Chapter 8 #4
Suppose – just suppose – that you were lucky enough to get hold of a genuine copy of an original imperial book, a thousand years old or older.
And then try and imagine that you’re wicked enough and skilful enough to take a piece of Aelian pumice (itself an irreplaceable antique, since the vein was exhausted seven hundred years ago) and slowly, patiently scrub away at your manuscript until all the writing was ground away.
You’d then have a piece of genuine thousand-year-old parchment, minus the surface layer; it’d be the right skin from the right animal, skived with the right tools, cured in the right way.
It would be, in essence, the truth – apart from missing the top layer.
To restore that, you’d need to grind and burnish it in exactly the same way they did it a thousand years ago, using clerks’ tools from the period – very, very difficult, but it could conceivably be done, by a genius-level forger.
Do all that, and you’ve got a surface on which to write what the hell you like, and pass it off as a text from antiquity.
Once you’d done that (using what for ink?
Don’t ask me, not my department, I’m only the parchment expert) you’d have to use a whole battery of tricks to age the finished surface.
For example, the putative document would have been written in a hot climate, so you need to warm it just right over a fire, then taken to a cold, damp climate three hundred years later (a bit of damping down with a wet cloth; allow mould to form, then carefully scrub it off) and left on a shelf in a library for over a century (work in some ingrained dust; squash it just right to simulate standing on end; do something or other to fade the outer surface where it would have been exposed to faint but continual sunlight) before being confined in an airtight rosewood box (use sawdust ground off the box itself where it wouldn’t show to simulate a very faint but lingering rosewood scent) –
The good news was, I didn’t have to do any of this stuff.
All I had to do was give the impression that it could have been done, enough to strike a spark of doubt in the lamp-oil store of my audience’s mind.
If you want to undermine an arch, remove one stone and the rest will come tumbling down.
More to the point, I didn’t want to convince the whole commission.
That would be the worst thing I could possibly do.
What I needed was dissent – the parchment expert declaring that there was room for doubt, the other experts swearing blind that the documents were authentic, and the parchment expert must be wrong, or deliberately making trouble.
It came as a shock to realise that I couldn’t think of anyone other than me who knew enough and had enough imagination to pull this trick off.
I thought about it and decided I was still missing something.
I needed to strike that essential spark.
There had to be that moment when a faint bell tinkled in the back of the parchment lady’s mind, edging her over from scepticism to subconscious belief (which would then do my work for me, because she’d be on my side without realising it) So, let’s think.
If I was the parchment lady, what would tilt the balance for me?
I scrabbled about in my mind for a bit, like someone trying to climb up a wellshaft, and then I got a toehold.
Books – rare books – yes, that’ll do nicely.
Seven years ago or thereabouts, back when I used to work for the archduke, he sent me to the monastery at Kreuz to copy the last surviving manuscript of Svartbald’s Types of Ethical Theory.
But it wasn’t there. Being young and naive I made a hell of a fuss about it, until someone took me aside and patiently explained that the abbot had sold the book (which he had no right to do) to a wealthy collector, and if I insisted on calling attention to the gap on the dusty shelves, something awful would almost certainly happen to me on my way home, and that would be a great shame but probably, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal.
When I say a hell of a fuss, I’m not exaggerating.
I’d actually got as far as registering a formal complaint with the patriarchal legate; which means three copies, sealed and notarised, and the legate’s office takes everything that crosses its desk so very, very seriously.
There was a good chance, therefore, that people right across the scribal community would have heard about it, including, pray God, the parchment lady.
The last copy of Svartbald would have been about the right age, written on the right parchment.
Stealing it and cutting it up into four strips – cutting it lengthways, that would’ve been my masterstroke; because in the relevant period, they did that all the time.
Parchment was expensive, even then, so if you wanted to copy something, it was cheaper to buy a second-hand book, cut it into strips and grind off the writing than to lash out good money on virgin material.
So I would confess that it was me who stole the copy of Svartbald, and that’s what I used to make the true gospels. Clever old me.
