A sculptor struggles when he is commanded to perpetuate the lies of a deceitful and cruel king…
Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
—Alyattes, Fifth Hymn to Bel-Ashur, ch4,v66
I’m good at most things, but my speciality is the death of lions. I’ve never actually seen a lion, but I can do you a perfect alpha male in full spring riddled with arrows, or rearing up on its hind legs and being stabbed, or writhing in its death throes, or flat on its back stone-dead, and you’d swear blind it was real—and that’s before the paint job. Someone else does the paint, it goes without saying. This is a highly specialised trade.
Luckily for me, there’s always a call for lions. Of course, every time there’s lions there has to be a Great King to kill them. My Great Kings are pretty good. I do outstanding forearms, and I really go to town on the detail of the embroidered robe and the curls of the hair and beard and the fingernails—I do the best fingernails anywhere. But I won’t pretend I’m happy with the faces. I’ve never actually seen the King, but in my mind I know exactly what he looks like, and I can never quite get that in stone. Other people can, but not me. But they can’t do lions.
After lions, my best thing is definitely nomads. Dead nomads, it goes without saying, or dying, or cowering in terror as the King grabs them by the hair with his left hand while wielding his sword in his right. I have no idea if people wield in real life. When I was a kid, my dad used to give me a brush hook and tell me to cut back the flags and nettles in the headlands, which is the closest I’ve ever got to wielding; and of course I’ve never seen an actual battle, something for which I’m truly thankful. But I regularly get compliments from the supervisors on my wielding. You’ve got the rippling of the muscles in the King’s arm as he strikes just right, they tell me, and I suppose they know what they’re talking about.
“You’re the lion guy, right?” he said to me. I looked at my feet. “Yes, Lord,” I said.
He was shorter than me, about forty, forty-five, grey hair, beard to his waist, fantastic gown. I wanted to grin. The pattern woven into the weave of his gown was one I’d invented, about seven years ago. I carved it into the King’s gown in the King-killing-lions scene for the portico of the new temple in Foregate; and I guess it must’ve caught on, and people started asking their tailors for it, because these days I see it everywhere. “Got a job for you,” he said.
Not what I wanted to hear. “Thank you,” I said. “What can I—?”
Really bad, because he was clearly direct from the King, so anything he wanted done would need to have been done yesterday; and he could see quite plainly that I was halfway through a King-killing-lions for the peristyle of Lord Pharnaspes’ new town house, because there I was in my apron, with my hammer in one hand and my chisel in the other, standing directly in front of a half-carved lion. Irrelevant, from his perspective. A pain in the arse from mine.
Actually, I was probably being naïve. Now I think about it, I almost certainly got that job, not because I’m the best at lions, although I am, but because His Majesty’s chamberlain saw that Lord Pharnaspes’ new town house was a miracle of ostentatiously extravagant beauty, suggesting that Pharnaspes might be getting a bit above himself; easiest way to bring the project to a shuddering halt would be to pressgang the lion guy. That way, Pharnaspes wouldn’t be entitled to take offence, and a subtle message would be communicated, Pharnaspes would have to make do with distinctly second-rate lions by somebody else and everyone would know where they stand. But for me, of course, it meant Lord Pharnaspes’ lasting displeasure, for undertaking a commission and failing to carry it through.
This explanation, which is undoubtedly the right one, didn’t occur to me until the man with the elegant gown told me about the new job. There would be, he told me, no lions.
“Understood, my lord,” I said. “What—?”
“A battle scene,” he said. “You do excellent battle scenes.”
“Thank you.”
“His Majesty,” he went on, “wants the Battle of Dylaxa for the side porch of the extension to the Spring Palace.”
Oh, I thought. “Yes, my lord,” I said. “When do I start?”
And there’s the thing.
Everybody knows about the Battle of Dylaxa. We won, it goes without saying. His Majesty drew up his army to face the nomad hordes, and immediately attacked. On the right wing, where His Majesty led the charge in person, we scattered the savages and slaughtered them by the thousand. On the left wing and in the centre, however, cowardly traitors in the pay of the enemy staged a pre-planned withdrawal, masquerading as a rout and headlong flight. Fortunately, His Majesty and the all-conquering Royal lancers got back from annihilating the enemy in time to save the day. A skilfully judged pincer movement enabled His Majesty to take the savages in flank and rear, after which he slaughtered them like sheep, and only a handful of survivors made their way back to the nomad encampment to spread the news of their total and utter defeat. The last scene (I always tend to think of stories in terms of scenes, fifteen feet by six feet of limestone depicting a single well-defined event) was the summary execution of the traitors, including two heads of noble families who really should have known better.
