Academic Exercises Read online

  The captain of the Squirrel was the son of one of the duke’s tenants in Rhiopa; he’d been in the duke’s service since he was twelve, and regarded him as a sort of middle-order god. When the duke put him in charge of the expedition and said he wanted no further part in it, the poor man was temporarily stunned. Once he’d come round, however, he set about sorting out the mess, and by and large he did a pretty good job.

  On closer examination, the damage to the Squirrel from the various storms proved to be worse than originally thought. Given time and a shipyard, she’d have been fixable. As it was, our new leader decided to abandon her and transfer the lot of us onto the Heron. We were short of pretty much everything—sailors, food and worst of all, barrels for storing water—but there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it with the resources available. He therefore decided to make a run for home as quickly as possible. Accordingly, at first light the next day, we sailed out of the bay and almost immediately picked up a very useful wind blowing north-west, precisely the direction we wanted. I can’t remember seeing anybody look back as we left the coast behind us. The feeling was more one of sneaking away before the bastard woke up and had another go at killing us.

  A word about plantains. Don’t let the frost get on them, or they spoil and start to rot. Therefore, don’t store them in nets on the deck of a ship.

  We didn’t know that. Accordingly, we ran out of food with at least six days still to go. I remember thinking, how perfectly ridiculous, to have survived so much, only to be killed by a cold snap. The Squirrel people tried casting their net, but it kept coming up empty; we were in a sea with no fish, which struck me as entirely in keeping. I’m not sure what we’d have done if we hadn’t spotted a sail, far away on the horizon.

  Odd, isn’t it, how things turn out. If we hadn’t lost the Lion and the rest of the fleet and all ended up squeezed together into the Heron, we wouldn’t have been able to sail up to within boarding distance of an Imperial carrack, bristling with heavy guns and loaded down with nutmeg, mace, pepper, walrus ivory and lapis lazulae. Reasonably enough, they assumed we were the relief escort they’d been told would be meeting them at precisely those co-ordinates to make sure they got home safe without being attacked by privateers from the Republic.

  I have a note somewhere of how much the cargo of the Fortitude and Mercy made at auction when we got home. To give you a rough idea, the twenty per cent claimed by the Treasury in payment for a retrospective privateering licence amounted to slightly more than the government’s entire annual revenue from other sources. The remaining eighty per cent was topsliced to pay off the mortgages the duke had taken out, reimburse him for the entire cost of the expedition and pay the death-in-service benefits of everyone who didn’t make it back. The balance was divided pro rata between all the rest of us, the duke taking fifty per cent. I got four hundred and seven angels, which at that time was more money than I’d ever had at one time in my whole life.

  I wondered about that. The ocean, after all, is a very big place, and the Fortitude and Mercy had made a point of staying well clear of the usual shipping lanes, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, what were the odds against us turning up, in an Imperial ship, at the exact place in all that sea where the carrack was expecting to rendezvous with an Imperial warship? I’m no mathematician, but they can’t be very much greater than the odds against finding a new continent or large island at a set of co-ordinates randomly generated by adding a bunch of letter-values together. The fact remains, however, that the Fortitude and Mercy was only the fourth largest prize ever taken by Republican privateers; consider the Roebuck, the Flawless Rays of Orthodoxy, the White Swan, all chance encounters, and the biggest haul of all time, the King of Beasts, which Orlaeus stumbled into after both ships, following courses over two hundred miles apart, had been caught in a freak storm and carried to within a few hundred yards of each other in the exact centre of nowhere.

  Not only was the Fortitude laden with treasure. They had salt beef, salt pork, biscuit, flour, fruit, water-casks, even six dozen live chickens (though not, after we’d caught up with them, for very long). Under other circumstances, we’d have been hard put to it to find enough men for a prize crew for a ship so much bigger than our own. As it was, we were able to secure the prize for the journey home and alleviate the overcrowding on the Heron at the same time.

  From that moment on, things couldn’t have gone more smoothly. We had a mild following wind all the way home, the weather was warm, and two of the men who’d been at death’s door with the unknown fever quite suddenly snapped out of it and were fine, as soon as we crossed the 17th parallel. By the time we saw the Belltower, the duke was very nearly back to normal. He called me up on deck and gave me a lecture on how, all things considered, the expedition had been a success. We’d found Essecuivo. True, the two cities we’d visited had been abandoned at some point in the three centuries dividing us from Aeneas. There were all sorts of possible reasons for that, all of which he’d be analysing in the book he’d already started to write. But there was no earthly reason to suppose that the entire country was like that; and when we went back again, next year—

  “The duke?” she said. “Oh, he’s out of it completely. Nobody even mentions him any more.”

  I had a slight headache. “I thought—”

  “The money?” She smiled at me, as if at a simple-minded child. “All gone. As soon as he got back, he took a massive gamble on wheat futures. But it was a record harvest, so he’s back home in the country licking his wounds. Meanwhile, the Viscount Eretraeus—” Her small black eyes lit up as she said the name. “Now there’s someone you should definitely get to know.”

  Shortly after that, I stopped seeing her.

