Petty Treasons Page 3

  You paced up the long room, ten strides to your desk, fifteen to the jewelled nightingale in its golden cage, twenty-five down. Ten back up, and there you paused, looking back across the room at the wall along from the guards, where the first state portrait of yourself as Emperor hung.

  Artorin Damara, hundredth and last Emperor of Astandalas.

  It was recognizably the face you saw in the mirror when you bothered to look, if younger and less serene and more handsome. One might almost catch a hint of personality in the quirk of the lips, had there been any emotion in the eyes. Those were painted flat gold, neither whites nor irises separated, as the convention had it. No pupils there to let in the light; not when you were ritually and ceremonially, legally and by custom, magically pinned and bound there at the centre of the Empire, its ostensible sun.

  Fourteen years, four months, four days, and seventeen hours, and then the Fall.

  One hundred years, the rumours said, comatose, laid out on a bier on the lower dais. You (I, I, I) had wandered in dark dreams until something woke you, and three of the four guards at the corners of your bier startled and panicked and faltered from their posts.

  All except Ludvic Omo, standing steady as a rock on the lefthand side, who let nothing rock him.

  Three years attempting to make some sense of the world left to you, the broken government and devastated lands, the unpeopled countries and the tender, tentative, tattered magic.

  On your desk were the piles of reports you had been reading over breakfast, duplicated with some convenient spell the wizards of the Empire had long since perfected and kept largely to themselves. You knocked the edge of one pile just slightly out of square, your hand like a shadow. When you had been Emperor you had cast no shadow. Black of skin, but radiant, gleaming, glowing.

  A faint, quiet knock, and Ludvic tapped the butt of his spear on the floor.

  You closed your eyes, just for a moment, and gestured for them to open the door. You could face this; you must.

  And yet, Cliopher sayo Mdang was there.

  The man was subdued and even more excruciatingly polite. He looked wan, exhausted as if he too had slept little, and his hands trembled more than the day before as he set up his desk. There would, it was clear, be no jokes this morning.

  But he was there.

  The relief was extraordinary: like a gush of cool water falling upon your head, drenching you from head to toe until your eyes swam with rainbows. You whirled around, away from the secretary, the guards, the door to the outer world, your painted imperial self, and busied yourself frowning at the outdated landscapes on the wall, the plain door that led to your private retreat.

  The bells tolled the third hour, nine of the old clock, the beginning of the session. You took three long, quiet breaths in, even more gently out, and blinked your eyes sharply against the rainbows. The alabaster wall was even more luminous than usual, no doubt catching some resonance from your magic.

  The last note died away, and you turned not directly to your new secretary, to Cliopher sayo Mdang—to Cliopher, you would name him so in your mind, to Cliopher who had given you the greatest gift you had received in all those years of tithes and tributes since you became Emperor—but began to pace.

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk.

  “Good morning,” you said, not fidgeting, not looking quite in your secretary’s direction. “We are pleased to see you today, Sayo Mdang.”

  Cliopher replied with something you might have taken as genuine fawning, had you not had the previous day’s behaviour to consider. And also—for although you appreciated the man’s restraint, it was notable—the display of fawning gratitude persisted barely more than half an hour, and even that seemed to be nearly beyond Cliopher Mdang’s willingness or capacity to play the game of courts. At one point he even flicked his glance up to see how you were taking it.

  Your eyes did not meet, for yours had slid off the man’s face a bare instant before, automatically lifting away as you came near, but you caught the motion in the corner of your vision as you turned at the bottom of your triangle.

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty five, ten back to your desk. Each time you turned away from your guards, your new secretary, you smiled, and you looked at the flat golden eyes of your state portrait with something akin to compassion, for even if the future stretched on uncertain, there was this unexpected benison for you, who supposedly provided all your people needed.

  A look, a word, a smile, a metaphorical hand outstretched across the ocean moating you—

  You received the tiny, inconsequential offerings Cliopher Mdang gave you with disproportionate joy, a child opening birthday presents.

  Inconsequential was not perhaps the right word.

  You didn’t dare search for the right one. Not yet.

  2

  Small Miracles

  It was a week, a month, a year, of small miracles.

  It was hard to tell time, to grasp hold of anything but the bells, the round of ceremonies, the glittering evening courts. Some nights you dreamed of your courts, that you were caught in some faerie enchantment, metamorphosized entirely into gold, that you were become in truth the idol you were created.

  For the weeks, months, years, since you had woken from his coma you had been unable (or was it unwilling?) to enter into time. There were strange reports from outside the Palace: stories that in one village it had been a handful of years since the Fall, and in its neighbouring village across the river, through the forest, on the other side of the mountain, it had been a handful of generations, even centuries.

  (I believed the reports.)

  Every time you turned around it was another stage of the performance. You closed your eyes so the gold leaf might be applied. You opened them, and it was court. You laid your head upon the silken cushions, the downy mattress, closing your eyes on the carved wooden canopy, the opulent curtains. You rose, and bathed, and dressed, and performed your ceremonies.

