Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  The handwriting was different; it was, in fact, practically illegible, all spikes and cramped squiggles, not the fluent, graceful hand of a clerk. It was a brief note, an unaccountable impulse frozen in ink, like a fly trapped in amber; are you, it asked, that boy who used to stare at me every evening when I was a hostage in Civitas Vadanis? I’ve often wondered what became of you; please write to me. And then her name; or he assumed it was her name, rather than two superimposed clawmarks.

  It had taken him a long time to reply, during which he considered a wide range of issues: the possibility of a trap designed to create a diplomatic incident, the real reason he’d never married, the paradox of the atrocious handwriting. Mostly, however, he hesitated because he didn’t know the answer to the question. He remembered the boy she’d referred to, but the memory brought him little except embarrassment. He thought of the boy’s strange, willful isolation, his refusal to do what was expected of him, his reluctance to ride to the hunt with his father; he resented all the opportunities the boy had wasted, which would never come again.

  So; the correct answer would be no, and the proper course of action would be to ignore the scribbled note and the breach of protocol it represented, and forget the whole matter. That would have been the right thing to do. Luckily, he had the sense to do the wrong thing. The only problem now was to decide what he was going to say.

  He could think of a lot of things, enough for a book; he could write for a week and only set out the general headings. Curiously, the things he wanted to write about weren’t anything to do with her. They were about him; things he’d never told anybody, because there was nobody qualified to listen. None of those things, he knew, would be suitable for a letter from one duke to another duke’s wife. So instead he sat down one morning in the upper room with no windows, and tried to picture the view from the battlement above the gatehouse, looking west over the water-meadows toward the long covert and the river. Once he’d caught the picture, flushed it from his mind and driven it into the nets of his mind’s eye, he thought carefully about the best way to turn it into words. The task took him all morning. In the afternoon he had meetings, a lawsuit to hear, a session of the greater council postponed from the previous month. That evening he tore up what he’d written and started again. He had no possible reason to believe that she’d be interested in what he could see from his front door, but he worked through four or five drafts until he had something he was satisfied with, made a fair copy, folded it and sent for the president of the Company of Merchant Adventurers. To make his point, he entrusted the request for a meeting to six guards, suggesting they deliver it some time around midnight.

  The wretched woman came, fully expecting to die, and he asked her, as sweetly as he could manage, to do him a favor. Members of her company were forever popping (good choice of word) to and fro across the border — yes, of course there was an embargo, but there wasn’t any need to dwell on it; would it be possible, did she think, for one of them to pass on a letter to one of her Eremian colleagues? It was no big deal (he said, looking over her head toward the door, outside which the armed guards were waiting) but on balance it’d probably be just as well if the whole business could be treated with a certain amount of the businesslike discretion for which the company was so justly famous. And so on.

  The woman went away again, white with fear and secretly hugging herself with joy at securing a royal mandate to smuggle at will across the border; a month later, she came back with a letter. She was, she stressed, only too pleased to be able to help; while she was there, however, there were one or two silly little things she’d like to mention, if he could spare the time. Luckily, she had the sense not to push her luck too far. He agreed; the mechanism was set up.

  He never knew when she was going to write. He always replied at once, the same day, canceling or forgetting about all other commitments. Letter days were long and busy. First, he would read it, six or seven times, methodically; the first reading took in the general tone and impression, each subsequent reading going deeper. Next, he would think carefully about everything she’d said, with a view to planning the outline of his reply. The actual writing of it generally took the afternoon and most of the evening, with two pauses in which he’d read her letter again, to make sure he’d got the facts and issues straight. Last thing at night, he’d read the letter and his reply over once more, and make the fair copy. From start to finish, sixteen hours. It was just as well he was used to long periods of intense concentration.

  Valens reached out slowly toward the letter on the table, like the fencer in First advancing on an opponent of unknown capacity. This might, after all, be the letter that said there would be no more letters, and until he’d looked and seen that it wasn’t, he daren’t lower his guard to Third and engage with the actual text. His fingers made contact, gentle as the first pressure of blade on blade as the fencers gauge each other by feel at the narrow distance. Applying a minute amount of force through the pad of his middle finger, he drew it toward him until his hand could close around it. Then he paused, because the next movement would draw him into an irrevocable moment. He was a brave man (he wasn’t proud of his courage; he simply acknowledged it) and he was afraid. Gentle and progressive as the clean loose of an arrow, he slid his finger under the fold and prised upward against the seal until the brittle wax burst. The parchment slowly relaxed, the way a body does the moment after death. He unfolded the letter.

  Veatriz Longamen Sirupati to Valens Valentinianus, greetings.

  You were right, of course. It was Meruina; fifty-third sonnet, line six. I was so sure I was right, so I looked it up, and now you can gloat if you want to. It’s simply infuriating; you’re supposed to know all about hounds and tiercels and tracking, and how to tell a stag’s age from his footprints; how was I meant to guess you’d be an expert on early Mannerist poetry as well? I’m sure there must be something you haven’t got the first idea about, but I don’t suppose you’ll ever tell me. I’ll find out by pure chance one of these days, and then we’ll see.

