Chapter 2 #3
Another good point. “I don’t fancy the idea of being arrested the moment I step off the ship,” I said.
“Yes, we’ve got diplomatic credentials and benefit of clergy, but that assumes they’re playing by the rules, which is probably an unwarranted assumption.
Even so. Killing us in a muddy riverbed’s a bit extreme when all they have to do is put us back on the boat and not let us into Choris.
On the other hand, doing that would probably be a diplomatic incident, whereas if we got ourselves killed by generic bandits, that’d be unfortunate but nobody’s fault.
Hence, I suggest, the steps they went to in order to make the attackers look like robbers. Am I making any sense here?”
“No.”
“Just thinking aloud, really.”
“Go and do it somewhere else.”
It did occur to me to wonder whether I should have told her about the list, with my name on it, written in an obscure dialect of a dead language nobody knows how to read.
The problem with that was that I could easily anticipate her proposed course of action, which would be to back my friend Egil up against a wall and break his fingers one by one until he told her what she wanted to hear.
The moment might well come when I’d be glad to let her do that, but it hadn’t come yet, and I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to fritter them away on idle speculation.
I told myself that Egil had a lot of papers in his room, that it was highly unlikely that he could read or write Old High Permian, and people came and went into his place every minute of the day, so planting something like that on him would be easy as pie.
I didn’t actually say trust me to myself, but it was sort of implied.
“My leg,” I told her, on the eighth day of our sea voyage, “is feeling ever so much better.”
Eight days on a stone barge had reduced her to a wilted flower.
What little she’d managed to eat had come straight back out again, and her voice had dwindled down to a tiny whisper.
The sea, however, was being flat and still and butter-wouldn’t-melt, like a dog that’s just killed a chicken, so I’d managed to prise her away from the rail and build her a little nest of blankets in the hold.
We were due to arrive in Mavais early the next morning, a day late because of the bad weather but still with plenty of time in hand.
“I’m really looking forward to the council,” I said. “I particularly want to hear Anthemius and Eudo of Schanz debating the doctrine of unified purpose. I read Carrhasio’s defence of Anthemius, but—”
“You’re full of shit,” she croaked irritably. “You don’t even believe.”
“No, but it’s still fascinating. If you regard it all as an intellectual exercise, it’s really very rewarding.
Take Orosius’ deconstruction of predestination, for example.
If you go along with it, you’re implicitly signing up for an entirely mechanistic view of the creation process, whereas if you go to the opposite extreme and side with Aviduus and Lutomer of Gratz—”
“Piss off and stop tormenting me.”
Someone who didn’t know her as well as I do could take offence at that, but I grinned and told her to drink plenty of fluids. Then I went up on deck to see if we were in sight of land yet.
Most people don’t care much for Mavais, but I rather like it.
I’m not sure why. It’s a run-down, dog-poor sort of a place, what’s left of it.
When the empire fell, and refugees escaping from the Aram Chantat crowded into the peninsula and dug a broad channel across it to make themselves into an island, they built a regular imperial city to live in, the last of its kind.
The idea was that they’d exist entirely on sea trade and never go anywhere near the Aram-infested mainland, and for sixty years or so that was a good working proposition.
But then the few surviving imperial outposts fell to the Aram or the Auzida and there was nobody left to trade with.
The Aram never did get the hang of ships, so the only vessels on the sea were Sherden pirates; they had several goes at Mavais, but the first thing the Mavasines did when they got there was build massive walls on the approved imperial pattern, so the Sherden never stood a chance.
Mavais never fell. It just sort of faded away.
Long after the Aram and the Auzida went back to wherever they came from, the Mavasines refused to risk setting foot on the mainland.
Instead, they demolished two-thirds of the city, starting at the walls and working inwards, and ploughed it up for farmland.
The houses were mostly empty anyway, since well over half the population died in three waves of plague over forty years, and these days the Mavasines are just dog-and-stick farmers living on a small island.
