Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  “I wanted to ask you,” he said. “What does your name mean?”

  He hadn’t expected a reply straight away, so a guard had to apply a little pressure. He repeated the question. It took three tries before the prisoner spoke.

  “What the hell do you want to know that for?”

  “Curious,” Valens said. “I’m looking for — I don’t know, some little glimmer of light. A chink in the wall I can peep in through. What does your name mean? Come on, it can’t hurt you to tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  Valens sighed. “There’s some taboo on saying your name to outsiders. Once they know your name, they can steal your soul or something.”

  The other man laughed. “No, that’s stupid,” he said. “But there’s no word for it.”

  “Ah.” Valens nodded to a guard. “You know,” he said, “I believe this man hasn’t had anything to drink for several hours. Get him some water.”

  He took the cup, which was nearly full; he emptied a third onto the ground. “Paraphrase,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Well,” Valens said, “what’s the closest you can get, in our language?”

  Skeddanlothi was looking at the dark brown dust, where the water had soaked away. “It’s a kind of bird,” he said. “But they don’t live north of the desert.”

  “Describe it.”

  Hesitation. Valens poured away a little more water.

  “It’s small,” the man said. “Bigger than a thrush but smaller than a partridge.”

  “You mean a pigeon.”

  “No, not a pigeon.” The prisoner, as well as being in agony and despair, was also annoyed. “It’s a wading bird, with a long beak. Brown. It feeds in the mud.”

  “I see,” Valens said. “Pardon me saying so, but it sounds an odd creature to name a great warrior after. I assume your parents wanted you to grow up to be a great warrior.”

  “It’s the bird of our family,” Skeddanlothi said. “All the families have a bird.”

  “I see. Like heraldry.”

  “No.” Almost petulant. “We follow a bird. Each family follows a different one.”

  “Follow,” Valens repeated. “You mean, you choose one as a favorite.”

  “No, follow.” Petulant to angry now. “When the grazing is used up and goes bad, we follow our family’s bird, the first one we see. We follow it for a day, from dawn to sunset, and where it stops to roost is where we move to.”

  “Good heavens,” Valens said. “But supposing it just flies round in circles.”

  “If it stops, we drive it on.”

  “Makes sense,” Valens said. “And a wader would always fly to water, of course. Do all the families follow water-birds?”

  But that was all; even pouring away the last of the water and the guard’s best efforts earned him nothing more, which was frustrating, and by then there wasn’t enough left to justify further expense of time and energy. It was the glimmer of light he’d been looking for, but it had gone out. He drew his finger across his throat; the guard nodded. Valens went back to his tent and gave orders to break camp and move out.

  “It’s not an interrogation,” Miel Ducas said, “or anything like that.”

  The Mezentine still looked apprehensive. “But you want him to ask me questions?”

  “Let’s say we want you to talk to someone who speaks your own language.” They’d reached the gate. Like all forge gates everywhere, it was almost derelict; the latch had long since gone, replaced by a length of frayed rope, and the pintles of the hinges on one side had come halfway out of the wood. There was probably a knack to opening it without pulling several muscles, but Miel wasn’t a regular visitor. “Basically, so you can see how much we know about, well, metalworking and things; and the other way about.”

  The Mezentine shrugged. “If you think it’ll help,” he said.

  “The key is always to establish” — Miel grunted as he heaved at the gate — “communication. No point talking if you can’t understand.”

  All forge gates open on to identical yards. There must have been a time, two or three hundred years ago, when all the blacksmiths in the world decided it would be a splendid thing to pave their yards with handsome, square-cut flagstones. Once this had been done, a great decline of resources and enthusiasm must have set in — you’ll search in vain in the history books for any reference to the cause of it, but the evidence is there, plain as day; those proud, confident flags are all cracked up now. Grass and young trees push up through the fissures, kept in check only by the seepage of tempering oil and a very occasional, resented assault with the hook. Ivy and various creepers grow up through the scrap pile, their hairy tendrils taking an uncertain grip in the rust. Worn-out and broken tools and equipment wait patiently through the generations for someone to find time to fix them. There’s always a tall water-butt with moss on one side, close to the smithy door, which has scraped a permanent furrow where it drags. There’s always a mound of perfectly good coal, inexplicably left out in the wet to spoil.

