Arcanum (63 page)

“We’ll divide the map up, find horses for those who can ride. Get your warrant from Mistress Sophia, your purse and your assignment from me. Let’s form an orderly line.”

Felix watched carefully how Ullmann handled the proceedings. His easy manner with the men made them feel like part of a street gang, but beneath that was a hard core of determination. The mostly rough-and-ready apprentices, carters, vendors, stevedores and messengers – they knew who was in charge, this bright and articulate chancer from the countryside.

Sophia, too. She was confident and aloof. She rarely smiled, and when she did, it was at their eagerness and their mistakes, not at them personally. They were much closer in age to her than Felix was: they could be forgiven a little banter, but she did nothing to encourage it. She rewarded politeness and frowned on familiarity, making it abundantly clear that she was untouchable, unassailable, like the fortress walls themselves.

Felix himself was the source of their authority, but he didn’t know how to use it. That troubled him. He’d made mistakes already, been betrayed by people he’d trusted, and he had little idea of how to avoid making those same blunders in the future when the stakes were just as great. So much to learn.

Ullmann dissected the map of Carinthia, detailing different pairs to visit the towns and villages, from the Venezia border down to the Bavarian lowlands, from the high valleys to the gates of Wien. If there weren’t enough horses in the stables to carry them, they could take them from elsewhere and compensate their owners. If there wasn’t enough food in the kitchens to keep them going, they could take it from wherever they wanted. They were to claim swords from the armoury, even if they had no idea how to use them: they could learn another time. Making it up as they went along, much like he was having to.

It felt all very hasty. Perhaps that was a good thing. Making quick decisions meant that at least they were doing something, even if it was wrong.

Suddenly, it was all over. Lists of names had been taken, the amount of money given to each man recorded, their routes through Carinthia noted. They probably wouldn’t reach everyone, but they’d catch enough that almost all would feel included.

Ullmann took the lists with him as he went, bowing at the door. “My lord, it’ll be done, and done well.”

The door closed, the latch clicked, and they were alone.

“Sophia?”

“Yes, Felix?”

“We should be glad he’s on our side.”

“Who? Max Ullmann?” Sophia crossed in front of him to sit next to the fire. “He’s an interesting find, for sure.”

“He has the common touch. He inspires people.”

“Felix, come over here.” She reached out and pulled a chair close to hers, and he reluctantly joined her, fearing a lecture.

“Having a common touch and inspiring people,” she said, “makes him sound like he’s walked straight out of the pages of Cicero. And I very much doubt he’d enjoy wearing a toga.”

“He has ideas. Radical, dangerous ideas.”

“All of which you told me about last night, and I told you that the only thing that makes his ideas radical is that they haven’t been tried before. Or that they have, but not for a very long time. There’s nothing wrong with ordinary people owning their own land: in the Torah, that’s one of HaShem’s promises, with everyone sitting in the shade of their own vines and fig trees.”

“It’s not the way we’ve done things.”

“And you know that we can’t carry on with that old way. You know that, Felix.” She reached out and took his hand. She had strong fingers, and his hand in hers looked small and fragile. “Have courage. I know that your mother died, your father died, your stepmother died, your chamberlain and your earls died, your tutors left you, and your sword-master betrayed you. And died. But I have no intention of going anywhere. Neither does Master Ullmann, or Frederik Thaler, or Peter Büber. Well, perhaps Master Büber isn’t the best example to use here.”

Felix tried to pull away, but she held him firm. “We can’t change our fate,” he said. “Everybody dies.”

“This is why nothing’s changed in a thousand years. Did your Alaric dream for a moment that he could challenge the might of Rome and shatter its walls?”

“It was foretold,” said Felix. “It was his destiny.”

“If that’s what it takes, then I will prophesy over you and tell you that you’re destined for even greater feats.” She pulled his hand closer, and he had no choice but to move with it. “Did Alaric bring the Roman Empire down on his own?”

