Chapter 11 #2
I came back to my room expecting to find her there, but she wasn’t, so I went looking for her in the other place she was likely to be, at Mother Krimhild’s bedside. But when I got there, I found the big oak door closed, and when I banged on it, nobody came. Now what, I asked myself.
I headed back out into the fresh air and ran into a crowd in the east cloister garden.
Lots of people standing around, not saying anything, all looking very depressed.
I edged my way through and saw an open space in the middle of the crowd, where four sextons were digging a hole in the manicured grass.
Oh, I thought, and then I called to mind the closed door I’d just been hammering on.
Vitimer was there, gorgeous in a purple chasuble, embroidered dalmatic, stole, rochet and tasselled maniple; he was mumbling the funeral service, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.
It occurred to me that we usually cut that last bit in the Mesoge, probably because there are some things that are sure and certain, but which don’t really constitute hope …
Svangerd was at the back of a clump of nuns, who were charitably pretending she wasn’t there.
I felt angry with them, and with the stupid old woman for dying and breaking Svangerd’s heart – people can be so inconsiderate.
And then it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t all bad, because here we had a great many delegates, all gathered together in one place and not yelling bloody murder at each other; it had been Mother Krimhild’s big speech that calmed things down and made the commission possible, though that had turned out to be a bust. In fact, I thought, this would be the perfect moment for Vitimer to make an impassioned plea for unity, invoking the memory of our dear departed sister, et cetera; here were all these scared, desperate people, no doubt longing to be let off the hook if only some way could be found to extract them from the political and ethical corners they’d backed themselves into.
He wouldn’t need to be particularly eloquent, provided he said the right things in roughly the right order.
Here was the perfect opportunity – I could feel it, like thunder in the air.
I scanned the crowd, and I got a strong feeling that that was what they’d come for.
An excuse, a note from their mothers to say they had a chill and couldn’t go to war today. A heaven-sent opportunity –
It occurred to me to glance up at the side wall of the Old Library, on which there was a rather beautiful and ornate sundial.
It was a bit overcast, so the shadow was a bit blurry; even so, I could make it out well enough to know that if Kotkel hadn’t trashed the council chamber, the afternoon debate would be just about to start; the debate before which I’d been duty bound to kill Vitimer if we were to have any chance at all of preventing a schism.
Nuts, or words to that effect.
“I need to speak to you,” said a voice in my ear. “Now.”
I followed him back through the crowd, out of the garden into the cloister. “I was looking for you,” I said. “I wanted to ask—”
He was furiously angry. “One small thing,” he said. “One simple thing, and you couldn’t be bothered to do it. You make me sick.”
“Yes, but then the debates got cancelled,” I said. “I didn’t know if that meant the plans had changed.”
“So you took it upon yourself to decide. How could you have been so stupid?”
“Just a moment,” I said. “I need to think about this.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t need that. What you need is to go out there, right now, and kill Vitimer. You have just under three minutes before he starts making his speech. I don’t suppose you’ve got a knife with you, so I suggest you strangle him. You do know how to do that, don’t you?”
“I need to think about this,” I repeated. “Vitimer’s going to make a speech.”
“Obviously.”
“And everybody’s going to listen, because they’ll know this is the perfect opportunity for wriggling out of having to have a schism and a war and bringing the roof down on everything. So it’ll work. And there won’t be a schism, or a war.” I looked at him. “Isn’t that what we want?”
He gave me a look of pure distilled contempt. “You don’t know anything about it,” he said. “You’re an idiot and a blunderer and you don’t obey orders. Now get out there and do as you’re told.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If I kill him right now, in front of everybody, when he’s just about to make his speech, how’s that going to stop the schism? Surely—”
“You don’t understand.” He was losing what little patience he had.
“It’s far more complex and involved than you can possibly begin to appreciate, and I simply don’t have the time to explain it to you.
” He was trying to burn holes in me with his eyes, but for some reason it wasn’t working.
“You now have one minute to go out there and do it. Otherwise you will be directly responsible for the deaths of millions.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“What you believe or don’t believe is supremely unimportant.
