A Conspiracy of Truths Read online

  Didn’t know if I was going to get lunch, and when my advocate had left, a big crowd of the students left with her. Others stayed behind, eating their lunch out of little boxes they’d hidden under their seats.

  I watched them for a while; part of my job, you know, watching. Some of the ones who had left had marked their place by draping a handkerchief across the seat, and it seemed like others had drawn straws and left a friend or two to guard their section. A wiser choice, I thought, since I saw a few sneaks shuffle seat markers around in order to get themselves a place nearer the front, the blackguards.

  I entertained myself for the next half hour by alternately taunting the guards and whining at them for a chair, citing my ancient knees. Consanza came back quite suddenly, having shaken her troop of fanatic admirers, or ass-kissers, or whatever they were.

  She asked me if I was going to cooperate.

  Tricky question. Loaded question. I asked her if she was going to bother to fight my case on any points besides ones she knew she could win.

  “None of your business,” she said. I was too appalled to reply. Of course it was my business! I was the one getting sentenced to death, jail time, and formal apologies! Then she said she brought me lunch. She held up two odd bags made of folded paper and said, “This one has a slice of bread. Warden Miloslav will get you a cup of water from the well. And this one has the leftovers of my lunch—half a goat pie and a baked pear. Warden Miloslav will get you a cup of water from the well, and he won’t spit in it on the way back. Guess which one you get if you cooperate, and learn your apology, and promise to the gods that you’ll deliver it to the court in a civilized manner.” I tell you, I was so hopping mad that I couldn’t find anything to say, not a thing. Just spluttered at her, something about the gall, the condescension, the utter cheek.

  “It was a good pie,” she said in this blank voice. Clearly didn’t give an iron penny about my pride. “Going to get soggy as it cools. Not a fan of pears, so I can’t speak for its quality, but that’s all they had, and it came with the pie, so there we are.” She shook the two bags at me, just out of reach, not that I would have tried to grab for them. Two weeks in prison and all I had left to me was my pride.

  Two weeks in prison. They didn’t bring me half-congealed pies, just salty barley porridge twice a day and a squishy, bruised apple every third day, for health.

  It stings me to confess to it, but the thought of meat alone would have been enough to win my good behavior. Thrice-cursed woman! That godforsaken pear just sealed my fate for me, damn her! I had thoughts about that pear that were as lascivious as any thoughts I’ve had about a person, and I tell you, when I was a young man—

  Hah, well, I suppose you don’t need to hear about all that. Another time, perhaps.

  That godforsaken pear. I’m partial to pears.

  I suppose I don’t have to tell you that I gave in, on the condition that I was allowed out of my cage and given a chair (with a cushion!) to sit on while I ate and Consanza coached me. “You’ve got two options,” she said. “Do you have about six hundred marks on your person?”

  “Pardon?”

  She gave me an exceedingly patient look. “Money. Do you have any?”

  “For what?”

  “Give all the judges and the students and the witnesses a nice little gift, purely out of the goodness of your heart, to atone for your brazen impertinence. That would be a very graceful apology, and it would . . . you know. Incline them towards leniency with your other charges.”

  I squinted at her. “That sounds like bribery to me.”

  “Does it?” she said. “Mere coincidence.”

  “Paying everyone in the room to sway their opinion of me sounds like bribery by coincidence?” I said, deeply incredulous.

  “It’s a simple gift, merely that and no more. A gesture of regret and atonement. A mark for each of the students, two marks for each of the witnesses, twenty for each of the judges—do you have that kind of money on you?”

  “What do you think?” I snapped. Mind you, I looked exactly like a man who had been wandering in the wilderness for a few weeks and then moldering in jail for a few more. I was shabby. I was smelly. I definitely didn’t have six hundred marks on me.

  “Some people,” she said crisply, “come to court prepared.”

  “Well, I’m evidently not prepared at all. What’s the other damn option?”

