Chapter 2
I lied. It was a truly terrible idea, and I only said it to be annoying. But, like all good lies, it was built around a tiny speck of truth.
A brief discourse on the art of telling lies.
I find it helps tremendously if you can put yourself into a state of conditional belief.
Conditional? Exactly. You say to yourself: X is not true; but if X were true, what sort of a world would it have to be, what would be different and what would be the same?
I then set about creating that world; a bit like the Invincible Sun who (as Sister Svangerd and the other true believers truly believe) woke up on the day before the First Day and imagined the cosmos.
Literally imagined. There was no light, but He said to Himself, how would it be if there was some?
And there was light; and so on and so fifth, right down to the fine detail like oxbow lakes and maidenhair ferns.
I don’t claim that my imagination is anything like as vivid or fertile as His, but a man can try.
Let there, therefore (I said to myself as I sat in the scriptorium, mindlessly copying St Avicaustus’ third epistle to the Olbians) be a Brother Jovian.
Furthermore, let him live in Plemyene, a far-distant place of which we know nothing except the name.
There’s a map of the world on the scriptorium wall.
It’s been there for three hundred years and I know for a fact that it’s wildly inaccurate, having been to a lot of places marked on it that aren’t actually there, and a lot of other places that are there but aren’t on the map.
But what the heck. The map is officially recognised as True, and you’ve got to start somewhere.
The map shows Plemyene as a large, empty space above and to the left of the Arcobene mountains, which cut off the northern provinces of the Sashan empire from the unspeakable savage-infested wastes beyond.
Psammetichus of Blemmya wrote (a thousand years ago) that north of the Arcobene it’s all high, wind-scoured steppe country, so Brother Jovian and his crew are presumably nomads – which fits in very well, because if they’re forever moving about and living in tents, it explains why nobody’s seen their fabulously wealthy cities.
Easy-peasy: they haven’t got any. Instead, they keep their fabulous wealth in tents – make that gorgeous pavilions – and lug it from place to place on the backs of ten thousand, make that a hundred thousand, camels. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Nomads (according to Ruitprand’s Geography) tend to move in large regular circuits, which may take anything up to ten years to complete.
This allows the pasture to recover from the intensive grazing of thousands, millions of sheep.
Which figures; Brother Jovian’s vast caravan moves in a huge orbit, like a planet (see Euderic’s Astronomy), and his orbit only brings him close to the borders of the known world once every five, ten, fifteen years.
Hence the intermittent nature of his diplomacy.
See what I mean? Already we know ever so much about Brother Jovian, more than we know about a whole lot of real people who actually exist. We know he’s a nomad, but an incredibly rich and powerful one.
Therefore he has at least a million sheep, a quarter of a million horses; therefore his military capacity consists of cavalry, lancers and horse archers, which is very good, because they’re the best soldiers in the world.
Just ask the Sashan or the Echmen. Furthermore, they can get to places very quickly indeed if they set their mind to it, so if only an enterprising king could strike a deal with Brother Jovian, military help could be on hand within months, maybe even weeks; none of that vague, hand-waving, some-time-in-the-next-twenty-years stuff that you get when your diplomatic currency is heavy infantry.
Even further more, nomadic wealth is hard wealth: gold, silver, livestock, things, portable things, as opposed to landed wealth, meaning millions of acres of small fields and woodlands yielding a penny per acre per year.
If Brother Jovian says he’s prepared to help you out financially, that means clinking money in your hand in six weeks’ time.
Further and better, if Brother Jovian has a million sheep, and all those sheep yield ten pounds weight of wool a year, and the nomads only need, say, half of that for clothes and blankets and stuff, that leaves 2,500 tons of wool we can buy off him for next to nothing and sell at two hundred per cent profit.
I decided that the principal objective of our mission would be a trade deal.
See what I mean? The more I thought about Brother Jovian, the more I learned about him, the more real he became.
The crimson robe was, of course, pure wool; but red, so dyed with the priceless vermilion dye, made from the incredibly rare and reputedly magical ingredient cinnabar, which according to Echmen scholars is also the key to making a practical Elixir of Eternal Youth…
Ever since the empire fell, nobody has the faintest idea what cinnabar is or where it comes from, but obviously it comes from Brother Jovian’s country, where they dig it out of the ground by the bucketful.
