Chapter 1 #3
“Why did I get put on this murdering princesses thing?” I made myself comfortable, filling the whole window. “I don’t naturally spring to mind when they’re handing out wet jobs.”
“Your pal does,” he replied. “And for some reason best known to herself, she likes working with you.”
“No,” I said, “There was a memo about eighteen months back, keep her away from sharp objects because she has a tendency to get carried away. As far as I know, that’s still in effect, so—”
“You oughtn’t to have seen that.”
“I can read upside down. So there’s a memo specifically saying, no more killing people for Svangerd until she’s learned to curb her enthusiasm. Therefore, we can deduce, that wasn’t the reason. Therefore if that wasn’t the reason, what was?”
He yawned. “Gives you a chance to go to the funfair.”
“Appreciated,” I said. “But that’s not the reason.”
“What’s the matter with you? Squeamish? Chicken? Suddenly got religion?”
“Yes,” I said. “Look, this isn’t the sort of thing I should be doing. There are other officers better qualified, and it’s a sensitive job that needs to be done properly. Also, when anyone gives me something nice, I get suspicious.”
He picked up his ruler and started scribing lines on a sheet of parchment with a small piece of soapstone. “You always were an ungrateful bastard.”
I took the ruler away from him. “Yes,” I said. “When I was a kid, we always saved the last of the apples so that, when it was time to slaughter the pig, we’d have something to lure her out of the pen with. What’s going on, Egil? Why is everything suddenly coming up apples?”
He looked at me. “Since you insist on asking,” he said, “I wrote in my report, this is obviously a job for Lauzeric and Anthemius. I even checked to make sure they were available, which they were. Then I filed my report, he read it and made a decision. That’s what he does.
I don’t argue with him, and in return I get a room with a window.
If you don’t like it, go and pester him. ”
“Right,” I said, giving him his ruler back. “I see. Thank you.”
Properly speaking, Egil gets a window because he needs the light, for reading and writing by.
Lesser mortals, assigned to less important functions, have to go out into the cloister garden.
There’s always a dozen or so readers and writers there during daylight hours, so it was perfectly natural for me to join them.
I sat on a bench under the chestnut tree and removed from my sleeve the half-sheet of coarse recycled parchment I’d picked up off Egil’s desk, while his attention was on the ruler I’d just taken from him with my other hand.
I can read upside down like it was my mother tongue, but I can’t read through a folded sheet.
Another thing I can’t read is Old High Permian.
That’s because it’s a dead language. Even here, where learning is concentrated like crows round a dead fox, there can only be half a dozen scholars who understand it.
Nobody’s written anything in it for seven hundred years, or so I’d been led to believe.
I can recognise the letters, because basically it’s a series of straight vertical lines with squiggles poking out of them (the Permians only ever used them for scratching on metal) but that’s as far as I go.
Egil, who I’ve known for a very long time, is no linguist, and I doubted very much that he was whiling away his leisure hours by compiling the definitive edition of the surviving Old Permian texts.
I’d stolen the folded sheet because it had my name written, in Robur capitals, on the bit I could see – mine and half a dozen others, which I didn’t recognise.
Nuts, I thought. As I believe I already mentioned, I relish the quiet life.
Brother Lauzeric and Brother Anthemius are two canons from our daughter house in Laxardal.
From time to time you hear weird rumours about them, and they have an uncanny knack of being in interesting places at interesting times.
Like me, they specialise in making copies of rare old books, usually ones of which only one copy is known to exist. They’re also renowned editors, which means they travel a lot, comparing texts, hunting out variant readings so they can amend, annotate and restore.
Things go missing and people die in places they visit.
I’ve never met them, as it happens. They’re who I’d have chosen for the job, if anybody had asked me.
It occurred to me, on my way back to the east wing, that Egil is a careful man, to whom confidential material is routinely entrusted. He doesn’t leave things lying around where dishonest people can steal them. He’s also, though he would probably dispute it if challenged, my friend. More nuts.
Properly speaking, Svangerd and I work for Simocatta, abbot of the Golden Star in Leerstad.
Neither of us have ever met him. I saw him once, when he preached a very fine Ascension Day homily on predestination in the chapel royal.
She reckons she met him a long time ago, before she left the world, but she says a lot of things.
For years, the ruling passion of his life was his rivalry with our previous boss, the duke.
Both of them were book collectors. Not in the usual way, which is all about heartbreakingly lovely illuminations and gem-encrusted bindings of unspeakable vulgarity; what they both obsessed over was rarities.
There are only so many books in the world – ten thousand have been written, according to Dimo of Schanz, ever since the world began, down to the present day (his present day – he died three hundred years ago), of which four thousand are written in Echmen and haven’t been translated, and three thousand have been lost for ever.
Four and three make seven, so that leaves three thousand.
Four hundred of those are scripture, the standard texts that everybody’s read or heard and some of us know by heart; there are hundreds of copies of them, in some cases thousands.
Four hundred from three thousand leaves two thousand, six hundred, in different degrees of rarity.
Pretty well any decent monastic library will have Jotapians’s Confessions and Theuderic’s Meditations.
I know of, and have seen with my own eyes, fifteen copies of Saloninus’ Principia Mathematica, and thirteen Ideal Republics.
But, staying with Saloninus for the moment, there are only six known copies of the Genealogy of Morals, only four of Daybreak and just two copies of his Collected Plays.
As for his Downfall of the Gods, there used to be one copy, in Abbot Simocatta’s collection, until it was destroyed by fire.
Luckily for the human race, a couple of murderous individuals working for the duke inveigled their way into his library, secretly copied the book and smuggled it out of the country.
The copy was subsequently published, causing an ideological earthquake that led to the disestablishment of the church in the duchy, the dissolution of all the monasteries, and the two murderous individuals I mentioned just now being forced to flee for their lives and ending up working for Abbot Simocatta.
That’s what you get for doing the right thing, apparently.
Dimo of Schanz reckoned that it was high time (three centuries ago) that someone started writing some new books, to replace the ones that were lost and top up the pool, so to speak.
That, of course, is just plain silly. It’s a knack we seem to have lost as a species, along with clockwork and stained glass and underfloor heating, back when the old empire fell.
In Dimo’s time, there were still men and women around whose great-grandparents could remember the empire, so I guess Dimo was one of the last few for whom the things they did back then made any sort of sense.
There was still a tiny ember of living memory, a few names and place names, making it possible for him to believe that the people who built the cities and made the things and wrote the books were ordinary real people, not gods and giants.
From our perspective, that’s impossible to believe or even imagine.
We see the ruined walls and tumbledown towers, we dig up their filigree and cloisonné and their rusted-solid clocks, we conserve and steal their books, and we know deep down in our hearts that there are some things – a lot of things – that human beings used to be able to do once upon a time but can do no longer: that as a species we’ve shrunk and diminished, and we’ll never be smart like that ever again.
It’s like dog-breeding, according to my old boss the duke.
You start off with a big dog, first cousin to a wolf, and you fiddle about with it for dozens of dog generations until you end up with something not much bigger than a rat, with floppy spinach-leaf ears and a little stub of a tail – and that, according to my old boss, is what the Invincible Sun has been doing to us, ever since the old empire fell.
Presumably we couldn’t be trusted with the strength and the speed of the wolf, because look at what we did to the empire.
Therefore it was necessary to diminish us into something small, cute and stupid.
If I believed in the Invincible Sun, that theory would make a lot of sense.
As it is, in order to accept the theory, I’d have to believe that we did it to ourselves, either deliberately or because we were too reckless and ignorant to realise what the consequences of our actions would be.
And that makes a certain degree of sense too, now I come to think of it.