
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has safely arrived at Tremissis City and has assumed control of the civil and military administration.
You are, of course, an unmitigated bastard. Not content with dragging me away from my chair at Anassus, which I worked bloody hard to earn and which will now go to that pinhead Atho, you made me waste three months of my life in a military academy, of all places, and now you've dumped me here, in the last place on earth, surrounded by snow, soldiers and savages. What the hell did I ever do to you?
Well, I'm here now. Absolutely ghastly journey, being thrown around in a post-cart along with mail-sacks and boxes of biscuits and cages of shitty chickens. There was this fat woman sitting opposite, and every time the cart went over a pothole or a rock, she got shot across the cart straight into my lap. I guess she must've been used to travelling post, because she just carried on reading; even when she ended up sitting on my head with one leg sticking out over the side, I don't think she ever lost her place. Oh, and a wheel came off, slap bang on the top of the mountain, just before noon. That was no fun. Thanks, friend.
Governor Philoctenus wasn't pleased to see me. Really, when you sack a man, it's only polite to tell him about it, rather than leaving that particular chore to his supplanter. He didn't believe me (and why should he?). He assumed I was some kind of loon, nearly had me slung in jail, except quite by chance I had my commission with me in my pocket rather than packed away in my document-case at the bottom of my trunk. It took me quite some time to convince him it wasn't a forgery. Then he lost his temper.
Anyhow, I'm here, and everything seems to be in order, more or less; I say that, but I haven't got a clue what a properly-functioning provincial government looks like. There's about ten thousand clerks in grubby shirts and worn-out sandals who dart in and out of offices and don't seem to hear you when you ask them something, and miles and miles of shelves of dossiers, files, records, ledgers, you name it, and everybody's extremely busy, so I guess something must be getting done. Whether it's anything useful, I simply don't know. By the way, it's perishing cold here; they have five enormous sheds full of charcoal, but it's against regulations to issue any before the Ides, and apparently I haven't got the authority to override the rules. The least you can do, in my opinion, is send me a woolly scarf.
You haven't got a book on governing you could lend me, have you? Seriously.
As for the insurgency, it can't be all that bad, because nobody around here seems to know anything about it. Of course, I haven't met the military yet. That particular joy still awaits me.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty acknowledges Phormio's report and hereby authorises the early release of restricted stores, namely charcoal, at the governor's discretion.
Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Please find herewith;
Item; three (3) scarves, woollen, long, thick
Item; six (6) pairs mittens, woollen, extra thick
Item; six (6) pairs socks, woollen, double ply
Item; twelve (12) blankets, civil/diplomatic grade
Item; one (1) jar oysters, Bethusian, first quality, in brine
(Are you all right for footwear? Hats? How about a portable stove?)
Look, I'm sorry, all right? It is, as they say, a lousy rotten job but someone's got to do it. A bit like being emperor, yes?
Anything you need, you write to me, it'll be with you as soon as possible---not Civil Service as soon as possible, but as fast as a cart can get up the mountain. The thought of you freezing to death, huddled in a blanket, warming your tiny pink fingers over a guttering candle, is more than I can bear. I've been losing sleep over it. The administration of the empire is on hold until I hear from you that you're warmer. All right?
Moving on, how are things out there? Have you found the war yet? Everything's always somewhere, as my mother used to say when I couldn't find my hymn-book. Maybe it's fallen down the back of something, or it got put away somewhere safe. A great big noisy thing like a war is bound to turn up sooner or later. Please advise.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun., father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has sought out the enemy, but as yet has been unable to identify them.
You're still a bastard, but thanks for the socks. Not my colour, but at least I'm getting some feeling back in my toes. They still won't let me have any charcoal. Apparently, you need to write separately to the quartermaster's office, charcoal being a military commodity (why?) and specify the quantity to be released and the date of release. You should know that, dammit. Why should I have to teach you your job?
I blame myself, of course. I remember it clearly; in third year, in the back bar of the Poverty and Justice. Political power, I said, should under no circumstances be allowed to vest in the hands of anybody who wants it, and all the important offices of state should be filled by men who'd much rather be doing something else. Well, quite.
Now then, the war. There definitely is one, but I'm damned if I can find it. I've been through all the reports, and the impression I get is that there's been a lot of skirmishing, hit-and-run raids, a good deal of general nastiness that's borderline criminal banditry but probably relates. Mostly, by the time we get there they've gone, whoever they are. That's the big mystery. There's theories, of course, hundreds of them, but when you look at it properly, nobody has the faintest idea who the enemy arc, where they come from, where they go back to, what they want, how many of them there are. Apparently they go to extraordinary lengths to retrieve their dead, so there aren't any corpses to examine. The few bits of kit we've recovered are either nondescript generic commercial stuff, like you can buy from any reputable arms dealer, or Imperial issue. Witnesses say they look a bit like Imperial regulars, only scruffier, less organised. I went and interviewed a bunch of survivors (me, on a horse; if that's not devotion above and beyond the call, I don't know what is) but they just looked scared and clammed up. I think they're terrified of what might happen to them if they help us in any way. Not a nice business. Anyway, my investigations are continuing (good, meaningless civil service phrase) and as soon as I know anything, I'll let you know.
A thought has just occurred to me. If you're really the brother of the invincible Sun, maybe you could persuade Him to pay us a visit, just long enough to thaw the ice in the latrine.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty acknowledges Phormio's report.
The point you raise is an interesting one, which has vexed the finest minds in Temple for generations. As far as I can make out, the invincible Sun isn't actually my brother, as such; more like a second cousin. As you can imagine, this came as a relief to me. Last thing I need to worry about is one more birthday to remember. Besides, what do you give the Sun? Socks? A nice book? I'm fairly sure He's not a great reader (the pages would get scorched, for one thing).
I've written about the charcoal. I made the Adjutant General look up the rules (he's got a book with all the procedural rules in it, the lucky sod. I asked him if he could let me have a copy, but he went all coy on me) and he copied out the proper form of mandate for me to use. So, fingers crossed, and let me know what happens.
In case I didn't make my meaning clear in my last letter, I really am dreadfully sorry about all this. Of course, it wasn't my fault that all my obnoxious relatives chose to massacre each other and land me with this job, but even so, I'm sorry, and I'm really grateful to all of you for rallying round like this and helping out. The plain fact is, I can't trust anybody here. Either they're completely useless, or they're robbing the Treasury blind, or they're plotting a coup, or their nephew's boyfriend's uncle's plotting a coup, and it's all so horrible and dreary I could scream. I'm convinced they're deliberately keeping me working all hours on meaningless trivia so I won't find out what's really going on; a clever enough idea, but it's going to backfire on them, trust me. As soon as the rest of the gang's come in and taken charge, we'll have those wankers out and then we can start doing things properly. And then, my dear old friend, you can come home. Promise.
Excuse me if I'm sounding a bit more bewildered than usual, but I've been trying to picture you on a horse, and the image has taken root in my mind and smothered practically everything else. Here's a tip you find useful. Once you've mounted, if you can sec the horse's tail, you're on back to front.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that the enemy have burnt Saleia. Imperial forces were unable to engage.
No kidding. Remind me; which end is the tail?
The Saleia business isn't quite as bad as it sounds. One useful thing I've done (sorry, forgot to mention it in my last letter) is organise a sentry network. What that means is, each village headman is responsible for posting a watch, round the clock, to look out for trouble. This idea hadn't actually occurred to anybody, which I find quite remarkable. Anyhow, the Saleia watch saw the bad guys coming well in advance, and they evacuated with time to spare. Nobody thought to send a runner to the garrison at Limes Regni, so the first the military knew about it was when they saw the column of smoke, but you can't have everything. The village got burned to the ground, but nobody died, the bad guys didn't find or couldn't be bothered with the cattle, and I've got carpenters and masons up there right now rebuilding the place. By all accounts it was the armpit of the North, so I imagine they'll do quite well out of it in the end. Even so; can't have been fun for them, and of course we're still none the .wiser about who these buggers are. I sent out scouts, naturally, but the trail petered out after a couple of miles (new snowfall covered the tracks; you might care to raise that with your second cousin. He's been no help at all.). All the village watchmen could tell us was that there were a lot of them; not much help, since people in these parts tend to count one-two-three-four-five-loads. Anywhere between a hundred and a million, in other words.
I looked up insurgency in my Art of War, and it says I should set up a rapid response unit, stationed in the epicentre of the attack sites, comprising two divisions of heavy cavalry supported by horse-archers and scouts. I'd do this like a shot, except;
1. Cavalry don't do so well in steep mountains
2. I haven't got two divisions of heavy cavalry
3. The attacks have been so widely spaced that there's no chance in hell of getting to where we're needed before the bad guys melt away into the hills.
I'm working, mind you, from the 9'h edition. Maybe they've updated since then. Failing which, I confess to being baffled, at a loss and screwed.
One last thing. Could you send me some more purple ink? The bonehead at Supply would only let me have an ounce; can't have more than that without a signed warrant from His Majesty personally. I tried asking the clerks to mix red and blue ink together, but they nearly had a fit. Apparently, unauthorised manufacture of purple ink carries the death penalty. What kind of a law is that, for crying out loud?
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty acknowledges Phormio's report and applauds his actions with regard to Saleia.
Please find herewith one (1) pound of purple ink. It's from my own personal stock. Life is too short to go through Supply.
The whole purple ink business is indicative (is that the word I want?) of what's wrong with this administration. You start off with a basically harmless, quite fun idea; purple ink is reserved for the exclusive use of the Emperor and his officials. That way, you can tell at a glance if the warrant or summons or conveyance you've just been handed is genuine. Fine. What happens? First, one of my megalomaniac-psychotic predecessors takes it a bit too seriously, and misuse of purple ink is suddenly a capital offence. Second, the clerks at Supply figure out that they can exercise a remarkable level of control over the administration, particularly officials they don't like or approve of, simply by limiting their ink supply. Do something that gets up their collective nose; next time you need a refill, you're told that the last batch they had in from the contractors wasn't up to snuff quality-wise (not purple enough, presumably); or else the ship it was on sank, or a new and unknown disease has wiped out all the oyster-beds in Fragia. Result; no ink, no documents, nothing can be done. Marvellous. It means I'm having to stockpile the stuff while I can, in case they stop liking me. Meanwhile, I'm on the track of a forger (he's in jail somewhere out East) who was convicted of making a copy so close to the real thing, it's indistinguishable. Soon as I find him, I'm having him brought here and set to work. Seriously. It's the way you have to do things here.
Sorry. Rant over.
I don't know what to suggest. The rapid response idea's clearly a non-starter; all you'd be doing is tying up forces in one place, giving the baddies a licence to attack somewhere else. All I can think of is infiltration and intelligence, but you don't need to tell me you've thought of that already and it's not that simple. Do the best you can, that's all I ask. Your best will be about as good as it's possible to get. That's why you're there.
In other news. Progress, at last. I've contrived to get Menestheus in as Chancellor, Strato as Master of Ordinances and Aristaeus as Grand Domestic, which means that all the key Cabinet posts are now in the hands of the Class of'13. There is, of course, a fair chance that by the time you read this, we'll all have been murdered in our beds by the palace guard, or the Optimates, or maybe even the public at large; it's not exactly been a popular move, but I'm determined to see it through; and when you get home, I'd like you to be Commander in Chief. Please?
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has engaged the enemy, but without success.
Thank you for your astonishingly generous and flattering offer, which you can stuff where your second cousin doesn't shine. I am not, repeat not, a soldier; I'm an effete, slightly overweight dilettante scholar who just might one of these days, if I'm lucky and the right people die and some clown doesn't send me away to the frontier, secure a senior lectureship at a respectable university. I know, we agreed; give positions of power to people who'd rather die than have them. But there are limits. The point being, I'm no bloody good at this.
As witness the recent debacle referred to above. Quite by chance I happened to be in Choris Anthropou (don't bother looking it up; not on map) to interview some time-waster who reckoned he'd seen the bad guys up close. Literally just as I was about to pack up and go home, a rider comes thundering up the street and falls off practically at my feet. Poor bugger was a horrible mess, all cut up and bleeding, but he managed to tell us that the bad guys were six miles down the valley, breaking up the road.
Needless to say, I didn't stop to think. I'd got fifty dragoons with me as personal escort. I sent them off to do what they could, scribbled a note to the garrison commander at Gelos, nine miles back in the wrong direction, then got in my chaise and wobbled off after the dragoons, with an absolutely terrified village headman as guide and coachman.
I owe my life to that man. He got us lost; I can only assume on purpose, since he lives there and must know the mountains like the back of his singularly grubby hand. Result; we arrived on the scene when it was all over. Ten minutes earlier, and we'd have ended up like those poor bastards I sent to their deaths, because I acted without thinking, because I was desperate to do something but didn't know what to do, because I panicked.
There were two survivors when we got there, and by the time I'd finished throwing up and pulled myself together, there was one survivor. Amazing; he apologised. Sorry, general, but there were six hundred of them and only fifty of us and we rode straight into an ambush, and thirty of us got shot full of arrows before we knew what had hit us, and they carved up the rest of us with axes and swords; I failed you. That's what he said. I felt so ashamed, I wanted to die. But I told him he'd done really well and Vesania was proud of him and a bunch of other shit. He made it, I'm delighted to say; lost an eye, though, and his left hand's useless. He obeyed my order, presumably under the misapprehension that I knew what the hell I was doing. I didn't tell him I'd never even seen a dead body before.
