The City (50 page)

She realized Marcellus was looking at her and she wondered, not for the first time, if he could read her thoughts.

The servants were bringing another extravagant course of food the City could ill afford, which would probably be largely wasted. Marcellus, who was served first, poked with his knife at the folded package of red and green leaves, revealing a heap of pink shrimp. Petalina moaned quietly in revulsion.

‘Eat it,’ he ordered her with mock severity. ‘These shrimp died so we might live. Ambassador,’ he said, leaning across her, and she gladly sat back to let him converse. It gave her an excuse not to eat.

‘We will have a chance to speak at length tomorrow,’ Marcellus
told the man, ‘but I was wondering if you and your colleagues would be interested in another trade agreement.’

‘What is that, my lord?’ The ambassador’s two colleagues, down the table, abandoned any pretence at conversation with lesser men and swivelled round to listen.

‘The Wester Isles are famous for their timber. I believe you have forests of oak and beech still uncut.’

‘It is true,’ replied the ambassador smoothly, ‘yet our western allies take all our surplus trees, and crave more. They are building a new city and need all the building stone and timber they can buy. We have many binding agreements with them.’

‘Do these binding agreements dictate the length and span of the timber required?’

‘Of course, my lord.’

‘Then there will probably be room for agreement between us. You supply your allies with timber for building. Any that falls short of their requirements we might buy for carriages and carts.’

Petalina wondered why her lover was claiming to be interested in timber. There was always a shortage, it was true, since the oak-clad mountains to the south had fallen into enemy hands, but it was not Marcellus, First Lord of the City, who dickered over supply contracts.

He smiled warmly at the ambassador. ‘Perhaps, if you have finished at table, you would join me in the Serpent Room to discuss it.’

The man had clearly not finished, for he held his fork poised in readiness for another bite, but he put it down hastily and said, ‘It would be an honour, my lord.’

They stood and Marcellus ushered the ambassador through the ornate doors at the end of the hall. The ambassador’s colleagues, uninvited, looked at each other, then gladly returned to their meal.

Petalina smiled to herself. No one says no to Marcellus, she thought.

For thousands of years the Wester Isles had languished in happy obscurity, the natives devoting their lives to fishing, logging and boat-building. Their only contact with the outside world had been the trade in these vessels: small, clinker-built fishing boats and larger cargo ships. The ambassador himself had been a fisherman for thirty years. Then the isles had come under the eye of the beleaguered City, which had been willing to pay inflated prices for
wood for its buildings and fish for its citizens’ bellies. The City’s gold flooded the islands, and with it came civilization, closely followed by administration. Within a few years the isles had a bureaucracy and a government, ministers, bankers, commissioners, and creditors. The simple fisherman, friend to a newly created minister, left his devoted wife and children, and was sent abroad to lie for his country in the most famous court in the world.

He missed his wife and their three growing children, and their golden oak home built on the dunes surrounded by tall grasses that sighed and shifted in the wind off the sea. He hated the City. With every footfall he felt further from the natural world of seasons and tides he was used to. Here there was just stone upon unrelenting stone; he could feel the many generations of cities beneath his feet, and they reeked of blood and death. Since he had been in the palace he had felt a low vibration of anxiety deep in his soul, and he became more certain as each hour passed that he would not leave alive.

He was not a foolish man. He knew how others viewed him, and he saw the slyness behind the courtesan’s smile. She had been told to entertain him, and she had done so, but her pride forced her to disclose to him her real feelings, almost concealed, of amused, indulgent scorn. He wondered if she had any clue how he really felt about
her
, the ageing whore with her doll-like face and her childish finery.

If the emperor’s feasting hall was designed to impress, then the Serpent Room was intended to inspire unease. It was not a huge room, on the scale of the Red Palace. It was wide, but quite low. And everywhere, on ceilings, floors, walls and furniture, were snakes. Painted, carved, stuffed, and live slithering ones in glass tanks. The ambassador looked round nervously. He did not mind snakes. But then he had never seen so many together at one time before.

‘I hope you do not mind snakes?’ Vincerus asked him. He had a mischievous smile on his face. ‘I imagine that its designers, whoever they were, hoped to arouse fear in visitors, to put them at a disadvantage. In fact, only a child would be frightened by these poor creatures. It is a fine example of more being less.’

