"How To Rule an Empire and Get Away with It"

[fiefoe]

Coming into the middle of the trilogy didn't diminish my enjoyment of this novel in the least. K. J. Parker made the stage to throne transition seem logical and believable, and Notker's is the most complex and interesting first-person voice I've encountered in a while. Don't quite get why Ogus's appearance was so necessary and so arduously achieved if the meeting was so inconclusive.

• “It’s one of those stories – well, a bit like you,” he said with a smile. “Starts off really well a long time ago and just keeps on getting better and better, no matter how many times you see it, up to a point, but after a while—” He shrugged.
• But (he explained to me, when I objected) what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns. Also, I told him, what they want is something that looks new and completely original but is actually the same old story we’ve all known and loved since we were kids.
• So, if you want an obnoxious old hag, you go for two or three out of the recognised iconography: wrinkles, hooked nose, wispy thin white hair like sheep’s wool caught in brambles, shrivelled hands like claws, all that. You don’t use them all, because it’s too much. Which is why you don’t get much real life on the stage. Nobody would believe it.
• There’s almost always a moment of dead silence, before all hell breaks loose. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you know what that moment is for. It’s the Invincible Sun giving you just enough time to choose: do I charge in and help and get involved, or do I discreetly turn round and walk away?
• self-centred as a drill bit / various friends with an unhappy knack of being able to find me
• I deliberately trod in a muddy rut in the road before I went in. Caked mud can happen to anyone, no matter how well shod, and hides cracks and splits. Attention to detail is everything.
• Just because the minister for this or the secretary of state for that is no bloody good and couldn’t find his own arse with both hands, that’s no valid reason for turning him out of office and replacing him with someone else, almost certainly with an entirely forgettable face, a squeaky little voice that won’t carry to the back of the hall and no known mannerisms. It’s bad enough when a general gets killed leading from the front; desperate waste of my time and trouble learning him like a book,
• Back then, just belonging to a Theme was a crime that could land you in the stone quarries or the galleys – which was awkward, since the Themes made sure that nobody in Poor Town who wasn’t a Blue or a Green could earn a living, on either side of the law.
• “The length and breadth of the City, in all the nasty places. And then, just fancy. Where do you eventually turn up? Burgling my house.”
• They were looking at me, as if I was a bill they were splitting three ways, and they couldn’t decide who’d had the turbot.
• I rather like melodrama, as a genre. It’s easy to write and good fun to act, and it fills theatres even in the hot weather. But I don’t like it much in real life.
• I had to work like mad to get rid of that voice, with its sharp, whining vowels, its devil-may-care slovenly aspirates and its smothered, bitten-off consonants. And the words would be all different,
• I could accept that. A friend of mine who used to make a living cutting dies for counterfeit coins told me once: a forgery’s got to be better than the original.
• Married to it would be closer to the mark. But, yes, a chip off the old block, to that limited extent. I go about my craft with the same – I’m reaching for a word here – the same whole-heartedness that he went about his. <> And now the chip stands back and considers the block, by means of a mirror, called Lysimachus.
• the Mirror of Battles, by Carnufex the Irrigator, who was a very great general a very long time ago, and which I’d happened to dip into when I was researching a play about, guess what, a siege. I wanted a whole bunch of military technical terms for the low comedian to reel off – ravelins and mamelons, I remember, and enfilades in side and rear, and pavises, and mangonels, and other stuff I never managed to find rhymes for.
• Once you find the half-worm of doubt in the apple of confidence, you start to worry.
• It slowly dawned on me that it’s possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and not have a plan for dealing with it; because they know what needs to be done but there are vested interests in the way, or they can’t figure out the politics, or they think it’ll be horrendously unpopular, or it’ll cost too much money, a commodity you can’t take with you if you get your throat cut by the enemy but never mind about that – it’s possible to build a beautiful house on the lip of an active volcano, with all the hot water you could ever want, and restructure your mind so you don’t actually think about what you’re doing, or what will inevitably happen.
• Did I ever tell you, I’ve never really liked sex?” <> I took a beat, then my cue. “If I’d known you could act, I’d have written a play for you.” <> She gave me her genuine smile. It’s not genuine, of course. It’s better than the real thing.
