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

by K.J. Parker

This is the true history of the intended and unintended consequences of my life, the bad stuff I did on purpose, the good stuff that happened in spite of me.

(by now we were trailing along a small army of sleep-deprived government officers, like someone driving geese to market)

They don’t read or write – don’t rather than can’t, please note; there’s all sorts of things we do and they don’t, which is why we tend to write them off as half-human savages. But, according to them, they don’t do them because they don’t want to, and they point to us and say, look what reading and writing and living in cities have turned you into, and we want no part of that. Well, it’s a point of view.

Failure doesn’t tend to make people well disposed towards those who thwarted them, and it’s easy to explain your lack of success by saying that the people who didn’t want to know are ignorant barbarians.

The Dejauzida (including, in this instance, the Hus) have all sorts of weird taboos about names. You can’t, for example, say the name of someone who’s died; you have to use an elaborate periphrasis. Nor can you ask someone their name; nor can you tell someone yours. If you really want to know, you have to ask a member of the family (and not just any member; there’s a rigid protocol, governed by family status and the name owner’s position in the family hierarchy). Asking a princess her name would constitute an insult that could only be avenged in blood.

Most definitely, you shouldn’t frame any reference to a person’s fatness in terms that might be construed as critical or disapproving. I have no quarrel with that. Sneering at people and making fun of the way they look may be a fundamental human instinct, but so are lust and smashing bones. We should aspire to be better than we were made.

The look he gave me was designed to shrivel my skin and strip the enamel off my teeth, but I’m used to people looking at me like that.

He’d never imagined, all the time he’d known me, that he’d ever be in a position to be proud of me, so after the initial shock it came as a pleasant surprise.

I had nowhere in particular to go, but her company made me anxious to go there.

“Sometimes I like doing what I’m not supposed to.” Like talking to a social inferior of the opposite sex in a public place off limits except to Echmen citizens and accredited diplomats. “Not me,” I said. “If you do that, you get in trouble.” “So?” “I’ve had a lot of trouble in my life. It’d be greedy and selfish to want any more. It might mean someone else having to go without.”

My own actions and decisions have shaped my history the way volcanoes and the impact of falling stars shape a landscape.

In Sashan society, insults must be avenged instantly in blood; therefore, if someone insults you deliberately, plainly not expecting you to stab him to death on the spot, it must be because you’re friends and it’s all in fun. My role was to take it in good part but not to dish it out. If a Sashan does it to a foreigner it’s good-natured ribbing. If the foreigner does it back, knives flash and the crows get lucky.

I could see that I was upsetting his fundamental view of how the cosmos works; the superior man can do everything better than the inferior man, except for this one bizarre anomaly. It itched him like mad, but the superior man never scratches in public. To do so would be to admit to having an itch.

On a corner of the flyleaf of Erzen’s Humans and Semi-Humans Beyond the Frontier I scribbled a brief note. The punishment for defacing a library book is death, but fortunately no one was looking.

“True. But staying here would probably be a bad idea, once you’re no longer needed. Of course you might be able to worm your way in, show them how useful and reliable you are. But you’re the wrong colour entirely, so if I were you I wouldn’t bank on it. The Echmen are wonderfully open-minded, but you know how the entire human race feels about your lot.”

Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.

I had to find Oio; but the selfish, inconsiderate bastard was out of his office, doing the work he was supposed to be doing instead of being there to bend the rules for me.

The world, according to Adzo Silanicus’ Principles of Advanced Geography, is a very big place, reaching from one side of the sky to the other, and although we know about lots of places, there are lots of places we don’t know about.

These days, received academic opinion is that Borabo is not so much a place as a state of mind. It’s the elusive, illusory, indispensable Somewhere Else we all need to believe in, whether we call it Borabo, Paradise or the Afterlife. There’s got to be something better, we tell ourselves, and if only we had a boat and a lucky wind we could go there and be happy. We don’t try, needless to say, but knowing we could keeps us from opening a vein and drifting away.

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.

I spread my arms wide, to convey peaceful intentions, and took a step back. “I’m on your side, you stupid bitch,” I said.

“Piss off,” she reasoned. “If I’m going to die, I might as well do it here. Save myself a long walk.” The Hus don’t like walking, under any circumstances. Walking is something horses do, with people sitting on them.

Being cruel doesn’t come naturally to me. Neither does playing the flute, but I forced myself to practise regularly and now I’m quite good at it.

I’m not at my absolute best in confined spaces in the dark. After we’d been walking for what seemed like my entire life, I got the horrors, crouched down on the floor and refused to go any further. But she yelled at me and kicked me and yelled at me some more, telling me I was pathetic and useless and I deserved to be left there to die of starvation and be eaten by rats, until eventually I dragged myself to my feet and stumbled forward into the darkness just to get away from her voice and her very hard left foot.

A weird-looking female in an amazingly expensive silk dress comes barging in through the door, ignoring the you-can’t-go-in-theres of the sentries with that special selective deafness that only comes with the bluest of blood.

The pheasant is only valid while you’re holding it. While it’s in contact with your skin, you’re sacrosanct. If they snatch it from your hand, they can cut your head off. You can see why the Echmen make such good lawyers.

Like all families, the Dejauzi has some members who are hated like poison by all the others. But there’s a difference between you hating your sister and somebody else hating her. Inside the family, it’s fine and perfectly natural. When it’s an outsider, it’s different. I had an uncle like that. We all loathed him, with good reason. He was horrible to his wife and children, he drank too much, he shouted at servants and when he came to stay with us he stole things. But when he was arrested for stabbing a stranger in a public place, the whole family mobilised, called in favours, spent a large percentage of its limited social and political capital to get him released and the charges dropped – not that he was the slightest bit grateful, and when he dropped dead of a stroke nine months later, we all felt like it was our birthday.

