Chapter 1 #4
Angkola, of course, never fell to the Aram.
Instead, they did it to themselves. Three centuries after the Fall they were all fishermen, drying a million split herrings on the 70,000 seats of the Hippodrome of Auxentian.
Then, one morning in high summer, a ship drifted into the bay, a funny looking ship with high castles at each end and a lateen sail, something that hadn’t been seen in the Middle Sea for two hundred years.
It was from Echmen, and out of its crew of forty only six were still alive, plus about five hundred rats.
When the plague arrived, there were maybe sixty thousand people on Angkola.
After it eventually burned itself out, there were five thousand.
Two years later, the Sherden came. They were pirates by trade, who’d made a nuisance of themselves back home in western Sashan and got out just before the Great King’s fleet turned up to exterminate them.
Angkola was exactly what they needed as a base of operations.
It had a magnificent natural harbour, and the two ends of the lagoon could be held by a handful of ships against massively superior numbers, even the infinite resources of the Great King.
The only thing lacking to make their new home paradise was ships to rob, but you can’t have everything.
They compromised, the way we’ve all had to in the post-imperial world.
Instead of plundering argosies of apes, ivory and peacocks from distant Auzor they sailed round the Middle Sea looting barns, slaughtering cattle, snatching farmers in their fields and selling them in the slave markets of northern Blemmya at practically cost. It wasn’t what the Sherden were used to, but it was a living, and never let it be said that the Sherden were afraid of hard work.
For the last three hundred years or so the Sherden have been a fact of life, like dysentery or mosquitos.
Every farmhouse ten miles inland from the shore is fortified like a tiny castle.
Ships scurry nervously up and down the coast like mice, with racks of spears and bows on deck in case one of those godawful red-and-white striped sails shows up on the skyline.
But these days the Sherden – they don’t like being called that any more – the Angkolans have calmed down a bit and aren’t such pests as they used to be, like a murderer who’s been in prison for forty years, or a wolf that’s learned to eat apples.
A lot of them work overseas, as hired muscle for dukes and princelings who can’t be fussed to conscript an army.
A few still nurture the traditional skills, but the main industries on Angkola are military surplus and human repurposing.
If you’ve just won a battle, and you’ve got five acres of dead bodies and three thousand prisoners of war, you strip the dead bodies and chain up the prisoners and send the lot off to Angkola, where they’ll give you a fair price and auction the goods at the next quarterly All Comers Fair, mostly to buyers from Blemmya and the East.
Oddly enough, people don’t like going to Angkola, even those with a choice in the matter.
They’re scared they’ll be grabbed off the dockside, clapped in irons and sold.
This is nonsense. Angkola welcomes foreign visitors, because who else would buy all the stuff?
So long as you keep to the main thoroughfares during the hours of daylight you’re perfectly safe; which is more than can be said of many of the civilised, respectable places I’ve been to.
As a matter of fact, the Angkolans are punctilious to the point of obsession about what they call provenance.
It’s illegal to sell anybody without the right paperwork, one of the reasons why clerks and bookkeepers fetch such good money at market, and why so many of them stay right there on the island.
One excellent side effect of that is that Angkola has one of the highest rates of adult literacy in the West, almost as good as it was under the empire.
If you can’t read and write dockets, you’re no use to anybody in the Human Resources biz.
It also means that Angkola is the earthly paradise and promised land for people who share my rare and abstruse talent for forging documents, not that I’ve ever been tempted in the slightest. To be honest with you, the thought of the place makes my skin crawl.
Up till about thirty years ago, Angkola was what they call a democratic republic, meaning it was ruled by gang bosses.
Then Zeuxis, head of the Prostitutes’ Union, cleared out all her competitors and made herself queen, and when she died, about six years later, her son Aviragus succeeded her, so Angkola is now a monarchy.
Compared to his mother, Aviragus is a sweetheart.
He sends ambassadors to other heads of state, signs treaties, complies with them when convenient.
He spends a quarter of his total revenues on building temples, buying holy relics and endowing colleges of priests, though since he’s constantly at daggers drawn with Holy Mother Church over trade tariffs they aren’t proper priests and so don’t count.
It’s in the constitution that the king is ex officio chancellor of the Pirates’ Guild, so not everything has changed, but at least if the Sherden burn down your house and steal your kids, there’s a consulate where you can file a formal complaint, and in due course you’ll get a written denial of responsibility, nicely illuminated on quality parchment.
Angkola, in other words, is gradually becoming respectable, which only goes to show that there is such a thing as progress.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, looking up from some report or other. “What do you want?”
Nominally I work for Abbot Simocatta, when I’m not running errands for visiting monsters.
In practice, my immediate superior is a short, skinny kid with a squint, a snub nose and a receding hairline.
He looks like somebody’s idiot nephew, but he’s sharp as a razor, the best administrator in the North and as dangerous as a pack of starving wolves.
He doesn’t like me much but he knows I’m useful.
“You sent for me.”
He scowled. “The hell I did,” he said, “so presumably she wants me to write you out a docket. That way, you’ll be my fault, not hers. Fine. What do you need?”
Interesting. He didn’t know what she’d ordered us to do. “Nothing, really,” I said. “Indefinite leave of absence for me and Sister Svangerd.”
“It must be my birthday and nobody mentioned it. Anything else?”
“Travel money,” I said. “And a ticket for the Stack.”
“Really? Usually you write your own. Or she breaks in after dark and helps herself. Still, if you want one, you shall have one. This office is only too happy to cooperate with the holy mother to the fullest extent of its resources.”
The look on his face wasn’t one I’d normally associate with happiness. “I’ll be sure to tell her you said that,” I said. I paused, waiting. “The tickets.”
He grinned and pushed a scrap of blank parchment across the desk at me. “Like I said, write them yourself. I can’t be bothered.”
Fine. If anything went wrong, he could swear on oath that any authorisations we claimed to have received from his office were forgeries. “Like that, is it?”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
I picked up the parchment and tucked it in my sleeve. “Thank you,” I said.
“Piss off.” I was pissing off when he called me back. “Word of advice,” he said.
“Yes?”
I like to think I can read faces. “This investigation,” he said. “The one she’s here for. There really is nothing to find. But I get the impression Tysapherna’s not the sort who lets facts get in the way of a good opinion. I don’t like it that she’s using my people rather than her personal goons.”
“Oddly enough, neither do I.”
“There’s a possibility,” he went on, “remote but nonetheless real, that you two are being set up to fail. Messily, all over the place. For all I know, that’s the whole point of this caper.”
Well, of course. Not having been born yesterday, I had already considered the possibility.
Abbot Simocatta is known to have a keen, possibly unhealthy fascination with obscure old books.
If he were to cause a serious diplomatic incident in furtherance of his lust for a really nasty old book, he’d be charcoal, and the fact that he hadn’t actually done anything – anything else – wrong would be neither here nor there.
There was no need to say anything, so I didn’t.
“So,” he went on, “don’t screw up. That’s an order.”
“Noted.”
“And if you do screw up, don’t come back. That’s friendly advice.”
“Thank you.”
“Now go away. I really wish to God she’d picked on somebody else for this, but you’ve got to hand it to her. She’s smart. My own fault, I guess, for having you two maniacs on the staff.”
I have no pride, but even so. “We can do this,” I said. “We handled it all right in Choris. This can’t possibly be as bad.”
He looked at me. Sometimes I wonder why we bother with language.