• Always been interested in what you can achieve, by way of light, shadow and the million degrees in between, with just candles, hoods and bits of coloured parchment. Take shadow, for example. You can stretch it, bend it, layer it, cast another shadow across it. Nobody ever notices it – why would you take any notice of what is, after all, basically only an absence – but it shapes and twists the way we perceive, you can mess with people’s heads with it.
• could’ve filled the pockets of their coats with small items of great value and hopped it halfway across the world; instead, they stayed on stage, playing their hearts out – because they were born into noble families with traditions of service to the state, for whom high public office is the only way of keeping score, like money is in our game. Not, I venture to suggest, because they liked the dirty, scruffy, ungrateful people, but because – because they never stopped to think about it, I guess. If you stopped to think about it you’d never do it,
• Nicephorus was following all the moves, seeing if there was anything he could learn – a serious-minded man, with a strong sense of his own inadequacy, which circumstances made him deny utterly in public. Artavasdus was enjoying the blood. Fair enough; as Saloninus says, the man who’s tired of killing is tired of life,
• Keeping a lid on it; bless his naïve soul. And, yes, there were riots, twenty dead and whole rows of shops burned and looted; and roughly forty completely innocent Jazygite sailors and traders were killed in one night, and we had to lock the rest of them up in the Guards’ barracks for their own safety. Nice to know that people care, but I’d have preferred it if they’d sent flowers.
• Which is why I’m making you the emperor.”<> My father had a trick punch, which he loved to show off. He’d hit someone just right, and the poor sod would stand there, completely winded and stunned, until my dad gave him a gentle little prod with the tip of his finger, whereupon he’d measure his length like a felled tree. <> “Haven’t we already got one?”
• I’ve never flown myself, but I’ve seen it done heaps of times, and so has anyone who’s ever been to the theatre. If you look really close, of course, you’ll see a rope tied to a sort of harness thing worn under the flyer’s shirt; but so what, they’re still up there moving through the air, and that’s a pretty good working definition of flight.
• You could’ve heard an ant fart, as the dozen or so senators present all thought of their unmarried daughters, nieces and similar livestock. Yes, it’s always nice to have an empress in the family, but on the other hand— <> “The People’s Emperor,” I went on, “should have a People’s Empress.”
• So up the aisle we walked; and that’s one of the really important things you learn on the stage, how to walk. A walk can be so many things, a strut or a pace or a waddle or a prance; we can do all of those and a thousand more. We can tell you who we are (hero, villain, ingenue, low comedian; prince, peasant, soldier, feisty kick-ass chick, crone) without saying a single word, just by the way we put one foot in front of the other.
• “I never read speeches,” I told him, snapping back into character like a set bone. “Half the people in the Themes would be horrified if they knew I can read. They’d think I’d sold out.”
• The steps of the Single Teardrop; many’s the time I’ve thought what a wonderful venue it’d make for the right production. Fabulous acoustic, because of the tall buildings on three sides. Great sightlines, and if you were doing the classics you wouldn’t need scenery,
• This city isn’t walls and houses and temples, it’s people, and who’s always looked out for the people, fed and clothed them, kept them safe? The Themes. So I promise you, as long as I’m emperor, the Themes will play their vitally important part in running this city, looking out for ordinary decent working people, feeding them, clothing them, keeping them safe. You have my word on that. <> “There’s just one thing wrong with the Themes, and once we’ve fixed that, everything’s going to be just fine. There’s two of them... Instead, there’ll be one Theme. Purple. Yes, that’s right. For four hundred years it’s been treason for anyone except the emperor to wear purple in public. From today, you’ll all be wearing it. My colour, my Theme colour, your colour.
• “Elected officers—” <> “In due course, I said. Meaning sometime, meaning probably never... “As and when we have elections,” I went on, “the people will get a chance to vote, yes. They can vote for you and the Optimates, or for Popilius and his Commonwealthers, and everything will be exactly the way it is now, except that instead of being at war with the Themes, you’ll be running them.”
