Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
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Truth is handy, but not vital to propaganda. Of course, if it turned out to be true in the end, then they can say "see, we told you so".
Thande
Donor
(Part #247.3)
Shiraz, Persian Empire
June 20th 1899
Selim Ibrahim Pasha self-consciously straightened his robes before stepping out onto the street, his Albanian bodyguard Mahmud discreetly falling into line behind him. Selim Ibrahim was dressed as an important nobleman, but his clothes nonetheless understated his true significance. The times in which the ambassador of the Sublime Porte could walk freely through the capital city of Persia, displaying his true colours, were past.
Indeed, Selim Ibrahim had seldom ventured forth from the embassy since the war that had consumed the whole world had begun, even before the Padishah had seen fit in his infinite wisdom to bring the Empire into it. Nonetheless, it seemed to him that whether on this rare adventures into the city in his person, or even when glimpsed from the embassy’s windows, Shiraz appeared to be in a state of continuous celebration. He had known before being exiled—given the important and respectable task of representing the Sultan at the Zand court—that the Persians had a notoriously large number of public holidays, reflecting their Shah-Advocates’ historically...eccentric views of how to be seen as beloved and benevolent rulers by their subjects. But he felt that even this could not fully explain why the crowded streets of the city Karim Khan Zand had built anew, more than a century ago, contained such an omnipresent sense of public exultation. It was as though the Persian people celebrated each night that their nation had not been drawn into the conflict yet, celebrated with a euphoria that suggested a relaxed attitude to the wines that the city was famous for, allegedly only for export.
The thought made Selim Ibrahim blench, although none of this showed on his practiced diplomat’s face as he walked past the famous Vakil Bazaar. Though nothing could compare with the markets of The City, of course, he could concede that it felt as though if a thing existed in the world, it could be purchased here. With the same blank, stony gaze as one of the borderline blasphemous statues of Cyrus the Great that decorated the now-obsolete city wall, Selim Ibrahim brushed aside the insistent cries of the traders offering him fruit, carpets, silk, jewellery, girls. He wished he could have been brought in a steam palanquin, but the Shah-Advocates had always proved reluctant to embark in civic demolition plans so that proper new wide roads could be cut through the city. For a moment he thought he did feel the tell-tale blast of hot steam on his cheek that would herald some optimist trying to get through the narrow streets in a powered vehicle, but it was just the equally famous Vakil Baths. Like the Bazaar, this was all part of the purpose-built capital complex that Karim Khan Zand had built. Selim Ibrahim had read that at the time, there was very little other to Shiraz other than that complex, like one of the overly artificial capital cities Christians had built in the New World. Now, though, that original city had long since been subsumed by the organic growth that peace and prosperity had brought, from the palaces of the great to the slums of the small.
The Vakil Baths were public, another of the Shah-Advocates’ eccentricities, and folk of both types were leaving amid the bursts of steam, chattering excitedly about the gorgeous inlaid decorations depicting hunting scenes that Karim Khan Zand had put in there. Selim Ibrahim overheard—he spoke Farsi with halting familiarity—one young boy eagerly urge a relative that he should come with him next time. Is that what I am here to do? he thought with sudden clarity. Tell him ‘come on in, the war’s lovely’?
Selim Ibrahim dismissed his doubts. No. He had pulled this off, he knew it. He had got the man into a corner before the Sultan had rolled the dice (and that choice of metaphor, a little voice told him, spoke of those same doubts; not the certainty of the truly divinely inspired). No, there was no way he could wriggle out of it this time. There wasn’t.
Before too long, the crowds finally thinned and he was there. Not at the great Arg-e Karim Khan, the castle that still loomed over the old city and was the residence of the Shah-Advocate of Persia. No, this was the true gate of power in this strange empire, the Kakh e-Marjan—the Coral Palace.
The Arg-e Karim Khan was not old by the standards of the great buildings of The City, having been built by Karim Khan Zand in the 1760s by the Christian calendar, but the Kakh e-Marjan was younger still. Pink marble imported from the province of Franklin in the Empire of North America[7] had been used to inlay the tall, modern columns and the sweeps of the dome, evoking the titular coral that was on display within. As he had several times before, Selim Ibrahim observed that coral as the suspicious guards gradually allowed him into the inner sanctum; of course, Mahmud had to stay behind the final door, producing a little unhappiness that he openly displayed on his usually taciturn features. Some sacrifices had to be made. But no, the coral was everywhere, imported years ago as a gift from the Portuguese who had once been a key ally of Persia, before that distant Christian nation went mad and turned in on itself. Some of the pieces, displayed on fine decorative tea tables throughout the palace, were deliberately rough and naturalistic, unchanged from when they had been hacked free from the primitive islands that the Portuguese had explored in the distant Oqyanus e-Aram.[8] Others had been carved by master sculptors both Portuguese and Persian, some characteristically straying suspiciously close to blasphemous representations of the human form, but others carved into shapes suggesting objects or symbols. One particularly large piece was carefully suspended above the last door, the one which he had to leave Mahmud behind: it had been carved to show the Lion and Sun of Persia on one side, and the five shields and armillery sphere of Portugal on the other. There was something forlorn about it, as though Persia was still waiting for her old ally to come back.
Selim Ibrahim brushed that thought aside. Those coral sculptures had been put here years ago. What was important was the man who he was here to meet today—the man who, rumour had it, had been responsible for displaying some of Persia’s finest carpets on the walls overhanging the coral. Walking along the long corridor with its pink marble covered with less distinctive carpet, Selim Ibrahim allowed himself to study each of those pieces, all made by master weavers, as he went. He had read that carpet-weaving had once been considered Persia’s finest art, especially by the Christian powers who had bought many of them in the era of the Safavid dynasty. Under the Zands, however, it had declined at the expense of greater interest in poetry, literature and (suspiciously) sculpture.[9] However, the remaining carpet-weavers had for the past twenty years enjoyed a significant patron who had reintroduced their work into the public eye: Mirza Khan Afshar.
The man who awaited Selim Ibrahim behind the final door.
Selim Ibrahim had studied Mirza Khan for years even before an ill-fated political gamble in Constantinople had sent him here, considered a fittingly ironic fate for his political enemies: Selim Ibrahim an Arab of Najaf in origin and had oft been accused of harbouring Shi’ite beliefs. Despite his Oghuz name, Mirza Khan was from a branch of the Afshar clan that had been exiled to the town of Andimeshk in Khuzestan, and there were all sorts of rumours about him having Lurish blood and consequent problematic views on women.[10] The details of his ascension to politics at the heart of the realm remained sketchy, and no-one was quite sure just how he had obtained such close relations with the royal family—which had led to him being a friend and role model of the young Shah-Advocate Ali Jafar Shah from a young age. What was clear was that, though Mirza Khan had not openly and continuously held the office of Grand Vizier for all of the last twenty years—the votes held for their Majlis were allowed to have a disturbing level of impact in Persia—he was unquestionably the most powerful man in the country.
Grand Vizier. Selim Ibrahim calmed his heart as he stared at the carpets that Miraz Khan reportedly loved. No matter what, Mirza Khan would always be known by an Ottoman title to Christians and other foreigners, reflecting the cultural dominance of the Porte. No-one would call him by his true title of Sadr e-A’zam, Chancellor. Yes. He had to hold on to that. The man was not as invincible as he seemed.
He had cultivated the image of being ever truthful, always honest and honourable. Much to Selim Ibrahim’s surprise, in the years since he had been sent here, he had seen nothing to suggest that that image was not the reality. Oh, Mirza Khan might be economical with the truth, he might be ambiguous or dissemble, he might phrase things in a misleading manner. But he never told an outright lie, and when he gave his word, he always kept it. Twice he had resigned his office and retired to his estate before rather than be forced into a situation where he would have to compromise on that principle, before inevitably being invited back to the Coral Palace once more to return his steady hand to the tiller.
Reflecting that allegedly simple and honest nature, Mirza Khan seemed to subscribe to the belief that to create a truly perfect work of art was to usurp the omnipotence of Allah. Each and every one of the carpets on the walls contained a deliberate mistake among their intricate kufic tendrils and arabesques, their glorious colours enhanced by the wondrous dyes of the Meridians’ Priestley company. Selim Ibrahim had discerned that he was far from the only official, both small and great, to pass the time in this corridor by trying to spot all the mistakes. He thought he had done it now. Yes—that was the last one. And now, just like that, he was finally ready.
Selim Ibrahim took a deep breath, schooled his features, and entered into the sanctum sanctorum of Mirza Khan Afshar.
The Grand Vizier sat atop a rather simple chair behind a rather simple desk covered with books—the dewans that had given their name to the office of chief ministers in India to the east. The usual tall hat he affected had been discarded and his clothes were as workmanlike as a vizier could dare to wear. In contrast to the simple ascetism of his immediate area, Mirza Khan was surrounded by yet more gorgeous carpets hanging from the elaborate curves of the office’s walls. Behind and between the carpets, delicate inlaid tracery was visible, though Selim Ibrahim could not link up the fragments he could see to deduce what the original design had been, if any. A potent metaphor for dealing with this man.
Mirza Khan had a long, greying beard, and was writing impatiently in one of his books. He waved Selim Ibrahim to a chair, equally simple and wooden as his own, as though he was an underling who had come to serve him coffee. Selim Ibrahim privately bristled at that, but had sat down before he thought even to lodge a polite diplomatic objection. That was bad. That revealed how desperate he was.
As though Mirza Khan couldn’t tell. As though every damn street boy in this city couldn’t tell.
As always, the forms must be obeyed. Mirza Khan offered tea and freshly baked koloocheh biscuits and Yazdi qottab pastries. They spoke of inconsequential matters for a few minutes, the latest operatic production of Rostam and Sohrab (a genre Selim Ibrahim had never been too comfortable with) and the gossip of the capital’s nobles. Selim Ibrahim usually prided himself on being able to participate in such small talk with no palpable sense of urgency for the real matter of the meeting, but this time he could feel himself showing tells like drumming his fingers on his elbow. Mirza Khan was making him sweat.
Finally, the Grand Vizier showed mercy. “My commiserations on the outcome of the incident at Rostov,” he said with casual innocence.
Selim Ibrahim ground his teeth. “The outcome was not what we would have hoped,” he conceded, suddenly abandoning any attempt to rhetorically play down what had been an unmitigated disaster. Just as he had feared, the Empire’s initial successful breakthroughs against the Ruslar had rapidly become overextended, and the Grand Duke of Lithuania’s army had halted Mustafa Sadik Pasha’s advance just sound of the city of Rostov-na-Donu.[11] What had begun as merely blunting Mustafa Sadik’s spearheads had rapidly turned into a rout as Petras III and his generals had boldly seized the Ottomans’ confusion as an opportunity. The Empire had gone into this war with the assumption that Russia would be weakened by the years of war with Germany. Germany, now out of the war save for a last diplomatic wrangle with Scandinavia and Belgium, already demobilising her army as she bowed to the inevitable. The Sultan’s advisors (Selim Ibrahim among them) had not considered that the allegedly weakened Russians had also learned many lessons for modern warfare and that other nations would be playing catchup. The stories Selim Ibrahim had seen, from painstakingly-decoded Lectel messages, of how the Russians had used their armart vehicles in a way that none of the Ottoman commanders had ever seen before...
“And now, I understand, your armies are in full retreat,” Mirza Khan said, his tone as relentless as one of the Russian Chernobog armarts crushing some hapless sipahi beneath its iron wheels. “Soon to find themselves pressed against the coastline of Circassia, which you so ably conquered some months ago.”
He leaned forward as he spoke, and despite everything, Selim Ibrahim found his gaze uncontrollably drawn to the final carpet, the biggest and most impressive carpet of all, that hung behind Mirza Khan’s desk. It was big, and red, and glorious. And Selim Ibrahim had never managed to spot a mistake on it at all.
“It is not of the Sultan’s army of which I wish to speak,” Selim Ibrahim said, carefully controlling his voice. “It is the Shah-Advocate’s. I must confess,” he said, injecting a slight note of sarcasm into his voice, “I do not see any signs of the mobilisation that I understood would be taking place by this time.”
Mirza Khan grinned behind his beard, showing surprisingly white teeth for all those tea and cakes. “You do not? Unaccountable!”
Selim Ibrahim frowned. This was it. This was the test. Had he read the man wrong? If he had, the Empire might be doomed. “Grand Vizier—” (turn the screw) “—you will recall a meeting we had some months ago—”
“More than a year now,” Mirza Khan said complacently. He finished writing in his book, opened a drawer of his desk and dropped it in, but did not close the drawer afterwards.
Maybe the flaw in the big carpet behind him was in the part that Selim Ibrahim, or anyone else sat here, couldn’t see behind Mirza Khan’s head. That would make sense for what he knew of the man, drive people insane trying to spot it when there was no way to.
Or, of course, that could just be a convenient excuse for the fact that the carpet had no flaw. That Mirza Khan’s honesty and honour and principle would collapse at the last hurdle, when it was politically convenient.
So long as his head was there, blocking the carpet, Selim Ibrahim couldn’t tell which it was. And that was slowly driving him mad.
“A meeting,” Selim Ibrahim continued pointedly, “in which we agreed that Persia would enter the war when—”
Mirza Khan frowned and tutted like an old woman, shaking his hand. “No. No. As though I, or indeed you, Ambassador, would agree to such a thing! As full of holes as the coral you passed on the way in. An agreement that ‘Persia would enter the war’?” He laughed musically. “That would not even specify on which side!”
Selim Ibrahim’s blood ran cold for a moment as he stared at Mirza Khan, then shook his head. No. No. Don’t let the man get into his head. “You...no, that wasn’t the exact words of our agreement, our written agreement, our signed agreement,” he mumbled, slowly growing in strength as he recovered from that shock. “In return for our agreement on the Indian concessions, and...certain information we obtained on your political rivals,” Mirza Khan nodded sedately, “you pledged that you would...”
“That I would do everything in my power to bring Persia into the war on the Ottoman Empire’s side, against Russia, at a time of your choosing,” Mirza Khan parroted in a singsong voice. “Yes, those words have lain heavily on my heart as well.” He folded his hands and waited.
Silence stretched. “Well?” Selim Ibrahim asked.
“Well, what?” Mirza Khan asked, his eyes shining above a small, fixed smile and that mass of beard.
Selim Ibrahim’s flesh was creeping again. “I say this is the time we want it,” he said, and tried not to think about how much he sounded like a weak, desperate child refused a treat.
“Now?” Mirza Khan asked. “Not earlier? I did wonder.” He smiled. “After those early victories, with the Russians still tied up in China...perhaps you thought you could win alone. Not have to share the prizes with your old enemy.”
Selim Ibrahim shook his head. “Never mind that. The important part is the agreement said at a time of our choosing.” He put his hands down on his robed knees. “This is the time. We choose now.”
Mirza Khan shrugged heavily. “Well. An agreement is an agreement.” He began rummaging in his drawer. “Let me ask you one thing, Ambassador—why did you make the agreement with me? Why not try to get the Shah-Advocate’s signature on it?”
Selim Ibrahim laughed. “Between these four walls, you know that the Shah-Advocate can do nothing without your word. You are the real power in Persia, the man who has ensured peace and prosperity for decades now.”
“Please do not, I feel as though I’m listening to my biography—or my obituary,” Mirza Khan said, still rummaging. “Where is that...but anyway, it is still a flaw in your plan,” he protested. “What if the Shah-Advocate had me dismissed so that I was sent to my estate again? Then I could fulfil the agreement by trying to bring us into your war, yet I would have no power to exert.”
“The Shah-Advocate would only do such a thing at your instigation,” Selim Ibrahim said complacently. “Which would contradict your pledge. If...” he trailed off significantly.
“Yes?” Mirza Khan asked, arching one eyebrow.
“If you truly are an honourable man.”
That smile again, a little bitter this time. “Very well. Let us find out. I want to apologise, by the way, Ambassador.”
“Apologise?” Selim Ibrahim echoed, and as he spoke, Mirza Khan pulled something out of the drawer.
It was not a document or a dewan book or anything of that sort.
It was a pistol.