  Cantacusene came out when he heard the yard gate scritch. He was almost unnaturally clean (blacksmiths aren’t called that for nothing) and he looked painfully nervous, as if he’d been chosen to be a human sacrifice. His greeting was splendidly formal, and he was wearing his best apron.

  “This is the man I was telling you about,” Miel said. “I hope you’ve thought up some good questions.”

  Cantacusene looked as though someone had just walked up to him and yanked out one of his teeth. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “Please, come in. There’s wine and cakes.”

  Indeed there were, and Miel tried to be polite about fishing a flake of dark gray scale out of his cup before drinking from it. It tasted like eggs beaten in vinegar.

  The place looked pretty much the same as it had the last time he’d been there; as though it had been burgled by someone with a grudge against the owner. There were tools lying about on the benches and the floor, a hopeless jumble of hammers, stakes, tongs, setts, fullers. On the floor were chalked patterns for various pieces of armor, their meticulously drawn details scuffed by feet passing in a hurry. Every surface was thick with black grime; everything glistened with spilled drops of water and new rust. Here, Miel said to himself, our guest will feel at home.

  But he didn’t, by the looks of it. He had the air of a man who is trying hard not to give offense by showing disapproval. Cantacusene picked up on that straight away; the poor man was in pain, obviously. Miel felt bad about torturing him like this, but it had to be done, apparently.

  “What I thought,” Cantacusene said, mumbling, “was that we could start off…” His words dwindled away as he looked at the expression on Vaatzes’ face. “Sort of like a trade test,” he said. “If you think that’d be in order.”

  Miel waited for a response from the Mezentine, who just stood registering distaste. “That sounds like a good idea,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”

  Cantacusene’s test would be to make a perfect circle, precisely one foot in diameter, out of quarter-inch plate. “Feel free to use whatever you like,” he added nervously. “If you think that’d be —”

  “Fine,” Vaatzes said. “Material?”

  Cantacusene picked up a three-foot square of steel and offered it to him. It didn’t mean anything to Miel, of course (except he noticed that someone had recently made a job of scrubbing the rust off it with a wire brush; like a woman being visited by her mother-in-law, he thought), but Vaatzes studied it for some time, turning it over in his hands and pinching at the edges with his fingers.

  “Have you got calipers?” he asked.

  “Calipers,” Cantacusene repeated. “Yes, of course.”

  He dug a pair of calipers out of a pile of junk and handed them over. Vaatzes took three or four measurements and handed them back. “Dividers,” he said, “or a bit of string and a nail, if you haven’t got any.”

  Cantacusene had some dividers; also files, a chest-drill and bits, a rule
(Vaatzes stared at it in horror for a couple of seconds) and various other things Miel had never heard of. Vaatzes took them and laid them out on the floor, like a huntsman displaying the day’s bag; the files in order of length, and so on. With the dividers he measured a foot off the rule, then knelt on the floor and scribed his circle on the plate — he did it three times, but Miel could only see one scribed mark. Next he stood up, clamped the plate upright in the leg-vice, and started to drill holes all round the circle with the chest-drill. This took a very long time. Miel soon lost interest and sat down to read the book he’d had the wit to bring with him. Each time he looked up, he saw Cantacusene rooted to the spot, watching like a dog at a rabbit-hole.

  When Vaatzes had finished drilling the ring of holes, he laid the plate on the bed of the anvil and cut through the web between the holes with a small cold chisel. This freed something that looked like a gear-wheel. Next he wiped his finger through the nearest accumulation of soot, rubbing black into the thin graven line left by the dividers; then he fixed the gear-wheel thing in the vice and picked up a file. Miel went back to his book.

  He’d almost finished it when he heard Vaatzes say: “I’m sorry.” He looked up. Vaatzes was holding up what looked to him like a steel platter. He handed it to Cantacusene as if it was something revolting and dead.