• Me, then you, and you can choose who you want for everything below that. That’ll be the caretaker hierarchy pending elections, which unfortunately can’t be held until the state of emergency is over. You’ll have to arrange for an emergency, but that shouldn’t be a problem.” I paused, as chivalry demanded. Even in the arena, you give the other man a chance to get up again before you finish him off.
• Just a few well-chosen words, that was all. Playing with people’s emotions is what I’m paid to do, and it’s not nearly as difficult as you might think.
• “There’s a quarter of a million milkfaces camped outside the City and you want us all to call ourselves Whites.” <> “Purple.” She said it in a clown’s voice. “Purple, purple, purple. You can’t even say the word without spraying the front three rows with spit.”
• Perfectly legitimate, statesmanlike act, and Cleophon IV saved the empire from the Aram no Vei, and if there’s one thing nobody can deny in this life, it’s that the end justifies the means. <> The hell with it. If the truth really was absolute and immutable, how could someone like me be expected to live with himself?
• In the past, in my dad’s day, it had never been possible to paralyse the Themes in this way because the authorities never knew who all the Theme bosses were; one or two in each quarter, maybe, but not all of them. It was only because the Themes had won their long, bitter fight to be recognised and given a share in government that it was now possible to kill them off.
• “And half of that,” I told him, “was luck, and the other half was the thought of what would happen to me if I didn’t make the most of the luck. That’s why the Invincible Sun gave us fear. It makes us smart. Show me someone who’s afraid of nothing because he’s got nothing to be afraid of, and I’ll show you a cow. Humans are at their very best when they’re scared shitless.” <> That was my exit line, only I had nowhere to go, so I sat down again.
• it was one of the things the Themes were genuinely good at, fighting fires. They had to be. And, of course, I went with him, and acted as his aide-de-camp and general runner, so I knew the drill. Under normal circumstances, I could’ve relied on the local Theme boss to take charge and see that everything was taken care of. But the circumstances weren’t normal, because some idiot, who wore my underwear and shaved with my razor, had had the boss of the Tanneries judicially murdered.
• “You lot—” (points) “—housebreaking tools. Two rows need to come down right away; the soldiers’ll show you where. Women to the well, we’ll need a bucket chain to damp down the firebreak. You lot, firehooks and drag the thatch off, four rows back from the fire on all sides, then work backwards from there. The soldiers will tell you what to do as we go along.
• I coped because I’d seen my dad doing it, and because I’ve watched real professionals – Hodda and Momas and Olethria – staging a play. I asked Olethria how she did it once, and she said, you need to see it all in your head; oh, and back home she’d got a little toy theatre, and blocks of wood, three inches tall for the men, two and a half for the women, and she worked out every move to the inch the night before. I didn’t have that luxury, but I could visualise the Tanneries as a stage, with Prompt and OP, wings and front and centre; not really very close, but close enough. All the world’s a stage, according to Saloninus; that’s not actually true, but if you pretend it is, it helps, when you’re managing a fire.
• “And the coat,” he went on, “the coat was just perfect. If you’d shown up in dalmatic and lorus, it’d have been a flop, you can bet. But the emperor in an old docker’s coat, directing the rescue efforts—” He stopped. “So that’s what you wanted it for. How did you know?”
• It’s what the profession is all about; every night, hundreds of people tell you that you’ve done good, or at the very least you’ve done all right, and so you don’t have to ask yourself that question. In no other walk of life do you get that affirmation and reassurance, they tell me, and really, how can a human being be expected to live and carry on living without it? How could you possibly tell if you’re doing all right or not? <> To which I tend to reply: have you ever actually looked at the sort of people who go to the theatre? The idle rich; the fat, complacent tradesmen; the scum of the earth; do you really value their opinions so very much?
• Colonel of engineers. By definition, one of the smartest men in the empire. “I’d have thought you could work it out by the angles the pots come over at. You know where the trebuchets are, roughly. You know where the pots are landing. And if the nets turn out not to be high enough, use longer poles.” <> (The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people’s lives.)