Selim Ibrahim didn’t cry out, or leap to his feet. He just stared. It wasn’t a modern pistol, but a wonderful work of art no less impressive than any of the carpets or coral in this palace. An old flintlock with wood grain and inlaid mother-of-pearl depicting hunting scenes...it might even be Safavid work with an updated mechanism. Older than the two Novamundine powers that had started this war, fired by some long-ago Persian nobleman before anyone had heard of George Washington or Simón Riquelme. A disturbing thought, which echoed from one side of Selim Ibrahim’s skull to the other as he stared at that slightly hexagonal-edged O of a barrel.
Old, but still capable of killing.
“I apologise,” Mirza Khan said tightly, “for likely involving you in some sort of diplomatic incident. But these are the hazards of the job, as I am sure you have learned.”
“Grand Vizier...!” Selim Ibrahim managed.
“Enough,” Mirza Khan said. Now he looked angry. “Perhaps you deserve it, at the end of the day. Persia will not benefit from this, and my family will weep. That is what your hand has wrought. For,” he sighed, “I am an honourable man.”
Mirza Khan reversed the pistol, placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
As the cloud of old black-powder smoke slowly dissipated, as the guards rushed in with cries of alarm and fury, the Ambassador of the Sublime Porte remained sat numbly in his chair. His mind was not full of recrimination for the unthinkable loophole, that Mirza Khan could not direct Persian foreign policy from Paradise, that now Persia would remain neutral and the Empire was likely doomed.
No, all he could think of was that the carpet was now splattered with blood and brains right across the area in which that hypothetical flaw would have been located.
And now he would never know.
Damn him.
[7] I.e. what is called Tennessee Marble in OTL.
[8] Literally ‘the Ocean of Calm’, a direct translation of ‘Pacific Ocean’.
[9] This is slightly inaccurate—it’s more that the art began to die out due to the disruption of the civil wars in this period. However, in OTL it did not come back until the Qajar dynasty, and in TTL it has remained more of a minor pursuit.
[10] The Lurs or Lors are an Iranian people who live in the south-west of the country and are related to the Kurds; like the Kurds, women generally have more freedom in society than in other cultures of the region—although one should bear in mind that Zand Persia is somewhat more open-minded about this than OTL Qajar Persia in this era anyway.
[11] Rostov-na-Donu was not founded until the late 1740s, but at that point there was insufficient impact from the POD of this timeline to alter Russian policy in the region.
Shiraz, Persian Empire
June 20th 1899
Selim Ibrahim Pasha self-consciously straightened his robes before stepping out onto the street, his Albanian bodyguard Mahmud discreetly falling into line behind him. Selim Ibrahim was dressed as an important nobleman, but his clothes nonetheless understated his true significance. The times in which the ambassador of the Sublime Porte could walk freely through the capital city of Persia, displaying his true colours, were past.
Indeed, Selim Ibrahim had seldom ventured forth from the embassy since the war that had consumed the whole world had begun, even before the Padishah had seen fit in his infinite wisdom to bring the Empire into it. Nonetheless, it seemed to him that whether on this rare adventures into the city in his person, or even when glimpsed from the embassy’s windows, Shiraz appeared to be in a state of continuous celebration. He had known before being exiled—given the important and respectable task of representing the Sultan at the Zand court—that the Persians had a notoriously large number of public holidays, reflecting their Shah-Advocates’ historically...eccentric views of how to be seen as beloved and benevolent rulers by their subjects. But he felt that even this could not fully explain why the crowded streets of the city Karim Khan Zand had built anew, more than a century ago, contained such an omnipresent sense of public exultation. It was as though the Persian people celebrated each night that their nation had not been drawn into the conflict yet, celebrated with a euphoria that suggested a relaxed attitude to the wines that the city was famous for, allegedly only for export.
The thought made Selim Ibrahim blench, although none of this showed on his practiced diplomat’s face as he walked past the famous Vakil Bazaar. Though nothing could compare with the markets of The City, of course, he could concede that it felt as though if a thing existed in the world, it could be purchased here. With the same blank, stony gaze as one of the borderline blasphemous statues of Cyrus the Great that decorated the now-obsolete city wall, Selim Ibrahim brushed aside the insistent cries of the traders offering him fruit, carpets, silk, jewellery, girls. He wished he could have been brought in a steam palanquin, but the Shah-Advocates had always proved reluctant to embark in civic demolition plans so that proper new wide roads could be cut through the city. For a moment he thought he did feel the tell-tale blast of hot steam on his cheek that would herald some optimist trying to get through the narrow streets in a powered vehicle, but it was just the equally famous Vakil Baths. Like the Bazaar, this was all part of the purpose-built capital complex that Karim Khan Zand had built. Selim Ibrahim had read that at the time, there was very little other to Shiraz other than that complex, like one of the overly artificial capital cities Christians had built in the New World. Now, though, that original city had long since been subsumed by the organic growth that peace and prosperity had brought, from the palaces of the great to the slums of the small.
The Vakil Baths were public, another of the Shah-Advocates’ eccentricities, and folk of both types were leaving amid the bursts of steam, chattering excitedly about the gorgeous inlaid decorations depicting hunting scenes that Karim Khan Zand had put in there. Selim Ibrahim overheard—he spoke Farsi with halting familiarity—one young boy eagerly urge a relative that he should come with him next time. Is that what I am here to do? he thought with sudden clarity. Tell him ‘come on in, the war’s lovely’?
Selim Ibrahim dismissed his doubts. No. He had pulled this off, he knew it. He had got the man into a corner before the Sultan had rolled the dice (and that choice of metaphor, a little voice told him, spoke of those same doubts; not the certainty of the truly divinely inspired). No, there was no way he could wriggle out of it this time. There wasn’t.
Before too long, the crowds finally thinned and he was there. Not at the great Arg-e Karim Khan, the castle that still loomed over the old city and was the residence of the Shah-Advocate of Persia. No, this was the true gate of power in this strange empire, the Kakh e-Marjan—the Coral Palace.
The Arg-e Karim Khan was not old by the standards of the great buildings of The City, having been built by Karim Khan Zand in the 1760s by the Christian calendar, but the Kakh e-Marjan was younger still. Pink marble imported from the province of Franklin in the Empire of North America[7] had been used to inlay the tall, modern columns and the sweeps of the dome, evoking the titular coral that was on display within. As he had several times before, Selim Ibrahim observed that coral as the suspicious guards gradually allowed him into the inner sanctum; of course, Mahmud had to stay behind the final door, producing a little unhappiness that he openly displayed on his usually taciturn features. Some sacrifices had to be made. But no, the coral was everywhere, imported years ago as a gift from the Portuguese who had once been a key ally of Persia, before that distant Christian nation went mad and turned in on itself. Some of the pieces, displayed on fine decorative tea tables throughout the palace, were deliberately rough and naturalistic, unchanged from when they had been hacked free from the primitive islands that the Portuguese had explored in the distant Oqyanus e-Aram.[8] Others had been carved by master sculptors both Portuguese and Persian, some characteristically straying suspiciously close to blasphemous representations of the human form, but others carved into shapes suggesting objects or symbols. One particularly large piece was carefully suspended above the last door, the one which he had to leave Mahmud behind: it had been carved to show the Lion and Sun of Persia on one side, and the five shields and armillery sphere of Portugal on the other. There was something forlorn about it, as though Persia was still waiting for her old ally to come back.
Selim Ibrahim brushed that thought aside. Those coral sculptures had been put here years ago. What was important was the man who he was here to meet today—the man who, rumour had it, had been responsible for displaying some of Persia’s finest carpets on the walls overhanging the coral. Walking along the long corridor with its pink marble covered with less distinctive carpet, Selim Ibrahim allowed himself to study each of those pieces, all made by master weavers, as he went. He had read that carpet-weaving had once been considered Persia’s finest art, especially by the Christian powers who had bought many of them in the era of the Safavid dynasty. Under the Zands, however, it had declined at the expense of greater interest in poetry, literature and (suspiciously) sculpture.[9] However, the remaining carpet-weavers had for the past twenty years enjoyed a significant patron who had reintroduced their work into the public eye: Mirza Khan Afshar.
The man who awaited Selim Ibrahim behind the final door.
Selim Ibrahim had studied Mirza Khan for years even before an ill-fated political gamble in Constantinople had sent him here, considered a fittingly ironic fate for his political enemies: Selim Ibrahim an Arab of Najaf in origin and had oft been accused of harbouring Shi’ite beliefs. Despite his Oghuz name, Mirza Khan was from a branch of the Afshar clan that had been exiled to the town of Andimeshk in Khuzestan, and there were all sorts of rumours about him having Lurish blood and consequent problematic views on women.[10] The details of his ascension to politics at the heart of the realm remained sketchy, and no-one was quite sure just how he had obtained such close relations with the royal family—which had led to him being a friend and role model of the young Shah-Advocate Ali Jafar Shah from a young age. What was clear was that, though Mirza Khan had not openly and continuously held the office of Grand Vizier for all of the last twenty years—the votes held for their Majlis were allowed to have a disturbing level of impact in Persia—he was unquestionably the most powerful man in the country.
Grand Vizier. Selim Ibrahim calmed his heart as he stared at the carpets that Miraz Khan reportedly loved. No matter what, Mirza Khan would always be known by an Ottoman title to Christians and other foreigners, reflecting the cultural dominance of the Porte. No-one would call him by his true title of Sadr e-A’zam, Chancellor. Yes. He had to hold on to that. The man was not as invincible as he seemed.
He had cultivated the image of being ever truthful, always honest and honourable. Much to Selim Ibrahim’s surprise, in the years since he had been sent here, he had seen nothing to suggest that that image was not the reality. Oh, Mirza Khan might be economical with the truth, he might be ambiguous or dissemble, he might phrase things in a misleading manner. But he never told an outright lie, and when he gave his word, he always kept it. Twice he had resigned his office and retired to his estate before rather than be forced into a situation where he would have to compromise on that principle, before inevitably being invited back to the Coral Palace once more to return his steady hand to the tiller.
Reflecting that allegedly simple and honest nature, Mirza Khan seemed to subscribe to the belief that to create a truly perfect work of art was to usurp the omnipotence of Allah. Each and every one of the carpets on the walls contained a deliberate mistake among their intricate kufic tendrils and arabesques, their glorious colours enhanced by the wondrous dyes of the Meridians’ Priestley company. Selim Ibrahim had discerned that he was far from the only official, both small and great, to pass the time in this corridor by trying to spot all the mistakes. He thought he had done it now. Yes—that was the last one. And now, just like that, he was finally ready.
Selim Ibrahim took a deep breath, schooled his features, and entered into the sanctum sanctorum of Mirza Khan Afshar.
The Grand Vizier sat atop a rather simple chair behind a rather simple desk covered with books—the dewans that had given their name to the office of chief ministers in India to the east. The usual tall hat he affected had been discarded and his clothes were as workmanlike as a vizier could dare to wear. In contrast to the simple ascetism of his immediate area, Mirza Khan was surrounded by yet more gorgeous carpets hanging from the elaborate curves of the office’s walls. Behind and between the carpets, delicate inlaid tracery was visible, though Selim Ibrahim could not link up the fragments he could see to deduce what the original design had been, if any. A potent metaphor for dealing with this man.
Mirza Khan had a long, greying beard, and was writing impatiently in one of his books. He waved Selim Ibrahim to a chair, equally simple and wooden as his own, as though he was an underling who had come to serve him coffee. Selim Ibrahim privately bristled at that, but had sat down before he thought even to lodge a polite diplomatic objection. That was bad. That revealed how desperate he was.
As though Mirza Khan couldn’t tell. As though every damn street boy in this city couldn’t tell.
As always, the forms must be obeyed. Mirza Khan offered tea and freshly baked koloocheh biscuits and Yazdi qottab pastries. They spoke of inconsequential matters for a few minutes, the latest operatic production of Rostam and Sohrab (a genre Selim Ibrahim had never been too comfortable with) and the gossip of the capital’s nobles. Selim Ibrahim usually prided himself on being able to participate in such small talk with no palpable sense of urgency for the real matter of the meeting, but this time he could feel himself showing tells like drumming his fingers on his elbow. Mirza Khan was making him sweat.
Finally, the Grand Vizier showed mercy. “My commiserations on the outcome of the incident at Rostov,” he said with casual innocence.
Selim Ibrahim ground his teeth. “The outcome was not what we would have hoped,” he conceded, suddenly abandoning any attempt to rhetorically play down what had been an unmitigated disaster. Just as he had feared, the Empire’s initial successful breakthroughs against the Ruslar had rapidly become overextended, and the Grand Duke of Lithuania’s army had halted Mustafa Sadik Pasha’s advance just sound of the city of Rostov-na-Donu.[11] What had begun as merely blunting Mustafa Sadik’s spearheads had rapidly turned into a rout as Petras III and his generals had boldly seized the Ottomans’ confusion as an opportunity. The Empire had gone into this war with the assumption that Russia would be weakened by the years of war with Germany. Germany, now out of the war save for a last diplomatic wrangle with Scandinavia and Belgium, already demobilising her army as she bowed to the inevitable. The Sultan’s advisors (Selim Ibrahim among them) had not considered that the allegedly weakened Russians had also learned many lessons for modern warfare and that other nations would be playing catchup. The stories Selim Ibrahim had seen, from painstakingly-decoded Lectel messages, of how the Russians had used their armart vehicles in a way that none of the Ottoman commanders had ever seen before...
“And now, I understand, your armies are in full retreat,” Mirza Khan said, his tone as relentless as one of the Russian Chernobog armarts crushing some hapless sipahi beneath its iron wheels. “Soon to find themselves pressed against the coastline of Circassia, which you so ably conquered some months ago.”
He leaned forward as he spoke, and despite everything, Selim Ibrahim found his gaze uncontrollably drawn to the final carpet, the biggest and most impressive carpet of all, that hung behind Mirza Khan’s desk. It was big, and red, and glorious. And Selim Ibrahim had never managed to spot a mistake on it at all.
“It is not of the Sultan’s army of which I wish to speak,” Selim Ibrahim said, carefully controlling his voice. “It is the Shah-Advocate’s. I must confess,” he said, injecting a slight note of sarcasm into his voice, “I do not see any signs of the mobilisation that I understood would be taking place by this time.”
Mirza Khan grinned behind his beard, showing surprisingly white teeth for all those tea and cakes. “You do not? Unaccountable!”
Selim Ibrahim frowned. This was it. This was the test. Had he read the man wrong? If he had, the Empire might be doomed. “Grand Vizier—” (turn the screw) “—you will recall a meeting we had some months ago—”
“More than a year now,” Mirza Khan said complacently. He finished writing in his book, opened a drawer of his desk and dropped it in, but did not close the drawer afterwards.
Maybe the flaw in the big carpet behind him was in the part that Selim Ibrahim, or anyone else sat here, couldn’t see behind Mirza Khan’s head. That would make sense for what he knew of the man, drive people insane trying to spot it when there was no way to.
Or, of course, that could just be a convenient excuse for the fact that the carpet had no flaw. That Mirza Khan’s honesty and honour and principle would collapse at the last hurdle, when it was politically convenient.
So long as his head was there, blocking the carpet, Selim Ibrahim couldn’t tell which it was. And that was slowly driving him mad.
“A meeting,” Selim Ibrahim continued pointedly, “in which we agreed that Persia would enter the war when—”
Mirza Khan frowned and tutted like an old woman, shaking his hand. “No. No. As though I, or indeed you, Ambassador, would agree to such a thing! As full of holes as the coral you passed on the way in. An agreement that ‘Persia would enter the war’?” He laughed musically. “That would not even specify on which side!”
Selim Ibrahim’s blood ran cold for a moment as he stared at Mirza Khan, then shook his head. No. No. Don’t let the man get into his head. “You...no, that wasn’t the exact words of our agreement, our written agreement, our signed agreement,” he mumbled, slowly growing in strength as he recovered from that shock. “In return for our agreement on the Indian concessions, and...certain information we obtained on your political rivals,” Mirza Khan nodded sedately, “you pledged that you would...”
“That I would do everything in my power to bring Persia into the war on the Ottoman Empire’s side, against Russia, at a time of your choosing,” Mirza Khan parroted in a singsong voice. “Yes, those words have lain heavily on my heart as well.” He folded his hands and waited.
Silence stretched. “Well?” Selim Ibrahim asked.
“Well, what?” Mirza Khan asked, his eyes shining above a small, fixed smile and that mass of beard.
Selim Ibrahim’s flesh was creeping again. “I say this is the time we want it,” he said, and tried not to think about how much he sounded like a weak, desperate child refused a treat.
