snorted Sorgius. “There was no poetry involved, and he won her in battle. I heard she jumped from the castle wall after he dishonored her.”
“I don’t know about that,” his fair companion said in a doubtful tone, “but it’s true that Ronko knows how to court a woman in style!” She threw Sorgius a skeptical look.
“Nonsense,” he snapped. “And how would you know?”
“Oh, I know a great deal,” the girl replied airily.
“Listen, Sorgius,” said Dag Vandey. “You know all the latest palace gossip. Do you really think Ronko carries weight with the Emperor?”
Sorgius put his glass down. “Seriously? His official position is called ‘advisor to the Heavenly Throne’. Today, that’s a post that is respected but doesn’t pay much. If I wanted to retire someone without hurting his feelings, that’s where I’d put him.”
“He isn’t old enough for retirement.”
“No, especially if what the ladies seem to know about him is true. I’ve also heard that he is absolutely fantastically rich.”
“Is that true?” Sorgius’ red-headed companion was suddenly attentive.
“Yes. And it isn’t the kind of wealth you would ever notice. People say that he eats in dirty, cheap taverns on the other side of the river port and wears the same robes for years, but his close friends know him to be a collector of antiques and rare manuscripts – only originals – that he buys for insane prices. He has two homes in Enteveria. One of them is an average house with average furnishings, but the other is a museum filled with treasures that would look well in the Emperor’s palace.”
“Why hasn’t he been robbed yet?” Vordius wondered aloud.
Sorgius grinned. “No one has ever tried. They say he has close friends in the criminal world. But those are just rumors.”
“My father once told me that Ronko was on friendly terms with the Emperor’s father,” Luvia said. “The old emperor respected him and valued his advice. It had something to do with reforming the imperial postal service.”
Sorgius was struck by an idea. “The imperial postal service. Of course! That must have been his gold mine. The postal service can transport anything you wish from one end of the empire to the other without any inspections or customs fees. That explains a lot…”
“You always turn the talk back to money,” said Vandey, making a wry face. “There’s more than that to the imperial postal service…”
“Enough!” Uni begged, looking pained. “I didn’t come here to discuss rumors and gossip about the people I work with. Let’s talk about something else!”
Sorgius grimaced, but after both women spoke warmly in favor of Ronko, he put an arm around his companion and proposed a hasty toast.
Uni sat back in his seat. There wasn’t enough air in the room. He wondered how all those people could sit there for hours. His forehead was sweaty. Suddenly, he lurched to one side, barely managing to hold onto the table to keep from falling.
“Looks like the little boy’s had enough,” he heard Sorgius’ voice somewhere in the distance.
“Air! I need air!” He leaned heavily against the table, one hand resting in the bread plate. A piece of bread went skittering across the table and fell over the edge onto the floor.
“There’s a balcony on the other side of the room where you can watch the sunset,” Sorgius’ girlfriend chirped.
Vandey stood up heavily. “I’ll walk you there.”
Uni felt like laughing when he saw the serious mask on his friend’s face. Dag was handsome and well-built, and he seemed taller than he actually was, but his narrow chin, thin lips and round, gray eyes clashed with the heroic image he cultivated in public.
The balcony was actually a rickety wooden overhang with a railing. It looked out over the deep ravine that separated the elite Trikazinso neighborhood from the Street of Plenty, which wandered off into the slums behind the northern river port. When the ancient capital had been expanded to meet the needs of the Herandian empire, which held sway over one-third of the continent, imperial architects had bemoaned the ravine as an inconvenient gash that interrupted Enteveria’s neatly laid-out city blocks. The most radical among them had proposed filling in the ravine, but in four hundred years no one had come up with funding for the project. The great emperor Norius could, of course, have decided the matter once and for all, but he listened to the words of his beloved Ovalio, who lobbied for the interests of the birds that made the ravine their home. Because of her efforts, when Uni and Vandey made their way out onto the balcony they were presented with a view of greenery, the smell of fresh grass, the sound of cicadas, and the warm rays of the summer sun.
“Is that better? Take a couple of deep breaths and your head will stop spinning.”
“I hope so.” Uni felt a bit better as the warm evening breeze cooled the sweat on his forehead. He leaned on the thin wooden railing, closed his eyes, and let the last breath of day enter his lungs.”
His friend was indifferent to the beauty surrounding them. After hesitating for form’s sake and waiting for a pair of lovers to leave the balcony, Dag Vandey cleared his throat. “You’re leaving soon. I wanted to ask you, have you thought any more about what we spoke of?”
“My friend, I haven’t had a chance to think about it at all,” Uni said tiredly. A week earlier, Vandey had visited him at the archive and brought him a book that he called “an explanation of all the things we’ve discussed.”
“I know you’re busy preparing for your trip, but I always thought you cared about the fate of our own land.”
Uni rubbed his eyes. “I’ve always distanced myself from politics. Do you want to know why? Because I know my limits. If you want to have influence, you have to have money, rank, and connections. What’s the point of talking about politics? You can write intelligent books and people will read them in secret as a form of entertainment. But then they’ll turn around and praise His Heavenly Majesty just like people have always done. And it’s not because they are weak or hypocritical. That’s just the natural order of things. People crave stability, order, and harmony.”
“Calling the current state of affairs in our empire the ‘natural order’ is the same as calling it harmonious for a cannibal to eat people!” Vandey grew lively at the chance to engage in competitive rhetoric. “Do you even see the difference between the mandates the Emperor announces and how people really live? You’ve never once left the capital, have you? Believe me, the city is like a leech, sucking the life-blood out of the countryside.”
“Like a leech? That sounds like the grumbling of provincials, nothing more. Vandey, you’re a good man, but you are too trusting. I know you’re proud that you’ve travelled around half the empire while I’ve been sitting in the archive. You’ve lived with peasant families and seen them work sunup to sundown. I don’t have that kind of experience, but that’s what books are for. They transmit the experiences of past generations.”
Vandey looked away. “What do your books tell you?”
“A lot. But the most important thing I’ve learned is that anything you see today can also be found in the past. Why waste time and trouble to reach the same conclusions that our own forefathers reached and set out for us on paper? Why invent the wheel, if the whole world is already driving fast carriages?”
“I don’t see what you mean.”
“I mean that your ‘struggle,’ as you call it, targets vices that have always been with us. They’re incurable. I agree that lots of people have hard lives. You’re right: one man can have a collection of diamonds that rivals Mount Erameo, while ten thousand other men have debts that stretch to the underworld and back. I hope this isn’t a surprise to you, but it was always like that. Always and everywhere. It’s never going to change. The harder you struggle against it, the faster the poor