• scattered with spent artillery shot – big boulders to you and me, and no troop of soldiers, however well drilled, can advance across that sort of terrain and keep in perfect step. So gaps started to appear, and once that happened they unravelled like a laddered sock. They shot back, of course, but mostly they shot wild – short or over the top, and the rising sun was in their eyes, which really puts you off your aim. We killed fifty or so of them for every one of us they hit, and the heaps of their own dead and dying made holding a straight line that bit more awkward, and still they came. All this time, of course, our mangonels and scorpions were pounding them with round stone balls, at a low trajectory with the springs partly relaxed, so the balls bounced and rolled instead of just hitting the ground and burying themselves in the dirt. They couldn’t reach the front, archery range, but they made a horrible mess of the fresh troops coming up. We had artillerymen who could drop a ball so precisely that it pitched at the front of a column of men and didn’t stop until it had reached the back, taking roughly a third of the poor bastards with it.
• “I know what it means,” she said. “It means what you want it to mean. It means you can do what you damn well like. Do you like having people killed, Notker? Does it make you feel big and strong?” <> “Enemy means someone who wants to hurt you,” I said. “Them or us, simple as that.” <> “Simple.” She gave me a look I won’t forget in a hurry.
• Of course, if it’s melodrama rather than legitimate tragedy, you can and should expect more twists than a corkscrew, and a lot of wars seem to me to have been melodramas of the worst possible sort. This war started really badly for us. We lost the empire practically overnight and came within a whisker of losing the City. Act 2, heroic defence by Nicephorus and Lysimachus, the City preserved. Properly speaking, the third act should be Lysimachus rallying the defence and driving the barbarians into the sea. <> Not really an option, since the sea’s on the wrong side of town,
• And, of course, there was Hodda, probably the smartest person I’ve ever known. She was quite definite about it. The City was dead meat, because of the arithmetic. There’s no shrewder manager than her, because she understands what people do and don’t want, what they’ll do and what they can’t be induced to do, even with bribes and horrible threats. She doesn’t get many runaway hits but she virtually never has a flop. She doesn’t sit down and work it all out with numbers and an abacus. She just knows. <> Winning the horrible thing; define victory.
• “You realise,” she said, on one of the rare occasions when she was speaking to me, “this is exactly the sort of thing that made Ogus decide to get rid of the Robur for ever.”
  “I didn’t start it,” I said.
  “Civilian targets,” she said. “People who’ve never done a single thing to hurt us, not even trying to make vases cheaper than we can. You’re no better than pirates. It’s disgusting.”
  “So’s wiping out a whole city.”
  “You should know.”
• A genuine Callicrates, for example; one of those would set you up for life, even if your favourite hobby was breeding pedigree racing elephants. Ridiculous, if you ask me. For one thing, they’re so small. You could fit five of them into a coat pocket.
• Colonel Apsimar – twenty-one years old, according to his docket; looked and sounded four years younger – led the raiding party himself. It was, of course, pitch dark in the saps and there wasn’t room to stand upright, let alone swing a sword or use a spear; and armour clinks when you move, so they didn’t wear any. It was, as Apsimar had said, knife-fighting in the dark, with a sulphur-fume garnish to add a touch of piquancy.
• Then we got the maps out. I wanted a spot where there was no chance of the current running me ashore. They needed somewhere they could build a jetty that wouldn’t get washed away. Unbelievably, there was a spot on the north coast that answered all the above, but it was two miles straight across the open water from the harbour mouth.
• “He got a letter to me curled up inside a perfume bottle. See for yourself.” She unstoppered one of the million trillion little bottles on her dressing table and handed it to me. Inside was a tiny scrap of rose-scented paper. I could just make out the writing on it.
• Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely. <> Which is odd, since the past has already happened; it’s done, complete, finished, signed off, sealed, delivered; dead. But, then, dead things change a hell of a lot, as the smell testifies. I tend to think of the past as compost; drifts of dead yesterdays rotting down into a fine mulch, in which all sorts of weeds germinate, sprout and flourish. Of course, the past changes, it can’t not change, and what was true yesterday—
• I think I know what happened, for what it’s worth. By all accounts, when Apsimar went back through the breach the enemy had all been cleared out, temporarily, though they rallied for one last unsuccessful push; but one of our side must have heard someone coming through, and smelt a very faint scent of roses, and stabbed him, thinking he was a bad guy. The mistake arose because Hodda is particularly fond of attar of roses and soaks her handkerchiefs in the stuff till they stink the place out.