And trimmed with ermine – ermine are little furry rat-like creatures, and I bet you anything you like that in Brother Jovian’s country you can’t spit without an ermine getting wet.
Definitely a trade deal, and what would Brother Jovian want in return?
Easy. They’re nomads. They’d want corn, flax, iron ore, copper, tin, a few basic manufactured goods – cheap as chips in our neck of the woods, but priceless in godforsaken Plemyene.
Rule 6, or is it 7, I can never remember, of the lying profession: people are much more likely to believe something if they really want to. Rule 6 (or 7) subsection A; rule 6 (or 7) applies unless the lie in question is too good to be true. Accordingly, we need a problem.
The problem: Brother Jovian is able to help us, but he won’t unless –
The answer fell into place in my mind like the pawl of a ratchet.
Brother Jovian is a Robur and a priest, intensely devout, a real true believer.
But he left the West and struck out into the far East to forge an empire a long time ago, and when he left, the eternal unchangeable orthodoxies of Holy Mother Church were slightly different from what they are today.
To be precise, three hundred and fifty years ago, the Third Ecumenical Council hadn’t yet declared the Pronomian doctrine of the dual procession of the Holy Breath to be heresy and anathema.
Brother Jovian is, therefore, a dyed-in-the-wool Pronomian, and he won’t lift a finger to save the beleaguered West until the anathema is lifted and his fellow Pronomians are restored to full communion.
Which, of course, will never happen. Which explains, doesn’t it, why three centuries of constant secret diplomacy between Brother Jovian and Holy Mother Church have failed to produce a satisfactory result.
So what’s changed? Brother Jovian, sick to death of the intransigence of Holy Mother Church and keen to strike a trade deal, is reaching out to the Church leaders in Angkola, that beacon of enlightenment – remember that King Aviragus’s puppet priests aren’t officially recognised by Holy Mother Church, even though they’re impeccably orthodox.
In Angkola, therefore, the king is head of the Church, not some mitred knobhead in faraway Choris Anthropou.
The deal on offer, therefore, is a trade deal plus a military alliance in return for Aviragus lifting the anathema on the Pronomian heresy.
This would mean Aviragus opening his mind to the possibility of the dual procession of the Holy Breath; but since I’m prepared to bet all my teeth that Aviragus wouldn’t recognise the dual procession if it tunnelled up his arse and popped out of his ear, that really wouldn’t be a problem – not if it meant an exclusive agency for 2,500 tons of prime fleeces every year, together with 50,000 horse archers at his beck and call.
There’s that priceless moment in any investigation when all the clues suddenly chime together and everything makes perfect sense.
So that’s why X is Y and Y is Z; how could I have been so blind as not to see it before?
I allowed myself the luxury of a grin, which earned me a stare from Brother Perceptuus sitting opposite.
I killed the grin and went back to the illuminated capital I was working on. Genius, after all, is its own reward.
Sister chamberlain, a massive woman who was never known to smile, showed us the costumes she’d had made for us.
They were amazing. About twelve yards of genuine purple cloth, encrusted with intricate embroidery in gold and silver thread, genuine pearl buttons.
The materials alone would have fed the poor in Cripplegate for a year.
I took a deep breath. “No good,” I said. “Sorry.”
“What do you mean—?”
“No good,” I repeated. “Look. The fabric’s all wrong, for a start.”
“How dare you. It’s the finest broadcloth money can—”
“Broadcloth,” I repeated. “Made from wool, from sheep from the Permian hill country. We’re supposed to come from north-east of Sashan. Completely different wool. Also, the dye.”
She hadn’t been briefed on our hailing from Plemyene, mostly because I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone yet. All she’d been told was, make them some flashy clothes. “Have you any idea how much that stuff costs?”
“Yes,” I said. “But this shade of purple is made from the shells of the murex oyster, which is a native of northern Blemmya. The Sashan use oyster shells from Ecbathan. And don’t get me started on what’s wrong with the embroidery.
In Sashan culture, the language of decorative needlework is a lifetime’s study. This is all completely wrong.”