Chapter 2 #3
Actually, blue would be very handy, since the Echmen emperor uses blue ink, made from the special rock, for his own personal correspondence – just the sort of quirky thing Brother Jovian would imitate, to impress his savage neighbours.
By the same token, the Great King of Sashan has a monopoly of the use of royal purple ink, made from the same incredibly rare crushed beetles that provide the dye for his robes of state.
Now then; eight hundred years ago, the Robur won one of their very, very few victories against the Sashan, and among the plunder taken from the battlefield was the Great King’s purple scarf; which survived the Fall and eventually found its way to the archiepiscopal treasury at Schanz, just a few miles down the road from Mother Tysapherna’s base of operations.
It’s technically possible, so they tell me, to bleach the dye out of fabric and reconstitute it, into (for example) purple ink.
Never been done to my knowledge, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.
It’d mean completely shredding the scarf, of course, but if a thing’s worth doing –
“I know what you’re up to,” Svangerd hissed at me after vespers, as we left the church.
“You’re finding excuses to put the job off as long as possible.
That’s why you’ve sent away for all this impossible-to-get stuff.
You’re hoping that by the time it’s all been brought here, she’ll have changed her mind and we won’t have to go. ”
“Maybe,” I said.
She grinned. “Sweet,” she said. “Won’t do any good, of course. She knows what you’re doing. She’s not stupid.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Does she really want that ghastly book enough to let me boil down the Great King’s scarf?
I doubt it. I know for a fact the scarf is mortgaged to the Poor Sisters for sixty thousand gulden.
” I shrugged. “But it’s the only genuine royal purple this side of the Olbian peninsula, and I made it pretty clear to that Framea woman that unless I get the stuff I need I can’t guarantee success.
Which means,” I added, with what I like to think of as my seraphic smile, “if she wants us to go to Angkola, she’s going to have to come up with sixty thousand gulden cash money to get the scarf out of hock.
Not a note of hand or a bill at a date. Actual clinking money. ”
She stared at me. “That bit of rag is worth—”
“Apparently.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.”
Quite. But I was wrong. As usual.
From here to Schanz is eight days, if you’ve got a racing thoroughbred, the roads are dry and firm and the rivers are behaving themselves.
But the messenger got back in fifteen days, bringing the scarf with him in an ivory box.
Nuts, I thought. I’d gambled and lost, and now I was going to have to shred sixty thousand guldens’ worth of priceless relic and turn it into purple ink, using a thousand-year-old recipe that had almost certainly been heavily garbled in translation.
“She must really want that book,” Svangerd said.
“Please go away,” I repeated for the third time. “I need to concentrate.”
The shreds were simmering in a brass pot over a charcoal stove in brother cantor’s workshop, where he repairs and maintains the bells.
The problem was, the Old High Robur word in the recipe meant simmer during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and boil ever after, and I had no way of knowing how old the recipe was.
There’s a difference between simmering and boiling; in context, the same degree of difference as between day and night.
After a sleepless night of agonising I’d gone with a long, slow simmer, on the specious grounds that I’d probably do less harm that way.
“The question is,” Svangerd went on, sitting on the corner of the workbench and swinging her legs at the very edge of my peripheral vision, “what she wants it for.”
“I neither know nor care,” I said. “Please keep still. If you spill anything, we’re dead.”
The linseed oil I was using as a base was changing colour, but not to purple; more a sort of murky brown, almost black.
“What do we actually know about this woman, anyhow?” Svangerd went on.
“She turns up on the doorstep with an impressive looking letter and suddenly she’s running the place and giving orders right, left and centre.
Presumably someone’s checked out her credentials, but then again, maybe they’re all too scared of her and don’t want to put her back up.
For all we know, that letter could be a fake. ”
“I doubt that.”
“Really? You, of all people.”
“Simocatta’s thing is old books,” I said, keeping my eyes glued to the brass pot, where the oil was just starting to bubble. “He knows as much as I do about books, maybe more. Therefore, he knows fakes.”
“Does he? Or does he rely on people like you?”
“He knows fakes,” I repeated firmly, on the basis of no actual evidence whatsoever. “And even if he doesn’t, you wouldn’t dare take the risk. You’d have to be mad to chance it, trying to fake a man with his reputation.”