• The only answer to the Robur problem, he said, was total extermination; until that happened, the world wasn’t safe. When the siege started I’d assumed he was a nutcase, insane, frothing at the mouth; now that I’d learned a bit about how things work and how they come to be done, I could sort of understand his reasoning. I could imagine one of those miserable, dreary meetings, with three powerful men bickering over whose deeply flawed plan to adopt; and I could picture myself saying, fine, let’s just slaughter the lot of them, and that’ll be that solved; and everybody agreeing with me so they wouldn’t have to agree with either of the other two. No, actually I couldn’t, but maybe that’s simply because my imagination isn’t strong enough. Not so different, after all, from some of the orders I’d given lately: burn down such and such a town I’d never heard of before the meeting; round up all the Green and Blue bosses and dispose of them; capture the breach, without fail. When you give the order, it makes sense.
• The closer we came, the higher up Ogus was. As soon as I saw him, I knew him; the type, I mean. I’d grown up with it. He was the typical Theme bruiser who’s made his pile and taken to indulging himself; pot belly, double chin, fleshy face, bags under the eyes, but all sort of added on, like modern additions to an old house, and under it you could see the man who made the pile, by hurting and scaring people and being more than usually smart. He was about the same age my dad would have been, had he lived.
• “I am the bloody emperor,” I snapped. Then: “But you’re right, of course. I can’t live like this, any more than you can. Long runs are great, but not a lifetime. We’ve got to get out.”


• He was bending down, grabbing a handful of her hair. Useful stuff, hair, in my dad’s line of work. “All right,” he said, and tried to yank her to her feet.
  I’d have grinned if I’d been able to. Hodda gets her wigs and hairpieces from the Curali brothers, in Long Acre. She pays a lot of money for them. Worth every penny.
  The hair came away in Ogus’ hand, and he staggered backwards. That gave Hodda just enough time to scramble to her feet, open the door and hurl herself outside.
• “He’ll be very confused for an hour or so,” I said, “all that blood and no hole. Other than that, he’ll be fine. I’m not a killer,” I added. “Not like some people.”
  She gave me a look of pure refined contempt. “You’re a clown, Notker.”
  “I like to think so,” I said. “We don’t get the girl, but we get all the laughs. You might have said something. I really thought we were going there to negotiate.”
• Granite, I realised, held the key to all our difficulties, if only I could make people do what I wanted. Compared to people, of course, granite is easy as pie to work with. Of all the components that go towards building a city, human beings are the most intractable, unreliable, expensive and dangerous. Didn’t need a book to tell me that. I learned that lesson at my father’s knee, or, properly speaking, his toecap.
• “Rubbish,” she said. “It’s all just you telling lies. You always were a liar, Notker. You tell lies even when you don’t have to. Half the time, I think you don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”
  “Fine,” I said. “Suppose you’re right. You’re my mother. Tell me what I should do.”
  She gave me that look, the sort that turns grapes into raisins.
• “So they cut the bodies into bits. A bit of a plague corpse does just as well, they found. Six weeks later, they rammed open the gate and found they had the place to themselves. Everybody inside was dead. Moral: you don’t mess with Mister Plague. He is not your friend.” <> She shrugged. It’s a beautiful thing to watch when she does that. “You do read a lot of books,” she said.
• “That’s why I did it,” she said. “I thought, everything I know and love is going to go up in smoke and everybody I know and love is going to die. Well, not me. I’m getting out, and I’m going to make damn sure I get a lot of money out of it to take with me.” She stopped and looked at me. “You can’t blame me for that, can you?” she said. “If they’re all going to die anyway.” <> “Everybody’s going to die,” I said gently, “it’s a medical fact. Not everybody helps murder a whole city.”
• I nodded. “I don’t think you’re capable of loving anyone,” I said. “And why should you? It’d be such a waste. I think of you as a goddess.”