They’ll still tell you they’re the last true blue-blood remnant of the old empire, unconquered and unsullied, but point to one of the inscriptions on the walls behind them and ask them what it says, and either they know it by heart or they guess.
Still, a surprising number of good things have managed to survive in Mavais, mostly by benign neglect, and it’s still a useful seaport, because of where it is.
The first things you see, therefore, are the old walls, rising up out of the sea like an outstretched hand, palm facing – thus far, but no further.
They’re the last ever made out of the legendary imperial powdered stone, the secret of which has been lost for six hundred years.
Apparently there was a mountain in Antecyrene made out of a special kind of rock you could grind into dust; then, if you mixed the dust with sand and water, you could cast it, like bronze, into any shape you liked.
The walls of Mavais are built out of hundreds of thousands of absolutely identical, perfectly straight and square one-ton blocks, mortared together and faced with more of the magic dust paste so that it looks like the whole wall is one solid piece of stone.
The neighbours, and most of the Mavasines themselves, say that the wall was built for the gods by the giants, who demanded the goddess of love as payment for their work, and that was how the first war in heaven started.
An easy mistake to make, if you don’t happen to know the true story.
Walls like that would be worth the price, if you ask me.
Ships from Choris call at Mavais to pick up linen from north Blemmya and salt from Olbia, so finding a ride wasn’t a problem.
I left her at the convent, to recover from her ordeal and catch up on her confessions, and strolled up into the old town to refresh my memories of the sights before going down to the docks and finding us a boat.
By some strange chance I’d put some of our money in the pocket of my habit, presumably for safekeeping, and it was still there when I happened to pass the door of a shop I remembered from my previous visit.
If you ask the man who runs it what his business is, he’ll tell you, scrap metal and general salvage – by which he means things that turn up, in the ground or at the back of old sheds, and which nobody in his right mind could possibly want for anything; things like books and icons and statues, along with rusty cart springs, broken lamps and old furniture so wormy it falls to bits when you try and lift it.
The last time I was there I paid a denier for the collected comedies of Notker, complete apart from the last volume; as far as I know, it’s the only surviving copy of The Gentleman in Black and Creatures of Impulse, and the version of Pollio’s Thumb is very different from the one in the abbot’s manuscript.
Like I said, things like that occasionally still come to light in Mavais, if you can be bothered to look for them down among the cracked trivets and two-legged chairs.
Old sources talk about there having once been an imperial library at Mavais.
If it didn’t burn down (as most libraries eventually do) then all the books from it must have gone somewhere.
So I went in and poked around, and I’d found a nice old Mezentine stiletto, which I knew she’d like, and an almost pristine copy of Anectho’s Commentaries (not particularly rare, but a steal at half a denier and useful as a swap for something else if I happened to meet a book freak at the council) when the shopkeeper came up behind me and made a sort of choking noise, presumably to get my attention.
“You like old stuff, then,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I’ve got something really old,” he said. “Out back.”
I didn’t hold my breath. Anything that isn’t still hot from the forge or wet from the mason’s trowel would be really old as far as he was concerned, and since he charged the same for a pitchfork head with one tine missing as he did for a late Mannerist icon of the Transfiguration, I assume he attributed equal value to both.
“Sure,” I said. “Oh, and what do you really want for this icon? You’ve got it down for a denier, but I imagine that’s just rustic humour. ”
“Half a denier,” he said without looking, and I paid him before he could change his mind. “This way.”
The front of his shop was a timber-frame shack, thatched with barley straw.
Out back was through a breathtakingly lovely late imperial arch, leading into what must once have been the private chapel of a substantial merchant’s house.
There was just enough flaking stucco left to show that the back wall had been a floor-to-ceiling Annunciation (if I knew more about it, I could probably have identified the artist), and the floor was paved with slabs of the same miraculous cast stone as the city walls were made of.
The room was full of junk and stank of mildew and rot, and in the middle of it, sitting on a rusted-out farrier’s forge with the bellows-leather hanging in rags, was a box.
“Three deniers,” he said.