Arcanum (58 page)

“There’s no food in them, more’s the pity. Look.”

He showed her the contents. One was empty. The other had part of a roll of soft lead sheeting in it, making it almost too heavy to hold in one hand. Thaler got down on his knees and balanced both pails on the very edge of the gallery, between the upright balusters.

“Which one do you think will reach the ground first?” he asked, looking up.

“The one with the lead in it, of course.” She leant over the handrail. “Assuming it doesn’t land on someone’s head first.”

“And yet yesterday, when a workman dropped both his hammer and the wedge he was trying to fix, this happened.” He jumped up, shouted “Clear down below!” and then ducked back to push both pails off.

There was a pause, and a single loud bang.

Sophia was watching very closely, and to her it looked as though the containers hit the stone floor at the same time.

“How is that possible?” She squinted down at them, trying to judge whether she’d seen what she thought she saw.

“I don’t know. I’ve tried them both empty, both full, one full and one empty. They fall at the same rate, every single time, in direct contradiction of Aristotle. I’ve tried it from the very top, too. I suppose it might not be far enough for the difference to show, but this building is one hundred and fifty feet, floor to ceiling. Some of the fortress’s towers are taller…”

“Yes, I’m sure you’ll get permission. Perhaps.” She stopped, and frowned. “Perhaps Aristotle was wrong. Or the world has changed, and Aristotle is no longer right.”

Thaler sat back on his haunches. “Have you noticed how we simply don’t have explanations for almost anything that happens? Things fall, yes? Then why do sparks rise? The sun at midday in winter is lower than in summer: is that because the sun is hotter in summer, or what? A barge floats, yet put a hole in it and it sinks. Has the barge lost its boatiness simply because of that hole?”

Sophia laughed. “Boatiness?”

“I don’t know what else to call it. Plato would have it that the more a boat diverges from the ideal, the less of a boat it becomes.” Thaler heaved himself up. “My head is so full of questions, I don’t know where to start.”

“Start down there, Frederik. Start with the books. I’ll find someone to look after the lanterns and let poor Mr Wess do some proper work. And my father, too. Just make sure you search him at the end of the day.”

Felix couldn’t help thinking how small Carinthia looked on the map, and how it wouldn’t take much movement of the lines that marked the border to erase it completely. The parts that lay over the mountains, the Drau and Danz valleys, could be swallowed up by Venezia without him even noticing. The land between the Enn and the Salzach was vulnerable to the Bavarians, and in the east, Wien could march around the top of the Alps along the broad Donau plain.

Being left with the area immediately around Juvavum, and the lower reaches of the Salzach and the Enn, was all but unsustainable. All the good land would have gone, with the trade routes that he currently controlled falling into other hands, and the mines at Durrnberg, too.

The palatinate would collapse, and someone else would be installed in the White Fortress, to rule on behalf of a distant king who didn’t care about the land or its people.

And the stupid thing was, he
did
care. He cared more than his father had, whose one excursion to protect Carinthia from invaders had ended with him dead and his orphaned son on the throne. But Büber was right. It was the Order who’d held all the power, and they were gone, all of them, for certain this time. His father, and his father before him, had been figureheads. Not puppets, exactly, but the faces of men put before other men so that no one would see the monster that hid behind them.

For the first time in a thousand years, a Carinthian prince was solely responsible for the safety of his people, and it happened to be him. The gods weren’t noted for their sense of humour, but he imagined a mocking laugh echoing from the mountaintops and down the steep wooded valleys.

There was a knock at the door, and he absently called his assent, but not so absently that he didn’t momentarily rest his hand on his sword and look around to see who it was.

“Mr Ullmann. Thank you for coming.”

“My lord.” Ullmann walked to the table and waited to be addressed, but inevitably his gaze wandered down to peruse the map.

Felix wondered what he made of it, so he asked him plainly. “What do you see, Mr Ullmann?” He waved his left hand across the map. His shoulder was sore. It was always sore, and he wondered if he was going to spend the rest of his life favouring it.

“Carinthia is here, my lord, and…”

“No. I’ve been schooled in geography. I want to know what
you
see when you look at this. What does it mean to
you
?” He adjusted one of the boxes that kept the map flat.