Everybody knows that’s what happened. Except that my nephew was there. He’s a junior officer in the lancers, and the way he tells it, the savages wiped the floor with us, and the only reason the King’s still alive is that he ran for it ten minutes into the battle.
That, I pointed out to him, simply wasn’t true. For one thing, if it happened like he said, the savages would’ve swept down on the City and burnt it to ashes. Not really, he told me. The savages didn’t want a war, but the King insisted on attacking them. Basically, they’re a peaceful people who just want to be left alone to look after their sheep; they don’t give a shit about gold or silk or pearls, or even slaves, so we haven’t got anything they want, and they don’t see the point of killing people for the sake of it. They had no intention of attacking the City. They were just glad to get us off their backs for a bit.
You don’t need me to tell you that my nephew got it all wrong. Evidently, what he saw from his very limited perspective was unrepresentative and misleading. What he mistook for the King running away was a perfectly timed tactical withdrawal, leading the enemy into a trap; the fact that he thought it was headlong flight shows what a good trap it was, since clearly it fooled the savages too. I don’t doubt for a moment that from where he was standing, it looked for all the world like we weren’t doing so well. But evidently he wasn’t in a position to see the bigger picture. And that’s how false versions of events and untrue stories get about; not necessarily deliberate lies, a simple misunderstanding can be all it takes. We won the battle, I have absolutely no doubts on that score.
Even so.
The next day I got sketches.
You need to have been in the trade for at least ten years to be able to make any sense of Palace sketches. They’re slabs of clay about the size of a small roof-tile, into which some scribe in one of the front offices has scratched some rather perfunctory lines. You couldn’t make head or tail of them, but as soon as I saw them, I could visualise the finished stelae in my mind, clear and sharp as if I was standing looking at them. The tallest scratched line is always the King, who is naturally always the centre of composition of every scene he’s in. The other squiggles are nomads. The upright ones are nomads being shot, carved or stabbed by our brave lads—the sketches don’t bother to show our side; I do all that—and the horizontal ones are dead nomads or severed parts thereof. I can read a Palace sketch the way a scribe can read a tablet of writing. I know what the symbols mean. It’s not something you can figure out for yourself; you have to learn it, and then you understand.
These sketches didn’t call for much thought. Basically, someone had copied them from the Battle of Sammalon on the facade of the New Year Temple down on Castle Bar. That makes sense. Everybody knows the Battle of Sammalon. If you live in the City, you’re bound to go past it at least twice a week. It’s a true masterpiece, and it’s always been there, we all grew up with it, like a respected uncle. And the one thing that everybody knows about Sammalon is that we won. It was a great and glorious victory that ensured the security of the nation for generations to come. You know that; you know what the carvings mean. And it helps no end that they’re quite unbearably beautiful, the most sublime expression of strength, honour, courage and Good prevailing over Evil ever put into stone. On a fundamental level, that’s how we all know they’re true. They couldn’t be so beautiful, so deeply imbued with majesty, serenity and grace, if they were a lie.
Good business sense, therefore, to make the composition of our new battle a conscious echo of Sammalon. I approved, even though it set me the enormous challenge of coming up with figures that could stand comparison with the finest achievement of stone-carving in human history. I thought about that and decided: the hell with it, why not? I’d fail, naturally, but that’s only to be expected. The important thing would be how nobly I failed. People, and in particular supervisors and Clerks of the Works, would judge me on that and—I hoped—be suitably impressed.
I live well, thanks to the lions. I have three rooms in the casemate of the West wall, about a hundred yards down from the Golden Gate. I have a window on the inside, looking out over the flower market. I own a carved bedstead, a table, a chair and two stools, a bronze tripod for cooking, three ten-gallon storage jars, nine pots, three plates, two cups, nine blankets, a cloak, six tunics, two gowns, three pairs of sandals, a boxwood comb (with incised decoration), a clay figurine of Mother Tiamat, two knives, an iron spit, a straw hat, a housemaid, eighteen shekels of chop silver and my tools. When you think that I came to the City with nothing but my big brother’s hand-me-down shirt, that’s not bad going.