  “I did the best I could,” he said. “But the drill-bits are blunt, the files are soft as butter, there’s no light in here and the plate isn’t an even thickness. And,” he went on, “I made a botch of it. It’s twenty years since I did any serious hand-filing, so I guess I’m out of practice.”

  “It’s perfect,” Cantacusene said.

  Miel looked at him. He had the expression of someone who’s just seen a miracle, a revelation of the divine.

  “It bloody well isn’t,” Vaatzes said. “I can’t measure it, of course, but I’d say the tolerance is no better than two thousandths, if that. And if you call that a square edge, I don’t.”

  Miel saw Cantacusene staring at him; he looked utterly miserable. “It’s better than I could do, anyway,” Cantacusene said. “Look, I’ll show you.”

  He took the drill and made a hole in the middle of the platter, passed a length of steel rod through it and clamped the rod in the vice; then he laid his fingers on the edge and set it spinning. “Perfect,” he repeated. Miel looked at it; it was as though the spinning disk was absolutely still.

  “I’ll try again if you like,” Vaatzes said. “Maybe if I took it outside, where I could see better…”

  Miel had seen more than enough pain in his life, but rarely such suffering as Cantacusene went through as the day wore on. Next he asked Vaatzes to make a square; then to draw out a round bar on the forge into a triangular section; then to make six identical square pegs, to fit perfectly into the square hole on the back of the anvil. Each time, the outstanding quality of the result seemed to hurt him like a stab-wound, and Vaatzes’ escalating self-reproaches were even worse. Miel excused himself at one point, went up the hill to a friend’s house and borrowed another book; it was going to be a long day. He got the impression that Cantacusene had set himself the task of finding something the foreigner couldn’t do better than he could, and that he knew he was going to fail, and that his whole world was coming apart. Miel enjoyed reading and listening to tragedy, but only when it came with the author’s guarantee that it wasn’t real.

  An hour before sunset he decided to call a halt to the butchery. By that point, Cantacusene had the Mezentine doing sheet-work, which was, of course, Cantacusene’s speciality in his capacity as Armorer Royal. There had been a note of desperation close to hysteria in his voice when he gave Vaatzes the specifications: a left-hand shell gauntlet, fluted in the Mezentine style, with four articulated lames over the fingers, the cuff moving on sliding rivets. Here at least Miel could understand some of the technical language; he had a pair of gauntlets to exactly that specification, for which Cantacusene had charged him nine silver thalers. He remembered thinking what a bargain they were at that price, when he took delivery. Accordingly, he marked his place, closed the book and shuffled discreetly close to watch.

  Vaatzes started with a sheet of steel plate — not the one Cantacusene provided him with, because he looked at it and said it wasn’t even; too thick at the top, too thin in the middle. So instead he scrabbled about in the scrap pile like a terrier, until he found a rusty offcut he reckoned would just about do, at a pinch. He traced the pattern onto it with chalk, cut it out on the shear, stopped cutting to take the shear to bits, make and fit a new pivot pin, clout the frame with a hammer, walk round it several times, stooping down and squinting, clout it a few more times, put it back together again (because he couldn’t be expected to do accurate work on a shear that was completely out of line); next he formed the component parts on the anvil and the swage block (it was impossible, he declared, to do anything at all with either of them; if only he had a lathe, he could at least make a decent ball stake. Cantacusene went white as a sheet and stood opening and closing his hands) and punched the holes, having first stripped down and reworked the punch; then he did the fluting, half an hour of tiny woodpecker taps, quick as the patter of falling rain, his left hand constantly moving the work while his right hand fluttered like a hummingbird’s wing (it was worthless, he declared as he held up the finished shell, because the flutes were uneven in depth and spacing, and the ridges weren’t sharply defined); he cut the slots for the sliding rivets with the blunt drill and the butter-soft files; finally, more in sorrow than anger, he adjusted the fit of the moving parts, peened the rivets so that everything glided perfectly, declared it was hopeless, cut the rivets off with a chisel and did them again. Then he handed the gauntlet to Cantacusene, who took it as though it was his own heart, torn out with tongs through his smashed ribs.