  I am, above all, a scholar. Just because I’m a bad human being, it doesn’t necessarily follow that my scholarship is proportionately deficient. I can analyse evidence, draw conclusions and formulate plausible hypotheses.

  So; as I think I mentioned, I have one of those see-it-once-and-it’s-there memories. What I must’ve done was remembered, deep in some remote part of my mind, which letters were illuminated red in the original manuscript. When I came to make my true-as-possible-in-the-circumstances copy, I remembered which letters to start the paragraphs with.

  The duke’s theory about Aeneas’ cypher was correct. The place we went to was Essecuivo. A lot can happen in three hundred years. Think about it. Three hundred years ago, Macella was a mighty kingdom, as big and strong as the Republic. What’s there now? The bases of a few statues, what’s left of a handful of buildings, after the locals plundered the worked stone to build pigsties.

  As for our incredible luck in running into the carrack; when we asked the captain where he’d come from with all that valuable stuff, at first he refused to tell us, quite properly. But then we explained how big and wet the sea was, and asked him if he was a really good swimmer; and he told us he was returning from the annual spice harvest at Mas Agiba, an Imperial outpost whence the Empire derived the bulk of its spices. It had been Imperial property for well over two hundred years, and no, he wasn’t going to tell us the map reference, not even if we threw him to the sharks.

  Mas Agiba could just about be the same word as Essecuivo, phonetically speaking; or, more likely, they’re both corruptions of the real name. Now, if the Imperial carrack had started from a different point on the same land mass as we had, going in more or less the same direction, it’s rather more likely that we’d have run into each other in the way we did. It was still an exceptional piece of luck—good for us, bad for them—but at least it’s possible. Imperial occupation would, of course, be a good reason for the destruction and abandonment of Aos and Eano. When the Empire makes a new friend in the colonies, it likes to play rough games. I imagine the captain is still being interrogated, somewhere in the State House cellars, assuming he’s still alive. I am therefore quietly confident that additional data will become available in due course, and the matter will be cleared up to everyone’s satisf
action.

  There was another expedition. Not the duke; he sold the Company to clear his debts from the wheat speculation, and a consortium of City merchants took over. They went to Essecuivo in an orderly, businesslike manner, with precisely one object in mind, and were more or less successful. They’d heard the story of the rose window and the appalling smell and taken a chance, which proved to be entirely justified. The smell, they guessed, was guano (bat-shit, as it turned out; the very best material for the manufacture of saltpetre, which as you know is the prime ingredient of gunpowder). They brought back a caravel filled with the stuff, and they plan on going back every year until it’s all gone.

  That worked out well for me. Leafing through my copy of Emulaeus one day, I found a sheet of paper I’d folded to use as a bookmark, many years ago. It was my father’s certificate for ten shares in the Company, which he’d bought on a tumbling market as an act of solidarity shortly before the crash. I sold my shares to the consortium for two thousand angels. So I’m all right.

  One piece of evidence I nearly suppressed; but I find I can’t. It wakes me up in the night sometimes, and I have to drink rather too much brandy to get rid of it.

  I said that the carrack’s cargo included fruit. So it did. What I neglected to mention was that it was carrying three tons of premium, freshly-harvested lemons.

  A Room with a View

  The door wasn’t locked. “Is he in?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “Depends.”

  I nodded. “I’ll go on up,” I said.

  I hate border towns. They have that insubstantial something-and-nothing quality, to be expected in a settlement that exists precisely because it’s neither one thing nor the other. Aperesia Apoina was my seventeenth posting; twelve out of seventeen, border towns. I have mentioned my feelings on this issue, but I don’t think anybody cares much.

  The stairs were pine, chipped white paint, shows the dirt. His door was shut. I knocked, not that it mattered. No reply, so I thumbed the latch and let myself in.

  Nobody behind the desk. It was a small room, mostly full of biscuit-boxes crammed with paper. There was a low, broken chair for visitors. I fixed it with choris anthropou, which I’m not particularly good at, and sat down. It creaked, but held.

  A form, even something as mundane as choris anthropou, would put him on notice, as effectively as the ringing of a bell. I settled down to wait. It was only boredom that made me pick up a letter from the desk.

  “You put that down,” he said, materialising in the chair and scowling at me. “Restricted.”

  I grinned at him. He’s three grades my senior but I was a year ahead of him in school. “Balls,” I said. “It’s the office copy of last month’s charcoal requisition.” I glanced at it again. “What a lot of charcoal you get through in this small building,” I said. “I’m surprised. It’s quite chilly in here.”

  He glared at me. He can’t resist small, pointless scams and fiddles. He was pulling the charcoal dodge back when he was a junior prefect, in sixth year. “That’s still restricted,” he said, snapping the paper out of my hand and stuffing it in a box on his desk. “Hence the red seal in the corner, which you can’t have failed to notice. What do you want?”

  “You sent for me.”

  “Did I? Why would I do that?”

  I shrugged. “How’s things, anyway?”

