Chapter 1 #3
There’s that bit in the litany, lead us not into temptation.
Actually, it doesn’t mean that. It’s a mistranslation, or at least it wasn’t to begin with, but the Robur word they used to translate the word in the original text has changed its meaning over the twelve centuries since the translation was made.
What it actually means is, please don’t destruct-test us; a vain plea, if you’d lived anything like the sort of life I have.
Temptation, though, in the sense you’re thinking of, is an insidious little bugger.
She was absolutely right. If we reported back that the book wasn’t where rumour and the intelligence reports said it was, who the hell would ever know?
“Rule two,” I said. “We do as we’re damn well told. Also known as the vow of obedience.”
That made her snigger; fair comment. “You and your stupid rules,” she said. “It’d be more convincing if they only stayed the same from one day to the next. Tell you what. We’ll only burn down the library if it’s absolutely necessary. How about that?”
If I have a natural talent – let’s not muck about: more like a unique genius – it’s for backing myself into corners.
The last thing I wanted to do was go to Angkola, break into a secure facility there and have anything to do with that particular book.
Left to my own devices, would I consign it unopened to the flames?
If it was actually, genuinely up to me? My choice, on moral and ethical grounds?
What book? Fine. Here goes.
Over nine hundred years ago, when the old empire was still strong and vigorous, though just beginning to slide into decadence, the emperor Gratian III gave orders for a book to be written.
Nobody knows what was in it; more to the point, nobody knew back then, apart from Gratian himself, the man who wrote the book and the clerks who did the copying and the illumination.
After the book was delivered, Gratian had it placed in the most secure chamber of his treasury, locked in a strongbox to which he had the only key.
Not long after that, the author and the clerks all mysteriously died. That book.
You didn’t need me to tell you that story, because you know it already. It’s one of the three things everybody knows about Gratian III, along with fiddling while Choris burned and all the saints he had thrown to the lions in the Circus.
But, you quite reasonably point out, that’s all garbage, isn’t it?
Even if such a book ever existed, surely it must’ve been lost or destroyed centuries ago, when the empire fell or during one of the countless civil wars just before the Fall, when the palace treasuries were constantly being sacked and robbed, and all the finest and most valuable and important works of art ever created were smashed or burned or melted down for bullion.
More to the point, since nobody ever laid eyes on the book after Gratian had it locked up, how could anyone possibly know that a book in a library in godforsaken Angkola, of all places, was that book? They couldn’t.
“Which means,” I explained, “that whatever the book is that she wants us to copy, it can’t possibly be that book.
In which case, it’s just some book. In which case, no skin off our noses if we do as we’re told and copy it.
Whereas acres and acres of skin off every inch of our bodies if we don’t. You do see that, don’t you?”
I know her repertoire of stares and glares so well. On this occasion I got number forty-six. Even so. “Well?” I said. “Think about it. It can’t possibly be that book, any more than the cow’s shinbone in the reliquary in the Glorious Light in Mavais is the right arm of St Hostilian.”
“Don’t start.”
“Because,” I went on, “the cow’s shinbone is patently a cow’s shinbone, not a man’s arm. And if your precious Invincible Sun’s idea of a miracle is turning a dead man into a cow, I suggest you might care to find yourself a slightly less scatterbrained god. And by the same token—”
When I really annoy her, she doesn’t say anything. That’s my cue to shut up. She took a deep breath and forgave me, which was really rather good of her, considering. “I’m sorry,” I said, after an appropriate pause. “This whole thing is getting to me. I really don’t want to go to Angkola.”
“Me neither.”
“I really don’t like taking orders from her, and I really don’t like the thought of what she’ll do to us both if we don’t manage to carry out her rotten mission. Nor do I relish the prospect of being flayed alive by the Angkolan royal guard. All things considered—”
She nodded. “Fucked if we do, fucked if we don’t.” She sighed. “You’re probably right. It can’t be that book. Nobody knows the first thing about it. Did you really not ask for me to go with you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Sorry. Only, you can be such a pathetic arsehole sometimes.”
“That’s all right. Come on,” I said, “it won’t be so bad. We’ve got this.”
Backed into a corner, like a pig in a slaughterhouse. Story of my life.
Angkola, for crying out loud.
A thousand years ago they called it the Bride of the Sea, a mighty maritime republic nominally independent of the empire, holding the gorgeous East in fee and attracting the brightest and the best in every field of worthwhile endeavour like flies to a turd.
Hostilian spent his exile there, sipping seventy-year-old Chereuscan wine as he fetched up his broken heart onto parchment like a landlubber on a ferry.
Stenteric came a thousand miles south to build the world’s biggest theatre.
Prega of Stachel set up his first glass factory on the promontory.
Aguiolus the Heretic came north from Antecyrene to paint frescoes on the ceiling of the Rose Revived.
Alizet, the most expensive prostitute of all time, set up shop there for three years, then bought a city in northern Blemmya and retired.
Saloninus brought the manuscript of Principia Mathematica to Angkola a year before his death, but none of the publishers were interested.
Then the Aram Chantat erupted out of wherever the hell it was they came from, the empire went up in flames and the lights started to go out all over the known world.
The Angkolans reckoned they’d be all right.
They lived on an island in a lagoon, and the Aram never really got the hang of ships.
True, nobody grew any food on Angkola, there wasn’t room because of all the houses, but that didn’t matter, because the Angkolans lived by manufacture and trade.
And so everything carried on more or less as usual for about a hundred and fifty years after the Fall; by which point, the last scattered embers of the empire had burned out and nobody was left who wanted or could afford the exquisite things the Angkolans made.
So they sailed further afield, all the way to Sashan and even the borders of Echmen, only to find that the very best the West had to offer simply wasn’t good enough.
Who wants wool where everyone wears silk?
Who would look twice at Angkolan slipware in Echmen, where even farmers eat off porcelain?
By this point, the Angkolans realised, there weren’t many people left west of the Friendly Sea.
That sounds like an exaggeration, but it isn’t.
Procopius of Angkola, one of the last authors in the true imperial tradition, figured that between the Fall and the time he was writing, a hundred and twenty years later, the population of the West declined by over fifty per cent.
They weren’t all rounded up by the Aram Chantat and slaughtered like sheep.
It was worse than that: a gradual process, like a ship slowly sinking.
All the young men went off to the war and never came back.
The women and the old men tried to keep the farm going but couldn’t quite manage it.
There were no big cities left to take them in and exploit them, so they stayed put or wandered about till they faded away.
With all the young men dead there were no children born.
Brambles and withies choked the fields, the watercourses clogged up with muck and cow parsley, wolves came south for the first time in a thousand years and ran off the sheep.
If a wheel broke, there wasn’t a wheelwright; if the axle broke there wasn’t a blacksmith.
People forgot how to spin thread or make pottery.
The Aram were long gone by this stage, back to their vast, featureless prairies in the north-east. They realised that the West was completely useless for nomadic pasture, but only after they’d burned down all the cities and slaughtered all the people.
Meanwhile, on the far side of the Friendly Sea, the Sashan and the Echmen were mauling each other to a standstill over Agbathan, so the Sashan had neither the energy nor the resources to be bothered with conquering the West, where there wasn’t anything they wanted anyhow.
Eventually the survivors swung it around and came through, and here we all still are, but compared to the empire we’re savages, barely human, not really capable of understanding the unspeakable difference between what we were once and what we are now.
Instead we tell fairy tales about giants, twenty feet tall in their socks, because no ordinary human being could have done what they did, before they conspired against heaven and the Invincible Sun wiped them all out.