So; being Saloninus, as far as I’m concerned, is about reacting desperately to desperate situations. I have this theory about, among other things, coal. I believe that what we call coal is in fact the decomposed compost formed by billions and billions of leaves, which fell long ago from forests long since cleared away; coal is just leaf-mould, compressed over inconceivably long periods of time by the weight of the layers of its own self above it, until it’s compacted and squashed almost as hard as stone, made brittle, dry and extremely combustible. There’s also evidence to suggest, though I won’t bore you with the details, that if you compress the compressed coal long enough and hard enough, that’s what makes diamonds. It’s just a theory, and I don’t suppose you’re all that interested. I only mention it because, if it’s true, it’s a good way to describe the process of being Saloninus. A lot of stuff falls on me from a great height, until the sheer weight of fallen stuff concentrates me very hard indeed, and one of the by-products is flawless gems of great value.

  “OF COURSE YOU need me,” she told me. “It just won’t work otherwise."

  It’s all a matter, she explained as to an imbecile, of authenticity. You’re dead, she pointed out. A freshly-written manuscript, with the ink barely dry, would naturally be taken as a forgery, a blatant attempt to cash in on the latest collecting craze—

  “But it’d be genuine,” I said.

  “Being genuine doesn’t matter,” she said patiently. “You can be as genuine as a new-laid egg and people will just laugh at you. You’ve got to look genuine.”

  “Ah."

  “That’s different. That takes a lot of work.”

  She knows what she’s talking about, trust me. So I paid attention.

  In order to look genuine, she said, a thing’s got to be just right. It’s got to be written on the right paper in the right ink, with the right amount of fraying and discoloration, with the right number of spelling mistakes, crossings out, illegible words, whatever. It’s got to be—well, right. And right, in this context, means it’s got to be what people expect it to be.

  “But I’ve only been dead, what, nine months. So it doesn’t have to be very old—”

  She shook her head, and I realised I was being stupid. “It’s got to look like the other manuscripts,” she said, “the ones that are proved to be genuine, because their provenances are above suspicion. Otherwise the buyers won’t want to take the risk.”

  “But surely,” I said, “the actual play. The words themselves.”

  Uh-huh. “You don’t understand,” she said. “The thing of it is, Saloninus is a genius, everybody knows that, but nobody really knows why. Or how, rather. Nobody knows how he does it, or else they’d all be doing it themselves. But about a million people have tried to write like him—”

  “Excuse me, but what’s with the third person?”

  She scowled at me. “It’s easier for me, with you sitting there. A million people have tried to write like him but they can’t quite do it. It’s that indefinable something.”

  “My point exactly."

  “No, you’re being stupid, you don’t get it. Nobody else can quite do it, but about a million people can get very close. It’s a tiny margin, thin as a razor, but so’s the difference between being alive and being dead. And nobody’s going to bet two million angels on their ability to assess a tiny margin. They say, this reads like Saloninus, but what if I'm wrong? What if I’m too stupid to tell the difference? So instead they go by the handwriting and the age of the paper and the composition of the ink, and most of all by the provenance. Which,” she added with a sunrise grin, “is why you need me.”

  The penny dropped. I once calculated that a falling object accelerates by a fixed ratio of thirty-two feet per second per second; so, the further it falls, the harder it hits when it lands. This penny must’ve fallen a very long way.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Exactly. I sold that silly poem of yours and they bought it because everybody knows we used to be lovers—”

  “But we—”

  "Everybody knows,” she repeated firmly. “The provenance was impeccable. So, if you gave me a poem, why not a play?”

  Valid point. You know when you’re driving a cart through the long grass and you run into a big stone you never guessed was there. She’d got me.

  “The reason we’re here,” she said, in her dove-like cooing voice, “is because— All right. Guess who bought the Philemon manuscript.”

  “No idea.”

  “The Duke,” she said. “Who also bought your crummy sonnet. He’s a collector. He’s the collector. His idea is to build up a massive collection of all the most important manuscripts ever, so that when he’s dead people will call him Sighvat the Learned or Sighvat the Wise instead of that bastard Sighvat. We’re here so that I can sell him the play. Which he’ll buy from me, because he’s already bought one absolutely genuine Saloninus manuscript from me, so he knows it’s all right.”

  I felt like I did the first time I saw the pea emerge from under the wrong shell. “I get you,” I said.

  “Of course,” she went on, “before he actually parts with the money he’ll have it gone over by experts. Handwriting experts, manuscript experts, historians, scholars and literary critics, the whole nine yards. So it’s got to be perfect.”

  “Well, it will be, won’t it?”

  She sighed. “You obviously don’t understand the first rule of forgery and faking. For a fake to be accepted as genuine, it’s got to be better than the original. Not almost as good, not close enough for country music; better. That's always worked for me.”

  I lifted my head and looked at her. “Better?”

  PERFECTION. THAT OLD thing.