The soldiers from Gelos got there amazingly quickly; two hundred heavy cavalry and two dozen horse-archers. Their commander seemed to know what to do, so I left him to it; my second mistake of the day. You see, I'd omitted to mention to him that the bad guys had been seen breaking up the road. If he'd known that (being a proper soldier, as opposed to me, an ignorant amateur), he'd have known that they were fixing up an ambush, and nothing on earth would have induced him to go galloping full-tilt along the main post road. Which (since I'd forgotten to pass on the one bit of information I had) is exactly what he did.
You know about this stuff, so I imagine you're way ahead of me. The bad guys had let themselves be seen. The rider who brought me the news was the only survivor of a regular six-man patrol (again, I should've thought to ask him who he was and what he was doing out there). They knew when the patrol would be passing, so they planned to attack it, kill five of them and let one go. The survivor would then rush straight to the nearest garrison and call out the cavalry, who'd zoom off up the road, straight into the ambush. To welcome them, the bad guys had undermined the road and set up rolling-log blocks to bottle them up in a cutting, where they could be quickly and efficiently slaughtered with minimum risk of any of them getting away. Smart, yes?
The only consolation I can see is that they're not completely infallible. They ballsed it up, slightly. They somehow missed the six-man patrol at the point where they'd planned to intercept it, which meant it blundered happily on until it ran straight into the main body of the raiding party, busily digging trenches under the road. Apart from that, it all went like clockwork. They killed five, let one go (turns out all that impressive blood was because he'd ridden so fast through the forest, he scrunched himself on a low branch and landed in a briar-patch). Instead of the garrison at Gelos, however, the survivor runs into me and my fifty dragoons, who shouldn't have been there at all. That, of course, cocks everything up further. The bad guys are expecting six hundred cavalry; instead they get fifty dragoons. They see them coming and are quite properly bewildered; this isn't how it was supposed to work out. So, instead of waiting patiently at the ambush site, they rush up the road to meet them, slaughter them, and then, presumably, panic. What if they're the ones who've just been lured into a trap? Because (I'm sure they argued) nobody in their right mind would send a piddling little detachment of fifty men in pursuit of a force of unknown size in that sort of terrain; therefore, something fishy must be going on, therefore it'd be sensible to cut their losses and get the hell out of there.
Which they were in the process of doing when the Gelos cavalry bumped into them. A stroke of luck, or what? As far as I can make out, our men ran slap into the undermined road and came horribly unstuck, as planned, but there weren't any bad guys on hand to complete the operation and slaughter them like sheep; they'd already buggered off, and were never seen again. Outcome; instead of six hundred dead, we lost one man killed (broken neck), seven badly injured, about twenty horses. Could've been far worse; but the fact remains, they did us good and proper. Correction; they did me. I was the idiot who turned our stroke of good luck---the original patrol getting sight of the undermining---into a narrowly and fortuitously avoided disaster.
Far be it from me to question the wisdom of your Imperial Majesty's proposed appointment, but do you honestly believe, after reading this, that I'm fit to command a sheep-dip, let alone the combined armed forces of the Empire?
I've written it all up in proper military language in despatches, copied herewith. I would also be enclosing herewith my formal resignation from the governorship, only my original supply of purple ink's been stolen and the stuff you sent me has dried up into a solid block, which has proved unbreakable even to strong men with sledgehammers. Please can I come home now, before I get any more of our people needlessly killed? Please?
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty advises Phormio to expect the arrival of reinforcements, namely two (2) divisions of dragoons and one (1) division of auxiliary cavalry.
Don't you fucking dare. Things are not going well for me here. The bureaucrats and the old money are dancing rings round us, because we don't know our way about in their precious systems, and I've been having to field questions in Senate about frontier security. Surely by now it's apparent to his Majesty that the situation requires the firm hand of a seasoned professional soldier. If you quit on me, they'll make me assign some steelneck from the Phocas or the Bringas, and you know what he'll do the moment he takes command? That's right. He'll march on the City and I'll be dead. You bloody well stay where you are, or we're all done for.
Sorry. Didn't mean to fly off the handle. I sympathise, I really do. But it's pretty desperate right now, and basically I'm hanging on by my fingernails. Yours is the only active military zone; therefore, the only place where they can legitimately post a fighting general. So; what I need most of all is you, my best friend, who I know I can unreservedly trust, to stay put, make it look like you're doing something, and hold things together until I can deal with Antilochus and the First Families and their huge entourage of subsidiary arseholes. All right?
Please?
Look, the troops I'm sending you are pretty damn good. They're my father's veterans; for some reason best known to themselves, they seem to like me, or at least they like me better than Eugenius Bringas. Also, they're hard as nails, the officers aren't just somebody's nephews, and so long as you let them know you're open to suggestions, if you're about to do something bloody stupid, they'll tell you. Also, the auxiliaries are Aram no Vei---a bunch of murdering savages, yes, but our murdering savages. Just pay them on time, and they'll kill anything that moves on this earth.
Talking of which; how are you off for money? It's a bit tight right now---the Treasury's playing silly buggers about collecting the property tax, to starve me of funds---but I've got Dad's reserve and uncle Zeno's reserve and a few other bits and pieces they don't know anything about. Sometimes it's good that all my family were basically a bunch of thieves and pirates. As the last man standing, I inherited their stashes.
Sorry about the ink. I can't prove it, but I'm convinced they put plaster in it, to stop me writing to anybody. Bastards. Anyway, the one (1) pound enclosed herewith is my unofficial homebrew, knocked up by my pal the forger. He's a treasure, that man. He's going to teach me how to lift seals next.
While I think of it, a few messages from the rest of the gang. Menestheus says to stop whining; you should try doing his job. Aristaeus asked me to remind you about that time in second year when we stole the Dean's post-chaise, dismantled it and put it back together again on the roof of the Old Library. He reckons that if we could do that and get away with it, running the Empire should be a piece of piss. Strato is looking about for a copy of The Bedchamber Dialogues for you (the seventh edition, with the full-page pictures) so at least you'll have something to read.
Having them here---and you there, of course---is the only thing that's keeping me going. I really do miss Gorgias, though. He'd know what to do.
I remember you saying to me once, when we were carrying that wardrobe up the back stairs at Chairmakers' Street; it's bloody hard work being your friend, Nico. Well, you were right about that. I hope I've never pretended otherwise. All I can say is, thanks; for the past, and for now.
You will stay, won't you?
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that the reinforcements have arrived and are being deployed in accordance with standing orders pending new developments.
Tell you what, this moonshine purple ink of yours is a major improvement on the official rubbish. Whatever you're paying your pet crook, double it.
Tell Strato thanks ever so much for the book. Tell him I especially appreciate it because it's evidently his own personal copy. At least I assume it is. That would account for the curious stains.
All right, I'll stay. Actually, things are looking up, ever since you sent me those lunatics. I've always been scared stiff of soldiers, but these guys are real headcases. I mean that in a nice way, of course, and so far they've been behaving themselves, more or less. The main thing is to keep them away from garlic. It does funny things to them.
Seriously; what I've got in mind is a string of rapid-response units, three hundred dragoons and a hundred Aram no Vei, right across the frontier, with the provincial regulars to stop up the gaps. Meanwhile, I've been spending your money like you wouldn't believe. Contrary to what it says in the briefings, it is possible to suborn the frontier elders into actions they consider dishonourable, just so long as you suborn them a lot. As a result, I think I may be able to find out a bit more about what's going on. The frontier villages must know something; the bad guys can't just flit backwards and forwards across the line without anybody seeing anything. You can break the news to Menestheus; tell him that my quarterly accounts will be a masterpiece of fiction unsurpassed since the golden age of Vesani literature. While we're on the subject; can you let me have HS 300,000 from your dad's rainy-day fund? Well, you did offer.
\*
Nicephorus to Phormio; greetings
Thanks
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has engaged the enemy and won a minor victory. Despatches herewith.
I don't know why people make such a fuss about this soldiering thing. It's a piece of piss.
No, really. It's all in the book. If you happen to have your copy handy, turn to volume II, chapter 16, paragraphs 36b to 42e, and that's more or less what happened.
Yes, but I'm not going to leave it there, because I want to boast about it. I was actually there, you see. I watched the whole thing.
I'd been brooding quite bit on how the bad guys had suckered me so easily, and then it struck me. Quinctillus, I thought (to be precise, On War, ch.7, 98f-101d). Always attack your enemy at his strongest point. You remember how dumb we always thought that was; but it's not.
Their biggest strength, I reasoned, is my weakness. Namely, my not having a clue; that's their greatest asset. So, all right, I thought. Use that. Because they made a monkey out of me so easily last time, they'll happily believe I'm capable of making further and yet more catastrophic bog-ups. Only this time, I'll make one on purpose, and be ready for them.
It took a bit of setting up, of course. The bait had to be money, the pay convoy. It's become fairly obvious that they've got sources of information here in the governor's office. They always seem to know what I'm going to do, usually before I do it. So, use that too.
So; I told my senior clerks that I'd asked you to send me the HS 300,000. I left it at that; let the information trickle down to the spies, it's more natural. The next step was the clever bit.
You remember Clearchus? Tall, thin, miserable kid in the year above us. Always being ragged about his dad being in trade. Well, I happened to remember that among other things, his dad supplied ironmongery to the military; nails, bolts, hinges. So I wrote to Clearchus, nice chatty letter, asking him what his best possible price was for forty barrels of sixteen-gauge hot drawn wire might be, COD Tremissis City. He wrote back, typical snotty attitude; he wasn't anything to do with the family business, he was a successful and highly sought-after lawyer specialising in religious law (I knew that already), but he'd passed on my letter to his father, who'd be in touch. Dad wrote back---much more friendly---quoting a price. We haggled; in fact, I got one hell of a deal, I surprised myself; who'd have thought I'd be good at trade? Anyhow, we agreed terms and I confirmed the order and sent him a money warrant, and we fixed up a delivery date.
Which was, of course, the whole object of the exercise. You see, I told Clearchus' dad a whole load of lies about the main roads being liable to get blocked by snow this time of year, and the subsidiary roads being iffy on account of bandits; basically, I gave him a delivery route that'd take his carts within spitting distance of the frontier, very close to where I'd had very promising reports of enemy activity (your bribe money at work). Then I told my clerks, as casually as anything, that I'd arranged a convoy of military supplies, coming in on such and such a date via the Leuca Pass.
Now, because I never do anything like that, sully my hands with the irksome business of day-to-day materiel procurement, that put the spies on notice that I was up to something. Forty barrels of something heavy, loaded on eight carts; hardly catapult science to figure out what that something heavy was likely to be, given that I was known to be expecting a huge sum of money from central government.
This is where your dad's lunatic dragoons were so important. I had to take the chance that the bad guys' infiltration network hasn't been able to get to them yet. To be on the safe side, I waited till we had a routine staff meeting, at the end of which I told the dragoon colonel to stay behind, because I wanted to discuss some disciplinary issues (plausible enough, right?). Instead, I told him exactly what I'd got planned. He was to be on hand with a whole division, plus half the Aram no Vei. I left it up to him to figure out how he'd manage that without letting the cat out of the bag. As it turned out, he had no trouble; simply didn't tell them about it until an hour before departure time; told them to get three days' rations and saddle up; didn't tell them where they were going until they were practically there. Apparently, dragoons will stand for that kind of shit.
I wasn't going to go along, but in the end I couldn't resist. It was sheer impulse. I saw the dragoons forming up in the barracks square, I grabbed my hat, the Art of War And a pair of boots and ran out after them. They were very kind; lent me a horse (horrible creature; foul temper, mad as a tanner; when I kicked up a fuss about it later, they said they'd chosen it for me because it was white, and a commander-in-chief should always ride a white stallion. Bastards) and off I went.
This is supposed to be a happy story, so we'll pass over the torments and miseries of getting there. Suffice it to say, I've been paying well over the odds for really good quality goose-down cushions lately. Anyhow, we got there, very fast indeed. I left the map-reading to the colonel and his people, so we didn't get lost. Actually, I tried to leave everything to them, but they weren't having that. Protocol. If the commander-in-chiefs present, he's got to command; junior officers can only advise. So, the first thing I said when we stopped and got off our horses was, "Advise me." Which, your second cousin be praised, they did.
The biggest laugh I got out of the whole business was when Colonel Bessas (good man, that; keep an eye on him) opened his saddlebag and took out, guess what, a very old and battered copy of The Art of War. Never left his tent without it, he told me. Snap, I said, and showed him mine. Better still, he's only got the seventh edition. There were so many bookmarks in it, it's practically twice the size it should be. Anyway, we looked it up and there it was, diagrams and clear instructions, so that was what we did.
And it worked, Bugger me, Nico, it worked. It's just like chess, only a bit more straightforward, and you have to send runners and despatch riders to make the moves. Other than that; you sit there on your horse, Nico, assuming you can persuade the loathsome thing to keep still, and you look down from a high place, like you're a god or something (I'm sure you know the feeling), and you try and find what you're looking at on the map. The little-kid's-doodle trees on the parchment sort of blend into the real but tiny trees you can see in the distance. In your mind's eye you flatten the hills down into the contour-lines; you learn the trick of ignoring one dimension. You find the river; and guess what, it's exactly where it's supposed to be. It's roughly the same relationship as between fresh and dried figs; the same, but flat and neat and all the juice drained out. A map is a whole desiccated world, once you've learned to sec it in those terms.