It’s cold scientific fact that the universe is composed of two basic elements, Us and Them, always opposed in fundamental, irreconcilable conflict. The fact that we may like individual Them loads more than we like any of Us is neither here nor there. When it turns into an Us-against-Them issue, we can no more side with Them than water can flow uphill.

Unlike the Sashan, the Robur, the Rosinholet and nearly every other variant form of tool-using biped, the Echmen don’t like war. It’s messy and the outcome is never certain, and it costs a ridiculous amount of money better spent on other things. Hence the desire for a big, thick wall, to keep the bastards out so they wouldn’t need to fight them.

I sighed. “I know,” I said. “That was a really bad thing to ask and I’m sorry. But I need to know, and screw your deeply held cultural directives.” I realised I’d broken into Echmen, too. But you try saying cultural directives in the language of goatherds.

“Fucking God almighty,” said the man on whom all our hopes were pinned. “Do you want to get us all killed?”

All my life, priests and monks and holy men have been urging me to turn aside from my licentious ways and believe. Invariably they neglect to tell me how I’m supposed to do it. I imagine that lecture was at the start of term, and I missed it.

To punish them, Agen sent down an angel with a golden box, which he forbade them to open. Needless to say, as soon as the angel had gone, they opened it, and out flew Death, Sickness, War, Poverty and all the other evils that plague mankind. All except one; Hope was too feeble to climb out of the box, and the stupid humans, not realising that Hope is the greatest torment and deceiver of them all, lifted her out and took her for their own.

I was shaking like a leaf, the reaction to all that talking big to strangers.

I wasn’t looking forward to meeting the Luzir Soleth. The Echmen haven’t got a lot to say about them, so you have to go to the Sashan accounts, which are somewhat biased on account of the fact that four hundred years ago the Luzir invaded the Sashan homeland, sacked three major cities and killed every living thing they could find. A certain degree of negativity, therefore. Of course the Sashan retaliated, which is why the remnants of the Luzir ended up here, two thousand miles south of where they’d started and greatly diminished in both number and self-confidence.

“That’s right, I am. I’m proposing peace. The peace that comes when your enemy can’t hurt you any more, because your foot is on his neck. It’s the only kind worth having, believe me.”

Living in cities tends to breed the smarts out of people somewhat, and the Hus prided themselves on their earthy common sense, their resistance to clever speeches and charisma, their robust scepticism, their knack for the awkward question, their downright rudeness. If they’d had a heraldic crest or a Great Seal, the motto on it would’ve been No Flies On Us.

“There is that possibility. And if it doesn’t work, we’ll be torn to pieces and they’ll feed the scraps to the dogs. Big deal. My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I’m not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn’t carry on the way it’s been so far. Your life, which I saved twice, belongs to me. Now shut up and stop making difficulties.”

Why can’t human beings be more like chemicals? In an alchemical experiment you add X scruples of A to Y drams of B and stir slowly over a gentle heat, next thing you know you’ve got what you want, predictably and reliably.

“She wants to know about the money.” “Lie to her,” I said. “She’s incredibly suspicious.” “Lie convincingly.”

The Luzir king got to his feet. Apparently he did it exceptionally well, because he got a big round of applause for it.

“Thank you so fucking much, you treacherous little shit.” I bowed my head, dazzled by her radiance. “It’s the least I can do,” I said.

Besides, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is practically a declaration of love.

Had I judged the little catch in the throat just right? I really wish I’d studied acting rather than Sozen III’s innovative use of light artillery.

“You must’ve had a reason. You always choose your words carefully.” “Do I.” “Yes, you do. And Dejauzi isn’t even your language.” “It is now,” I said. “And the Hus are now my people. I don’t think you can have a nation of one, it’s a grammatical impossibility.” “That would matter to you. The grammar.” “Yes,” I said. “Nation is a collective noun.” I was using the Echmen words, of course, but she understood them. “So if I belong to a nation, it’s got to be plural, not singular. Therefore I may have been born Robur, but now I’m Hus.” “I don’t think so. People aren’t words, you can’t just translate them.” She considered me. It wasn’t a comfortable experience.

“We do it my way,” I said, “and see where we end up. Could be an absolute bloody disaster, for all I know. Or we could end up ruling all the kingdoms of the earth. Would you like that?” She thought about it. “I can’t see the point,” she said. “Nor me. But you never know. Maybe it’s like what my mother used to tell me when I got invited to kids’ parties and I didn’t want to go. You’ll enjoy it when you get there, she used to say. Maybe we’ll get there and find it’s fun.”

One of the reasons people get irritated with me is my incurable flippancy. Everything’s a joke to you, they sooner or later say, you can’t be serious about anything. Which, I think, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of humour. There’s a sort of cuttlefish, so they tell me. When it’s chased by a shark or whatever, it squirts ink in its eyes and dashes for cover. For ink, read joke. The whole world scares me. A lot of the time, even thinking about who’s coming for me next makes me ill with fear. So, because I assume everything and everybody is hostile, I spend my life behind a screen of floating ink.

“Basically, we can’t go on the defensive, this town simply isn’t big enough to hold all the country people, even if we could round them up in time. The technical term is chevauchée, which is Sashan for cruising around at your leisure burning houses and barns, driving off livestock and trashing standing crops. Oh, and killing people, of course. It’s how the Echmen prefer to fight less developed nations, and they’re very good at it. The idea is to force them into a pitched battle, which the Echmen inevitably win because of their superior equipment and training. All of you are wide open for it, and they know that. And, obviously, you can’t possibly win.”

The next morning, we marched out, sorry, we shuffled out to war.

“I’ve seen healthier looking corpses. Admit it, you’re exhausted.”