A Practical Guide to Conquering the World Read online

  Not good, I thought. The Echmen are refined, artistic, intellectual, spiritual, courteous to a fault and a whole bunch of other good things. Easy-going they are not. Yes, diplomatic immunity, they invented it and they abide by the spirit as well as the letter whenever conveniently possible, but there are limits. A fat, chalk-faced foreigner deliberately blotting out the Divine Word with off-key bee imitations had to be pretty close to those limits, and I was sitting next to him. For two pins I’d have got up and sat somewhere else, if not for the uncomfortable knowledge that these people – these clowns – were all that stood between me and death in a hail of stones and half-bricks. I got hit on the head by a stone once, as it happens. I was walking down the street and a carriage horse happened to flick up a loose cobble with its hooves, right between my eyes. I remember the pain to this day, an intolerable ache deep in the bone. Death by stoning would probably be even worse than that. I stayed where I was and tried to be invisible.

  Two of the principal tenets of the Echmen faith are: love your neighbour and forgive your enemy. They’re realistic enough to admit that these are things you should aspire to rather than actually do, but it’s a noble ambition and one which, at that precise moment, I found absolutely impossible. I had no idea who my enemy was, only that he’d wiped out my entire race and left me dependent on the charity of my neighbour, who nobody could possibly love, not ever. I tried thinking about other things – summer meadows, horse racing, the Nine Basic Assumptions in Saloninus’ Ethics, sheep jumping over a low wall – but I couldn’t. My mind was completely occupied with the weird hybrid of Echmen plainsong and the fat man’s humming. It was worse than barley straw down the back of your neck, and all I could do was sit there and suffer.

  Finally, quite some time after I could tolerate no more, the priest recited the grace and led the minor clergy in procession into the nave, and we were free to go. I jumped up. A hand grabbed my wrist and dragged me down again as though I was gossamer. The fat man had opened his eyes and was looking at me.

  I don’t think he liked what he saw. “You the translator?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.”

  He carried on scowling at me, and his grip on my wrist was turning my fingers numb. I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

  “Come on,” he said. “I haven’t got all day.”

  I call him the fat man because he was fat. Seriously fat. Huge.

  The enlightened, sophisticated societies of the far north, where they seem to spend all their time writing snotty commentaries on each other’s books, have recently started taking the view that if someone’s fat, you shouldn’t say so. Most definitely, you shouldn’t frame any reference to a person’s fatness in terms that might be construed as critical or disapproving. I have no quarrel with that. Sneering at people and making fun of the way they look may be a fundamental human instinct, but so are lust and smashing bones. We should aspire to be better than we were made. Fine.

  The fat man, though, would’ve been livid if I were to try and play down his immense bulk. Among the Dejauzi, a race who often don’t have quite enough to eat, being fat marks you out as superior. If so and so looks like a sixty-gallon barrel, he clearly knows where his next meal is coming from, therefore he must be rich and powerful, so be sure to do as he says and not piss him off. You can tell at a glance, and so unfortunate mistakes are pre-empted and don’t happen. Affluent Dejauzi accordingly stuff themselves like geese in autumn, and those who aspire but lack the necessary means wear padded clothes and wrap sacking round their stomachs under their coats. Lots of the women and some of the men stuff their cheeks with pads of felt to get that pigs’ chaps look, and they have these artfully designed collars worn under a scarf that give you an instant double chin. The doorposts of Dejauzi tents are set much wider apart than they need to be, to create a subliminal impression of the owner’s girth, and their chairs are massive, to support their owners’ notional weight. Like the supercilious northerners, like all of us, the Dejauzi aspire to be better than they were made. In their case, quality is directly equated with quantity. There’s a sort of logic, I suppose.

  As a translator, I don’t make judgements. They get in the way of the translation, leading to inaccuracy and error. For me, it’s a matter of equivalences of meaning. If, in their mental language, the word for beautiful is fat, that’s not something to pass judgement on. I just take note of it for future reference. My own opinion on the matter, if I have one, is of no use to anyone, particularly me, so screw it.

