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  Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all / Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.

  —Alyattes, Fifth Hymn to Bel-Ashur, ch4,v66

  I’m good at most things, but my speciality is the death of lions. I’ve never actually seen a lion, but I can do you a perfect alpha male in full spring riddled with arrows, or rearing up on its hind legs and being stabbed, or writhing in its death throes, or flat on its back stone-dead, and you’d swear blind it was real—and that’s before the paint job. Someone else does the paint, it goes without saying. This is a highly specialised trade.

  Luckily for me, there’s always a call for lions. Of course, every time there’s lions there has to be a Great King to kill them. My Great Kings are pretty good. I do outstanding forearms, and I really go to town on the detail of the embroidered robe and the curls of the hair and beard and the fingernails—I do the best fingernails anywhere. But I won’t pretend I’m happy with the faces. I’ve never actually seen the King, but in my mind I know exactly what he looks like, and I can never quite get that in stone. Other people can, but not me. But they can’t do lions.

  After lions, my best thing is definitely nomads. Dead nomads, it goes without saying, or dying, or cowering in terror as the King grabs them by the hair with his left hand while wielding his sword in his right. I have no idea if people wield in real life. When I was a kid, my dad used to give me a brush hook and tell me to cut back the flags and nettles in the headlands, which is the closest I’ve ever got to wielding; and of course I’ve never seen an actual battle, something for which I’m truly thankful. But I regularly get compliments from the supervisors on my wielding. You’ve got the rippling of the muscles in the King’s arm as he strikes just right, they tell me, and I suppose they know what they’re talking about.

  * * *

  “You’re the lion guy, right?” he said to me. I looked at my feet. “Yes, Lord,” I said.

  He was shorter than me, about forty, forty-five, grey hair, beard to his waist, fantastic gown. I wanted to grin. The pattern woven into the weave of his gown was one I’d invented, about seven years ago. I carved it into the King’s gown in the King-killing-lions scene for the portico of the new temple in Foregate; and I guess it must’ve caught on, and people started asking their tailors for it, because these days I see it everywhere. “Got a job for you,” he said.

  Not what I wanted to hear. “Thank you,” I said. “What can I—?”

  Really bad, because he was clearly direct from the King, so anything he wanted done would need to have been done yesterday; and he could see quite plainly that I was halfway through a King-killing-lions for the peristyle of Lord Pharnaspes’ new town house, because there I was in my apron, with my hammer in one hand and my chisel in the other, standing directly in front of a half-carved lion. Irrelevant, from his perspective. A pain in the arse from mine.

  Actually, I was probably being naïve. Now I think about it, I almost certainly got that job, not because I’m the best at lions, although I am, but because His Majesty’s chamberlain saw that Lord Pharnaspes’ new town house was a miracle of ostentatiously extravagant beauty, suggesting that Pharnaspes might be getting a bit above himself; easiest way to bring the project to a shuddering halt would be to pressgang the lion guy. That way, Pharnaspes wouldn’t be entitled to take offence, and a subtle message would be communicated, Pharnaspes would have to make do with distinctly second-rate lions by somebody else and everyone would know where they stand. But for me, of course, it meant Lord Pharnaspes’ lasting displeasure, for undertaking a commission and failing to carry it through.

  This explanation, which is undoubtedly the right one, didn’t occur to me until the man with the elegant gown told me about the new job. There would be, he told me, no lions.

  “Understood, my lord,” I said. “What—?”

  “A battle scene,” he said. “You do excellent battle scenes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “His Majesty,” he went on, “wants the Battle of Dylaxa for the side porch of the extension to the Spring Palace.”

  Oh, I thought. “Yes, my lord,” I said. “When do I start?”

  * * *

  And there’s the thing.

  Everybody knows about the Battle of Dylaxa. We won, it goes without saying. His Majesty drew up his army to face the nomad hordes, and immediately attacked. On the right wing, where His Majesty led the charge in person, we scattered the savages and slaughtered them by the thousand. On the left wing and in the centre, however, cowardly traitors in the pay of the enemy staged a pre-planned withdrawal, masquerading as a rout and headlong flight. Fortunately, His Majesty and the all-conquering Royal lancers got back from annihilating the enemy in time to save the day. A skilfully judged pincer movement enabled His Majesty to take the savages in flank and rear, after which he slaughtered them like sheep, and only a handful of survivors made their way back to the nomad encampment to spread the news of their total and utter defeat. The last scene (I always tend to think of stories in terms of scenes, fifteen feet by six feet of limestone depicting a single well-defined event) was the summary execution of the traitors, including two heads of noble families who really should have known better.

  Everybody knows that’s what happened. Except that my nephew was there. He’s a junior officer in the lancers, and the way he tells it, the savages wiped the floor with us, and the only reason the King’s still alive is that he ran for it ten minutes into the battle.