“Now?” Mirza Khan asked. “Not earlier? I did wonder.” He smiled. “After those early victories, with the Russians still tied up in China...perhaps you thought you could win alone. Not have to share the prizes with your old enemy.”
Selim Ibrahim shook his head. “Never mind that. The important part is the agreement said at a time of our choosing.” He put his hands down on his robed knees. “This is the time. We choose now.”
Mirza Khan shrugged heavily. “Well. An agreement is an agreement.” He began rummaging in his drawer. “Let me ask you one thing, Ambassador—why did you make the agreement with me? Why not try to get the Shah-Advocate’s signature on it?”
Selim Ibrahim laughed. “Between these four walls, you know that the Shah-Advocate can do nothing without your word. You are the real power in Persia, the man who has ensured peace and prosperity for decades now.”
“Please do not, I feel as though I’m listening to my biography—or my obituary,” Mirza Khan said, still rummaging. “Where is that...but anyway, it is still a flaw in your plan,” he protested. “What if the Shah-Advocate had me dismissed so that I was sent to my estate again? Then I could fulfil the agreement by trying to bring us into your war, yet I would have no power to exert.”
“The Shah-Advocate would only do such a thing at your instigation,” Selim Ibrahim said complacently. “Which would contradict your pledge. If...” he trailed off significantly.
“Yes?” Mirza Khan asked, arching one eyebrow.
“If you truly are an honourable man.”
That smile again, a little bitter this time. “Very well. Let us find out. I want to apologise, by the way, Ambassador.”
“Apologise?” Selim Ibrahim echoed, and as he spoke, Mirza Khan pulled something out of the drawer.
It was not a document or a dewan book or anything of that sort.
It was a pistol.
Selim Ibrahim didn’t cry out, or leap to his feet. He just stared. It wasn’t a modern pistol, but a wonderful work of art no less impressive than any of the carpets or coral in this palace. An old flintlock with wood grain and inlaid mother-of-pearl depicting hunting scenes...it might even be Safavid work with an updated mechanism. Older than the two Novamundine powers that had started this war, fired by some long-ago Persian nobleman before anyone had heard of George Washington or Simón Riquelme. A disturbing thought, which echoed from one side of Selim Ibrahim’s skull to the other as he stared at that slightly hexagonal-edged O of a barrel.
Old, but still capable of killing.
“I apologise,” Mirza Khan said tightly, “for likely involving you in some sort of diplomatic incident. But these are the hazards of the job, as I am sure you have learned.”
“Grand Vizier...!” Selim Ibrahim managed.
“Enough,” Mirza Khan said. Now he looked angry. “Perhaps you deserve it, at the end of the day. Persia will not benefit from this, and my family will weep. That is what your hand has wrought. For,” he sighed, “I am an honourable man.”
Mirza Khan reversed the pistol, placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
As the cloud of old black-powder smoke slowly dissipated, as the guards rushed in with cries of alarm and fury, the Ambassador of the Sublime Porte remained sat numbly in his chair. His mind was not full of recrimination for the unthinkable loophole, that Mirza Khan could not direct Persian foreign policy from Paradise, that now Persia would remain neutral and the Empire was likely doomed.
No, all he could think of was that the carpet was now splattered with blood and brains right across the area in which that hypothetical flaw would have been located.
And now he would never know.
Damn him.
[7] I.e. what is called Tennessee Marble in OTL.
[8] Literally ‘the Ocean of Calm’, a direct translation of ‘Pacific Ocean’.
[9] This is slightly inaccurate—it’s more that the art began to die out due to the disruption of the civil wars in this period. However, in OTL it did not come back until the Qajar dynasty, and in TTL it has remained more of a minor pursuit.
[10] The Lurs or Lors are an Iranian people who live in the south-west of the country and are related to the Kurds; like the Kurds, women generally have more freedom in society than in other cultures of the region—although one should bear in mind that Zand Persia is somewhat more open-minded about this than OTL Qajar Persia in this era anyway.
[11] Rostov-na-Donu was not founded until the late 1740s, but at that point there was insufficient impact from the POD of this timeline to alter Russian policy in the region.
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A Grand Vizier being a Machiavellian schemer. Whoever heard of such a thing? 
Also, steampunk + Persia =
Also, steampunk + Persia =
Seems like another instance of the TTL author playing with history. Realistically, all they would know is that the Ottoman ambassador to Persia was found in a room with the Grand Vizier of Persia killed, and this interpretation of the Grand Vizier as a man who committed an implication suicide isn’t exactly the most obvious.
Thande
Donor
Indeed - I'm going to throw a bit into the next segment of someone reading it in the paper and it being a totally different interpretation of what happened.
Alex Richards
Donor
I suspect the Ottoman Ambassador put this story out and the in-universe author has chosen it as the most exciting possibility.
Honestly, I think the Ottoman ambassador would be executed too quickly to be able to put this story out.
A Grand Vizier being a Machiavellian schemer. Whoever heard of such a thing?
Shame that it's the crown prince whose name is Jafar.
Fake news!
Now that's some 4D chess from the Grand Vizier. Promises to enter the war on the Ottomans' side, but kills himself just so that Persia enters on the side opposite to the Ottomans. Absolutely brilliant.
Wasn't it just the soldiers in the Caucasus region who were panicking?
And most of all, the Persians have the high ground since it looks like the Ottoman ambassador killed the Grand Vizier in cold blood.
Thande
Donor
Part #248: Shadows of the Future
The country’s official name is: FEDERATION OF AUTIARAUX or MAURÉ FEDERATION (Mauré: TE COTAÏTANGA MAURÉ).
The people are known as: MAURÉ.
Capital and largest city: Tetaitocquerau (200,000)
Flag: The central government has adopted a flag consisting of a red courou (a traditional Mauré symbol based on the curling shape of a native silver fern), outlined in white on a black background. In practice, individual iwi units have often created their own flags based on their traditional art.
Population: 700,000 (main islands only, excluding Mauré elsewhere and colonial possessions)
Land area: 18,000 lcf (main islands only)
Economic ranking: Minor by European standards, significant within the Pacific region but difficult to quantify given many institutions are still based on iwi rather than federal.
Form of government: Autiaraux has a very loose federal government which exists primarily to unite the Mauré in response to pressure from outsiders (mostly Europeans). Defence and some economic practices are regulated to prevent foreign governments or corporations from gaining a toehold via influence with a particular iwi (clan). Direct open war between iwis is also no longer permitted, though there are often informal power struggles. However, business outside Autiaraux is usually based on iwis and individuals, with many of the Pacific island colonies being effectively run in the interests of one or a few iwis rather than the central government.
Foreign relations: Autiaraux has enjoyed close relations with France since first contact with La Pérouse, although the Mauré are often suspicious that the French are trying to gain further and unequal influence over them. Historic encounters with slave traders and rivalry in the Pacific means Mauré-UPSA relations are rarely good, although individual iwis have traded with the Meridians and their vassals. The Russians have also often shown an interest in the Mauré and Orthodox missionaries have had some success in the islands.
Military: The Mauré have an all-rifle army (or collection of militias) and have developed impressive tactics suited for Pacific island warfare (as many French observers have reported). Their limited industrial base means they lack modern land vehicles or warships, but they have developed a large fleet of wooden ships and purchased a small number of armourclads from the French. The Mauré military is unified in the cause of defence of the home islands, but often acts more in the interests of powerful iwis when it comes to obtaining colonial possessions in the Pacific islands.
Current head of state: Collectively held by the Hira Hui (the parliament, or assembly of Rangatiras who each head up an iwi)
Current head of government: Held by the Kawana, first among equals in the Hira Hui, for a one-year term. At time of the outbreak of the Pandoric War, this is held by Rangatira Wharangi (iwi: Egnaté Pourou).
*
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME V: THE QUENCHING ECLIPSE (1988):
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province, United Provinces of South America
June 24th 1899
Ignacio Cabrera slowly dragged himself around the edge of the Plaza de la Unión, his crutches catching in cracks in the flagstones. A century ago, when he had been a whole man, those cracks would have been repaired overnight, if not by the city mayor than by the company his brother ran—for an exorbitant fee, half of which he would have pocketed. His stubbled face split into a bitter smile. Yes, it had been an awful status quo, one which he had cheered for the overthrow of, back in those distant halcyon days when he had listened to then-Intendant Monterroso giving his speech in this very square. But, after a fashion, it had worked.
Now…now, Ignacio began in his internal monologue, and then found himself unable to continue for a moment, the enormity beyond him. Now, the buildings that had once been the regional headquarters of pseudopuissant corporations, from PAWC to American Fruit, from Acero Cruz del Sur to FrancoNavarro...they lay empty, boarded up, the old logos covered up with posters saying SUPPORT OPERATION VIBORA – DEATH TO TRAITORS. The posters might bear the official government imprint of the Sun and Torch, but they looked as though they had been printed amateurishly and on a shoestring, not by one of the proper programmable printers derived from loom technology. Maybe Monterroso had locked up all the people who knew how to print things, Ignacio thought to himself, and the half-joke quickly turned sour as he caught sight of the remains of an old newspaper lying in a doorway. He bent, swinging himself over one one crutch in the way he had painstakingly learned, and managed to grab it without overbalancing. He coveted such things these days, but not to read them: that was too depressing. Newspapers could be insulation for his clothes and fuel for the little fires he made under the bridge in which he fell into an exhausted sleep at night. In the chill of a Southern Hemisphere winter, that could make all the difference.
He glanced around him at the Plaza as he tucked the newspaper away. It was La Balanza de Córdoba, which he had been told had been started up as a government mouthpiece after the venerable old La Lupa de Córdoba had seen a fire burn down its offices and its assets ‘temporarily’ seized. The headlines in the paper were repeated in the propaganda posters pasted on the wall in between the Operation Vibora ones, suggesting they had come from the same source and there was no interest in even pretending to hide it. One had to be quite creative to find any Meridian victories to talk about lately, but Monterroso’s men had done their best – doubtless on pain of sharing the fate of their counterparts at La Lupa if they failed. One poster showed a host of names in Spanish and English that purported to be the site of Meridian victories, and only a sceptic with an atlas might have noticed that they were all places in Venezuela that had been conquered two years ago. Several posters loudly trumpeted the successes of the UPSA’s Heroic Ally, Russia. The Bear had taken bites out of the northwestern ENA and the German-led alliance in Europe—which had only the most tangential relationship to the war the UPSA was fighting, but never mind. Besides, Russia was now finally exiting the war, unless one counted their fight with the Turks (whose ambassador to Persia had apparently just shot the grand vizier, meaning Persia might join the Russians now). Perhaps having realised that, one poster instead decided to gloat over the dismemberment of Germany and Danubia, as though that mattered. Apparently the Scandinavians had signed a treaty now under French auspices that had given them back most of Jutland (though the Germans had got Kiel out of it, their only war gain). By contrast, the posters were silent on Belgium, which—reading between the lines—had refused French mediation, found itself isolated, and got out with only measly gains in the Rhineland, none of the additional Ruhr industry the King had coveted, and swept up Germany’s pointless colonies to save face.
One of those colonies was in New Guinea, and Ignacio winced with a flashback at the mere thought. New Guinea had been far too close to the Godforsaken chunk of the East Indies where his life had changed forever.
His left leg ended at the knee, and a crude pegleg did an inadequate job of replacing it. He had been dumped here, in the city where he had lived all his life, given a stipend of a military pension which inflation had rapidly rendered near-worthless, left to rot. Monterroso had spoken of downtrodden and forgotten people before he was elected; now he seemed determined to create more of them than the pseudopuissant corporations ever had.
What Ignacio hated more than anything was that walking now took so much effort that he found himself out of breath just from bending down to pick up a newspaper. He leaned on the wall and panted, wondering if he’d ever find one of the sequents he had once loved to read. His vision focused on yet another propaganda poster, this one a little better printed and in colour. It took the subtler tack of admitting that the Americans were pushing forward, but noting how slow and grinding their advance in Guatemala had been since taking Mexico. A snail with Starry Georges flying from its antennae slowly headed up jungle-covered mountains, each of which had angry eyes and a grin of teeth with blood dripping from it. The message was that the Septens would pay dearly for every inch of land they took in Central America. However, Ignacio—and, presumably, many others—had worked out that the Americans didn’t want to do that anyway. Rumours circulated of them assembling the biggest fleet in the history of the Novamund.
As a dog returns to its vomit, so the Empire of North America would revert to its old ways, the ways of 1756, of 1808—it would send its soldiers here, to Buenos Aires, to overthrow the fount of Meridian liberty at its source.
Once, the thought would have filled Ignacio with dread and anger. Right now, he found it difficult to care.
His remaining foot nudged a stone. If he had been the young man he once was, he might have kicked it disconsolately. He couldn’t even do that now. Monterroso had taken everything he had. Not the Septens, not a bullet, not the jungle.
Monterroso.
“Friend, are you quite well?” came a voice—a young, female voice. Reflexively, Ignacio tried to turn quickly to look, and almost overbalanced again.
Indeed, a young woman, or two of them. They wore the dull, utilitarian fashions that had become the norm now, both because of wartime shortages but also because PAWC’s assets had been seized and the dye factories requisitioned for war purposes only—or just shut down. The only splash of colour on their pale tan dresses was not really a colour at all: they each wore a black armband, as though in mourning. One girl had a tray of bread rolls, the other a folder of pamphlets.
A religious cult of some kind, maybe? One of the Roman groups who still firmly believed the UPSA would one day return to bowing down to the Pope? Or something odder altogether—loonies who didn’t believe in the Resurrection and were ‘in mourning’ for Christ? Who knew?
Right now, Ignacio didn’t care. His gaze, which once would have first have been drawn to the curves behind the shabby dresses, was instead dragged inexorably to the tray of bread rolls. Steam was still rising from them in the cool winter’s day, carrying with it a heavenly smell.
Belatedly, he heard the words, and tried not to drool as he replied: “Quite well? I haven’t been quite well for a long time, señorita.”
The girl with the tray blushed. “Of course, I’m—I’m sorry, Señor.” Ignacio felt oddly guilty for making her blush. “I just meant—I only meant—”
“Irene meant if there was anything we could do to help,” said the second girl—young woman. She was a bit older than Irene, a bit shorter and dumpier, though still attractive. She also had an immediate air of authority that Ignacio recognised from the best officers in his units. “Please do take one,” she added kindly.
All sorts of automatic polite refusals echoed in Ignacio’s mind, the part that remembered what it had been like to be a man, but entirely failed to reach his lips. He clumsily reached out, almost overbalanced once more, grabbed a roll and, with no sense of decorum, crammed it into his mouth with a spray of crumbs. Once, he would have drawn disapproving glances from passers-by. Now, there were precious few of those—here, in what had once been Buenos Aires’ busiest square—and they kept their heads down, lest someone finger them as having some tangential connection to one of the Vibora companies. Roberto Priestley’s trial had already dragged on for months and had long since produced enough evidence (real or otherwise) to hang him three times over, but Monterroso’s goons were clearly getting enough propaganda material out of it to keep it going indefinitely. They could always use more ‘witnesses’.
Irene giggled at his enthusiastic eating, then blushed again. “I’m sorry, Señor, I know you must be desperate.” Her voice turned sympathetic. “Are you a wounded soldier?”
“I was wounded. I was a soldier,” Ignacio said laconically in between bites. “Now I don’t know what I am. Nothing.”
“No man is nothing!” Irene retorted with surprising fire. “Isn’t that right, Valeria?”
“Yes, you’ve quoted it right for once,” Valeria said, raising an eyebrow in mock surprise. For the first time in a long while, Ignacio felt like smiling.
Ignacio finished his roll and his stomach gurgled in a satisfaction that it felt so seldom these days. “Thank you, ladies,” he said sincerely. “I’ll take any pamphlet you want me to.” I could use some more fuel with the newspaper, if nothing else.”
To his surprise, Valeria shook her head. “No, Señor. There will be time for pamphlets later. We are not going to give you one roll and then walk away, patting ourselves on the back that we have done our charitable duty. Come with us.” She put a hand on his arm.
Ignacio hated that her grip was strong there. Once he could have easily shrugged off a young woman’s hold, but to try this time might send him flying. “Come where?”
“Soup kitchen,” Irene explained. “Come on, Valeria’s right—you need feeding up.”