It's also a bit like the theatre; the theatre as seen from a very high place, like the cheapskates who climb the trees in Victory Avenue so they can watch the play without paying. Of course, they're too far away to hear a word the actors arc saying. A general's a bit like that. He's a cheapskate too (unless he's a steelneck fighting general, in the thick of it with his men; not me) He won't pay the ticket money, namely the risk of getting stabbed or hacked or trampled to death, so he has to perch in his tree, and he never hears the words. He has to follow the whole thing in dumb-show. But the cheapskates in the trees get to sec far more. They can see backstage as well as what goes on in front of the curtain. So; I saw the carts trundling along the road, way off to the left, not a care in the world (naturally, the drivers weren't in on the secret; security); simultaneously, I could see the bad guys, just little insect shapes moving about just inside the tree-line. And, because I knew exactly where to look, I could see our boys, keeping absolutely still, like chess-pieces, or those bizarre porcelain armies your illustrious ancestors used to be buried with, to guard them in the next world. There was a moment when they were all moving at the same time---carts going trundle up the road, bad guys sneaking through the woods, good guys creeping down the hillside; none of them could actually see any of the others, but I could see them all; they were all there because of me, because I'd brought them all there to come together in one small place at one specific time, to achieve the result I wanted. It's the weirdest feeling, Nico. In one sense, you're the Angel of Death. People are going to die because of you, and isn't that the most appalling thing imaginable? On the other hand, it's all perfectly all right, because the bad guys are the enemy, it's like killing rats, not homicide but pesticide; and some of the good guys will have to get killed too, because that's the price we pay. Well, not you and me personally. Just soldiers. It's what they're paid for.
Way off on a mountain, of course, you don't get to see the detail. You don't buy a ticket, you aren't entitled to see blood, and smashed bones, and hands and feet cut off, and dying men ignored because they're no longer relevant. In a way, I almost admire the fighting generals; except I have a nasty feeling they enjoy it.
Be that as it may. It worked just fine. The bad guys never knew what hit them. A double volley of arrows from the Aram no Vei, followed by a full-on heavy cavalry charge. Best estimates say there were about a hundred and fifty of them (which suggests that robbing the pay convoy was only part of their mission; some village somewhere got lucky), of whom we killed a hundred and nine. I'd told the colonel that taking live prisoners was top priority, followed by securing dead bodies. That didn't work out. They don't surrender. Those who were too badly hurt to run had their throats cut by their friends. According to our men, quite a few of them got killed because they stayed behind to finish off the wounded when they could easily have made their escape. I can't understand how anybody could do that.
The whole performance lasted a matter of minutes. If I'd gone off into the bushes for a shit just before the carts first came into view, I'd have missed nearly all of it. It's hard to believe so much can happen, so much really drastic stuff, in so short a space of time, in such a small area. Four hundred yards away to the east, while the fighting was fiercest, I saw two deer amiably grazing; not a clue there was anything untoward going on just over the ridge.
Anyhow. We now have a hundred and nine dead bodies. (Our losses; six, of whom two were Aram no Vei. Oh, and the cart crews, unfortunately) I had them unload the carts and load up the corpses, exactly as they were, and we lugged them back here for a closer look.
You remember the story about the philosopher; the more I think about it, the harder it gets? Well, quite. The more data we get on the bad guys, the less we know about them. Their kit, for example. Seventy-four of the corpses had the same pattern of basic, entry-level scale-mail jerkins and half-onion pot helmets. I'm no expert (I'm sending examples to you so your people can make a proper analysis) but I believe that stuffs made in Rhangabe, the big mass-production factories, for sale on the open market. It may be possible to trace the actual batch numbers from the ordnance marks, in which case you may be able to find out who the actual buyers were. The rest of them had standard government issue, just like our men except the crests, unit and rank badges had been cut off---isn't that standard practice for decommissioned stuff sold as surplus? Again, your experts may be able to find something useful. It's the best lead we've got.
As for the men themselves; well, they aren't foreigners. Not overseas foreigners, anyhow. I haven't been to look at them myself, but I'm told they could be anybody; locals, Northerners from over the border, or recruited anywhere in the Empire north of Uncia. I'm getting the village headmen down to look at the bodies to see if they recognise any faces. Nobody here knows any of them.
Well, that's about it. I sent the carts back for the wire, by the way. I'll need it for the wall I'm building; right the way across the Seclera valley, just in case that's where they've been coming in and out. Ten-foot high earth bank with matching ditch, topped off with pallisades and post-and-wire fences, to slow up a direct assault. The idea is, forward observation patrols see the bad guys coming and send word to the nearest rapid response unit, who zoom up and man the wall before the bad guys reach it. It'll never work, of course. The real idea is to discourage the bad guys and make them choose another entry/exit point; and we'll see them doing it and be ready.
Like I said; this soldiering is the proverbial slice of pudding. It's better than work any day.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty congratulates Phormio on his success. Preliminary results of the examination of the armour and other effects recovered from the dead insurgents herewith. The plan to construct a barrier approved and applauded.
Years ago, before I even met you and the rest of the gang, I saw a man killed. He was one of the builders working on the roof at our old house, and the scaffolding platform he was standing on gave way. I was watching out of my window at the time, and I vividly remember seeing it happen. One moment there was this little man, standing on a platform, doing something with nails and a hammer. Then the platform shifted and broke away from the wall; and I laughed, because it looked just like one of those slapstick routines in the circus. The man was so surprised; he did an enormous double-take, just like the clowns do, and grabbed wildly and caught hold of one of the brackets holding up the guttering. Well, of course he did, I thought. That's what happens. That's what's so funny. I was absolutely sure he'd clamber up the bracket, pulling a big funny face, and then he'd haul himself up onto the roof, do the big oversize dusting-himself-down gesture, and then move on to the next part of the routine. But he didn't. He struggled and struggled to get his leg over the bracket, but then his fingers just let go, and he fell; and he wriggled in the air, like a fly caught in a web, and then he hit the ground, and he bounced just a little bit, and ended up sprawling all over the place. I didn't understand. I stood there thinking, no, that's not right, he was supposed to climb back up again (and then the plank he was on would shift and throw him, or a hoist full of bricks would swing round and hit him on the head, or something equally diverting). It was wrong, like the sun starting to come up and then changing its mind and setting again, in the east. I don't suppose I'll ever forget that. It was the moment when I decided that death was a really had, wrong thing, about as bad as it could get.
Recently, I had to sign a death warrant; my first. They put it on my desk along with a load of other stuff---minor charters, land grants, proceedings of the House for my approval, and this other bit of paper, that said a man had to be killed. I sat there staring at it, with my pen dribbling ink up my sleeve. A clerk asked me if anything was wrong and I just turned and looked at him, and he backed away and left me to it.
Of course, the man in question had to be executed. He was a nasty piece of work---murder, rape, armed robbery---but he was a nobleman's son, so it needed my signature. I simply couldn't do it. My arm wouldn't move. I thought, scribbling my name on this bit of paper will kill someone; well, don't do it, then, that's obvious enough. But it had to be done, and eventually I did it. Believe it or not, I closed my eyes as I signed. I went around the rest of the day in a daze; people had to repeat everything they said to me, and I couldn't grasp the simplest thing I was told.
So what? It's like the old argument about eating meat; if all the city people had to kill and skin their own food, everybody'd be a vegetarian. But that's not true. A few weeks of living on nothing but greens, and they'd find it in themselves to get the job done. They'd do what I did; they'd make an effort of will and do it. I felt afterwards like I'd cut out a part of myself, or blinded a third eye. I felt smaller, less smart, reduced. But the next time, I won't make such a meal out of it. Probably I'll shudder and feel bad, but I'll just sign the bloody thing and have done with it. That's what we do, and it's amazing what you can accustom yourself to. Like the very first time you taste wine or beer, and it's revolting, and you think, people drink this stuff for fun?
I've made damned sure everybody everywhere's heard about your success. I even considered raising a statue or having a special issue of coins minted, but I suppose that'd be premature. But a least it's shut the mouths of the Bringas in the House, and I'm sleeping a great deal easier. It goes without saying, I'm so grateful. I knew I could rely on you.
Neatly done, too; the stuff with the wire was pure Charisticus; exactly what Xanthus the Fox would've done (is that where you got the idea from? Go on, you can tell me.) And to think you were talking about packing it in and coming home. You idiot.
Now, to business. We've learned a lot from that armour and stuff, though I can't see that it gets us anywhere, at least not yet. You were right about the commercial stuff. It was made in Rhangabe, at the Strength & Honour factory, the second biggest armoury in the city. They're a perfectly legitimate concern; in fact, I'm their biggest customer. They make basic equipment which we ship to the buffer states in the East as military aid. Once it gets there, of course, anything can happen; the local chieftains give it away as presents to their retainers, or the grand vizier intercepts it, tells his boss the ship sank, and then sells the stuff through intermediaries, or it's used to fit out mercenary companies, who neglect to give it back or keep it against arrears of pay. That's before it gets used, of course. Most of the armour in the trade is, of course, battlefield pickups. I didn't know this, but one of the biggest companies quoted on the Exchange is the Philargyrus Brothers; they employ fifteen thousand free men and eight thousand slaves, as at close of business yesterday their ordinary shares stood at HS 70, and their main business is going round battlefields stripping the dead. Where they can't get their own people in, they buy the stuff from local freelances---usually grim old women and orphan kids; it's one of the few ways you can make a living if you haven't got land in the North-East and the South. The Philargyrus company's the biggest dealer, but there's a dozen other major players, plus a whole crowd of small independents. A lot of the stuff they pick up just goes for scrap, but anything that's serviceable or can be cost-effectively repaired goes straight back on the open market. The Philargyrus aren't too bad, actually; in return for the plunder concession (which they negotiate with both sides in advance) they undertake to look after the wounded and bury the dead, and they do a pretty good job. The local freelances are much more likely to cut the throats of anybody they find still alive, just because it's easier to strip a body if it's not wriggling about.
Anyhow; we've been in touch with the Strength & Honour people, and they tell us that the stuff you recovered wasn't just one big order. They mark their work with batch numbers and ordnance marks, and your stuff came from at least a dozen different batches, ranging in date from two years ago to twenty. There were fifteen helmets from the same batch, so they looked up their records; apparently, those helmets were part of a consignment that went, through the War Department, to the Principality of Chosroene; which, before you ask, is a mountain with three goats on it the other side of Tazrat, and what Uncle Zeno thought he was playing at, giving those clowns military aid, I can't begin to imagine. Anyway, the stuff's forty years old, and there's no way of tracing how it got from Chosroene to Tremissis in the meantime. Sorry.
Slightly better luck with the Imperial issue stuff. It was all made at the state ordnance factory at Chloe, just down the road, in fact, seventeen years ago, and issued to the 276,h Regiment five years later. As you will doubtless remember, the 276,h sided with my Uncle Vatatzes in the late unpleasantness, and got wiped out by my unspeakable brother on the Field of Magpies. Looking at the stuff itself, in particular the mailshirts, I believe they were battlefield retrievals. The Philargyrus had the contract for that battle, and they're checking their records now to sec how long they had the proceeds from that battle in inventory, and what became of it.
The bottom line is; it looks like your bad guys bought all their gear through the trade. That tells us something, at least; it implies they've got money, because it's been a seller's market for decades and good stuff is expensive, and they can't just be bandits and hooligans if they're placed so they can conduct large-scale arms deals with reputable firms, even indirectly. I've asked Menestheus to get his Treasury snoops to look around and see if they can follow the money trail, but I'm not holding my breath. The weapons business isn't like crockery or carpets or bulk grain; I think the people who take part in it must actually enjoy being furtive and cloak-and-dagger, because everything's done through agents and shell companies using bills drawn on banks in Perimadeia and private letters of credit and all that sort of crap. We'll see.
I was reading Stesimachus last night, and I opened a page at random and there was Gorgias' handwriting in the margin. He'd written some smart-arse comments, and drawn one of his trademark cows. I suppose I must've lent him the book at some point; I can't remember. Anyway, I just sat there, staring at it for I don't know how long, until my valet came in and asked me why I'd been crying. I felt so stupid. But hardly a day goes by when I don't think about him. I've told the War Records people to go back through the lists, just to check his name isn't on them. If we knew for certain he was killed, at least that'd be better than knowing nothing at all.
I like your idea of building a barrier. It's so military.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that he has succeeded in capturing a number of insurgents, and is interrogating them.
Well, it had to happen. Eventually, I had to get lucky.
Which is precisely what Antimachus Voutzes did. You won't know the name. He's about nineteen years old, his father's a purveyor of high-class sausages here in Tremissis City (he does particularly good black pudding, if that's not a contradiction in terms). He went to school, decided he wanted to be a scholar, tried to get in to the Order but they wouldn't have him because his clothes smelt of blood; got mightily pissed off at the Order, what he calls the Establishment and the world in general, and wandered off into the mountains looking for trouble. Which he found, in the shape of the insurgency. They took him on---pity, maybe, or desperation, or more likely because he can read and write and do sums--- and made him a supply officer. So far, so good, but after a while he decided that counting jars of salt herring and getting yelled at because the officer's mess had run out of vinegar wasn't his idea of overthrowing a corrupt and decadent society, and so he demanded a transfer to active service. I guess someone must've taken pity on him, or else wanted rid of a nuisance. They assigned him to a forward unit just the other side of the frontier (yes, I'll get on with the proper military stuff in a minute; just let me do the human interest first), where he spent six weeks shivering his nuts off in a threadbare tent out on the mountainside, and occasionally sneaking down into Limes to steal food.
Which is how he got lucky, as previously advised. He met this girl. Apparently he was burgling her house, and their eyes met, and the rest you can extrapolate. Anyhow, he told her he was a desperate freedom fighter, which naturally she thought was just too romantic for words, and for a while she was feeding him and giving him cast-off clothes, not to mention aid, comfort and spiritual guidance, until her parents noticed that the larder was emptier that it should have been and Dad's best overcoat had gone missing; to cut it short, they found out what their daughter was up to, got really, really frightened and ratted on her to the guard. Naturally, we scooped him up without further delay, and suddenly we've got a genuine, hundred-percent captive insurgent. Ain't love grand.