  “An apology,” she said dully. “A really good one.” I could see she had no faith in me, none whatsoever. She didn’t think I could do such a thing, not well enough to satisfy.

  So she explained how. Wasn’t a terribly complicated job, once she got into it; based mostly on Nuryeven philosophies of rhetoric, which were set out, oh, seven or eight hundred years ago by a dozen or so self-congratulatory morons—but then, I’ve never had much patience for that flavor of navel-gazing. It’s not natural, not real people, and my business, as you know, deals in real people, sometimes too real to have actually lived.

  Consanza didn’t bring up the issue of bribes again, and I was too distracted and proud to mention it. A hundred marks amongst the judges to apologize for brazen impertinence and to make a pesky little witchcraft charge go away? I wondered later how much it would have taken to brush aside something worse, something I’d actually done.

  Consanza fed me some quotes to use in the apology and told me the wording that would garner me at least a little more goodwill from the panel of judges. Said that if I liked, the laws of rhetoric allowed me to start with a brief anecdote to illuminate my point. “And act like you’re sorry,” she said.

  Cheeky twit, but by that time I was nose-deep in a pear, flavored with honey and baked in a very thin sheet of flaky pastry, and I couldn’t be much bothered to work up a temper again. In fact, I found myself in the first reasonable state of mind I’d had in weeks. When she was satisfied that I was adequately prepared for my sentencing, I made small talk. Not the inanities most people consider small talk, the weather and so forth, things of no consequence—small talk is a rather different animal in my profession.

  There’s a story in anything, if you know what to look for and how to frame it. If you can find the person who needs to hear it. That is my sacred calling—collecting stories and passing them along—but it’s not just myths and tall tales. It’s people, and the way people are.

  So I talked with Consanza a little, to find out the way she was. She wasn’t exactly forthcoming. About all I got from her was that her grandparents, all four of them, had traveled to Nuryevet from Arjuneh when they were young—there was a story there, but she gave me that blank, stone-wall look again when I tried to tweak it out of her.

  From Arjuneh to Nuryevet. Thousands of miles by land or by sea, from lush, steaming jungle to bleak, stony hills and a bleak, steely sky. She has the look of that land about her, in the strong bones of her face and the rich color of her eyes, the point of her chin, the dark varnished-walnut color of her skin, and her black hair, which she wore in the style that Nuryeven advocates tend to use: tied back in a tail with a plain ribbon.

  When the students started trickling back into the courtroom, Warden Miloslav locked me back in the cage—don’t know why, ’cause as soon as the judges filed in and sat down, Miloslav unlocked the cage again and dragged me back out. It was the look of the thing, I guess.

  There was some more chatter of formalities when they hove me back up in front of the panel, and the official sentencing—which, as we’d been told, was a demand for an immediate apology. I launched right into it.

  “A very long time ago and half the world away, I met a man who had sailed through the Straits of Kel-Badur nineteen times—the very first to ever survive the passage with his ship intact, and he did it eighteen more times after that. An impressive number, to make an outrageous understatement, a number that earned him a near-mythic status amongst his fellow sailors in every port around the Sea of Serpents, for the straits are narrow and treacherous, with tall cliffs on either side and jagged rocks
beneath the waves. It takes a sailor with an ironbound stomach to even think of attempting them, even in the calmest weather. And they say there are ghosts in the cliffs. . . .

  “This man, called Xing Fe Hua, or Xing Fe the Sailor, or Xing Fe of Map Sut, whose ship was the silver-sailed Nightingale, whose first mate was almost as legendary as he: Faurette, golden-haired and sharp of sword. They made passage through the straits those nineteen times, escaping with their lives by the skin of their teeth and no more.

  “I asked him once how he had done this when so many others had perished. It was, he said, because others had tried to defeat the straits, had approached with their own ideas of the nature of danger. They were foolish men and women who thought they could conquer the sea, who expected it to submit to their will if will enough they had. And so, for their hubris, they had been dashed upon the rocks.

