Immortal at the Edge of the World (6 page)

Never in history has a government been as effective at taxation as the Romans. Nowadays we see
taxes
and think in terms of monetary income, but this was more about goods: spices, grains, wine, wood, stone, and so on. Really, one of the biggest advantages of such a vast empire was that nobody starved, because if there was a lack of food in one part of the world, the Romans owned a part of the world where food was in abundance. So they would collect grains as tax and use it to feed the people who didn’t have food. This was also how cities managed to exist, given that was where the most people and the fewest farms coincided.

And then the Roman Empire collapsed. Or so I’ve read.

It was a thousand years before someone suggested to me that the Empire collapsed, as if this was a thing that took place overnight. Like the barbarians turned up, Rome fell, and the entire government apparatus just disintegrated. And then, I guess, we were all left stumbling in the dark. Because—Dark Ages. I will grant that when Alaric and the Goths seized the city of Rome it had a not insignificant psychological impact on the European sphere, but there were still plenty of Romans around and half an empire left—in the East—that went on for another twelve hundred-odd years. (For reasons that I will never understand, the Eastern Roman Empire is called the Byzantine Empire in the books. I never met a Byzantine, and nobody called them that. They were called Romans because they were Romans.)

Taxes were a big reason Rome fell, too, in a way. All it took for the Romans to lose the power they relied on to maintain their vast holdings was for one or two key territories to go south. If you lose the land that produces the crops that feed another region, you may end up losing both regions. I mean, sure there were the barbarians and all that, but one of the other things the Romans did well was bring “barbarian” cultures into the empire, until the people from that culture started to act like Romans. So there were always barbarians hanging around, and the truth was, they were basically like everyone else, especially after a generation or two.

Anyway, what
did
happen was that the localities that had been part of a unified top-down structure all tried to create their own smaller governments based loosely on the political structure the Romans had perfected. With only one exception—the Catholic Church—nobody got this right. Literacy went to hell, as did a tremendous amount of common sense, and it became a lot more likely that political disputes were resolved violently.

Most importantly, if you were in the middle of all of this, you pretty much had no idea what the hell was going on. This is an excellent way to get killed.

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I tried to lay low for the majority of Roman rule. As I’ve explained before, it’s not always a good idea to become a prominent citizen in the local community when you don’t get old. For a while it’s okay, because you can amass a decent-sized fortune if you do a couple of things well, and having a fortune makes it easier to convince people—monetarily—not to notice that you are the same guy you were four generations ago. But that’s impossible to maintain, especially in cultures that have a strong belief system involving some sort of personified evil force. And most of them do.

So when the empire unstrung itself, I was not exactly left destitute because I had nothing substantial in the way of wealth—or at least land—to lose. I had already been traveling from town to town for years by then, peddling various wares that people might find useful enough to barter for.

Usefulness changed from area to area, as did quality of product. In good times, I’d have some silver bowls, rare spices—like pepper—or silks. In bad times, maybe nothing more than a few clay pots. The way it worked was not dissimilar to how the Romans distributed taxes, only on a smaller scale. I’d get stuff from one region and cart it to another region to trade it for things a third region might want. It was extremely time-consuming and the profit margin was always verging on zero, but I had so much free time to work with there was really no way not to succeed. Plus, I got to see a lot of different places and meet a lot of different people, learn all the local languages right when they were born, and most nights I could sleep comfortably in the back of my wagon and under the stars.

It was a good deal, right up until it wasn’t anymore.

I was visiting a region I’m pretty sure is now taken up by either Germany or Austria. I
think
it was part of the Rhine valley, but I’m not positive and I’m not positive partly because I didn’t return to it for a very long time after the fact. This would have put it in the hands of the Franks . . . I’m pretty sure. Again, I have to apologize, but people stopped writing and following calendars and place names changed and it was a mess, so I barely know where this happened, and
when
is just as difficult.

One of the good things about being a peddler was that I didn’t have to care all that much whose territory I was in because most days I was dealing with the peasantry, and peasants didn’t really much care who was who as long as nobody took their land or set fire to their houses. Any king—or emperor or bishop—who successfully kept that from happening was okay with them. Granted, they had to know who to give taxes to and which armies to feed and which to hide from, but a lot of that was pretty easy to pick up quickly. Taxes tended to go to whoever had the biggest house in the area, and armies were usually okay if they had the same colors as the guy who lived in the biggest house. And neither army nor lord had much impact on their daily lives.

Village hierarchies did have an impact, though. On the ground, most of the little villages and hamlets and whatnot had local politics to settle local issues. It was different in every place: he could be the tax collector; the nearest priest or religious equivalent; the guy who lived in the
second
biggest house; or the only literate layperson in town. It was almost always a man, and the village was almost always exactly as sane as he was.

So I was traveling with my wagon and my ass, and I came to this particular nameless town. The center of the town was a modest crossroad, which was also pretty common. Towns tended to pop up any place two main roads intersected, because I guess lots of people decide they’d rather stop and build a house than make a left turn. Or something.

At the time I had a wagon full of some pretty classy porcelain I was going to claim came from China if anyone with a decent coin purse asked, and some crude brass jewelry that was common about a thousand miles east of the village but likely to be seen as exotic locally. I also had a lot of stoneware that was superior to anything they had on hand, and a few other trinkets.

