The Devil You Know (4 page)

Well, it’s not my money, so I kept quiet. “Fine,” Saloninus said indifferently. “I’ll put a lump sum in escrow with the Knights, as a token of good faith; draw on it as you need it.”

I think the poor man was seriously shaken. He’s straightforward enough for a man in his line of work, but I’m guessing that
draw on it as you need it
undermined the very core of his understanding of the world. All those years killing people and beating them up in order to get money, and instead, there are people out there who’ll just give it to you. “Suits me,” he said, in a quiet voice. “Right. First thing in the morning.” He paused. I surreptitiously conjured a small steel-reinforced chest under my right foot. “Here,” I said, and pushed it toward him under the table.

He wouldn’t need to count it. He knew that. He rested his foot delicately on it, as if on a rose.

* * *

Same old same old for the villagers and nomads of Mysia. Out of the early morning mists emerged a column of armoured men, their footsteps barely audible on the thick leaf mould. King Carduan IV wasn’t at home when we called; he never is when people invade his kingdom. He has barges moored ready all the time, with the royal treasury stowed aboard. He’s not bothered about anybody stealing it. After so many wars and occupations, there’s not enough there to make it worth the effort. The royal guard stayed home, their wives busily weaving baskets to sell to the foreigners.

Our forces occupied the Citadel. It’s an amazing thing, if you like military architecture (I must confess I do, though purely on an aesthetic level). It was built by the Eastern Empire, back when they were the invaders du jour. They chose a flat-topped mountain, actually a dormant volcano; there’s a rainwater lake up there on top, natural hot water. The defensive walls are built out of huge rectangular blocks of black lava; fifteen feet thick at the base. There’s a curtain wall, a boiling—seriously—moat, an outer wall, and an inner keep. There’s fifteen acres of storage sheds for food and equipment. The circumference of the curtain wall is three miles, but four hundred men could hold it indefinitely against the world, assuming they’ve laid in adequate supplies. It won’t come as a surprise to learn that the Citadel has never been taken, by storm, siege, or treachery. Come to that, it’s never been attacked. It’s been voluntarily evacuated and abandoned nine times, but that’s different.

He got me to fill the barns with sacks of flour and barrels of salted bacon, while Alban’s sappers made a few minor repairs to the drawbridge. The Mysians don’t come near the place ever, except to loot the food stores when an invader leaves. They know it’s nothing to do with them. Also, I think they know it’s a volcano, a fact which appears nowhere in the military libraries of the surrounding nations.

Alban kept trying to report to me for orders, even though he knew perfectly well who was in charge. He was trying to make himself believe this was a normal, businesslike military operation, and that he wasn’t working for a lunatic. “Do you anticipate any hostile activity from the King?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “Usually when there’s an invasion he goes and stays with his cousin the seed-merchant, just across the border,” I said. “I gather he prefers it there to here. The Mysians won’t bother you at all. Particularly if you buy their baskets.”

He nodded. “What are we doing here?”

“Don’t ask me.”

The customer is always right; if we had a physical headquarters, that would be written up on the wall in golden letters. But you can’t help speculating. Why would a man want to invade a country? The primeval will to power, maybe, or perhaps he likes watching the way blood changes colour when it soaks away into the dust. A philosopher? He might want to observe the changes that absolute power made to his personality—does it corrupt absolutely, or can the philosopher-king control it and bend it to his will? An opportunity to create the perfect society; I considered and rejected that, because if that was what you had in mind, you wouldn’t try and do it in Mysia. Or perhaps he’d played with toy soldiers as a boy, or years ago a Mysian kicked sand in his face on a beach somewhere. You just don’t know, with humans. There is no wrong or right, except for the eternal, unchangeable rightness of the customer.

Mine not to reason why. Not my place.

“You’ve got to tell me,” I said to him. “It’s driving me crazy. What are we doing here?”

He looked up from a huge scale plan of the Citadel. He’d been going over it for hours, making tiny notes in red and green ink; improvements in the defences. I’d peeked over his shoulder a few times. They were brilliant. He should’ve been a military engineer. Belay that; Mankind, thank your lucky stars he was never a military engineer.

“Excuse me?”

“You know exactly what I mean. Why did we invade this country? Why are we here?”

