Chapter 2 #2
She glared at me for what felt like a very long time, then shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “So what do you want?”
“Rags,” I told her.
But very specific rags. Rather than try to explain to a strong-minded woman at the limits of her patience, I went down to the haberdashery and told them what I wanted.
We start, I said, with genuine Sashan broadcloth.
Got any? The nice woman went away and came back.
We’ve got this, she said, and explained that it was a cope or a dalmatic or something, a diplomatic gift from a Sashan envoy about a hundred years ago, only it had been stored in an old chest in a cellar and the damp had got into it, and –
“Perfect,” I said. “All right, cut it in half and make two ordinary basic gowns. Line them with fine bleached linen, imported if you’ve got it, Blemmyan for choice—”
“I can do Blemmyan.”
“Brilliant. Then I want you to go down to the kitchens and ask them for five gallons of brine. You know, the stuff they use for pickling.”
Because the two envoys from Brother Jovian hadn’t had an easy time of it getting to Angkola.
For one thing, the ship they were on sank, or got attacked by pirates, and we spent two days clinging to a floating plank before the tide eventually washed us up on a beach.
That would explain, among other things, what happened to all the fabulously expensive and exotic gifts from Brother Jovian to the king, now at the bottom of the sea.
Still, it’s the thought that counts. The only items we’d managed to save were our diplomatic credentials…
The librarian knows me only too well. “Get out,” he said. “You’re not allowed in here.”
I smiled. “I take it you got the memo.”
He scowled at me. I’d asked Sister Framea to drop him a line; please afford every assistance, something like that. Poor devil; he knew what I was capable of, but he had no choice but to let me do my worst. “Yes,” he said. “But I’ll be watching you.”
“Watch away. You might learn something.”
I knew what I needed. Some years earlier, before I got barred from the Reserve Stock for damaging the books, I’d seen it: a rare but not particularly special or interesting item, more of a curiosity than anything else.
A standard book of Gospels, not all that old, not particularly beautiful and containing no interesting variant readings or anything like that.
The only thing of note about it was where it was from.
It had been made in Echmen, far away on the other side of the known world, by people so different from us that the only thing we have in common is two arms and two legs.
They don’t worship the Invincible Sun in Echmen.
But apparently someone in authority there thought that an Echmen-made copy of the most common book in the West would make a suitable gift to accompany some low-to-middling diplomatic mission.
Needless to say, when it got here nobody wanted it, and eventually it trickled through like groundwater and ended up in Abbot Simocatta’s library, presumably waiting for the day when he found someone he could offload it onto.
A misbegotten thing, of no real use to anybody.
Except me. The point being, unlike all other Echmen books, which are rolls of parchment wound round two sticks, this one was codex-bound, Western-style, which meant it had a flyleaf.
A blank sheet of parchment with nothing written on it.
A blank sheet of Echmen parchment. Quite possibly the only one west of the Friendly Sea.
Brother librarian groaned out loud when I unsheathed my penknife, but it had to be done. “There’s a place reserved in hell,” he told me, “for people who cut bits out of books.”
“Don’t watch if it upsets you,” I suggested. “Now then, I want Gathanaric of Triden, On The Phases of the Moon.”
“Why? Are you going to mutilate that, too?”
“No,” I said. “I want to look something up.”
Death, said the look in his eyes, is too good for people like you. “Wait there,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”
While he was gone I amused myself by moving several books a quarter of an inch to the right or left, knowing that when he came back he’d notice and fear the very worst. A shame, really: brother librarian is a thoroughly decent man who does an important job very well and cares about books almost as much as I do.
We should like each other, which is rather like saying to the man whose wife you’re sleeping with that we ought to be great pals, because we have so much in common.
The art of forging documents – I could be very boring about that.
I know so much, and once the well’s unstoppered, it all comes bubbling out, like those hot fountains in Permia that shoot a column of boiling water a hundred feet up in the air.
But you’ve never done me any harm, so I’ll restrict myself to details necessary for a proper understanding of the events of the narrative.
The art of forging documents is founded on authenticity, which means being as close as possible to a genuine original.
But if there is no genuine original – because the scriptorium attached to the chancery attached to the royal court of the nation in question doesn’t exist – the job suddenly becomes much, much harder.
Bullshit, you’re thinking. There is no original, therefore there’s nothing to get wrong. You can just make it up out of your head.
Probably the closest I’ve ever come to death is a result of arguing like that.
I forged a complete set of papers making me out to be a Tavrian military attaché on an exchange programme with the Mezentine People’s Army.
There is, of course, no such place as Tavria.
But that wasn’t what got me in trouble. The shaven-headed young thug of a lieutenant who interrogated me was fully prepared to believe in Tavria.
It was just the documents that didn’t seem too right to him, an indefinable whiff of fishiness that prompted him to have me followed; whereupon he found out that I was meeting with dissidents and criminals and all sorts of bad people generally, and Svangerd only figured out where I was being held an hour before the execution was scheduled.
In the event she got to kill three jailers with a sailmaker’s needle hidden in the boning of her corset, which made her as happy as a dog with two tails, but it was a horribly close-run thing.
All because I’d had to use my imagination, instead of having the real thing to copy slavishly.
Moral: never imagine when you can copy, and if you have no choice, imagine something very similar to something real. Such as? Good question.
So: if I was a nomad living in a felt-walled tent somewhere in the trackless wastes of the north-eastern steppe, and some fool insisted on me writing a letter, how would I go about it?
First premise. Nomads aren’t literate. They don’t need to be.
Therefore, if they use and practise the skill of reading and writing, they must have learned it from somebody.
Since I had in my possession a sheet of Echmen parchment, it would have to be the Echmen.
Plausible enough; the steppe shares a five-thousand-mile border with the empire, on their side of which the Echmen built the most amazing wall.
But the wall has gates in it, so we’re given to understand, through which camel trains and caravans pass daily, laden with things to buy and sell.
Let one of those commodities be writing materials – Echmen parchment, Echmen ink, Echmen pigments and so on. No problem. I can do all that.
Really? Yes. Mind you, I’m probably the only man this side of the Friendly Sea who can.
Years ago, when I was a novice, my boss was an old boy who’d been a prisoner of war in Sashan for twenty years, which was where he’d learned the scribe and illuminator’s trade.
Being a slave in Sashan is no fun at all, so he paid dearly for his education, but he always reckoned that on balance he’d got the best of the bargain.
In so many aspects of life, compared to the Sashan, we Westerners are dumb animals.
The Sashan empire never fell, so everything they ever learned is still there, just about, more or less – along with far more of our learning and culture than we’ve managed to retain, only the bastards won’t let us have it back.
Long story short: my boss taught me a lot of things that only he knew, including how to make ink, paint, brushes, gold leaf and parchment Sashan-style – and the Sashan, of course, learned it all from the Echmen, two thousand or so years ago.
Mostly useless knowledge, because although the ingredients can be had here in the West, they’re so murderously expensive that even Abbot Simocatta can’t afford to pay that sort of money.
To make Echmen blue, for example, you need to grind a certain kind of rock into dust. The rock comes from only one mountain, in north-central Echmen.
A few handfuls of the stuff have made it over to the West, but as jewellery, not artists’ materials.
There was a knob of it right here in the abbey church, exquisitely rose-cut and set into the headband of Simocatta’s mitre.
I confess to a certain perverse pleasure at the thought of what Simocatta might say to Mother Tysapherna about that.
Harsh words, quite possibly. Still, omelettes and eggs.