One of the storage jars, the straw hat and the housemaid were gifts from Hydaspes the oil merchant. I say gifts; I did him a frieze of acanthus flowers and a very small lion for the back wall of his office in Mill Street. Since he’s only a merchant he’s not allowed to hire a Guild artist, we only work for the Palace and the nobility, but there’s nothing in the rules about doing a friend a favour, or the friend expressing his delight in the form of an unsolicited gift.
“You’re making a rod for your own back, is what you’re doing,” she said. “What were you thinking of? You must’ve gone soft in the head.”
She put the bowl of porridge down in front of me. “It’s not like I had a choice,” I said.
“Bullshit,” she pointed out. “You could’ve done your I’m-not-worthy spiel. He’d have bought it. You could’ve said to him, I’m only any good at lions. Which is true.”
“I can do nomads.”
“Yes, but Tiridates does them much better. You should’ve said, you don’t want me, you want Tiridates. He’s the best, and only the best is good enough for the Palace. He couldn’t have argued with that.”
Yes, I thought, I could’ve done that, but I didn’t. “It’s good money,” I said. “Palace rates.”
“Yes, and they’ll keep you hanging about for months before you get it, and maybe you won’t get it at all. I keep telling you, Palace work is nothing but trouble. But do you listen?”
I love her dearly, even when she’s right. “You don’t say no to the Palace,” I said. “Oh come on. It’s six months assured work, and who knows what it’ll lead to? They do say there’s plans to redo the whole of the west frontage of the Prefecture. This time next year, we could be living in Haymarket.”
She has this knack of not having the last word sometimes, which leaves my last remark hanging in the air, so we can both see clearly how fatuous it is. I hate it when she does that.
I got to the Palace early, just before dawn. It meant walking through the streets in the dark, which I don’t like doing, but I’ve learned the hard way that you need to be on site before the stone arrives; otherwise the carters dump it down wherever they can find a clear space, and one of the salient features of stone is that it’s a real nuisance to move about. I’m getting too old to spend a whole working day crouched down on my knees because some ignorant clown couldn’t be bothered to unload the material onto a trestle.
You get a lot of solo thinking time in my line of work. You can’t really talk to anyone, because you can’t make yourself heard over the noise, so you find yourself thinking long thoughts. Such as: am I an artist or just an unusually well-paid stonemason? Don’t know, is the answer. The latter, probably, because I don’t get to decide what I put into the stone, the sketches do that. So, the man who does the sketches is the artist, and I’m only there to do the chisel-work. But I’ve met the men who do the sketches, and if they’re artists, the word doesn’t mean what you and I think it does. For the most part they’re junior clerks in the Ceremonies department, and they get the job because the senior clerk who’s supposed to do it can’t be bothered. So they keep their eyes open on the way to work in the morning, and memorise the composition of the famous masterpieces of yesteryear they pass in the street, and that’s what they scratch in the clay for me to copy. I think the word I’m groping for is tradition; certain groupings and shapes are handed down from one generation to the next (like catching a cold, I guess) and we chisel-monkeys do as we’re told, or else. And gradually, those groupings and shapes come to mean something. They can’t help it, when so many thousands of people look at them every day of their lives. The composition—the way the King stands, the way the dead nomads are heaped up round him, the way he grips the rearing lion’s paw with his left hand while stabbing it with his right—acquires a symbolism, as a hundred generations take it in and their minds gradually gnaw on it, leading to an interpretation, what it all means, what it all stands for. Then it’s down to me and others like me to do the actual cutting; and we want to be known, to get ahead in the trade, so we hunt around for ways of making a slight difference. It can be inventing a new weave for the gown, or a new refinement for doing the curls of the King’s beard, or some original insight into the way muscles and sinews stiffen when drawing a bowstring, or relax in death. Whatever; the point is, we’re constantly probing and fiddling about, but within the rigid limits of the sketches, which are set (no pun intended) in stone. Which is how you get someone like me, who can give you something that’s both entirely traditional and completely new, or at least that’s what I tell you when you’re thinking of hiring me. Actually, when I’m on my own working and nobody’s peering over my shoulder breathing down my neck, I fall into a sort of trance, precisely halfway between divine inspiration and being bored out of my skull, and I only really see what I’ve done when I step back at the end of the day and look at it. I guess the lions and the nomads just happen. They seem to grow of their own accord out of the stone, which is very obliging of them.
