Chapter 3 #2
Then one of the women’s daughters tugs at her mother’s skirt. Look, Ma, strangers. Her mother looks up; so do her friends and relations. They see two ragged figures walking slowly and painfully along the beach, a tall man and a woman.
If you live in Numbart you’re naturally wary of strangers, especially if they come from the sea.
But these people clearly aren’t Sherden.
Their clothes are sodden and mouldy and ripped to shreds, but they’re made from some weird kind of fabric you’ve never seen before, and in spite of its deplorable condition, you just know it’s incredibly rare and expensive.
Whoever these people are, they’re in no state to constitute a threat.
Under the protective layer of cautious suspicion, Numbart folk are kind-hearted and hospitable.
The sea has brought these poor suffering creatures to them to be looked after.
Besides, though of course this only occurs to you later, after the first fine flush of altruism, they might have money.
It turns out that they do. For a simple meal of grilled herrings and barley bread they cheerfully offer a whole gulden. They also want a ride, across the straits to the island. It’s vitally important that we get there as soon as possible, they say, in their strange, heavily accented voices –
(The accent took us hours; first me inventing it, then Svangerd and me practising it until we could do it without having to think.
Imagine, I told her, what you’d sound like if you spoke a dialect of Robur that broke off from the mainstream of phonetic development three hundred and fifty years ago, and was only ever spoken by priests and high officials on state occasions.
You really are weird, she told me, but she resolved to humour me, bless her.)
Needless to say, when the men get back that night, they’re torn between the prospect of earning three gulden and their natural lifelong terror of sailing too close to the shoreline of Angkola.
You don’t know those people, they insist; as soon as they see us, they’ll grab us and load us in chains, and then it’ll be straight to the slave market and a short, unpleasant life in a slate quarry somewhere.
The strangers shake their heads. We have to get to Angkola, they say.
We’re ambassadors from the most high and excellent Emperor Jovian IX, king of kings, son of the sun, undisputed monarch of the eastern steppe.
That gets their attention. You don’t mean Brother Jovian?
The strangers smile. Yes, that Jovian; well, actually, his lots-of-times-great-grandson.
Even so, Angkola. A compromise is reached.
Five very brave fishermen agree to row out across the straits by moonlight and deposit the strangers on a remote beach, in return for five gulden.
Included in the deal are two pairs of stout waxed boots and a generous supply of bread, salt fish and the local sheep’s milk cheese, an acquired taste.
As it happens, the following night is what the Numbarters call a pirate moon: just enough light to steer by, if you know precisely where you’re going.
The boat reaches the island, the strangers disembark, the boat leaves quickly.
Three hours later, just after sunrise, the strangers walk up to the door of a farmhouse.
Take us to your leader, they say, or words to that effect.
The rest of that day was fraught and very intense.
Svangerd and I weren’t left alone for a moment, which meant staying in character the whole time.
Not a problem for me if I really put my mind to it, but I could see Svangerd was starting to get a bit ragged round the edges.
By that stage we were in some deputy assistant prefect’s office, explaining who we were for the seventh time.
Her accent had already slipped twice, though I was fairly sure the deputy assistant prefect hadn’t picked up on it, and she’d contradicted herself once, which was rather more serious.
“What the lady deaconess means,” I said smoothly, “is that we were cast ashore in the middle of the night, but naturally we couldn’t see where we were until the sun rose in the morning.”
“But she said—”
“You’ll have to make allowances, I’m afraid. This has been a terrible experience for her. For both of us. It’s the first time either of us has ever seen the sea. Tell me, is it usually that bad?”
That made him grin. “Yes,” he said. “Round here, anyhow. The current running out of the straits is a right bitch if you aren’t used to it. Your skipper should’ve stopped off at Meloisa and taken on a pilot.” That made him frown. “Wonder why he didn’t do that.”
“Maybe he did,” I said, “I don’t know, we were just passengers. And all I know about sailing is what I’ve heard in old stories and poems. Out of interest, what is a pilot exactly? Isn’t it a bad man who makes a living stealing from ships?”
