Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  He sighed. When he shut his eyes, he could see the ratchet mechanism — a blank cut with a shear, teeth filed by eye to lines scribed with a nail, pivot-holes punched on an anvil, sear bent over a stake; it haunted his conscience like a murder. He hated it. But an Eremian blacksmith could make twenty of them in a day, during which time two Eremian carpenters could make a frame out of a log, an Eremian armorer could make ten sliders or a dozen locks, any bloody fool with another bloody fool to do the striking could make ten springs, and the garrison of Civitas Eremiae could drive the Mezentine army away from the walls with horrendous losses. That would be enough.

  Someone called his name; that fool Calaphates, whose money had made all this possible. He looked up and there was the fool himself, leading a gaggle of suspicious-looking men across the yard. Ziani found a smile somewhere in his mental lumber-room.

  “Gentlemen,” Calaphates was saying, “allow me to present Ziani Vaatzes, until recently the foreman of the Mezentine state armory. Ziani, I’d like to introduce you to…”

  (The names slipped in and out of his mind like elvers through a coarse net. That level of detail — being able to tell one Eremian nobleman from another — was not required at this stage. All that mattered was that these six worried-looking men were here to see the scorpion; if they liked it, they would go to Duke Orsea and tell him he ought to buy as many of them as Ziani could make. A smile was a lot to ask of him, but on balance it was worth it.)

  One of the men cleared his throat. He was trying to look skeptical, but he just looked nervous. “So,” he said, “this is it, is it?”

  Ziani could have smiled at that free of charge, but he refrained. “We call them scorpions,” he said. “Of course, this is a very crude copy of the ones they make in the Republic, but it works just as well. I’ll give you a demonstration in a moment.”

  The man recoiled slightly. Probably he wasn’t used to being spoken to so freely by someone whose grandfather hadn’t known his grandfather. Unimportant; the machine would speak for itself. “So this is what they used against us…” The man’s nerves got the better of him and he fell silent. Ziani nodded.

  “More or less,” he said. “The Mezentine ordnance factory makes these at the rate of twenty a day when they’re running flat out. I think we can match that, if we really want to. It’ll cost a lot of money, but I think you’ll agree it’s worth it.”

  One of the others was frowning, as though the subject was somehow obscene. “You said you’d show us how it works,” he said.

  “Of course.” Ziani took a breath, then pointed. “Over there, see that lump of steel sheet set up on a stand? The distance is fifty yards, and the sheet is sixteen gauge, roughly one sixteenth of an inch; it’s what the Mezentines use to make armor. Now,” he went on, “if you’d all care to stand behind me.”

  They were happy to do that; eager, even. He took the ratchet handle, fitted it into the square slot, and began to wind the winch. To show off, he used one finger to turn it; a mistake, because the ratchet wasn’t beautifully engineered like the ones he was used to, and he had to use rather more pressure than he’d have liked, but it was too late to stop without losing the effect. The winch cable drew back the slider, compressing the spring, until the catch dropped into its detent. Ziani picked up the three-foot-long, half-inch-diameter steel pin that was leaning against the side of the frame and laid it in the loading groove, its butt end resting on the nose of the slider. He’d already set up the sights (if you could call them that; a small rectangular plate with a hole in it, mounted on two crude set screws for windage and elevation; a post on a bent-nail gate at the front end to line it up by). He paused, to check they were all watching, and flipped the catch that released the sear. The spring shot the slider forward until it slammed into the stop, the noise coinciding with the hollow clang of the pin against the target.

  “My God,” someone said.

  “Let’s go and have a look, shall we?” Calaphates said in a rather embarrassed voice, as though he wanted everybody to know that this really wasn’t his fault.

  As Ziani had known it would, the steel spike had gone clean through the steel sheet; and the one behind it, and the two behind that; it was buried deep in the brickwork of the wall. He asked if anybody wanted to try and pull it out; no takers.