So I spent the next four months trapped like a fly in amber in the three or so hours it took to fight the Battle of Dylaxa; and when it was all finished and I stepped back, I told myself, not so bad, after all. For once, I’d managed a pretty decent Great King. His face was completely calm as his massively powerful arms drew the bow or wielded the sword, and all around him the dead and dying nomads sprawled and writhed and lay crumped and twisted. I put in nine horses, one more than the sketches called for, but nothing says movement like a horse, so I felt the indulgence was justified. I realised I’d put across the message that the world is in flux, constantly moving, changing, rearing up in your face and plunging down in death throes, but the King is always there, right in the middle of things, defining the centre; calm, strong, in control, victorious. I’m not saying I couldn’t have said it rather better with lions, but the customer is always right.
The supervisor came along about an hour after I’d sent to let him know it was finished. He stood back and looked at it for about five heartbeats. “That’s fine,” he said. “Make sure it’s all dusted off ready for the painters.”
And that’s the really stupid thing about what I do. People like my work because it’s so lifelike. My arms and legs and horses and lions are so real, or so they say. But there’s absolutely nothing special about a real arm or a real horse or a real dead body. You can see a hundred of them between Temple Bar and Foregate any day of the week. My job is to absorb all this dull, boring real stuff and take your breath away by reproducing it in stone—so it’s just a conjuring trick, a novelty, a gimmick. But I take all this dull, boring real stuff and with it I say something that’s so important, the King pays a vast sum of money to have it said. And maybe what the King wants and needs to have said isn’t—how shall I put this?—necessarily the absolute unvarnished truth; not in the imperfect sense that you and I understand the term. Only, by the time I’ve finished saying it, it is. Which is why I earn such good money, and why you need people like me; because there are some things that need to be made true, if we’re all to go on living without scaring ourselves to death.
I guess the King must have liked it, because a short while later, while I was working on a King-killing-lions on the front entrance to the Scriveners’ Guild, my pal the clerk came up to me and said, “This is your lucky day.”
There are, of course, two kinds of luck. “Thank you, Lord,” I said, studying my toes as usual.
“I am commanded by His Majesty,” he went on, “to grant you a wish.”
I liked the sound of that. “Thank you,” I said.
He laughed. “Actually,” he said, “strictly speaking, the wish only extends to the painters, because His Majesty is under the impression that they do the carving as well. But I figured, what matters is the royal intention, not the actual royal words. Obviously, His Majesty knows what he means, and presumably I was too stupid to grasp the full inferences. Anyhow, one wish. Within reason, naturally.”
“Within reason.”
“Defined as fifteen shekels or less.”
I thought about it for three heartbeats. Fifteen shekels is a lot of money. On the other hand, I could think of something I wanted rather more, and which wouldn’t cost His Majesty’s Exchequer anything. “I would like,” I said, “for my nephew to be assigned to the Palace guard.”
He looked at me. “Would you, now.”
“Yes, Lord. At the moment he’s a decurion in the lancers, out East. Seven years’ exemplary service, worked his way up through the ranks. He’s all the family I’ve got, and it’d be nice to do something for him.”
He frowned. Fifteen shekels saved is no small matter; on the other hand, was I up to something? “I’ll look into it,” he said. “Carry on.”
I carried on, and eight weeks later, as I was finishing off the ear of the last-but-one of the Scriveners’ lions, who should yell out my name but my nephew?
He wasn’t looking too good. He was thin, and he had a scar on his face—it started just under his left eye and ran slantwise across his top lip down to the right corner of his mouth; a fat pink ribbon of shiny skin. He was also missing the little finger of his left hand, and his army cloak was mostly shreds.
“You saved my life,” he told me, as we sat in my rooms that evening, sharing a jar of wine I’d put by for a special occasion. “Literally. I’ve been on the northeastern front. Things aren’t going so well up there.”
I wasn’t aware there was a northeastern front. “How do you mean?”
“The Eftal,” he said. Then he looked at me. “You don’t know about the Eftal.”
