‘Why?’
‘Someone with such a great ability but less full of herself than you could be very useful.’
‘IdrisPukke wants to meet you, and Vipond.’
Artemisia was excited by this and was not someone able to hide her enthusiasm – her eyes widened, her eyelashes, long as a spaniel’s, fluttered away as if signalling desperately to a distant shore. There was something about her; perhaps most importantly, she was not Thomas Cale. He was very sick of himself indeed. Being in the company of a sick person all the time was a strain even if you were the sick person: always feeling horrible, never wanting to go anywhere, always asleep or, when awake, wanting to go back to sleep. She liked him a great deal, which was a considerable help, as girls seemed mostly to be afraid of him or sometimes, more worryingly, they imagined that this enticingly bad reputation was a mask that could be removed by a sensitive woman to reveal the soulmate beneath. They didn’t appreciate that there are some souls, not necessarily the cruel or the bad, with which it might be better not to join.
Another thing that fascinated Cale about Artemisia was that for the first time he had met someone whose story was odder than his own. Artemisia had always been a puzzle because she was no tomboy. In fact, she had been considered the girliest of little girls – not at all like her older sister, who was notorious for her rough and noisy habits. Artemisia liked pink and feminine colours that made your eyes ache to look at them, wore so many frills and flounces that it could be hard to find the little girl hidden inside them and had a collection of red-lipped dress-me-up dolls that numbered in the hundreds. Courtiers began to notice that in the morning she would dress and undress the dolls, babbling away like the lunatic so many small children resemble, scolding her dolls for getting dirty or squabbling with each other or wearing the wrong gloves for a Tuesday – but in the afternoon she would arrange them in great effeminate phalanxes of pink and cerulean and work out the best way of slaughtering them. Soldiers in mulberry petticoats fought to the death with irregulars in lavender pastel bonnets and cavalry riding on cotton reels in bloomers coloured baby blue.
It was assumed that in time her taste for these mincingly effeminate soldiering games would fade but her interest in everything military seemed only to grow more intense the older she got. She had no interest in any form of personal violence at all. She did not want to practise with swords or knives or, God forbid, wrestle with boys like her older sister. She did not have to be ordered not to box (like her sister), any more than she had to be ordered not to fly. She was an excellent horsewoman but no one tried to prevent this because Halicarnassus was famous for its horses and riding was considered perfectly acceptable for girls.
‘You don’t know how to fight?’ Cale asked.
‘No. My arms are so weak I get out of breath lifting up a powder puff.’
‘I could teach you,’ he offered.
‘Only if you let me teach you how to wear a corset.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Not exactly at all. I don’t want to be a girl.’
‘And I don’t want to be a soldier. I want to be a general. And that’s what I am. You can carry on cutting people’s heads off and spilling their insides on the ground in great piles of giblets the size of Mount Geneva. But you don’t have to – there are plenty of people who are good at that.’
He wondered if he should tell his new friend that, without a snort of a drug powerful enough to kill, his days as a scourge of the battlefield were long gone. But he thought better of it for now. How did he know she could be trusted? However, it had to be said that something in him longed to tell her the truth.
She finished her story. She had been married off at fourteen, protesting noisily at the age of the man, his obscurity, and that where the country was flat it was too flat and where it was mountainous it was hideously so. In addition it was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. It took nearly four years of petulance and general disagreeableness before she began to appreciate her good fortune. Daniel, fortieth Margrave of Halicarnassus, was an intelligent, wise and unconventional man, though it was an unconventionality he had carefully hidden lest it frighten his family and neighbours. In addition, he adored and was amused by Artemisia rather than irritated, which he had every right to be given how awkward and rude she was to him at first. While he didn’t always indulge her, he did encourage her in her peculiar interests, in part out of affection and to win her heart and in part out of curiosity to see where it would lead. He wasn’t interested in war but he recognized his small militia was almost completely useless and so there was no harm in letting her loose on them.
Artemisia won the support of the militia, and rid herself of the officers who out of natural self-interest opposed her, by dividing the soldiers in two and offering to fight three war games. Then she bet the officers three thousand dollars she would win all three. If they lost they were to resign. She had three thousand left in her dowry (Daniel had given it back to her on their wedding day) and she used a thousand of it to bribe the militia now under her command and who, until she paid them so much money, were not very happy about it either. She had two and a half thousand men, mostly farmers and their hired workers and an assortment of brewers, bakers and metal workers. She had three months.
At first the men worked hard because they were paid to – but only on results. Each week the men were paid more but only if they ran the length of this field faster, or carried a heavy weight for longer. But she also divided them up into groups with different fierce-sounding names and dressed them in waistcoats of different colours – though wisely not the baby blue or cerulean of her childhood dolls. Anyone who failed to improve was stripped of their waistcoat publicly and thrown out. But if they subsequently passed the test they’d failed, and bettered it, they’d be reinstated. She made mistakes – but money and an apology seemed to cure everything. When the three months were up, the games began. They were rough enough, though with padded sticks instead of swords and spears, and there were many injuries. She won all three easily because of her talent but also because her opponents were made up of intelligent officers who were complacent and complacent officers who were stupid. She retained some of the former and began a further series of rough games to correct her mistakes – which she knew were many. She ordered books by great authorities on the art of war from everywhere possible – and found most of them maddeningly vague when it came to what she wanted to know: the details of how something was actually done. One bombastic authority after another would tell of, say, the night march by General A that had daringly outflanked and surprised General B – but the details of how you moved a thousand men over rocky, lousy paths without lights and without the men breaking their legs or falling over the edge of a cliff – the things you actually needed to know – were nearly always absent. What was left were just stories for children and daydreamers.
‘I still don’t understand,’ Cale said, laughing, ‘how you got to be so good. I’ve been taught to do nothing else my whole life.’
‘Perhaps I’m more talented and clever than you.’
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met anyone more talented than me.’
She burst out laughing.
‘I don’t know what’s so funny,’ he said, smiling.
‘You are. I’m not surprised nobody likes you.’
‘Some people like me. But not many, it’s true,’ he admitted. ‘So how did you do it?’
‘I played.’
‘All children do that. Even we used to play.’
‘I played a different way from everyone else.’
‘Now who’s boasting?’
‘I’m not boasting. It’s true.’