  I sat at my window yesterday watching two of the men saw a big log into planks. They’d dug a hole so one of them could be underneath the log (you know all this); and the man on top couldn’t see the other one, because the log was in the way. But they pulled the saw backward and forward between them so smoothly, without talking to each other (I wonder if they’d had a quarrel); it was like the pendulum of a clock, each movement exactly the same as the last; I timed them by my pulse, and they were perfect. I suppose it was just practice, they were so used to each other that they didn’t have to think or anything, one would pull and then the other. How strange, to know someone so well, over something so mundane as sawing wood. I don’t think I know anybody that well over anything.

  Coridan — he’s one of Orsea’s friends from school — came to stay. After dinner one evening, he was telling us about a machine he’d seen once; either it was in Mezentia itself, or it was made there, it doesn’t really matter which. Apparently, you light a fire under an enormous brass kettle; and the steam rises from the spout up a complicated series of pipes and tubes into a sort of brass barrel, where it blows on a thing like a wheel with paddles attached, sort of like a water-mill; and the wheel drives something else round and round and it all gets horribly complicated; and at the end, what actually happens is that a little brass model of a nightingale pops up out of a little box and twirls slowly round and round on a little table, making a sound just like a real nightingale singing. At least, that’s the idea, according to Coridan, and if you listen closely you can hear it tweeting and warbling away; but you need to be right up close, or else its singing is drowned out by all the whirrings and clankings of the machine.

  Talking of birds; we had to go somewhere recently, and we rode down the side of an enormous field, Orsea said it was beans and I’m sure he was right. As we rode by a big flock of pigeons got up and flew off; when we were safely out of the way, they started coming back in ones and twos and landing to carry on fee
ding; and I noticed how they come swooping in with their wings tight to their bodies, like swimmers; then they glide for a bit, and turn; and what they’re doing is turning into the wind, and their wings are like sails, and it slows them down so they can come in gently to land. As they curled down, it made me think of dead leaves in autumn, the way they drift and spin. Odd, isn’t it, how many quite different things move in similar ways; as if nature’s lazy and can’t be bothered to think up something different for each one.

  Another curious thing: they always fly up to perch, instead of dropping down. I suppose it’s easier for them to stop that way. It reminds me of a man running to get on a moving cart.

  I know we promised each other we wouldn’t talk about work and things in these letters; but Orsea has to go away quite soon, with the army, and I think there’s going to be a war. I hate it when he goes away, but usually he’s quite cheerful about it; this time he was very quiet, like a small boy who knows he’s done something wrong. That’s so unlike him. If there really is to be a war, I know he’ll worry about whether he’ll know the right things to do — he’s so frightened of making mistakes, I think it’s because he never expected to be made Duke or anything like that. I don’t know about such things, but I should think it’s like what they say about riding a horse; if you let it see you’re afraid of it, you can guarantee it’ll play you up.

  Ladence has been much better lately; whether it’s anything to do with the new doctor I don’t know, he’s tried to explain what he’s doing but none of it makes any sense to me. It starts off sounding perfectly reasonable — the human body is like a clock, or a newly sown field, or some such thing — but after a bit he says things that sound like they’re perfectly logical and reasonable, but when you stop and think it’s like a couple of steps have been missed out, so you can’t see the connection between what he says the problem is, and what he’s proposing to do about it. At any rate, it seems to be working, or else Ladence is getting better in spite of it. I don’t care, so long as it carries on like this. I really don’t think I could stand another winter like the last one.

  When you reply, be sure to tell me some more about the sparrowhawks; did the new one fit in like you hoped, or did the others gang up on her and peck her on the roosting-perch? They remind me of my eldest sister and her friends — Maiaut sends her best wishes, by the way; I suppose that means they want something else, from one of us, or both. I do hope it won’t cause you any problems (I feel very guilty about it all). I suppose I’m lucky; there’s not really very much I can do for them, so they don’t usually ask anything of me. I know it must be different for you; are they an awful nuisance? Sometimes I wonder if all this is necessary. After all, you’re Orsea’s cousin, so you’re family, why shouldn’t we write to each other? But it’s better not to risk it, just in case Orsea did get upset. I don’t imagine for one moment that he would, but you never know.

  That’s about all I can get on this silly bit of parchment. I have to beg bits of offcut from the clerks (I pretend I want them for household accounts, or patching windows). I wish I could write very small, like the men who draw maps and write in the place-names.

  Please tell me something interesting when you write. I love the way you explain things. It seems to me that you must see the whole world as a fascinating puzzle, you’re dying to observe it and take it apart to see how it works; you always seem to know the details of everything. When we saw the pigeons I had this picture of you in my mind; you stood there for hours watching them, trying to figure out if there was a pattern to the way they landed and walked about. You seem to have the knack of noticing things the rest of us miss (how do you ever find time to rule a country?). So please, think of something fascinating, and tell me what I should be looking out for. Must stop now — no more room.