No, I didn’t. They’re nomads, goes without saying; they live on the far side of the Mataxes river, and from time to time they come across and kill and burn and steal women—mostly, he told me, when the King provokes them with a punitive expedition, paying them back for the last time they raided us. “If only he’d let them well alone they’d be fine,” he told me. “Left to themselves they’re a peaceful bunch, and their lifestyle’s completely different to ours, so there’s nothing we’ve got that they actually want. But every eighteen months or so the orders come down: launch a raid, do as much damage as possible. So we do that, and then they feel obliged to return the favour, and the fact is, they’re rather better at it than we are. That’s how I got this,” he said, lifting a finger towards his face. “And they’re shepherds, so when we come calling they drive their flocks up into the hill where we can’t find them. But when they come, they burn the corn just before it ripens. So they’ve always got plenty to eat, and we’re starving.”
None of which did I believe. At least, I believed every word he told me, because my sister’s boy isn’t a liar. But clearly he’d got the wrong end of the stick. He could only see a tiny glimpse of the big picture, and so he’d got it all wrong. The truth, I knew, was that the northeastern frontier was at peace, because the King before the King before last had been over there with a vast army and had slaughtered the savages in those parts until they ceased to exist as a nation. So what my nephew was talking about could only be a few scattered bandits; a nuisance if you happen to live next door to them, but in the great scheme of things, too trivial to mention. Even so; “Don’t mention it,” I said. “I had this favour coming to me, because of some work I did, and there was nothing I wanted for myself. As you can see, I’m pretty well fixed.”
He nodded. “Looks like it,” he said. “Rooms in Old Town and a pretty girl waiting on you hand and foot. Maybe it’s not too late for me to learn stone-carving. Only kidding,” he added, before I could say anything. “I like soldiering, most of the time. It’s good money, and you’re only scared shitless about five percent of the time. The rest of it’s just doing chores and sitting around. Better than working for a living. Especially,” he added with a grin, “in the Palace guard. Thanks.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “We’re family.”
He nodded. Last time I saw him he was fifteen, just off to enlist. It was that or forced labour building cisterns. We need cisterns where I come from, because it only rains once a year, and it’s a wonderful thing that the King provides them for us, so we really shouldn’t grumble when the soldiers come by rounding up men to do the work. Also, it was while I was cistern-building that I learned stonemasonry, which led to stone-carving, which led to three rooms in Old Town and eighteen shekels in a clay jar put aside for my old age; none of which I’d have had if I’d stayed on the farm, that’s for sure. And now, here was my nephew, a subaltern in the Palace guard, practically gentry. All of which, ultimately, we owed to the King, and his devotion to his people, which prompts him to build cisterns in the desert.
What I like about doing favours for people is the returns on your investment of kindness. Wangling a Guards commission for my nephew meant that I got to see him, usually once or twice a month, instead of once every seven years. Either he’d come to me and we’d splash out on a chicken and a jar of date wine, or he’d invite me to dine in the officers’ mess, where once a month they have date wine and chicken. Naturally she moaned at me when it was my turn to entertain; all that extra work for her, she said, as if she hadn’t got enough to do. She didn’t mean a word of it. My nephew’s a good-looking boy, even with that ghastly stripe across his face, and he tells a good story, and she’s as fond of chicken and date wine as anybody. It felt like having a family again, something I never thought I’d have; not after the war, when the nomads burned our village and killed my parents and all their relatives, apart from my sister and me, because we were away from home at the time, building cisterns for the King. Of course the King dealt with the savages, and those particular nomads no longer exist. You can see them getting slaughtered any day of the week, if you go up Cartgate and pause to look at the monumental arch.
I was finishing up a lion in Conduit Street when I saw my pal the clerk looming over me. “Job for you,” he said.
It’s nice to be in demand. Also, the Palace had paid my bill (eventually) for the Battle of Dylaxa, plus I’d got my nephew his cushy posting. “Thank you, Lord,” I said. “How can I serve?”
“Walk with me.”
I slung my tools into my satchel, because you don’t want to leave anything you value lying around in Conduit Street, and followed him, the regulation pace behind and to his left. Of course there’s no crime in the City, but a bit of occasional pilfering is inevitable.
“His Majesty,” he said, “wants a battle.”
“Lord?”
“For the entrance hall to the new extension to the Palace foregate. Like what you did for us the other day.”
I had no idea why, but I knew I didn’t want to do it. “A battle scene.”
“Yes.”
I remembered what she’d said. “With the greatest respect, Lord, might I suggest, you don’t want me, you want Tiridates. He does the best battle scenes. And for the Palace, only the best is—”
“He wants you.”
