Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  In the event he slept soundly, dreaming of Manuo Crisestem being eaten alive by monkeys, so that he woke early with a smile on his face, ready for his breakfast. His clerk had already come and gone, so he took his time shaving and dressing — it was always pleasant not to have to rush in the mornings; he even had time to trim his nails and pumice yesterday’s ink stains from his fingertips. That made him smile — subconsciously, was he preening himself just in case the deviant’s wife did turn out to be pretty? — and he back-combed his hair in gentle self-mockery; then he thought about his wife, spending the off season at the lodge, out at Blachen with the rest of the committee wives, and that took the feather off his clean, sharp mood. Still, he wouldn’t have to join her for a month at least, which was something.

  The first three hours of every working day were eaten up by letters; from the morals and ethics directorate, the assessment board, the treasurer’s office, the performance standards commission (twenty years in the service and he still didn’t know what they actually did), the general auditors of requisitions, the foreign affairs committee. Three of them he answered himself; two he left for his clerk to deal with; one went to one side for filing in the box he privately thought of as the Coal Seam. The process left him feeling drained and irritable, as though he’d been cooped up in a small room with a lot of people all talking at once. To restore his equilibrium he spent half an hour tinkering with the third draft of his address to the apprentices’ conference, at which he would be the keynote speaker for the fourth year running (“Doctrine: A Living Legacy”). He was contemplating the best way to give a Didactic spin to the proceedings of the Third Rescensionist Council when his clerk arrived to tell him that the abominator’s wife would be arriving at a quarter past noon.

  He’d forgotten all about her, and his first reaction was irritation — he had a deskful of more important things to do than talk to criminals’ wives — but as the day wore on he found himself looking forward to the break in his routine. His clerk, he suspected, was getting to know him a little too well; the hour between noon and resumption was his least productive time, the part of the day when he was most likely to make mistakes. Far better to use it for something restful and quiet, where a momentary lapse in concentration wasn’t likely to involve the state in embarrassment and ruin.

  There were five interrogation rooms on the seventh floor of the Guildhall. He chose the smallest, and left instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed. The woman was punctual; she turned up half an hour early. Psellus left her to wait, on the bench in the front corridor. A little apprehension, forced on like chicory by solitude and confinement, would do no harm at all, and he’d have time to read another couple of letters.

  He’d been right; she was pretty enough, in a small, wide-eyed sort of a way. He had the dossier’s conclusive evidence that she was twenty-four; without it, he’d have put her at somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one, so what she must have looked like when she was seventeen and the subject of negotiations between her father and the abominator, he wouldn’t have liked to say. She sat on the low, backless chair in the corner of the room quite still, reminding him of something he couldn’t place for a long time, until it suddenly dawned on him; he’d seen a mewed falcon once, jessed and hooded, standing motionless on a perch shaped like a bent bow. An incongruous comparison, he told himself; she certainly didn’t come across as a predator, quite the opposite. You couldn’t imagine such a delicate creature eating anything, let alone prey that had once been alive.

  He sat down in the big, high-backed chair and rested his hands on the armrests, wrists upward (he’d seen judges do that, and it had stuck in his mind). “Your name,” he said.

  Her voice was surprisingly deep. “Ariessa Vaatzes Connena,” she said. There was no bashful hesitation, but her eyes were big and round and deep (so are a hawk’s, he thought). “Why am I here?”

  “There are some questions,” he said, and left it at that. “You were married young, I gather.”

  She frowned. “Not really,” she said. “At least, I was seventeen. But five of the fifteen girls in my class got married before I did.”

  She was right, of course; he’d misplaced the emphasis. It wasn’t her youth that was unusual, but her husband’s age. “You married a man ten years older than yourself,” he said.

  She nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  What a curious question, her eyes said. “My father thought it was a good match,” she said.

  “Was it?”

  “Well, clearly not.”

  “You were unhappy with the idea?”

  “Not at the time,” she said firmly.

  “Of course,” Psellus said gravely, “you weren’t to know how things would turn out.”

  “No.”

  “At the time,” he said, “did you find the marriage agreeable?”

  A faint trace of a smile. There are some faces that light up in smiling; this wasn’t one. “That’s a curious word to use,” she said. “I loved my husband, from the first time I saw him.”

  “Do you still love him?”

  “Yes.”

  She said the word crisply, like someone breaking a stick. He thought for a moment. Another comparison was lurking in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t place it. “You’re aware of the law regarding the wives of abominators.”

  She nodded, said nothing. She didn’t seem unduly frightened.

  “There is, of course, a discretion in such cases,” he said slowly.

  “I see.”