Soup kitchen. Precious few of those these days, Ignacio knew all too well—too many of them had turned out to have corporate connections, apparently. It might be a scam, it might be a trap.
Right now, did he really care if it was?
“Si, alright,” he said. “But you may have to help me if there are stairs.” And maybe if there weren’t, his pride wouldn’t let him say.
They did, in a businesslike manner. Even if he had been able to put his heart over his stomach for a moment, there was something too impersonal about the whole affair for him to be put in mind of the fact that his arms were draped asymmetrically over the two girls’ shoulders despite their varying heights. They were not girls, or women, and he was not a man. They were all just…people. People helping each other, with no thought for what they were. Like the Good Samaritan. He remembered hearing the priest talk about that one when he had been a little boy.
The soup kitchen was in a building that looked suspiciously as though it had once been a newspaper office, and indeed young women and a few young men were dashing through it at all times holding printed posters and pamphlets that looked hot off the press. Clearly some presses had survived around the back and were in use. Ignacio caught a glimpse of one of the stacks as the girl in her oversized courier’s cap ran past. All he could tell was that it wasn’t one of the government propaganda leaflets—for a start, it looked more professionally printed.
Irene and Valeria wouldn’t let him get away with having the cook slop just one helping of pork, pumpkin and corn soup into his bowl. They made him go around several times, supplemented with some more of Irene’s rolls, until his stomach felt full to bursting. He managed to avoid throwing up, even given the spicy taste of chimichurri sauce that supplemented the soup and gave him fond memories of steak. It had once been the Meridian boast that even the poorest in the Plate could afford bread, beef and milk, in contrast to the starving peasantry of Europe. As in so many other things, the war had made a mockery of that.
Finally, Ignacio let out a long breath. The soup kitchen was warm enough that his breath no longer misted in front of his face for the first time in weeks. “That’s it—I’m full.” He managed. “Gracias, señoritas... I cannot thank you en…” The man who had once been a joking and cynical boy now almost wept with emotion over being fed.
Irene patted his hand. “It was our pleasure. But we still do not know your name, Señor.”
“Oh…uh…” Ignacio blinked. He had planned to give a false name. But why, really? Who was he trying to protect at this point? His distant surviving relatives who wanted nothing to do with him? “I’m…I’m Ignacio Cabrera.”
Valeria nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Ignacio. And now you’re full,” she grinned mock-wickedly, “now it’s pamphlet time!”
Ignacio joined in the girls’ laughter. “Alright. Who are you people, anyway? Right now, I think I’ll convert to whatever creed it is you have.”
Irene’s smile faded for a moment. “We’re not a religious movement,” she explained.
“More a political one,” Valeria agreed.
Ignacio stared for a moment, looked at their black armbands, then around the brickwork of the soup kitchen. There were many other derelict men there being fed, many of them wounded like himself. On the walls were several plain black flags, but also some bearing a white or yellow symbol that looked like a triangle with too-long sides and a circle in the middle.
He hadn’t seen the symbol before, but the black colour…he had once followed politics a little, just enough to enthusiastically cast his vote for Monterroso’s People’s Party, but…it seemed lifetimes ago now, but… “You’re Sanchezistas?” he hazarded.
“We prefer the term Societist, but yes,” Valeria said, with the air of a village schoolteacher correcting a smart alec pupil.
“Pablo Sanchez was a great man, but a movement can never just be about one man,” Irene added.
Ignacio nodded. “My unit was like that,” he said. “We were a great fighting force under Captain Istúriz—he inspired us and led us to many victories.” He sighed. “And then he was shot down over…I can’t even pronounce the name of the place. And without him, with the nincompoop they sent instead…”
He shrugged, then realised the two girls were staring at him. He belatedly remembered something else about Sanchezistas—or Societists. “Sorry. You’re like the Pacific Society, aren’t you? You don’t like soldiers.”
Irene frowned. “We don’t like war, like any sane person,” she said. “Soldiers…” She gestured around the soup kitchen. “Soldiers are victims, who were lied to and sent off to die. If we hated you, why would we help you like this?”
Ignacio lowered his gaze and stared at his bowl, which he had scraped clean with half of his last bread roll. He felt ashamed for judging them. “I thank you for seeing past that,” he mumbled.
“You said you were shot down?” Valeria prompted.
Ignacio was surprised they wanted to discuss it, but soon his words were pouring out like a stream: “Over one of the Nusantara islands…again, don’t ask me to say which it was…I flew cielagos.” He laughed bitterly. “I was so excited when I signed up and was recommended for that, just because I was good at maths! The wave of the future—not slow lumbering steerables, but flying with wings like a bird…”
He rambled on for a while. “Not dying in the trenches like animals, but knights of the air…till you get hit, and peanut oil…flames, he was like a skeleton, I was luckier maybe…American bullet right through a control wire, crashed in the jungle…could have died, should have died, cielago hit a tree, bit of twisted metal through my foot…barely hurt, I was able to get down even…then surrounded by natives…”
“What were they like?” Irene interjected softly.
Ignacio screwed up his eyes. “Primitives…savages, painted or tattooed, almost unclothed…that sweltering heat, the insects…I thought they were going to kill and eat me…”
“But they didn’t,” Valeria said flatly.
Ignacio shook his head. “No…even tried to nurse me back to help, maybe I was a curiosity…kept me alive for a week till a Batavian ship found me, God knows how they did…”
“But you lost your leg,” Irene said, as though he could have forgotten that part.
“Gangrene,” Ignacio said baldly. “Amputated. Said I should count myself lucky it wasn’t lockjaw…and then six months later I was finally shipped back here to die because I hadn’t managed it myself.” He had meant it for a bitter joke, but couldn’t stop the tears.
Valeria put a hand on his. “Ignacio,” she said quietly. “From the point of view of those people on that island, you were invading their space. They had every right, from the point of view of nations, to kill you as an invader. But they didn’t.”
Irene covered his other hand with hers. “Who is the savage, and who is the civilised man?”
“You sound like that French author,” Ignacio mumbled through the tears.
“A Frenchman can say something worthy of notice, just as one of your Nusantara natives could,” Valeria said. “That’s the secret. There’s no difference. Nothing’s worth fighting for. Nothing to kill or die for.”
It sounded simple. Suspiciously simple, in some ways. But, here and now, Ignacio was willing to listen.
*
Vostochny Pavlovsk [Tokyo], Russian Yapon
July 3rd 1899
Ari Nikau, better known here as Nikku-san or (if he was lucky) Gospodin Nikov, kept his hood down as he crept through the sweltering twilit streets of Vostochny Pavlovsk towards his destination. Rangatira Wehihimana had chosen him for this task because he bore the closest resemblance to the natives here: he was of mixed birth, kéroi-Mauré, but rather than a white European, his mother had been Chinese. It was the closest they could get, so few Yapontsi ever being permitted to leave their mysterious islands other than the ronin soldiers and nindzhya bodyguards that the Russians used for their own purposes.
On arriving here, unsurprisingly he still stuck out, being taller and having somewhat different facial features than the Yapontsi norm. But, given he had learned that few Yapontsi were even permitted to travel far within their islands—just like the old serfdom system that the Russians had long abolished for their own people—he could easily claim to be from a distant, now half-legendary, han-domain in the far north or the Corean-ruled southern isles. Claims of incompatible dialect also excused his halting, rudimentary command of the Yapontsi language, but that usually wasn’t an issue regardless. He had learned that Yapontsi only used that tongue behind closed doors, and then fearfully. The Russians had made it an offence to speak it in the streets, punishable by flogging.
Similarly, the signs on the buildings around him in this narrow street, a few lit by hissing luftlights, were all in Cyrillic. Sometimes Cyrillic transliterations of Yapontsi words, but usually just Russian. One had to look very carefully for how the Yapontsi characters had been subtly scratched into doorframes or displayed in places where they could quickly be covered up, in case the authorities came around.
Nikau knew that Russian rule here had not always been so draconian. He had been shocked on arrival because his mental image of Yapon was still driven by the French bloodies and sequents he had inherited as a boy from his older brother, a trader who had visited Pérousie. Those ripping tales depicted a country in which every Han-capital was a mass of primitive wooden and paper houses, perhaps a few larger buildings with exotic pagoda roofs like the daimyo’s palace, and then a modern brickwork Russian kremlin in the centre with defensive walls and an onion-domed Orthodox church. The Daimyo of that Han-domain would continue to theoretically govern as the local sovereign, like the rangatira of a hapu, but periodically a Russian resident would emerge from the little kremlin to kindly remind the Daimyo of what policies he should choose if he wanted to keep his head. Nikau was vaguely aware that this system was still used in some other colonies throughout the world, by many powers, such as the Persians in East Africa.
Ever since the rule of Dolgorukov and the crackdown on the Hanran rebellion against him twenty years ago, though, the Russians had swept aside such polite fictions. Though Nikau had not been able to see much beyond the former imperial capital since he had arrived, he had seen many of those exotic pagodas of his childhood sequents now lying as burnt-out ruins or converted to Orthodox churches and schools. The natives were no longer permitted to carry on their own affairs providing they did not interfere with the moneymaking business of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company: each and every one of them was now regarded as a little cog in a big machine, and them retaining their native beliefs and language was clearly bad for business.
Nikau passed one storefront, slightly more official-looking in this generally seedy street, and was surprised to see it openly displayed its title in Yapontsi characters as well as Russian text. However, when he shakily interpreted the latter, he understood why: this was a remedial school to help young Yapontsi master the tongue of the Empire that ruled them, opening up more prestigious jobs such as the lower ranks of the Imperial civil service to them. Such establishments must be authorised to advertise themselves to those who did not already have the necessary command of Russian to read their title.
Only a couple of doors down, there was a hint of the sort of occupations open to those Yapontsi who refused to set their own culture aside. A pretty young girl, heavily made up with white makeup to make her look more European,[1] her hair in an elaborate coiffure affixed by two lacquered needles, and wearing a form of the native dress called kimono. The ones her grandmothers would have worn, though (Nikau was quite sure), would have been a rather more modest interpretation of the garment, though. She flashed her ankles at him and simpered. Beside her, half hidden in the shadows, was a man with a blackjack stuck prominently in his belt, his eyes on Nikau and filled with flinty suspicious. There was enough facial resembance there to suggest that he was the girl’s brother.
Nikau hastily raised a hand to brush off the unwanted attention and put on a burst of speed. Bile filled his mouth. He couldn’t help thinking that the Mauré had once been as vulnerable as these savages, as far behind the technological curve of the first Europeans who had contacted them. If La Pérouse had not been a good man, if he had not sided with the Mauré over his own people when they turned to the dark barbarism of the Jacobins…if the Mauré had not seen the good sense to unite when faced with threats like Meridian slavers, rather than continuing to pettily fight amongst themselves like the Yapontsi had…
He didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but it could have happened. It could. Autiaraux might now be a country whose very name had been overwritten with one from the other side of the world, whose folk were forbidden to speak their own tongue, whose children were taken away and raised in an alien culture—and those who escaped condemned to an existence as miserable as these street Yapontsi.
Give them the chance, the Russians would do the same to Autiaraux. And Nikau was here to stop it.
He finally reached the meeting place, an izakaya public house with a red luftlight-lit lantern outside it. The sign boldly displayed its name, the August Moon, in Yapontsi characters, and only a subtle eye could spot that it could clearly be flipped to a Russian alternative when required. In this case the boast was not thanks to authorisation, but that those who really run the August Moon did not fear any but the most direct clash with the authorities. No, they were one of the few organisations that the average Yapontsi might fear as much as those authorities.
Nikau rapped on a side door with his knuckles. “Password?” came a voice from within in accented Russian.
“Mekajiki,” Nikau said, carefully pronouncing the Yapontsi syllables. All the passwords since he’d been coming here had been the names of the damn raw fish that the Yapontsi seemed to eat all the time like the savages they were. Oh, he was sure at some point in the distant past the Mauré had done the same, but even before La Pérouse had arrived, oral tradition said that food had been cooked on fires and even steamed on geothermal springs. He wondered if the embrace of any and all technological innovations had been unhealthily tied to collaboration with the Russians…
Evidently not, though, judging by the modern pistol peeping out of the rather more workmanlike kimono that the door guard wore. He gave Nikau a grudging nod and beckoned him in.
Nikau sat nursing a mug of sake for perhaps twenty minutes, taking polite sips; his hapu belonged to the strand of Mauré opinion that regarded alcoholic drinks as wai piro, stinking water that only destroyed people’s lives. He was aware that was a view even among many of the kéroi, who had been drinking them for centuries, so there must be something to it. And, indeed, the Russians seemed to encourage the establishment of izakaya bars like this one: let the Yapontsi drown their national tragedy in sake just as the average downtrodden Russian peasant dreamed of ‘if only the Tsar knew’ from inside his bottle of vodka.
Eventually, the barman came to dispute the authenticity of the kopeck notes that Nikau had paid for his drink with, and angrily ushered him into the back in an incoherent mix of Yapontsi and crude, swearword-heavy Russian. Almost as soon as they crossed the threshold into the back room, the barman switched to fluent Russian and all the anger left his voice. “Over there in the corner, Mauré-san.”
A little uncomfortable that his ethnic origin had been shared with the barman, Nikau walked over to the shadowy table, lit only by a single wa-rousoku tapered Yapontsi candle. Reflected light glimmered faintly from the rims of spectacles worn by the men around the table. Rather than kimonos or other native garb, they wore the dark Rusisan suits and cravats that might be worn by Yapontsi-born Imperial civil servants or others in trusted positions. They lacked the overly decorative cuffs that were in fashion in Europe, however. Perhaps because they were so hard to clean the blood off.
Nikau bowed slightly as he sat down. “Konnichi wa, gentlemen.”
A very slight change in the spectacles-reflected light opposite him as the man raised his eyebrow. “It is evening, Nikku-san,” he said coldly in Russian. “Here in Nihain we say konban wa.”
“My apologies,” Nikau said, his cheeks burning a little. There were too many subtleties to Yapontsi culture, too many that a casual visitor would just ignore anyway because it wasn’t as if the natives could protest if you got them wrong. But these men were different.
They were yakuza.
They had survived, Nikau knew, because their power base had long been in Kiushu and the other southern isles, and Corean rule had never tried to confront them, seeing them as a natural part of the economic landscape. They had slowly wormed their way into Niphon[2] and now were arguably the only remaining native power base that had escaped Russian control.
The oldest among them, who had remained silent thus far, had greying hair, though there was still vitality in the way he sat. The others were younger; perhaps they were the kobun to his oyabun (Nikau had read up on this). Like many criminal organisations throughout the world, they were structured like an artificial family of blood brothers, with loyalty to the ‘father’. It was a strange thing for a Mauré to learn about; Mauré society had never been centralised and disassociated enough for someone to try to build an artificial hapu across the real iwis.
The yakuza wore black leather gloves, as some kéroi wore when driving steam vehicles, presumably to hide the tell-tale mutilations that were sometimes made to their little fingers. Similarly their collars were high, though Nikau thought he could glimpse the very edge of a chest tattoo on the man opposite him. These men were dangerous.
Which was exactly what he needed.
“You have the information,” a younger man said without preamble.
“Patience, Kiryu-bo,” said the older man; Kiryu, if that was his name, actually blushed slightly. The older man turned to Nikau and regarded him with a stare that, though invisible behind his dark glasses, seemed to burn into Nikau like twin synchlamps.[3] After a moment, he inclined his head as though he had found what he was searching for. “Speak, Nikku-san.”
Nikau didn’t follow all the complexities of Yapontsi honorifics, but he knew that the older man, the oyabun, had dealt Kiryu an insult by continuing to call Nikau ‘san’ while relegating his own kobun to some other honorific. He decided to push ahead before Kiryu could decide to take this out on Nikau himself. “Yes, honoured sir, I have the information.” He partted his pocket significantly.
Another of the younger men laughed. This one had an eyepatch, Nikau noted; he wondered if it was the result of a battle wound or a ritual mutilation by his own ‘brothers’. “You are unwise to advertise it so freely!”
The oyabun frowned, but Nikau spoke before he could discipline the young man: “Why would I fear advertising it you, sir?”
“We could simply slay you and take the information,” the eyepatch man said bluntly, his one eye on the oyabun, who had decided to remain silent.
Nikau nodded. “You could steal it while giving me nothing in return,” he said. “That is why one is usually unwise to advertise that one has the prize to those who want it.”
