The big score, p.8
The Big Score, page 8
part #1 of Saloninus Series
The title of the paper was; On The Authorship of The Plays of Saloninus.
Marvellous effort, though I do say so myself. Segipert began by posing the obvious question. Was it really credible that an incorrigible small-time thief and confidence trickster could have written the plays that bear his name, not to mention the philosophical treatises, scientific works and musical compositions? Segipert freely admitted that he wasn’t qualified to discuss science, philosophy or music, so he’d concentrated his attention on the plays, a subject he knew something about.
In the first part of the essay, he collated vocabulary and imagery that proved that the author of the plays must have had extensive first-hand knowledge and experience of royal courts, diplomacy and the business of government. Saloninus, he pointed out, had none of these, apart from the circumstances of his disastrous first marriage, which were hardly conducive to absorbing a detailed understanding of such issues.
Next he examined various documents written by what he called the historical Saloninus, the man wanted by the authorities in practically every jurisdiction on Earth. To these he applied various philological and metrical tests, from which he drew the inevitable conclusion that Robur wasn’t even the historical Saloninus’ first language. When he applied the same tests to the plays, he found that not only was the author a native Robur speaker, he was also from one of the three northern provinces of Meturene—the dialectic and syntactical signatures were unmistakeable. Saloninus, the historical Saloninus, had never been anywhere near northern Meturene in his life, as witness the fact that there were no outstanding warrants for his arrest in that jurisdiction.
There followed a summary of the known facts about the life of the historical Saloninus, with particular emphasis on where he was known to have been at the time the plays were composed. In prison; on a prison galley in the middle of the Aelian Sea; a thousand miles away on the borders of the Echmen empire. Unless he had an identical twin brother or wings like a bird, it was simply impossible for him to have written at least four of the twenty-seven plays attributed to him.
Therefore, Segipert argued, Saloninus did not write the plays. In which case, who did?
I WAITED. THEN I waited a bit more. After that, all I could do was wait.
Four and a quarter million angels. More money than anyone could ever spend, or need, or even want. I could imagine my partner ripping me off if it was just a single lousy million. Suppose you split that fifty-fifty. You might feel that extreme bad luck could intervene and wipe you out of a mere five hundred thousand. You might build a city with it, and then there might be an earthquake, the ground opening and swallowing it up. Stuff happens. You’d want to hang on to the whole million, just in case. But four million; four and a quarter. Just the quarter would be a bigger score than anything I’d ever played for in my whole life.
Maybe we should have discussed it before she went to the auction, leaving me behind. I should have said to her, straight out; I know you'll double-cross me, and that’s fine. After all, the bare bones of the scam were your idea, you did a lot of the work and I did make one tiny mistake, so it’s only fair that you should get, say, sixteen-seventeenths of the take. But would it kill you to spare me just one lousy seventeenth? It would make me so happy, and think how virtuous and honest it’d make you feel.
I waited, but she didn’t show. It won’t hurt, I told myself, to wait just a little bit longer. That’s one thing you learn when you're dead. Patience.
THEREFORE, SEGIPERT ARGUED, Saloninus did not write the plays. In which case, who did?
We have already established, he continued, a number of facts about the true author. He was born and raised in northern Meturene, he was a man of good family, he enjoyed a political or diplomatic career. Already, the field of potential candidates has shrunk to a mere half dozen. Five of them we can safely discount, for a variety of reasons. The sixth—the only possible contender—is Gilifred, Margrave and hereditary Elector of Stammen.
Consider the facts. Gilifred (nicknamed the Frogmouth) was born at the castle of the Stammenburg on the border between the central and eastern provinces of northern Meturene. He was educated at the university of Felsen—of which more later—and thereafter embarked on a period of service as the Imperial ambassador to Blemmya. On his return he retired to his extensive estates, where he lived out the rest of his life. He died— coincidence?—six months before the historical Saloninus.
