Chapter 10 #3
He gave me a thin smile. “I suppose it’s possible you’re stupid enough to believe that,” he said.
“In which case, let me give you a word of advice. Prepare to be disappointed. But,” he went on, before I could say anything, “that still gives you time. Tomorrow morning, after your hero’s been found with his head crushed.
I suggest you speak to Vitimer’s clerks straight away about an appointment.
If you leave it too late he might get booked up. ”
“Like hell I will,” I said, lifting his hand off the cover of the book. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.”
He flipped the book open, ripped out a page, screwed it into a ball, put it in his mouth, chewed a couple of times and swallowed. “No,” he said. “If you carry on looking you’ll be wasting your time. Feel free to do that if you wish, but it won’t be work; it’ll be foolishness.”
He walked away. I was too horrified by what he’d just done to stop him.
After a while, I pulled myself together enough to close the book and put it back on the shelf.
The mutilated book … That’s me, right? I can look at dead bodies and heads squashed flat and think nothing of it, but somebody hurting a book …
Yes, but not just any book. Polemon’s Philology.
And it takes a day to copy just one page of something like that, whereas a human life can be created in a couple of minutes, by two drunk kids in a haystack.
“This is no good,” she told me. “We’re pulling in opposite directions, you doing your stuff, me doing mine. We need to pull together.”
“Agreed.”
“What we need to do is sit down and figure out a plan of action.”
“Absolutely,” I said, looking past her out of the refectory window.
In an hour it would be dark. A few hours after that, Rotlaug the hero would kill, or at least dispose of, the two walkers and that would be that.
I wouldn’t have to assassinate the head of Holy Mother Church, and we could go home.
True, there was going to be a schism; but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad away up north, where we’re mostly out of it anyway.
I tried to think what it would mean, in real terms. Probably what we’d notice most would be not being able to get things.
Schism would mean closed borders, disruption of trade, all the stuff that comes in on ships or pack-mules.
Big deal. We’re too poor and too remote to be major importers and exporters, so mostly we make what we need and only need what we can make.
And stuff is just stuff, after all. We’d survive.
There’d be wars, of course. There always are, when Holy Mother Church isn’t there to stop the children quarrelling and breaking each other’s toys, and for some reason people dearly love to kill each other over questions and interpretations of faith.
Thou shalt not suffer a heretic to live, so soldiers would be recruited from the villages, would march away and not come back, then when harvest came round there’d only be women and old men to do the work, so half the crop would spoil before it could be cut and stacked, and half of the other half would go for taxes, to pay for the war effort.
The hedging and ditching wouldn’t get done over winter, so there’d be flooding and escaped livestock, and too little grain in winter would mean having to slaughter the plough oxen (either they eat or we do), so spring ploughing would be drastically curtailed.
Coppicing and winter logging wouldn’t happen, so come next winter it’d be pretty cold with no faggots or firewood; also no charcoal for the forge, so tools would break and not get mended or replaced; no share for the plough or hooks for cutting back brambles and withies, so gradually the wilderness would spread and the useful land would be lost, like the books in the Sisters’ library.
Then more soldiers would be needed, to replace the ones who’d been killed or died of dysentery.
More villages would be looking to buy food rather than sell it, and before long there wouldn’t be enough, so people would starve or leave, heading for the towns and cities under the mistaken impression that things might be better there, rather than worse.
Life would go on, of course, but diminished, downsized, pared and withered away.
Sulpicius calculated that as a result of the Third Social War, the population of the empire declined by just under forty per cent; that was a thousand years ago, when there was still an emperor, and things were properly organised, and most of the knowledge hadn’t been lost. How long the starving and shrivelling process would take I couldn’t begin to guess – five years?
Twenty? A hundred? There was no Sulpicius around to do the maths when the empire fell, but at a rough guess I’d say that there were easily ten times as many people alive then as there are now, quite probably more.
They didn’t all die at once, of course; there wasn’t a terrible year with bodies stacked like cordwood.
It was a trend more than a cataclysm. Eventually it bottomed out, and now here we all were, suffering no major collapses and making no progress; until, that is, some fool comes along and drives a wedge into the head of Holy Mother Church, and the whole world breaks up in splinters.
That fool would be me, yes? Well, yes and no. I’d had no idea what I was doing, just as the crew of the ship who brought the Great Plague to Perimadeia had no idea that the swollen glands in their armpits were going to wipe out two thirds of the human race. It wasn’t done on purpose. Was it?
Was it?
“I said,” she repeated, “what are we actually going to do?”
Done on purpose; actually, yes, by a bunch of lunatics who believed they were serving the devil.
What’s done can be undone, sometimes, if you’re quick, if you know what you’re doing.
I had no idea what needed to be done, but then, I wasn’t a student of the long game. I wasn’t – but I knew someone who was.