Ullmann scrubbed at the bridge of his nose while he thought. “That we’re surrounded by both enemies and friends, but the ink on the parchment doesn’t tell us who’s who.”

It wasn’t an answer designed to please. But it was honest. Felix leant his elbows on the table. “Nor does it tell us that the Bavarians are broke and have no money to pay for their soldiers. It doesn’t tell us whether the Doge or the Duke have the upper hand in northern Italy. It doesn’t tell us what’s happening in München or Wien or the Eastern empire, or in the Franklands.” He pointed to each place in turn. “We’re blind. We always have been. It never mattered before, but suddenly we need to know whether they’re in as much trouble as we are, or whether they’re plotting to carve us up like a roast boar.” He stared at the hand-drawn lines, trying to make sense of it all. “If you’d arrived in Juvavum just two weeks ago, we’d have appeared as strong as we ever were. Now look at us. If the Teutons come at us again, in the same numbers as they did before? A tiny army, a few hundred horse. They could walk in and take over, and there’s very little I could do – that anyone could do – to stop them.”

Ullmann shifted from one foot to the other. “My lord…”

Felix drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, Mr Ullmann. Really, I have no idea. Everyone else, they seem to be busy at what they do best, and I’m left gazing at the stupid map, wondering if I should be trying to raise a huge army to defend us, or writing letters to my fellow princes. I’m twelve. The people I used to trust to tell me what to do have gone, Mr Ullmann. I need new advisers, a whole new court, and that takes time we might not have.”

“Then it strikes me, my lord, that you need to call a grand council, to hear the views all the people. I’m sure Master Thaler can tell us from his books how to run one.” Ullmann tapped Juvavum with his forefinger. “Hold it here, in the fortress.”

“I don’t see how that’s going to help. The few earls I have are even younger than I am, Mr Ullmann, or their families are still arguing about succession.” Little Ulf had been eventually fished out of the river, along with a dozen or so other bodies, none of which was his stepmother. She hadn’t been found among the other bodies either. She was lost, more surely than he was. Felix stared out of the window at the mountains, and wondered if that was another pain that would never cease.

Ullmann cleared his throat and spoke softly. “My lord, you can’t wait on these things. The town needs a new mayor, even though we don’t know what happened to Master Messinger yet. You gave Master Thaler the library seal, remember, even though the old master librarian is still with us.”

“So I should just make new earls? Perhaps,” said Felix absently.

“Not quite what I meant, my lord. You could rule that all the earldoms have reverted to you, and that you’ll portion out the land in a way that suits the new ways.”

Felix sat back so quickly he jarred his whole body. “Take the earls’ lands? I don’t think so.”

“My lord, there are so few earls to take them from. Some families have been completely wiped out. Rather than having distant cousins squabbling – and fighting – over who’s the heir, which’ll go on for years and become impossible to make right, just cut them out now, while everyone is still willing to accept that we have to do things differently.” Ullmann took the chair next to Felix without invitation, but the prince decided he didn’t mind.

“Are you after an earldom, Mr Ullmann?”

Ullmann reacted as if he’d just been offered a freshly squeezed cup of aconite. “No thank you, my lord. Not at all. Shall I tell you what I’m thinking?”

Can I stop you? wondered Felix. He welcomed the distraction, though, and waited as Ullmann pulled the map closer.

“When the Romans went on the march, they promised every legionary their own piece of land in return for twenty-five years of service. They were well paid, and they knew what they were fighting for.”

“A professional army, yes: I know this.”

“What better way to get an army than to promise this for our people? Most of them spend their entire lives working land that their earl owns. Give them their own land, and they’ll fight for you.”

Felix looked at the map again. “So I take away land from the earls, and distribute it to the peasants?” Even as he said it, he couldn’t quite believe that someone was seriously suggesting it.

“Forget that they’re peasants. Some of them have worked the same land for generations, and it’s a hard life that just got harder. If you make them give you their sons for a few coppers a day, then,” Ullmann shrugged, “all your fears will come true. If you ask them for their sons and tell them that, in return, the soil they’ve sweated and bled on is their own? They’ll love you, my lord.”