  We touched on this earlier. Perfection, so they taught me at the seminary, is an attribute unique to the Divine. Only the Invincible Sun is perfect. Our path to salvation is to imitate the divine, but it’s an unattainable ambition, a hiding to nothing. So, you can be like me and refuse to play a game where you’re not allowed to win, or you can spend your life trying, because success doesn’t matter, trying does.

  In my defence I’ve never tried to write the perfect play, symphony, meditation, homily, equation or treatise. I know I can’t do it, because it can’t be done. I’ve come close, but so does the man who jumps off a high tower aiming for the three-foot square well of deep water two hundred feet below' him. He misses, by a matter of a few inches, and they scrape what's left of him off the flagstones. A nine is a nine is a nine, and when you need to score ten, it's completely useless. The smaller the margin by which you miss, the worse you feel.

  I don’t aim at the ten. I don't aim at all. I just close my eyes and relax my fingers. And, by and large, I haven’t done so terribly badly. With my eyes shut, I outscore everyone else. Comparative merit, as opposed to absolute, is good enough for me. The problem arises when you ask me to compete against myself.

  I’d far rather you asked me to create something perfect. At least I’d know what the outcome would be, which would save the anxiety and the stress, and there’s always a chance of getting on a side-bet that I’d fail. But ask me to outdo myself—see above, under archery. In order to do that, I’d need to know how I do this stuff in the first place; what that tiny margin between me and everyone else actually is. Know your enemy; it’s the golden rule of competition. But the one competitor you can’t watch like a hawk is yourself. I can tell you in exquisite detail how Theudahad and Simmacho and Notker and Ellaeus wrote plays, their various tricks and devices, the second-act reveal, Simmacho’s jar on the mantelpiece, the double peripateia, the third-act syncopated false ending. Ask me about me; not a clue. I just sit there gnawing the end of my pen and let the characters do the work.

  “THIS IS TRIPE,” she told me.

  “I know,” I said.

  She was getting impatient. She was just back from a morning hanging round at the Duke’s court, where it was getting harder each day to fend off the Duke’s frantic enquiries about the genuine Saloninus manuscript she claimed to have. “If it goes on much longer, he’ll send someone to burgle the house,” she said.

  "Tell him it’s in a safe place.”

  “He knows that’s not true. He owns all the safe places, banks, temples, abbey treasuries, he knows it’s not in any of them. It’s getting embarrassing. He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but sooner or later he’s going to start suspecting something.”

  I sighed. The play wasn’t going well. I was trying too hard, and I kept getting in the way. There was only one thing I could do, so I did it. I got up, crossed to the fire and shoved my manuscript in among the glowing embers.

  “Well, that was melodramatic,” she said, as the paper blossomed into flame. “Now what?”

  “Now I start again,” I said. “New plot, new characters, everything.”

  “Fine.”

  I sat down and let my head sink into my hands. "As it happens,” I said, “I do have another idea at the back of my mind.”

  She poured herself a large drink. “Go on.”

  “There’s this prince,” I said. “He’s lounging about feeling vaguely discontented when suddenly his father’s ghost pops up. I was murdered, the ghost said, by my brother; you know, the one who subsequently married your mother and siezed [sic] the throne. Avenge me.”

  I looked at her. “And?” she said.

  “The prince avenges him.”

  “And?”

  "That’s it.”

  She put down her drink. “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, what about the sub-plot?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “Love interest?”

  “No.”

  “Oh come on," she said. “You've got to have a love interest. And a feisty, kick-ass heroine. It’s the law.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s a girl, but he’s not in love with her."

  “For crying out loud. So what happens?”

  “He sees the ghost. After a while, he kills his uncle. Curtain.”

  “That’s it?"

  “There’s a certain amount of internal debate about morality and the nature of human existence.”

  She curled her lip. “Padding.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing. It's the stuffing people like, not the chicken.”

  “Padding,” she repeated grimly. “No, what you’ve got there is Act One, Scene One and Act Five, Scene Six. Now go away and figure out the rest of it.”

  She was beginning to annoy me. “Who’s writing the bloody thing, you or me?”

  “You know your trouble? You haven’t got a clue. You're not just clueless, you're a bottomless pit down which clues fall and are utterly lost for ever. You can’t write that. It’s garbage.”

  IT’S A PROBLEM I have. I tease people.

  The problem isn’t so much the teasing as the corners I back myself into as a result. Having pitched her the outline of what would obviously turn out to be the worst, most boring play in the history of the drama, I was now committed to writing it, or else face her wrath for wasting precious time by burning two-thirds of a play that could’ve been fixed with rewrites and judicious cutting. The burning, of course, wasn’t the tease. I had to do that, or else I’d have carried on tinkering with the stupid thing when it was obviously dead.

  But I’ve found, on the rare occasions when I’m having difficulties with something, that it often helps to make it harder still. It concentrates the mind, piles on the dead leaves and narrows the focus. Having created for myself the once and future piece of shit, I now began to see its possibilities.

  At the very least, I had a character I could listen to. When he first comes on, he’s feeling rather like I was feeling at that moment; depressed, miserable, resentful, angry. Then enter the ghost, who immediately multiplies his troubles by a thousand. I paused and listened, and my prince started talking to me.