Oh, I thought; and it was like having my head squeezed in a vice. The King—think about it, the King—had noticed me. He was aware of my existence. How many people live in the Empire? Two million? Three? But the King had allowed his attention to light on me. Possibly, he’d even heard my name. Remembered it. “Yes, Lord.”
“Splendid. Make yourself available, and I’ll see you get the sketches.”
“Thank you, Lord.” He started to turn away. “Lord.”
“What?”
“Which battle?”
He stopped. He was frowning. “The thing is,” he said, “not any particular battle. Just a battle.”
“Lord?”
“Against the nomads, naturally. And we get to kick their arses.”
Which made no sense.
“You must’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “You can’t have been listening properly.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “But ’ve been over and over what he said and what I said, and those were his exact words. Just a battle. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Easy,” my nephew said. “He wants you to make one up.”
I don’t usually lose my temper; specially with the people I love. “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “That’s impossible. Can’t be done.”
“You do it every day,” he replied. I stared at him. She made a sort of squeaking noise. “Well, you do. You make up lion hunts.”
“I do not,” I told him. “Everybody knows, once a month the King goes out to hunt lions. He protects his people from monsters, it’s part of what he does for us.”
“You make it up,” he said, cool as a cucumber. “Well, you do. You’ve never been on a Royal hunt. You’ve never seen a lion. All right, tell me the place and the date of the hunt you’ve just finished carving. You can’t, can you?”
“The King hunts lions. It’s a known fact.”
He shrugged. “Fine,” he said. “And he fights battles. Only, this is going to be a battle he hasn’t actually fought. There’s a word for that.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “That would be a lie.”
“Eat your chicken before it gets cold.”
I couldn’t sleep that night, or the next, or the night after that. Here was this major commission, from the Palace, and I had no idea how to go about it.
Take the nomads, for example. There are six different sorts of nomads: the Sakai, the Cimru, the Mazaged, the Farz, the Flat-Caps and the Pointy-Caps. How was I supposed to know which sort? And if this battle never actually happened, how could I possibly tell its story? The sketches, I decided; the sketches will show me everything I need to know.
The sketches arrived. They were just like any other set of sketches, but I couldn’t make any sense of them. I looked at them and they were just lines.
“Oh for crying out loud,” she said. “Give it here.”
So I handed her the tablet and she stared at it. “Well,” she said, “I think that’s pretty self-explanatory.”
“You’ve got it upside down.”
She handed them to my nephew, who peered at them. “Looks quite straightforward to me,” he said. “This long line here’s presumably the King, and here’s a bunch of dead savages, and I imagine these are dead horses, so I’m guessing the enemy launched a cavalry charge, which His Majesty beat off with crippling losses before counterattacking and surrounding the enemy centre in a nicely judged pincer movement. Don’t look at me like that,” he added. “I know about this stuff, I’m a soldier.”
“You can see all that? In those squiggles?”
“Yes,” he said. “Also, it’s more or less exactly what’s on the triumphal arch at Nabastun. Thirty feet tall, cut into the side of a mountain. I’m guessing whoever did these sketches must’ve seen it, same as I did. It’s the Battle of Korasm.”
Which was two hundred years ago; the King defeated the Mazaged and made them cease to exist as a nation. “Then why the hell didn’t that clerk say so?”
“Because they’re not calling it that,” my nephew said. “Oh for pity’s sake, can’t you see what’s going on? We’re in deep shit, on the northern frontier, out east, in the southwest. Everywhere you look, we’re getting creamed by the nomads, and people are starting to talk. So, what we need is a victory, to make people feel better. Only we keep losing all the battles, so it’s necessary to make one up.”
I stared at him.
The world, as we all know, is an unending battle between the Truth and the Lie. The King is the champion of the Truth, and we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Everything else, all the savages beyond the frontiers, all the monsters and predators, lions, wolves, storms, diseases, famines, droughts, earthquakes, floods, are the Lie, constantly battering against us like waves lashing the seashore, until the King drives them back. So to say that the King was telling a lie— It wasn’t bad, it was meaningless, like dry water or a dark Sun. “I think you ought to go now,” I said. “Obviously you’ve had too much to drink.”
He stood up. She was telling me not to be such an arse.
“Think about it,” he said. “I’m a lieutenant in the Guards. If there was a battle, I’d be in it. But here I am, not out on the frontier somewhere. Therefore, there is no battle. Therefore—”
“Shut up,” I said. “And get out.”