“Oh, that.” He carefully dried the nib of his pen on a scrap of cotton waste before laying it down, so it wouldn’t splodge the plans. “I’d have thought you’d have figured that out for yourself by now.”

He had the only chair. I sighed and sat down on the floor. “I’ve tried, believe me. But I can’t.”

“Keep trying,” he said. “It’s dogged as does it.”

I’m ashamed to say I jumped up and banged the desk with my fist. He gave me a pained look. “You want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Ah well.” He leaned back in his chair. It had been the seat of twelve consecutive garrison commanders, and the arms were scarred by fingernails picking at the carved edges. “It’s a bit of a sideshow, really.”

“Is it?”

“Oh yes. It’s just that I want Mankind to be in a suitably receptive frame of mind, for when my great hypothesis is published. You may disagree, but my personal experience is that when you’re trying to concentrate on the higher metaphysical and ethical issues, things like hunger, poverty, and the constant threat of violent disruption really don’t help at all. Get rid of them, therefore, and they’ll be that much more willing to listen and easier to persuade.”

I looked at him. “Get rid of them,” I repeated.

“Yes, why not? And that’s what we’re doing here.” He winked at me. “That’s a hint,” he said. “A great big one. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m trying to get some work done.”

Disturbing the customer’s concentration when he’s engaged in his chosen task is explicitly forbidden in the contract; so I didn’t talk to him again until he’d finished for the day, rolled up his plans, closed his books, and put his feet up on the desk. Only then did I take him in a light supper and a glass of white wine.

“Here’s what I think,” I said. “Mysia is bordered by three powerful, militaristic nations. For centuries, all three have lived in terror of one of the others seizing Mysia and using it as a springboard for invasion. In consequence, they’ve spent a grossly large proportion of their national wealth on defence, anticipating what they see as the inevitable aggression; their kings have taxed their feudal barons to the point where all three countries are on the edge of economic collapse and revolution and civil war are a distinct possibility, but the foreign threat refuses to go away so long as Mysia remains independent and weak.”

He gave me a faint smile, which I found patronising.

“Your idea,” I went on, “is a Mysia that’s independent and
strong.
Once the three great nations come to understand that Mysia can no longer be conquered, they’ll realise that war isn’t inevitable. In fact, since any enemy would have to pass through Mysia to get to them, and Mysia is strong and independent, war is actually impossible. So, with a vast sigh of relief, they stop bleeding themselves dry with defence spending; the people prosper, prosperity brings content, there’s no more talk of revolution, and everybody is happy and peaceful. Since the three nations dominate the civilised world, happiness and peace become general throughout Mankind.” I paused for breath. “You think you’re so clever.”

“I am so clever.”

“Yes.” I hesitated. Not my place. The customer, and so on. Even so. “It’s not going to work, you know.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Of course not. We’ve got a thousand years of case law on our side. If you sell us your soul in return for a chance to do good, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. A contract is a contract. The higher courts will not intervene.”

He laughed. “I know
that,
” he said. “I’m not stupid.”

I looked at him. Usually I’m so good at reading faces. “You’re up to something.”

He lifted the lid off the plate I’d brought him; pan-fried liver in a cream and white wine sauce. “Whatever gives you that idea?” he said.

* * *

Bless his suspicious little heart.

Consider mortality. Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and awareness of this crucial brevity tends to concentrate his mind. Immortals are under no such constraint. True, they have so much longer in which to acquire and assimilate data, but far less incentive to get on with the job of processing it, assessing and analysing, forming hypotheses, and reaching conclusions. They have infinite time in which to stop and smell the flowers; furthermore, for them there is nothing to gain and nothing to lose. Change and decay, however, is in all around we see, and this prompts us to think harder, faster, and more clearly. That’s my take on it, anyway. Maybe they’re just not as smart as we are.

I first became interested in Mysia when I read the bit about the ants in Peregrinus’s
Geography
—you know, about how the Mysians train ants to dig for gold; the ants burrow into the earth and come back up with specks of gold dust clinging to their legs, which the Mysians carefully brush off with the pin-feather of a woodcock. It reminded me of something else I’d read, about a gold mine in Blemya where the dust was so close to the surface that the grass grew up through it and forced it to the surface; and that mine was well documented and real.

