Chapter 1 #4
Moral: don’t let me get started about books, or I guarantee I’ll bore you to death.
Suffice it to say, I rather like the things – some more than others, I have to admit, but nobody’s perfect.
She reckons that if I was walking along a riverbank and I saw a drowning man clutching a book and I could only save one of them, I’d save the book.
That’s a trifle unfair. It would depend on what the book was.
But I guess that by the time I’d dived in, grabbed the book from the drowning man and turned to the flyleaf to see the title, it’d be too late anyhow.
One thing my superiors never seem to realise when they send me on inconvenient junkets to foreign parts is that I actually have work to do here, at home.
Presumably they reckon I spend my life sunning myself in the cloister garden or idly browsing through unsuitable books in the Old Library. If only.
“Go away,” I accordingly said, when she came breezing in the next morning. “I’m working. Also, you shouldn’t be here. This is the men’s side.”
She grinned. Nobody would have seen her, of course.
She’d have gone round the back of the stables, shinned up the drainpipe, crawled in through the skylight, crept down the disused back stairs and flitted like a ghost through the corridors.
She likes doing stuff like that. “Call that work?” she said, peering over my shoulder.
“Drawing pictures in the margins of books?”
She had dust and cobwebs all down the left side of her habit, and a cut on the back of her right hand. “This,” I said, “is a special illuminated missal, to be presented to the elector’s youngest son on his name-day, which is in three weeks’ time. If it’s not ready by then—”
She yawned. “I think all the pictures are silly,” she said.
“Actually, they’re more than that; they’re blasphemous.
I mean, why do rich people have pictures in their prayer books?
It’s so they’ve got something nice to look at during the boring old prayers.
Which means they aren’t listening to the prayers, which means their being at divine service is a mockery and a vanity.
So, by painting your pretty pictures, you’re actually encouraging them. That’s really bad.”
I was drawing the outline of a leopard crouched in a bed of lilies.
I had no idea what it thought it was doing there.
“The images,” I said, “are aids to meditation. Taken in conjunction with the text, they make the subconscious mind receptive to the multiple levels of meaning implicit in the words of the scriptures. Any fool knows that. Would you mind moving to your left? You’re in my light. ”
“What’s a leopard got to do with the seventy-third psalm?”
I took a deep breath, which didn’t help.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But He does, which is why He put that particular image in my mind. I do this job not just because I have exceptional graphic skills but because I have a proven track record of divine inspiration. Satisfied customers reckon that my illuminations increase the spiritual value of their devotions by up to twenty-six per cent—”
“Bullshit. You don’t even believe.”
“Beside the point. If He chooses to make me the vehicle of His light, what have my personal opinions concerning His existence got to do with anything? Look, I’ve got to concentrate on this or it’ll all come out cock-eyed. Please go away.”
“Fine,” she said. “In that case, I’ll just take your agreement as read and carry on, shall I?”
I put my pen down on the desk. It rolled off onto the floor and disappeared under the edge of the lectern.
“No you bloody well will not,” I said. Her shadow was across my page, which meant she was standing by the door.
“At least tell me what I just agreed to,” I said.
“That way, it won’t come as a complete shock. ”
The shadow moved. “While you’ve been in here doodling,” she said, “I’ve been working out a plan of operations. Basically, we need to keep it simple. In, do the job, out again, no messing.”
“You always say that,” I said. “And it always ends the same way. Please let’s not go through all that again.”
If she’d hit me for saying that, it wouldn’t have been the first time. “Fine,” she said. “You do all the planning. You think of a way of getting us into the state apartments, past all the guards—”
“Already done that,” I said.
Credit where it’s due, she’s always prepared to listen. “Go on, then,” she said.
I opened the lid of the desk and took out a scrap of parchment.
“This,” I said, “is the floor plan of the old imperial palace in Choris Anthropou.” I held up my hand to forestall her objections.
“I know, there isn’t one. No plan of the building is known to exist. But there is, because the palace is very old, and six hundred years ago it was described in detail in Psammetichus’ Principles of Architectural Theory.
I looked out the abbot’s copy, read it carefully and made this plan. ”
“Smart,” she said.