By the time the stone arrived, I’d had a chance to think about it, long and hard.
Obviously, my nephew was right. The King had ordered me to tell a lie. And equally obviously, the King had a very good reason for doing something so appalling. Since the whole purpose of the King’s existence is to nourish and protect his people, this particular lie was necessary—essential, even. The King wouldn’t do a bad thing unless he absolutely had to. Therefore—
I have no imagination, but I do have skill. Give me a flat, smooth slab of stone and I can do pretty much anything you want with it. I decided the nomads would be Flat-Caps, because I already knew how to do the way the earflaps of the caps come down the sides of the faces—it doesn’t sound much, but you try doing it and see how far you get. And the hems of the caps are tasselled, and the tassels give me a splendid opportunity for fine, detailed work; you barely notice it, looking at the finished piece, but your eye takes it in without you knowing, and that level of fine detail makes the whole thing so much more believable, so you can almost feel the soft touch of the tassels against your cheek. So I chose the Flat-Caps—dear God, the presumption of it all, the downright arrogance. I chose to make war on the Flat-Caps. Not the King, not Father Ea or Mother Tiamat; me.
I was on a schedule, but I’m used to that. I put in a requisition for two hundred oil lamps, and there they were the next day, no quibbles, no questions asked. I worked at night by lamplight, and by day by sunlight. I wrapped strips of rag round the blisters on my hands and pretended—lied to myself—that they weren’t there; and guess what, I barely noticed them. Above all, I concentrated. I made a picture in my mind, and I copied it exactly. I felt—God forgive me for saying this—like Father Ea creating Heaven and Earth; because in the beginning there was nothing at all, and Father Ea imagined it all, and suddenly it was there, just like in His mind. Now you tell me, was that all a lie (because He made it all up) or was it true, because a moment later everything He imagined was real, capable of being seen and smelt and touched and picked up, the quintessence of Truth?
“Not bad,” my pal the clerk said. “That edge there wants smoothing off a bit. Someone might brush against it and cut themselves. And is that someone’s ear or a pomegranate?”
“Abstract decoration, Lord.”
“Really? Get rid of it. Other than that, not bad at all.”
Not bad at all, though I do say so myself. By the time I finished it, I was shattered. Drained, I think is the word. I hadn’t slept properly for weeks, my hands were a mess, my back was killing me and my forearms ached from gripping the hammer and the chisel. Not that any of that mattered a damn. What mattered was that the King was seven feet tall, calm, straight and outstandingly strong, and all around him the nomads were crouched, slumped, twisted, broken, small and powerless, scattered like fallen leaves, crushed, slashed, split, cut into, utterly and abjectly beaten—as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. But the weave of the King’s robe, the tight curls of his hair and beard, the muscles of his arms and legs, the serene line of his mouth and eyes, the sinuous arc of his drawn bow (forever at full draw, though the fact is that if you hold a bow at full draw for more than a few seconds, you ruin it and it’ll probably break) were perfect. Tiridates, who does the best battle scenes, couldn’t have produced something like it in a thousand years of trying. And it was all a lie.
“You need to go round there,” she told me. “You need to go and stand outside that clerk’s office and tell them, you’re not leaving till you get paid.”
My nephew had gone away, out East, with his regiment. The Flat-Caps had burst through the frontier defences and burnt the city of Eridu, and the King was off to teach them a lesson they’d never forget.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I told her. “You send in a bill, they pay it. Eventually. These things take time. It’s got to go through channels.”
“Bullshit. You let them walk all over you, because you’re too chickenshit to stand up for yourself. How would it be if I went over there and—?”
“No,” I said. “Don’t do that. Please.”
“Fine. You do it, then.”
So I put on my cloak and went out and spent a couple of hours walking round town looking at the statues. I even went to the new extension to the Palace foregate, where there was a crowd of people gawping up at the battle scene, and there was some smartarse (there always is) pretending to read out the inscription, though clearly he couldn’t read, because he traced the lines with his finger from left to right, instead of right to left. The King, he told the crowd, encountered the nomads near the oasis of Oanaxar and immediately attacked; taken by surprise, the enemy were driven back, only to be surrounded by His Majesty’s Guards, who caught them in a perfectly executed pincer movement, and by the time it was all over there wasn’t a single nomad left alive. He was making it all up, of course, but he wasn’t using his imagination. That’s what the inscriptions say on the stelae of the Battle of Gaugar, down by the Great Cistern, which has been there for three hundred years. But the crowd was loving it, hanging on his every word, oohing and aahing in all the right places. Fair enough. Just because something was true once doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be true again, and if it’s carved in stone, who’s going to have the insane temerity to call the King a liar?
