Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  Now he was designing without pens, dividers, straight edge, square, calipers or books of tables. It would be his finest work, even though the objective, the job this machine would be built to do, was so simple as to be utterly mundane. It was like damming a river to run a flywheel to drive a gear-train to operate a camshaft to move a piston to power a reciprocating blade to sharpen a pencil. Ridiculous, to go to such absurd lengths, needing such ingenuity, such a desperate and destructive use of resources, for something he ought to be able to do empty-handed with his eyes shut. But he couldn’t. Misguided but powerful men wouldn’t let him do it the easy way, and so he was forced to this ludicrously elaborate expedient. It was like having to move the earth in order to slide the table close enough to reach a hairbrush, because he was forbidden to stand up and walk across the room.

  I didn’t start it, he reminded himself. They did that. All I can do is finish it.

  He had no idea, even with the shape coming into existence in his mind, how many components the machine would have, in the end: thousands, hundreds of thousands — someone probably had the resources to calculate the exact figure; he didn’t, but it wasn’t necessary.

  He stood up. It was taking him a long time to come to terms with this room. If it was a prison, it was pointlessly elegant. Looking at the fit of the paneling, the depth of relief of the carved friezes, all he could see was the infinity of work and care that had gone into making them. You wouldn’t waste that sort of time and effort on a prison cell. If it was a guest room in a fine house, on the other hand, the door would open when he tried the handle, and there wouldn’t be guards on the other side of it. The room chafed him like a tight shoe; every moment he spent in it was uncomfortable, because it wasn’t right. It wasn’t suited to the purpose for which it was being used. That, surely, was an abomination.

  I hate these people, he thought. They work by eye and feel, there’s no precision here.

  Decisively, as though closing a big folio of drawings, he put the design away in the back of his mind, and turned his attention to domestic trivia. There was water in the jug; it tasted odd, probably because it was pure, not like the partly filtered sewage they drank at home. Not long ago they’d brought him food on a tray. He’d eaten it because he was hungry and he needed to keep his strength up, but he missed the taste of grit. With every second that passed, it became more and more likely that they’d let him live. At least he had that.

  His elbow twinged. He rubbed it with the palm of his other hand until both patches of skin were warm. The elbow, the whole arm were excellent machines, and so wickedly versatile; you could brush a cheek or swing a hammer or push in a knife, using a wide redundancy of different approaches and techniques. So many different things a man can do…

  I could stay here and make myself useful. I could teach these people, who are no better than children, how to improve themselves. A man could be happy doing that. Instead…

  There’s so many things I could have done, if I’d been allowed.

  The door opened, and the man he’d started to get to know — names, names; Miel Ducas — came in. Ziani noticed he was looking tired. Here’s someone who’s a great lord among these people, he thought, but he chases around running errands for his master like a servant. Using the wrong tool for the job, he thought; they don’t know anything.

  “How are you settling in?” Ducas said.

  It was, of course, an absurd question. Fine, except I’m not allowed to leave this horrible room. “Fine,” Ziani said. “The room’s very comfortable.”

  “Good.” Ducas looked guilty; he was thinking, we don’t know yet if this man’s a prisoner or a guest, so we’re hedging our bets. No wonder the poor man was embarrassed. “I thought I’d better drop in, see how you’re getting on.”

  Ziani nodded. “Has the Duke decided yet if he wants to accept my offer?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Ducas hesitated before he sat down; maybe he’s wondering whether he ought to ask me first, since if I’m a guest that would be the polite thing to do. “The thing is,” he went on, “we can’t really make that decision, because none of us really understands what it’d mean. So we’d like you to explain a bit more, to one of our experts. He’d be better placed to advise than me, for instance.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Ziani replied. “I’m happy to cooperate, any way I can.”

