Chapter 8 #3
“For crying out loud, Svangerd. Next you’ll be saying the angels are telling you to drive the Sashan out of Rumeli Hesar.
Only it’s not angels. It’s some problem you’ve got, squirrelled away down deep where you can’t get at it, and this is your way of making things right with yourself.
I don’t know, maybe you want to get yourself killed.
Maybe that’s what it’d take, to wash away the guilt or whatever it is you feel you have to do.
A lot of the time you act like that’s what you want, but I generally put that down to you being crazy as a polecat and a homicidal maniac.
But trust me on one thing, Svangerd: it may be a lot of things but it ain’t angels.
Because you know what? There’s no such thing. ”
There was a moment when she was perfectly still. Then she grinned.
“Nice try,” she said. “You want me to go home so I’ll be safe, so you say a lot of nasty things, to make me mad at you and stomp off in a huff. Actually, that’s rather sweet. Just don’t ever say them again, or I’ll pull out all your teeth.”
We looked at each other, a bit sheepishly, as though we’d just fought a long and bloody battle and then realised we were on the same side. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean a word of it.”
That didn’t merit a response, obviously.
“It’s blindingly obvious what’s going on,” she said.
“The forces of Evil are here – you talked to them – and they brought those monsters here to break up the council and start a schism. And it’s equally obvious that I’m here to stop them.
I was here to deliver Mother Krimhild’s speech, and now I’m here to kill the monster. Simple as that.”
Simple as that; naturally I didn’t argue, because she wasn’t in the mood to listen, and I was on thin enough ice as it was. But it wasn’t as simple as that, was it?
The story so far, I said to myself, as I sat on a bench in the shade, watching the delegates go in for the debate.
My name is on a list, written in Permian letters.
I arrive in Choris, bringing with me the fatal documents, which just happened to be in a junk shop I was drawn to visit.
A monster, who turns out to be Dad, kills the princess, who would probably have had the moral authority to stop the schism, had she lived.
The soi-disant ambassador of the Loyal Opposition retrieves the documents from where I’d hidden them, and next thing you know, they’re all over town, and Holy Mother Church is teetering on the brink of disaster.
Krimhild and Svangerd save the day, so the new Loyal Opposition rep sidles up to me and blackmails me into trashing the ceasefire.
Yes, it all made sense. As simple as that.
But not really. The other story so far. On the way to Choris, before I’d so much as set eyes on that horrible wooden box, someone tries to kill me.
Later I dispose of the monster, but only because the Loyal Opposition dropped a massive hint about the bell-tower; if it hadn’t been for that, my brains would’ve been squeezed out through my ears.
Then another monster turns up (leaving on one side the fact that it’s my brother) and kills the Loyal Opposition agent.
Not content with that, he goes on to kill the man who could’ve discredited Svangerd and made it impossible for her to make the big speech and stop the schism.
Later the same monster comes to kill Krimhild – but too late to be useful, since at that very moment, Svangerd was in the council chamber, delivering the speech.
So, you see, not simple. Not simple at all.
You could wriggle a way through it by saying there were two opposing forces at work: Pure Evil, trying to bring about the schism and overthrow Holy Mother Church (which would be a perfectly reasonable thing for Pure Evil to want to do); and an opposing faction, trying to stop it.
So what name would you give that faction? The angels?
If I was an angel (not that they exist) and I wanted to stop the schism, is that the way I’d go about it?
Quite probably not. For a start, if I’m an angel, I’m a servant or agent of the Invincible Sun, who’s all-powerful and all-knowing.
I wouldn’t have to muck about with monsters and counter-monsters.
I could stop Dad in his tracks by turning him into a block of stone.
I could appear to Svangerd’s former john in a dream and tell him to go away somewhere.
I could see to it that the true gospels got eaten by mice years before they reached the junk shop.
I wouldn’t need to resort to violence. I wouldn’t need to squeeze anybody’s brains out.
Besides, if angels existed (and they don’t), they wouldn’t behave in this ridiculous, melodramatic fashion.
A god who (in person or through his duly authorised subordinates) carried on like that would be a laughing-stock, demonstrating with each feckless and irresponsible move that either He’s not omnipotent or else He’s too stupid or too perverse to run His universe competently.
Bottom line: if Good behaved like that, it wouldn’t be Good at all. It’d be good for nothing.
Not that there’s any such thing as Good and Evil.
Instead, there’s a lot of human beings (the vast majority of whom believe in all that nonsense) and a few phenomena, such as the Mesoge walkers, which an ignorant person could easily mistake for acts of God or the devil, but which were perfectly well understood by Tractantius, Thrasamund and Scaphio of Iden, although the books they wrote about it were carelessly mislaid when the empire fell and are no longer available.
It’s Saloninus’ razor: when you have two conflicting explanations, the simplest and most reasonable one is likely to be correct.
True but unhelpful. If Saloninus had been there in the cloister, in my shoes, he’d have used his razor to cut his own throat.
Drastic, perhaps, but being the sensible man he was, he’d have decided it was preferable to having to choose between wrecking the ceasefire and being directly responsible for the death of the woman he loved.
The same thought did cross my mind. If I died, I wouldn’t be able to tell the big lie, so there’d be no point in harming Svangerd, except pure spite.
It was, I realised, the sensible, responsible thing to do.
Furthermore, I was in a position to be able to do it, having so thoughtfully arranged my life and my affairs that I could afford to die and not be guilty of causing a single tear to be shed.
My sacrifice would save Svangerd and prevent the downfall of Holy Mother Church.
In fact, I’d have to be some sort of monster to insist on staying alive, when my death would be so universally beneficial.
If I’d wanted to be like that, I’d never have left the Mesoge.
I considered all that, and you know what? I decided to be heartless and selfish. Wrong of me, I know, but nobody’s perfect. Least of all me.
In which case – one damned thing after another, as the man said when he saw the policeman chasing the thief – I was going to have to find a way of fooling one of the experts on the authenticity commission.
Question: which one? Answer: consider their various areas of expertise and decide which one I was best at. Parchment; ink; handwriting; grammar, syntax and dialect.
Not an easy choice. When Assarion faked the Donations of Florian (the document by which the last emperor was supposed to have given the empire to Holy Mother Church), he was only found out because he used a pluperfect subjunctive in a dependent relative clause: spot on for the Golden Age of classical literature, but all wrong for the slipshod language of the late empire.
But I didn’t actually have access to the texts, so I couldn’t go through them looking for an anachronistic verb form or word ending, even assuming there’d be one to find, which there wouldn’t be.
The same went for handwriting. Without seeing the originals – what was circulating freely around the council were, of course, copies – I couldn’t really do much with that.
So I was left with ink and parchment. No bad thing.
I know a lot – far more than any honest man – about both topics.
Besides, I didn’t have to find fault with either of them – just as well, since there would be no fault to find.
Instead, I had to come up with a plausible way of faking them, and pretend that that was what I’d done.
There was no way of faking parchment and ink of that period. Correction: there was no way yet.