Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  Ziani looked at him for a moment before answering. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m rather busy at the moment, and it’s not really the sort of thing I do. I’m sure there’s plenty of other smiths who’ll do a much better job than I could.”

  The wrong answer, evidently; Jarnac Ducas gave him a well-bred look and went on: “Obviously, since it’s a rush job, that’ll have to be reflected in the price. I don’t mind paying over the odds for the best. The main thing is to have them ready in time without skimping on quality. I’m sure you understand.”

  Then Ziani realized he was being stupid, allowing his irritation to cloud his perception. He looked at Jarnac Ducas again and this time saw him for what he was. “Of course,” he said. “I think the best thing would be if you could have the old spears brought here, so I can have a look at them and decide whether they can be spruced up, or whether we’ll need to make new ones. Would that be all right?”

  “Of course. I’ll see to it straight away.”

  “That would be most helpful,” Ziani said.

  Jarnac beamed at him; he’d forgiven and forgotten the earlier misunderstanding, where Ziani had misinterpreted his request as something capable of being refused, and now they understood each other. “Oh, and another thing,” he said.

  Half an hour later, Ziani crossed the yard to the materials store, where Cantacusene was marking out timber for scorpion frames. Cantacusene had joined him straight away, as soon as he asked; he’d left his workshop, locking the door behind him, and vowing never to return. It was like a religious conversion, a disciple following the master.

  “What do you know,” Ziani asked him, “about boiled leather-work?”

  “Ah.” Cantacusene nodded. “You don’t do that in Mezentia, then.”

  Ziani shook his head. “Not that I ever heard. But it’d presumably come under the Shoemakers’, or maybe the Saddlers’. You know about it, then.”

  Cantacusene nodded again. “You take your leather,” he said, “sole bends are best but it depends on what you’re making. You cut it out a third bigger than you want it to be, nail it to a wooden former, and dip it in boiling water for as long as it takes to count fifty. Pull it out, it’ll have shrunk to size and gone hard as oak. They use it for armor mostly. Why?”

  Ziani frowned. “Why not use steel?” he said.

  “Steel’s dear, leather’s cheap. Also, for hunting armor, it doesn’t clank or rattle. If you want to be really fancy, you can dip it in melted beeswax instead of boiling water; makes it even harder, but you got to be careful on a hot day.”

  “You’ve done it, then?”

  “Loads of times,” Cantacusene said. “Very popular line with the gentry, specially those who can’t run to a full set of steel. I got all the formers back at my place.”

  “Fine,” Ziani said. “Some clown called Jarnac Ducas wants a dozen sets of hunting armor in ten days: vambraces, couters, rerebraces, pauldrons, gorgets, plackets, cuirasses, taces, cuisses, cops and greaves. Plain, he said, not fancy, whatever that means.”

  Cantacusene was staring at him. “Ten days? ”

  “That’s right. Problem?”

  “I can’t do all that. Not on my own.”

  Ziani smiled; at least his lips parted, like a crack in an old post. “Well of course not,” he said. “You show me what to do and I’ll help you. Doesn’t sound like it’d be too hard, not if you’ve already got the formers.”

  Cantacusene had that worried look; there was something dog-like about it, Ziani thought. “Me teach you?” he said.

  “That’s right. Now, presumably you know where we can get the material from, and you’ve got all the tools and stuff. The material won’t be a problem, will it?”

  Cantacusene shook his head. “Sole bends,” he said. “Got to be a quarter inch thick, good clean hides without scars or fly-bites. I always used to get them from —”

  “I’ll leave all that to you, then,” Ziani said. “Let me know when you’re ready to start. And, I nearly forgot, we’ll need a thirteenth set, but I’ll be making that one all myself.”

  “For his lordship, is it?”

  “No,” Ziani said. “For me.” He smiled again; private joke. “I’m going on this hunt as well.”

  Cantacusene couldn’t have been more surprised if Ziani had pushed him down a well. “You’re going hunting with the Ducas?”

  “That’s right. Jarnac invited me.”

  “Invited you?”

  “After I asked him, yes. I said I’d never done it, nothing like it where I come from. He was very pleasant about it; of course I could come along, he said. I suppose he’s hoping for a good deal on the armor. Oh yes, and a dozen boar-spears as well, but I’ll see to them.”

  That was obviously as much as Cantacusene could take. He mumbled something about going to see the leather merchant, and stumbled away as though he’d been in a fight.

  Ziani shrugged, and went back to tempering his spring. It came out well enough in the end; half as much power again as the Mezentine standard for a scorpion spring, with a modified hook linkage that should help with the awkward problem of stress fracture that the Guild had given up on two hundred years ago. It would increase the strain on the wooden frame, of course, reducing the machine’s working life still further, but that hardly mattered. No point building anything to last, given who his customers would be.

