Hard to Be a God

Chapter 6

His shift at the prince’s bedchamber started at midnight, so Rumata decided to stop by his house to make sure everything was in order and to change clothes. The city this evening amazed him. The streets were dead silent, the taverns closed. Clusters of storm troopers with torches in their hands were standing around at the intersections, clanking their weapons. They were quiet, as if waiting for something. A number of them approached Rumata, took a good look at him, and after recognizing him, just as silently let him pass. When he was about fifty steps from his door, a group of shady characters began to trail him. Rumata stopped, clanked his scabbards against each other, and the characters fell back, but he immediately heard the sound of a crossbow being loaded in the dark. Rumata hurried onward, clinging to the walls, groped for the door, and turned his key in the lock. He remained aware of his unprotected back the entire time, and he rushed into the entrance hall with a sigh of relief.

All the servants were gathered in the entrance hall, armed as best they could be. It turned out that the door had already been tried a few times. Rumata didn’t like that. Maybe I shouldn’t go? he thought. To hell with him, the prince.

“Where’s Baron Pampa?” he asked.

Uno, extremely agitated and with a crossbow on his shoulder, answered: “The baron woke up at midday, drank all the brine in the house, and again left to make merry.” Then, lowering his voice, he informed Rumata that Kira had been very worried and had asked about the master more than once.

“All right,” said Rumata. He ordered the servants to line up.

There were six servants, not counting the cook, all of them tough and used to street brawls. They wouldn’t tussle with the gray soldiers, of course—they’d be afraid of the anger of the all-powerful minister—but they’d be able to withstand the tramps from Waga’s night army, especially since tonight the bandits would be looking for easy prey. Two crossbows, four poleaxes, heavy butcher knives, iron hats; the doors were sturdy and bound with iron, as was the custom. Or maybe he really shouldn’t go?

Rumata went upstairs and tiptoed into Kira’s room. Kira was sleeping fully clothed, curled up on the still-made bed. Rumata stood over her with a lamp. To go or not to go? He really didn’t want to go. He covered her with a quilt, kissed her cheek, and came back to his study. He needed to go. Whatever was happening, an operative had to be in the center of things. And it benefits the historians. He chuckled, took the circlet off, wiped the lens carefully with a soft piece of suede, and put it back on. Then he called Uno and ordered him to bring a military uniform and a polished brass helmet. Shivering from the cold, he pulled on a metalstrom shirt shaped like chain mail underneath his waistcoat, right over his undershirt. (The local chain mail offered decent protection from swords and daggers, but crossbow bolts punched right through it.) Tightening the uniform belt with the metallic buckles, he told Uno, “Listen, kid. You’re the one I trust the most. Whatever happens here, Kira must remain alive and well. Let the house burn down, let all the money get stolen, but you must save Kira for me. Take her away over the rooftops, down through the cellars, whatever you like, but save her. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Uno. “Maybe my master shouldn’t go today.”

“You listen to me. If I don’t come back after three days, take Kira and bring her to the saiva, to the Hiccup Forest. Know where it is? Anyway, in the Hiccup Forest you should find the Drunken Lair—it’s a hut not far back from the road. If you ask, you’ll be shown the way. Just be careful who you ask. A man called Father Cabani will be there. You’ll tell him everything. Got it?”

“Got it. Only maybe master shouldn’t go.”

“I wish I didn’t have to. I do—duty calls. Well, take care.”

He gently flicked the boy’s nose and returned his awkward smile. Downstairs, he gave the servants a short pep talk, went out the door, and found himself in the dark again. The bars clanged shut behind him.