  That, I pointed out to him, simply wasn’t true. For one thing, if it happened like he said, the savages would’ve swept down on the City and burnt it to ashes. Not really, he told me. The savages didn’t want a war, but the King insisted on attacking them. Basically, they’re a peaceful people who just want to be left alone to look after their sheep; they don’t give a shit about gold or silk or pearls, or even slaves, so we haven’t got anything they want, and they don’t see the point of killing people for the sake of it. They had no intention of attacking the City. They were just glad to get us off their backs for a bit.

  You don’t need me to tell you that my nephew got it all wrong. Evidently, what he saw from his very limited perspective was unrepresentative and misleading. What he mistook for the King running away was a perfectly timed tactical withdrawal, leading the enemy into a trap; the fact that he thought it was headlong flight shows what a good trap it was, since clearly it fooled the savages too. I don’t doubt for a moment that from where he was standing, it looked for all the world like we weren’t doing so well. But evidently he wasn’t in a position to see the bigger picture. And that’s how false versions of events and untrue stories get about; not necessarily deliberate lies, a simple misunderstanding can be all it takes. We won the battle, I have absolutely no doubts on that score.

  Even so.

  * * *

  The next day I got sketches.

  You need to have been in the trade for at least ten years to be able to make any sense of Palace sketches. They’re slabs of clay about the size of a small roof-tile, into which some scribe in one of the front offices has scratched some rather perfunctory lines. You couldn’t make head or tail of them, but as soon as I saw them, I could visualise the finished stelae in my mind, clear and sharp as if I was standing looking at them. The tallest scratched line is always the King, who is naturally always the centre of composition of every scene he’s in. The other squiggles are nomads. The upright ones are nomads being shot, carved or stabbed by our brave lads—the sketches don’t bother to show our side; I do all that—and the horizontal ones are dead nomads or severed parts thereof. I can read a Palace sketch the way a scribe can read a tablet of writing. I know what the symbols mean. It’s not something you can figure out for yourself; you have to learn it, and then you understand.

  These sketches didn’t call for much thought. Basically, someone had copied them from the Battle of Sammalon on the facade of the New Year Temple down on Castle Bar. That makes sense. Everybody knows the Battle of Sammalon. If you live in the City, you’re bound to go past it at least twice a week. It’s a true masterpiece, and it’s always been there, we all grew up with it, like a respected uncle. And the one thing that everybody knows about Sammalon is that we won. It was a great and glorious victory that ensured the security of the nation for generations to come. You know that; you know what the carvings mean. And it helps no end that they’re quite unbearably beautiful, the most sublime expression of strength, honour, courage and Good prevailing over Evil ever put into stone. On a fundamental level, that’s how we all know they’re true. They couldn’t be so beautiful, so deeply imbued with majesty, serenity and grace, if they were a lie.

  Good business sense, therefore, to make the composition of our new battle a conscious echo of Sammalon. I approved, even though it set me the enormous challenge of coming up with figures that could stand comparison with the finest achievement of stone-carving in human history. I thought about that and decided: the hell with it, why not? I’d fail, naturally, but that’s only to be expected. The important thing would be how nobly I failed. People, and in particular supervisors and Clerks of the Works, would judge me on that and—I hoped—be suitably impressed.

  I live well, thanks to the lions. I have three rooms in the casemate of the West wall, about a hundred yards down from the Golden Gate. I have a window on the inside, looking out over the flower market. I own a carved bedstead, a table, a chair and two stools, a bronze tripod for cooking, three ten-gallon storage jars, nine pots, three plates, two cups, nine blankets, a cloak, six tunics, two gowns, three pairs of sandals, a boxwood comb (with incised decoration), a clay figurine of Mother Tiamat, two knives, an iron spit, a straw hat, a housemaid, eighteen shekels of chop silver and my tools. When you think that I came to the City with nothing but my big brother’s hand-me-down shirt, that’s not bad going.

  One of the storage jars, the straw hat and the housemaid were gifts from Hydaspes the oil merchant. I say gifts; I did him a frieze of acanthus flowers and a very small lion for the back wall of his office in Mill Street. Since he’s only a merchant he’s not allowed to hire a Guild artist, we only work for the Palace and the nobility, but there’s nothing in the rules about doing a friend a favour, or the friend expressing his delight in the form of an unsolicited gift.

  “You’re making a rod for your own back, is what you’re doing,” she said. “What were you thinking of? You must’ve gone soft in the head.”

  She put the bowl of porridge down in front of me. “It’s not like I had a choice,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” she pointed out. “You could’ve done your I’m-not-worthy spiel. He’d have bought it. You could’ve said to him, I’m only any good at lions. Which is true.”

  “I can do nomads.”

  “Yes, but Tiridates does them much better. You should’ve said, you don’t want me, you want Tiridates. He’s the best, and only the best is good enough for the Palace. He couldn’t have argued with that.”

  Yes, I thought, I could’ve done that, but I didn’t. “It’s good money,” I said. “Palace rates.”

  “Yes, and they’ll keep you hanging about for months before you get it, and maybe you won’t get it at all. I keep telling you, Palace work is nothing but trouble. But do you listen?”

