Chapter 3 #4
She was having trouble speaking because the muscle had very nearly strangled her, when she tried to make a break for it on the stairs down to the cells.
I’d realised at the time that she didn’t stand a chance, so I didn’t do anything, and accordingly I was suffering from nothing worse than an average bad sore throat.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “We did everything right. It was all perfect, the parchment, the inks, the cloth, the tube—”
“Stop drivelling,” she rasped, and the pain it cost her to say it made me wince.
Yes, I didn’t say, but it was important. “Those men,” I said. “Five of them, dressed like goldsmiths or something like that. Did you hear what they said?”
“Shut up.” She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing for a while. It didn’t come easily, and she had to put a lot of effort into it. “Right,” she said. “We’d better figure out what we’re going to do.”
“Do?” I gazed at her, or at least the vague shape in the darkness where the voice was coming from.
“Are you nuts? We’re not going to do anything.
We’re going to lie here in the straw till they beat out of us who we are and why we were sent here, and after that, presumably, we’ll die of our injuries. That’s what we’re going to do.”
“You can if you like. I’m getting out of here.”
At which point I heard bolts moving. The cell door opened and there was light, as on the First Day. “It’s all right,” said a voice I recognised. “I’ll shout if I need you.”
The door closed and the bolts shot, but the light stayed.
By it I could see one of the five well-dressed men; the boys, Aviragus had called them, in one of the most monstrous abuses of language I’ve ever been forced to witness.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said, and I realised he wasn’t talking to me.
“Because if you jump me and try and escape they’ll kill you.
But if you stay still and quiet as a little mouse, I’ll get you out of here and you can go home. Capisce?”
He was a tallish man with a big nose; I’m guessing he was one of those people who start going grey in their early forties. Robur to the core, or I can’t read faces. “Why would you do that?” I said.
He grinned. “Good question. Not my idea. Orders. Apparently you’re needed for something else.”
At which point the penny dropped. Talking of which, Saloninus once did an experiment, in an attempt to prove some theory of his which unfortunately didn’t survive the Fall.
He climbed up to the top of the tallest tower in Iden Astea, and dropped a penny.
When it hit the ground, it cracked a paving slab, reputedly two inches thick.
That sort of penny. “No,” I said. “Please.”
“Excuse me?”
But I couldn’t. It says in scripture, forgive your enemies, and although I’m not a believer I can see the merit in the idea and I do try. But not these enemies. It simply can’t be done.
The point being, I’d heard that justification before, in Choris, when I had my run-in with the bunch of self-deluded lunatics calling themselves the Loyal Opposition.
We would have killed you, they told me (or maybe it was, we would have let you die; can’t remember offhand) but we’ve got orders.
You’re needed for something else, some later stage of the grand design, and killing you now would be more than our jobs are worth.
The grand design, you see, is what these maniacs are all about.
They’re genuinely convinced that there is one – they call it the long game – and everything they do is part of it, even the bits that go horribly wrong.
Especially the bits that go horribly wrong; the merit of the long game being its infinite flexibility, in a world without end, amen.
Everything screws up and all the work you’ve done comes to nothing?
Don’t you believe it. All that happens is that the plan gets amended, to take account of the change in circumstances, and re-emerges better and stronger than before.
When your timescale is eternity, you can do that.
Garbage, needless to say. There is no Loyal Opposition, because there is no devil, because there is no God.
Ergo, there is no grand design or long game.
But these idiots won’t accept that, just as Svangerd and ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the population of the known world won’t accept that there is no Invincible Sun, and what the hell is one poor isolated enlightened man – me – supposed to do in the face of universal delusion?
He was grinning at me. His wasn’t the sort of face that was ever meant to grin. Then he flicked his eyes sideways, towards Svangerd, then back again. Not in front of her. Well, at least we could agree on something.
“Splendid,” he said. “All right, then. You two just sit tight and try not to do anything stupid, and I’ll have you out of here and on your way in two shakes.”
Svangerd was staring at him. She believes in the Loyal Opposition, implicitly and unquestioningly. My guess is, the penny had just hit her and smashed her head in.
“It’s them,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
We were in darkness once again. The man with the nose had been gone for about ten minutes. It was the first time she’d spoken.
“I think so.”
“Oh, God.” Svangerd is pretty hot on not taking His name in vain, so I’m guessing that was a genuine prayer.
“Lighten up, will you? We’re getting out of here. We’re not going to die.”
No response. I could just hear very faint muttering. That would be Svangerd, saying the catechism over and over again.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “This is no time—”
“Shut up.” For a woman with a crushed windpipe, she was doing pretty well. Tough as old boots, Svangerd. “This is all your fault.”
“Really? How the hell do you make that out?”
“You attract them,” she rasped back. “It’s something about you.”
“I don’t even believe—”
“Maybe that’s it. I don’t know, do I? I don’t want to know. I just want them to go away.”
Trust a true believer – I’m not being disrespectful here, just factually accurate – not to be able to see the positive side of not being tortured to death.
When the muscle came to tell us we were free to go, she just lay there in the straw looking desperately sad; they practically had to drag her out of there.
“The ambassador wants to talk to you,” the muscle told me. “Not her,” he added. “Just you.”
I’ll bet he does, I didn’t say. “It’s all right,” I told her. “Excuse me,” I asked the muscle, “but can you recommend a good inn?”
He looked at me. If things had gone the way he’d been anticipating, at that moment he’d be pulling my teeth out one by one. “Well,” he said, “there’s the Falcon, in Cripplegate.”
“What’s it like?”
“My brother-in-law runs it.”
“That’s good enough for me. I’ll see you there,” I said to Svangerd. “I won’t be long.”
Along about a mile of corridor, then up some horrible spiral stairs, then more corridor, then more stairs, only going down this time.
I got the impression that I was being led round and round in circles, with a view to keeping me from forming a mental image of the layout of the place.
It occurred to me that you didn’t get to be a high-ranking goon in King Aviragus’s muscle by being stupid. “In there,” he said.
We’d stopped outside a door: plain oak, fairly new, one of many. “Thanks,” I said, and went in.
It was the man with the nose. He was sitting in a window seat, with a view out over the stable yard. There was a stool next to the fireplace, which wasn’t lit. I sat down.
“Well now,” said the man with the nose. “First things first. Sigurthus says hello. He’s sorry he can’t be here himself, but he’s got a lot on at the moment. Important stuff. He says he trusts you understand.”
“I couldn’t give a flying fuck what Sigurthus trusts,” I said. “Or you, come to that.”
He nodded, as if I’d just said something perfectly rational and reasonable. “Personally,” he went on, “I prefer the Unicorn.”
“What?”
“In Southwell Street. The sheets are clean, and they do good seafood. But the Falcon is all right.”
I breathed out through my nose. “Did you really come all the way from Sammagene?”
“Of course not.” He smiled. “There’s no such place as Sammagene, I made it up.
No, I gave the security officer the impression he’d been halfway across the world to fetch me, but the fact is, he never went further than the docks.
It’s belief that counts, every time. Faith.
He’ll grow old telling his grandchildren about the amazing things he saw on his travels, dragons and sea serpents and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, and they’ll believe him, and one of them will grow up to be a famous navigator, and he’ll sail right across the Western Ocean and discover Essecuivo.
” He grinned. “Forget I told you that,” he said.
“You have no idea how much trouble Essecuivo’s going to make for everybody, once they discover the gold mines.
Rampant inflation and colonialism in all its most brutal forms are only the start of it.
Not supposed to tell you that, but since you haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m talking about, I really don’t see the harm, do you? ”
“All that,” I said, “just so you could screw up my plan.”