing, but as soon as the priest started to recite the introductory prayer, the fat man next to me began to hum. I don’t think it was a tune or even an attempt at one. It was just a noise designed to stop him hearing what the priest was saying. When there was a pause in the service, he stopped. When the priest started again, so did he.