Academic Exercises (20 page)

Anyway. Back to the real history.

For about five years, the Company continued to thrive. True, no progress whatsoever had been made in finding Essecuivo. I don’t think anyone even tried. They were too busy.

To begin with, the money that poured in to the Company’s coffers came from the gold miners and bullion dealers, who had, essentially, too much money and nothing to spend it on. Before long, however, the old landowning families started to invest, and then the established City merchants; and then, as the stock price kept on going up, anyone who could find or borrow the cost of a share or two. Land was easy to raise money on; canny investors who’d already made a pile sold out and bought estates, farms, forests, only to mortgage or sell them again to reinvest when the temptation grew too great to bear. The Council started buying stock with public money—why not? Each share issue was bigger than the last, and the price kept on rising steadily.

My father’s side of the business—making artillery—was an early diversification. It came about because the
Squirrel
had twelve gun-ports but no guns. One of the original clockmakers knew a bell-founder who was going through a slow patch; he leased a space in his yard and had a dozen cannon made. They happened to turn out pretty well (cannon are notoriously hard to cast), and a friend of the clockmaker who was outfitting a ship of his own asked if he could buy eight pieces just like them. Before long, the Company had bought out the bell-founder and was turning out three dozen premium demi-culverins a week.

My father’s fellow directors, who were starting to worry, realised that there was a lesson to be learned from what was essentially a commercial accident. They had enormous sums of money at their disposal. One day, it would be needed for Essecuivo. In the meantime, however, there was no sense in it just sitting there. They looked around for good ideas, like my father’s cannon, to put money into.

At first, they didn’t have far to look. They invested in shipyards, lumber yards and forestry—all quite logical, since once Essecuivo turned up, they’d be needing ships; lots of ships, well-built, properly fitted out, the right size and tonnage, at a sensible price. Then they figured that once they got to Essecuivo, they’d need goods to trade with. So they invested in woollen mills, sheepwalks and hill-country grazing; they bought land on the Sieva river and planted a thousand acres of lemon trees; they put money into cutlery, tinware and mining; all so as to be as well prepared as possible once Essecuivo eventually rose out of the sea, shining and inviting as the Goddess of Love.

The lease on the
Squirrel
ran out and somebody forgot to renew it; but the Company’s investments were all doing quite well. So, quite accidentally, were the citizens of the Republic. Every month, hundreds of people left the farms and ranches where they’d been accustomed to scrape a meagre living, and headed for the City, to work in the new foundries and factories. With the money they earned, they were able to buy the cheap goods the Company’s trading partners produced; families who’d always eaten off wooden trenchers now had fine pewter plates, and wore good broadcloth instead of homespun. Thanks to the three per cent tax and its own investments in Company stock, the Council had funds for all sorts of magnificent projects; public buildings, paved roads, a dam on the Deneipha river to drain the marshes to provide more land for more lemon trees. They also commissioned the Republic’s first fleet of publicly-owned warships, built in the Company’s yards and armed with my father’s cannon. They were reckoned to be the most advanced warships in the world, and more than a match for anything they’d be likely to meet, in our own waters or beyond. They would even—people reckoned—give the antiquated galleys and galliots of the Empire a run for their money, if it ever came to it.

The war lasted three years. The immediate cause was the Evec peninsular. It seemed quite logical at the time. The Evec was notionally Imperial territory, but there was nothing there; just a few sheep ranches occupied by a handful of peasants, primitives (about as primitive as we’d been, before the Company came along). The Empire wouldn’t waste money and resources defending an obscure and distant outpost, it wouldn’t be cost-effective. We, on the other hand, could plant the whole lot out with lemon groves. It was the obvious thing to do.

The first action of the war took place off Cape Acuela. Two squadrons of antiquated Imperial galliots sent the Republic’s magnificent new fleet to the bottom in just over an hour.

When the news reached the City, it sparked off a reaction of incandescent rage. Addressing the huge crowd gathered in Aeneas Peregrinus Square, the First Citizen vowed that we would never yield, not if it took every penny, every man. The replacement fleet was ready to sail in three weeks; it was twice the size and twice as heavily armed. The third, fourth and fifth fleets were even better. But not, unfortunately, good enough.

Once the Articles of Surrender had been signed and the Imperial fleet raised its blockade of the City harbour, the newly-appointed provisional government sat down and looked to see what was left. There wasn’t much. I have figures somewhere for the total cost of the war, in men and money. I can’t recall them offhand. Some things are too uncomfortable to store in your head for any length of time. There was a debate about whether to dissolve the Company or to leave it as a sort of midden for the national debt. They couldn’t decide, so they referred the matter to committee. That was eleven years ago. They haven’t reported yet.

At first, I must have thought he was prodding the fire with the poker.

That’s what the brain does. It takes images and tries to interpret them in accordance with a sane, rational view of reality. I’d seen a man poking a sluggish fire back to life a thousand times. It was something that made sense. Burning the manuscript made no sense at all.