The prince’s chambers had been poorly guarded through the ages. It’s possible that was precisely why no one ever attempted to assassinate the Arkanarian princes. And there was definitely no one interested in the current prince. No one in the world needed this sickly blue-eyed boy who resembled anyone but his father. Rumata liked the boy. His education had been woefully neglected, and therefore he was smart, wasn’t cruel, and—probably instinctively—couldn’t stand Don Reba. He liked to sing a variety of songs set to Zuren’s poetry and to play with boats. Rumata had ordered him picture books from the metropole, told him about the starry sky, and had won the boy once and for all with his tale of flying ships. For Rumata, who rarely interacted with children, the ten-year-old prince was the antithesis of every social class in this savage country. It was ordinary blue-eyed boys like this one, identical in every social class, who would grow up to be brutal, ignorant, and submissive men; and yet they, the children, showed no traces or beginnings of such rot. Sometimes Rumata thought it’d be great if all the people older than ten years of age disappeared from the planet.

The prince was already asleep. Rumata started his shift—he stood by the sleeping boy next to the departing guardsman, performing the complex motions with drawn swords required by etiquette. Then, as prescribed by tradition, he checked whether all the windows were locked, whether all the nurses were in place, and whether all the lamps were lit in all the chambers. After this, he came back to the front room, played a game of dice with the departing guardsman, and inquired how the noble don felt about what was happening in the city. The noble don, a man of great sagacity, thought very hard and conjectured that the common people were preparing to celebrate the Day of Holy Míca.

Left alone, Rumata pulled up a chair to the window, sat back, and began to watch the city. The prince’s apartments were on a hill, and during the day, you could clearly see the entire city all the way to the sea. But now, everything was sunk in darkness, and the only things visible were scattered groups of lights—the intersections at which the storm troopers were gathered with torches, waiting for a sign. The city was asleep, or pretended to be. I wonder whether the inhabitants feel something horrible looming over them tonight? Or, like the noble don of great sagacity, did they also think that someone was preparing to celebrate the Day of Holy Míca? Two hundred thousand men and women. Two hundred thousand blacksmiths, gunsmiths, butchers, haberdashers, jewelers, housewives, prostitutes, monks, money changers, soldiers, tramps, and surviving bookworms were currently tossing in bedbug-ridden, stuffy beds; sleeping, making love, recalculating profits in their heads, crying, grinding their teeth in anger or resentment. Two hundred thousand people! To a visitor from Earth, they all had something in common. It was probably the fact that almost without exception, they were not yet humans in the modern sense of the world, but blanks, unfinished pieces, which only the bloody centuries of history could one day fashion into true men, proud and free. They were passive, greedy, and incredibly, fantastically selfish. Almost all of them had the psychology of slaves—slaves of religions, slaves of their own kind, slaves of their pathetic passions, slaves of avarice. And if the fates decreed for one of them to be born or become a master, he didn’t know what to do with his freedom. He would again hurry to become a slave—a slave of wealth, a slave of outlandish excesses, a slave of his slaves. The vast majority of them weren’t guilty of anything. They were too passive and too ignorant. Their slavery was the result of passivity and ignorance, and passivity and ignorance again and again breeds slavery.

If they were all identical, there would be reason to throw up your hands and lose hope. But they were still people, the bearers of the spark of reason. And here and there in their midst, the fires of the incredibly distant and inevitable future would kindle and blaze up. They would kindle despite it all. Despite all their seeming unworthiness. Despite the oppression. Despite the fact that they were being trampled with boots. Despite the fact that no one in the world needed them, and that everyone in the world was against them. Despite the fact that at best, they could expect contemptuous, puzzled pity.

They didn’t know that the future was on their side, that the future was impossible without them. They didn’t know that in a world belonging to the terrible ghosts of the past, they were the only manifestation of the future—that they were an enzyme, a vitamin in society’s organism. If you destroy this vitamin, society will rot, and social scurvy will begin: the muscles will go weak, the eyes will lose their sharpness, the teeth will fall out. No country can develop without science—it will be destroyed by its neighbors. Without arts and general culture, the country loses its capacity for self-criticism, begins to encourage faulty tendencies, starts to constantly spawn hypocrites and scum, develops consumerism and conceit in its citizens, and eventually again becomes a victim of its more sensible neighbors. Persecute bookworms all you like, prohibit science, and destroy art, but sooner or later you’ll be forced to think better of it, and with much gnashing of teeth open the way for everything that is so hated by the power-hungry dullards and blockheads.