  True enough; the last seven words tapered away into the edge of the parchment, using up all the remaining space; a top-flight calligrapher might just have been able to squeeze in two more letters, but no more.

  This isn’t love, Valens told himself. He knew about love, having seen it at work among his friends and people around him. Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied. That, he knew from her letters, was how she felt about Orsea — how they felt about each other — and so this couldn’t be love, in which case it could only be friendship; shared interests, an instructive comparison of perspectives, a meeting of minds, a pooling of resources. (She’d said in a letter that he seemed to go through life like one of the agents sent by the trading companies to observe foreign countries and report back, with details of manners and customs, geography and society, that might come in handy for future operations; who did he report to? she wondered. He’d been surprised at that. Surely she would have guessed.) Not love, obviously. Different. Better…

  He read the letter through three more times; on the second and third readings he made notes on a piece of paper. That in itself was more evidence, because who makes notes for a love letter? He’d seen plenty of them and they were all the same, all earth, air, fire and water; was it his imagination, or could nobody, no matter how clever, write a love letter without coming across as slightly ridiculous? No, you made notes for a meeting, a lecture, an essay, a sermon, a dissertation. That was more like it; he and she were the only two members of a learned society, a college of philosophers and scientists observing the world, publishing their results to each other, occasionally discussing a disputed conclusion in the interests of pure truth. He’d met people like that; they wrote letters to colleagues they’d never met, or once only for a few minutes at some function, and often their shared correspondence would last for years, a lifetime, until one day some acquaintance mentioned that so-and-so had died (in his sleep, advanced old age), thereby explaining a longer than usual interval between letter and reply. If it was love, he’d long ago have sent for his marshals and generals, invaded Eremia, stuck Orsea’s head up on a pike and brought her back home as a great and marvelous prize; or he’d have climbed the castle wall in the middle of the night and stolen her away with rope ladders and relays of horses ready and waiting at carefully planned stages; or, having considered the strategic position and reached the conclusion that the venture was impractical, he’d have given it up and fallen in love with someone else.

  He stood up, crossed the room, pulled a book off the shelf and opened it. The book was rather a shameful possession, because it was only a collection of drawings of various animals and birds, with a rather unreliable commentary under each one, and it had cost as much as eight good horses or a small farm. He’d had it made after he received the third letter; he’d sent his three best clerks over the mountain to the Cure Doce, whose holy men collected books of all kinds; they’d gone from monastery to monastery looking for the sort of thing he wanted; found this one and copied the whole thing in a week, working three shifts round the clock (and, because the Cure Doce didn’t share their scriptures, they’d had to smuggle the copied pages out of the country packed in a crate between layers of dried apricots; the smell still lingered, and he was sick of it). He turned the pages slowly, searching for a half-remembered paragraph about the feeding patterns of geese. This wasn’t, he told himself, something a lover would do.

  He found what he was after (geese turn their heads into the wind to feed; was that right? He didn’t think so, and he’d be prepared to bet he’d seen more geese than whoever wrote the book), put the book away and made his note. He was thinking about his cousin, that clown Orsea. If he was in love, he’d know precisely what he ought to do right now. He’d sit down at the desk and write an order to the chiefs of staff. They’d be ready in six hours; by the time they reached the Butter Pass, they’d be in perfect position to bottle Orsea’s convoy of stragglers up in Horn Canyon. Losses would be five percent, seven at most; there would be no enemy survivo
rs. He would then write an official complaint to the Mezentines, chiding them for pursuing the Eremians into his territory and massacring them there; the Mezentines would deny responsibility, nobody would believe them; she would never know, or even suspect (he’d have to sacrifice the chiefs of staff, some of the senior officers too, so that if word ever did leak out, it could be their crime, excessive zeal in the pursuit of duty). That was what a true lover would do. Instead, he took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote to the officer commanding the relief column he’d already sent, increasing his authority to indent for food, clothing, blankets, transport, personnel, medical supplies. His first priority, Valens wrote, was to put the Eremians in a position to get home without further loss of life. Also (added as an afterthought, under the seal) would he please convey to Duke Orsea Duke Valens’ personal sympathy and good wishes at this most difficult time.

  How stupid could Orsea be, anyway? (He took down another book, Patellus’ Concerning Animals; nothing in the index under geese, so he checked under waterfowl.) If his advisers came to him suggesting he launch a preemptive strike against Mezentia, the first thing he’d do would be put them under house arrest until he’d figured out how many of them were in on the conspiracy; if it turned out there wasn’t one, he’d sack the whole lot of them for gross incompetence; he’d have them paraded through the streets of the capital sitting back-to-front on donkeys, with IDIOT branded on their foreheads. Needless to say, the contingency would never arise. He opened the door and called for a page to take the letter to the commander of the relief column.

  It was just as well he and the Eremian Duchess were just good friends, when you thought of all the damage a lover could do in the world.