“Exactly,” she said triumphantly. “So it’s exactly what I’d do, in her shoes. Everybody knows you’d have to be crazy, so they assume you’re honest, they don’t even bother checking. And then you’re in.”
There was a sort of logic in that, but not one of the varieties I feel comfortable with.
Very tentatively, I dipped the tip of a woodcock’s pin feather into the oily black mess, collecting a single tiny droplet.
I flicked it into a small earthware dish of clean oil, then stirred it with the point of the shaft.
The oil turned a deep, unmistakeable purple. “Shit,” I said.
She knows I rarely swear. “Bad?”
“Good,” I said. “It worked. We have purple ink.”
She grinned at me. “Told you it’d be a piece of piss. Just follow the recipe and you can’t go wrong.”
I lifted the brass pot off the stove. The recipe said let it cool down, then reheat it and reduce it to the consistency of pitch. Except that the relevant word could also mean bitumen, which isn’t quite the same thing. “Exactly,” I said, in a slightly shaky voice. “Lot of fuss about nothing.”
“So,” she went on, “you’ve got your blue, you’ve got your purple, you’ve got your bit of old skin. What else do you need?”
“Gold leaf,” I said. “But not the sort we get around here.”
“Of course not.”
“No,” I went on, “it’s got to be Echmen gold, which is nine-nine-two pure with just a hint of copper, but not the stuff they make coins out of, because that’s only nine-eight-nine pure.
The kind of gold they make leaf out of only comes from the bed of one river, in the south-eastern delta, and the mine belongs to the emperor, and he uses all the gold himself or gives away tiny quantities of it as presents to very highly favoured dignitaries in the aristocracy, the civil service and the Church—”
“Don’t call it a church. They’re heathens.”
“The religious hierarchy,” I amended. “Now, it so happens that in the abbey treasury at Spitz there’s an absolutely exquisite Echmen incense box, which they use as a reliquary.
The hinges and lock escutcheon of the box are enough pure imperial Echmen gold to give me enough leaf to write our letter.
Of course, it’d mean taking about ten thousand gulden off the value of the box—”
She grinned at me. “You’re enjoying this.”
“Violating irreplaceable works of art? Certainly not. It’s breaking my heart.”
“Sticking it to Mother Tryphaena.”
“Let’s say I’m testing her resolve. You’ll notice, she hasn’t actually said no yet.
I find that interesting, to say the least. If she wasn’t absolutely dead set on this mission succeeding, she’d have told us, get knotted, use ordinary gold and ordinary purple, those clowns in Angkola won’t tell the difference.
But she hasn’t done that. Instead, she’s taking the advice of her expert, regardless of cost and inconvenience.
That’s interesting. And disturbing. She really must want that book an awful lot. ”
I know I can’t really be in love with Sister Svangerd, because there are times when I want her to go away and leave me in peace to get on with something, such as forging an incredibly difficult, important document.
Those, of course, are the times when she’s harder to get rid of than a Mesoge accent.
In the end I managed it by pointing out that she was late for Terce, by which time the sun was past its zenith and I’d lost the best of the light.
But (I argued, or realised) in Brother Jovian’s country, letters and similar documents would be written in a tent, by the light of a lamp or candle, so if I tried to imitate them in the full glare of noonday, blazing in through the perfectly situated scriptorium window, I’d be bound to get it all wrong, and we’d die.
“That’s it?” she said.
I nodded. She looked at me. I looked right back at her.
Sister Framea wasn’t the enemy, just the enemy’s gofer.
I’d proved that over the last few weeks.
If she wanted to have me killed, she’d have to ask first, and put together a report with cogent reasons, a timetable, a cost analysis and an action plan.
Meanwhile, Mother Tysapherna needed me enough to have spent the best part of a hundred thousand gulden following my expert advice.
Accordingly, I wasn’t scared of Sister Framea, or at least not much.
“You spent all that money on this.”
“Yes,” I said, “and it’s perfect. Well, it will be, after I’ve scruffed it up a bit.”
She stared at me. “The technical term,” I went on, “is distressed. It means you take something that’s a bit too pristine and beat the pudding out of it.”
That made her wince. The document lying on her desk was beautiful, no two ways about that. Whether or not it was a hundred thousand gulden beautiful was a matter of personal taste, but at least there was something visible and tangible to show for all that money. “What are you going to—?”