I stopped and thought it all through from the beginning, just to make sure I wasn’t being too clever by half.
I was reaching that point you often get to in this sort of scam where the truth and your lies get so hopelessly intertwined and alloyed with each other that you can’t tell them apart.
That’s a good thing, in context, usually, but you can trip yourself up if you’re not careful.
Now then. Take it step by step, and do try and remember which bits are true and which bits aren’t.
It’s a bit like the coinage. In theory, a denier is pure silver: silver and nothing else.
But if you add a cupful of copper to a ton of silver, nobody’s ever going to know the difference and you’re in profit by the difference in value between a cupful of silver and a cupful of copper – say ninety deniers, roughly what a master mason makes in a year.
Governments realised this about two thousand years ago and turned it into an instrument of fiscal policy, so that by the time the empire fell, the coinage was 99.
95 per cent pure copper with a tiny sprinkling of silver added to the melt like a flux, or the dab of holy water on your forehead that’s supposed to wash away all your sins.
Once you start alloying truth and lies, you end up with a currency that’s patently debased but which passes everywhere as legal tender, mostly because it’s got the emperor’s head stamped on it, so it must be all right.
When the empire fell, of course, there weren’t any more emperors, so for five hundred years we’ve been minting deniers in the name of Florian VIII – except that the people cutting the dies and hammering out the coins couldn’t read or write, so the letters became weird and garbled, and Florian’s portrait gradually sort of slipped, melted like he’d been left out in the sun, and these days he looks rather more like a hedgehog than the Emperor of the Robur, Defender of the Faith.
Moral: presumably there is such a thing as the truth, in abstract, in Saloninus’ Ideal Republic or somewhere like that.
But the currency, the circulating medium we all use every day, is an alloy.
The emperor Callimachus the Drunkard, so I read somewhere, took to drink to help himself forget about the catastrophic state of the imperial economy, which led (among other things) to an unprecedented level of base metal in the coins.
It got so bad that, after a month or so, all the silver rubbed off the raised portions of his portrait, revealing the red copper beneath (the silver in the alloy migrates to the surface as the molten metal cools) – which is why Callimachus the Drunkard came to be known as Old Coppernose, a very good joke which didn’t amuse him in the slightest.
Naturally, the art of skilfully diluting silver was lost when the empire fell.
Like so many things. We aren’t nearly such good liars as they were.
Oh, we lie, all the time, but our lies are so much harder to believe.
But a really good old-fashioned imperial lie, like imperial silver or imperial steel: they don’t make ’em like that any more. Except for me. If I was lucky.
Armed with her magic sword, swathed in an old habit she’d pinched from Mother Krimhild’s trunk (for added sanctity) and doused from head to toe in water that had been used to wash up the Holy Chalice after Communion, Svangerd got into the guest wing by climbing onto the roof and prising open a skylight.
She spent the night in a corridor waiting for Kotkel, who didn’t show, so she gave up and went back to bed.
While she was huddled in the shadows with her teeth chattering, Kotkel smashed his way into the guardhouse and killed four sentries who’d just come off watch. A fifth sentry, who’d gone outside for a piss, saw the whole thing through a crack in a shutter.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “I should’ve guessed what it would do next, but I didn’t. I suppose I underestimated its tactical abilities. I won’t do that again.”
“Oh come on,” I said, a bit desperately. “Of course it’s not your fault. If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine, because he’s my brother. But it’s not my fault, and it definitely isn’t yours.”
She gave me a sour look. “What you mean is,” she said, “you’re really glad I screwed up, because you think I don’t stand a chance against it. Silly of me, but I really thought you had a better opinion of me than that.”
A fool would’ve pointed out that Kotkel had slaughtered four armed and armoured men without any apparent difficulty. Fortunately, this fool wasn’t that stupid. “I don’t think fighting Kotkel is the answer,” I said. “I think there’s a better way of solving this.”
“Really? What?”
“Find out who’s controlling him. Find out what they want.”