“Well, yes,” Eyepatch said uncertainly, clearly a little disconcerted that Nikau was putting it so bluntly.
Nikau cocked his head on one side. “But did it occur to you to ask what I wanted in return?”
He was not sure of the exact details of the information’s origins, only what Rangatira Wehihimana had told him. As he understood it, the distant Germans had managed to insert a very capable spy in the Russian high command, who had never been discovered by the Russian secret police. However, much to the Germans’ frustration, the spy had rarely managed to get assigned to those parts of the high command dealing with the war against Germany and Danubia, the parts that would have relevant valuable information to help the Pressburg Pact armies. He had, however, successfully obtained plenty of useful information about Russian deployments in the Far East, which was of no use whatsoever to Dresden but could be very valuable to those fighting the Russians out here.
As Germany had made peace, presumably some unscrupulous fellow in their intelligence corps had decided to sell on the information for his own profit. The nation that could most benefit from the information was, of course, Feng China, and doubtless that German intelligence man had retired handsomely on the proceeds of what the Feng had paid him. But Rangatira Wehihimana’s great father Tamahimana had fought for a past Feng Emperor, and the son had retained some of the father’s old contacts. Despite the ragged state of the Lectel lines across the Pacific, the information had been passed on to Wehihimana by a Feng official.
The information was of limited use to Wehihimana himself, who could hardly reach out and attack the Russians in their own bases in Yapon or the Asian mainland. It did, however, reveal that the Russians—despite the ongoing fight with the Feng Chinese—were assembling a large fleet right here in Vostochny Pavlovsk, with the goal of sailing to retake Gavaji from Wehihimana. And they might not stop there.
Once again, visions of Autiaraux under the Russian bootheel like Yapon flashed before Nikau’s eyes, and he dismissed them with the determination that he would never see that come to pass.
“What do you desire?” the oyabun asked finally in a quiet voice.
Nikau took a packet of papers from his pocket, painstakingly translated into Russian by one of those whom Wehihimana had taken captive in Gavaji two years ago. He laid them on the table. “I want you to take this information on Russian military vulnerabilities,” he said bluntly, “and use it to rebel against the Tsar.”
The yakuza just stared at him for a long moment, and then Kiryu laughed. “You do not ask much!”
“But do you understand?” Nikau asked. “I do not fear you slaying me and taking this without my payment. Because my payment is that you use this information—and it is no use to you unless you use it to rebel, which is what I want.”
The oyabun sighed. “I was there for the Hanran, young man,” he said harshly. “I remember what it is to rebel against the Tsar. It does not end well for anyone.”
Nikau had not expected this. “But you know there are undercurrents of rebellion even now,” he protested. “Anyone can see that.”
Kiryu and Eyepatch looked excited, but the oyabun raised a hand. “Of course there are,” he said dismissively. “It has been twenty years. Time for men to forget, and time for a new generation of boys to grow up who have not seen it with their own eyes. That does not make it any more likely to succeed.” He closed his eyes for a moment behind his spectacles, as though overcome with reminiscence. “A yakuza is one who knows when to confront authority, and when to bow to it. Opposing the Tsar will bring only death.”
Nikau felt the meeting slipping away from him. “But what use is this information without that?” he asked.
“We can use it to stage robberies,” the oyabun said. “Burn down a few bases. Harrass the Russians a little, steal their weapons. Make it easier when the time comes that we may be able to succeed.”
“But they are weakened, Akira-samu!” Kiryu said excitedly. “They have sent their forces across the world to fight others! We will never have an opportunity greater than this!”
“If we rebel now they will crush us, Kiryu-kun,” the oyabun (Akira, apparently) retorted. “And this time they might succeed in exterminating our culture altogether.”
Eyepatch frowned, and spoke more softly. “But, Akira-samu…will our culture survive till that day you look forward to?”
“Of course it will,” Akira snapped. “They have been trying to wipe us out for years. We always survive in the shadows.”
“I don’t speak of the Russians,” Eyepatch said quietly.
Akira frowned in return. Then his expression cleared. “The Kurohata brigade? They are nothing but one old man’s stupid dream.”
“That once described many groups and ideologies that changed the world,” Eyepatch protested.
“Excuse me,” Nikau said diffidently, “but may I ask who this…kurohata group are?” He frowned for a moment, his lips moving as he recalled what Yapontsi he knew. “Black something? Black banner? One of your mon-flags?”
Akira glared at him. “It is none of your business,” he said. “None will ever follow their absurd path of cultural self-immolation, at least not so long as I lead this family.” He slapped the table.
He turned towards Nikau. “I am afraid we must decline your request, Nikku-san. Though perhaps we can come to an accommodation, for sabotaging that Russian flotilla in harbour would serve our interests as well.”
Nikau felt relief. A full rebellion would make a better distraction, but at least that would help Wehihimana in the short term. “Very well, Akira-san. Let us make a blood pact.” He produced a tiny knife, the biggest that the barman had let him take in here.
Akira stood up and Nikau blinked as a loud sound echoed in his ears. When he opened his eyes again, everything was blood.
Confusion reigned as he thought for a moment that the yakuza had betrayed him, or had overreacted to the appearance of the little knife, yet he felt no pain. Blood covered the table and Akira was slumped on it, red craters in his back. His two kobun were crying out and drawing their own pistols, but bullets were already flying. An ambush!
Nikau had no weapon beyond the tiny knife. He hit the floor and took cover behind the table. As he did, he heard words echoing in loud, clear, Russian: “SURRENDER IN THE NAME OF THE TSAR!”
They had found him out, followed him somehow. The yakuza had been decapitated. There would be no sabotage of the fleet bound for Gavaji.
And, incidentally (he thought as a Russian bullet struck splinters from the table near his hand) that presumably meant that those kurohata people would have a more influential voice in any future Yapontsi rebellion plans.
Right now, he found it very difficult to care.
*
Córdoba, Province of Córdoba, United Provinces of South America
July 14th 1899
Jorge Suárez, U.P. Minister for Foreign Affairs, took what was meant to be a small, polite sip of his ’47 Mendoza Côt.[4] Somehow, without his brain ever quite sending the required conscious command to his arm and hand and mouth, the action turned into him draining the glass in one gulp. He set it down on the table, breathing heavily for a moment. He could not afford to lose control. He couldn’t.
Across the table, his dining partner nodded sympathetically. “The war is heavy upon all our shoulders,” said the old, spry man with the long fingers of a pianist or a writer. “Upon yours, perhaps, more than anyone’s.”
Suárez shrugged those burdened shoulders as he refilled his glass from the bottle, a little clumsily; it had not been his first of the night. Usually the Ruby Club’s discreet waiters would be here to do it for him, but even given the number of them that had been called up and replaced with waitresses (pre-war decorum be damned), he would not have desired their services right now. Some things had to remain secret.
Even from the President-General.
“You are, perhaps, thinking of President Monterroso,” the other said, sipping his own glass genteelly. Suárez started at him following his own train of thought, but the following words clarified that the destination had been reached from another track: “Surely, you say, I am wrong to say that your shoulders are bound most heavily by the burden of the war, the burden of office. You are, after all, second to the President.”
Suárez’s hand twitched, going through the motions of rolling a cigarette. His tobacco pouch was empty, and he forced himself to stop. “Yes,” he began, then paused, thinking. “Perhaps. But my role means I must think more of—”
“Of the world,” came the reply. The old man stroked his neatly-trimmed, greying goatee beard. He had lost weight, Suárez nodded. Wartime deprivation again, for he had first met this man as an enthusiastic gourmand who paid for his vice with a flabby figure. “Yes, Minister—”
“Jorge, please.”
“Jorge, then—I thank you—your thoughts are ever on what lies beyond these shores.” A hand gripping a glass of the red Mendoza wine waved expansively around without spilling a single drop. “You think of the problems overseas, the American victory in Carolina, in Mexico, the war winding down—thank God—elsewhere.” The glass of wine was set down and the hands pressed intensely against the tablecloth, palms down. The gaze bored into Suárez. “You think that all that remains is one final decisive confrontation between the ENA and the UPSA.” He leaned backwards again. “And you think that that is not a confrontation the UPSA can win.”
Suárez shook his head. “The notion of one decisive confrontation is a childish one,” he protested, “the dream of tinpot Vetomundine monarchs, the altar upon which they will sacrifice the lives of their peasantry on a whim. Modern warfare is a long hard struggle…”
“A struggle we have seen too much of,” his acquaintance replied.
The Foreign Minister inclined his head. “You will have no argument from me. But where is this conversation going?”
A pause as another glass of wine was poured. The old man looked around him as he did, once more not spilling a drop. “I have not visited the Ruby Club before,” he said, apparently changing the subject. “I trust the décor is more welcoming in happier times.”
Suárez looked around, too, with new eyes. The Ruby Club had been founded by himself and several of the other Adamantine Party deputies who had decided, about ten years ago, that their party had become morally bankrupt. They had, over the course of time, joined with the Colorados and Mentians to form the combined People’s Alliance under the charismatic figure of Intendant Monterroso. The Ruby Club had been the meeting place of that faction of the Alliance which Monterroso had called the Pinks or the Roses, apparently affectionately, but who themselves preferred the gemstone signifier. It had been created in imitation of the original Adamantine Club.[5]
Now, that Club had been closed down for a month, allegedly damaged by fire, though some of the opposition deputies had a different view of affairs—but they kept quiet lest they join those who had been imprisoned for ‘unpatriotic international corporate connections detrimental to the war effort’. Almost every non-People’s Alliance deputy had been on the board of one pseudopuissant corporation or another over the years, and now many were just dreading waiting for the hammer to fall, for Monterroso to send his “People’s Volunteers”, boys in red sashes with clubs and truncheons, around to beat them up or hand them over to the police. The Golden Sun Club frequented by the Unionists had met with a similar fate.
Suárez had changed his party, destroying friendships and even family ties, because he had felt that the Adamantines had lost their way, had become careless of their original purpose in paternalistically looking after the poor people of the United Provinces, and had become no different from the elitist Unionists. And he had been right to do so, he felt. The people deserved better, a renaissance in that spirit of liberty in which the UPSA had once led the world. Monterroso’s slightly rougher and more humble background had always been a wall between he and Suárez, but the two men had liked and respected one another enough for all that. They had worked well together to drive the People’s Alliance forward in both the middle-class dinner parties and the working-class street slums.
Perhaps they had always gotten along better when they had both privately suspected they would never succeed in actually taking power, just being an irritant that would drag the big parties around to a form of governance that put the people first rather than the almighty dollar. So much had changed when his old friend Álvaro had actually won the election. Suddenly, all his idle daydreams about taking revenge for the mistreatment of the people could become a reality. All the things Suárez had once dismissed as allowable high spirits…
No, it wasn’t even that. If they had had peace, it would have been all right, he was sure of it. He and the other Ruby moderates could have restrained Monterroso from his wilder ideas, and—just as had often happened in election campaigns—he would have argued but then calmed down and admitted they were right. Justice for the people could have been won without revenge.
But with the war increasingly a disaster on all fronts, and Monterroso looking for someone, anyone to blame…
It wasn’t just that the Golden Sun and Adamantine Clubs had been closed down. Even the Ruby Club, as his dining partner had hinted, was looking threadbare, periodically roughed up by People’s Volunteers and targeted by taxmen, its once-admirable menu rather sparse. Who was making those decisions? One of Suárez’s old enemies in the Colorado old guard who had always been hostile to the idea of making common cause with middle-class Adamantines?
Or…?
Seemingly changing the subject once more, the old man twinkled at him. “The President, indeed, seems very concerned with domestic affairs these days. More so than even the war.”
Decorum, good practice, and honour told Suárez to hold his tongue. The words forced their way through his lips nonetheless. “I went to see him at the Casa de Riquelme yesterday. He…” He shook his head viciously. “I had sent him several memoranda yesterday about my attempts to broker peace through the French.”
The old man nodded. “He was hostile to the idea?” he suggested.
“Ha!” Suárez drained his glass again. “He hadn’t even looked at them! They sat on one side of his desk, gathering dust.” He stared off into the distance behind his dining partner’s ear, where candles did duty for the silent luftlights whose luft had been cut off due to ‘war sacrifices’ which oddly didn’t affect the People’s Volunteers headquarters down the street. “All he wanted to talk about was the latest from that farcical trial of Roberto Priestley, all the corporate board members his men had managed to hunt down yesterday…it’s like…”
“He’s turned in on himself?” the old man asked, raising a fork quizzically. “He can’t face the army coming for him, so he’s just trying to leave his country in as…pure a state it can be before it arrives.”
Suárez sucked in a breath. Had those words been deliberately chosen? Surely they must be. His opposite number was a writer, after all. But equally, he wouldn’t…
That play about Jean de Lisieux had been very popular when it had opened in the capital, five years ago. Before the war. Before everything went mad.
“What are you suggesting?” Suárez asked, trying to sound as casual as he could.
The old man shrugged. “President Monterroso is the legitimate, democratically-elected leader of this country. It would be wrong, and, ah, unpatriotic, to do anything to change that.”
“You still sound awkward when you say that—those silly childhood beliefs of yours,” Suárez snorted. His words were harsher than intended, and he wondered why. Had he actually dared hope…
Hope that he’d be given the opportunity to stab a friend and colleague in the back, betray the dream for which they had so long worked?
When one put it like that…
“However,” the old man continued, “there are things we can do together to…support the war effort,” and again he sounded a little distasteful, “that the President does not know about.”
“Why should he not know?” Suárez said sharply.
The old man smiled evenly above his goatee. “Because they involve speaking to people connected with the pseudopuissant corporations.”
Suárez relaxed. “I see what you mean. Yes, he would not give them the time of day.”
“But you would,” the old man noted. “You are a pragmatist, not a purist. You want any way out of this mess.”
Suárez nodded. “I don’t deny that. We’re not going to leave this war with anything resembling a victory…but anything that can knock the Yanquis back, bring them to the negotiating table so we can at least seek a peace with honour…”
“And convince the President that it is the right thing to do, perhaps?” The old man shrugged. “Well, we may be able to help you.”
Suárez raised an eyebrow. “Who’s we?”
“Some colleagues. Some old friends.” The old man spread his hands self-deprecatingly. “You know the power of a friend of a friend…a shared background.”
Suárez nodded ruefully. The old boys’ network had been one of the things Monterroso had always railed against, not seeing how it could be used for good as well as ill. “So what is this way out?”
Their discussion went on for a little while. Suárez knew his acquaintance was being deliberately vague in places, but if it was true that this…plan involved PAWC, even Carlos Priestley himself, then it was understandable that he would be reticent to speak of it. Even here, even now.
Another half bottle of wine later, Suárez considered his decision. It was a risk, it was clearly a risk. And it was suspicious that the only think the old man wanted in return was a few of his friends taking certain minor positions in the government, temporarily vacated by Monterroso dismissing some ‘unreliable’ deputies. He clearly had some sort of plan to exploit this, and Suárez couldn’t figure out what it was. He didn’t like that. “What do you really want?” he asked.
The old man smiled. “Nothing so secretive as you think. We want to build a land fit for all to live in, where all can live in security—having to fear neither the deprivation that the corporations brought, nor Señor Monterroso’s death squads.”
Suárez froze, staring at the old man in shock. He opened his mouth. Death squads? What the hell did he think he was talking about, accusing his old friend Álvario (sometimes a little over-enthusiastic, true, but) of something like—
Before Suárez could speak, the old man had beckoned over a waitress. She looked strange in her uniform, with only the most cursory attempts at a feminine take on the Club’s traditional waiter’s garb: sometimes tradition could override decorum. She wore little makeup, though whether that was due to Club rules or ironsharks sinking convoys and driving prices up, Suárez didn’t know. She seemed nervous. “Sir?”
“That’s all right, señorita, I don’t want anything,” the writer said suavely. “Not drink or food, I mean…but I did want to speak to your head waiter, I believe his name is Otto?”
Otto Engler: yes, he had been the Club’s head waiter for several years now. A son of Bavarian immigrants, a natural Mentian voter really, but he had served the Rubies with skill and aplomb. Suárez liked him. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen him yet tonight.
“Sir…” The waitress glanced from side to side nervously. To his surprise, Suárez saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, as though she had been crying. “I…” her voice cracked. “Señor Engler was…he died yesterday.”