  “Dismal.” Yes, but they always are. If he dies and goes straight to the Court of the Sun, he’ll complain about the cold. And probably put in a spurious charcoal requisition. “Studium’s on my back about the Clearwater case, I’m two men short and nobody ever does anything around here except me. Did I really send for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I must’ve had a damn good reason.” He opened the big book on his desk and made a show of examining it closely. All theatre, of course, to put me in my place. I made a better show of yawning. I’d have put my feet up on the desk, only I didn’t trust the chair.

  “Oh, right,” he said, and closed the book with a thump. “What’s your view of compliance work?”

  “I hate it,” I said. “I’d rather cut turf.”

  He nodded. “How about mentoring?”

  “Worse.”

  “Thought so.” He was writing something on a scrap of paper, a corner he’d torn off some old letter. “Got a job for you. Compliance and mentoring. As soon as it came in, I immediately thought of you.”

  I’m what you might call something of an under-achiever. I was recognised when I was six years old, immediately admitted to the Temple under-school, won an open scholarship to the main school, straight on to the Studium after that, came fifth in my year out of a class of forty-six. Everybody said I had a remarkable natural talent, that I’d sail through my induction year, qualify before I was thirty and get a research post by forty. It didn’t turn out that way. I struggled through induction, failed, retook twice, scraped through, interviewed badly for all my chosen postings, got one rubbishy job after another and ended up here, a freelance on the reserve list. When people ask me what someone like me is doing in a place like this, I must confess I find it hard to explain. Usually I hint at a scandal or a disastrous error of judgement; it’s easier than telling the truth, and people are so ready to believe it. Fact is, I do have a remarkable natural talent and on my day I’m as good as any adept in the College. But my days don’t come round as often as I’d like, and the rest of the time, I flounder. Silly little mistakes, inattention to detail, failure of concentration, that sort of thing. People tell me it’s because my heart isn’t in it, and when I’ve finished slandering them under my breath I have to admit they’ve got a point. I just don’t care much for the work. I’d rather not have the gift and do something else. Not an option, of course. Anyway, I’m too old now to start on a new profession, so it’s this or unskilled manual labour.

  “Sweet of you,” I said. “So, what’s it involve?”

  He grinned at me. “Here’s the address,” he said. “They’ll explain when you get there.”

  There is no such thing, they tell you on your first day in school, as magic. Instead, there’s natural philosophy, science; logical, provable facts and predictable, repeatable reactions and effects. What the ignorant and uninformed call magic is simply the area of natural philosophy where we’ve recorded and codified a certain number of causes and effects, but as yet can’t wholly explain how or why they work. Research is, of course, ongoing, and in due course it’ll all seem as simple and straightforward and ordinary as the miracles of procreation, metallurgy or fermentation. Until then, foolish country people insist on calling it magic and calling us wizards. Meanwhile, since we can do all this useful stuff and they can’t, we get to charge them large sums of money for exercising our strictly controlled and regulated powers. The cynic in me wonders whether the research that will finally strip away the curtain, explain it all and make it so that anyone can do it would be a bit further along if we didn’t hold such a profitable monopoly.

  I say ‘we.’ I have no profitable monopolies. I don’t even have a job. I have jobs, from time to time, and that’s another thing entirely.

  Compliance is bread-and-butter stuff to failures and no-hopers like me; I guess I just don’t like bread and butter terribly much, or at least not for every meal. It’s boring, it’s repetitive and the pay’s garbage. Mentoring, though, is worse. Mentoring is taking some pushy young kid under your wing for a fortnight, knowing that once the ordeal’s over, he’s going on somewhere better and you’re stuck here. That makes it so much worse, somehow. Besides, I don’t like young people. I didn’t like them when I was one, and I like them even less now I’ve grown out of it.

  You can’t really comment on how close laughter is to tears without sounding trite, so I won’t bother. By a supreme effort of mental strength and discipline I managed to avoid both. And they say there’s no such thing as magic.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “That’s it. You want the job or not?”
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  Want, no. Need, yes. “When do I start?”

  “Now.”

  And that’s how I came to be there, at that time, in that place. Fundamentally, I believe, comedy and tragedy are the same thing, right up to the end. At the end, in comedy they get out of the mess they’re in and live happily ever after. In tragedy, they all die. But there’s a tipping point, a moment when it’s so evenly balanced it could go either way.

  Dogs; that’s what the job was. Our wonderful empire is blessed with many old and distinguished noble families, who among other things love to hunt. The best hunting dogs come from Razo, on the other side of the border from Aperesia Apoina. Razo’s one of those mountain towns; desperately poor, can’t grow anything, can’t keep any useful livestock apart from goats, and nobody ever got rich, or even comfortable, raising goats. Can’t be done. They graze so close that they wreck the pasture. Result: either you severely limit the size of your herd (so no expansion, no surplus, no wealth) or you overgraze and end up stripping your ground down to bare rock. Luckily for the Razoans, they have the dogs, for which our gilded nobility are prepared to pay silly money. Every Razoan is therefore a full or part-time dog breeder, and twice a month they bring a convoy of the stupid animals over the mountain passes to Apoina, where dealers buy them for a fraction of what the end users will eventually pay. My part in all this? It’s a legal requirement (I’m not making this up) that every dog coming into the country from abroad is examined by a Studium-qualified practitioner for signs of demonic possession.