” He fought hard and managed to get a grip on his fury.
“I know I can’t rely on you to do it because it’s the right thing, so I’ve made sure I have other levers to move you with.
Go and kill Vitimer, or by this time tomorrow Svangerd will be dead.
Your father will crush her skull like an egg. Do you understand me?”
“No,” I said. “If you want it done, do it yourself. I think you’re full of shit.”
He opened his mouth, then stopped. I could hear Vitimer’s voice. He’d begun his speech.
“This is your last chance,” the old man said. “Your very last chance. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “And you’re still full of shit.”
He’d have made his fortune as an actor, back in the empire. He could register furious anger, blind terror and grim resolution without actually moving a muscle, and he did. Then he took a short knife from his sleeve and turned to walk away.
“Oops,” I said. “Sorry.”
I’d tripped him up, and he’d gone sprawling on his nose. I moved to help him up, inadvertently standing on the knife as I did so. “Out of interest,” I said, “I thought you people weren’t allowed to take direct action. The puppet-masters, not the puppets, and all that.”
He gave me a glare that should’ve shrivelled me up like a leaf in a furnace. “You lunatic,” he said.
“Really?”
All the force had gone out of him. He looked so weary, he was having trouble standing up. “A million deaths,” he said. “A dark age lasting a thousand years. The end of civilisation as we know it.”
“Balls,” I said. “There isn’t going to be a schism. So there won’t be a war.”
“Not now,” he said. “But in five hundred years’ time, when the Great Schism rips the West apart and leaves it defenceless against the Sashan hordes—”
“Oh, I see. That schism.” I grinned at him. “I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. Sufficient until the day. Besides, something’s bound to turn up. It generally does.”
He registered contempt at me so intensely that I couldn’t help giggling, and stalked away.
“What do you mean, you missed it?” she said.
“I was talking to that man,” I said. “Why, was it good?”
“Only the best, most beautiful speech ever made,” she said. “God knows I don’t go for that sort of thing, but I’m not ashamed to admit it, I was in tears.”
“I was stopping the Loyal Opposition rep from assassinating Vitimer,” I said. “So, what did he say?”
She shook her head. “You had to be there. Really, it was the most amazing—”
“Yes, all right.”
“It’s funny,” she said. “You were so mad keen to come to this bash because you particularly wanted to hear the speeches. But—”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
We were sitting in a side-chapel. Sunlight slanted in through one of the six (that’s right, six) remaining examples of imperial stained glass to have survived Time, a dozen sieges and the iconoclast movement.
It bathed the altar in a wild jumble of seething, dancing colour, like a funeral pyre for an angel.
This chapel had been on my must-must-see list when I left home, and I’d completely forgotten about it until then.
“Really,” she was saying, “it was all Mother Krimhild. She stopped everything going to shit with that speech, and then she did it again by dying. You know, thinking of it like that, I can’t feel sad that she’s gone. Just amazingly proud that I was allowed to know her.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Nice,” she repeated. “You really do have the soul of a slug.”
“Probably. But it doesn’t matter. There isn’t going to be a schism, which is all that matters, I was at the session this morning, and you wouldn’t believe how polite everybody was being.
Open-mindedness, the importance of rational discussion, freedom of conscience and respecting the other man’s point of view.
It takes all the fun out of it, but I reckon it’s probably better than the end of the world. ”
She nodded. “I think we should go home,” she said. “Go and find out about ships.”
So I did that. There was a lumber freighter sailing in two days’ time, and the captain said we could go for free. He liked having holy men on board, he said. It was good luck.
I went to the afternoon session, but there was so much sweetness and light everywhere that I fell asleep, and when I woke up the chamber was empty.
So I went looking for a pastry shop and embezzled half a denier from our travelling fund and blew it on honeycakes and spice buns.
If ever you’re in Choris, people had been telling me all my life, for crying out loud make sure you try the honeycakes and the spice buns.
So I did, and they weren’t bad, at that.