  “Thank you,” Ducas said. “That’ll be a great help. You see, this expert knows what we’re capable of, from a technical point of view. He can tell me if we’d actually be able to make use of what you’ve got to offer, how much it’d cost, how long it’d take; that sort of thing. You must appreciate, things are difficult for us right now, because of the war and everything. And it’d be a huge step for us, obviously.”

  “I quite understand,” Ziani said. “Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about what would have to be done. It’d be a long haul, no doubt about that, but I’m absolutely certain it’d be worth it in the end.”

  Ducas looked even more uncomfortable, if that was possible; clearly he didn’t want to get caught up in a discussion. He’s a simple man, Ziani thought, and he’s had to learn to be versatile. Like using the back of a wrench as a hammer.

  “Sorry we’ve had to leave you cooped up like this,” Ducas went on. “Only we’ve all been very busy, as you’ll appreciate. I expect you could do with a bit of fresh air and exercise.”

  No, not really. “Yes, that’d be good,” Ziani said. “But I don’t want to put you to any trouble on my account.”

  “That’s all right,” Ducas said. “Anyway, I’d better be going. I’ll call for you tomorrow morning, and we’ll go and see the expert.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Ziani said gravely, though he wanted to laugh. “Thank you for stopping by.”

  Ducas went away, and Ziani sat down on the bed, frowning. This man Ducas; how versatile could he be? What was he exactly: a spring, a gearwheel, a lever, a cam, a sear? It would be delightfully efficient if he could be made to be all of them, but as yet he couldn’t be sure of the qualities of his material — tensile strength, shearing point, ductility, brittleness. How much load could he bear, and how far could he distort before he broke? (But all these people are so fragile, he thought; even I can’t do good work with rubbish.)

  In the event, he slept reasonably well. Happiness, beauty, love, the usual bad dreams came to visit him, like dutiful children paying their respects, but on this occasion there was no development, merely the same again — he was back home, it had all been a dreadful mistake, he’d committed no crimes, killed nobody. After his favorite dinner and an hour beside the lamp with an interesting book, he’d gone to bed, to sleep, and woken up to find his wife lying next to him, dead, shrunken, her skin like coarse parchment, her hair white cobwebs, her fingernails curled and brittle, her body as light as rotten wood, her eyes dried up into pebbles, her lips shriveled away from her teeth, one hand (the bones standing out through the skin like the veins of a leaf) closed tenderly on his arm.

  8

  To his surprise, Valens was curious. He’d expected to feel scared, horrified or revolted, as though he was getting ready to meet an embassy of goblins. Maybe I don’t scare so easily these days, he thought; but he knew he was missing the point.

  “Well,” he said, “we’d better not keep them waiting.”

  He nudged his horse forward; it started to move, its head still down, its mouth full of fat green spring grass. It was a singularly graceless, slovenly animal, but it had a wonderful turn of speed.

  “I’ve never met one before, what are they like?” Young Gabbaeus on his left, trying to look calm; Valens noticed that he was wearing a heavy wool cloak over his armor, and the sleeves of a double-weight gambeson poked out from under the steel vambraces on his forearms. Curious, since Gabbaeus had always insisted he despised the heat; then Valens realized he’d dressed up extra warm to make sure he wouldn’t shiver.

  “I don’t know,” Valens replied, �
��it’s hard to say, really. I guess the key word is different.”

  “Different,” Gabbaeus repeated. “Different in what way?”

  “Pretty much every way, I suppose,” Valens replied. “They don’t look anything like us. Their clothes are nothing like ours. Their horses — either bloody great big things you’d happily plow with, or little thin ponies. Like everything; you expect one thing, you get another. The difficulty is, there’s so many of them — different tribes and sects and splinter-groups and all — you can’t generalize till you know exactly which lot you’re dealing with.”

  “I see,” Gabbaeus said nervously. “So you can’t really know what to expect when they come at you.”

  Valens grinned. “Trouble,” he said. “That’s a constant. It’s the details that vary.”