“Well?” she said, when I got back.
“I went to the clerk’s office.”
“And?”
“He wasn’t there, so I waited. Then I waited some more. Then I came home.”
A lie? Maybe. Or maybe not. If I had gone to the clerk’s office, he wouldn’t have been there, or he’d have said he wasn’t there; and I’d have waited, then waited some more, and then I’d have come home. I could have made my lie true by actually doing it, only I preferred to spend my time looking at statues; and it made absolutely no difference to the outcome, and there were no witnesses, so I guess what I told her was the truth, at that.
A man came to see me. He was a soldier, in an army cloak. It had been bright red once, but the sun had faded it. Bright red means an officer. I’m sorry, he said. I have bad news.
I told her to open the last bottle of the date wine, and he sat down. I was a friend of your nephew’s, he told me. I shouldn’t really be here, but I felt you ought to know. He died well.
Oh, I thought.
The King, he told me, advanced to the oasis of Oanaxar, where he’d had reports the nomads were camped. We managed to sneak up on them before they knew we were coming, so we attacked straight away. The savages didn’t know what hit them. The King went in with the lancers and the auxiliary cavalry, and our lot, the Guards, were positioned behind the camp, ready and waiting for when they broke and ran. They came straight at us, and we slaughtered them. We got the lot—men, women, even the kids, they won’t be bothering us again, not ever. We even killed the dogs, and the chickens. But your nephew—well, there was a moment when the sheer weight of numbers was too much for us, and they were on the point of breaking through and escaping. But he rallied the men and led a counterattack, and that’s what saved the day, though sadly he didn’t make it. But if it hadn’t been for him, a lot of the savages would’ve escaped, and then the whole exercise would’ve been pointless, and those bastards would’ve slipped away and rebuilt their numbers and come back, and a lot of innocent people in the eastern provinces would’ve died, sooner or later. If it hadn’t been for your nephew—
Thank you, I told him. Thank you for letting me know.
If there was any confusion in the public mind about the fact that the carvings celebrating the Battle of Oanaxar were unveiled a month before the battle actually took place, it didn’t last very long or cause many problems. Most people decided that the news of the victory didn’t reach the public ear for a long time after the battle was actually fought, presumably for sound reasons of Royal policy; or else the King had had a vision predicting the battle, so he knew exactly what was going to happen before it actually did, which made it a miracle as well as a famous victory. Whatever. We won, that was the main thing, and if you wanted to feel good about yourself and the world in general, all you had to do was go along and look at the beautiful sculptures, and everything was fine.
Like it matters. My nephew would have died sooner or later, and he died a hero. That’s what he’d have wanted. I can’t possibly begrudge him that, just because his death hurt me so very badly. That would be sheer selfishness on my part. No; the only one his death affected was me, and I’m of no consequence whatsoever. Meanwhile, nobody on the eastern frontier will ever have to worry about the savages again, thanks to the King’s courage and skill, and my boy. Even so; I can’t help torturing myself. If only I’d made them Sakai or Mazaged instead of Flat-Caps, would it have made any difference? Almost certainly not. The Guards would still have been sent to fight them, because where the King goes, they go; and it was me who wangled his promotion to the Guards and put him directly in harm’s way. But if I hadn’t done that, he’d still have been in the lancers out East, so he’d have been at Oanaxar. One way or another it would’ve happened. You can’t fight the truth, after all.
Nine months or so after the last time I saw him, when I told him to shut up and get out of my house, she gave birth to a baby boy. She swears blind he’s mine, but I don’t think so. I think he’s my nephew’s; because he and she clearly liked each other, and there were a lot of times when I was out of the house working, and she and I don’t—well, you know; not very often. Also, the boy is beautiful and strong, like my nephew was and I’ve never been, and like the poet says, beauty is truth, truth beauty.
I really, truly want the boy to be his son. I want him to live on. And since it makes absolutely no difference to the outcome, and there are now no reliable witnesses, I guess it’s the truth, at that.
“Set in Stone” copyright © 2024 by K.J. Parker
Art copyright © 2024 by John Anthony Di Giovanni
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Set in Stone