The ambassador relaxed a little. He had been daunted by the prospect of meeting the Vincerii, but the brothers had been nothing but courteous and appeared to be open and candid. Such powerful and charismatic men, he guessed, had no reason to be devious.
Marcellus was tall and well built, with fair, shaggy hair and a boyishly handsome face. The ambassador estimated him to be about forty, maybe a little more. He had very dark eyes which contrasted strangely with his fair countenance.

‘How do you like our City?’ asked Vincerus affably, sitting on a snakeskin couch and gesturing that his guest do the same. The ambassador looked round at all the serpents’ eyes on him and sat on the edge of his couch.

‘It is remarkable,’ he replied honestly. ‘I have been here before, once, when I was a child. I saw the emperor in a parade. It was the highlight of my young life. I’m sorry the emperor did not attend tonight.’

‘The Immortal does not go to feasts,’ Marcellus replied and, though the words were light, the atmosphere in the room cooled. The ambassador felt the low thrum of dread in his belly.

Nervously, he said, ‘Rumours of his death reached our islands earlier this year. I am glad they proved untrue.’

It was as if he had not spoken. The lord said, ‘You and your colleagues have a busy schedule, I’m sure,’ although nothing could be further from the truth. ‘I will get to the point. I have no interest in timber. We have battalions of supply officers to deal with that. I have a proposition for you, for your government.’ He leaned forward and the boyishness dropped away. ‘You may know that the greatness of our City is buttressed by the workers in the furnaces of the northern wastes. Their work is hard and the death rate high. The war has decimated the population of the City and that of our many tributary kingdoms. We need more workers to man the furnaces.’

The ambassador was silent, baffled. But we are just a small country, he thought, of fisherman and loggers. We have no spare workers.

Marcellus went on. ‘To the west of you, weeks to the west, I understand, is a large landmass which has been so far uncivilized.’

‘Yes?’ the ambassador said, wondering.

‘There are thousands, tens of thousands of potential workers there. The City will pay generously for every man or woman brought here to work in the furnaces.’

There was a moment of silence. Then, ‘Slaves?’ the ambassador asked.

‘Workers. We have found that slaves and convicted criminals die very quickly in the furnaces. Workers, however, are asked to sign a
year’s contract. This is a legal document which is binding on both the worker and the City. This gives them hope that at the end of their year, if they survive, they will return home with generous compensation. Hope keeps them alive. Some of them.’

‘How many of them?’ the ambassador asked sceptically.

Vincerus frowned. ‘I’m sure some functionary in the palace offices can tell you the number if you really wish to know.’

So this is why we are here, the ambassador thought. This is why we have been invited here, and wined and dined and flattered. He is asking us to become slavemasters. He felt the ground underneath him shifting, and his sense of dread burgeoned.

Playing for time, he feigned naivety and asked, ‘But why would they agree?’

‘They will be handsomely paid.’

‘In their own terms?’

‘In the City’s terms.’

‘You want men of the Wester Isles to sail to their land, fill our ships with these people. By force?’ Marcellus shrugged as if indifferent how the mission was fulfilled. ‘And bring them here to die in the service of the City. For which we will be paid.’

‘Handsomely.’

The ambassador looked at the floor. ‘I cannot … in all conscience …’ he started. Then he had an idea. ‘I must return and discuss this with my peers,’ he said, managing a thin smile which, he guessed, looked ingratiating. ‘It is not a decision I have authority to make myself. You will hear our decision very shortly.’

He looked up again at Marcellus, and wished he hadn’t. The man was not frowning, but his face had lost all expression. He looked suddenly older, like his own father. And his eyes, his eyes had lost all … life. They had disappeared. They were just two empty holes in his face. The ambassador blinked.

‘You are lying,’ Marcellus said flatly, his voice as cold as winter seas. ‘You are lying because you are a weak man who does not dare to say no. You are right in that. It is best not to say no to me.’ Every word was heavy with meaning and with each one the ambassador felt the life and energy disappear from the room.

Marcellus was silent. His strange eyes held the ambassador.