“Died?!” Suárez sat up, shocked. “What happened?”
The young waitress looked even more overwhelmed, but mumbled on: “The…the PVs came, asking about taxes, Señor Engler explained we had already paid, but…” she looked down at her shoes. “He must have been mistaken…and while running into the back to fetch the register he…” She swallowed a sob. “He…he bashed his head on the doorframe and never…never regained consciousness.”
Suárez stared at her. Then he looked over at the bar, and the staff door at the side. It was low enough that a tall man might have bashed his head against the doorframe.
But Otto was—had been—a short man.
“Thank you, señorita; I am sorry to hear that,” the old man said. “When you have a moment, by the way, I noticed that someone had spilled some wine or something at the end of the bar, there.” He pointed.
“Uh—oh yes, that’s where they—” The waitress abruptly clammed up. “Yes, sir.” She quickly turned and fled.
Suárez found his gaze inexorably drawn to where the old man was pointing. There was a few spots of something dark there, and fairly fresh-looking, which the cleaners must have missed.
Suárez had seen plenty of wine stains on wood in his life. That brown stain did not look like wine.
Slowly, he turned back to the old man. He took in one long breath, then let it out.
Decision time.
“Tell me more about this plan,” he asked.
Hours later, his palm still ringing from the firm handshake with which they had sealed the deal, Suáez left the Ruby Club. He had a lot on his mind, and it was perhaps understandable that he did not particularly notice that his drinking partner had given the nervous waitress a rather large tip.
But if so, what of it? Bartolomé Jaimes had always been a generous man.
[1] This is Nikau misunderstanding the fact that this sort of look was always popular in East Asian cultures because it implies someone sufficiently wealthy not to be outside working the fields, and is not necessary an attempt to emulate white Europeans.
[2] Niphon is an old term for Honshu (not to be confused with Nippon, here transliterated as Nihain, which is a term for the whole of Japan—though the term may have originated through a confusion of these).
[3] An anachronistic choice of analogy by this author (a synchlamp is a laser).
[4] Known as Malbec in OTL.
[5] Technically the original Adamantine Club is the one in Buenos Aires, but the subsidiary in Córdoba usurped its title as ‘the’ Adamantine Club as Adamantianism became a more relevant political ideology in the UPSA and the one based in the capital therefore became more important.
The country’s official name is: FEDERATION OF AUTIARAUX or MAURÉ FEDERATION (Mauré: TE COTAÏTANGA MAURÉ).
The people are known as: MAURÉ.
Capital and largest city: Tetaitocquerau (200,000)
Flag: The central government has adopted a flag consisting of a red courou (a traditional Mauré symbol based on the curling shape of a native silver fern), outlined in white on a black background. In practice, individual iwi units have often created their own flags based on their traditional art.
Population: 700,000 (main islands only, excluding Mauré elsewhere and colonial possessions)
Land area: 18,000 lcf (main islands only)
Economic ranking: Minor by European standards, significant within the Pacific region but difficult to quantify given many institutions are still based on iwi rather than federal.
Form of government: Autiaraux has a very loose federal government which exists primarily to unite the Mauré in response to pressure from outsiders (mostly Europeans). Defence and some economic practices are regulated to prevent foreign governments or corporations from gaining a toehold via influence with a particular iwi (clan). Direct open war between iwis is also no longer permitted, though there are often informal power struggles. However, business outside Autiaraux is usually based on iwis and individuals, with many of the Pacific island colonies being effectively run in the interests of one or a few iwis rather than the central government.
Foreign relations: Autiaraux has enjoyed close relations with France since first contact with La Pérouse, although the Mauré are often suspicious that the French are trying to gain further and unequal influence over them. Historic encounters with slave traders and rivalry in the Pacific means Mauré-UPSA relations are rarely good, although individual iwis have traded with the Meridians and their vassals. The Russians have also often shown an interest in the Mauré and Orthodox missionaries have had some success in the islands.
Military: The Mauré have an all-rifle army (or collection of militias) and have developed impressive tactics suited for Pacific island warfare (as many French observers have reported). Their limited industrial base means they lack modern land vehicles or warships, but they have developed a large fleet of wooden ships and purchased a small number of armourclads from the French. The Mauré military is unified in the cause of defence of the home islands, but often acts more in the interests of powerful iwis when it comes to obtaining colonial possessions in the Pacific islands.
Current head of state: Collectively held by the Hira Hui (the parliament, or assembly of Rangatiras who each head up an iwi)
Current head of government: Held by the Kawana, first among equals in the Hira Hui, for a one-year term. At time of the outbreak of the Pandoric War, this is held by Rangatira Wharangi (iwi: Egnaté Pourou).
– Taken from APPENDIX: GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S NATIONS AT THE EVE OF THE PANDORIC WAR, OCTOBER 1896, from
The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
*
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME V: THE QUENCHING ECLIPSE (1988):
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province, United Provinces of South America
June 24th 1899
Ignacio Cabrera slowly dragged himself around the edge of the Plaza de la Unión, his crutches catching in cracks in the flagstones. A century ago, when he had been a whole man, those cracks would have been repaired overnight, if not by the city mayor than by the company his brother ran—for an exorbitant fee, half of which he would have pocketed. His stubbled face split into a bitter smile. Yes, it had been an awful status quo, one which he had cheered for the overthrow of, back in those distant halcyon days when he had listened to then-Intendant Monterroso giving his speech in this very square. But, after a fashion, it had worked.
Now…now, Ignacio began in his internal monologue, and then found himself unable to continue for a moment, the enormity beyond him. Now, the buildings that had once been the regional headquarters of pseudopuissant corporations, from PAWC to American Fruit, from Acero Cruz del Sur to FrancoNavarro...they lay empty, boarded up, the old logos covered up with posters saying SUPPORT OPERATION VIBORA – DEATH TO TRAITORS. The posters might bear the official government imprint of the Sun and Torch, but they looked as though they had been printed amateurishly and on a shoestring, not by one of the proper programmable printers derived from loom technology. Maybe Monterroso had locked up all the people who knew how to print things, Ignacio thought to himself, and the half-joke quickly turned sour as he caught sight of the remains of an old newspaper lying in a doorway. He bent, swinging himself over one one crutch in the way he had painstakingly learned, and managed to grab it without overbalancing. He coveted such things these days, but not to read them: that was too depressing. Newspapers could be insulation for his clothes and fuel for the little fires he made under the bridge in which he fell into an exhausted sleep at night. In the chill of a Southern Hemisphere winter, that could make all the difference.
He glanced around him at the Plaza as he tucked the newspaper away. It was La Balanza de Córdoba, which he had been told had been started up as a government mouthpiece after the venerable old La Lupa de Córdoba had seen a fire burn down its offices and its assets ‘temporarily’ seized. The headlines in the paper were repeated in the propaganda posters pasted on the wall in between the Operation Vibora ones, suggesting they had come from the same source and there was no interest in even pretending to hide it. One had to be quite creative to find any Meridian victories to talk about lately, but Monterroso’s men had done their best – doubtless on pain of sharing the fate of their counterparts at La Lupa if they failed. One poster showed a host of names in Spanish and English that purported to be the site of Meridian victories, and only a sceptic with an atlas might have noticed that they were all places in Venezuela that had been conquered two years ago. Several posters loudly trumpeted the successes of the UPSA’s Heroic Ally, Russia. The Bear had taken bites out of the northwestern ENA and the German-led alliance in Europe—which had only the most tangential relationship to the war the UPSA was fighting, but never mind. Besides, Russia was now finally exiting the war, unless one counted their fight with the Turks (whose ambassador to Persia had apparently just shot the grand vizier, meaning Persia might join the Russians now). Perhaps having realised that, one poster instead decided to gloat over the dismemberment of Germany and Danubia, as though that mattered. Apparently the Scandinavians had signed a treaty now under French auspices that had given them back most of Jutland (though the Germans had got Kiel out of it, their only war gain). By contrast, the posters were silent on Belgium, which—reading between the lines—had refused French mediation, found itself isolated, and got out with only measly gains in the Rhineland, none of the additional Ruhr industry the King had coveted, and swept up Germany’s pointless colonies to save face.
One of those colonies was in New Guinea, and Ignacio winced with a flashback at the mere thought. New Guinea had been far too close to the Godforsaken chunk of the East Indies where his life had changed forever.
His left leg ended at the knee, and a crude pegleg did an inadequate job of replacing it. He had been dumped here, in the city where he had lived all his life, given a stipend of a military pension which inflation had rapidly rendered near-worthless, left to rot. Monterroso had spoken of downtrodden and forgotten people before he was elected; now he seemed determined to create more of them than the pseudopuissant corporations ever had.
What Ignacio hated more than anything was that walking now took so much effort that he found himself out of breath just from bending down to pick up a newspaper. He leaned on the wall and panted, wondering if he’d ever find one of the sequents he had once loved to read. His vision focused on yet another propaganda poster, this one a little better printed and in colour. It took the subtler tack of admitting that the Americans were pushing forward, but noting how slow and grinding their advance in Guatemala had been since taking Mexico. A snail with Starry Georges flying from its antennae slowly headed up jungle-covered mountains, each of which had angry eyes and a grin of teeth with blood dripping from it. The message was that the Septens would pay dearly for every inch of land they took in Central America. However, Ignacio—and, presumably, many others—had worked out that the Americans didn’t want to do that anyway. Rumours circulated of them assembling the biggest fleet in the history of the Novamund.
As a dog returns to its vomit, so the Empire of North America would revert to its old ways, the ways of 1756, of 1808—it would send its soldiers here, to Buenos Aires, to overthrow the fount of Meridian liberty at its source.
Once, the thought would have filled Ignacio with dread and anger. Right now, he found it difficult to care.
His remaining foot nudged a stone. If he had been the young man he once was, he might have kicked it disconsolately. He couldn’t even do that now. Monterroso had taken everything he had. Not the Septens, not a bullet, not the jungle.
Monterroso.
“Friend, are you quite well?” came a voice—a young, female voice. Reflexively, Ignacio tried to turn quickly to look, and almost overbalanced again.
Indeed, a young woman, or two of them. They wore the dull, utilitarian fashions that had become the norm now, both because of wartime shortages but also because PAWC’s assets had been seized and the dye factories requisitioned for war purposes only—or just shut down. The only splash of colour on their pale tan dresses was not really a colour at all: they each wore a black armband, as though in mourning. One girl had a tray of bread rolls, the other a folder of pamphlets.
A religious cult of some kind, maybe? One of the Roman groups who still firmly believed the UPSA would one day return to bowing down to the Pope? Or something odder altogether—loonies who didn’t believe in the Resurrection and were ‘in mourning’ for Christ? Who knew?
Right now, Ignacio didn’t care. His gaze, which once would have first have been drawn to the curves behind the shabby dresses, was instead dragged inexorably to the tray of bread rolls. Steam was still rising from them in the cool winter’s day, carrying with it a heavenly smell.
Belatedly, he heard the words, and tried not to drool as he replied: “Quite well? I haven’t been quite well for a long time, señorita.”
The girl with the tray blushed. “Of course, I’m—I’m sorry, Señor.” Ignacio felt oddly guilty for making her blush. “I just meant—I only meant—”
“Irene meant if there was anything we could do to help,” said the second girl—young woman. She was a bit older than Irene, a bit shorter and dumpier, though still attractive. She also had an immediate air of authority that Ignacio recognised from the best officers in his units. “Please do take one,” she added kindly.
All sorts of automatic polite refusals echoed in Ignacio’s mind, the part that remembered what it had been like to be a man, but entirely failed to reach his lips. He clumsily reached out, almost overbalanced once more, grabbed a roll and, with no sense of decorum, crammed it into his mouth with a spray of crumbs. Once, he would have drawn disapproving glances from passers-by. Now, there were precious few of those—here, in what had once been Buenos Aires’ busiest square—and they kept their heads down, lest someone finger them as having some tangential connection to one of the Vibora companies. Roberto Priestley’s trial had already dragged on for months and had long since produced enough evidence (real or otherwise) to hang him three times over, but Monterroso’s goons were clearly getting enough propaganda material out of it to keep it going indefinitely. They could always use more ‘witnesses’.
Irene giggled at his enthusiastic eating, then blushed again. “I’m sorry, Señor, I know you must be desperate.” Her voice turned sympathetic. “Are you a wounded soldier?”
“I was wounded. I was a soldier,” Ignacio said laconically in between bites. “Now I don’t know what I am. Nothing.”
“No man is nothing!” Irene retorted with surprising fire. “Isn’t that right, Valeria?”
“Yes, you’ve quoted it right for once,” Valeria said, raising an eyebrow in mock surprise. For the first time in a long while, Ignacio felt like smiling.
Ignacio finished his roll and his stomach gurgled in a satisfaction that it felt so seldom these days. “Thank you, ladies,” he said sincerely. “I’ll take any pamphlet you want me to.” I could use some more fuel with the newspaper, if nothing else.”
To his surprise, Valeria shook her head. “No, Señor. There will be time for pamphlets later. We are not going to give you one roll and then walk away, patting ourselves on the back that we have done our charitable duty. Come with us.” She put a hand on his arm.
Ignacio hated that her grip was strong there. Once he could have easily shrugged off a young woman’s hold, but to try this time might send him flying. “Come where?”
“Soup kitchen,” Irene explained. “Come on, Valeria’s right—you need feeding up.”
Soup kitchen. Precious few of those these days, Ignacio knew all too well—too many of them had turned out to have corporate connections, apparently. It might be a scam, it might be a trap.
Right now, did he really care if it was?
“Si, alright,” he said. “But you may have to help me if there are stairs.” And maybe if there weren’t, his pride wouldn’t let him say.
They did, in a businesslike manner. Even if he had been able to put his heart over his stomach for a moment, there was something too impersonal about the whole affair for him to be put in mind of the fact that his arms were draped asymmetrically over the two girls’ shoulders despite their varying heights. They were not girls, or women, and he was not a man. They were all just…people. People helping each other, with no thought for what they were. Like the Good Samaritan. He remembered hearing the priest talk about that one when he had been a little boy.
The soup kitchen was in a building that looked suspiciously as though it had once been a newspaper office, and indeed young women and a few young men were dashing through it at all times holding printed posters and pamphlets that looked hot off the press. Clearly some presses had survived around the back and were in use. Ignacio caught a glimpse of one of the stacks as the girl in her oversized courier’s cap ran past. All he could tell was that it wasn’t one of the government propaganda leaflets—for a start, it looked more professionally printed.
Irene and Valeria wouldn’t let him get away with having the cook slop just one helping of pork, pumpkin and corn soup into his bowl. They made him go around several times, supplemented with some more of Irene’s rolls, until his stomach felt full to bursting. He managed to avoid throwing up, even given the spicy taste of chimichurri sauce that supplemented the soup and gave him fond memories of steak. It had once been the Meridian boast that even the poorest in the Plate could afford bread, beef and milk, in contrast to the starving peasantry of Europe. As in so many other things, the war had made a mockery of that.
Finally, Ignacio let out a long breath. The soup kitchen was warm enough that his breath no longer misted in front of his face for the first time in weeks. “That’s it—I’m full.” He managed. “Gracias, señoritas... I cannot thank you en…” The man who had once been a joking and cynical boy now almost wept with emotion over being fed.
Irene patted his hand. “It was our pleasure. But we still do not know your name, Señor.”
“Oh…uh…” Ignacio blinked. He had planned to give a false name. But why, really? Who was he trying to protect at this point? His distant surviving relatives who wanted nothing to do with him? “I’m…I’m Ignacio Cabrera.”
Valeria nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Ignacio. And now you’re full,” she grinned mock-wickedly, “now it’s pamphlet time!”
Ignacio joined in the girls’ laughter. “Alright. Who are you people, anyway? Right now, I think I’ll convert to whatever creed it is you have.”
Irene’s smile faded for a moment. “We’re not a religious movement,” she explained.
“More a political one,” Valeria agreed.
Ignacio stared for a moment, looked at their black armbands, then around the brickwork of the soup kitchen. There were many other derelict men there being fed, many of them wounded like himself. On the walls were several plain black flags, but also some bearing a white or yellow symbol that looked like a triangle with too-long sides and a circle in the middle.
He hadn’t seen the symbol before, but the black colour…he had once followed politics a little, just enough to enthusiastically cast his vote for Monterroso’s People’s Party, but…it seemed lifetimes ago now, but… “You’re Sanchezistas?” he hazarded.