  You wrestled with magic. Your own magic, the world’s magic, the tattered and torn remnants of the Empire; all of it whirling uncertainly, broken and battered, tender and tentative.

  You opened your mouth and spoke the ritual blessings. You closed your mouth and ran your hand along the edge of your desk, moved the papers just slightly out of alignment. You paced, fifteen paces up, twenty-five paces down, ten back to your desk. You spoke decrees, wrestled a simulacrum of good government out of the general anarchy, the threadbare bureaucracy, the skeleton army, the surviving nobility, the starveling populace.

  They all wanted order, stability, a central point on which to rest their hopes and their minds: you could be the last, at least; at the very least, to the very last. You could be the idol to whom they prayed, knowing the gods had not heard their cries when the Empire and all its magics came tumbling down.

  Your household had been decimated like all the rest in the Fall, in that hundred years comatose. (How? Why? How could it be that there were men and women around me who remembered my coming to the throne, as I remembered myself coming to the throne; remembered before then, when I had not been even a name to the courts, to my own family: I the second heir of the Empire, the back up, the spare.) You knew their names, the soft hush of their voices, their hands never touching you, ghosting around your skin with brushes and dressing wands and gloves.

  And then. And then.

  Enter Cliopher sayo Mdang.

  Add that one competent, intrepid, unpolished (funny) secretary into the even, enchanted tenor of your days, and the kaleidoscope began to—

  Not shift. It shifted all the time, shuffling those same elements into their infinite permutations, each recombination subtly different from the one before, fascinating until the essential sameness cloyed.

  Add Cliopher sayo Mdang into the mix, one speck in that ugly brownish-grey uniform that suited nobody, a pebble amongst all the yellow diamonds and white alabaster and jet, and the kaleidoscope slowly … stopped.

  Those first few days, that first week, that first month, it was just—you told yourself it was just—that you were concerned about any lingering consequences to that accidental meeting of gazes.

  Each morning, at five minutes to the third hour, nine of the old clock, you were there, waiting in your official study for the door to open on your secretary, leather box under one arm and the neat, undistinguished, plain Fifth Degree robes.

  You greeted him, each morning the same words, so that at first you did not realize the spinning was slowing, would soon stop.

  “Good morning, Sayo Mdang.”

  And, in a tiny, unbelievable gift, treason according to the absolute letter of the law, Cliopher sayo Mdang would look up after his obeisance and meet my eyes and smile and say, “Good morning, my lord.”

  One moment each morning in which you spoke as a person to another person, and was greeted as a person by another person: on such did the entire machinery of apotheosis stutter to a halt.

  You became increasingly suspicious that Cliopher sayo Mdang was smarter than you were.

  At first it seemed a simple matter that Cliopher was clearly much better at anything to do with numbers. You had never liked them; had never found anything about mathematics appealing. You did not like the mathematics of magic used by the Schooled wizards of the Empire. You did not like geometry or algebra for their own sakes, and the entire concept of fluxions was something you were grateful to have forgotten.

  Cliopher had a positive relish for budgets. It was uncanny.

  He was also disconcertingly efficient. You requested him to find the tapestry map, which he did: it was hanging on the wall by the next morning. When he entered that day, Cliopher also presented you with an accounting of the current state of the Treasury, which had surely been in so
me of the many reports you had read over the days, weeks, months, years before he came, but to which you had not paid more than the slightest necessary heed.

  No less than the necessary heed; you had your pride, distant and risible as it seemed to think you might. But the numbers washed out of your mind as the kaleidoscope turned, never any better, sometimes worse.

  You paced up fifteen strides, twenty-five down, ten back to your desk.

  Cliopher mentioned that the Treasurer might respond well to a personal audience.

  You considered your responsibilities, and eventually agreed.

  With the new tapestry map in place there seemed to be a lacking object on the other side of the room. You remembered the marble plinth that had once held the chained lion, and how you might find another treasure that you admired out of those your ancestors had looted.

  One day, therefore, you did not spend your afternoon wrestling with impossibilities, with unbound magic and hungry spirits, with time that ran like water or puddled like honey. Instead you called for the litter and descended the spiral to the level below the Throne Room, where the Treasury honeycombed the Palace roots.

  The tithes and tribute and plunder of a hundred Emperors was gathered there. After speaking with the Treasurer, words falling out of your mind, your mouth, you walked through the rooms, magic lighting your way though the Treasurer and her staff had brought torches. Five thousand lands and ten thousand titles. So much blood. So much gold.

  In one of the storerooms was a vase, asymmetrically glazed with teal.

  “This,” you said, remembering the flash of a kingfisher’s wing, on a river far from the Palace, once upon a time.

  With the vase on a new plinth, your route shifted.

  Ten paces from the inner door to your desk: the scent of sandalwood, the silky-smooth wood, the papers, the serene countenance of your own portrait a reminder of who you were and what you were not. Fifteen strides up to the jewelled nightingale; that infinitesimal pause to glance out the window at the moment you could see through the alabaster screen.