‘I … no … I …’ was all the man could manage.

He felt he was being sucked into the eyes; all the room was being
drawn in. And the palace and the City and the world. The eyes were dark dreadful holes filled with emptiness that would never be filled. He was being drawn in and he would never get out and he would spend eternity in the horror of the emptiness. Terror closed his throat and he started to panic; he felt as though his limbs were flailing about, although he knew he was really seated immobile on the couch. The sane part of his mind prayed for unconsciousness or the relief of a heart seizure. He was drowning in the blackness, gasping for his last breath for ever, through an infinity of eternities until the world ended and the skies fell and still he would be struggling for one last breath and …

‘Yes!’ he gasped.

Then there was release.

He never lost consciousness, nor believed he was in a nightmare. For the next hour he lay curled on the snakeskin couch in the empty room shaking with fear, fear that was totally focused. He was terrified of Marcellus, of what the man could do to him and his wife and children, terrified of the possibility of even seeing him again. At last his colleagues from the Isles, wondering, came into the Serpent Room and helped him, trembling, to bed. The ambassador did not sleep that night. The next day he signed the pieces of paper placed in front of him. On the voyage home he had a seizure of the brain. He lingered, cared for by his loving wife, for half a year and never spoke again.

The Serpent Room had been built more than two hundred years before, and was once the Lord Chancellor’s bedchamber. It was buried deep in the palace, and its single window looked out on one of the palace’s myriad enclosed courtyards. Because the Chancellor was an important man, a water closet had been secreted in the wall in a corner of the courtyard, with doors both to the chamber and to the outside. At some time the inner door had been walled up and forgotten, but the small dark room still existed. Nothing could be seen from within it, but much could be heard of what happened in Marcellus Vincerus’ favourite parlour.

After silence fell in the room there was a long pause, then the listener heard the door to the Serpent Room open and close and there was silence again. The listener wondered if the luckless ambassador was still alive, for it sounded as though the First Lord
of the City was strangling him. The listener shrugged to himself, too concerned with his own safety to worry about a foreigner. He waited long anxious hours until it was pitch dark before he let himself out into the courtyard and made his way to his room to write his report.

DOL SALIDA READ
the listener’s tiny, precisely written words early the next day, then set a light to the paper and watched as it flared then became ash. He sat back and stroked his moustache absently.

The report told him little he did not already know. It was hardly a secret that they needed slaves. The City was fighting for its life. The population was dwindling; it was rare to see anyone of fighting age walking the streets, and the sight of children, playing or labouring, was increasingly rare. When Dol was a child he had had several years of schooling, even in the poor quarter of Barenna where he was raised. Now there were no schools, for there were few children to attend and no one to teach them. The City was filled with the old, the maimed, the forgetting and the forgotten. Workers were still needed, though, to mine metal and man the foundries which produced armour and weapons, and to build ships and the new defences.

Yes, the City certainly needed slaves although, Dol thought, Marcellus must be getting desperate to insert himself into the problem. Did he coerce the ambassador to agree to his proposition? The spy’s report was unsatisfactory. Marcellus was a ruthless man; he would not have the power and influence he had if he were not. But would he really half strangle a foreign ambassador to get him to comply? It seemed … well … crass. Marcellus was known to be even-tempered, and according to the bland words of the report the
ambassador had said nothing to arouse the man’s anger. Dol Salida had checked with the palace that morning and found the delegation had left at dawn, all present and correct.

Dol reached down a hefty file of papers from a shelf above him. The file was marked
Hallorus
and appeared to be a minute report, wearisome in its abundant detail, of the daily doings of an Otaro businessman with interests in the manufacture of body armour. The man existed, but he was of no concern to Dol Salida. The dossier was in code, one of the urquat master’s own devising, another legacy of his time in the prison camp. It was about Marcellus. It contained every word Dol had heard spoken about the First Lord of the City, everything he had read, everything he had surmised from his daily interactions within the palace and outside with people who had met the man, or knew people who had met him, his body servants, or their relatives. If Marcellus was mentioned in his hearing, the date and time of the conversation was noted, along with who did the speaking, and to whom, with cross-references to their own files.