  I listened. I may have chewed the end of my pen a bit. And then it was finished.

  AS SOON AS my work ended, hers began. There was nothing I could do to help except keep out of her way, so I sat in a chair and watched. There’s something about watching a true master at work that really gets me, especially when I’m not seeing it in a mirror.

  We’d figured out that I must have written the play about twelve years earlier, about the same time as the sonnet. In which case, I’d written it in Ap’Escatoy, when I was living in a room over a stable on North Street. Important; because the kind of paper they use in Ap’Escatoy is made from reed pulp, not boiled-rag mush. It’s a different colour, the fibres are coarser, and ink doesn’t soak into it in the same way. If we used rag paper it wouldn’t be absolutely fatal, since it was conceivably possible that I'd written the play on imported paper, maybe a supply I’d brought with me, but it was just the sort of thing that raises an expert’s hackles, and once he thinks there's something funny going on, he’s apt to pay closer attention.

  But it was no big deal. There’s only one kind of reed that’s suitable for making paper, but fortuitously it was the kind that grows wild along the banks of the river. The actual manufacture makes your arms ache like death but it’s scarcely catapult science. Drying the paper once we’d made it was a bit more problematic, since the sun is so much hotter down south; it gives the finished product a crisper feel, and it's shinier. We fixed that by warming it very carefully over a whale-oil stove and burnishing it with a polished steel rod.

  Next came the actual writing out—

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said.

  "Copying—”

  “Give me that.” She snatched the pen out of my hand. “And get out of my chair. No, don’t stand there, you're in my light.”

  We couldn’t use my handwriting. It’s always been poor verging on catastrophic, though I’m used to that, but I hadn’t realised it had changed over the last twelve years, not till she told me to write something, and then showed me an old letter (the one enclosing the sonnet). I saw what she meant. It was only a slight difference—a bit more rounded, a bit more slipshod—but if you knew what you were looking for, you could see it. And there was no way I’d be able to imitate it. She was going to have to do that. Just as well she’s the greatest living expert.

  “And I’ll do it much faster than you could," she told me, as her hand scuttled sideways across the page like the world’s daintiest crab. “That’s the trick, go fast. It’s when you stop to think that it goes blue on you.”

  I sat and watched her for a long time. Then she called me over. “I need you to sweat,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You sweat when you write. Buckets. Didn’t you know that?"

  No, but I didn’t say anything. “So what?”

  “I need a couple of drops on this page. And I don’t sweat.”

  Now that I could attest to. “Can’t you—?”

  “No. You need the real thing. Salt solution ages differently, it’s the wrong colour.”

  So I had to go outside, in the freezing cold, and run round and round the block. “Is that the best you can do?”

  “On demand? Yes.” I captured a little sweat off my forehead on the tip of my fingernail and trickled it onto the page where she showed me. “That’s not quite right,” she said. “That’s a dribble, not a drop. A drop’s round, and that’s more pear-shaped. Still, it’s done now.”

  It was strange to see my words being written out in my handwriting by someone else. It would probably have been slightly easier if it had been a stranger rather than someone I knew so well. I offered to dictate to her so she wouldn't have to keep looking from one page to another, but she said no, that would actually make it harder and slow things up. I wasn’t sure I liked that. It would have been nice to have played some part in the process. As it was, it felt like I was watching my identical twin brother screwing my wife.

  THE THIRD, NO, sorry, the fourth time we worked together, we did what lovers do, up to a point. Between us we created a new life.

  The impetus or motivation was a strip of second-rate pasture on the south-facing slopes of the Blackmoor hills, about fifteen miles west of Bine Sauton. When I went to look at it, there was nothing there except a vast, billowing tangle of briars, so tall they choked the few maiden birches and withies; but the underlying soil was sandy loam, and you only get thick briars on good, fertile ground. My guess was that it had once been a vineyard, that if it hadn't it should have been, and that if you found the right buyer, it was worth a great deal of money.

  And nobody owned it. I went round asking the locals, and they all shrugged and said, nobody. The district had once been government land, parcelled out to military veterans as their pension, but this particular bit I had my eye on wasn’t shown on the government distribution plan in the archive at Bine; nor did it show up on any of the tithe maps at the manor court at Cophis, where the local big house used to be, before it burned down. It quite genuinely didn’t belong to anyone.

  This sort of thing does happen, very occasionally. Government land gets that way when an estate gets confiscated, for treason or some other major felony; and where you have government action you get government clerks, and for some reason the government doesn’t invariably hire the brightest and the best. Mistakes happen, bits get left off, red lines get drawn on plans with a thick brush (and the width of a brush-stroke, to scale, can be as much as a quarter of an acre). My vineyard was probably someone’s momentary lapse of attention. It didn’t belong to anybody, and Nature abhors a vacuum.

  Since I really didn’t want to spend the next ten years digging up bramble roots, I decided to sell it. In order to do that, however, I needed to be able to prove legal title. That meant documents. Documents meant a forger. And only the very best would do for the young, stupid Saloninus.

 

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