I couldn’t do anything about it at the time, as I was on the run in Antecyra, sleeping rough in a derelict dovecote and stealing pigswill to eat. But as soon as I was back in a place with libraries, I started to read everything I could lay my hands on about Mysia, and gradually it all started to come together. Rusty brown and greenish yellow rocks, beds of porphyry, bits of stone brought back by travellers with a distinctive honeycomb look about them, accounts of dried-up riverbeds and lava fields; all of them connected to one particular place, the mountain range in the middle of which the Empire had built the Citadel.

I searched the Imperial archives at Rosh Roussel. The military surveyors had chosen the site on purely strategic grounds, but that might just mean they were unobservant, or ignorant. Buried in the survey notes I found references to gold nuggets found in dried-up watercourses, together with strict instructions from the commander-in-chief to hush up such finds and discourage off-duty prospecting; the last thing they wanted was the garrison deserting en masse to go gold prospecting.

What with one thing and another, I never had time or liberty to go to Mysia; not until I made my big score in the paint trade, at which point I lost interest in get-rich-quick projects, settled down, and got disgracefully old. But I never stopped being interested. If only I were fifty years younger, I kept telling myself. And then, quite suddenly, I was.

No problem finding excuses to go strolling in the hills around the Citadel, unobserved by my servant/keeper. I couldn’t very well take a pick and shovel with me; luckily, I didn’t need them. Peregrinus was right after all; there was gold dust to be found in the anthills, kick them over with your toe and there it was, glittering in the sun.

Query: why had nobody else found it? Quite simple, really. The Mysians aren’t interested in gold, never have been. Their currency and medium of exchange is fine woollen cloth. As for invading soldiers, they were under orders not to stray too far from the Citadel, lest they be caught and eaten by the savages.

A few cursory inspections led me to what I’d known all along I’d eventually find. At first I couldn’t believe it, so I smuggled out a few tools. I didn’t have to dig very far.

The two low, plump, free-standing hills half a mile from the Citadel, the ones the Imperial surveyors nicknamed the Cow and Calf, are solid gold. Two enormous nuggets, with a bit of peat and cooch-grass on top.

And, best thing of all,
he
didn’t know about them. Nobody did; except me.

* * *

He was up to something, and I had no idea what it was.

It did occur to me that maybe he was after the vast gold deposits buried under the mountains nearby; but no, it couldn’t be that. If he’d wanted unlimited gold, all he’d have had to do was ask me; no need for soldiers and invasions. Besides, what good would gold be to him, in his situation? One truth abides, and overshadows all the rest—you can’t take it with you. And it’s not like gold’s any good for anything except as a source and repository of wealth. You’d have to be desperately, profoundly stupid to trade your immortal soul for mere purchasing power. So, clearly, it wasn’t that.

I can’t pretend I was enjoying Mysia. “Cultural desert” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Generally speaking, whenever a certain number of humans congregate in one place, they tend to generate art in some form or another, even if it’s just whittled bones and splodges of ochre on the cave wall. And all human art (tautology; all art is human; it’s the only thing we omnipotents can’t do) has merit, if you look at it long enough and closely enough. Except in Mysia. The Mysians don’t sculpt or paint, they don’t scratch incuse decorations on the handles of their axes, they don’t even tattoo their bodies or weave fish bones into their hair. Having no gods, they carve no idols. There is no word for artist in the Mysian language; instead there’s a long-winded periphrasis that translates as man-who-deceives-others-into-giving-food-by-spoiling-bits-of-wood.

Well; I’ve been in deserts before, sand deserts and ice deserts, landscapes of volcanic rock, bleak plateaux blasted clean of life by war and weapons you couldn’t begin to imagine. On such occasions, I seek solace in a good book. But that was one thing I simply couldn’t do in Mysia. It came as something as a shock to me when I realised it. All my favourite books were either written by Saloninus, or commentaries on, rejections of, or defences of his works and theories. And here I was, shackled by chains of contract to the man himself. I remember opening my battered old copy of
Human, All Too Human
and glancing down at the so-familiar text, and thinking, I can’t accept any of this anymore. I felt utterly betrayed, bereft, and destitute.