I think God had got bored by the time he came to make the Principality of Morania. It’s roughly rectangular, thirty miles north-south and twenty east-west. It has one town in the centre-north forest, named Northtown, and the capital in the centre-south plains, Morania City, so the naming people knocked off early too. Each has a river running down from the high ground in the middle, which have both been turned into ruler-straight canals because somewhere in the country’s history, somebody suspected squiggly lines might prove too interesting. One is called North River. I shall allow a degree of extrapolation to amuse my otherwise sleepy reader.

In the very centre there rises Mount Rylinkiartusaria. Oh no, wait, it’s Mount Morania. At least it’s got some pretty sweet glacial features you’d enjoy. Crap pencil sketch attached. Mount Morania has a rather underwhelming 942.7 metres elevation, which I’ve just discovered because everybody here’s apparently been too busy eating grapes and embezzling funds to be arsed before. So, now that I’ve actually achieved something with my life, I’ll crack on with the map and return home the proud hero I always knew myself to be. I expect a trumpet fanfare and one of those iced buns with the cherry on top. Ta-ta for now.

School was bad. The guild was worse. It's not that I was ungrateful for the opportunity. It's just that I would have preferred beekeeping.

It cost Father a lot to get me in, not just financially but... well, actually, just an ungodly amount of money. The Splendid Society of Cartographers is perhaps the most prestigious guild in all of western Panachia. Naturally, the students were arseholes.

Except me. I just got my head down and got to work. I mastered the surveying apparatus with ease. I achieved a guild record in my second year by assessing the length of the auditorium to nineteen decimal places. I was the only student to choose and pass the three oldest grandmasterclasses of the classics department: an A in Polyvolcanic Geobiomes, a B in Middle Fargian Landscape Representation, and an unheard-of A* in Planning Early Seventh Age Subterranean Mead Delivery Channels. The guild has a weird history.

I also didn't have a lot of fun and never once got laid. Beekeepers, on the other hand, get all the girls.

Then it was over and I was off in a carriage to my first assignment as a professional with a certificate of recommendation from the Technical Dean in one hand and a honey and liquorice tiffin in the other. If you haven't tried one you haven't lived. Again, if I'd been a beekeeper instead, I could have made my own at half the price, but that's just life.

It was a three-day ride to Morania. I slept through most of it, because I’d seen every mile so many times in atlases I didn’t need the live version with drunks and cowpats. Then we got across the border, and I headed for the big hill in the middle where I made history, and then I wrote the postcard to Father, endured a cup of mildly burnt coffee in a little stone cafe on the way down, and then I did the whole map thing and got ready for the road back. I even managed some pretty serious umming and ahhing during said cartographeering to make it seem like they needed to pay for someone to come out and draw a rectangle with a couple of names on it. I was a little bit insulted to be honest; I mean, I know it was my first commission, but Adley had graduated on the same day and he’d just stopped getting his ruler and compasses mixed up the day before the exam. Why me?

Then, moving back west across the plain plain, there followed a load of musket shots and royal escorts falling off their horses and some rough men that smelled alarmingly like goats bustled in to whisk me off to Devil knew where, and I realised why it had had to be me all along.

You see, and there’s no easy way to put this... humans complicate things. Even when they’ve named towns and rivers in the north things like Northtown and North River. A map really isn’t just a picture of the rocks and trees and fields, is it? If cartographers just made those then they’d be called artists and drink gin out of paint jars and make millions of coins and, once more, get all the girls. There’s so much opinion in maps, so much perspective and subjectivity. How big the names of the cities are, which roads you put on, which dirty farming regions to smudge out with a nice elegant compass rose. There’s a rather astounding number of ways to insult someone with a map. And, for all my technical prowess (ladies), I really was, up to that point, just drawing pictures. If only I’d had the gin too.