I looked up interrogation in the book, and it said that many prisoners break down when merely shown the instruments of torture. Fine, I thought; the only drawback being, we have no instruments of torture. So I had young Voutzes taken round to the millhouse and shown the back end of the countershaft mechanism, and we told him that was the instruments of torture; and of course he didn't know any better, and to anybody with even the shreds of an imagination all those cogs and wheels and ratchets look absolutely shit-yourself terrifying; and he burst into tears and said he'd tell us everything.
That's about the high point of the story, since everything in his case turned out to be not much. Translated from the pathetic, it goes like this. It was pure fluke he bumped into the insurgents, who happened to be on their way back from a reconnaissance mission. He couldn't tell us anything useful about where the main camp is; he simply has no sense of direction, and they blindfolded him on the way up there, and when they brought him back down to the frontier. He said it was a long ride in the back of a cart---somewhere between four and six hours, he thinks, but he's got no sense of time. And that's it. I scared him as much as I could. I even dragged him up into the Barracks bell tower and showed him the insides of the clock. That was when he started making stuff" up, hoping to please me.
We had rather more luck with the forward post, where he'd been living. He was shamefully eager to take us up there and betray his comrades; we got seventeen of them. They're made of rather better material than Voutzes. I tried the same trick on one of them; I took him up the mill and showed him the bit where the big reciprocating arm goes backwards and forwards, and I said, "Well, are you scared?" And he gave me a look and said, "Not really, but the camshaft bearings need oiling." He used to work there. Great. Actually, it's fairly clear they don't know a great deal more than my boy Voutzes. Whoever the bad guys are, they're good at this.
So now we know a little bit more. They aren't foreigners. All the men Voutzes met were from this area. True, some of them came from villages a few miles the other side of the border, but that doesn't mean a great deal. It's never been a closed frontier as such, and people tend to come and go quite freely. Prices are generally lower on our side, so we've never had a smuggling problem (there's a certain amount of it going the other way, of course, but that's none of our business). Most of the prisoners I spoke to got involved because they had nothing better to do; men who'd lost their land, by foreclosure or in lawsuits or just because they were no good; artisans and apprentices who'd been sacked for laziness or stealing; tradesmen and shopkeepers who'd gone bust. Not the most likely material, you'll agree, from which to forge a successful guerilla army. Think about what they've been able to do. They move very fast, very efficiently, they fight extremely well and they've got this honour code thing that means they don't surrender and they don't leave their wounded or their dead. We only got the ones we caught because we took them by surprise when they were asleep---couldn't run for it or get to their weapons in time.
This suggests, doesn't it, that they've been very well trained by someone who's very good indeed at training soldiers. Consider also the infrastructure and administration that Voutzes told us about; a well organised supply system, a properly structured chain of command, the right support services to back up the front-line units. Everything, in fact, done right and by the book.
And not just any book, if you ask me. I think whoever's running the insurgency is reading the same book I am; which suggests we're dealing with Imperial career military. One of ours.
You can see where I'm leading. There can't be that many Imperial soldiers with the necessary skills and experience who aren't accounted for. I would guess we're looking for a colonel at least, possibly a brigadier-general, with a pretty solid career behind him, including training experience and combat. How many men can there be who fit that description?
I watched two old men fighting a duel yesterday. I should've stopped it, of course, but I was fascinated. They were both well into their seventies; one was tall and bald and skinny, with a stoop, and the other one was short and fat, with a limp. I have no idea what it was all about, but they were going about it very formally---seconds, a doctor, a roped-off ring in a meadow at dawn. It was sheer luck I happened to be passing (I was on my way to do a surprise inspection at the Stymon garrison). They fought with swords and bucklers, and my guess is that thirty years ago they were both accomplished fencers; they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't quite do it. Even so, they kept going for about five minutes, until they were both ash-white and stumbling about with exhaustion. Then the skinny one tripped and fell badly, and the short one tried to stab him on the ground but missed and overbalanced and went sprawling. Neither of them could get to their feet, so they sat up and shuffled towards each other on their bottoms, and started hacking at each other like that. Then the skinny man managed to connect with the fat man's kneecap---I don't suppose that's what he was trying to hit; in fact, it looked like an accident to me, and it only goes to show what happens if you play with sharp objects. To make matters worse, I think it was the fat man's bad knee. Anyway, he dropped his sword and started howling and hugging his leg and rocking backwards and forwards---he'd forgotten all about the duel and the other man, who just sat there looking bewildered. Then the seconds helped them both up, and the doctor got busy, and I came on.
Why do people insist on trying to hurt each other, Nico? Beats me.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty acknowledges Phormio's report and encloses detailed information relating to the current investigation.
We're amateurs, Phormio, obviously. I was never meant to be the Emperor. It was made abundantly clear to me when I was ten years old; Nico, you're never going to be the Emperor, you're never going to be anything. Find something to do with your life and stay out of trouble Which came as a great relief, let me tell you. Even when I was ten, I could read. I read how, in the past hundred years, there had been seventy-seven emperors, five of whom died of natural causes (and one of them was apoplexy brought on by news that his brother was rebelling against him). Seventy-two emperors murdered by their families, their soldiers, their friends, their household servants, or torn apart by the mob, or overthrown by armed revolts and executed, usually in a very nasty way. Who the hell would want to get involved in that business, I thought.
So I went to Anassus (they waived the entrance exam, for some reason) and there I met you and the others, and we read books and talked (sober, some of the time). I tried to put who I was completely out of my mind. I was just tall, skinny Nico with the stammer and the long, pointy nose, and by and large people were pleased to see me. It helped that I was in with Menestheus and Gorgias, the coolest of the cool. But they accepted me because I was, on balance, an asset to the community rather than a liability, because of what was in my head and what came out of my mouth (and because, unlike the rest of you, I still had the price of a round of drinks at mid-term? Well, maybe. That's something I'll never know).
So; I'm an amateur, and so are we all. That said, we aren't doing all that badly. In fact (bearing in mind that we're a bunch of political, economic and military virgins who couldn't wipe our arses in the dark) we're doing pretty well.
Take land reform. Second reading of Aristaeus' Community Freeholds Bill in the House yesterday; and we got it through without me having to intervene. Law reform; three days ago, Strato pulled off an astounding dawn raid, and we impeached the twenty most corrupt and bigoted judges on the circuit; they never knew what hit them, they went so quietly I could hardly believe it---and, more to the point, we did it within the rules, instead of me sending soldiers round at three o'clock in the morning. Menestheus has actually made sense of the Treasury accounts, so for the first time in nearly forty years we know how much money there really is, how much we owe and how much is coming in. He's cancelled sixty-six illegal or oppressive taxes, while at the same time he's cut out so much graft and corruption and inefficiency and waste that we can cover expenses and maybe even start paying back some of the debt. Not bad for a bunch of unworldly, ivory-tower academics.
None of which would be worth a damn if we couldn't keep the bastard steelnecks off our backs. You remember the dog at Leuco's; how it used to sit there while you were eating, watching your every move, waiting for the slightest chance to jump up and snatch the bread off your plate or the meat out of your sandwich? That's what the generals have been like, ever since I got the job. Dreadfully bad luck on them, of course, that for the first time in a decade, the Empire's at peace with its neighbours. The only crack they could possibly get a knife into is Tremissis; and boy, haven't they been trying their best. But---thanks to you---I've been able to smile sweetly at them, thank them for their offers of assistance but assure them that my governor and I have the matter entirely under control and expect a satisfactory resolution in due course. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it. They pace up and down like caged jackals; and meanwhile, I'm quietly stripping away their funding and their support mechanisms. If we can only hold things together up there, I'm hoping I can get rid of the whole pack of them, and then the Empire will be safe from the greatest threat of all.
No pressure, Phormio. But---I'm telling you the truth---what you're doing is the single most important thing in the whole business. Without you, the steelnecks would have my head on a spike, and it'd be civil war, business as usual. Just thought I'd mention that.
Now, here's something really strange. You asked me to go through the military and find out which officers answering the profile can't be accounted for. Well, the answer is, none. We've checked up on everybody who fits that description under the age of eighty, and none of them can be our man. So we've started again and we're checking out their sons and grandsons, their adjutants, Academy lecturers, foreign asylum seekers with military experience; I know, it doesn't make sense. You think someone, no military experience or background but extremely bright, could pick up the Book and learn it well enough to put it all into practice?
Rather more luck with the money. It's a bit like the story about the invisible man; you couldn't see him, you could only see his shadow. Menestheus' people are trying to trace the money by the wake it leaves behind as it passes, if that makes any sense (if it does, please explain it to me). For example; the Philargyrus Brothers are very scrupulous about paying their taxes. When they make a big payment, it's a sign they've done a big deal. Likewise, if a bank cuts its lending rate, it can mean they've just had an unusually large deposit. Stuff like that. It makes my head hurt, but Menestheus appears to understand it, so I don't have to. He reckons that large sums have been moving about since roughly a year before the insurgency started---a bit nebulous about the early stages, because of the chaos during the last stages of the War---and there's no indication of where it came from to begin with; it just appeared out of nowhere, and that simply doesn't happen, apparently. Unfortunately, at various stages this mysterious fortune vanishes completely. Menestheus reckons it leaves the jurisdiction; gets shoved into Perimadeia for a while to cool off, throw the likes of us off the scent. Still, as the Treasury boys keep telling me, it only needs them to make one mistake and we'll have them. Indeed. My breath, however, remains resolutely unheld.
Full reports enclosed. In with them, somewhere near the bottom of the third tin, if memory serves, there's a copy of the new and utterly definitive edition of Form & Substance---yes, it would appear that Doc Stesichorus (he must be nearly ninety by now) has finally finished revising and mucking about with it and handed it over to the copyists. Amazing. I can only assume it's because we're not there any more to get under his feet and bother him with idiot questions. If that's not an omen of the end of the world, I don't know what is.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that the insurgents have breached the defensive barrier, burnt Theano and demolished the bridge at Zapontus.
From Stesichorus, Form & Substance, book IV, chapter 7, paragraphs 7a to 9d (the new edition);
"If therefore we postulate an abstract, objective measure of freedom, of justice, of good and bad government, of right and wrong, what then? What means are we justified in using to attain our ends, to bring about the desirable outcome? Is it acceptable to wage war in order to bring peace; to murder a bad king in order to replace him with a good one; to oppress in order to liberate; to damn ourselves in the cause of our redemption? Can an objectively bad act be subjectively good; and if so, can there be any objectivity in morality? But if we withdraw our hand and, fearing to transgress, abstain from action and thereby suffer the wrong to be perpetuated, is that not also a misdeed---worse, arguably, since compounded with the sins of prevarication and cowardice?"
Just thought I'd share that. Forty-six years in the writing, and what does he give us? An answer? No, a rhetorical bloody question. Thanks, Doctor.
I was reading Stesichorus when they told me about the raid. You know that wretched feeling you get when the worst thing that could possibly happen happens? You simply can't help taking it personally, even if it quite obviously isn't. So; I don't really believe that the bad guys went to all that trouble and effort just to spoil what, up till then, had been a really quite pleasant day; but it felt like it. It felt spiteful and petty and mean, and I wanted to hit someone, and there wasn't anybody to hit.
They must've approached the barrier the long way, right round the top of the woods, because our scouts didn't see or hear a thing. What was so clever, they broke into the trench right at the extreme western end, where we'd only just finished propping and boarding in. I imagine they must have started just after dark, because it would've taken them at least six hours to work their way along, slowly and carefully sawing through the load-bearing props---not all the way through, of course, they left just enough to keep them from caving in; roughly half-way, they piled up a great big heap of the dry brushwood bundles we were using to reinforce the parapet; then they carried on sawing through the rest of the props. When they set the brushwood heap on fire, it burned through the main beams of the lower gallery, which made it collapse at that one point, which put a strain on the adjoining chambers, which was enough to snap off the nearly-sawn-through props, which made the whole bloody trench collapse in on itself in less than a minute. It really is a shame none of our people saw it, because it must've been the most amazing sight. All the dirt we'd spent all that time, effort and money digging out and piling up into a bank, just quietly sliding back down where it came from. It was so quiet, it didn't wake up the workers in their camp, a hundred yards away. I went and had a look for myself, and honestly, I had trouble seeing where the ditch had been, it was filled in so neatly.
You've got to admire people who can do something like that.
Well, so much for finesse. Wasn't much of that in evidence when they broke into the camp. There were three hundred and sixty men asleep in there; we found a hundred and sixty-eight bodies. A few survivors trickled back out of the woods when we showed up, but the rest just kept going, and I can't say I blame them. It's bloody obvious we can't protect them, so they'd have to be mad to go back to work, even if we decide to rebuild the trench.
By this time, it was about an hour before dawn. They must've walked pretty fast to get to Theano by first light. I gather the scouts saw them coming and raised the alarm, but by the time the garrison was awake and ready to do anything useful, the bad guys were already inside the gates and setting fire to anything with thatch on it. The garrison commander, Major Lonaras, very sensibly decided to leave them to it and get his men, and as many civilians as he could, out of the southern gate before the fire reached it and trapped them all inside the town. It was a good decision; it's just a pity that the bad guys had anticipated it, and were waiting just outside the gate. Lonaras and those of his men who were still obeying orders at that point managed to get between them and the civilians long enough for them to get away. It was a brave thing to do, but in the event he needn't have bothered; the bad guys headed straight for the Zapontus bridge and cut them off there. All told, out of two thousand civilians and nearly a hundred soldiers, so far we've got thirty-odd civilian survivors; sixteen hundred confirmed dead, including nearly all the garrison, and Lonaras, of course.