  “My niece,” said the fat man, “has given you to me.”

  “Ah.”

  He scowled at me. “Eat much?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you eat much?”

  “No, not really.”

  He nodded. I’d given the correct answer. He peered at me. “Those clothes ought to last a good while longer, if you take care of them. What do you do, hang them up at night?”

  “Actually, I put them under the mattress.”

  He was staring at my shoes. “Years of wear left in those,” he said. “Show me the soles.”

  I showed him. “Excuse me,” I said.

  “We don’t use coined money,” he said, ignoring me, “so you won’t get paid. Daily allowance is a bowl of rice, two wheat flatbreads, two ounces of cheese and either grapes or an apple.” He hesitated. “There’s beer if you want it, but I don’t think you’d like it. Probably not to your taste. You can sleep on the floor in the little round room we don’t use. Got a blanket?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded again, more slowly this time. “We all speak Echmen,” he said. “I speak Sashan and Rosinholet, and one of the others knows Vesani, so we don’t actually need you for anything.”

  “I see.”

  He frowned. “But,” he said, “we think it’s not a bad idea to pretend we can’t understand what the fuckers are saying, even though we can, so we’ll have you along to sit in on meetings and do your stuff. At the moment, they provide the translators, so we can say we don’t trust their translators any more, so we’ve got one of our own. Scores a point, you see. It’s all about scoring points with these arseholes.”

  “Got you.”

  He sighed. “I never did like the Robur much,” he said, “and now you’re all dead it doesn’t bother me at all. The world’s a better place without you, in my opinion.”

  “Noted,” I said.

  He glared at me, like I was an itch he couldn’t quite get at to scratch. “Just so you know where you stand,” he said. “My niece reckons you saved her life, so we owe you. But the less I see of you the better, and the same goes for the rest of us. When we want you, we’ll send the boy for you. The rest of the time, be somewhere else. Got that?”

  “Loud and clear,” I said.

  “Grand. Never sit with us at prayers or meals or anything ever again.”

  “Understood.”

  “And polish your shoes occasionally, for crying out loud. We aren’t forking out for new ones.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s all right, then. What did you say your name was?”

  “Felix. It’s Robur for lucky.”

  He grinned. “Good name for you,” he said. “Now piss off.”

  I went back to my room – my old room – and found it empty.

  A bit upsetting. All my books had been there, not to mention my clothes and the few but precious bits and pieces I’d brought from home, including the thing I loved most in all the world, my bow.

  I could understand the logic; Echmen logic, the finest in the world, naturally. Since the Robur nation no longer existed, it couldn’t have diplomatic representatives, just as you can’t have a shadow of something that isn’t there. Accordingly, the room I used to occupy was an unoccupied room, and anything it contained belonged to nobody. All ownerless property in the empire belongs to the emperor. In practice, since his divine majesty can only cope with so much stuff, surplus property is sold at auction and the proceeds accrue to the Treasury. I went to see Oio, my Lystragonian pal, who wasn’t pleased to see me.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “As soon as you’ve told me something.”

  He pulled a face. “You just don’t get it, do you? You’re a non-person. I really don’t need to be seen with you.”

  “Fine,” I said. “The sooner you get rid of me the better.”

  I felt sorry for him. “What?” he said.

  “All my stuff’s gone into the next auction,” I said. “If you get it back for me, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Fine,” I said. “In that case, tell me when the auction’s going to be, and I’ll go and buy it back. Only I haven’t got any money, so you’ll have to lend me some.”

  He closed his eyes. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and everything was turning out to be his fault. “I know where they keep the list of confiscated property,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. But that’s it. If you show up here ever again, I’ll call the guards.”

  I smiled at him. “It was a pleasure knowing you,” I said.

  “Piss off and die.”