  According to the herald, Skeddanlothi and his raiding party were waiting for them on the edge of the wood, where the river vanished into the trees. Valens knew very little about the enemy leader; little more than what he’d learned from a couple of stragglers his scouts had brought in the day before. According to them, Skeddanlothi was the second or third son of the High King’s elder brother. He’d brought a raiding party into Vadani territory in order to get plunder; he wanted to marry, apparently, and his half of the takings was to be the dowry. The men with him presumably had similar motives. If they were offered enough money, they’d probably go away without the need for bloodshed.

  “Beats me,” Gabbaeus went on, “how they got here at all. I thought it was impossible to get across the desert. No water.”

  Valens nodded. “That’s the story,” he said. “And fortunately for us, most of the Cure Hardy believe it; with good reason, because raiding parties go out every few years, and none of them ever come back. They assume, naturally enough, that the raiders die in the desert.” He yawned; it was a habit of his when he was nervous. “But there is a way. Some clown of a trader found it a few years ago. Being a trader, of course, she didn’t tell anybody, apart from the people in her company; then one of their caravans got itself intercepted by one of the Cure Hardy sects.”

  “Wonderful,” Gabbaeus said.

  “Actually, not as bad as all that.” Valens yawned again. It was a mannerism he made no effort to rid himself of, since it made him look fearless. “The Cure Hardy are worse than the traders for keeping secrets from each other. I think it was the Lauzeta who first got hold of it; they’d rather be buried alive in anthills than share a good thing with the Auzeil or the Flos Glaia. Even within a particular sect, they don’t talk to each other. Something like a safe way across the desert is an opportunity for one faction to get rich and powerful at the expense of the others. Sooner or later, of course, the High King or one of his loathsome relations will get hold of it, and then we’ll be in real trouble. Meanwhile, we have to deal with minor infestations, like this one. It’s never much fun, but it could be worse; sort of like the difference between a wasps’ nest in the roof and a plague of locusts.”

  Gabbaeus had gone quiet. Valens made an effort not to smile. A first encounter with the Cure Hardy was rather like your first time after boar on foot in the woods. Most people survived it, but some didn’t.

  Valens had done it before, six or seven times; so he wasn’t too disconcerted when their escort turned up. How they did it he had no idea; they seemed to materialize out of thin air. One moment the Vadani had been alone on a flat moor; the next, they were surrounded by armored horsemen. Valens made no effort to stifle a third yawn. He knew from experience that it impressed the Cure Hardy, too.

  Not Lauzeta, he decided. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe not. The Lauzeta, who wore long coats of hardened leather scale and conical helmets with nasals and aventails, were clever, imaginative fighters; tremendous speed and flexibility based on innate horsemanship and constant practice. This lot, on the other hand, wore coats of plates over fine mail, and their rounded helmets had cheek-pieces and articulated neck-guards. At a guess, that made them Partetz or Aram Chantat; he knew nothing about either sect beyond the basics of fashions in armor, and he didn’t want to think about how the secret of the safe passage had penetrated right down to the far south. At least they’d be one or the other, rather than both. The Partetz and the Aram Chantat hated each other even more than the Auzeil, the Cler Votz, the Rosinholet or the Flos Glaia. On balance, he decided, he’d rather they were the Partetz.

  They were, of course, the Aram Chantat. Their demands were simple: four hundred thousand gold thalers, or two million in silver, and five hundred horses, at least half of them brood mares. Delivery (their interpreter spoke tolerably clear Mezentine, with a firm grasp of the specialist vocabulary of the extortion business) within three days, during which time the raiding party would be left to forage at will; once payment had been made, they undertook to leave Vadani territory within a week, causing no further damage (provided that they were kept supplied with food, wine and fodder for the horses). Nobody said anything about what would happen if the demands weren’t met. No need to go into all that.

  Valens replied that he’d think it over and send his answer before daybreak. The horsemen watched him go, then vanished.

  “So,” Gabbaeus asked, after they’d ridden halfway back to the camp, “what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Valens answered.

