A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (The Siege, #3)

by K.J. Parker

The idea that you can make life bearable merely by living it in a different place has always struck me as bizarre. I base this view on experience. Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve always still been me, and some obstacles are too much even for geography to overcome. Fortunately, I’m in the minority. Most people don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between movement and amelioration. They believe in the Promised Land. They also can’t get past the misconception that if you move away from something bad, inevitably you’re moving towards something better. This is just bad geometry, a total failure to understand the properties of a straight line, but never mind. Simply because something is factually wrong doesn’t make it untrue.

Strange things start happening inside your head when people like you. At first you feel smug and a tiny bit guilty. Then, without realising it, you begin to believe. If they like me, you find yourself thinking, there must be something there to like. In vain you try reminding yourself where all this comes from; they like me because I happen to be able to group all six inside the inner gold at thirty yards, or because my father got killed because of the incompetence of the joint chiefs of staff. You start to spin cobwebs of rationalisation; ah yes, but what they really like is how modest and unassuming I am as I walk forward to pull my arrows out of the target, how bravely I took the news about his death. It somehow slips your mind that you practised that modest and unassuming stuff beforehand until you were pitch perfect, and that one of the first things that crossed your mind when the adjutant told you the news was, act brave, they’ll love you for it. Instead, you see someone different in mirrors, a likeable man, a good man, someone who’s worth something.

And the old man’s daughter, Lady Melaxuntha – did I mention her? No, I don’t suppose I did. They didn’t have anything like her where I came from. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful; in fact, looking back, I’m not sure she was beautiful at all. But – there’s this theory, about dogs. They can’t really see things when they’re still, only when they’re moving. Lady Melaxuntha’s face was never still, never the same two seconds together. It changed with every word, every expression, every emotion. I imagine that if she held perfectly still, she’d be handsome going on plain. I expect the wind would be very different if you caught it when it wasn’t blowing. But if it wasn’t blowing, it wouldn’t be the wind.

If they’d been sheep or chickens you’d have been merciful and put them out of their misery, but mercy means something else when applied to human beings.

For a count of five, dead silence. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. I knew it was coming, sooner or later; like the Echmen, only harder to deal with. “Because it’s what you want,” I told her. “What you really want, deep down. What you deserve.” “Fine,” she said. “Don’t tell me, see if I care. I’ll just have to guess. You’re doing this because you want to be the king of whole world.” I smiled at her. See above under muscle memory. “Really.” “I know,” she said, “it sounds crazy. It’s such a totally crazy thing to want. But I think you want it.” She was shredding a scrap of linen offcut in her broad, stubby fingers. “Otherwise I can’t think of a reason why you’ve done all this. I’m guessing it’s all to do with your people being wiped out, the almighty Robur empire, so much better than everybody else that God even made them a different colour, so there’d be no excuse for not knowing. I think that really got to you.” “I’m not denying that,” I said. “So,” she went on, “you figured it something like this. The world belongs to the Robur. I’m the only Robur left. Therefore the world belongs to me.” “That’s a syllogism,” I said. “I didn’t know you’d learned logic.” “I read a book about it,” she said. “It was all bullshit.” “You mean you couldn’t understand it.”

“I understood it just fine. But it was bullshit.

“You did see her, didn’t you? That time when you thought you were bleeding to death and you were going to die.” “No,” I said. “I made that up.” She shook her head. “You think,” she said, “that just because you don’t believe in her, she doesn’t exist. Well, fuck you. I don’t know if this needle believes in me or not, but if I want to sew something, I use it. I couldn’t give a shit whether the needle has faith.” She was really starting to get to me. “Pull yourself together,” I said. “You know perfectly well that what you saw was a Robur actress called Hodda with no clothes on.” “Do I?” She grinned at me, like I’d just made a stupid chess move. “Explain to me, I’m just an ignorant savage. What’s an actress?” “You know perfectly well—” “Explain to me.” “Fine. An actress is a woman who plays a part in a theatre.” “I don’t know what that means. Explain some more.” “All right. A man writes a play. He writes out what all the actors are going to say. They learn it by heart. Then they stand up in front of an audience and pretend to be the people in the play.” “That’s what I thought,” she said. “So, when your Hodda goes out in front of the people watching, she’s not Hodda any more. She’s someone else.” My head was starting to hurt. “She’s pretending.” “Really.” She glared at me. “You go to one of these plays and you see a woman stand up and say and do things. Has she got a name?” “Yes.” “And the other people in the play. They can see her?” “Well, yes.” “And hear her?” “Yes, unless sh...

Lovely dialogue on the nature of truth

There is therefore something of a discrepancy between the Sashan army on paper and the Sashan army in the field. A bit like the Echmen, only more so, because the Sashan actually believe. If the king has an inscription carved on a wall saying THIS PROVINCE IS DEFENDED BY A HUNDRED THOUSAND MEN, it inevitably follows that it’s true. Furthermore, it always was true and it always will be, because the king says so. That notional hundred thousand is represented on the ground by twenty thousand. Note the word represent. The hundred thousand are the truth; the twenty thousand stand for them, just as the idol in the temple stands for the god, but the god is infinitely more real in any meaningful sense.

Again, the truth. Truth as represented on earth by symbols which is in turn represented by something tangible and incidentally totally different from "the truth."

Now the twenty thousand representative Sashan lancers are pretty hot stuff, never doubt that. They’re Sashan, they’re strong, they have the honour to have been chosen out of a hundred thousand ultra-real soldiers to represent the king’s right arm out on the frontier.

The thing about people who believe defeat is unthinkable is that they tend not to think. My kind of enemy.

Take me, for instance.” “The Great King.” “Exactly. The strongest man on earth. When I’m not tearing down city gates with my bare hands, I’m strangling lions. And that’s true. It’s true because people believe it.” “I suppose it depends on your definition of—” He shook his head. “No,” he said. “The truth’s the truth, that’s it’s defining quality. Either a thing’s true or it isn’t. But tell me this. If I don’t believe in a thing and everybody else in whole wide world does, what then?” He smiled. “A thing is true because we believe it. If we stop believing, it stops being true.” “We stop believing because new evidence comes along.” “You think that? How sweet. No, really it’s all about fashion, like hairdos and hemlines and tassels on cushions. We believe something because people we think are really cool tell us it’s true. Then we shape the evidence to fit, like a blacksmith bending iron. Or we just believe, because the truth is so self-evident it needs no proof, and no proof can shake our belief.” He stopped and caught his breath again. “Listen to me, nattering on. But you’re not a subject of the empire, so you don’t have to listen to me. Lucky you. The long and the short of it is, the fact that a miracle was really all camels doesn’t stop it being a miracle. From time to time, God uses tools and instruments. He makes use of you, just as you make use of camels. It was a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I’d best be getting back now.

Once again truth. What we belive is truth. We fit evidence to it.