  “Xing Fe told me he had survived because he knew it was useless to fight against the sea, or to expect that his will could subdue its nature. He said that it was a foolish man indeed who would expect the world to behave according to his own notions.

  “And that is what I have done today, Your Excellencies. I have been a foolish man—I expected you to act according to my own principles, and not only have I been met with frustration, but I have also caused frustration, strife, and at the very least, inconvenience to you, to the students of the court, to my fellow defendants—and to them I have caused real injury, too, for my foolishness is the reason their sentencing has been delayed, and it may be the reason it is further delayed. For any man who would have been set at liberty today, it is upon my head if he must spend another night in bondage.

  “I attempted passage through these straits with arrogance, and it is only your mercy that has saved my ship from the rocks.

  “I spent several years on Xing Fe’s ship, and yet I still forgot this lesson. I profess my deepest apologies to all present, and I beg your forgiveness.”

  I bowed deeply to the panel in the style that Consanza had shown me. My back creaked and popped.

  “When was the last time you spoke with Xing Fe the Sailor? Xing Fe Hua of the province of Phra Yala?” asked the chief judge.

  I tell you now, I committed another great foolishness then—I thought my story had so taken His Honor that . . . Well. You see. I am a vain man. I tell you now, this happened exactly as I tell it, without any embellishment.

  “Years ago,” said I. “He sailed west towards the Ammat Archipelago from the Gulf of Dagua and was never heard from again. They say he must have been spirited away, for he disappeared entirely. No one ever saw or heard of him again. Some say he sails the waters of heaven now; some say he lives on in the waters he crossed in life, that in the moments of darkest peril, his spirit has guided ships to safety—”

  “Xing Fe Hua the Sailor, of Phra Yala in Map Sut, known pirate, smuggler, spy, murderer?” said the judge.

  “Ah . . . I see you have heard of some of his more controversial exploits,” I replied. “If he lives still, I hope he knows how far his fame has spread. It would have delighted him, that you have heard of him so far from his homeland.” So very far—Map Sut is half the world away.

  “Heard of him!” the judge laughed. Something about it tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. “I was on the panel that convicted him of murderous intent towards a citizen of the realm, five counts in the third degree, one amongst a laundry list of other crimes, each more lurid and horrific than the last! That was twenty years ago! Heard of him! I was there to hear him scream when we wrapped him in those ridiculous sails and burned him!”

  I tell you now, I was struck speechless. It must have been forty years since I had traveled with Xing Fe, and the width of the world and the span of time had long since separated us. It is no easy thing to be confronted with unexpected loss.

  So when the judge, seeing my face, asked the nature of my relationship to Xing Fe Hua, I could only say softly, “We were friends.” It had been so long, and a man like Xing Fe is a man no one ever imagines growing old, let alone succumbing to death. I had . . . I had always assumed he’d have stayed just the same, though he had been older than I back then and surely would have passed on by now one way or another.

  But men like Xing Fe Hua never really die. They leave behind too much of themselves.

  The judge had been speaking. I hadn’t heard him, had been too busy listening to the wretched animal-cry of my heart.

  The judge rapped his gavel on the table, which brought me out of it pretty well, so the first thing I heard him say was, “The court hereby passes this case to the Queen of Justice and remands him into the custody of the wardens of Order.”

  The courtroom burst into chaos, the students and witnesses in the galleries all shouting at once, and a guard came up on either side of me, took me by the elbows, started dragging me towards the door. I couldn’t see Consanza anywhere, and whenever I tried to turn to look for her, the guards yanked on my arms to pull me forward faster—nearly wrenched my shoulders out, which didn’t help with the confusion and the blur. Everything seemed to be whirling around me, and I kept flinching at the shouts on either side of the aisle, and I must have been stumbling because the guards hauled me to my feet several times before we reached the big wooden doors into the main hall of the courthouse.