After that, they broke up a jetty about two hundred yards downstream, piled up the dry planking on the middle of the bridge and set fire to it. The bridge is repairable, but that's not the point. They did it so the Mesoura garrison had to take a fifteen-mile detour in order to cross the river, and when they got to Theano, needless to say, it was all over and the bad guys were long gone. We tried following their trail, but it petered out in the foothills. We didn't catch a single prisoner or recover a single body. For all I know, they may have pulled it off without losing a man.
So, there you have it. I suppose you could try asking your generals what they think they might have been able to do to prevent it, or catch the bad guys before they got away. It might shut them up, at least in public, because I really don't see what we could've done. We can't put out pickets along the whole length of the frontier. That was the whole idea of the barrier---and I suppose we've proved it would've been a good idea; it must've worried them, to make them go to so much trouble to stop us doing it. But they have.
Nico, I don't want to add to the horrendous problems this mess is about to cause you; but just think for a moment and be perfectly honest with yourself; am I really the right man for this job? If you can think of anybody else, maybe I should step down and go home. To cope with something like this, you don't need a plodder, an honest man doing his level best. You need a genius; someone even cleverer than the clever bastard who planned that whole operation. Seriously. Think about it.
Meanwhile, I've only got one suggestion, and personally I think it stinks. Rebuild the barrier; not just put it back how it was, but extend it, right down to the sea at the western end and the Hog's Back to the east. It would, of course, be an undertaking of truly staggering proportions. We'd need at least ten thousand men working on it, with certainly no less than five thousand soldiers to guard them; materials, plant and equipment, food, shelter and general support. I haven't even considered how much all that would cost. But; I don't know. I'm trying to put myself inside the mind of my enemy, trying to think; if I was him, what could that clown Phormio possibly do in response to the raid that might in any way alarm, inconvenience or even annoy me? And the answer came back; build the barrier. Build a bigger, longer, better specified barrier. Build a fucking wall.
Apart from that, I have only one suggestion, which relates directly to the Stesichorus quote. The only alternative to a wall, that I can think of, would be to bring up another two divisions, then do a fast, thorough sweep of everything within five miles of the border; burn every house, intern all the people, burn or impound all livestock and food reserves; then, when we've done that, cross the border and make a similar dead zone for five miles on the other side, put in a garrison, build forts; if that doesn't work, increase the cross-border zone to ten miles, bring up even more troops, and so on until the insurgency stops.
I remember my father telling me something his father told him when he took over the family business. If a man treads on your foot, break his arm. If he spits on your shoe, kill him. Let them hate you, so long as they fear you. That was how he thought, and I have real problems with knowing that I'm descended from someone like that. The horrible thing is, though, that Grandad's approach, in certain circumstances, does seem to work really well. It's how Grandad made his fortune in shipbuilding; and if there's anywhere on earth harder and nastier than the Gallirhoe shipyard, its the Tremissis frontier.
Please, please, please think of a third alternative.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
By these presents, know that His Majesty has appointed the bearer of this letter, General Lamachus, as deputy commander of the Tremissis sector. Lamachus will assist Phormio with co-ordinating the defences and overall security of the province.
You have a new number-one priority. Immediately find and secure the person of the leader of the insurgency, buy him lots of drinks and offer him a job. We need someone like that at Command.
It won't have escaped your notice, my brilliant and perceptive friend, that enclosed herewith, instead of oysters or a warm scarf or a nice book, there's a steelneck. Sorry about that. Not---definitely not---my idea, can't be helped, do the best you can. Your spot of bother has become my spot of bother, and thing aren't looking good here at the moment. Lumbering you with an unwanted four-star arsehole was the best deal (for all of us) that I could cut in very uncongenial circumstances. Play nicely together.
(If the seals on this letter were broken or showed signs of having been played about with, you'd better arrange an accident for him. But I don't think that's likely. I have no reason whatsoever to suppose that General Lamachus can read.)
Fairly soon, you should also be taking delivery of;
Item; two (2) divisions regular infantry
Item; one (1) division auxiliary cavalry
Item; one (1) division, the Imperial Corps of Engineers, with an architect, his pencil-sharpeners, cartographers, specialists and other assorted entourage, useful and/or ornamental, literate and semi-literate.
I think we'll build a wall. You can't have too many walls. In years to come, the happy and contented subjects of the Empire can take their families for picnics among the picturesque ruins. It'll be marked on all the maps as Nicephorus' Wall, which means my name will live for a thousand years, which will be nice. Also, there is a desperate need here for me to do something, and building as wall is as definite and concrete (pun intended) a something as even the most intractable steelneck could ask for.
Talking of the most intractable steelneck; General Lamachus served my father (not in itself a recommendation), and was never conclusively proved to have taken part in any serious conspiracy against him. In military circles, this means we're practically engaged to be married. Be nice to him, keep him well away from the garlic and the wives of people you daren't offend, and he's not actually all that bad. He also knows a surprising amount about building walls (the wide bit goes in the ground, the crenellated bit sticks up in the air; all the latest cutting-edge technical stuff) and he's worshipped as some sort of minor god by the Lusir Soleth, a whole division of whom you will soon have the pleasure of entertaining. Of the Lusir Soleth, the best thing that can be said is, they take some of the pain out of reading casualty reports. I've stuck you with them purely and simply because, if things turn smelly here, I want them as far away from the City as possible. Sorry about that.
Menestheus' financial wizards have drawn a blank on the money trail, and so have the chronic under-achievers who've been looking into the personnel records.
Look on the bright side. We may be facing the final collapse of the Empire, the overthrow of all our hopes and our own violent and painful deaths, but at least neither of us will ever have to take an end-of-term philosophy exam again, or listen to Phylarchus lecturing on precepts of Nominalist theory, or eat another breakfast in Great Hall. You see? Once you put this stuff in perspective, it ain't so bad.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that the reinforcements have arrived, general Lamachus has taken up his command, and work has begun on the Nicephorine Wall.
(Happy now? Your place in history.)
Really, Nico, you should try talking to people. Just because someone served your father faithfully throughout a long and distinguished military career, it doesn't necessarily follow he's a total bastard---a safe bet, yes, but not an absolute certainty. If only you'd taken the trouble to share a glass or two of wine with my new best friend Lamachus, you'd have found out that underneath that bluff, grim, savage, raw-flesh-eating, human-sacrificing exterior beats the heart of a rather unpleasant person---but (and this is where I may have a slight edge over you, even if you are the second cousin of the invincible Sun) a rather unpleasant person who in his spare time collects old manuscripts. True, the sort of old manuscript he particularly likes tend to be mostly pictures of athletic young men and women with no clothes on, but at least it's a start; a tiny bridge of shared humanity linking the human and the steelneck. Fact is, I happened to leave lying around in my study that copy of the Bedchamber Dialogues that Strato sent. When Lamachus came to report in, he caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye and swooped on it like a vulture. Offered me HS 2,000 for it, cash. Apparently, it's the rare sixth edition, with the extra woodcut in chapter nine. Take it, I said, as a gift. General Lamachus is now my friend.
(Accordingly, please have your literary advisers scour the City for every last scrap of antique porn they can lay their hands on, expense no object; must be at least two hundred years old, and the rarer the better. Lamachus isn't just a sad bastard, he's a genuine collector. Last night I had to listen to him banging on for two hours about watermarks. But for as long as I can feed him a steady trickle of goodies, he's mine.)
Work on the wall progresses. What can I say; it's a wall. Everybody in these parts thinks I'm out of my tiny mind, but they're happy enough to sell us stuff or take our wages, now that there's soldiers everywhere you look to keep them safe. The idea that the government can be a net provider of money, rather than a bottomless pit into which their taxes vanish without trace, is new and intriguing around here, and in consequence we're rather more popular than we used to be. In fact, I have a suspicion that the Nicephorine Wall will do us more good, hearts-and-minds-wise, as a source of easy money for the local spivs and unemployables than as a piece of military architecture. Nothing wrong with that, needless to say.
Tell Strato his unerring instinct for quality smut may just have saved the Empire. He'll be ever so pleased.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty is pleased to enclose the top-priority military materiel requested by Phormio in his last communication.
You bastard. You owe me. I've now acquired a reputation for depravity and unspeakable vice comparable only with that of my father, my brothers and my uncle. Talking of which, there's a copy of Corydon's Fragrant Bedchamber from Dad's own personal travelling-chest. Went with him everywhere, the lascivious old git, from the halls of Hyperpyron to the sands of Miliarense. Tell your pal Lamachus you had your agents steal it for you. He'll love that.
You've also confirmed my long-held suspicion that I'm as thick as a brick. I used to wonder exactly why Lamachus always stuck by my dad, when he could've stabbed him in the back a score of times. Human nature. A man will betray his honour, his country and his friend, but the bond between two people who share a common devotion to hardcore porn is unbreakable.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that General Lamachus has engaged and defeated the enemy at Choris Andron.
And there you have it. Proof positive of the enormous social value of dirty books. Primed to bursting point with the finest vintage filth money can buy, our friend Lamachus has sought out and destroyed a respectable chunk of the enemy; and I for one applaud him for it. A fine soldier and a wonderful human being.
And he made it look so simple, too. When I had my crack at the bastards, you may remember, I went to all kinds of elaborate lengths--- cartloads of wire, careful drip-feeding of information through their spy network. Lamachus' approach is more straightforward, and quite brilliant.
You want to pay close attention to this, because it's a master-class in practical tactics. All Lamachus did was pick a fight with one of the guild bosses, something about withholding agreed bonuses, productivity targets not met, which provoked him into calling a two-day strike. The men lay down tools and stomp off in a huff. Lamachus sends in troops to do their work, so as not to hold up progress. The troops he assigns are a unit who've been guarding the section of the perimeter closest to the mountain pass we believe they've been using to get across the border. Result; a gaping hole in the perimeter, with easy access to the site, and anywhere else they may care to go.
It looked so convincingly like a genuine balls-up that our friends in the mountains simply couldn't resist. Very sensibly, Lamachus didn't try and catch them out in the open. He let them get right up onto the parapet, like they did the last time, and there he was in the ditch, waiting for them. He thinks we got them all; over five hundred dead; better still, fifty-odd very much alive. He's talking to them now, and I suspect that he's not confining himself to showing them round clock-towers. But let's not dwell on that.
I may be tempting providence a lot; but maybe this is the ideal solution. A proper fighting general doing his stuff as only a true professional can, but kept on a leash by a human being.
Stesichorus wouldn't like it, of course. Men like Lamachus are quite definitely an evil means to a good end. I'm writing this in the chief clerk's office, because my study's just across the yard from where Lamachus is conducting his interviews; the theory being, if I can't hear it, it's not happening. Nice theory, but I fancy there's a fallacy in there somewhere. Men like Lamachus save lives by taking lives. They prevent cruelty and inhumanity by inflicting it. Men like us let them, because it's for the greater good, and because we're afraid that, if it wasn't done for us, we might find it in our hearts to do it ourselves.
On which cheerful note, I'll let you get back to your feasting and your nameless debaucheries. Lamachus loved the copy of The Blacksmiths Daughter, by the way. Not because of the content, but because it's the much scarcer third edition by the Smicrines brothers of Ianassa, with the page numbers on the left instead of the right.
\*
Nicephorus to Phormio
Gorgias is alive.
It's true. No, I haven't seen him, but I know he's alive. It's like this. One of the first things I did when I got the throne was send for the chief clerk of the Military Roll; that's the department that records stuff like enlistment dates, expiry of tours of duty, and deaths in service. I figured that if it was true that Gorgias got press-ganged at Smicra and died at Thanatta, there'd be a record; the Roll seems to be the one department of the civil service that actually works. Sure enough, they found me his draft notice and enlistment details, which tie in pretty well with what we'd heard from his sister. So, needless to say, I told them to find me the record of his death. They couldn't.
Which meant precisely nothing, since a hell of a lot of the dead on both sides at lhanatta were simply shovelled into a mass grave. So I ordered the Engineers to find the mass grave and dig it up.
I expect you're way ahead of me, but just in case you aren't; Gorgias, as you know, was missing his upper front tooth. He was six feet two inches tall, and when he was twelve he broke his left leg. So; I had the Engineers pull out every single body in that pit and prise the jaws open, looking for that missing tooth. In the event that they found more than one (they did, of course), they were to measure the overall length of the skeleton, and check the left femur for signs of a childhood fracture.
He wasn't there. Sixty-two corpses were missing the front tooth, but forty-nine of them were missing other teeth that I knew Gorgias still had; ten of the remaining eleven were under six feet tall, and the last two showed no sign of having had a broken leg.
Which still meant precisely nothing. So I had them go over the battlefield inch by inch, digging out every last body that'd been overlooked at the time; then they worked outwards for a radius of two miles, plus they interviewed all the local farmers, anybody who might've found an unrecorded dead body. It took them three months, but they found plenty. None of the skulls was missing the upper front tooth.
Now, Gorgias' unit was the 725th Infantry, and we know for a fact exactly where they were all through the battle. Dad kept them in reserve until the last hour of the action, when he managed to smash through the left wing of my brother Philo's infantry line; at which point, he sent in the 725th to wedge the gap open. But he got it horribly wrong, and (as you know) Philo's horse-archers cut them off and shot them to pieces where they stood; the handful of survivors surrendered, and were marched off the battlefield by the Aram no Vei auxiliaries while Philo was staging his counter-attack.