“We prefer the term Societist, but yes,” Valeria said, with the air of a village schoolteacher correcting a smart alec pupil.
“Pablo Sanchez was a great man, but a movement can never just be about one man,” Irene added.
Ignacio nodded. “My unit was like that,” he said. “We were a great fighting force under Captain Istúriz—he inspired us and led us to many victories.” He sighed. “And then he was shot down over…I can’t even pronounce the name of the place. And without him, with the nincompoop they sent instead…”
He shrugged, then realised the two girls were staring at him. He belatedly remembered something else about Sanchezistas—or Societists. “Sorry. You’re like the Pacific Society, aren’t you? You don’t like soldiers.”
Irene frowned. “We don’t like war, like any sane person,” she said. “Soldiers…” She gestured around the soup kitchen. “Soldiers are victims, who were lied to and sent off to die. If we hated you, why would we help you like this?”
Ignacio lowered his gaze and stared at his bowl, which he had scraped clean with half of his last bread roll. He felt ashamed for judging them. “I thank you for seeing past that,” he mumbled.
“You said you were shot down?” Valeria prompted.
Ignacio was surprised they wanted to discuss it, but soon his words were pouring out like a stream: “Over one of the Nusantara islands…again, don’t ask me to say which it was…I flew cielagos.” He laughed bitterly. “I was so excited when I signed up and was recommended for that, just because I was good at maths! The wave of the future—not slow lumbering steerables, but flying with wings like a bird…”
He rambled on for a while. “Not dying in the trenches like animals, but knights of the air…till you get hit, and peanut oil…flames, he was like a skeleton, I was luckier maybe…American bullet right through a control wire, crashed in the jungle…could have died, should have died, cielago hit a tree, bit of twisted metal through my foot…barely hurt, I was able to get down even…then surrounded by natives…”
“What were they like?” Irene interjected softly.
Ignacio screwed up his eyes. “Primitives…savages, painted or tattooed, almost unclothed…that sweltering heat, the insects…I thought they were going to kill and eat me…”
“But they didn’t,” Valeria said flatly.
Ignacio shook his head. “No…even tried to nurse me back to help, maybe I was a curiosity…kept me alive for a week till a Batavian ship found me, God knows how they did…”
“But you lost your leg,” Irene said, as though he could have forgotten that part.
“Gangrene,” Ignacio said baldly. “Amputated. Said I should count myself lucky it wasn’t lockjaw…and then six months later I was finally shipped back here to die because I hadn’t managed it myself.” He had meant it for a bitter joke, but couldn’t stop the tears.
Valeria put a hand on his. “Ignacio,” she said quietly. “From the point of view of those people on that island, you were invading their space. They had every right, from the point of view of nations, to kill you as an invader. But they didn’t.”
Irene covered his other hand with hers. “Who is the savage, and who is the civilised man?”
“You sound like that French author,” Ignacio mumbled through the tears.
“A Frenchman can say something worthy of notice, just as one of your Nusantara natives could,” Valeria said. “That’s the secret. There’s no difference. Nothing’s worth fighting for. Nothing to kill or die for.”
It sounded simple. Suspiciously simple, in some ways. But, here and now, Ignacio was willing to listen.
*
Vostochny Pavlovsk [Tokyo], Russian Yapon
July 3rd 1899
Ari Nikau, better known here as Nikku-san or (if he was lucky) Gospodin Nikov, kept his hood down as he crept through the sweltering twilit streets of Vostochny Pavlovsk towards his destination. Rangatira Wehihimana had chosen him for this task because he bore the closest resemblance to the natives here: he was of mixed birth, kéroi-Mauré, but rather than a white European, his mother had been Chinese. It was the closest they could get, so few Yapontsi ever being permitted to leave their mysterious islands other than the ronin soldiers and nindzhya bodyguards that the Russians used for their own purposes.
On arriving here, unsurprisingly he still stuck out, being taller and having somewhat different facial features than the Yapontsi norm. But, given he had learned that few Yapontsi were even permitted to travel far within their islands—just like the old serfdom system that the Russians had long abolished for their own people—he could easily claim to be from a distant, now half-legendary, han-domain in the far north or the Corean-ruled southern isles. Claims of incompatible dialect also excused his halting, rudimentary command of the Yapontsi language, but that usually wasn’t an issue regardless. He had learned that Yapontsi only used that tongue behind closed doors, and then fearfully. The Russians had made it an offence to speak it in the streets, punishable by flogging.
Similarly, the signs on the buildings around him in this narrow street, a few lit by hissing luftlights, were all in Cyrillic. Sometimes Cyrillic transliterations of Yapontsi words, but usually just Russian. One had to look very carefully for how the Yapontsi characters had been subtly scratched into doorframes or displayed in places where they could quickly be covered up, in case the authorities came around.
Nikau knew that Russian rule here had not always been so draconian. He had been shocked on arrival because his mental image of Yapon was still driven by the French bloodies and sequents he had inherited as a boy from his older brother, a trader who had visited Pérousie. Those ripping tales depicted a country in which every Han-capital was a mass of primitive wooden and paper houses, perhaps a few larger buildings with exotic pagoda roofs like the daimyo’s palace, and then a modern brickwork Russian kremlin in the centre with defensive walls and an onion-domed Orthodox church. The Daimyo of that Han-domain would continue to theoretically govern as the local sovereign, like the rangatira of a hapu, but periodically a Russian resident would emerge from the little kremlin to kindly remind the Daimyo of what policies he should choose if he wanted to keep his head. Nikau was vaguely aware that this system was still used in some other colonies throughout the world, by many powers, such as the Persians in East Africa.
Ever since the rule of Dolgorukov and the crackdown on the Hanran rebellion against him twenty years ago, though, the Russians had swept aside such polite fictions. Though Nikau had not been able to see much beyond the former imperial capital since he had arrived, he had seen many of those exotic pagodas of his childhood sequents now lying as burnt-out ruins or converted to Orthodox churches and schools. The natives were no longer permitted to carry on their own affairs providing they did not interfere with the moneymaking business of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company: each and every one of them was now regarded as a little cog in a big machine, and them retaining their native beliefs and language was clearly bad for business.
Nikau passed one storefront, slightly more official-looking in this generally seedy street, and was surprised to see it openly displayed its title in Yapontsi characters as well as Russian text. However, when he shakily interpreted the latter, he understood why: this was a remedial school to help young Yapontsi master the tongue of the Empire that ruled them, opening up more prestigious jobs such as the lower ranks of the Imperial civil service to them. Such establishments must be authorised to advertise themselves to those who did not already have the necessary command of Russian to read their title.
Only a couple of doors down, there was a hint of the sort of occupations open to those Yapontsi who refused to set their own culture aside. A pretty young girl, heavily made up with white makeup to make her look more European,[1] her hair in an elaborate coiffure affixed by two lacquered needles, and wearing a form of the native dress called kimono. The ones her grandmothers would have worn, though (Nikau was quite sure), would have been a rather more modest interpretation of the garment, though. She flashed her ankles at him and simpered. Beside her, half hidden in the shadows, was a man with a blackjack stuck prominently in his belt, his eyes on Nikau and filled with flinty suspicious. There was enough facial resembance there to suggest that he was the girl’s brother.
Nikau hastily raised a hand to brush off the unwanted attention and put on a burst of speed. Bile filled his mouth. He couldn’t help thinking that the Mauré had once been as vulnerable as these savages, as far behind the technological curve of the first Europeans who had contacted them. If La Pérouse had not been a good man, if he had not sided with the Mauré over his own people when they turned to the dark barbarism of the Jacobins…if the Mauré had not seen the good sense to unite when faced with threats like Meridian slavers, rather than continuing to pettily fight amongst themselves like the Yapontsi had…
He didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but it could have happened. It could. Autiaraux might now be a country whose very name had been overwritten with one from the other side of the world, whose folk were forbidden to speak their own tongue, whose children were taken away and raised in an alien culture—and those who escaped condemned to an existence as miserable as these street Yapontsi.
Give them the chance, the Russians would do the same to Autiaraux. And Nikau was here to stop it.
He finally reached the meeting place, an izakaya public house with a red luftlight-lit lantern outside it. The sign boldly displayed its name, the August Moon, in Yapontsi characters, and only a subtle eye could spot that it could clearly be flipped to a Russian alternative when required. In this case the boast was not thanks to authorisation, but that those who really run the August Moon did not fear any but the most direct clash with the authorities. No, they were one of the few organisations that the average Yapontsi might fear as much as those authorities.
Nikau rapped on a side door with his knuckles. “Password?” came a voice from within in accented Russian.
“Mekajiki,” Nikau said, carefully pronouncing the Yapontsi syllables. All the passwords since he’d been coming here had been the names of the damn raw fish that the Yapontsi seemed to eat all the time like the savages they were. Oh, he was sure at some point in the distant past the Mauré had done the same, but even before La Pérouse had arrived, oral tradition said that food had been cooked on fires and even steamed on geothermal springs. He wondered if the embrace of any and all technological innovations had been unhealthily tied to collaboration with the Russians…
Evidently not, though, judging by the modern pistol peeping out of the rather more workmanlike kimono that the door guard wore. He gave Nikau a grudging nod and beckoned him in.
Nikau sat nursing a mug of sake for perhaps twenty minutes, taking polite sips; his hapu belonged to the strand of Mauré opinion that regarded alcoholic drinks as wai piro, stinking water that only destroyed people’s lives. He was aware that was a view even among many of the kéroi, who had been drinking them for centuries, so there must be something to it. And, indeed, the Russians seemed to encourage the establishment of izakaya bars like this one: let the Yapontsi drown their national tragedy in sake just as the average downtrodden Russian peasant dreamed of ‘if only the Tsar knew’ from inside his bottle of vodka.
Eventually, the barman came to dispute the authenticity of the kopeck notes that Nikau had paid for his drink with, and angrily ushered him into the back in an incoherent mix of Yapontsi and crude, swearword-heavy Russian. Almost as soon as they crossed the threshold into the back room, the barman switched to fluent Russian and all the anger left his voice. “Over there in the corner, Mauré-san.”
A little uncomfortable that his ethnic origin had been shared with the barman, Nikau walked over to the shadowy table, lit only by a single wa-rousoku tapered Yapontsi candle. Reflected light glimmered faintly from the rims of spectacles worn by the men around the table. Rather than kimonos or other native garb, they wore the dark Rusisan suits and cravats that might be worn by Yapontsi-born Imperial civil servants or others in trusted positions. They lacked the overly decorative cuffs that were in fashion in Europe, however. Perhaps because they were so hard to clean the blood off.
Nikau bowed slightly as he sat down. “Konnichi wa, gentlemen.”
A very slight change in the spectacles-reflected light opposite him as the man raised his eyebrow. “It is evening, Nikku-san,” he said coldly in Russian. “Here in Nihain we say konban wa.”
“My apologies,” Nikau said, his cheeks burning a little. There were too many subtleties to Yapontsi culture, too many that a casual visitor would just ignore anyway because it wasn’t as if the natives could protest if you got them wrong. But these men were different.
They were yakuza.
They had survived, Nikau knew, because their power base had long been in Kiushu and the other southern isles, and Corean rule had never tried to confront them, seeing them as a natural part of the economic landscape. They had slowly wormed their way into Niphon[2] and now were arguably the only remaining native power base that had escaped Russian control.
The oldest among them, who had remained silent thus far, had greying hair, though there was still vitality in the way he sat. The others were younger; perhaps they were the kobun to his oyabun (Nikau had read up on this). Like many criminal organisations throughout the world, they were structured like an artificial family of blood brothers, with loyalty to the ‘father’. It was a strange thing for a Mauré to learn about; Mauré society had never been centralised and disassociated enough for someone to try to build an artificial hapu across the real iwis.
The yakuza wore black leather gloves, as some kéroi wore when driving steam vehicles, presumably to hide the tell-tale mutilations that were sometimes made to their little fingers. Similarly their collars were high, though Nikau thought he could glimpse the very edge of a chest tattoo on the man opposite him. These men were dangerous.
Which was exactly what he needed.
“You have the information,” a younger man said without preamble.
“Patience, Kiryu-bo,” said the older man; Kiryu, if that was his name, actually blushed slightly. The older man turned to Nikau and regarded him with a stare that, though invisible behind his dark glasses, seemed to burn into Nikau like twin synchlamps.[3] After a moment, he inclined his head as though he had found what he was searching for. “Speak, Nikku-san.”
Nikau didn’t follow all the complexities of Yapontsi honorifics, but he knew that the older man, the oyabun, had dealt Kiryu an insult by continuing to call Nikau ‘san’ while relegating his own kobun to some other honorific. He decided to push ahead before Kiryu could decide to take this out on Nikau himself. “Yes, honoured sir, I have the information.” He partted his pocket significantly.
Another of the younger men laughed. This one had an eyepatch, Nikau noted; he wondered if it was the result of a battle wound or a ritual mutilation by his own ‘brothers’. “You are unwise to advertise it so freely!”
The oyabun frowned, but Nikau spoke before he could discipline the young man: “Why would I fear advertising it you, sir?”
“We could simply slay you and take the information,” the eyepatch man said bluntly, his one eye on the oyabun, who had decided to remain silent.
Nikau nodded. “You could steal it while giving me nothing in return,” he said. “That is why one is usually unwise to advertise that one has the prize to those who want it.”
“Well, yes,” Eyepatch said uncertainly, clearly a little disconcerted that Nikau was putting it so bluntly.
Nikau cocked his head on one side. “But did it occur to you to ask what I wanted in return?”
He was not sure of the exact details of the information’s origins, only what Rangatira Wehihimana had told him. As he understood it, the distant Germans had managed to insert a very capable spy in the Russian high command, who had never been discovered by the Russian secret police. However, much to the Germans’ frustration, the spy had rarely managed to get assigned to those parts of the high command dealing with the war against Germany and Danubia, the parts that would have relevant valuable information to help the Pressburg Pact armies. He had, however, successfully obtained plenty of useful information about Russian deployments in the Far East, which was of no use whatsoever to Dresden but could be very valuable to those fighting the Russians out here.
As Germany had made peace, presumably some unscrupulous fellow in their intelligence corps had decided to sell on the information for his own profit. The nation that could most benefit from the information was, of course, Feng China, and doubtless that German intelligence man had retired handsomely on the proceeds of what the Feng had paid him. But Rangatira Wehihimana’s great father Tamahimana had fought for a past Feng Emperor, and the son had retained some of the father’s old contacts. Despite the ragged state of the Lectel lines across the Pacific, the information had been passed on to Wehihimana by a Feng official.
The information was of limited use to Wehihimana himself, who could hardly reach out and attack the Russians in their own bases in Yapon or the Asian mainland. It did, however, reveal that the Russians—despite the ongoing fight with the Feng Chinese—were assembling a large fleet right here in Vostochny Pavlovsk, with the goal of sailing to retake Gavaji from Wehihimana. And they might not stop there.
Once again, visions of Autiaraux under the Russian bootheel like Yapon flashed before Nikau’s eyes, and he dismissed them with the determination that he would never see that come to pass.
“What do you desire?” the oyabun asked finally in a quiet voice.
Nikau took a packet of papers from his pocket, painstakingly translated into Russian by one of those whom Wehihimana had taken captive in Gavaji two years ago. He laid them on the table. “I want you to take this information on Russian military vulnerabilities,” he said bluntly, “and use it to rebel against the Tsar.”
The yakuza just stared at him for a long moment, and then Kiryu laughed. “You do not ask much!”
“But do you understand?” Nikau asked. “I do not fear you slaying me and taking this without my payment. Because my payment is that you use this information—and it is no use to you unless you use it to rebel, which is what I want.”
The oyabun sighed. “I was there for the Hanran, young man,” he said harshly. “I remember what it is to rebel against the Tsar. It does not end well for anyone.”
Nikau had not expected this. “But you know there are undercurrents of rebellion even now,” he protested. “Anyone can see that.”
Kiryu and Eyepatch looked excited, but the oyabun raised a hand. “Of course there are,” he said dismissively. “It has been twenty years. Time for men to forget, and time for a new generation of boys to grow up who have not seen it with their own eyes. That does not make it any more likely to succeed.” He closed his eyes for a moment behind his spectacles, as though overcome with reminiscence. “A yakuza is one who knows when to confront authority, and when to bow to it. Opposing the Tsar will bring only death.”