The sticking point in the Principality of Morania turned out to be borders. Or whether there were borders in that boring oblong which I wished with all my heart was still a boring oblong. Or if it was the Principality of Morania, or the Hovel-lands of the Weakling Prince of Morania and Mighty Mighty Northland. Either way, I’d made up my mind to ‘lose’ the fine quills and shorten those bad boys down. I wasn’t going to embarrass myself with those howlers of names no matter how many bayonets (possibly all at once) the northmen threatened to shove up my breeches.

On my five-day bonus tour of Morania, several points became clear, one after the other:

1. The country was embroiled in the bloody commotion of civil strife. This was evidenced by guns, loads of angry men marching about, angry men with guns, and several explosions much too close to my carriage, horse, then mud-caked socks that were my progressively more miserable methods of conveyance. Usually, after the explosions, men who smelled like lavender would pluck me from the clutches of the men who smelled like goats, or, for a bit of variety, men who smelled like goats would take me away from the men who smelled like lavender.

2. Morania was a beautiful place. To draw a map is always a sacrifice. A dastardly choice of what not to put in. Morania City had the finest botanical gardens I’ve ever seen. Cathedrals. Fishing lakes. Theatres. One of the streets in Northtown had a working toilet. The choices of what to put in my second map, once I deigned to bestow it upon the populace, I would leave to whoever offered me the best chocolates. Also, I promised things when big bearded men shouted at me and made me cry.

3. I was never in any real danger. In fact, I was practically a prince myself. A god of a single, pure power, an independent adjudicator who would decide once and for all where the boundaries of the warring nation lay in the year of our splenditude 1326. Both sides were extremely proficient in avoiding me in the frequent ambushes and retreats and counteroffensives to get me back. One northman even shot a particularly bothersome mosquito off my left ear at thirty paces one evening before our roadside crumpets. I determined to honour his skill by naming a future child after him. After learning his name, I quietly adjusted the offer to the naming of a goldfish, or possibly a preternaturally polite rat.

4. That the border was extremely difficult to pin down. I was hoping for some trenches or, even better, a line of little colour-coded flags I could just view from atop the shoulders of a sturdy footsoldier. Instead, I attended palace meetings, and townhall meetings, and fortress meetings, and other types of meeting too. Each time I woke up, my original geographically brilliant map would have more crude squiggles on it in more colours than I’d ever imagined. An artist could have sold it off for a year’s worth of comfy bedtimes. I couldn’t get two minutes.

5. That I was completely, totally, utterly and indisputably out of my depth; and that I really should have listened to those other teachers back at the guild that wittered on about politics; that that was what that smug nincompoop of a chief dispatcher who’d sent me out here had been trying to teach me in the first place; and that maps would have been so much better if the Knights of the Lion Shield hadn’t been left to kill off all the dragons. Then I could have spent a nice leisurely year or so mapping gravestones instead. Nice, still gravestones.

6. That no matter how much I expressed my excitement at taking up that carrot stall operator position that had just that moment opened up in my hometown, I would not be allowed to leave this blasted little warlord’s paddock of a country until my new map, complete with clear and carefully reasoned borders laying out the territories of the two factions that had torn the place asunder, were to be presented before a panel of the rulers of the neighbouring kingdoms at the summit of Mount Morania within three more days, there to declare the terms and conditions of a formal ceasefire lest the twenty-seventh annual spatula fair be unceremoniously postponed.

And that brings us to the night, the final one before my final deadline for the summit summit, in a neutral encampment at the foot of the hill, and the night upon which I started my masterwork. For all the awe-inspiring sights I had seen upon my travels, the country had taken on a darker air that evening. Peasants rattled wheelbarrows threateningly in my direction, painted with slogans about this here rock and that there duck pond that needed to be in their bit. Haggard-looking riflemen fingered their muskets fretfully from their guardposts. And from every candle-licked window of every inn of the occupied royalist village across the field, the purple faces of furious spatula salesmen glowered straight at me.