Felix scratched at his nose and eyed the usher – no, not usher any more – he was wasted in that post. “I’ll have to think about this. Your parents…”

“Serfs, my lord. I’m not apologising for that.” Ullmann sat taller and straighter. “Please don’t think that I’m just saying this to give my mum and dad an easier time; that’s not what this is about.”

“So how did you get off the land? What did your earl say?”

Ullmann looked away for a moment. “Should I lie, my lord?”

“Not to me, Mr Ullmann.”

“My dad could see how much I might do, if I could only get my chance. So he pretended I’d run away to seek my fortune in Italy.”

“And yet you’re here, in Juvavum.” This Ullmann lad was definitely lively, as Thaler had noted. Ambitious, but in a good way. Felix was warming to him.

“I needed to learn to read, I knew that. So I found work in the library, cleaning and washing and carrying for the librarians, and after my day’s work, I used to sneak a book off the shelves and find a quiet corner – if a round building can be said to have corners, that is – and see if I could make out what it said. When I was found out I thought I was for the road again, but the librarian – no names, my lord, don’t want him in any trouble – asked me if I could read, and I had to say I couldn’t, so every night afterwards, he’d spend a while schooling me in my letters, and now I can read honest German as good as any man alive, and some Latin and Greek, too.”

Felix tapped his finger against his lips. “And a year and a day later, you were free of your obligations to the land.”

“That’s when I asked to be an usher, my lord. I knew I couldn’t be a librarian because I was too old to be apprenticed, but being an usher was the next best thing. Then I got to help Master Thaler on his adventure, and that made me feel like I could be useful, not just to the library, but to the palatinate.”

The prince looked askance at him. “Useful? Oh, you’ve been more than useful, Mr Ullmann. Which is why I asked to see you. To thank you.”

Ullmann was very still for a while, except that his eyes darted about in their orbits, his gaze lighting on the map, the door, the fireplace, just for a moment, before darting like a fly to another place.

“Thank me? For what, my lord?”

“For giving Master Thaler the help he needed in securing the library, and later underground.” Felix scraped his chair back and found a jug with wine, and another with water, and two cups. He poured Ullmann half a cup, and watched as the man added the same amount of water. Sober, then. Self-reliant and self-restrained. If he was putting on an act, it was a good act. “Without you, the expedition would have failed, and for that, you have Carinthia’s thanks.”

Felix realised, sitting there in the solar with Ullmann opposite him, that both of them were playing the grown-up and that it wasn’t just that he had to take risks, but that any decision he made was a risk. The map on the table between them was instructive, but it told him what things used to be like, not how things were now. The borders of Carinthia, a pale yellow wash on the paper, meant nothing if he couldn’t defend them. That was the threat. The opportunity was that borders went both ways.

If he was going to count holding on to the lands his father had left him as success, he could guarantee the similar calculations were being made in throne rooms the length and breadth of Europe.

“Land for service,” said Felix, returning to Ullmann’s earlier suggestion. “What you’re suggesting overturns a thousand years of history. We Germans have never done anything like this before.”

“We know it worked for the Romans.”

“Up to the point we destroyed them,” said Felix.

Ullmann pressed his hands together. “We had magic then, my lord. Now all we have is muscle, like the Romans had. In a straight fight, it served them well enough.”

“An empire.” The Romans had carried their eagle standards to some unlikely places, and it had only been the dark woods, deep rivers and raw magic that had prevented his barbarian ancestors from being overrun. “I don’t think I want the Carinthian leopard to travel at the head of an army and conquer my neighbours.”

“But my lord would like them to leave your lands alone.”

“Yes.” Felix looked again at the map, the smallness of Carinthia. “Professional armies are expensive, and from what I’ve read of the Romans, they had to conquer to keep the money coming in.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big army, my lord. It might even be better if it was small. Elite soldiers, trained to the hilt. A cohort or two. And you’d have your own Praetorians to guard you. The cohorts would support local militias; that way, you’d be able to field a large number of men quickly, anywhere.”