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

by K.J. Parker

She thought for a moment. “In the story, the lions started it.” “The lions always start it,” I said. “By being lions.”

“You want to rule the world.” It was like a slap in the face. “I suppose so,” I said. “Like they say. If you want something done properly, do it yourself. And from what I’ve seen, nobody else is fit to be trusted with it.” “And you are.” “Me, no. You, maybe. But even I couldn’t make a bigger hash of it than everyone who’s tried so far.”

“Do you want to know what I really think?” The words came out like blood from a wound, a sight I’m familiar with. “I think you and I are very much alike. The lions came looking for us, we didn’t start it. They murdered your father and all your family, and me—” I grinned. “They cut me up. But that’s a thing about worms. You cut one in half, all you achieve is two worms.” She frowned. “We’re not really all that alike,” she said. “For a start, I’m a queen and you’re—” Her turn to choose her words with care. “Nobody.” “True. But being a queen wasn’t doing you a lot of good when you were sitting in that cell. And the queen of the worms is still a worm.”

That still leaves a hundred and eighty-eight thousand, and with an army that size you could comfortably storm heaven and slaughter all the gods.

Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?

There’s a convention, of course, that all fathers long to see their offspring and will go to any length to be near them. I don’t think that would’ve cut much ice with my father.

“We’ve come to make sure the empire never does anything like that to us ever again. We can do it by stamping on your heads till you’re dead. That’s fine, we can do that. It’s well within our capability. Or we can adjust the empire so it works properly. No more forced labour, no more extortionate taxes, no more government by corrupt bureaucratic elites. Maybe even an empire that helps people once in a while.”

“You’re full of shit.” “So people tell me. That doesn’t mean I’m not serious. I can be trusted implicitly so long as our interests absolutely coincide. What about you?”

Their function was to march by our side, comrades in the glorious cause, rather than do any actual fighting; at least until they were so thoroughly compromised in the eyes of the empire that they’d have no choice but to join with us for real. As a wise man once said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

I really don’t understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.

“If I’d known being a prophet was going to be like this,” I told her in Echmen, “I’d have been something else. A military genius, something like that. Much more of this and all my hair’ll fall out.”

“Saloninus,” I told her, “says that there are basically two kinds of invasion. There’s conquests, where you get hordes of savages streaming across a frozen river, cities burned to the ground, every living thing slaughtered right down to chickens, the end of civilisation as we know it, followed by a dark age, followed by something very much like what you had before. The other kind is called a takeover. That’s where you clear out the people at the top and take their place and everything else goes on as normal. Takeovers are better because you inherit all the nice things your predecessors had, which is why you wanted to rob them in the first place. Otherwise it’s like breaking into a rich man’s house, smashing everything up and torching it, then walking away empty-handed. I think this ought to be a takeover, don’t you?”

I drew a long breath so I could point out to her all the fallacies in her argument, but then I thought; why? Out of an overwhelming duty to the truth? Fuck, as I may have observed before, the truth. If it was here, would it go out of its way to defend me? Unlikely. The truth is utterly selfish and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor.

And, come to that, Alyattes was now the nephew of the old emperor and the rightful heir to the throne. He hadn’t been until quite recently, but pretty soon anyone who could testify against his claim would be dead or singing a very different tune, and what was once a lie would become the truth, official, carved on the lintels of triumphal arches; and if you can’t believe what you read on a government arch, what can you believe?

He didn’t say anything and I let well alone. Once you’ve planted an idea, you don’t want to kill it by overwatering.

When he woke up to find us behind him and Carcamela (who I’d left behind) in front of him, General Samodattes, commanding the loyalists, gave up. It wasn’t just that he was surrounded and outnumbered three to one. He was an Imperial general, and fighting your way out of fixes like that is all in a day’s work for men of that calibre. It was the fact that I’d somehow miraculously spirited two-thirds of my army across an uncrossable river that broke him.

as usual, the public had fought tooth and nail for the wrong end of the stick.

I sat down on the edge of the table. It was beautiful thing. It was made from a special sort of wood, a sort of honey colour with a complicated black figure. Someone told me the trees only grew on one island in the middle of the sea, miles off the south coast of Echmen. When the prince of the island sent him the table as a gift, the emperor liked it so much he had all the other trees on the island cut down and burned, so that this table would be unique.