“No, but…”

“You won’t save Carinthia on your own, either. No king, no prince, ever rules alone. Your authority is not diminished when you share it; it grows. Every time you trust someone enough to make them a prince’s man, then your power and your reach increases.” She leant forward and pressed her forehead against his. “You’re not a tyrant, although that temptation will always be with you. Remember that tyrants get overthrown, but a well-loved prince is respected by his people.”

“Sophia,” he said, “I’m scared.”

“We all are. Part of me wishes that you’d stop telling everyone how close we are to disaster, but they have the right to hear it, I suppose.”

“Lying to them isn’t honest,” he mumbled. Her breath was hot on his cheeks, and it made him feel more than a little strange.

“Sometimes you have to lie to them to make them think they’re going to win. It only becomes a lie when they lose.” She disengaged one of her hands and rested it at the back of his neck. It was both cool and hot at the same time.

“You mean, like when you say I’m destined for greater feats than even Alaric the Goth?”

She laughed, and he laughed too.

“Yes, just like that. There’s no one to tell me I’m wrong, though. Felix, you’ve been left by everyone you knew when you were a child, and you can’t be the prince they expected you to be because that’s just not possible.”

“I’m still a child,” he said.

“No. By any measure, German or Jewish, you’re a man. You’ve had blood on your face and blood on your sword. You’ve fought in battle and you’ve won. I don’t see many children doing that.”

He sighed, and let her stroke his neck for a while. He didn’t feel like he was in charge – that was the problem. No,
his
problem: despite the moment of madness that had overtaken some of his subjects when Eckhardt had appeared, promising them a return to the old ways, they all seemed content now to maintain the fiction that he was still the Prince of Carinthia.

His princeliness was the only aspect of the past to survive.

“Can you get a pen, and some parchment?” he suddenly asked.

“Yes, yes of course.” She fetched them and sat at the table, poised ready to write. The sun broke through for a moment, temporarily dazzling the two of them with its brightness.

He could see more clearly in that brief, blinding interval between one cloud and the next than he had ever seen before. Perhaps Sophia was right: he could become greater than Alaric. But she could just as easily be wrong, and he’d die along with his palatinate.

He’d aim high.

“Write this: a decree against magic. Magic in all its forms and practices is from this time forbidden throughout every part of Carinthia. All magical books and items are forfeit. Various fines and penalties will be levied against those who keep forbidden items and practise forbidden arts. For the crime of necromancy, the punishment will be death by pressing.”

Sophia wrote clearly in a neat Gothic script, and added, “By order of Felix I, Prince of Carinthia” at the bottom.

“Would you get another piece of parchment?” he asked, and she fetched one from the drawer while he composed the words in his mind. He stared out of the window for so long that he was only reminded of her presence by her polite cough.

If the first decree of his reign was going to cause trouble, the second was likely to cause worse.

“A proclamation of general freedoms. All those who call themselves Carinthians will be subject to the same laws, the same taxes and the same freedoms granted by Carinthia, without favour. Given the great service shown by the Jews of Juvavum to the palatinate, all Jews within Carinthia are considered true Carinthians, and no man is to say otherwise.”

The scratching of her pen stopped. Her chair rasped against the boards, and her footsteps came up behind him. He found himself enveloped in her arms, with her tears running onto his head.

Being a prince meant something, he decided.

She went back to the library, to order the scribes to copy more of the spies’ letters of authority. She was also clutching Felix’s new laws. The one against magic? She was surprised that it had taken him so long, and had been going to suggest it herself in time for the grand council.

The one forbidding discrimination against Jews? It burnt in her hand. She’d never even thought of that. A few concessions, here and there. Wresting the sefer from the grip of the library was as far as she’d hoped, and Thaler, distracted as he always was these days, had already signed the transfer without so much as a murmur.

There, echoing down the alleyways of Juvavum, was the sound of the shofar. How long had it been since that had been heard, proud and joyful outside the walls of the synagogue? She turned the corner into Library Square, and Rabbi Cohen was at the head of a procession – an armed procession, Jews with spears and swords and helmets over their kippah – in which two huge scrolls, ornate with gold and silver, were lifted shoulder-high.