  “Anyhow,” he said, “that’s what it does. The differences between this one and the ones they make in the Republic are mostly about durability; this one won’t last nearly as long, it’s more likely to break apart or get out of true, you can’t aim it as precisely; it’s heavier, too, and because it jumps about rather more when you let it off, you’ll need to check the alignment after every fourth or fifth shot. On the other hand, it’s a bloody sight better than what you’ve got at the moment, which is nothing at all.”

  Calaphates looked like he wanted to crawl down a hole and die, but Ziani couldn’t help that. His job was to create a strong impression, and he was doing just fine. “You can make twenty of these a day?” one of them asked. Ziani nodded.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said, “provided I can hire the workers I need. I’ve got a list of suitably skilled men who’ve agreed to join me. All I need now is a firm order and some money.”

  “Money,” one of them repeated. “How much are we talking about?”

  Ziani looked at him, and then at the plate, with the steel pin stuck in it. “Does it matter?” he said.

  They didn’t have anything to say to that. “Of course,” Ziani went on, “as and when I’ve got the time and the resources, I can make a far better machine. I can make pretty much anything you like, as cheaply or as well as you want. For now, though, what you need is a lot of these things mounted on the city wall and pointed down the road. As soon as you tell me I can get started, I’ll have the first batch of twenty for you inside a week; twenty a day after that until you tell me to stop. How does that sound?”

  They were looking at him again, their eyes bright and feverish with an uneasy blend of hope and fear. On one level, he could understand why. Here was a Mezentine, by his own admission the man who’d made the machines that had butchered their army only a very short time ago; a Mezentine, offering to build them machines with which to massacre his fellow citizens in return for an unspecified but presumably vast sum of money. They wanted the weapons, but having them would change everything and they weren’t the sort of men who held with huge, irrevocable changes, particularly ones involving slaughter. Paying out money bothered them, too. They were simple but weak components and he wished he didn’t have to rely on them, on his estimate of their tensile strength. But they would do what he wanted, because they had no choice, not even if he spat in their faces or cut off their beards with a sharp knife.

  He felt mildly guilty when he saw the look on Calaphates’ face; after all, Calaphates had done nothing except give him money and support, and now Ziani was dragging him into the world-changing business, which wasn’t quite what he’d believed he was putting his money into. But he hardened his heart. Calaphates would get his money back, along with an enormous profit — it’d do him no good, but it was what he wanted, and Ziani would get it for him, no question about that. As to the larger scope of the mechanism; already been into that, not his fault. It’d be like feeling guilty about an earthquake or a tidal wave.

  They went away eventually, and Ziani got back to some proper work. The angle of the ratchet sear, the diameter of the spring link retaining bolt, the depth of engagement of the slider lock pin; real issues, soluble and precise. Every step away from chaos toward perfection accrues merit, no matter what the context, and the line between them is straight. When you can devote yourself to one problem, with everything else subsidiary to it, you begin to understand.

  “There you are,” she said, walking in across the polished threshold. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Miel caught his breath; it was a sensation remarkably like fear in its symptoms and effects. He turned round slowly and smiled.

  “What can
I do for you?” he asked.

  “Well.” She sat down on the window-seat, right next to the chest in which he’d imprisoned her letter. “This is a bit awkward,” she said.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s Orsea,” she said. “I don’t know. Ever since he came back from the war. It’s like…” She frowned. She had the most precise face he’d ever seen; not sharp or pointy, but perfectly defined, as though it had been carefully designed by an architect. He knew it by heart, of course; it was there when he closed his eyes, it ambushed him when his mind wandered. He had learned it years ago, when they were both little more than children; he’d learned it the way a schoolboy prepares his lesson, because it was virtually inevitable that, sooner or later, they’d get married, thereby linking the Sirupat to the Ducas, with a view to breeding a superlative strain of nobleman. It hadn’t turned out that way in the end. By a highly unlikely freak of chance, the Sirupat had suddenly been elevated from minor royalty to heirs to the Duchy; infelicity of timing had made her the carrier of the succession (as though it was some painful disease, passed down the female line to afflict the male) and the banalities of political expediency had made Orsea the only possible husband for her — Orsea his best friend, from back when they were safely outside the golden circle, married to the girl he’d never felt the need to fall in love with, because she’d been his practically from the cradle…

  “It’s like,” she said, “that old fairy story, where the prince is kidnapped by goblins, and the goblin king turns himself into an identical copy and goes away to rule the kingdom, and everybody’s fooled except the girl the prince is going to marry. It’s like he hasn’t come home yet, I don’t know. It’s awkward.”