  They threw me into a little box, smaller than the cage I’d been in earlier and solid-sided like a coffin, and they shoved all my limbs in after me and slammed the door and locked it, and I was confined there in the dark for who knows how long until the box started moving. It was lifted onto something with wheels, and I was rolled off somewhere new, my heart pounding like a rabbit’s in my chest and my breath coming short. I was almost glad of the dark, almost glad to be shut away from the noise and confusion and chaos.

  But what had I done? I didn’t know.

  Took two days for Consanza to come see me, or for them to let her come. I had been taken immediately from the House of Justice back to the House of Order, yanked from that tiny coffin-box, and dragged down two flights of stairs to a new cell. A more secure cell, I suppose it was, as it didn’t have a window. The ceiling was low, the walls were all stony and plastered over, and the stale air was rank with the smells of filthy humans, damp, rats, piss. And no one would tell me what had happened, though I begged and wheedled and asked to simply be told.

  At least the food wasn’t any worse.

  But yes, as I said, Consanza came after two days, led in by a guard, who stood by the wall a little way down the corridor and crossed his arms. He didn’t look at me, and I didn’t recognize him, but the light was very poor, even for my eyes. There was a little table, where sometimes a guard would sit and play solitary card games when they were watching this block—watching me. There wasn’t anyone else in the other cells, unless they were bound and gagged.

  Consanza entered in a billow and whirl of black robes, and I was glad enough to see someone I knew that I didn’t even think to sneer at her for her dramatics. They say parting makes affections sweeter—and that hawkish unfortunate nose of hers did seem to be softened in my eyes by familiarity and, let’s be honest, relief. She took a chair from the table, set it in front of the door of my cell, and sat in it backwards with her arms crossed over the backrest.

  “You really got yourself into it, didn’t you?” she said, and it took all I had not to cry.

  “What happened? What did they sentence me with? I don’t know what happened, and no one—no one will tell me what I’ve done.”

  She looked at me for a long time, expressionless except for that typical sour look. “Espionage,” she said.

  “Espionage!” I squawked. “Against whom? When? What evidence have they? What actions did I ever take? Espionage!”

  Well, it was something having to do with my association to Xing Fe Hua, she explained, and went on in legal jargon and unnecessary detail, unknowing that each word was a punch to my heart and my gut.

  “At least they’ve been distracted from the witchcraft
for now. That’s a good thing.”

  “A good thing! A good thing, she says! First a witch, now a spy, and they separate me from legal counsel for days. They lock me up in the dark with only one candle in the whole room! A good thing! When I was a witch, I had light and fresh air and a guard who would speak to me!” They might not have known how to deal with blackwitches, but they had procedures for spies.

  “Be quiet,” she snapped. “Just be quiet and stop running your mouth. It is a good thing. It is. If you’d been convicted of witchcraft, you’d be dead by now. They’d have burned you or buried you alive—”

  “They have buried me alive!” I shrieked, and flailed my arm at the wall. “They’ve manhandled me down into this hole in the ground! They’ve buried me!”

  “Hush!” she snarled. “It’s not my job to hold your hand.”

  “Oh, not your job to hold my hand, not your job to hold my hand—what is your job, then? Hmm!” I had leaped from my bench and started pacing back and forth. Four steps to the wall and four steps to the bars. “It’s your job to get me out of here, isn’t it? It’s your job to prove me innocent.”

  “That’s what I came here about. It might not be my job anymore.”

  “Ahaha! They’re burying me alive!”

  “No. They can’t take me off a case once it’s been assigned to me.” She had lowered her voice again; it was calm and level and nigh apathetic. “I might resign, though.”

  “You can’t resign!”

  “I can, and I might. I haven’t decided yet.”

  I sat down on my narrow little bench again and rubbed my hands over my face. “Why? Why, why? You can’t leave me like that,” and I heard my voice come out in a pathetic creak.