  “I’ll polish it if you want,” Vaatzes said, “but it’d be a waste of soap. Useless.”

  Cantacusene turned it over a few times, slipped it onto his left hand, flexed his fingers, turned his wrist; the five wood-louse sections moved up and down like the skin of a breathing animal. He took it off and gave it to Miel, who could hardly bear to touch it. He’d seen more than enough for one day.

  “Well,” he said. The gauntlet was still on his hand; somehow he didn’t want to take it off. He could hardly feel it. Part of him was thinking, nine thalers; he had the grace, catching sight of Cantacusene’s face, to feel ashamed of himself for that.

  Getting out of the forge wasn’t something that could be achieved gracefully; he thanked Cantacusene as best he could and walked away, leaving the gate open because he couldn’t face fussing with it. All he wanted to do was leave behind the worst embarrassment he’d ever had to endure.

  They’d been walking for ten minutes, up through the winding alleys, before he felt safe to say anything to the Mezentine.

  “Was that necessary?” he said.

  “How do you mean?”

  Perhaps the man simply didn’t understand; but that wasn’t very likely. He might be all sorts of things, but he wasn’t a fool. The whole thing had been deliberate, from start to finish. “You might as well have cut his throat or bashed his head in.”

  “What?” Vaatzes frowned. “Did I do something wrong?”

  More than anything he’d ever wanted in his life, Miel wanted to hit the Mezentine. Nothing else would do but to smash his face until the cheekbones and jaws and teeth were beyond recognition as human. But if he did that, he’d have lost.

  “You had to make your point,” he said. “But did you have to be so bloody cruel about it?”

  “You wanted to see some metalwork.”

  Miel looked at him. “Were you getting your own back?” he asked.

  Slowly, Vaatzes shook his head. “You needed to be convinced,” he said. “That I’m what I claim to be, and I can do what I say I can. Now you are. I’m sorry if your blacksmith got caught up in the machinery, but I didn’t start it. Besides,” he went on, “his whole setup was a joke.”
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  “Not to him,” Miel said.

  Vaatzes waved the objection away. “It’s not a subjective issue,” he said. “There’s a right way to do things and a wrong way, and his was wrong. Everything was wrong about it. Tools useless and jumbled up all over the place; no decent work space; nothing calibrated or even straight, every single thing out of true.” He shook his head. “If I hurt him, he deserved it. It was his shop, so it must be his fault. It’s an abomination.”

  Miel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Oh.”

  Vaatzes laughed. “You think that word’s a bit odd, coming from me.”

  “I wouldn’t have imagined you’d think in those terms.”

  Vaatzes stopped walking and looked at him. “The thing you need to understand,” he said, “if you want to understand what I have to offer — if you want to understand me, even; the one thing that matters is the principle of tolerance.”

  The word didn’t fit at all. Miel repeated it. “Tolerance.”

  Vaatzes nodded. “That’s right. Do you know what it means, to an engineer?”

  Miel shrugged. “I thought I did, but maybe I don’t.”

  “Tolerance,” Vaatzes said, “is the degree something can differ from perfection and still be acceptable. It’s not always the same. For one job, it could be three thousandths of an inch, and for something else it could be half a thousandth. The point is, if you want to make something that’s good, you need your tolerance to be as small as possible. That’s the key, to everything. It’s what the Guilds are built on, it’s everything Mezentia stands for. Precision; tolerance. We try and get as close to perfection as we possibly can, and we don’t tolerate anything less than that.” He smiled. “Your man back there,” he said, “I don’t suppose he even thinks in those terms. If it just about works and it sort of fits, it’s good enough.” Miel thought about his gauntlets, which had saved his hands in half a dozen battles. “We don’t tolerate the word enough,” Vaatzes went on. “Either it’s good or it isn’t. Either a line is straight and a right angle’s a right angle, or it’s not; it’s true, or out of true. True or false, no gray areas. Do you see what I mean?”