  I love her dearly, even when she’s right. “You don’t say no to the Palace,” I said. “Oh come on. It’s six months assured work, and who knows what it’ll lead to? They do say there’s plans to redo the whole of the west frontage of the Prefecture. This time next year, we could be living in Haymarket.”

  She has this knack of not having the last word sometimes, which leaves my last remark hanging in the air, so we can both see clearly how fatuous it is. I hate it when she does that.

  * * *

  I got to the Palace early, just before dawn. It meant walking through the streets in the dark, which I don’t like doing, but I’ve learned the hard way that you need to be on site before the stone arrives; otherwise the carters dump it down wherever they can find a clear space, and one of the salient features of stone is that it’s a real nuisance to move about. I’m getting too old to spend a whole working day crouched down on my knees because some ignorant clown couldn’t be bothered to unload the material onto a trestle.

  You get a lot of solo thinking time in my line of work. You can’t really talk to anyone, because you can’t make yourself heard over the noise, so you find yourself thinking long thoughts. Such as: am I an artist or just an unusually well-paid stonemason? Don’t know, is the answer. The latter, probably, because I don’t get to decide what I put into the stone, the sketches do that. So, the man who does the sketches is the artist, and I’m only there to do the chisel-work. But I’ve met the men who do the sketches, and if they’re artists, the word doesn’t mean what you and I think it does. For the most part they’re junior clerks in the Ceremonies department, and they get the job because the senior clerk who’s supposed to do it can’t be bothered. So they keep their eyes open on the way to work in the morning, and memorise the composition of the famous masterpieces of yesteryear they pass in the street, and that’s what they scratch in the clay for me to copy. I think the word I’m groping for is tradition; certain groupings and shapes are handed down from one generation to the next (like catching a cold, I guess) and we chisel-monkeys do as we’re told, or else. And gradually, those groupings and shapes come to mean something. They can’t help it, when so many thousands of people look at them every day of their lives. The composition—the way the King stands, the way the dead nomads are heaped up round him, the way he grips the rearing lion’s paw with his left hand while stabbing it with his right—acquires a symbolism, as a hundred generations take it in and their minds gradually gnaw on it, leading to an interpretation, what it all means, what it all stands for. Then it’s down to me and others like me to do the actual cutting; and we want to be known, to get ahead in the trade, so we hunt around for ways of making a slight difference. It can be inventing a new weave for the gown, or a new refinement for doing the curls of the King’s beard, or some original insight into the way muscles and sinews stiffen when drawing a bowstring, or relax in death. Whatever; the point is, we’re constantly probing and fiddling about, but within the rigid limits of the sketches, which are set (no pun intended) in stone. Which is how you get someone like me, who can give you something that’s both entirely traditional and completely new, or at least that’s what I tell you when you’re thinking of hiring me. Actually, when I’m on my own working and nobody’s peering over my shoulder breathing down my neck, I fall into a sort of trance, precisely halfway between divine inspiration and being bored out of my skull, and I only really see what I’ve done when I step back at the end of the day and look at it. I guess the lions and the nomads just happen. They seem to grow of their own accord out of the stone, which is very obliging of them.

  So I spent the next four months trapped like a fly in amber in the three or so hours it took to fight the Battle of Dylaxa; and when it was all finished and I stepped back, I told myself, not so bad, after all. For once, I’d managed a pretty decent Great King. His face was completely calm as his massively powerful arms drew the bow or wielded the sword, and all around him the dead and dying nomads sprawled and writhed and lay crumped and twisted. I put in nine horses, one more than the sketches called for, but nothing says movement like a horse, so I felt the indulgence was justified. I realised I’d put across the message that the world is in flux, constantly moving, changing, rearing up in your face and plunging down in death throes, but the King is always there, right in the middle of things, defining the centre; calm, strong, in control, victorious. I’m not saying I couldn’t have said it rather better with lions, but the customer is always right.

  The supervisor came along about an hour after I’d sent to let him know it was finished. He stood back and looked at it for about five heartbeats. “That’s fine,” he said. “Make sure it’s all dusted off ready for the painters.”

  * * *

  And that’s the really stupid thing about what I do. People like my work because it’s so lifelike. My arms and legs and horses and lions are so real, or so they say. But there’s absolutely nothing special about a real arm or a real horse or a real dead body. You can see a hundred of them between Temple Bar and Foregate any day of the week. My job is to absorb all this dull, boring real stuff and take your breath away by reproducing it in stone—so it’s just a conjuring trick, a novelty, a gimmick. But I take all this dull, boring real stuff and with it I say something that’s so important, the King pays a vast sum of money to have it said. And maybe what the King wants and needs to have said isn’t—how shall I put this?—necessarily the absolute unvarnished truth; not in the imperfect sense that you and I understand the term. Only, by the time I’ve finished saying it, it is. Which is why I earn such good money, and why you need people like me; because there are some things that need to be made true, if we’re all to go on living without scaring ourselves to death.

 

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