  She was watching him, the way one animal watches another: wary, cautious, but no fear beyond the permanent, all-encompassing fear of creatures who live all the time surrounded by predators, and prey. “The discretion,” he went on, “vests in the proper compliance officer of the offender’s Guild.”

  “That would be you, then.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I imagine,” she said, “there’s something I can help you with.”

  (In her dossier, which he’d glanced through before the interview, there was a certificate from the investigators; the wife, they said, had not been party to the offense and was not to be proceeded against; her father and brother were Guildsmen of good standing and had cooperated unreservedly in the investigation on the understanding that she should be spared. It was, of course, a condition of this arrangement that she should not know of it; nor had she been made aware of the fact that clemency had been extended in her case.)

  “Yes,” Psellus said. “There are a few questions, as I think I mentioned.”

  “You want me to betray him, don’t you?”

  Psellus moved a little in his chair; the back and arms seemed to be restricting him, like guards holding a prisoner. “I shall expect you to cooperate with my inquiries,” he said. “You know who I am, what I do.”

  She nodded. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” she said. “I don’t know where he’s gone, or anything like that.”

  “I do,” Psellus said.

  Her eyes opened wide; no other movement, and no sound.

  “We have reports,” he went on, “that place him in the company of Duke Orsea of Eremia Montis. Do you know who he is?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “How did he —?”

  Psellus ignored her. “Clearly,” he said, “this raises new questions. For example: do you think it possible that your husband had been in contact with the Eremians at any time before his arrest?”

  “You mean, spying for them or something?” She raised an eyebrow. “Well, if he was, he can’t have done a very good job.”

  He’d seen a fencing-match once; an exhibition bout between two foreigners, Vadani or Cure Doce or something of the sort. He remembered the look on the face of one of them, when he’d lunged forward ferociously to run his enemy through; but when he reached forward full stretch the other man wasn’t there anymore. He’d sidestepped, and as his opponent surged past him, he’d given him a neat little prod in the ribs, and down he’d g
one. Psellus had an uncomfortable feeling that the expression on his face wasn’t so different to the look he’d seen on the dying fencer’s.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think he was spying for Eremia. I don’t think he’d have known where Eremia is. I didn’t,” she added, “not until the other day. A lot of people don’t.”

  “You sound very certain,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” she said. A pause, then: “I know that what my husband did was wrong. One of your colleagues explained it all to me, and I understand. But that was all he did, I’m absolutely positive. He just did it for our little girl, for her birthday. I suppose he thought nobody’d ever find out.”

  Psellus looked at her for a while. She ought to be frightened, he thought. At the very least, she ought to be frightened. Maybe her father or her brother broke the terms of the deal and told her; but then she’d know that if we found out, the deal would be off, and she ought to be frightened about that. I don’t think she likes me very much.

  He thought about that. I don’t like her very much either, he thought.

  “So,” he went on, “you don’t think your husband took any interest in politics, foreign affairs, things like that.”

  “Good Lord, no. He couldn’t care less.”

  He nodded. “What did he care about?”

  “Us,” she said, quick as a parry. “Me and our daughter. Our family.”

  Psellus nodded. “His work?”

  “Yes,” she said — it was a concession. “But he didn’t talk about it much at home. He tried to keep it separate, home and work. I could never understand about machinery and things.”

  “But he did work at home sometimes?”

  She shrugged. “In the evenings,” she said, “sometimes he’d be in the back room or the cellar, making things. He liked doing it. But I don’t know if it was work or things he made for himself, or us.”

  Psellus nodded again. “It’s customary for an engineer to make some of his own tools — specialized tools, not the sort of thing you’d find hanging on the rack — in his own time. Do you think it’s likely that that’s what he was doing?”

  She shrugged; no words.

  “We found quite a few such tools,” he went on, “in the house, and at his bench in the factory. The quality of the work was very high.”

  She looked at him. “He was a clever man,” she said.

  “Too clever,” Psellus said; but it wasn’t like the fencer’s ambush. Leaden-footed, and a blind man could have seen it coming. Nevertheless, she must parry it or else be hit. He waited to see what form her defense would take; he anticipated a good defense, from a fencer of such skill and mettle. Not a mere block; he was hoping for a maneuver combining defense and counterattack in the same move, what Vaatzes’ illegal fencing manual would call a riposte in narrow time. He made a mental note to requisition the book and read it, when he had a moment.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Oh, Psellus thought. (Well, it was a riposte, of a sort; stand still and let your opponent skewer you, and die, leaving the enemy to feel wretched and guilty ever after. Probably the most damaging riposte of all, if all you cared about was hurting the opponent.)

  I had a point once, he told himself. I was making it. But I can’t remember what it was.