  Awkward, Miel thought; and he could almost see the letter, through an inch of oak board. “I know,” he heard himself say. “He’s going through a rough patch. What happened in the war really smashed him up.”

  She was looking at him; he knew, though he was looking the other way. He always knew when she was watching him. “He seems quite his old self when he’s with you,” she said.

  Miel shrugged. “Well,” he said, “that’s different. For one thing, I was there with him; also, we only ever talk about work — you know, affairs of state, all that.” He grinned; had he really said affairs of state? She was grinning too. She knew him too well. “Boys’ stuff,” he said. “Things you can talk about on the surface without having to go to the bad places. I know he’s tearing himself into little bits inside, but that’s not…” He hesitated. She couldn’t understand how his oldest friend could talk to him and not to her; it was, of course, because Orsea loved her. That single fact made everything different. Love, Miel had known for some time, is the most destructive force in the world, doing more harm than war and famine put together. “Look,” he said. “Have you actually talked to him about it? About what happened?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve hardly said two words to him about anything,” she said. “And that’s not how it used to be.” He could feel her come to the stop, the point beyond which she couldn’t go with someone else. It was murderously frustrating; the two most important people in Orsea’s life, and they couldn’t talk about him beyond that point. “I was wondering,” she said, “if there’s something we could do to — I don’t know, snap him out of it. Which is why I thought of you.”

  “Like?”

  “He needs — I don’t know, he needs to do something fun for a change, so he can forget about this terrible thing that’s smothering him for a while; something frivolous and outdoors and energetic, nothing to do with the war or politics or —”

  “Affairs of state.”

  “Absolutely.” She’d slipped into that mock scowl, with the furrowed eyebrows and the exaggerated pout. No matter how much her face changed as time passed, that expression always stayed the same, and when she wore it she was fourteen again, and so was he. “So I thought, your cousin Jarec —”

  “You mean Jarnac. Jarec was my uncle.”

  “As though it mattered,” she said pleasantly. “Your cousin, the great big tall one with the big shoulders and the impossible manners. Him. I think you should get him to take Orsea out hunting. Or hawking. Orsea used to love hawking, a few years ago, and your cousin whatever-his-name-is has got lots and lots of hawks. He showed them to me once,” she added. “I’ve never been so bored in my life. But Orsea was sick with jealousy for a week.”

  Miel frowned. “It’s not the season yet,” he said. “Hawking doesn’t start till the middle of next month.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake.” She waved away a thousand years of immutable law with a wave of the fingers. “Nobody’s going to mind, and it’d do him so much good, I’m sure of it.”

  “Will you come?” Miel said. “If I can arrange it?”

  She nodded. “And I’ll make it look like I’m enjoying myself,” she said. “Just so long as I don’t have to give bits of dead animal to anybody. There are limits.”

  He smiled. “That’s boar-hunting,” he said, “not hawking. And besides, it’s a great honor to preside over the unmaking. You should be thrilled to be asked.”

  “Should I really? I’ll try to bear that in mind. Meanwhile, will you do it? Ask your cousin, I mean. I’m convinced it’d help.”

  Miel shook his head. “Jarnac won’t fly his precious hawks out of season,” he said. “Not for anybody. If I asked him, he’d just look down his nose at me and quote bits out of King Fashion and Queen Reason.”

  She stared at him. “Out of what?”

  “The Venerable Dialogue of King Fashion and Queen Reason, Concerning the Proper Exercise of Huntsmanship,” Miel said. “Good God, you mean you weren’t made to read it as a child?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You lucky —” Miel shook his head. “I had to learn the whole thing off by heart when I was nine.”

  “Is it ghastly?”

  “It’s long,” Miel replied, with feeling. “And the bit about how to tell the age of a roebuck by the shape and texture of its droppings is just a bit too graphic for my taste. Jarnac lives by it, you’d never get him to break the rules.”

