Chapter 9 #2
Pray for what? I asked myself, as I picked my way down that horrible spiral staircase.
Krimhild was never going to get better; nor did she seem to be in any hurry to die.
If there really was an Invincible Sun, He’d been very badly brought up, and never learned to take proper care of His toys.
You wouldn’t let a dog linger like that, not one you were fond of.
And on the other hand, there was Kotkel, and my dad –
I realised, as I reached the bottom of the staircase and emerged into the comparatively blinding sunlight, that I wasn’t going to stand up in the next session and pretend I’d forged the true gospels.
All along I’d been kidding myself, but it was time to face facts, if I was serious about putting together a Plan B.
I wasn’t going to do it because – well, for a start it’d be the end of me; the letter had reminded me that there was a world outside Choris and this appalling mess, and I wanted to go home.
Also, I’d reached the point where I didn’t believe anything.
Good, Evil, angels, the Loyal Opposition, the Invincible Sun – everybody was trying to sell me something, even though they knew perfectly well I had no money.
So it was time to think about it rationally, something which, as a good atheist, I ought to be able to do.
As it happened, I couldn’t; I’d tried, but no dice. Even so –
The Institutions of Florian the Great, setting out in unambiguous detail the entire law code of the empire, was lost hundreds of years ago, and only a few fragments remain.
All the laws comprised in it, however, remain in force (because they were never repealed) and are still binding on every one of us, even though nobody knows what they are.
This has allowed judges and law enforcement a substantial degree of scope over the centuries, mostly in the direction of holding that the prisoner at the bar must be guilty of something, but that’s not the point.
One of the few scraps that survived is Florian’s double standard of the burden of proof.
In criminal and ecclesiastical cases, guilt is established if the prosecution can prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.
In civil cases, liability is established if the case is proved on the balance of probabilities. Big difference.
Fuck – I rarely swear to myself, but sometimes you simply have to – fuck beyond reasonable doubt.
Doubt was everywhere, reasonable, unreasonable and purely intuitive, and trying to get rid of it was like trying to get rid of the last rat under a chicken coop.
The balance of probabilities, on the other hand: that was more like it.
On the balance of probabilities, everyone who’d been trying to influence me lately was lying to me and more full of shit than the East River, so the logical thing to do was not believe a word of it and do the best I could with the few facts I could verify by personal observation. Which were as follows.
Two walkers – my father and Kotkel – had come to Choris from the Mesoge.
They’d killed the princess and the fat man and Svangerd’s ex-john and some soldiers.
Dad had tried to kill me, but Kotkel … Face it, he’d gone out of his way not to hurt me, even though I’d done my best to provoke him.
Someone was controlling him, he’d as good as admitted it, but he wouldn’t say who.
Why was that? Fear, maybe, except what on earth would a walker be scared of?
And if it wasn’t fear, how could you control one of those things?
You can’t bribe them with gold or sweeties, because there’s nothing they want, except to hurt people, and they could do that just as well in the Mesoge.
Implication, therefore, that there’s some power at work capable of controlling the uncontrollable, which in turn would tend to suggest a supernatural agency –
I didn’t like that, but I caught sight of Saloninus, leering at me and brandishing his razor, so I stuck with it.
A supernatural agency. Talking of Saloninus, his third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and that what we poor fools take to be the supernatural is in fact science that nobody’s invented yet or, more likely, that used to be known to every schoolboy under the empire but which has since been lost and forgotten.
But just because it isn’t magic doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
In practice, the advanced technology and the magic achieve the same result, and a kick in the head from either of them hurts just as much.
In other words, magic or science, it doesn’t matter a toss.
Which in turn, therefore, suggests a very powerful agency, supernatural or scientific; at any rate, much bigger and stronger and nastier than me, which was all that mattered.
Fine. Now then; did I honestly and sincerely believe that the man with the chins was the duly authorised representative of such an agency?
Think about it. If I was incredibly powerful, would I choose a tosser like that to be my agent? And would I need someone like me to get what I wanted done; and would I want the sort of thing the man with the chins apparently wanted?
Good question, and one I’ve put to theologians before now, usually when I and the theologian are both very drunk.
What, I’ve asked, does the Invincible Sun want us for?
What function could we possibly serve? Why should He give a damn whether we’re naughty or nice; what does He get out of it that He couldn’t get elsewhere or in another fashion, given that He’s omnipotent and infinitely wise?
Does He keep us as pets – which is the only possible explanation, if you look at it rationally?
And if so, what does God need with a dog or a cat or a hamster?
If He needs one, he can’t be God, by any meaningful definition.
God, after all, doesn’t need anything – just like a Mesoge walker.
If you ask me, that’s an argument so cogent that it’s hardly surprising I remember it the morning after, when my head’s splitting and my mouth tastes like the floor of a pigsty.
(And, while we’re on the subject of the balance of probabilities, with that in Pan A, you can stuff whatever you like into Pan B and it won’t make the slightest difference, world without end, amen.)
Well, then. I brought the force of that to bear on the big question, which was: did I believe the man with the chins when he told me he’d set Kotkel on Svangerd if I didn’t do as I was told, or not?
Answer: yes and no. Balance of probabilities? No, I didn’t. Beyond reasonable doubt?
Ay, there’s the rub. If I guessed wrong, and anything happened to Svangerd –
Just a moment, I thought. I know that man.
Panic. That’s the bitch about cities. You bump into someone, you take your eye off them for two seconds and they’re gone, lost, swallowed up in the crowd.
A certain degree of thought is therefore called for.
Now then. If I was a messenger who’d just come a long way very fast, what would I do, as soon as I’d accomplished my mission?
Actually, that was misleading. What would he do?
Answer: have a drink. For which he’d go to an inn, or a beer-shop, or a tavern.
Or a brothel; no, probably too tired for that, because we’re none of us quite as young as we were.
I ran back to the place where I’d been handed the letter, and looked around.
The nearest watering-hole would be the place under the arches, where the clerks and students went, but my man was a stranger in town and it was the sort of place you had to know about to find.
The nearest obvious watering-hole: just look around, the way he’d have done, and let your eyes do it all for you.
It was called the Poverty and Persistence, and sure enough, he was there.
I didn’t recognise him, but I recognised the hat, which he’d taken off and put down on the bench next to him; likewise the army coat, revealing the clothes he wore under it, which were dead shabby and a shade of homespun butternut linen that was painfully familiar.
Flax does grow in the Mesoge – reluctantly, like it’s doing you a favour and it knows it’ll get in trouble for it if it gets caught.
Linen means status; only the big farmers can be bothered with it, to show off, because it’s far less warm and practical than wool.
Therefore, if you wear linen, it means you aren’t out in all weathers, implying that you have hired men to do all that stuff for you.
And, when it starts to wear out and fray at the seams, you intensify your grandeur by giving it to your grateful retainers.
Thus, in the Mesoge, linen is worn exclusively by the top five per cent and the bottom five per cent of society: the cream and the scum.
This man, if I’d identified him correctly, was not the cream.
Big if. I hadn’t seen the man I took him to be since I was ten years old, though I had reason to remember him.
Don’t you go anywhere near him, my mother had told me.
Stay away from him, my father said, and if he follows you, run and holler and make as much noise as you can.
What it was that Rotlaug did to children nobody was inclined to tell me; he ate them, I assumed, in the absence of further and better particulars, and so I kept the hell away from him, having taken pains to commit his face, shape and way of walking to indelible memory.
I bought a jug of beer and took it over to the corner where he was sitting. “Hello, Rotlaug,” I said. “I didn’t recognise you under that hat.”
He grinned at me. “You haven’t changed,” he said.