You’d be taking power away from the horse-owner class and giving it to the common man. I can’t think of anything that would do more damage, except maybe plague.”

The third part, though, was new. In it, I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. Then I saw the beautiful city of the Robur, coming down from heaven, dressed as a bride adorned for her husband, and a voice from heaven saying there will be no more death, nor sorrow, nor pain, for the former things have passed away. I got the impression that somehow I was supposed to be something to do with it happening, but you know how it is in dreams. And then I woke up, sweating, thinking; no more late-night savoury dumplings for me.

I got a letter. It was from the king of the Sashan, delivered by a royal messenger wearing more red velvet than should ever be concentrated in any one place at any one time, and addressed to me personally. Hold your horses a moment and consider that. Imperial protocol requires that emperors write to emperors. You don’t send a letter to a fellow emperor’s subject, just as you don’t put your hand down the blouse of a fellow emperor’s wife. It’s not respectful.

The letter started off telling me a lot of things about myself that I already knew; I was a false prophet, a deceiver, I’d stirred up the people with a lot of lies about God and induced them to murder their rightful sovereign, I was a blasphemer and an idolater – I’m not entirely sure what an idolater is, but it’s probably safe to assume that I’m one, I’m everything else, after all – and there was an unspeakable punishment lined up for me some time real soon. That punishment, he went on, it would be both his duty and his pleasure to carry out; to which end, please note that a state of war now existed between the Sashan and the Echmen. Followed by the royal seal, love and kisses conspicuous by their absence.

Harsh economic truths can’t just be waved away, and one such truth is that keeping a large standing army costs a lot of money. The Great King is no fool. Why keep a dog, he reasons, and bark yourself? Since everybody knows that the king is so strong that his sneezes flatten mountains, why spend an absolute fortune on soldiers and equipment that probably won’t ever be needed? Should the need arise, of course, the mighty Sashan nation will surge up like a river in spate and annihilate the enemy as though he’d never existed. Until then, better to keep the money in the Treasury, or spend it on a nice bit of art for the palace courtyard.

But they don’t see any merit in fighting. To them, it’s a bit like peeing. You do it when you have to, but you don’t make a song and dance about it, or pretend you enjoy it, or that your peeing skills make you a superior human being. Rather, they feel it’s somehow distasteful and dirty, to be ashamed of.

I’d given up eating the yummy dumplings but I was still getting the dreams, so I consulted a doctor. Echmen medicine is so much better than anywhere else. They have cures that frequently work and doctors who sometimes make you better. Rather startling for someone brought up on Robur medical practice, which tends towards the view that the doctor’s job is to help finish what nature started.

“Just try and get some rest and fresh air now and again and drink plenty of liquids.” As opposed to drinking solids; yes, right.

Meanwhile, when you’re preoccupied with all of that and have more than enough on your plate as it is, some clown in the civil service back home discovers that military activity on the grand scale has led to a catastrophic cash-flow problem, so calmly announces that your men are going to have to wait for their pay for another six months. You’re careful not to call it a mutiny, or even let the M-word cross your mind, because mutiny is so desperately serious that you’d have to take extreme measures to deal with it so it’ll never happen again. The punishment for mutiny is laid down in the military statutes and can’t be altered. You drive a lot of tall posts in beside the road, precisely twenty-five yards apart, and you sharpen them. Then you choose every tenth man from the mutinous units and impale them. Because of this, the army hasn’t had a mutiny for four hundred years.

Your horse rears again, and while it’s upright and off-balance something else bashes into you from the other side, and you both go down. You hear and feel your bones break at the same moment. You try and pull yourself free, because there are stampeding horses all round you, you can see them surging up towards you, filling your field of vision. One of them is very close indeed. You can see the ends of the nails, driven through the shoe into the hoof and clipped off short by the farrier − And now I must ask you to stop imagining, because you’re dead.

The soldiers had thrown away their weapons, stripped off their armour and flattened themselves on the ground in the excessively melodramatic conventional pose of surrender familiar to anyone who knows Sashan monumental art.