  “How about if I —?”

  “But,” Miel went on briskly, “Jarnac also keeps an excellent kennel, and it’s still boar season, so we can go boar-hunting instead, and that’ll do just as well, if you really think it’d help.”

  “You aren’t sure about that, are you?”

  Miel shrugged. “I don’t think Orsea’d let himself have a good time, not the mood he’s in at the moment. The trouble is, he’s torturing himself because he believes the disaster was his fault, and to a certain extent he’s right. Someone like him can’t get round something like that.”

  “I know.” She stood up, kicking at the hem of her dress. “And it’s so stupid, because nobody else would carry on like that, and people really don’t blame him. They’re so used to things like that happening, it’s just a fact of life to them. That’s something I don’t understand,” she went on. “I guess it’s because I spent most of my childhood abroad, being a hostage. I can’t see how you’d get to a state where thousands of people suddenly aren’t there anymore, and yet you carry on like nothing’s happened. How can people live like that?”

  Miel sighed. “It was very bad in the war — the proper war, I mean, between us and the Vadani. We were within an inch of bleeding each other to death. That’s why your father and Valentinian had to patch it up at all costs.” That, he didn’t add, is why you had to marry Orsea instead of me. “Anyhow,” he went on, “back in those days — you weren’t here — it was one hideous massacre after another, except when we were butchering them, and that wasn’t often. Or often enough, anyhow.” He shook his head. “That’s where the trouble lay with this war,” he went on. “We simply hadn’t realized how weak we’d become, not till we’d committed to the invasion and it was too late to go back. We knew before we left the city, deep down, that the whole thing was a complete joke — us, fighting the Mezentines —
but we didn’t dare face up to it. Orsea should’ve, but everybody wanted to go, so we could feel good about ourselves, and he went along with it because he always does. It’s remarkable the truly stupid things people can do just because it’s expected of them, or they think it’s expected of them.”

  She gave him a look he didn’t like. It said, You could have stopped him. He shook his head to say, no, I couldn’t. He believed that was true, as an article of faith.

  “I’ll go and see Cousin Jarnac,” he said. “There won’t be any trouble about getting up a boar-hunt; any excuse, as far as he’s concerned.” Miel clicked his tongue. “And who knows,” he said. “Maybe someone can get into a tight spot and Orsea can be terribly brave and save his life. That’d do him the world of good; it’s a sort of blind spot with him, he’s got no sense of perspective. So long as he does well and helps someone and does the right thing, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s something big and important, like saving the city, or something small and trivial, like rescuing an old woman’s dog from drowning.” He paused. “Did he ever tell you about that?”

  “About what?”

  Miel smiled broadly. “You should get him to tell you, it’s glorious.”

  “You tell me. He’s not talking to me, remember.”

  Miel frowned, then went on: “We were out walking once, when we were kids — playing rovers, I think, or something like that. Anyway, there’s this river, and there’s this old woman kneeling on the bank, and two or three puppies splashing about in the water. Orsea immediately assumes they’ve fallen in by accident, so he hurls himself into the water to save them, forgetting in the excitement of the moment that he can’t swim — well he can, but only a sort of feeble frogs’-legs-and-otters’-paws swimming, which is no good at all in a fast-flowing river. Luckily we’ve got a couple of my father’s men along with us — thinking about it, I think we were shooting wild duck, not playing rovers; anyhow, they jump in and fish him out, and he makes them go back and rescue the puppies; they get two of them but not the third. He takes them to the old woman, and she looks at him like he’s gone off his head: what did you want to go and do that for? she says. Turns out, of course, that they were the leftovers from the litter and she was drowning them on purpose. I’d figured that out pretty early on, of course, but Orsea had real trouble with the whole idea, he couldn’t believe someone’d actually do that. Anyway, he caught one hell of a cold, and his father gave him a dreadful shouting-at for nearly getting drowned making a fool of himself. And he hasn’t changed. I think he’d still do exactly the same thing if we walked in on some old woman and a dog in the water; just in case, if you see what I mean.”