And no matter how much the gray people in power despise knowledge, they can’t do anything about historical objectivity; they can slow it down, but they can’t stop it. Despising and fearing knowledge, they will nonetheless inevitably decide to promote it in order to survive. Sooner or later they will be forced to allow universities and scientific societies, to create research centers, observatories, and laboratories, and thus to create a cadre of people of thought and knowledge: people who are completely beyond their control, people with a completely different psychology and with completely different needs. And these people cannot exist and certainly cannot function in the former atmosphere of low self-interest, banal preoccupations, dull self-satisfaction, and purely carnal needs. They need a new atmosphere—an atmosphere of comprehensive and inclusive learning, permeated with creative tension; they need writers, artists, composers—and the gray people in power are forced to make this concession too. The obstinate ones will be swept aside by their more cunning opponents in the struggle for power, but those who make this concession are, inevitably and paradoxically, digging their own graves against their will. For fatal to the ignorant egoists and fanatics is the growth of a full range of culture in the people—from research in the natural sciences to the ability to marvel at great music. And then comes the associated process of the broad intellectualization of society: an era in which grayness fights its last battles with a brutality that takes humanity back to the middle ages, loses these battles, and forever disappears as an actual force.

Rumata kept looking at the city, motionless in the dark. Somewhere out there, in a stinking garret, curled up on a pathetic bed, the crippled Father Tarra was burning with fever, and Brother Nanin sat by his side at a wobbly table, drunk, cheerful, and angry—finishing his Treatise on Rumors, using hackneyed phrases with relish to disguise a vicious mockery of gray life. Somewhere out there, Gur the Storyteller was blindly wandering through empty luxurious apartments, realizing with horror that despite everything, some mysterious pressure caused vivid worlds full of remarkable people and extraordinary feelings to burst into his consciousness out of the depths of his torn, trampled soul. And somewhere out there, God knows how, Doctor Budach was whiling away the night—broken down, brought to his knees, tormented but alive. My brothers, thought Rumata. I’m yours, I’m the flesh of your flesh! He suddenly felt with tremendous force that he was no god, shielding the fireflies of reason with his hands, but instead a brother helping a brother, a son saving a father.

I’ll kill Don Reba, he thought. What for? He’s killing my brothers. He knows not what he does. He’s killing the future. It’s not his fault—he’s a product of his time. So he doesn’t know it’s his fault? But does it matter whether he knows it? I know it’s his fault. And what will you do with Father Zupic? Father Zupic would give a lot for Don Reba to be killed…

You’re silent? There are a lot of people you’d need to kill, aren’t there? I don’t know, maybe there’d be a lot. One after the other. Everyone who raises a hand against the future. That’s been done already. They used poison, they threw pipe bombs. And nothing changed. No, things did change. That’s how the strategy for the revolution was created. You don’t need to create a strategy for the revolution. You just want to kill. Yes, I do. And are you capable of it?

Yesterday, I killed Doña Ocana. I already knew that I was killing her when I walked toward her with a feather behind my ear. And the only thing I regret is killing her in vain. So they’ve almost taught me. But that’s bad. That’s dangerous. Remember Sergei Kozhin? And George Lenny? And Sabine Kruger? Rumata passed a hand over his damp forehead. You keep thinking, thinking, thinking like this—and eventually you invent gunpowder…

He jumped up and opened the window. The groups of lights were now in motion, dispersing, lining up, then moving forward, appearing and disappearing between the invisible houses. Some kind of noise sounded above the city—a distant many-voiced howl. Two fires broke out and illuminated the neighboring rooftops. Something blazed up at the port. Things were developing. In a few hours he would know the meaning of the alliance between the gray army and the night army, the unnatural accord between shopkeepers and highway robbers; he would learn what Don Reba was trying to do and what new provocation he had conceived. Or, to put it simply: who was being slaughtered today. Chances were that it was the beginning of a Night of the Long Knives, which would see the destruction of a gray leadership that had gone too far, accompanied by an extermination of the barons who happened to be in town and the most inconvenient of the aristocrats. I wonder how Pampa is doing, he thought. If he’s not sleeping, he’ll fight them off.