“That’s a pirate,” the deputy assistant prefect said. “A pilot’s a specialist navigator. Tells you how to steer the ship,” he amplified. “Still, when the sea really wants to get you, a pilot’s neither here nor there. When it’s your time, it’s your time.”
I nodded gravely. “And yet you people spend your lives sailing on the sea,” I said. “You must be very brave.”
He laughed. “Brave as two short planks,” he said. “You wouldn’t catch me going out in one of those things. That’s why I wangled this cushy little number. Got an uncle who plays dice with the archdeacon’s chaplain. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, you know?”
When they start acting stupid, I worry. The nature and quality of his questions so far gave me the impression that he hadn’t got his job through honest nepotism, and now he was trying to make us believe we were dealing with an idiot.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t quite understand what you’re talking about. ”
“Things are different where you come from,” he said, nodding. “Well, sounds like it’s a hell of a long way. Anyhow, welcome to Angkola. I reckon you’re going to make a hell of a stir, one way or another.”
At least we got to spend the night in guest rooms in the prefecture, rather than a cell. I didn’t look to see if there were guards on the door. Svangerd did, needless to say.
“They don’t believe us,” she hissed in my ear as we bounced up a steep hill in a small covered chaise the next morning. “There were guards in the corridor last night. You must’ve said something to put their backs up.”
I explained that Angkola was a small, barely stable dictatorship surrounded by understandably hostile states; naturally, they were paranoid.
“But everything’s fine,” I reassured her.
“Our covers are unbreakable. Why? Because I’ve been to infinite pains to get every damn thing exactly right.
Therefore there’s nothing at all to worry about. Trust me.”
I’ve been around, which is more than practically everybody in the world can say these days.
Ninety-nine people out of a hundred in the West have never been more than twenty miles from where they were born, but I’ve been to Choris (twice) and Schand and Iden and Boc Bohec.
I’ve seen the ruins of the Great City, and the coast of Blemmya, in the distance, through the mist and the driving rain.
The most extraordinary thing the poet can think of to say about the hero of the Song of Bardas is that he’s seen the cities of men and understood their minds; well, I’ve done that, after a fashion, though whether it’s made me a deeper, wiser person I really couldn’t say.
The point is, these days I don’t impress easily.
Show me a wonder of the world and I’ve seen something bigger, taller, older, more intact.
The North Gate of Raffengard? Yawn. I’ve seen the remains of the Walls of Florian. Been there, seen that.
But my first sight of the citadel of Angkola – seen from the landward, not the sea – made me stop and stare.
And yet it’s a relatively recent thing, built after the empire fell, by people who were already well on the way to declining into the savagery we know as normal.
Even so; the walls of the citadel are cut stone, not brick or wattle and daub.
Its roof is tiled, which means that someone on Angkola remembered how to make a furnace hot enough to bake clay till it glazed.
The same man, or someone else, knew how to build scaffolds and cranes that could lift those massive ten-ton blocks halfway up a mountain and deposit them on the ledge the citadel rests on, and how to cut cisterns out of solid rock.
I don’t know, maybe he read how to do it in a book, or maybe his ancestors had been engineers and masons since before the Fall.
The fact remains, he did it; which proves that that sort of thing can still be done, even though there are no more emperors of the seed of Florian, and human beings have dwindled from giants into dwarves, and turned stupid.
If I was only slightly more gullible than I am, something like that might even make me feel hope for the future.
The fact that the unknown genius built this remarkable thing for a bunch of slave dealers and pirates is probably beside the point.
In my mind’s ear I can hear him telling himself that their money was as good as anybody else’s.
That’s what I’d have said, in his shoes.
“That thing is a real bitch,” Svangerd muttered in my ear. “How the hell is anybody supposed to get in and out of it without being seen?”
“People can be so thoughtless,” I said. “But we’re not going to have to do that, so don’t worry about it. We’re legit, remember? We have a letter.”