Nikau felt the meeting slipping away from him. “But what use is this information without that?” he asked.
“We can use it to stage robberies,” the oyabun said. “Burn down a few bases. Harrass the Russians a little, steal their weapons. Make it easier when the time comes that we may be able to succeed.”
“But they are weakened, Akira-samu!” Kiryu said excitedly. “They have sent their forces across the world to fight others! We will never have an opportunity greater than this!”
“If we rebel now they will crush us, Kiryu-kun,” the oyabun (Akira, apparently) retorted. “And this time they might succeed in exterminating our culture altogether.”
Eyepatch frowned, and spoke more softly. “But, Akira-samu…will our culture survive till that day you look forward to?”
“Of course it will,” Akira snapped. “They have been trying to wipe us out for years. We always survive in the shadows.”
“I don’t speak of the Russians,” Eyepatch said quietly.
Akira frowned in return. Then his expression cleared. “The Kurohata brigade? They are nothing but one old man’s stupid dream.”
“That once described many groups and ideologies that changed the world,” Eyepatch protested.
“Excuse me,” Nikau said diffidently, “but may I ask who this…kurohata group are?” He frowned for a moment, his lips moving as he recalled what Yapontsi he knew. “Black something? Black banner? One of your mon-flags?”
Akira glared at him. “It is none of your business,” he said. “None will ever follow their absurd path of cultural self-immolation, at least not so long as I lead this family.” He slapped the table.
He turned towards Nikau. “I am afraid we must decline your request, Nikku-san. Though perhaps we can come to an accommodation, for sabotaging that Russian flotilla in harbour would serve our interests as well.”
Nikau felt relief. A full rebellion would make a better distraction, but at least that would help Wehihimana in the short term. “Very well, Akira-san. Let us make a blood pact.” He produced a tiny knife, the biggest that the barman had let him take in here.
Akira stood up and Nikau blinked as a loud sound echoed in his ears. When he opened his eyes again, everything was blood.
Confusion reigned as he thought for a moment that the yakuza had betrayed him, or had overreacted to the appearance of the little knife, yet he felt no pain. Blood covered the table and Akira was slumped on it, red craters in his back. His two kobun were crying out and drawing their own pistols, but bullets were already flying. An ambush!
Nikau had no weapon beyond the tiny knife. He hit the floor and took cover behind the table. As he did, he heard words echoing in loud, clear, Russian: “SURRENDER IN THE NAME OF THE TSAR!”
They had found him out, followed him somehow. The yakuza had been decapitated. There would be no sabotage of the fleet bound for Gavaji.
And, incidentally (he thought as a Russian bullet struck splinters from the table near his hand) that presumably meant that those kurohata people would have a more influential voice in any future Yapontsi rebellion plans.
Right now, he found it very difficult to care.
*
Córdoba, Province of Córdoba, United Provinces of South America
July 14th 1899
Jorge Suárez, U.P. Minister for Foreign Affairs, took what was meant to be a small, polite sip of his ’47 Mendoza Côt.[4] Somehow, without his brain ever quite sending the required conscious command to his arm and hand and mouth, the action turned into him draining the glass in one gulp. He set it down on the table, breathing heavily for a moment. He could not afford to lose control. He couldn’t.
Across the table, his dining partner nodded sympathetically. “The war is heavy upon all our shoulders,” said the old, spry man with the long fingers of a pianist or a writer. “Upon yours, perhaps, more than anyone’s.”
Suárez shrugged those burdened shoulders as he refilled his glass from the bottle, a little clumsily; it had not been his first of the night. Usually the Ruby Club’s discreet waiters would be here to do it for him, but even given the number of them that had been called up and replaced with waitresses (pre-war decorum be damned), he would not have desired their services right now. Some things had to remain secret.
Even from the President-General.
“You are, perhaps, thinking of President Monterroso,” the other said, sipping his own glass genteelly. Suárez started at him following his own train of thought, but the following words clarified that the destination had been reached from another track: “Surely, you say, I am wrong to say that your shoulders are bound most heavily by the burden of the war, the burden of office. You are, after all, second to the President.”
Suárez’s hand twitched, going through the motions of rolling a cigarette. His tobacco pouch was empty, and he forced himself to stop. “Yes,” he began, then paused, thinking. “Perhaps. But my role means I must think more of—”
“Of the world,” came the reply. The old man stroked his neatly-trimmed, greying goatee beard. He had lost weight, Suárez nodded. Wartime deprivation again, for he had first met this man as an enthusiastic gourmand who paid for his vice with a flabby figure. “Yes, Minister—”
“Jorge, please.”
“Jorge, then—I thank you—your thoughts are ever on what lies beyond these shores.” A hand gripping a glass of the red Mendoza wine waved expansively around without spilling a single drop. “You think of the problems overseas, the American victory in Carolina, in Mexico, the war winding down—thank God—elsewhere.” The glass of wine was set down and the hands pressed intensely against the tablecloth, palms down. The gaze bored into Suárez. “You think that all that remains is one final decisive confrontation between the ENA and the UPSA.” He leaned backwards again. “And you think that that is not a confrontation the UPSA can win.”
Suárez shook his head. “The notion of one decisive confrontation is a childish one,” he protested, “the dream of tinpot Vetomundine monarchs, the altar upon which they will sacrifice the lives of their peasantry on a whim. Modern warfare is a long hard struggle…”
“A struggle we have seen too much of,” his acquaintance replied.
The Foreign Minister inclined his head. “You will have no argument from me. But where is this conversation going?”
A pause as another glass of wine was poured. The old man looked around him as he did, once more not spilling a drop. “I have not visited the Ruby Club before,” he said, apparently changing the subject. “I trust the décor is more welcoming in happier times.”
Suárez looked around, too, with new eyes. The Ruby Club had been founded by himself and several of the other Adamantine Party deputies who had decided, about ten years ago, that their party had become morally bankrupt. They had, over the course of time, joined with the Colorados and Mentians to form the combined People’s Alliance under the charismatic figure of Intendant Monterroso. The Ruby Club had been the meeting place of that faction of the Alliance which Monterroso had called the Pinks or the Roses, apparently affectionately, but who themselves preferred the gemstone signifier. It had been created in imitation of the original Adamantine Club.[5]
Now, that Club had been closed down for a month, allegedly damaged by fire, though some of the opposition deputies had a different view of affairs—but they kept quiet lest they join those who had been imprisoned for ‘unpatriotic international corporate connections detrimental to the war effort’. Almost every non-People’s Alliance deputy had been on the board of one pseudopuissant corporation or another over the years, and now many were just dreading waiting for the hammer to fall, for Monterroso to send his “People’s Volunteers”, boys in red sashes with clubs and truncheons, around to beat them up or hand them over to the police. The Golden Sun Club frequented by the Unionists had met with a similar fate.
Suárez had changed his party, destroying friendships and even family ties, because he had felt that the Adamantines had lost their way, had become careless of their original purpose in paternalistically looking after the poor people of the United Provinces, and had become no different from the elitist Unionists. And he had been right to do so, he felt. The people deserved better, a renaissance in that spirit of liberty in which the UPSA had once led the world. Monterroso’s slightly rougher and more humble background had always been a wall between he and Suárez, but the two men had liked and respected one another enough for all that. They had worked well together to drive the People’s Alliance forward in both the middle-class dinner parties and the working-class street slums.
Perhaps they had always gotten along better when they had both privately suspected they would never succeed in actually taking power, just being an irritant that would drag the big parties around to a form of governance that put the people first rather than the almighty dollar. So much had changed when his old friend Álvaro had actually won the election. Suddenly, all his idle daydreams about taking revenge for the mistreatment of the people could become a reality. All the things Suárez had once dismissed as allowable high spirits…
No, it wasn’t even that. If they had had peace, it would have been all right, he was sure of it. He and the other Ruby moderates could have restrained Monterroso from his wilder ideas, and—just as had often happened in election campaigns—he would have argued but then calmed down and admitted they were right. Justice for the people could have been won without revenge.
But with the war increasingly a disaster on all fronts, and Monterroso looking for someone, anyone to blame…
It wasn’t just that the Golden Sun and Adamantine Clubs had been closed down. Even the Ruby Club, as his dining partner had hinted, was looking threadbare, periodically roughed up by People’s Volunteers and targeted by taxmen, its once-admirable menu rather sparse. Who was making those decisions? One of Suárez’s old enemies in the Colorado old guard who had always been hostile to the idea of making common cause with middle-class Adamantines?
Or…?
Seemingly changing the subject once more, the old man twinkled at him. “The President, indeed, seems very concerned with domestic affairs these days. More so than even the war.”
Decorum, good practice, and honour told Suárez to hold his tongue. The words forced their way through his lips nonetheless. “I went to see him at the Casa de Riquelme yesterday. He…” He shook his head viciously. “I had sent him several memoranda yesterday about my attempts to broker peace through the French.”
The old man nodded. “He was hostile to the idea?” he suggested.
“Ha!” Suárez drained his glass again. “He hadn’t even looked at them! They sat on one side of his desk, gathering dust.” He stared off into the distance behind his dining partner’s ear, where candles did duty for the silent luftlights whose luft had been cut off due to ‘war sacrifices’ which oddly didn’t affect the People’s Volunteers headquarters down the street. “All he wanted to talk about was the latest from that farcical trial of Roberto Priestley, all the corporate board members his men had managed to hunt down yesterday…it’s like…”
“He’s turned in on himself?” the old man asked, raising a fork quizzically. “He can’t face the army coming for him, so he’s just trying to leave his country in as…pure a state it can be before it arrives.”
Suárez sucked in a breath. Had those words been deliberately chosen? Surely they must be. His opposite number was a writer, after all. But equally, he wouldn’t…
That play about Jean de Lisieux had been very popular when it had opened in the capital, five years ago. Before the war. Before everything went mad.
“What are you suggesting?” Suárez asked, trying to sound as casual as he could.
The old man shrugged. “President Monterroso is the legitimate, democratically-elected leader of this country. It would be wrong, and, ah, unpatriotic, to do anything to change that.”
“You still sound awkward when you say that—those silly childhood beliefs of yours,” Suárez snorted. His words were harsher than intended, and he wondered why. Had he actually dared hope…
Hope that he’d be given the opportunity to stab a friend and colleague in the back, betray the dream for which they had so long worked?
When one put it like that…
“However,” the old man continued, “there are things we can do together to…support the war effort,” and again he sounded a little distasteful, “that the President does not know about.”
“Why should he not know?” Suárez said sharply.
The old man smiled evenly above his goatee. “Because they involve speaking to people connected with the pseudopuissant corporations.”
Suárez relaxed. “I see what you mean. Yes, he would not give them the time of day.”
“But you would,” the old man noted. “You are a pragmatist, not a purist. You want any way out of this mess.”
Suárez nodded. “I don’t deny that. We’re not going to leave this war with anything resembling a victory…but anything that can knock the Yanquis back, bring them to the negotiating table so we can at least seek a peace with honour…”
“And convince the President that it is the right thing to do, perhaps?” The old man shrugged. “Well, we may be able to help you.”
Suárez raised an eyebrow. “Who’s we?”
“Some colleagues. Some old friends.” The old man spread his hands self-deprecatingly. “You know the power of a friend of a friend…a shared background.”
Suárez nodded ruefully. The old boys’ network had been one of the things Monterroso had always railed against, not seeing how it could be used for good as well as ill. “So what is this way out?”
Their discussion went on for a little while. Suárez knew his acquaintance was being deliberately vague in places, but if it was true that this…plan involved PAWC, even Carlos Priestley himself, then it was understandable that he would be reticent to speak of it. Even here, even now.
Another half bottle of wine later, Suárez considered his decision. It was a risk, it was clearly a risk. And it was suspicious that the only think the old man wanted in return was a few of his friends taking certain minor positions in the government, temporarily vacated by Monterroso dismissing some ‘unreliable’ deputies. He clearly had some sort of plan to exploit this, and Suárez couldn’t figure out what it was. He didn’t like that. “What do you really want?” he asked.
The old man smiled. “Nothing so secretive as you think. We want to build a land fit for all to live in, where all can live in security—having to fear neither the deprivation that the corporations brought, nor Señor Monterroso’s death squads.”
Suárez froze, staring at the old man in shock. He opened his mouth. Death squads? What the hell did he think he was talking about, accusing his old friend Álvario (sometimes a little over-enthusiastic, true, but) of something like—
Before Suárez could speak, the old man had beckoned over a waitress. She looked strange in her uniform, with only the most cursory attempts at a feminine take on the Club’s traditional waiter’s garb: sometimes tradition could override decorum. She wore little makeup, though whether that was due to Club rules or ironsharks sinking convoys and driving prices up, Suárez didn’t know. She seemed nervous. “Sir?”
“That’s all right, señorita, I don’t want anything,” the writer said suavely. “Not drink or food, I mean…but I did want to speak to your head waiter, I believe his name is Otto?”
Otto Engler: yes, he had been the Club’s head waiter for several years now. A son of Bavarian immigrants, a natural Mentian voter really, but he had served the Rubies with skill and aplomb. Suárez liked him. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen him yet tonight.
“Sir…” The waitress glanced from side to side nervously. To his surprise, Suárez saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, as though she had been crying. “I…” her voice cracked. “Señor Engler was…he died yesterday.”
“Died?!” Suárez sat up, shocked. “What happened?”
The young waitress looked even more overwhelmed, but mumbled on: “The…the PVs came, asking about taxes, Señor Engler explained we had already paid, but…” she looked down at her shoes. “He must have been mistaken…and while running into the back to fetch the register he…” She swallowed a sob. “He…he bashed his head on the doorframe and never…never regained consciousness.”
Suárez stared at her. Then he looked over at the bar, and the staff door at the side. It was low enough that a tall man might have bashed his head against the doorframe.
But Otto was—had been—a short man.
“Thank you, señorita; I am sorry to hear that,” the old man said. “When you have a moment, by the way, I noticed that someone had spilled some wine or something at the end of the bar, there.” He pointed.
“Uh—oh yes, that’s where they—” The waitress abruptly clammed up. “Yes, sir.” She quickly turned and fled.
Suárez found his gaze inexorably drawn to where the old man was pointing. There was a few spots of something dark there, and fairly fresh-looking, which the cleaners must have missed.
Suárez had seen plenty of wine stains on wood in his life. That brown stain did not look like wine.
Slowly, he turned back to the old man. He took in one long breath, then let it out.
Decision time.
“Tell me more about this plan,” he asked.
Hours later, his palm still ringing from the firm handshake with which they had sealed the deal, Suáez left the Ruby Club. He had a lot on his mind, and it was perhaps understandable that he did not particularly notice that his drinking partner had given the nervous waitress a rather large tip.
But if so, what of it? Bartolomé Jaimes had always been a generous man.
[1] This is Nikau misunderstanding the fact that this sort of look was always popular in East Asian cultures because it implies someone sufficiently wealthy not to be outside working the fields, and is not necessary an attempt to emulate white Europeans.
[2] Niphon is an old term for Honshu (not to be confused with Nippon, here transliterated as Nihain, which is a term for the whole of Japan—though the term may have originated through a confusion of these).
[3] An anachronistic choice of analogy by this author (a synchlamp is a laser).
[4] Known as Malbec in OTL.
[5] Technically the original Adamantine Club is the one in Buenos Aires, but the subsidiary in Córdoba usurped its title as ‘the’ Adamantine Club as Adamantianism became a more relevant political ideology in the UPSA and the one based in the capital therefore became more important.
Thande
Donor
Actually managed to upload a whole chapter at once, for once - though people who are on the Sea Lion Press forums may have seen an early preview of the first two segments of it due to how I had to store it!
Nearly finished the 19th century, readers - it's only taken me, er, twelve years...
Nearly finished the 19th century, readers - it's only taken me, er, twelve years...
Imagine there's a reference to a John Lennon song...
Societism is creeping in. It may start as a polite revolution, but things are about to turn nasty.
Belgium really should have accepted French mediation. Or have joined the peace deal with the Russians.
How many more parts until the end of the volume, Thande?
Societism is creeping in. It may start as a polite revolution, but things are about to turn nasty.
Belgium really should have accepted French mediation. Or have joined the peace deal with the Russians.
How many more parts until the end of the volume, Thande?