He didn’t have the chance to finish his thought. Someone was pounding on the door with a heartrending wail of “Open up! Guardsman, open up!” Rumata threw back the bolt. A half-dressed man, blue-gray from fear, burst in, grabbed Rumata by the lapels of his waistcoat, and shrieked, trembling: “Where’s the prince? Budach has poisoned the king! Irukanian spies have started a riot in the city! Save the prince!”

This was the Minister of the Court, a foolish and highly loyal man. Pushing Rumata away, he dashed into the prince’s bedroom. Women screeched. Sweaty, jowly storm troopers in gray shirts were already trying to get through the door. Rumata drew his swords. “Back off!” he said coldly.

He heard a short, muffled scream in the bedroom behind him. Something’s not right, thought Rumata. I don’t understand a thing. He jumped into a corner and barricaded himself in with a table. Storm troopers were filling the room, breathing hard. There were about fifteen of them. A lieutenant in a tight gray uniform pushed his way to the front, his blade drawn. “Don Rumata?” he said, out of breath. “You’re under arrest. Lay down your swords.”

Rumata gave a derisive laugh, glancing at the window. “Take them,” he said.

“Get him!” the officer barked.

Fifteen well-fed bumpkins with axes weren’t too much for a man who’d mastered methods of battle that would only become known on this planet three centuries in the future. The mob pressed forward and fell back. A number of axes remained on the floor; two storm troopers were doubled over and clambering into the back rows, carefully cradling their dislocated arms. Rumata had complete mastery of the fan defense, in which attackers are faced with a solid curtain of gleaming steel, and breaking through this curtain seems impossible. The storm troopers, huffing and puffing, exchanged uncertain glances. They gave off a sharp odor of beer and onions.

Rumata pushed the table away and carefully walked to the window along the wall. Someone in the back rows threw a knife but missed. Rumata laughed again, put a foot on the windowsill, and said, “Try it again, and I’ll start chopping hands off. You know me.”

They knew him. They knew him extremely well, and not one of them budged, despite the cursing and prodding of the officer, who nonetheless was also behaving very cautiously. Rumata stood on the windowsill, continuing to make threatening gestures with his sword, and at that very moment a spear came out of the dark yard and hit him in the back. It was a terrible blow. It didn’t pierce the metalstrom shirt, but it knocked him off the windowsill and threw him onto the floor. Rumata didn’t let go of his swords, but they were now completely useless. The entire herd was immediately on top of him. Together, they probably weighed more than a ton, but they got in each other’s way, and he managed to get to his feet. He slammed his fist into someone’s wet lips, someone screamed like a rabbit under his arm, he kept smashing and smashing them with his elbows, fists, and shoulders (he hadn’t felt this free in a long time), but he couldn’t shake them off. With great difficulty, dragging a pile of bodies behind him, he walked toward the door, bending down and tearing off storm troopers who clung to his legs along the way. Then he felt a painful blow to the shoulder and fell onto his back, the crushed storm troopers flailed beneath him, but he stood up again, delivering short strikes with full force, causing the storm troopers to smack heavily into the walls, waving their arms and legs. The twisted face of the lieutenant, who was holding his unloaded crossbow in front of him, was already flickering before his eyes, but then the door opened and some new sweaty faces clambered toward him. They threw a net on him, tightened the ropes on his legs, and toppled him.

He immediately stopped struggling, conserving his strength. They trampled him with boots for some time—intently, silently, grunting avidly. Then they grabbed him by the feet and dragged him. As he was being pulled past the bedroom door, he had time to see the Minister of the Court pinned to the wall with a spear, and a heap of bloodstained sheets on the bed. So it’s a coup! he thought. Poor boy… They started dragging him down the stairs, and then he lost consciousness.