Right; let's do a logical assessment. The 725th were intact when they advanced towards the gap in the line. We know precisely where the horse-archers bottled them up, and where the vast majority of them died. We know, from unit insignia found on the bodies, that all the dead from that engagement went in pit number 6, and Gorgias isn't in there with them. Eye-witnesses confirm that there was no way anybody could've broken out of the encirclement and made a run for it. Therefore, the only logical possibility is that Gorgias wasn't killed in the shoot-up; he was one of the survivors who surrendered and got taken away by the savages. We can confirm that beyond reasonable doubt from the fact that he wasn't one of the stray bodies that never got collected and buried. At the close of the battle, he must still have been alive.
So, the next thing I did was call in the Aram no Vei liaison, and offer a HS 100,000 reward for relevant information. It's amazing how helpful and co-operative they can be when there's a vast amount of money at stake. They found me this sergeant (their equivalent of a sergeant) who remembered a man with a tooth missing and a limp. Naturally, I didn't believe a word of it, so I had the man arrested and taken down into the cellars for a word with the very bad men who work there. Fortunately for my conscience, he was both willing and able to adduce proof of his assertion; quite by chance, but it's good evidence. He remembered the missing-tooth man because he'd gone to pull a gold signet-ring off his finger, and instead of being all meek and scared, the man had punched him in the mouth. He was so taken aback he let the man live, but he took the ring, and---
Phormio, it's his ring. It's on the desk in front of me right now. I remember it so well. I remember how we gave him hell about it when he first started wearing it, and how he got all upset because his dying father had made him promise to wear it, because it bore the family crest; and how we said that was very touching, but his father was still very much alive; and how he came clean and admitted that this girl had given it to him and---You remember, don't you? Of course you do. I'd know it anywhere, Phormio, and it's here, in my hand. The savage stuck it on his own finger, but it was too tight and he couldn't get it off again, and there it still was. My people got it off no trouble at all; it can't have been much fun for the savage, but he's got HS 100,000 to console him, so I don't suppose he's too unhappy, at that.
After that, it was comparatively straightforward. The prisoners from the 725th were interned in one of the prison ships in Thymnos bay. Obviously, some of them died; the ship's captain had the bodies dumped over the side, and since the ship never moved all the time it was being used as a prison, it was a fairly simple job for my team of pearl-divers to go down and fish them all up again. Gorgias wasn't one of them. So, he was alive when the surviving prisoners were released at the end of the war. I talked to the officer in charge, and he told me they were each given a change of clothes, a pair of boots, three days' rations and HS 10 and sent on their way; I checked, and that's what actually happened, remarkably enough. I managed to trace a dozen 725,h veterans who were on the ship, and they backed up the officer's story.
Better than that; much better. I asked each of them in turn if they knew the name, Gorgias Bardanes. One said yes. I talked to him this afternoon, and he described Gorgias exactly. He said they'd been in the same compartment of the hulk; he remembered Gorgias very well because of his posh voice, also he muttered in his sleep (didn't that make me grin when he said it). To cap it all, he told me a name he used to mutter, over and over again; Eudocia.
He can't have known that unless Gorgias was there, and alive. He just can't.
This man said Gorgias was very much alive when they all got sprung; that he collected his clothes and his money and walked away, and that was the last he saw of him, headed into town, same as most of the others, but walking alone, not talking to anybody.
Phormio, if he survived the battle and the march and being in the prison ship, I absolutely refuse to believe he could've died of anything after that---pneumonia, knocked down by a cart, slipped on a muddy bridge and fell in the river, no way. Gorgias was alive when he was released from the prison ship, he had money in his pocket, he knew that all he had to do was come here, or write me a letter, or get in touch with any of us, or his sisters, or--- There's all those people he could've gone to, but he didn't. And that was two years ago. His family haven't moved house, and there's no way in hell he doesn't know exactly where to find me, or the rest of us.
That's what I simply can't understand, and it's tearing me up. He's alive, he's on his feet and walking about, and he hasn't made contact. Why? What the hell is going on?
Naturally, I've got a small army of people on it; trying to pick up the trail in Thymnos. So far, no joy.
The others are stunned. I didn't tell them anything until today, just in case the news turned out bad, or it didn't add up after all. None of us can make head or tail of it. It just doesn't make sense.
Anyway, now you know. As soon as there's any news, I'll write. The main thing is, he's still alive. But why---Oh, the hell with it. He's alive.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that general Lamachus has successfully engaged the enemy.
Nico, it's not true. I'm sorry. I couldn't bring myself to tell you, or Menestheus, or any of the others. Gorgias is dead. He died just after I got here, at the temple in Parcys. There's a free hospital there, run by the Order. The doctor who treated him said it was pneumonia. I've known for some time.
He knew I was coming here---must've heard the announcement, I don't know; he wrote to me, but by the time I got here and saw his letter, he was already dead. I went to Parcys straight away, but they'd buried him in the paupers' ground and nobody could remember where. So, no, I haven't actually seen the body, but I know for a fact it was him. Quite by chance, they hadn't got around to getting rid of his stuff, what little there was of it. The drill is, when someone dies in the free hospital, his things are stored in a ware\* house along with the other paupers' stuff, until there's enough for an auction. I went there and scrabbled about---it's heartbreaking, Nico, all that junk, the last scraps of so many wasted lives---and in an old arrow-barrel I found Gorgias' things; his clothes, shoes, penknife, an old kitbag, and his journal.
That's how I know it was him, Nico. Proof positive.
I sat on a biscuit box in that dismal bloody shed, and I read it. It was like he was sitting next to me, talking, moaning, complaining, looking for an argument, soaring off on crazy flights of extrapolation and speculation. He was furious at being ill; of all the bloody stupid things, he said. He was determined he wasn't going to die. Then he started to wonder; what if I am going to die? Then he was scared stiff, and then he was angry again. He tried to calm himself down---it doesn't matter, he said, nothing matters, viewed objectively one life is utterly trivial. But he couldn't accept that. All the memories, the knowledge, the perceptions, the experiences stored inside a man's head, all wasted in the time it takes a heart to stop beating. It was the waste that appalled him. What a ridiculous way to organise things, he said; a man spends his whole life learning, acquiring information, both on his own and as part of a collective. Just when he's starting to get somewhere, the bucket's tipped out and all the good stuff is poured out onto the ground. He had a lot to say about that. He said that of all the evils in the world, of which there were rather too many for his liking, the greatest evil of all was love; it's sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love, because everybody dies, but the love they cause to be in others doesn't die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow, therefore love is the greatest evil.
I think I know what he meant.
I know why he never got in touch with any of us after the war. He was so angry about being conscripted. The last thing he wanted was to be a soldier. He didn't want to have to march all day in sopping wet clothes and sleep on the damp ground and eat garbage and get dysentery and do demeaning physical labour and get ordered about by men who weren't fit to clean his shoes. He didn't want to kill anybody, and he most definitely didn't want to die. But, being Gorgias, when it became obvious that there was no getting out of it, he determined to do his very best, if only to show the ignorant rubbish around him how much better than them he was. He tried really hard. He was determined to get promoted, to make sergeant at least; but he didn't, and that really hurt him, because he wasn't good enough, and in the end he knew it. That really depressed him. In the battle, he only survived by pure fluke. He was livid that a savage stole Eudocia's ring; he tried to fight for it, but the savage punched him in the mouth and (here's a typical Gorgias phrase) he was left with no alternative but to fall over. While he was in the prison ship, he more or less gave up. He lay there in the dark trying to remember as much as he could of the first book of the Bessaid, but he could only remember the opening thirty lines; so he said them to himself over and over again, until they lost all traces of meaning. When they finally let him go, he made a conscious decision that he was through with everything from his past life. He'd betrayed himself and us, we'd betrayed him, the whole world, everything he'd valued and put his trust in had failed him and let him down. As far as he was concerned, he'd died at Thanatta. He made up his mind to walk to the monastery at Eschate---mostly, I think, because it's a very long way away; as and when he got there, he'd pull himself together and decide what to do next. He made it four-fifths of the way; and then he got ill.
That's how Gorgias died, Nico. And that's why I couldn't bring myself to tell you, or send you his journal. That Gorgias, of all people, died angry and afraid and in despair; I had to read that book, Nico. I didn't see why the rest of you should have to.
Well, there you have it. I've got a team of clerks making copies of the journal (I'm not going to risk the original in the mail, not even your infallible Imperial couriers). I suppose I was wrong to try and keep it from you all. I'm sorry.
Lamachus won a battle against the insurgents. I enclose a copy of his report. He did a great job and things are going really well.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty commends the courage and diligence of General Lamachus.
I see. Thank you for telling me. Thank you, I suppose, for not telling me. I guess I've only got myself to blame.
The trouble with this job, with all the power and the resources and the ability to actually get things done, is that you start believing you can fix things. You see an obvious injustice; fine, you stretch forth your Imperial hand and there, you've fixed it. The economy's in a mess. So, you summon the people who really control it, and you make sure that on their way to your office they're taken past the guard-room and the dungeon and the place I told you about where the very bad people work, and then you tell them to get it sorted out, and it gets sorted out. You're disgusted at the poverty in the Naranite Quarter; you send in food, you start up public works to provide employment, problem solved. You think the new wing they've built onto the Goldsmiths' Hall is an eyesore and shouldn't have been allowed; ten days later, they're carting it away in big skips. Job done.
But you never fix any damn thing. The obvious injustice turns out to have rather more to it than you first thought. You make them fix inflation, you get a run on the banks. Your public works mean you've got to jack up taxes, and small businesses go to the wall. And everybody liked the Goldsmiths' new wing except you, and you had it pulled down. The more you try and make things better, the more you end up looking, sounding and acting like the Government.
I thought I could fix the Gorgias problem. Either I'd find him alive, or at least we'd know for sure what happened to him. Result; more misery, more unhappiness, which you tried to spare us.
My illustrious ancestors and predecessors in this ridiculous job used to have themselves made into gods. Some of them actually believed it, and I always used to wonder how that was possible.
How can you believe you're immortal, all-powerful, equal of the invincible Sun, when you've got a toothache, or when you're wiping your arse? But I understand better now. After all, I tried to bring the dead back to life, and look where it got me.
Oh well. Looks like it's still just the five of us after all.
\*
General Theophano Lamachus, commanding the auxiliary forces in Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
General Lamachus begs His Majesty's indulgence far the grave breach of protocol which this letter represents. In his defence, he pleads the potential seriousness of the allegations herein contained.
General Lamachus has been given to believe that His Majesty has been making enquiries concerning the whereabouts of Dr Gorgias Bardanes, late of the University of Anassus, formerly a fellow-student with His Majesty at the said University. General Lamachus further understands that Governor Phormio has assured His Majesty that the said Gorgias Bardanes died in Parcys on the seventh day preceding the Ides of Trionalis.
General Lamachus begs to inform His Majesty that this is not the case.
Furthermore, General Lamachus has compelling evidence, acquired during the course of his intelligence operations relating to the current insurgency, that the said Gorgias Bardanes is closely involved with the said insurgency, possibly at the highest level. General Lamachus annexes hereto duly notarised copies of witness statements taken from suspects questioned by him in which said witnesses state, without prompting or coercion, that the said Gorgias Bardanes is involved with the said insurgency. The said witnesses are in custody and can be forwarded to His Majesty at any time.
General Lamachus makes no accusation against Governor Phormio, but begs to suggest to His Majesty that the said Governor Phormio should be questioned by His Majesty or his agents concerning his knowledge of and dealings with the said Gorgias Bardanes.
General Lamachus begs to remind His Majesty that he loyally served His Majesty's late father, now restored to the Divine Element, for twenty years, and it is General Lamachus' dearest wish that he be permitted to serve His Majesty with the same loyalty, sincerity and total commitment for as long as His Majesty shall please to employ him in any capacity whatsoever. General Lamachus is aware that in making allegations that might potentially be interpreted as detrimental to the honour of Governor Phormio, he risks His Majesty's grave displeasure. Should such allegations prove to be unfounded. General Lamachus submits himself willingly and penitently to His Majesty's mercy, should His Majesty see fit to bestow it.
\*
Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, to His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
It is with great regret that Phormio begs to inform His Majesty of the death in combat of General Lamachus. The general died bravely and with honour in the act of leading his troops into battle, and the engagement was successful.
He was a steelneck, and besides killing people his only interest in life was dirty books. That said, damn.
They made a surprise attack on the wall. At least, that's what they thought they were doing. He was there waiting for them, again, and we made a real mess of them. They'd already broken and were about to run; Lamachus saw an opportunity to cut them off and led the charge in person. But something went wrong; he and his guards got there just a bit before the main force, he was surrounded and killed. Once our men realised the general was down, they more or less lost interest, and the bad guys got away. Even so, we killed sixty-two of them and caught another dozen. I don't know if they realise they got Lamachus; I think they probably do, and if they don't they soon will. How much of a setback this will prove to be, I don't know. Damn it, he was making real progress. He made fools of them twice; a few more times and I think they might lose their nerve. Well, it's up to me now.
Listen to me. It's getting so I'm afraid to go out in the rain, in case my neck rusts.
I don't know who you'll choose to replace him. I do believe we need a fighting general up here. But it's got to be someone we can control.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to Phormio, governor of Upper Tremissis, greetings.
His Majesty acknowledges Phormio's report concerning the death of Lamachus.
Enclosed herewith, please find a letter. I got it two days before your last report. You can keep it; I don't want it back.
Phormio, what the hell are you playing at?
\*
Phormio to Nicepborus
I have a confession to make.
Yes, he was alive when I got there. I honestly thought he was dead. But no, he was sitting up in bed, bitching at the nurses. He was bored, his head hurt, the bedlinen was a disgrace, the food was rubbish. Hello Gorgias, I said.
He told me what had happened; Thanassa, and afterwards. All more or less what you'd been told, except for one thing. He was on his way up here to join the insurgency, with a view to taking it over.