  “Oh, come on.”
  “I do,” I said, “really. Spiteful, selfish, utterly self-centred, addicted to worship, callous, unfeeling and incapable of loving anyone but yourself. What do you say?”
• really it was a ditch. It ran parallel to the walls, thirty yards distance between them, all the way round the City, sixty feet deep. The spoil was piled up in the gap between the walls and the ditch, forming a bank that completely filled the space, so we had to build towers on our side, and a walkway, so the sentries could get to the watchtowers and the artillery bays. <> Sixty feet deep, because that’s as far down as you can go before you hit bedrock. We had all sorts of problems, as you can imagine. We hit four underground springs, which flooded the trench and turned everything into revolting sticky mud. They had to be located and diverted, a massive undertaking in itself.
• But with the government paying silly money on one side and the Theme bosses explaining what would happen to them if they didn’t show up for work on the other; two sides of the same coin, almost certainly counterfeit. <> And on a schedule, too. It had to be done by Ascension Day.
• But what if they got as far as the wall, undermined it and brought it crashing down, only to find a huge bank of earth? As good as a wall; better, in many respects. For a start, you can’t bash it down with rams or catapults, like you can with a stone wall. It’s soft: it gives instead of splintering. And if you drive a sap into it, as soon as you break through your sap fills up with loose dirt; as fast as you shovel it out of the way, more comes cascading down. So, you dig under the huge pile of dirt in the hopes of coming out on the other side of it, and what happens? You run into another granite shelf, twice as thick as the first one...  I’ve sent away to the place where we used to get all our granite from, with instructions to buy up everything they’ve got. When it’s finished there’ll be a sort of mirror wall, sixty feet high and twelve feet across, only under the ground instead of over it. And when they try and sap holes in it, we’ve got a surprise in store for them. We came across four underground rivers when we were digging the ditch. A nudge of a sluice gate and all that water will go gurgling down right on top of them.” I paused for breath, then went on,
• I’d closed all the factories and workshops, the shops and the market stalls, even (God forgive me) the theatres; if you wanted to earn money, you came and worked for me. Not real money, of course. Nothing I do is real. But my pretend money was good all over town; you could buy bread with it. All you had to do was suspend your disbelief, like the audience at a play, and everything went smooth as ironed silk. It was a pretty paradox – let’s save the City by taking it apart stone by stone and burying it in the ground – but paradox is the gatehouse of truth, in my opinion. I have no idea what that means, by the way, but I bet you it means something.
• The cranes we’d built to handle the blocks were all there ready and waiting, and once the blocks were on the quay the teams took over, rollers and levers and ropes, because it’d be quicker to manhandle them from the docks to the wall than to lift them up onto carts and then lift them down again. I climbed up onto one of the observation towers, and from up there it was like a granite river running through the streets, like rainwater, or the lava from an erupting volcano. Ah, volcano imagery; how useful it’s been to me in telling this story. Maybe this was the point where the lava starts flowing back up the hill, to fill in the fiery hole and make sure it never bursts out again.
• I’d made her angry. “Then what’s all this in aid of? Just to make people feel better?” <> I wanted to laugh. All my working life, all the effort and skill we put into it, structures we build out of words and costumes, greasepaint and pretty scenes painted on cloth; castles in the air. Do we change the world? No. We make people feel better, for a little while. I could almost hear myself pitching it to a manager. Castles in the air, I’d say, they’ve been done to death. Now a castle under the ground; that’s something new.
• It’s all been a lie, I told her. The underground wall won’t work. But that’s not the point. The purpose of the exercise wasn’t building a wall. Building walls never achieves anything. The purpose was getting those ships here. <> Question: why didn’t we evacuate the City years ago?
• But why did you cut and run, you ask, when your people needed you? Seriously? Because when I looked into that mirror in my head, I saw Lysimachus, except that – call it a trick of the light – he looked just like Ogus. Anyone who thinks killing inconvenient people and sending soldiers to burn down cities is a good idea is Ogus, sooner or later. I wasn’t him, not yet, just a man doing impressions, but that’s the risk with staying in character. Sooner or later, the character stays in you.