  The bow was worth it, though. I don’t suppose you’re remotely interested, so I won’t bore you with the details. No, actually, I will. However, I won’t be offended if you skip the next inch or so. Cast your eye down the page and start reading again at after that I went below…

  My bow is a one hundred and fifteen-pound draw weight composite with a maple core, gazelle-horn belly and wild ass backstrap sinew back. The ears are sharply reflexed sugar maple, with bone bridges. The string is twenty plies of silk, pre-stretched, with linen serving at the nock and loops. At fifty-six inches nock to nock it’s longer than is strictly fashionable these days, but I like the extra length for accuracy, stability and docility of release; it sends a six hundred grain arrow two hundred yards plus, but without shaking you to bits in the process, and I can actually hit things with it. It’ll draw thirty-one inches without complaining, and once you’ve got the knack it’s no bother to string. If you haven’t got the knack it’ll jump up and knock your eye out, but that means people aren’t keen to borrow it, which in my opinion is a bonus. Unstrung, it bends back so much the other way that the ears touch – practically a perfect circle. I had it made for me by the third best bowyer in the City, after I got an unexpected legacy when I was nineteen. He told me when I went to pick it up that he’d never had a more demanding, irritating, nit-picking customer in thirty years in the trade. I took that as a compliment.

  I could tell you loads more about it if I wanted to – the smoothness of its draw, the complete absence of stack, its superior cast, which I attribute to the ear geometry – but I won’t. Why should I? You’ve never done me any harm. Suffice to say, it’s the only nice thing I’ve ever owned, my only encounter with Perfection. My family were furious with me for spending all that money on what was basically a toy, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, they’d missed the point. I caused that utterly perfect object to be brought into existence, it was joined to me by a love that can’t be crammed into mere words, and I wanted it back. Enough, I think, said.

  After that, I went and found the room the fat man had told me about, where I’d be sleeping. I knew what to look for and where I’d find it as soon as he told me the room was round and they didn’t use it. The Hus had their quarters at the far end of the North wing of the palace, just underneath the watchtower, so the floor above their room would inevitably be round. And they didn’t use it because it’s the garderobe. In case you’re not familiar with Echmen military architecture, a garderobe is where you go to pee. There’s a channel in the floor that leads to a pipe through the wall.

  The first thing I saw was my bow. It was on the garderobe floor, in a silk bag, with a note pinned to it; a release docket from the Treasurer’s Office, explaining that the enclosed item had been confiscated in error by the Treasurer’s bailiff under the impression that it was the personal property of a member of the now disaccredited Robur delegation. The truth having emerged – that it had been intended as a diplomatic gift from the Robur emperor to the Hus, but had subsequently been misappropriated by a junior member of the Robur mission – the Treasurer was pleased to return it to its intended recipients, with apologies for any inconvenience. The docket was beautifully inscribed in authentic civil service calligraphy and sealed with what was almost certainly the Treasury seal, except that some fool had pressed it into the hot wax twice, so some of the details were a bit smudged. The rest of my stuff was nowhere to be seen, but you can’t have everything. Having just one thing is enough, if it’s something perfect.

  Oio is short for Oionoisi de’Pasi. I believe the de’Pasi clan are a big noise in southern Lystragonia. If so, it was unfortunate for Oio, since the Lystragonians are firm believers in noblesse oblige. Lystragonia is a horrible place where it’s always blisteringly hot. The humidity is murder. For a third of the year it rains incessantly, and for two-thirds it doesn’t rain at all. Lystragonia is mostly heavily forested mountains. In most of the country you can’t grow crops or herd animals, so the Lystragonians live by trade. They have only two exports. One of them is the tailfeathers of certain huge, incredibly colourful birds, once plentiful but now for some reason getting scarce and fiendishly hard to catch. The other export of Lystragonia is Lystragonians. Twice a year, they round up about a thousand of their best and brightest young men and women and exchange them for seven thousand fifty-gallon jars of barley flour. This, as far as they’re concerned, is a good deal, since the alternative is mass starvation. They’ve been doing it for quite some time and they’ve got it organised down to the last detail. There’s no dodging the draft, no matter how noble and influential your clan happens to be; but better-off families educate their first-born so they’ll end up as clerks and scribes rather than fieldhands or coalminers. An educated Lystragonian is therefore very educated indeed, and Oio was smart and erudite, even for a Lystragonian. As a result, he ended up at the Echmen Imperial court, where he’s spent the last five years making himself indispensable. He’s a year younger than me; a big man, almost as tall and broad as a Robur, with sand-coloured skin, curly red hair, blue eyes and freckles.