  “So that’s the picture, is it?” he said. “In the evenings, after dinner, while you wash the dishes, he retreats to his private bench with his files and hacksaws and bow-drills, and makes things for the pure pleasure of it. Is that how it was?”

  She frowned. “Well, sometimes,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” Psellus repeated. “You’d have thought he’d had enough of it at work, measuring and marking out and cutting metal and finishing and burnishing and polishing and so on.”

  “He liked that sort of thing,” she said, and her voice was almost bored. “It was what he did when we were first married, but then he got promoted, supervisor and then foreman, and he was telling other people what to do, instead of doing it himself.” She shrugged. “He was glad of the promotion, obviously, but I think he missed actually making things, with his hands. Or maybe he wanted to keep himself in practice. I don’t know about that kind of stuff, but maybe if you stop doing it for a while you forget how to do it. You’d know more about that than me.”

  Psellus nodded. “You think he wanted to keep his hand in?”

  She shrugged again. Her slim shoulders were perfectly suited to the gesture, which was probably why she favored it so much.

  “Do you think he’ll want to keep his hand in now he’s with Duke Orsea?”

  To his surprise, she nodded; as though she was a colleague rather than a subject brought in for interrogation. “I know,” she said, “they explained it to me before. You’re afraid he’ll teach all sorts of trade secrets to the enemy.”

  “Do you think he’s liable to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know,” he repeated.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I suppose it’d depend on what he’s got to do to stay alive. I mean, the people you say he’s with, they’re our enemies. We just wiped out their army, isn’t that right? Well, maybe they caught him, wandering about on the moors, and thought he was a spy or something.”

  Psellus frowned. “Possibly.”

  “Well then. If you were him and that’s what’d happened to you, what would you do?”

  Psellus leaned back a little in his chair; he felt a need to increase the distance between them. “I hope,” he said, “that I would die rather than betray my country.”

  It sounded completely ridiculous, of course, and she didn’t bother to react. She didn’t need to; she didn’t have to point out what Vaatzes’ country had done to him in the first place. This wasn’t getting anywhere, Psellus decided. He was here to get information, not defend himself.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  (She was letting him off lightly, though; she was past his guard, controlling the bind, in a strong position to shrug off his defense and strike home. Which is what you’d do, surely, if your husband had just been driven into exile; you’d be angry. But she was no more angry than frightened. Curious hawk; doesn’t strike or bate. It dawned on him suddenly why he felt so confused. It was as though he didn’t matter.) “I take it,” he persevered, though he knew he was achieving nothing by it, “that you feel the same about treachery.”

  She looked at him. “You mean, about betraying the Republic? Well, of course.”

  He frowned at her, trying to be intimidating, failing. I’m not concentrating, he realized; there’s something wrong, like one of those tiny splinters that get right in under your skin, too small to see but you can feel them. “The circumstances,” he said slowly, “of your marriage. Let’s go back to that, shall we?”

  “If you want.”

  He made a show of making himself comfortable in his chair. “When was the first time he became aware of you? How did you meet?”

  She was looking at him as though he was standing in front of something she wanted to see, blocking her view. “Which one do you want me to answer first?” she said.

  “Why did he want to marry you?”

  Another beautiful shrug. “I think he wanted to get married,” she said. “Men do. And my dad wanted to find me a husband.”

  “At seventeen? A bit quick off the mark.”

  “We never got on,” she said. “I wasn’t happy at home.”

  “He wanted you off his hands?”

  “Yes.”

  Psellus winced. She’s good, he noted ruefully, at that defense. Probably one hell of a cardplayer, if women play cards. Do they? He had to admit he didn’t know. “So your father became aware that his supervisor was looking for a wife, and thought, here’s a fine opportunity, two birds with one stone. Is that how it was?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He hesitated. It was like when he’d been
a boy, fighting in the playground. He’d been a good fighter; he had the reach, and good reflexes, and he was older than most of the other boys. He threw a good punch, to the nose, chin or mouth. But he was too scared to fight, because he hated the pain — jarring his elbow as he bashed in their faces, skinning his knuckles as he broke their teeth — until the pleasure of inflicting pain ceased to outweigh the discomfort of receiving it. Even hitting them with sticks hurt his hands more than he was prepared to accept. “Was it a deal, then?” he persevered. “Your father and your brother’s promotions, in exchange for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. And how about the terms of the transaction? Was he buying sight unseen?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Did he come and inspect you first, before the deal was finalized? Or wasn’t he bothered?”

  She frowned, as though she was having trouble understanding. “He came to dinner at our house,” she said.

  “And?”

  “He sat next to me. We talked about birds.”