It is regrettable, Segipert went on, that the main thing for which Gilifred is remembered today is his appearance. The Stammen jaw had been a distinguishing feature of his father’s family for seven generations. The Lysacht nose, inherited from his mother, Adiol of Lysacht, was always equally prominent. Together, the effect was unfortunate. Fiercely conscious of his disadvantage, Gilifred was throughout his life a solitary, private man, becoming more reclusive as he grew older and the stigmata of his heritage grew more pronounced. He did his duty to his country and his emperor to the best of his abilities as ambassador, but his extreme self-consciousness made him diffident and somewhat remote; a man unable to express himself by conventional means, cut off from the normal society of his equals, perforce an observer rather than a participant; a prisoner of his own body, with no option but to spend most of his life trapped in his own company. He never married. Birth and breeding urged him to distinguish himself, as his forefathers had so spectacularly done in every field of human endeavour. The same thing, the visible legacy of his ancestry, prevented him from doing so. Inevitably, such a man would have to find an outlet, a way of making his mark on the page of history. The desire for fame and glory would have no appeal to a scion of the legendary house of Stammen. Money could not possibly have interested him. But achievement; he would have felt it as a burning physical need. He must achieve, or die. And, since every other avenue was closed to him, where else could he turn but the arts?
Here, once again, his ancestry and family pride at first seemed to thwart him. An Elector of the Empire, writing plays for the public stage; unthinkable. Very well; if he was to fulfil his destiny, he must do so secretly, under an assumed name. Furthermore, there must be no possibility whatever of his secret being revealed. Let it be known that he was dabbling in such things and all his achievements would instantly turn to shame. A dreadful dilemma for a sensitive, tortured man.
At some point, therefore, he will have remembered a chance encounter from his student days. There is firm documentary proof that, while he was a student at Felsen, the historical Saloninus also resided in the town. They both frequented the same inn; we have a sutler’s bill, for fortified wine and herrings, addressed to the young margrave; an injunction taken out by the landlord barring the historical Saloninus from his premises on account of breakages and obnoxious behaviour. The two men, therefore, met. Quite possibly, the older man’s outrageous conduct, specious glamour and catchpenny wit impressed itself on the impressionable mind of the shy young nobleman. From these facts it is but a short step to an agreement between them, a deadly secret that both would carry to the grave. Gilifred would write plays; Saloninus would pass them off as his own and see that they were produced.
A plausible hypothesis, but can it be proved? Yes, said Segipert, it could, and beyond all reasonable doubt. By good fortune, a number of works from Gilifred’s pen survive, preserved in the family archives, which on his death and the extinction of his direct line passed into the custody of the monks of the Studium. They are slight enough, very limited in scope; letters to his father and a cousin; essays on philosophy, theology and the humanities, written while a student; a slim volume, in blank verse, on hare-coursing. But the most rigorous linguistic, grammatical, metrical and stylistic analysis proves beyond any possibility of a question that the man who wrote them also wrote the plays. All the most reliable indicia—use of subordinate clauses, incidence of the double caesura, frequency of hapax legomena (here followed thirty-six pages of detailed philological evidence, in paralysing detail)—point to the same conclusion Gilifred of Stammen was the true Saloninus.
We are on firm enough ground when we speculate as to the mechanics of their collaboration. Gilifred sent manuscripts to Saloninus, who copied them out in his own semi-literate handwriting and sold them to theatrical managers. In consequence, Saloninus enjoyed his undeserved moment in the sun, while his noble patron had at least the private satisfaction of knowing that, like his forefathers, he had made no small contribution to the wellbeing of all mankind—
THE FIRST THING they take you to see in Apaogoa City is the statue. I went there about fifteen years ago, just to see it—mostly to see it (at that time there was no extradition treaty between Apagoa and the Empire)—and yes, I was impressed.
The statue is fifty feet tall. A woman stands with her arms by her side, looking down from a mountaintop onto the city below. The locals tell you that they don’t know who she is, but she’s waiting for the world to end.
Clearly a patient woman, because she was there long before the city, which is relatively recent, though built on ruins built on ruins built on ruins... People have lived there for a very, very long time, but not the same people. When I was there, someone had just dug a well. The story was, the well-sinkers were about a hundred and sixty feet down when they came up against what seemed to be solid rock. It was the flat roof of a building. They broke through and realised that their fragile wicker cage was dangling inside a large chamber. Their lamps flashed off gold and silver, but too far away for them to see. They scrambled back up to the surface, got an armful of better lamps, and went down again. They saw the interior of a vast temple, its walls covered with gilded mosaics, its roof-beams supported by exquisite marble, porphyry and alabaster columns. Above a solid gold altar they saw an icon, ten times life size; a mother and child of such transfixing beauty that none of them were able to eat or sleep for days afterwards. They saw inscriptions on the walls, in some sort of hieroglyphic script, hundreds of thousands of words miraculously preserved for who knew how many centuries, representing who knew what sublime and ineffable truths. They saw chests, coffers, reliquaries, pyxes and caskets of gold, silver and ivory, all intact, their seals unbroken. Even the silk hangings around the altar and the gorgeous cloth-of-gold hassocks were perfectly preserved. It was, they later agreed, like a vision of Paradise, and worth an absolute fortune.