  Oio is my friend. He didn’t want to be. He doesn’t like my name – Felix, meaning lucky.

  Lystragonians have strong views about luck. They figure that lucky people crash through a basically unlucky world like the bows of a ship, drenching bystanders with a wake of corrosive misfortune, and are therefore best shunned as sources of danger and grief. I point out that I’m incredibly unlucky; if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here in this mess. He says that in order to have encountered all the bad luck I’ve run into and sliced through and still be alive, I must be the luckiest man going, and therefore a clear and present danger to all those around me. Accordingly, he’d have preferred to avoid me like the plague. Circumstances conspired, however, to make us true friends, grappled to each other’s souls with hoops of steel, whether either of us liked it or not (tell you about that some time). Circumstances conspired is, of course, just another way of saying luck, so I guess he and the Lystragonians are probably right. Like it matters.

  “You promised me,” he said. “You promised me I’d never see you again, in this world or the next. You lied to me.”

  I like Oio. “Just one little favour,” I said, “and then I’ll leave you alone. Really.”

  “What?”

  “I need a library pass.”

  He gazed at me with something approaching awe. “I’ll say this for you,” he said, “you’re no piker. You’re sure you wouldn’t settle for the crown jewels instead. Or the hand of the Princess Royal in marriage.”

  The Echmen palace library is the biggest and best in the world. Access to it, however, is rigidly controlled. To get a pass – a jade badge in the shape of a heron, so intricately carved it’s impossible to fake, why a heron I have no idea – you have to show your credentials, from the precentor of your home monastery or university, to the Chief Proctor of the Imperial chapel, who decides whether or not to forward your application to the supreme conclave of the House of Cardinals, who meet twice a year to issue passes; generally speaking, about one application in fifty actually gets approved. Alternatively, you can have a friend in the clerks’ office who’ll steal you one.

  “Please?” I said.

  “All right,” Oio said wearily, “let’s just suppose for one minute that I owe you some incredible debt of gratitude, because you saved me from being eaten by bears or rescued my entire family from headhunters. What makes you think I could get my paws on one of those things, even if I was minded to? I don’t even work in the same building—”

  “Because you’re wonderfully intelligent and resourceful and everybody likes you.”

  The look he gave me was designed to shrivel my skin and strip the enamel off my teeth, but I’m used to people looking at me like that. “What in God’s name do you want it for, anyway?”

  “I’d like something to read.”

  He considered me as though I was one of those riddles in fairy stories; get me right and he’d win the princess, get me wrong and they’d throw him in the snake pit. “You’re something else, you know that?”

  “Thank you.”

  “No promises,” he said. “Now go away. Please.”

  Something to read; some way of passing the time. Being alive is clearly the most important thing, but it’s not everything. I was alive, thanks to the Hus, but they had absolutely no use for me, except as an accessory for their long-standing practical joke. Once every ten days or so, the boy – seven years old, at a guess, disturbingly thin and whip-scarred – would materialise out of nowhere and beckon me to follow. Then I’d sit in a stunningly elegant anteroom and do my job, translating Echmen and Sashan and Rosinholet into Dejauzi for the benefit of men who knew those languages just as well as I did. Then the foreigners would stand up, bow and leave. The Hus would wait for a count of twelve and then leave, too, never once having looked at me or acknowledged that I was there.