The porcelain was going to be too costly for most of the locals, so my goal was to find the biggest house and start from there, but I reached the crossroad toward the tail end of a long day of travel and decided to stop and set up on the spot. I thought I could maybe make a few deals before sundown, get some directions to whatever castle might be nearby, and start the next day off heading for it.

Stopping turned out to be a massive error.

“What sort of man are you?” was the first question anyone thought to ask. I had just unhitched my wagon, fed my ass, and was in the process of unloading a few of my goods when this question was posed by a simple-looking fellow on the opposite side of the street.

“Only a man, friend,” I offered. This seemed an obvious enough answer, and more or less true.

“You are here to sell those things?” he asked. My inquisitor was short and hairy, with a pretty common farmer’s build and with teeth of the quality one might expect for an area that had little fruit. He also had a large wooden cross around his neck, which was very useful to me as it wasn’t always obvious which god I should be invoking from location to location. He was the only one out on the street, which was a little surprising as it was a lovely day and the farmland I’d passed up the road had led me to believe I was dealing with at least a modest population. Generally a crossroad such as this would have plenty of peddlers, and locals would be accustomed to seeing them. But this fellow seemed to be shocked by my profession.

I had turned to pull a clay pot from the back of the wagon in an effort to visually elaborate on what I was there to do, but the guy with all the questions had already decided the conversation was over. He scurried off down the road, leaving me to wonder if every customer in town was going to be a hard sell.

A few minutes later another man happened by and we went through the same questions:
What sort of man am I
and
am I here to sell things
and then he ran off, too. Nobody, it seems, had seen a private merchant around here before.

Then came the crowd.

All right, it was a small crowd, but while they appeared to be unarmed there were enough of them to separate me from my body parts by hand if they felt like it. Especially since, when it came to farmers, upper body strength was something they excelled at.

Leading this crowd was the local chieftain or whatever it was he went by. He was cleaner and better dressed than the people who followed, and the wooden cross around his neck was a touch larger, which could have indicated he was a priest. There was really no way to be sure; village priests didn’t often dress like the way we expect priests nowadays to dress. Sometimes the only way to tell was if they emerged from a building that looked like a church. Not that churches looked much like churches back then either.

He stopped across the road from me, as the others before him had. This was actually very close given it was a small road with no real traffic to speak of. “What sort of man are you?” he asked.

With yet another chance to answer this same question, I decided not to. “What sort are
you
?” I asked.

“I am a humble man,” he answered immediately, and I guess that was what I was supposed to have responded with.

“I, too, am a humble man,” I said, hoping nobody minded I cribbed the answer.

“And you are here to peddle your wares?” It was an innocuous question, but the way he said it was in roughly the same tone someone might use to say,
you’re here to rape my daughter?

The people with him had begun to spread out. The intent was to surround me, and by all rights I should have been the one who was worried, but there was a lot more fear in their eyes than I imagine there was in mine. It was me they were afraid of, but until I understood why I couldn’t really use that to my advantage. There are times when being fearsome is useful, but it always helps to know the reason and limit of that fear.

It was obvious that my way out of this situation was through the man with the largest cross. “If I could speak with honesty, friend,” I said to him, “the concern you and your cohort express on the matter of my profession appears to have little to do with what I sell.”

“My name is Garivald, and I am no friend!” he shouted. “And you are no man.”

“You have me at a disadvantage, Garivald,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “What do you imagine me to be if not a man?”

Religious fanatics are the
worst
. They’re basically impossible to bargain with, they accept no outside opinion about anything, and they departed from reality well before you met them. The best thing to do when encountering one is either hit them before they get a chance to hit you, or run.

I couldn’t run. I had a sword and a knife, neither of particularly high quality but both fairly sharp and pointy. But they were in the wagon under my bedding and I was standing several feet away from them. If you think it was foolish of me, in this time and this place, to be so far away from a blade of any kind, you aren’t wrong. In fairness, I didn’t know how dangerous the time had become until it became dangerous for me at that crossroad.

“Your coming was foreseen,” Garivald said. “That you would appear at the corner of these roads with cursed goods from far-off lands and a forked tongue with nothing but poison on it. Your face would be new to all men.”

“You don’t see a lot of strangers around here, I take it. This is a pretty old face, I have to be honest.”

He actually spat on the ground, which is just a disgusting habit. “A devil is what you are,” he barked.

“But my tongue is perfectly normal, see?” I stuck out my tongue. This was probably a bad idea, but the whole thing sounded so stupid I couldn’t really take it seriously.

Garivald was not impressed by the normalness of my tongue, but the guy next to him at least had the decency to recoil.

“What exactly do you intend to do with this devil once you’ve found him?” I asked.

“Send him back from whence he came.”

“Oh all right. I came from over there.” I pointed up the road.

Garivald didn’t laugh or anything. This is because almost nobody had a sense of humor in the Early Middle Ages. It’s true, look it up.

The people he’d brought with him had more or less surrounded me by then. Just so we’re clear, I am very good in hand-to-hand combat. And if I was incredibly lucky, and these lunatic yahoos charged me one at a time like in a karate movie, I probably would be okay. But that seemed really unlikely. Still, if I was going to have a chance, what I needed to do was identify who would be attacking me first—there is always a first, even if he is then joined by many—which was what I was working on when a man on a horse rode up to the crossroad.

Actually—and this was really the height of irony—he wasn’t a man at all.