They hauled up their basket to the place where they’d smashed through the roof, carefully replaced the fragments of slab and sealed them with lead. Then they rushed into the city to tell various business associates of theirs what they’d found.
It took them a while to raise the sort of capital and make the sort of deal that was needed to do their discovery justice, so it was several weeks before they were able to return. They broke the seals, removed the pieces of slab, lit their lamps and lowered their basket. They went down about six feet, and hit water. The whole place had flooded.
Learned men from the university eventually came up with an explanation. It was something to do with air pressure, the weight of a hundred and sixty feet worth of stone and rubble, the disturbance caused by breaking the roof, a change in the direction of a subterranean watercourse, a little shifting and settling; at some point since the temple was lost and buried one tiny crack in the temple wall, with all that pressure behind it. All good, valid science, I have no doubt. Anyway, that was that. The short version of the story is that a number of men went to dig a well, and they succeeded. They didn’t get to achieve the big score, but then again, nobody ever does.
(THE SCHEME WAS, as I explained to her after the Duke’s men had let her go, brilliant, foolproof and simple. If the play wasn’t by Saloninus, it had to be by someone else. Someone better. Someone worth even more money.
The problem wasn’t with the play, or the manuscript. It was the provenance that was no good. But without a provenance, nobody would give her sixpence for it. So we needed another provenance. She had already committed herself to one version of her dealings with Saloninus, which had been proved to be a lie. So we needed a reason for that lie which would make her a credible witness once again.
Easy as falling off a log.
Bear in mind that I first met her, all those years ago, in the Boar’s Head tavern in Schanz, where she was working in the hospitality and entertainment sector. She introduced me to a rich and spectacularly ugly undergraduate who was looking for someone to ghostwrite some things for him—essays, letters home begging for money to pay off his debts, that sort of thing. As it happens, I knew him slightly. Everybody in Meturene (where I was born and grew up; never been back since) knew Pigface by sight, and I’d actually spoken to him, begging him not to send my father to the slate quarries for poaching two rabbits. But I forgave him. I even knocked him up a mock-epic about hunting for some dinner-party entertainment he was organising. He was an idiot but we got on quite well together. He paid my bar bills, and gave her a small gold brooch with a tiny chip of genuine ruby.
All of that is true; but the truth gets lost and buried, and when eventually it’s dug up again, sometimes it needs to be cleaned and carefully restored, like a neglected work of art. The bit we restored was the bit where she and Gilifred remained friends throughout his life; she knew his dark secret but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged it out of her while he was still alive. So, when desperate poverty forced her to sell her most treasured possession, the play he’d written for her, she kept up the pretence that it was by Saloninus. The mistake she made was trying to give it a fake provenance by linking it to the letter the historical Saloninus had sent her, enclosing a sonnet—by Gilifred, of course, but Saloninus had shamelessly copied it out and passed it off as his own. Quite rightly, her attempt at fraud had been frustrated by the Duke’s scholars, though of course they only grazed the surface, so to speak. But when Segipert’s paper was published and everybody knew the secret, what possible harm could it do finally to tell the whole, unblemished truth?)
AFTER I’D BEEN waiting for a very long time, some steelnecks came and arrested me, acting on information received from a lady, whose name (quite properly) they declined to reveal. They accused me of being Saloninus. I can’t be, I told them, he’s dead. Prove you’re not him, they said. Prove I am him, I replied. Eventually they let me go. While they were at it, they gave me some very wise, valuable advice. Leave town, they said.
SUICIDE IS GETTING to be a habit with me. Unlike most habits, though, I believe it’s good for me. I killed Saloninus’ body to escape my enemies. I killed his immortal soul, his deathless name, his glory, to be rid of her. Small price to pay.
We’re bilingual in Mesurene, even the country people. And, before my death, I wrote twenty-three plays. Even when I lie, I tell the truth. And when I’m telling the truth, I’m generally lying.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, but at least I have an opportunity I haven’t enjoyed before. I can, if I so choose, go away and leave myself behind; crucified, dead and buried. And if that's not the big score, I don’t know what is.
K. J. Parker, The Big Score