  Ten strides down to the ebony plinth.

  Fifteen strides to the door.

  No.

  You had them move the ebony plinth, but you did not like that either. Twelve strides down; thirteen strides down; no.

  You paused in your pacing, frowning at the plinth.

  “My lord?” said your secretary, after a long silence.

  You had forgotten entirely what you were dictating. You turned, lifting your eyes to meet the other man’s quizzical smile.

  Some atrophied sense of the absurd made itself known in your heart. After due consideration, you permitted yourself to ask, “What is the difference between a rhombus and a trapezoid, Sayo Mdang?”

  Sayo Mdang blinked, once, twice, his eyes bright and intrigued. “A rhombus has all of its sides parallel but its angles acute, my lord,” he said. “A diamond, for instance. A trapezoid has two sides only in parallel. In some places such is called a trapezium.”

  In another mood, in another life, you might have made some quip about trapeze artists. In this mood, in this life, you frowned at the plinth, at the shape your route took. “And if the sides are all of them out of synchrony?”

  “In that case it is a quadrilateral, my lord.”

  “A shape, that is, with four sides.”

  “Indeed, my lord.”

  Maths. Bah.

  You turned back to your desk, ten strides up, scent of sandalwood, and glanced across at the ebony plinth and then at the guards on the door.

  Ludvic was still, or again, on morning duty, and when your glance crossed his face, the guard met your eyes calmly, his expression warm. He had brown eyes, darker than Cliopher’s, more widely set in a broader face.

  A slight hitch of your own breath, hands clenched painfully behind your back, and then you said—serene as if this was not the second person, the second gift—you said, “Guard Omo, will you move the plinth back another foot?”

  Ludvic saluted, leaned his spear against the wall, and moved first the superlative teal vase to sit on Cliopher’s desk, where the secretary could regard it with cautious, concerned awe, and secondly moved the plinth, and thirdly returned the vase to its spot before he returned to his.

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk. But now when you strode past the middle of the long wall, your footfalls set up a very soft sympathetic chime from the vase.

  “A triangle is a more pleasing figure,” you said to no one in particular.

  “Indeed, my lord,” said your secretary, head bent, voice threaded through with amusement.

  You remembered that you were speaking about the pirates reported off the coast of southeastern Exiaputl, and continued on.

  Slowly, incrementally, things changed.

  Cliopher sayo Mdang continued to offer his small gifts, his petty treasons, each of them casually, as if he did not realize he was even offering them. As if he did not realize he was humming the banned, brilliant epic Aurora as he finished an official declaration, brush singing across his paper, while you paced up fifteen, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk, slow and steady, hands behind your back, face more serene than the painted portrait, giving no indication whatsoever that either of you knew the infamous poem.

  You might have believed his innocence, had you not had come to realize just how brilliant a mind worked behind that unassuming exterior.

  Up fifteen, down twenty-five (the soft chiming ring from the glorious kingfisher-blue vase, the colour of a moment long ago but cherished, polished in my heart as if it were the only stone in my treasury), back up ten to your desk.

  Cliopher finished that particular proclamation just as the fourth hour of the morning tolled. He stopped humming and instead busied himself cleaning his brush of the gold-flecked black ink he had been using. By the time the fourth toll fell away into silence he was ready with his pen and a clean sheet of paper, face nearly calm, eyes brimming with unspoken mirth.

  Surely Cliopher had to know what he was doing?

  Offering these gifts, moments of transgressing social norms—moments of transgressing laws, though it was not quite a crime to hum that song; only to sing or speak or read or write or print its words—moments of him being a real person, as if you were a real person, too.

  (I would not see the humour if I did not look upon the man’s face. I would not know it was there if I were not also stepping over those norms, reaching out past those taboos, looking back. But there had never been anyone to cross over for, before.)

  How long had it been since Cliopher had come to you? Already you could not quite recall what it had been before, when you had been sleepwalking, when you had been caught in the enchanted moment of the transition from the mortal to the divine. A soap bubble, glistening, brilliant, floating on air, caught on the end of a child’s wand, held trembling there. Popped in a gush of relief.

  The old myths of metamorphosis were full of rape and transgression: violence was done to those who crossed between those realms, who were torn from the human and made divine. To be drawn back—

  “And have you decided what will you be working on next, my lord?”

  You blinked, realizing you had been speaking, dictating something. Cliopher’s page was half-filled with the arcane symbols the scribes used. You could read them, had learned them in your other life, before you had been given the crown and the sceptre and the throne, but upside-down and several strides away you could see only that there was something about storms.

  You could not recall what you had been thinking. “Read out the last few lines,” you ordered, spinning around and returning to your desk. Why did you even have a desk? You never sat at it. You did not need to write anything down, not with Cliopher sayo Mdang there, his neat hand singing across the papers; nor look anything up, not with Cliopher sayo Mdang of the prodigious memory and sly humour.

  You used it in the afternoons, sometimes, when you were doodling a mimicry of magical formulae.