Cohen sounded the great coil of ram’s horn and the cantor raised his voice in one of David’s psalms. The people – her people – sang to celebrate the liberation of the sefer: the men-at-arms were surrounded by a cloud of women calling out praises at the tops of their voices, and children ran among them all, their Purim rattles finding a new use.

They marched by, heading for Jews’ Alley, a noise, an event, that distracted the Germans from their journeys and their labour, and made them stare and wonder. Some of her neighbours spotted her, and their reactions were curiously mixed. She was, in turn, acknowledged, ignored, frowned at and smiled on.

She looked down at herself. Her own clothes, the ones she’d fought in, were … somewhere. She hadn’t given it much thought. She was dressed now like a German princess for the want of anything else to wear – there were chests of women’s clothes in the fortress, unused and unlikely to ever be worn again. Practical and thrifty, she’d taken them over.

And her neighbours were no longer that: she and her father lived in the fortress now, and their house was empty and cold and still.

Sophia watched the backs of the processors, a curious longing to be in among them mixing with the creeping realisation that she was now irrevocably separate; that was the price she personally had to pay.

They were waiting for her in the library. She’d lingered long enough.

Library Square resembled a builder’s yard. There were stacks of timber and piles of stone, and the sound of sawing and chiselling rattled off the walls of the surrounding buildings. Inside was barely quieter. The cap on the oculus was almost completely removed, with buckets of material going both up and down the tower of scaffolding in the centre.

At last, though, there was natural light. Not enough that it didn’t need supplementing, but it was a start. Glazers and leaders were already attempting to construct something like a window to fill the gap, but the sheer weight and size of it was defeating them.

Every problem they tried to fix simply provided them with another. And they were mounting up.

Everyone wanted to speak to her and claim a moment of her time. Of course they did; she had the palatinate’s purse. She listened carefully and then, surrounded by clamouring tradesmen, simply held up her hand.

Eventually, they fell silent. Taking one, two, three steps up the stairs to the first gallery, she turned to face them. They had followed her, waving bills and receipts in the air.

“Gentlemen. This simply cannot continue. There is business and there is chaos, and this is chaos.”

“Our suppliers need paying. Our men need paying,” called a builder.

“They do.” Rather than accuse them outright of trying to gouge the royal treasury, she tried another way. “I am aware that your costs are greater than they would once have been because everything has to be done by hand. Food costs more, materials cost more, labour itself costs more. However – they are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. There’s a natural, and understandable urge to add a little to each account in this time of emergency. However, for the moment, only the palatinate is hiring.”

She suddenly wondered if she should consider directly employing craftsmen at standard guild rates – as set before the crisis. It would be substantially cheaper, but she also thought of the nightmare that would ensue if she directly challenged the guilds.

“I need to talk to the guildmasters. We all need to eat, and prices that keep on rising are going to hurt the widows and the orphans harder than a master or a journeyman. Especially those whose husbands and fathers have died most recently.”

There, that was magnanimous. The bodies laid out in the main square hadn’t all been men, but the lion’s share of them had. They were all burnt now, ashes on a pyre, but some of them would certainly have been guild members, whose guilds now had a responsibility to look after their destitute families. Higher charges from the guilds meant higher costs for the guilds.

From the look of some of them, the lesson had hit home. They didn’t want to see their own wealth destroyed.

“But what about the money we’ve already laid out?” called someone.

“I’ll pay guild rates,” she said, and left the rest unspoken. If they’d been foolish enough to get caught holding an excessive bill, then they were twice as foolish thinking they could simply pass it on. Neither would she countenance any surreptitious redrafting of their promissory notes. “Hand everything to me. Tomorrow, I’ll pay what they’re worth.”

She called on the library ushers to help her, easy enough as they were already looking her way, and they made sure that the merchants and craftsmen handed their papers over. The bills made a tidy pile, and she wasn’t going to be able to both sleep and enter all the items in her ledger. Perhaps it was time to co-opt a librarian or two, ones that were numerate as well as literate.