“Thank you. Right then, this is the entrance hall, which leads out into the square, on the opposite side of which is the temple, which is where the council will meet. With me so far?”
“I think you’ve got it upside down,” she said.
“Well spotted.” I turned it the right way up.
“This is the entrance hall. This here is the grand staircase, which Psammetichus reckoned was the eighth wonder of the world. It leads to the first floor, with state apartments for all the most important delegates. The princess will be on the east side, because she reckons she can’t sleep in a room that faces out onto the street. ”
“How do you know—?”
“Because she made a hell of a fuss about it when she paid a state visit to Earl Rothgar in Schanz about four years ago,” I said.
“It was noted in dispatches by our man in Schanz because they had to turf the Mezentine ambassador out of his room and give it to her, and he threatened to stalk out in a huff, which would’ve scuppered the trade negotiations, which were important to us because back then we were getting a lot of our salt from Beal Auzida.
I remember things,” I pointed out, “and years later, they come in handy.”
“So she’ll be in a room in the east wing. Go on.”
“On the east side,” I corrected her. “Now, Psammetichus devotes a chapter and a half of book six of Principles to ventilation. He points out that in a building with more than one floor anywhere north of the Olbian Caucasus, you need tubes for smoke to go up, otherwise people on the ground floor are apt to suffocate or freeze to death. Now, there’s a grand fireplace in the middle of the entrance hall, here.
I know that, because Bakkehard wrote an ode to celebrate the wedding of Gunthamund and Ortriz, four hundred and thirty years ago, and he specifically mentions the fireplace hung with garlands of ivy and mistletoe, extending from one corner of the room to the other.
From which we can deduce that the fireplace is in the exact dead centre of the hall. ”
She looked at me. “Who the hell is—?”
“Bakkehard of Odestat. Very minor court poet, wrote very long, bad poems, one of the last authors in the imperial tradition before the extinction of learning in the West. None of his work survives apart from snippets quoted in Kievegund’s textbook on Classical Robur grammar, to illustrate the use of the pluperfect subjunctive. ”
She gave me a sort of shocked look, as if she found it hard to believe that people like me really exist. “Cool,” she said. “So there’s a fireplace. Or there was a fireplace, four hundred years ago.”
“And where there’s a fireplace,” I said, “in a building of that period, there’s bound to be a chimney. And it gets hellish cold in Choris in winter, so the principal guest rooms are bound to have fireplaces too, which will connect to the main chimney by way of flues. Do you know what a flue is?”
“No.”
I told her about flues. “Chances are,” I went on, “that the flue leading from the fireplace in the princess’s room to the chimney will be wide enough for someone to crawl along, if they don’t mind getting their hair all sooty.
So in order to get into her room without being seen, all you need to do is get up on the roof and climb down the chimney and find the right flue, and there you are. ”
“You got all that out of some stupid old book?”
“There are no stupid books,” I said, “only stupid—”
“How long did that take you?”
I smiled. “Not nearly as long as you’d think,” I said. “Like I said, I tend to remember things. And I made a copy of Kievegund’s grammar for the duke’s daughter about eight years ago, so that bit of Bakkehard stuck in my mind. It was such a dreadfully bad poem, it was hard to forget.”
She nodded. “Clever you,” she said. “But my way’s better.”
I like her a lot, but sometimes she just makes me feel tired. “Go on.”
“It’s simple,” she said. “We waylay her personal chaplain, knock him on the head, steal his clothes, go straight up to her room and do her. No mucking about. No crawling around in confined spaces.”
“It’s crude. It’s violent. It won’t work.”
“Says you.” She gave me a long look, part contempt, part analysis. “You’re a selfish bastard,” she said. “And a coward. But mostly selfish.”
I’m a lot of things, I freely concede, but those two qualities wouldn’t have sprung immediately to mind. “What makes you say—?”
“Oh, come on.” Her fists were clenched; bad sign. “You come up with a plan that depends on someone crawling along a narrow shaft. Obviously you can’t do that: you’d get stuck. So the poor sucker doing the crawling will be me. Right?”
“Now you come to mention it—”
“Why’s that, I wonder? Is it just because you’re chicken, or is it because you really don’t fancy killing a woman?”