I turned and looked at her. “These people who think they’re the Loyal Opposition,” I said. “Do you believe they know what they’re doing?”
“They’re evil,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “I know that. But are they competent?”
“You what?”
It seemed such a simple, obvious question.
“Are they any good?” I asked. “Do they understand politics and economics and the ebb and flow of cause and effect? Are they capable of figuring out complicated long-term plans? If they say doing this will have that result, are they likely to be right or are they just guessing, or talking drivel? Come on, it’s important. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I assume they are. After all, Evil is very powerful.”
“Really? It always loses. Well, does it or doesn’t it?”
“In the long term, of course it does. But in the short term—”
I closed my eyes and opened them again. “I guess we’re going to have to trust them,” I said. “Put our faith in them and hope they know what they’re doing. It’s ghastly, I know, but I really can’t see any other way.”
“What in fuck’s name are you talking about?”
Deep breath. “Something happened earlier today that I may have neglected to mention,” I said.
She took it better than I’d expected. She swore at me, called me names, almost hit me but didn’t, and that was it. “He said he’d kill you if I didn’t do it,” I explained. “Well, my dad would. Same difference.”
“Your dad? What about Kotkel?”
A valid point, which I’d entirely missed.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I think he was right. This new man wants to stop the schism, same as we do. Apparently he has reason to believe that murdering Vitimer will do the trick. I have absolutely no idea what those reasons might be, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
So I think that’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to kill Vitimer. ”
“You’re out of your tiny—”
“We came here,” I said, “to murder the princess. Why? Because someone who knows much more about these things than we do reckoned it’d be a good idea. And now someone who knows a lot more about these things says we should kill Vitimer. Think about it. Can you see a difference, because I can’t.”
“But they’re evil—”
“We’ve got to kill Vitimer,” I said. “It’s the only way.”
I’d hoped I’d get a good night’s sleep after all the excitements of the past few days, but no such luck. About an hour before matins, I was woken up by yelling and crashing about and booted feet running in corridors and cloisters. No rest for the wicked.
I blundered my way down the horrible spiral stairs into the courtyard, which was crowded with people and bright as day with lanterns and torches.
In the middle of the yard was Rotlaug, sitting on the decapitated trunk of a walker.
In his right hand he held a Mesoge hog knife.
With his left, he was hugging a severed head, like a mother nursing a baby.
I walked over to him. He saw me and told the high official who’d been talking to him to go away. “Told you so,” he sang out as I reached him. “Piece of piss.”
The head was Kotkel’s. “Nice job,” I said. “Thanks.”
“It’s what I do,” he said. “I’m good at it. Fucking good at it.”
Poor Kotkel, I thought. He never stood a chance. “So,” I said, “what’s the drill?”
“Big bonfire,” said Rotlaug. “Then wait till the ashes get cold and mix them with piss. Don’t ask me why piss, but it works. Then flush it away in running water. Job done.”
I nodded. “I dumped the ashes in the sea,” I said. “Didn’t seem to make much difference. Dad still came back.”
He frowned. “Fine,” he said. “Let him come back, I’ll do him again. I don’t mind getting paid twice, specially for a piece of piss job like this. That priest I was talking to, he says they’ll give me a thousand gold besants.” His brows narrowed. “How much is that in silver money?”
I told him. He looked like he’d been struck by lightning.
“I can’t help noticing,” I said, “there’s only one of them. What about my father? I take it he didn’t show up.”
“No. But what the fuck. Here, do you reckon they’ll pay me the same for doing him when he does show?”
I smiled. “If I were you,” I said, “I’d haggle. Say you’re not going to kill any more walkers for a denier under twelve hundred besants.”
I’d shocked him, something I really wouldn’t have thought was possible. “You reckon they’d stand for that?”
“I think it’s probably a seller’s market,” I said. “Definitely go for twelve hundred. And fifteen hundred if Kotkel comes back.”
He looked like an eyewitness to the Transfiguration. “Thanks,” he said. “I might just do that.”
“I would,” I said. “If I were you.”
He looked at me. “You know what,” he said, lowering his voice, “I think maybe you ought to come in for a slice of the action. After all, they’re your folks. Say five per cent. I feel like I owe you, somehow.”
I was touched. “That’s really sweet,” I said, “but no thanks. I’ve got my vow to think of. Besides, you’ve earned it. I haven’t.”
“True,” he said. “Bollocks to it, then. You know what, I might just settle down and live here. It’s a damn sight better than home.”
“I think so.”
“I think you’re right. I mean, what’s the point having all that scratch in the Mesoge, with nothing to spend it on?”
“With twelve hundred gold besants,” I said, “you could buy the Mesoge.”
That made him laugh – not a sight for the faint-hearted. “I might just do that,” he said. “That’d show the fuckers, right? When I chuck them all out and tell them to get off my land. That’d be a sight to see, you fucking bet.”
Quite, I thought, and left him alone with his glory.