  Back at his camp, he sent for the people he wanted to see, and put guards on the tent door so he wouldn’t be disturbed. Just after midnight, most of the staff officers left. Two riders were sent back on the road to Civitas Vadanis. Their departure wasn’t lost on the Aram Chantat scouts, who reported back to their leaders. Around three in the morning, they saw a great number of watch-fires being lit on the far side of the camp, where the horse-pens were, and sent word back to Skeddanlothi to prepare for a sneak attack at first light.

  The messengers never got there. They were intercepted by the Vadani light cavalry, dismounted and covering the left flank, and efficiently disposed of. An hour later, the scouts sent another message to say that the heavy cavalry had mounted up and ridden due west, which they took to mean a wide encircling movement. Valens let them through. They reached Skeddanlothi an hour and a half before dawn. He drew up his forces in dead ground below his camp, facing west, to surprise the heavy cavalry when they arrived.

  They never did, of course. What the scouts had seen was the horses being led away by their grooms. The heavy cavalry, also dismounted, came up on the east side of the camp and launched a sudden, noisy attack that took the Aram Chantat reserves completely by surprise. Someone had the presence of mind to send riders to the main army on the west side, who came scrambling back just in time to be taken in flank and rear by the light cavalry and the infantry.

  It was still a tricky business. The Cure Hardy were on horseback, Valens’ men were on foot; it was still too dark for accurate shooting, and the coats of plates and mail took some piercing. Valens told his archers to aim for the horses rather than the men, and sent up his infantry to engage Skeddanlothi’s personal guard.

  If the Cure Hardy had been huntsmen, they’d have understood what Valens was up to; let the dogs face the boar, while the hunters come at it from the side. Valens led the infantry himself, because they were going to have to face the boar’s tusks. As always on these occasions, as soon as he’d given the word to move up he found he was almost paralyzed with fear; his stomach muscles twisted like ropes and he wet himself. But it was his job to stay three paces ahead of the line; if you don’t keep your place, nobody knows where you are, and you’re liable to come to harm. At the same time as he was forcing his legs to move, he was struggling to hold the full picture in his mind: movements of men and horses, timings, closures and avoidances. Forty yards across open ground in the pale, thick light, and then someone stood out in front of him, a man who wanted to kill him. He let go of the grand design and concentrated on the job in hand.

  Fighting six hundred enemies in four dimensions over thirty-five acres is one thing; fighting one man w
ithin arm’s length is something else entirely. Someone had told him once, the first thing to do is always look at the other man’s face, see who you’re up against; once you’ve done that, keep your eyes glued to his hands. Whether it was good advice or not Valens wasn’t sure, but he followed it anyway, because it was the only method he knew. On this occasion, the other man was big and broad, but the look on his face and the puckering of his eyes told Valens that he’d been asleep and wasn’t quite awake yet. He had a spear in his right hand and a round shield on his left arm; he was maybe inclined to hide behind the shield, conceding distance and therefore time. It was therefore essential that the other man should attack first; this, however, he was annoyingly reluctant to do, and a whole second passed while the two of them stood and looked at each other. That wasn’t right; so Valens took a half-step forward, just inside the other man’s reach; he recognized the mistake, but he wasn’t watching where Valens put his feet. He lunged, spear and shield thrust forward together in a semi-ferocious hedging of bets. Valens stepped forward and to the right with his back foot — a fencing move he’d learned from the tiresome instructor when he was a boy — grabbed the back rim of the shield with his left hand and twisted as hard as he could from the waist. His enemy was a stronger man but he hadn’t been expecting anything like that; he stumbled forward, and Valens stabbed him in the hollow just below the ear, where the earflap of the helmet left a half-finger-width of gap. The whole performance took less time than sneezing, and not much more effort. The dead man’s forward momentum pulled him obligingly off Valens’ sword, so that a half-turn brought him neatly back on guard.