The King's Eye

On the morning the tribute came up the great stairway, Mara was supposed to be counting jars of wine.

Instead Mara was standing on a wall.

Not a high wall. Just the low mud-brick wall at the back of the archive yard, where the scribe-school pupils were not allowed to climb, from which, if you stood on tiptoe and held on to the branch of the old fig tree, you could see over the roof of the storehouse and across the whole terrace of Parsa to the Stair of the Nations.

And today the Stair was full.

They came up the stairway from the plain in a river of people that did not stop. The stairway was wide enough for ten horses side by side, and shallow, so that horses could climb it, and the people climbing it now had come from every corner of the world. Mara knew them from the carvings on the walls of the great hall, where the scribe-school master had taken the pupils once, to show them what an empire looked like. But the carvings were grey stone. These people were not grey. Medes in round felt caps. Elamites leading lions on chains, actual lions, yawning in the sunlight. Babylonians with long fringed robes and cups of silver. Bactrians with two-humped camels, the camels groaning on the steps. Indians carrying gold dust in little jars, slung from poles across their shoulders. Nubians with ivory tusks longer than a man. Arabians, Armenians, Scythians in pointed hats, Ionian Greeks with oiled hair and painted shields. Each nation with its gifts, each with its guide, each climbing the stairway towards the great audience hall, where the King's guards stood in their ranks, forty cubits high, looking down at the world coming up to meet them.

It was the New Year. The world was bringing the King his tribute.

Mara had lived on the terrace of Parsa for six years, since the day her mother had brought Mara up the long road from the village below the mountain with a bundle of clothes and a letter from the village headman, and left her at the archive gate with the scribe-school master, and walked home again without crying until she was out of sight. Six years of clay. Six years of wet tablets and the smell of the kiln, and the sharp end of a reed stylus, and Elamite signs, hundreds of them, wedges and corners and hooks, learned by heart and copied a thousand times. Six years of counting. Sheep and goats, jars of wine and sacks of barley, workers' rations and horses' fodder, everything that came into the King's storehouses and everything that went out, tallied, sealed, baked and stacked on shelves in the long dark rooms of the archive, where nobody would ever read them again.

Mara was good at it. Better than good. The master said so, grudgingly, about once a year. But in six years Mara had never once been allowed to go down the stairway to the plain, or farther than the barley fields at the foot of the terrace. The world came up the stairs to Parsa. Nobody from Parsa, it seemed, ever went down them to the world.

Mara wiped the clay from her fingers onto her tunic, out of habit, and leaned out as far as the fig branch would allow, until the bark creaked.

Mara held on to the fig branch and stared until her eyes watered.

"You," said a voice below. "On the wall."

Mara nearly fell off.

A man was standing in the archive yard, looking up. He was not tall. He wore a plain brown riding coat, dusty at the hem, and plain trousers tucked into plain boots, and a plain felt cap, and nothing on him shone. But there was a scar across his face, an old white seam running from the corner of his left eye down to his jaw, and his eyes, above the scar, were the palest Mara had ever seen in a Persian face: grey, like ash, and very still.

"Come down," said the man.

Mara came down.

"You're supposed to be counting wine," said the man. "Jars of the King's wine, from the Kamfiruz storehouses, tallied for the steward. I've just been in to see the tallies. Yours is the only one that's finished." He held up a clay tablet. Mara's tablet. Mara recognised the slightly crooked line at the top, where her stylus had slipped. "Two hundred and twelve jars received, two hundred and nine stored, three broken in the carrying. Except that your tally says two were broken in the carrying, and one was never there at all." He looked at Mara. "Why?"

Mara swallowed.

"The seal on the delivery tablet," said Mara. "It says two hundred and twelve. But the carriers' rations were for carrying two hundred and eleven. Flour and beer, one ration per jar per day, from Kamfiruz. Somebody wrote the delivery tablet after the jars arrived, not before. With an extra jar. So there was one jar that was never carried." Mara stopped, then went on, because the man was still waiting. "Somebody's selling one jar every few days from the steward's store and writing it as broken. I think."

The man was quiet for a long moment.

"You think," he said.

"I'm fairly sure."

"Have you told your master?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Mara had been asked a great many questions in scribe school, but not, until now, one Mara did not know the right answer to.

"Because once is a mistake," said Mara. "A dozen days of it is a habit. I wanted to see if it happened again before I said anything." Mara hesitated. "It did. Twice more since. One jar. Written as broken."

The man with the scar raised an eyebrow, which pulled the scar crooked.

"So you've got a dozen days."

"Three. I went back."

"Without being asked."

"Yes."

He turned the tablet over in his hands. "Careful is useful," he said. "Most people who see something wrong either shout at once or say nothing for ever. Very few go and count it twice." He did not smile. "Fewer still go and count it three times."

From beyond the storehouse roof came a great sound, a roar like the sea, and the clash of cymbals, and the long braying of horns. The tribute had reached the top of the Stair.

The man did not turn to look. He kept his pale eyes on Mara.

"Do you know who I am?" he said.

"No," said Mara. Then, looking at the plain coat and the dusty boots and the scar, and remembering a story the older pupils told in whispers, at night, about a man who came to storehouses and treasuries and satraps' palaces without warning, and read everything, and missed nothing: "Yes."

"Say it, then."

"You're the King's Eye," said Mara.

"My name is Bagadata," said the man. "And yes. When the King wants to know whether what he's told is true, he sends me to look." He put the tablet away inside his coat. "I've got two apprentices. Both older than you. Both good. Neither of them would have noticed the carriers' rations." He looked at Mara for a long time. "I'm leaving for the west in nine days. On the Royal Road. It's a long way and it's a hard road, and I can't promise you'll come home. And I don't trust you. I want that clear from the start. I don't trust anyone. Not my apprentices. Not the treasurers. Not the King's own steward, as you've just shown me." His mouth moved, very slightly, at the corner, where the scar did not reach. "But I could use someone who counts things three times."

Mara stood in the archive yard, with dust on her knees and fig leaves in her hair, while beyond the wall the whole world climbed the stairs to the Stair of the Nations.

"Think about it," said Bagadata. "Tell me tomorrow."

He walked away across the yard without looking back. And Mara climbed back up onto the wall, and held on to the fig branch, and looked out over the roofs, past the top of the Stair and the half-built hall, past the stairway full of nations, to the plain below, and the road running away across it to the west, white in the sun, until it vanished into the blue hills.

The sun went down behind the mountain. The drums stopped. One by one, the lamps came on along the palace walls, and the crowds began to wind back down the stair towards the plain and the tents and the long roads home. Mara stayed on the wall until the last of the light was gone, and the yard was dark, and the master came out with a lamp and called Mara in to supper, and still did not quite climb down.