What the hell do you want to do that for, Gorgias? Well, he said, I've had a lot of time to think, and I've come to the conclusion that it's got to go. What's got to go, Gorgias? The empire, you idiot. It's all got to go. Pull it all down and start over.
Don't talk stupid, I said, that's Nico you're talking about. I know, he said, and then he grinned---you know how he grins when he's really upset about something. If it'd been anybody else, he said, I'd probably be able to let it go, I'd just give up on everything and go somewhere, get a job, die. But Nico's betrayed us. He's gone back on everything we agreed.
What are you talking about, I said. He scowled at me, like I was stupid. Everything, Phormio, he said. Everything we talked about, everything we decided on, everything we agreed, back in Anassus, when we were still thinking straight. And then he pointed to his coat and told me to look in the pocket, and there was the book.
You remember the book, Nico. It's in your handwriting; proceedings of the board of inquiry into the condition of the world. He made me give it to him, and then he leafed through and found the place. Then he made me read it out loud.
You remember the bit, Nico? It goes---
Proposed by Nicephorus Tzimisces; that all power (political, military, economic) is an abomination; that Mankind is addicted to servitude through long use, but is capable of surviving without it; indeed, can only survive if the addiction is broken; that all and any means are justified in the struggle against power. Further proposed by Nicephorus; that in the unlikely event that he should succeed to the Imperial throne, he would immediately dissolve the Empire and give power back to the Senate, subject to an overriding agenda to disband the standing army, grant self-determination to the provinces, break up the major trading corporations and put in place all measures necessary and expedient to reduce power and government to the absolute minimum necessary, until such time as Humanity is ready to do without it altogether. Put to the vote and passed unanimously.
Come off it, Gorgias, I said, we were just kids.
He looked at me. You don't mean that, he said. And I thought about it, and he was right. Then he took the book back, and found another bit. Remember this?
Proposed by Phormio; Man is born free. As soon as he is born, he is subjected to authority; that of his parents, his educators, the government. Each submission to authority diminishes him, so that as the body grows, the soul withers. He learns away his freedom, his divine essence, until the day comes when, fully educated in the skills of the slave, he denies all his potential, forswears everything he might have done or been. Proposed, therefore, that the members of this board of enquiry shall make a solemn undertaking to remember this moment, when they could still see clearly, and to acknowledge that on this day, at this moment, the seventeenth hour of the sixteenth day after the Calends of Triptolemon in the fifth year of the Emperor Actis IV Tzimisces, being one thousand, two hundred and fifteen years from the foundation of the city of Vesa, they agreed and declared that the following precepts were unalterably and unequivocally true; that power is the greatest evil; that evil must be resisted; that compromise is betrayal; that the fight must never end. Put to the vote and passed unanimously.
I looked at him. I did say that, didn't I?
He nodded. And Nico wrote it down in the book, he said. Look, there it is, in his truly terrible handwriting.
I shook my head. Fine, I said, you look at it. That's kids talking, Gorgias. Notice the unique blend of cockiness, pomposity and ignorance that identifies the voice of youth. So when I was nineteen, I wanted to abolish the Empire. Big deal. When I was eleven I really wanted to be a cavalry captain. I made a promise to myself that that's what I'd be. But I grew up, I said to him, and I'm not bound by that earlier undertaking, and I'm not bound by this, either. Idealism is like spots and wanking; it's a phase you go through, and then you grow out of it. But he just looked at me and shook his head. It's me you're talking to, he said. I know you better than that.
And you know what, Nico? He was right.
God, we were pompous in those days; and cocky, and very, very ignorant. We'd read a few books, thought we'd understood them, thought we could see so much more clearly than our stupid parents and grandparents and a million generations before them. Like the kid who wanted to be an explorer, so he set off from home and after half an hour he came to a place he'd never been to before; so he said to himself, I've discovered a new country. But.
They trained me in logic, rhetoric, analytical thinking and adversarial disputation. Somewhere there's a bit of paper with a seal at the bottom that says I'm fully qualified in the above; so it's hardly surprising I can win arguments, even against myself. I can win this argument any day of the week. But that doesn't mean a bloody thing. If I close my eyes and ask myself, were we right or not, and I only give myself one heartbeat to answer, the answer's got to be yes, we were right. We were stupid kids, but we were right.
You should've seen the smug look on Gorgias' face, Nico. I hat look.
It hasn't been easy. The main thing was to play for time. Gorgias has been raising money for the cause (I'm sorry, but I can't tell you where from) and building an army. The little piddly raids and bits and pieces he's done so far are really just training exercises, though they served a more important purpose; to get you to send me an army of my own. It was a bit of a blow when I found that Lamachus came with it. Gorgias (he learned it all from the Book, would you believe; you and I read it too, but he understood it. I always knew he was the clever one) played it quite well, I think. He let Lamachus have his victories, to get his blood up, make him feel good. Then he and I laid the trap; or rather, we let Lamachus lay the trap, and we tweaked it a bit. All I had to do was transfer one lieutenant (one of our people) to command the company that should've backed Lamachus up, but didn't. I regret that. I regret all the dead, on both sides. My trick with the barrels of wire was actually genuine---I didn't even tell Gorgias what I was doing until afterwards, because it had to be perfect or it wouldn't have been convincing. And you were convinced, Nico, and that was all that mattered.
It's a comedy, isn't it? In order to eradicate the evil of the misuse of power, I've been misusing power like few people in the history of the world. Wicked of me, but it's got to be done. Of course, I couldn't have done it without your help. You gave me everything I needed. I now have a field army large enough to march on the Gity. I have supplies, equipment, the very best; my troops are the only regulars in Imperial service who have boots that are younger than they are. Thanks to your generous funding for the wall project, I have the money to pay them, plus a HS 500 incentive payment (I think that's what your father used to call it)---in other words, I've bought them, in the traditional manner. Five hundred down, another thousand each when we've won the Empire. You were kind enough to send me the best troops in the army. Even if any of the steelnecks are minded to fight for you, which I'm inclined to doubt after your really quite savage attacks on their pay and privileges, with my army and Gorgias' forces, we can take them all, one at a time or all together. Please therefore accept this as my formal declaration of war. Sorry, Nico.
But, of course, we don't have to do that. Absolutely no need. All it'd take would be for you to walk into the Senate, issue the dissolution decree and the rest of it---disband the army, provincial autonomy, dismantling the monolithic corporations---and not a drop of blood need be shed. You'd have in your hand a letter from Gorgias and me, guaranteeing the reforms, undertaking that as soon as they're in place, we'll pay off our army and disband it. Think about it, Nico.
Why are you Emperor? Not because you wanted to be. I know that's the case. Because you were the third son of Actis IV; because your father and both your brothers and your uncles and their sons slaughtered each other in an orgy of violence that was remarkable even by Vesani standards; because after all the other Tzimisces were dead, the army wanted an unquestionably legitimate ruler, born in the purple, and they practically had to drag you by the hair. I understand that at the outset there was no way you could've dissolved the Empire, because the steelnecks would've killed you. But we're past that now. Menestheus and Strato and Aristaeus have seen to that; and you, of course. You've been trying to keep your word, Nico; that's what decided me to go along with Gorgias. Deep down, you know we were right. You're trying to do it, but you're afraid---not of being killed, of course not. You're afraid of failure. You're afraid that if you're not careful, you'll play into the bastards' hands and we'll end up with another civil war, worse than before, and an even worse Empire after that.
If I thought you wanted the job, if I thought you didn't hate every minute of it, I'd have told Gorgias to go to hell. Same with Menestheus and the others. They're trying too, but they're just as scared as you are. Well, it's all right now. Gorgias and I have dealt with all that. We're coming with an army that the steelnecks can't beat; they'll see that, and there won't be a military coup and thirty years of civil war, and we can do what we agreed to do.
Isn't that what you really want?
Sure, you're angry with us both. You wouldn't be human if you weren't. Two of your closest friends have been plotting against you; it doesn't get worse than that. But ask yourself this. Why would Gorgias and Phormio do something like this? If we thought it wasn't the best thing, for you as well as everybody else, we wouldn't be doing it.
Think about it, Nico; really think. If you carry on the way you've been doing, what do you suppose your chances are of reaching thirty? Pecking away at the steelnecks and the bureaucrats and the merchant princes and the landed aristocracy; all that'll happen is that sooner or later you'll push them too far, and then that'll be it. That's what's always happened before. Remember your history, for crying out loud. Theonides' reforms. Sinon and the redistribution of public land. Basiliscus and the Franchise Act. As soon as the established interests decided that they'd had enough, what happened? Blood on the floor, and back to how things have always been. The plain fact is, there are certain things that the emperor, brother of the invincible Sun and father of his people, simply can't do. We recognise this. We know it's up to us. If you want, we can wait until our army's camped under the Gity walls; you can tell them it's the only way to avoid a terrible siege followed by a murderous sack. You'll go down in history as the emperor who voluntarily gave up his throne to save his people; what could be nobler and better than that? And it won't just be myth and spin, it'll be the whole truth.
Think about it, Nico. See what the others have to say. Then, if you really must, you can hate us. Or, in a year or so's time, we'll look at all this clearly, like we used to be able to when we were arrogant, ignorant kids, and we'll see that we all did the right thing, when it mattered.
\*
His Divine Majesty Nicephorus V, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, to the criminal traitors Phormio and Gorgias, defiance.
His Majesty commands the aforesaid, criminals and traitors, to disarm immediately and surrender themselves to the garrison commander at Sybas, there to await transportation to Vesa for trial.
Well, I've got to write something. The courier's been waiting in the corridor outside for two hours already, while I've been here staring at this stupid sheet of parchment, trying to think what I'm going to say. So, I figure that if I just start writing, maybe
Three hours now. The poor bastard. And not just him. They'll have got his horse all ready, tacked up and tethered in the despatch yard, with a groom standing by. I expect they're all wondering what's going on. Me too.
All right, let's start at the beginning.
Gorgias is alive. You can't imagine how wonderful that is. Particularly after you told me he was dead. Phormio, you bastard, you lied to me. Why did you do that? Gorgias is alive; you've known that all this time, and you didn't tell me. Us.
The others have been in here with me all night. A sort of pattern emerged. There'd be a long silence, minutes at a time. Then we'd all start talking at once; then we'd be shouting, swearing at each other---the guard came busting in at one point, they thought I was being murdered---and then back to the long silence.
You two should know that the four of us have talked it through, and I'm speaking for Menestheus and Aristaeus. Strato gave up at about five o'clock this morning. He stood up, said, I think I'll go to bed now, and off he went. He hasn't been back. It's been too much for him, I guess. I think, when we all thought Gorgias was dead, it hit him the hardest. Now this.
Four hours. About an hour ago, I got a note from Strato. It says; whatever the rest of you decide is fine by me. Then they told me he's gone. Left the City. My guess is, he's gone back to Anassus. So it's just the three of us here now. But we've sort of reached an agreement, though we haven't actually called it that.
Phormio, I can't. When I read your letter the sixth time, I thought; hell, yes, why not? Do what they say, and it'll be all right. It'll work. As soon as their army passes the twentieth milestone, go to the Senate and abdicate, like Phormio suggested. It'll work, I thought; and then it'll all be over, this stupid job, this pretence. Gorgias is coming to take charge, and I've been let off.
Let off; that was where it broke down.
When I was at school in Histamenon---actually, thinking about it, Histamenon was a good experience for me. Because whatever happens to me in later life (a monastery, on campaign, even prison), it's got to be better than Histamenon. When you've been that miserable, as I was there, it gives you a wonderful sense of freedom. And I survived school, so I can survive anything.
When I was at Histamenon, they used to make us play the boot game, once a week, even when it was so cold outside that even the peasants stayed indoors. I hated that so much. So I spent a large part of my life trying to find ways of getting let off the game. Illnesses; I had my brother smuggle me in Semonides' Medical Summary, and I'd read it for hours, looking for new illnesses I could fake. I joined every club and society going, took up every musical instrument going. I'd do anything, just to be let off. And when I was successful, I'd watch the other poor bastards trooping off to the playing field in the murderous cold, and I felt awful.
So; I'm done with being let off. That's not a good enough reason.
Then I went to the cellar, where they generously allow me to store a few personal things (can't have them in the palace; it's not seemly) and I dug about in my old college trunk until I found my diary. You never knew I kept a diary; you'd have kidded me about it, and got hold of it somehow. But I sat there and read it, trying to remember. And I found the entry for 16 aK Trip, 1115. I quote;
Board meeting, back bar. Poverty & Justice. Very drunk. Gorgias on good form, Aristaeus had a good point but said it badly. Phormio, mostly. Can't remember what he said. Can't remember what I said. Can't read own handwriting, so sod it. Got stuck with the bill, again. All right, I've got more money than them, but it'd be nice if just once, someone else paid for something. Must go bed now; head hurts.
So much, then, for when we could all see clearly.
Phormio, it's not as simple as that. Real politics, in the real, grown-up world; Gorgias simply doesn't understand that. I do. I have no choice. I hated Histamenon, every waking moment. But--- you know, this has only just become clear to me; thank you---do you suppose for one moment that if I'd said to Dad, I don't like it there, don't send me back, that he wouldn't have taken me out of there so fast, people would've been knocked down by the slipstream? I stuck it there because it was so much better than home. Home, where my father and brothers and uncles lived. Until they murdered each other.
So don't you fucking dare talk to me about politics; or power, or the evils of authority, or the menace of faction and a standing army. I understand all that. When the only important things to you were the girl two doors down and exam results and your arrowhead collection, I was eavesdropping on my father conferring with his steelnecks about how to kill his brothers and his other two sons. So, yes. Yes, you're both absolutely right. We were right, back in the Poverty. All power is evil. All government is evil. All armed force is evil. And there's nobody on earth knows that better than me.