Somehow I don’t feel so bad about the slaughter of the Sashan top brass, who’d wanted the war and looked forward to it and taken bets with each other the night before as to who could skewer the most Echmen. All human life has value, even the lives of shitheads and arseholes, but then again, you can’t make omelettes, so on and so forth. On balance I’d rather see six dozen senior officers trampled into squashed bags of broken bone than the same number of other ranks. No real logic to that, of course, but there you go. I’d wanted the war, too, of course. But at least I had the sense to keep as far away from the action as I could possibly get without emigrating.

“We won,” I explained. “But there’s something I need you to do for me. It’ll only take you five minutes and it’s no big deal.” “What?” I told her. Then she hit me so hard it made my head spin.

He opened his mouth and stammered for a bit. There was a real possibility he’d choke himself to death if I didn’t do something.

That, it turned out, was the Gospel According To Me, translated into Shasu by the bashful giant. It was an awful lot to ask and he wouldn’t dream of bothering me with it when I was so busy, but could I possibly see my way to just glancing it at, and maybe even pointing out some of his more catastrophic blunders? It was that or watch him boil to death inside his own skin, so I said yes, I’d be delighted. He backed away and went off to die of joy, and I started to read.

Once you’re past the Blue Falls the road gets easier and the country is flat and fertile. That makes it worse, because people can live there.

They weren’t happy about letting us march through their country but there was absolutely nothing they could do about it apart from raise all their prices by thirty per cent.

“Why have you brought us here, prophet?” a young subaltern asked me, head reverently bowed. “Is this a holy place?” I wasn’t in the mood. “Piss off,” I said.

Sashan lancers don’t like walking. They regard it as something of an admission of failure, as if the age-old symbiosis of man and horse had turned out to be a lie. But they were believers, and if the prophet ordained that they should get blisters which turned septic and they all died, so be it.

“You,” said my old friend Carloman, with all the hate in the world. Then he pulled a knife and stabbed me. Two minutes later, there wasn’t enough of him left to bury, more a sort of mulch.

We’d brought along an Echmen-trained doctor, just for luck. He’d done good work. (“The hardest part,” he told me later, “was all those idiots wanting to dip bits of cloth in your blood, for holy relics. I can’t operate under those conditions. How anyone could get a knife in that deep without hitting anything important, I really don’t know. I couldn’t do it, and I’m a surgeon.”)

I was too sick to move, they told me. I liked the way they said sick, like I’d caught malaria. What they should have said was, I’d been carved up by my own people too badly to move.

General Shardana, to whom faith had come in a blinding moment of revelation when he saw me weltering in my own blood, like (as he so vividly put it) a duck in raspberry sauce.

Meanwhile, I was plagued in my convalescence by an unending stream of earnest young Sashan who just wanted to stand there and gaze, knowing that the sight of me would be enough to wash away their sins and make paradise a dead certainty. I don’t know if any special spiritual merit accrued from getting sworn at by the prophet; if so, quite a few Sashan lancers were profoundly blessed.

Home: I used the word when I spoke to him, but what did it mean? I’d spoken instinctively, so I guess that deep inside I knew what I meant by it. Take me back to Sashan, or Echmen, or the Dejauzi territories; anywhere but here. Home defined as everywhere on earth except for one place, the place I originally came from.

They carried me into the newly consecrated temple and put me down at the feet of my own statue, a vast thing with an outstretched right arm and a beard. I do have a right arm, so it wasn’t all that inaccurate.

The library we’re assembling here will be the biggest and best in the world, and when it’s finished that’s where you’ll find me, doing what I do second best; reading, researching, gradually putting things together into orders and patterns, figuring a way out of here, a way home. I shall be wasting my time, because the Great Queen, She Stamps Them Flat, has given strict orders that I’m never to be allowed to leave this place. I’ll be safe here, she says. That’s a poor translation, because in Robur it can only mean one thing: here I shall not be in danger. In Apiru it’s ambiguous. It can mean either I’ll be safe from everything else, or everything else will be safe from me.

I use words carefully, and between translation and interpretation there’s a sliver of difference, as thin as a knife blade. Very thin, but it’s amazing the difference a knife can make. All the intended consequences in my life have turned to shit and all the unintended ones have turned to gold. Everything I’ve touched I’ve translated, into one thing or the other.