It had to be tonight. The combined forces of the bigger and more important empires and republics and Fabulous Serfs’ Democracies from all around could never save me if the fair be cancelled. So, looking up at that would-be-mount for some sort of mountainly inspiration, I took up my inks, sat down by my tent, and unrolled my parchment. The crowds chanted and jostled, and promptly the soldiers ran to see them on their way. A couple of the rowdier ones were helped on their way via twelve inches of pike shaft. And it was all for me, the guild cartographer, most important foreigner in that horrible little land for all the kings and lords present in the camp. The one who just wanted to be off for his iced bun and a nice civilised joust or maybe a beheading as a special treat. I stared and stared as the sky turned indigo. It would take me but five minutes to lay out an accurate map. But humans complicated things, indeed. I thought about my adventures of the past week: the churches and castles; glade dances in the forests; a fight in a tavern over the name of the long-dead eighth Duke of Farlingall; the near miss with the blown-up bridge once those third pretenders to lordship had announced secession of the eastern steppe. And I thought about those things that had so fascinated me as a child, before even the school that was bad but not as bad as the guild: those limitless, sweeping masses of nameless lands where no human had set foot, to north and east and south and west, as far as our imaginations went, or at least, until the mapmakers got there. And then I got to work. Because yes, humans complicated things, but it was all a matter of perspective.

Lords, Ladies, Gentlecorns, I hope this postcard finds you well. I have learned much from my survey of your admirable and esteemed nation, country, countries, fieldlets and/or prestigious piece of pebble on which you can play out your lives in contentment and prosperity. I hope you learn as much from the piece of cartography which I now present to you, as commissioned from my ever-so-important guild in order to settle the terrible and wasteful disputes which have ravaged this troubled land. All meaningful borders are marked in colour, except the boundaries of the world, which are represented by the edges of this postcard.

Half of a very confused hour went by in the mist-drenched babble of the mountain before the King of Darrowin saw that the last full stop was marked with red and green.

It was easy to get out. It’s not that people don’t understand maps, it’s that they can be read so many ways.

I’d gotten about half a mile along the grassy path that lead down into the steppe by the time my retinue noticed me missing. I was halfway along the Prince’s highway to God knew where when I was finally stopped, by a squadron of southern cavalrymen at a stake wall just before a sleepy village. My eyes were already roving the horizon beyond, taking in the trees and the rolling hills and finally the jagged edge of mountains. Real mountains. They’d be in an atlas I’d studied, probably, but I was trying not to think about it now.

“Aren’t you the map person everyone’s been fighting over?” the captain said, suspicious. “And at the hour of the council, too. My, my, wherever could you be going on the very day of your upcoming glory?”

One of his men drew his sword, stepped down amid the vapours of his horse, white in the cold morning air. “Sir, if I may be so bold, this does not bode well. He could be selling military surveys to our enemies.”

“Or collecting tribute from the barbarians for adding a few steps to their borders,” another sneered.

“Well, it’s all easily cleared up,” said the captain, his tone mocking. “No map maker would dream of coming out this way, without....?”

“Tuna sandwiches?” an eager young soldier tried.

“A map, you mongrel!” snapped the captain, and, nodding to the soldier on foot, his underling stepped forward to manhandle me.

But I already had what they were looking for ready. It was the second map I had drawn the night before, and the last map I had vowed to ever construct. A plan, really. Not the road home, because that could never be safe for my family or friends ever again. And it wasn’t secrets or treasure or anything like that. A change of scale. A focusing.

The soldier presented it to the captain. His face fell in disappointment. “A... beekeeper’s lodge? Out of honey, are we, laddie?”

“It’s for tiffin,” I replied courteously. “And if you look, I’ve even put a double bed in.”

“I see,” muttered the captain, handing back my parchment, and then, remembering his manners because I was still the cartographer, to him, “Well, it’s nothing important. Let him pass.”

Nothing important. They let me pass. And so I did. On I went, and, as I paused by the village stables to buy myself a horse, I wondered how far away those mountains on the horizon actually were. But it was only for fun. Because depending on the perspective, the answer was whatever I wanted it to be.