But---Phormio, for crying out loud, this is not the way. If you do this, and I let you, we'll end up right back where we were before my grandfather's time. Seventy-seven emperors in a hundred years; all steelnecks, each with an army. My family were all murdering bastards, but at least Grandad kept the peace for twenty years. In passing, interesting piece of family history I only found out recently, looking through old papers, the way you do. When Grandad became emperor, the first thing he did was have death warrants made out for all his sons except Uncle Vatatzes. He knew that after his death, Dad and Uncle Zeno and Uncle Phrontis would try and carve up the empire; so he took the decision to have three of his four sons killed, to stop that happening. My grandmother managed to talk him out of it, but only just. Then, when Dad had Arcady and Philo and me, and Grandad got sick, Grandad ordered him to have me and Philo killed. Dad actually had to pretend he'd done it; Philo and I were whisked away and hidden for a month, until Grandad got better and it was fairly certain he wasn't going to die after all.
When you tell Gorgias about that, he'll say it's just more evidence in favour of his view; that power makes men evil. I don't agree. I remember Grandad, just about. He was a nice old man, a bit stern but quite kind really; he gave me strawberries he'd grown in his glasshouse, and we talked about something I'd been learning at school. He actually listened to what I was saying, which was the first time a grown-up had done that. But he was prepared to kill his own sons and grandsons to avoid the evil; and, for pity's sake, Phormio, he was right. And grandmother was wrong, and she's responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands.
That was his way. He was a steelneck, and so was my father, his brothers, my brothers. And you know what, Phormio? If you do this, you'll be a steelneck too.
Have they done the inauguration yet? Where they make you stand on a shield, and four captains lift you up, and all the soldiers whoop and holler? My personal theory is, that's when it happens. That's when the brain and the heart die. When they lift that shield, it doesn't matter who you were before. When they raise you off the ground, you become something else. A bit like my crazy predecessors declaring themselves gods, I suppose.
I left it for an hour, and I'm calmer now. I think the courier's given up and wandered off. It's unnaturally quiet around here. They know something's wrong. I walked down the corridor just now and I didn't meet anybody. Usually there's clerks and servants and guards everywhere. Maybe they know something I don't. Hey, Phormio, you haven't arranged to have me murdered, have you?
I'm calmer, and I've thought about it some more. I thought a lot about Grandad. If he was prepared to slaughter his family, I suppose I have to declare war on my friends. Steelneck is as steelneck does. That'd be the one thing I'd have serious trouble forgiving you for, if it turns out you've made me into one of them.
If you possibly can, please change your minds. It goes without saying, if you do, I'll grant a full pardon---you and your men, whoever you damn well like. If you're afraid that if you give it up now the soldiers will kill you, then we'll think of some way to get you out of there.
Gorgias; when you read this, I want you to know something. I'm so glad you're alive after all. That's the main thing.
\*
Gorgias Bardanes to Phormio, greetings
The war goes well.
That, I believe, is what soldiers say. How goes the war, my friend? The war goes well. We have today engaged the loyalist armies, and we have defeated them.
And that, I must confess, is a gross simplification. I received a message from Nico's latest general, a man called Euphorbus; I confess I hadn't heard of him. I can only suppose he's the next in line of seniority, after the recent spate of defections. General Euphorbus wished to put me on notice that he would be deploying his forces at (some map reference). I understood this to be a sort of invitation; be there or be square. So I wrote back and said I'd be delighted. I asked Nico's previous five generals who this Euphorbus was, and none of them had heard of him, either.
So we went to the place on the map. That's all it was, a place on a map; no village, no river or mountain or anything. I think we arrived unfashionably early, because it was a long time before the enemy showed up. They shuffled onto the battlefield; they reminded me of Strato in the morning, before he's had anything to eat. Nearly two thirds of the army were auxiliaries, and even I could tell, from a mile away, that they really didn't want to be there. And can you blame them? You know the recruiting pitch, out there in the territories; join the army, see the civilised world, fight Vesa's enemies and earn good money. Fighting Vesani regular troops wasn't what they joined up for. The battle was over before it started.
I met with the salvage companies and struck a good deal, and then we had a final staff meeting, and then I couldn't put it off any longer, so we advanced. I did as you said and put a lot of auxiliary archers out front. It worked. They shot up Nico's auxiliary infantry for about five minutes at maximum range, and provoked a wild, spontaneous charge; they fell back, and our Vesani cavalry cut them off and slaughtered them like rats in a barn. That was enough. The rest of Nicos auxiliaries started to pull slowly back, and it was obvious they hadn't been ordered to do so. The regulars just stood there, trying to figure out what to do. I ordered our heavy centre slowly forward. Immediately, I got a message from General Euphorbus; he'd considered his position, and wished to join the Alliance.
Call that a victory? I just think it's depressing.
So now I have six of Nicos generals, and five of his armies. We only need two more for the complete set. We held a welcome-to-the-club party that evening. I was appalled to see the condition his Vesani were in. Most of them hadn't eaten for two days, and when one regiment was called on to lay down their arms, they just laughed, because they hadn't got any; just shields, no swords or spears. I gather they hadn't been paid since the war began. Nico's run out of money, as well as everything else.
Our poor friend; I feel desperately sorry for him. But we have to face facts. It's too late now. I imagine he's virtually a prisoner in the palace, and his keepers are most likely arguing among themselves about the best way of getting rid of him before we reach the fifteenth milestone. I asked the special forces people if there was any way we could get a unit inside the City and pull him out, but they advised against it; chances of success were slight, and projected losses unacceptable. Docs Nico constitute an acceptable loss? I didn't ask them that. I don't like to ask questions I don't know the answer to.
By the time my next letter reaches you, it may well all be over. I do hope so. It's been the most dreary, miserable business. I never thought doing something so well could be so tedious.
Added in haste; I just managed to catch the messenger before he set off. Excellent news, the best---almost the best---possible. Guess who's looking over my shoulder while I write this. Menestheus; and Aristaeus is standing next to him, drinking cinnamon tea. And Strato's safe at Anassus; he'll join us at the City when it's all over. They didn't want to leave Nico, but he insisted. They say he's been bearing up remarkably well, right up till the last defection---well, the last defection but one, strictly speaking. Then he called them all in and said that the only thing that mattered now was for them to get out and be safe, and the safest place would be here. I'm pleased to say they don't blame him for what's happened.
Not long now, Phormio, and the five of us will be together again, and then; you wait and see what we'll do. It'll be amazing.
\*
Phormio, commander in chief of the Imperial farces, to His Divine Majesty Gorgias, brother of the invincible Sun, father of his people, defender of the faith, emperor of the Vesani, greetings.
Phormio begs to inform His Majesty that his forces have arrested the criminal traitor Nicephorus Tzimisces and sent him to Vesa to await His Majesty's pleasure.
No message.
\*
Nicephorus, brother of the Order of the Invincible Sun at Tyene, to General Phormio, commander in chief of the Imperial forces, greetings.
Gorgias came to see me today.
He, of course, did all the seeing. I couldn't see him back, for obvious reasons.
When I was a kid, they taught me that the custom of blinding illustrious prisoners and banishing them to monasteries, rather than killing them outright, was a mark of how civilised our society is. I thought, that's wrong, it's barbarous. How could anybody bring himself to do such a thing? I guess Dad and the rest of our family thought the same way, or else they weren't taking any chances. After all, it's just a convention that a blind man can't be emperor.
Now that I've been on the receiving end, literally and figuratively, I've changed my views somewhat. It's not so bad. It's a damned sight (pun) better than being dead. It has its advantages. They don't expect a blind man to do all the hard manual labour that a novice brother usually gets lumbered with; weeding the vegetable garden, lugging jars of water about, sweeping up, emptying the latrines. I think I'd have quite liked copying manuscripts, mind you, but would they have ever let me? You know what my handwriting's like. So, what I mostly do is sit here in this room, which I can't describe to you because I've never seen it, and some of the older brothers take it in turn to read to me. I have Strato to thank for that. He paid HS 1,000 for a permanent endowment; monks to read to me while I'm alive, prayers for my soul when I'm dead. I'm not all that fussed about the prayers---I can't see the look on the face of brother Anthemius, who's writing this down for me, but I bet he's shocked at that last bit. You're not? No, don't write that, you fool.
Actually, they've all been very kind to me, ever since I got here. Partly, I think, it's a sort of vague respect for my former office. After all, for a while there I was the second cousin of the Invincible Sun. I asked the prior about that, by the way, and he explained it to me very clearly, how I could be a blood relative of the Supreme Essence one minute and no relation at all the next. I wish I could remember his argument. It was very good. Father Prior has, in fact, been exceptionally kind. He even lets the monks read me proper books, not just religious stuff, which is a great blessing. Mind you, I've grown quite fond of the Precepts and the Offices lately. For the first time in my life (never thought I'd say this), they're starting to make some kind of sense. Perhaps we were wrong after all, Phormio, about seeing things clearly. Maybe this is what you have to go through before it's possible.
(In case you think I've adjusted really well, I haven't. Every morning, when I wake up, I try and open my eyes. Then there's a moment of panic; and then I think, Oh.)
I'm wandering, I know. Easy to do in the dark. The reason for this letter is, Gorgias came to see me. The emperor, himself. I have to confess, the truly special nature of the honour was wasted on me just a bit. But then, I've always loathed and despised emperors, until now, of course. All the emperors I ever knew before I came here were rubbish.
I heard his footsteps in the cloister, and I knew it was him. You don't believe me, but it's true. I asked the brother to stop reading, and called out his name. I heard the door open. Hello, Nico, he said. Hello, Gorgias, I replied, how are you? Fine, and yourself? A bit blind, I replied, but otherwise not so bad. I could hear the monk who'd been reading to me suck in his breath sharply, so I asked him if he'd mind leaving us, and I heard him go.
I'm sorry, he said. There's a coincidence, I said, so am I. He wasn't quite sure how I meant that, so I said; Let's not talk about bad stuff. Sit down and tell me something cheerful. So he sat down next to me on the bed and started talking---well, lecturing; like he was making a speech---about all the political stuff you're doing. Shut up, Gorgias, I said.
He was quiet for some time. Then he laughed, like a twig snapping. Sorry, he said. I guess that's not what you want to hear. Doesn't bother me, I replied, but it's boring. All right, he said, and there was another silence. So, he said, what isn't boring?
I couldn't help smiling. Is it true, I said, that you're hanging round Eudocia's kid sister?
A sort of a gasp; then, Who told you that?
Strato was here, I said. So it's true, then.
Emperors don't hang around, he said gravely. They negotiate marriage contracts with dynastically and politically suitable candidates. And she isn't, I said, and he clicked his tongue. Unfortunately not, he said. I'll probably end up marrying some savage with a bone through her nose, to safeguard the northern frontier. Meanwhile, he added, I'm hanging round Pulcheria. Nice kid, he added, but she reminds me of her sister.
Then we talked a bit about the old days, and then he gave me the news about the rest of the gang (nothing Strato hadn't already told me); then we started arguing about textual cruces in the Bessaid, of all the crazy things. I thought I'd win for sure, because the monks had just finished reading me Glycerius' Commentaries; but no, Gorgias somehow managed to dredge all the relevant stuff up out of his memory, from ten years ago. I'm telling you, Phormio, it was a hell of a good debate. And Gorgias won, of course.
Then, I really am sorry, he said suddenly; and I said, Forget it. You don't really mean that, he said. True, I said. I can't forget something just because I want to, in the same way I can't fly. But I can forgive. Besides, I said, it doesn't matter all that much.
I think that upset him a bit, but I wasn't too bothered about his fine sensibilities. All that stuff, I said, politics and morality and good and evil, it's just nonsense we used to talk about in the Poverty when we were kids. But if you insist on being deadly serious, I want you to answer me some questions. Truthfully, I said. On the Book.
Book?
I grinned. Not the Precepts, stupid, I said. On our book. I don't suppose you've got it with you.
As a matter of fact, he said. (I don't know if he was telling the truth. Could've been any book. It's easy to lie to a blind man.) All right, he said, on the book. So?
Question one, I said. Is it true that, all along, you wanted to be emperor?
No, he said.
On the book.
Yes, he said. And then he added, in a rush, Because how else could I ever get anything done? Good things, like we're doing now. Like the land reform proposals, or---
Question two, I said. When we were kids, was the only reason you let me hang out with you because I had money to pay for the drinks?
He laughed. No, of course not, he said. I'm not saying it didn't help us like you, but no, it wasn't that. It's true, he went on, we were never as close to you as we were to each other. I tended to think of you as Phormio's friend, rather than my friend, to begin with. But that changed, by second year.
I nodded. Question three, I said. If Phormio had been emperor instead of me, or Strato, would you have done the same thing?
Can't answer that, he said. The situation could never have arisen.
I let him get away with that. One lie out of three wasn't bad.
He stayed for two hours. Apparently, there's going to be a sort of visiting rota, which is a bit patronising, but very welcome nonetheless. Next month, Aristaeus will come and see me, and Menestheus the month after that; and Gorgias promised me faithfully you'll all come and visit on my birthday. I'm not holding my breath, but it'd be nice. In fact, it'd be the best thing.
My friends the monks read me the Gazette each week, Phormio, and I know how to interpret all those official announcements. I know that Gorgias has more or less given up trying to change anything. He'll be the Emperor from now on. I think he'll be a good one, so that's all right. Better than me, anyhow. Anyway, what do I care? I've been let off all that.
This is probably the best place I've ever been, and I've only been happier once. Please write, when you can spare the time.