But I looked again and saw what he was really doing, and I froze. I’ve been over it in my mind time and time again. If I’d reacted at once, could I have pushed him out of the way and saved the manuscript? It’s almost like a game, a tennis match or something. Roughly four times out of ten, I win; I drag him back from the hearth, I wrestle the manuscript out of his hand and stamp out the fire, the damage is sometimes quite bad and sometimes minimal, but at least I save
something
. The other six times I don’t make it; he shoves me out of the way, or we’re struggling over it and the flames surge up and burn our hands, and I let go. It burnt surprisingly quickly, I remember that. Possibly something to do with how the parchment was originally cured, I think they may have used saltpetre back then.

Anyway, the parchment burned. I stared at him. I couldn’t speak. He looked at me. When the flames reached his fingers, he opened them and let go.

“Now look what you’ve made me do,” he said.

He explained. He told me that love and hate are as similar as brother and sister, both of them forms of the same obsessive fixation on another; love and hate both lead people to do extravagant acts, to make sacrifices, to subordinate themselves to the other. He told me that when the manuscript first came into his hands, he’d more or less made up his mind to kill me, because he couldn’t bear the thought that I continued to exist. He’d had his reservations, nonetheless. In killing me he’d be giving his own life, because he would inevitably have been found out, arrested and hung. This troubled him, because in a very real sense (he said) it would have meant that I’d have
won
. I would be remembered as an innocent victim, he’d be condemned as a criminal, therefore he’d have handed the moral victory to me on a plate. That, he said, struck him as a gross crime against natural justice and ultimately self-defeating.

Nevertheless (he said) he’d resolved to go through with it, to make the ultimate sacrifice—his reputation, his moral soul; to give his life and his honour, greater hate hath no man than this—when quite suddenly and out of a blue sky, the manuscript arrived, along with a load of other junk, from his uncle. It could only have been, he said, a sign, sent by the Invincible Sun, in Whom he’d never believed until then.

It was particularly significant because at that precise moment he had my dissertation open on his desk. He read the manuscript and my dissertation side by side. At first, he was crushed. The manuscript proved that I was
right
, had been all along—in which case, I was right, a better scholar, I was the more worthy, I had prevailed and beaten him. But then (he said) the Invincible Sun’s true design slowly revealed itself to him, and he understood why the manuscript had come to him at exactly that moment.

I was, after all, a scholar. Unsatisfactory and unworthy in every respect, but a scholar. Nothing mattered more to me than my work, science, the truth, to be proved right. What better punishment, therefore, than for me to know I was right, know beyond any shadow of a doubt, and
never to be able to prove it
. He and I would know; we two only, joined inseparably by our shared bond of mutual obsession. But the definitive proof, which I would have seen and read, would be lost for ever. When in due course, as was inevitable given the nature of scholarship, some other scholar came along with the mental strength and agility to cast doubt on my research and question my findings, I would have no defence. I would know the truth, but not be able to prove it.

And that, he said, was why he’d done it. It was, of course, entirely up to me what I did next. I could kill him in an excess of entirely justified rage. He wouldn’t mind that in the least; because then I’d be the one dragged through the streets on a hurdle and pushed off a stool with a rope round my neck, to die with the jeers of common people in my ears. No? Ah well. In that case, I could go to the faculty and denounce him, tell them exactly what he’d done. He hoped I’d do that. He would deny it strenuously, I’d have no proof, and (given the history between us) my accusations would be dismissed as a deranged attempt to blacken his name, I’d be disgraced, and all my work would be discredited with me. And if I did neither—well, then, I’d have to spend the rest of my life reflecting on how he’d beaten me, out-thought me, used his superior intellect to devise the perfect snare; which thought would gradually eat me up over the years, like a tapeworm, growing commensurately bigger and stronger as I faded and became weak.

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I drank my tea, which had gone cold, and went home.

Once I met an old man who told me he reckoned he was happier in his eighties than he’d ever been in his youth. I told him that was hard to believe. He grinned at me. I’m free, he said, of my worst enemy. Myself. My past (he explained). All the stupid things I’ve done and said, all the lies I told, everything that makes me cringe or weep when I think of it. You see, everyone I ever knew is dead, so there’s no witnesses. Only I know the truth, and my memory’s so bad these days, I can’t rely on it worth a damn. So, all the bad things, for all I know, they may never have happened. And that (he said) is freedom.

History, science, scholarship; the art of extracting the truth from unreliable witnesses. Nine times out of ten, the best you can hope to do is make out a case that convinces on the balance of probabilities. Your jury—fellow-scholars, minded and motivated just like you—will be persuaded by the most plausible argument, the most probable version. Thus we create a model of the past governed by common sense, rational thought, considered actions, reasonable motives. Now think about the decisions you’ve made and some of the things you’ve done over the years.

History, therefore, will have every right to be sceptical about my account of the destruction of the Aeneas manuscript. No sane man, history would argue, would do something like that for such a reason. Logically, therefore, Carchedonius could only have done such a thing if he was insane. Indeed; and it’s proverbial among historians that if your argument depends on such and such a key player being insane, it’s probably untrue or at least deeply unsound. Go away and think of a more plausible explanation, we say. Insanity just isn’t that common.