  Cantacusene came back two hours later; the material would be delivered early in the morning (he started to tell Ziani the price, but Ziani wasn’t interested), and the carrier would pick up the tools and formers from his workshop later that evening; they could start work tomorrow, if that suited. Ziani thanked him and went back to his bench, where he was clearing up a few minor problems with a redesigned ratchet axis. He would have liked to have given it more thought, made a few more changes, but there wouldn’t be time now. His mind drifted; he was contemplating a two-piece fabricated spear-blade socket, square section box drawn down so the tang of the blade could simply slot in (interference fit) and be retained by the crossbar —

  “Are you busy? Could you spare a moment?”

  It was the Ducas voice, but not Jarnac this time; quieter, politer. Which meant it had to be the more important one, Miel Ducas. Ziani put down his calipers, looked up and smiled.

  “Of course,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  Miel Ducas looked different; tired, that would account for some of it, but he’d also been worrying about something recently. His face wasn’t exactly hard to read. “I’ve got a message for you, from the Duke’s council. They’ll be writing, but I thought I’d come and tell you myself.”

  There could be no doubt as to what the message would be; even so, Ziani found that his lungs were locked and he couldn’t breathe. “That was very kind of you,” he said. “This is about the scorpions.”

  Miel nodded. “The council would like to place an order,” he said, in a guarded, level voice. “Basically, as many as you can make, as soon as possible.”

  Ziani nodded. He was afraid it’d look offhand, but he wasn’t able to speak. Miel Ducas was having difficulties, too; he started to say something, hesitated, and started again.

  “About the price —” he said.

  “That’s all right,” Ziani interrupted. “I’ve decided I’ll do it at cost — materials and what I’ll have to pay my men. Calaphates doesn’t know yet, but I’ll talk to him.”

  “That’s —” Miel stopped; he reminded Ziani of someone searching for a word in a foreign language. “That’s very generous of you,” he said.

  “Least I can do,” Ziani replied. “After all, I owe you people my life. My way of saying thank you.”

  A long moment, with neither of them knowing quite how to say what was in their minds. Then Ziani went on: “We’ll start straight away. I’ve been doing some preliminary work, a few improvements to the design. Nothing you’d notice, unless you knew what you were looking for. I’ve taken on twenty men so far, and there’s fifteen more I’m waiting
to hear from.”

  “That’s a lot,” Miel said, though he knew he was wrong as soon as he said it. “I thought you were on your own here, actually.”

  Ziani smiled. “That wouldn’t be any good, not for a job like this. Actually, I won’t be involved at all, once everything’s up and running. In fact, I’ll be busy with a job for your cousin.”

  “Jarnac?” Miel scowled. “Look, no offense, but this is far more important. I’ll talk to Jarnac, tell him he’ll have to find someone else.”

  “It’s all right,” Ziani said. “Once everything’s set up, I’m just another pair of hands. Besides, your cousin’s job’ll only take a week, and then I’ll be free to muck in with the rest of the men. You’ll have the first half-dozen scorpions finished and ready in three days, you’ve got my word on that.”

  When the Ducas had gone and he was alone, Ziani allowed his knees to buckle, as they’d been wanting to do ever since he’d heard the words he knew he’d hear. He leaned against the wall and slid down it, until he was sitting on the floor. Strange; it was simply the moving into engagement of a component of known qualities, sliding along its keyway and coming to rest against its stop. Perhaps it was the scale of what this development meant that affected him so powerfully: the expenditure of lives and resources, the men killed (they were alive, presumably walking about, eating, talking somewhere, but they were already as good as dead, and Ziani had seen to all that); the destruction, the laying waste, the burning and breaking of well-made goods, the sheer effort he’d unleashed; like the man in the story who was given all the four winds tied up in a sack, and some fool untied it and let them go. There would be so much noise, and movement, and pain. A man with a keen imagination would have trouble with the thought of it.

  But not yet. Before all that, he had a lot of work to do, a great deal to think about; and he had the hunt to look forward to. As yet, that was still a separate piece, little more than an unfinished casting waiting to be fettled, machined, drilled to accept moving parts. He would have to design a mechanism for it, once he knew what it was going to be for. A pity; the man was a clown, but he’d quite liked Jarnac Ducas. There was a straightforwardness about him that he shared with his cousin. Ziani had arrived in Eremia expecting to find the aristocracy difficult to work with — brittle like cast iron, or soft and sticky to cut, like copper — but so far at least they’d proved to be quality material, a pleasure to use. It had all come together very sweetly, though of course it was the easy bit; and making the parts was one thing, assembling them was something else entirely.

  This is no time to be sitting on floors, he told himself, and stood up. As he put the finishing touches to the axis pin, he called Miel Ducas back into his mind, considering and analyzing his manner, his appearance. Tired, a little nervous, and worried about something beyond the awkwardness of his mission; what would worry the Ducas, the second most important man in Eremia, to the point that it showed in his face to a stranger?

  Of course he couldn’t answer that, or even know where to begin speculating. You can’t take the back off a man’s head and examine the works for signs of damage and wear. The most you can do is make a note of where the visible flaws run, the line along which the material will eventually break once it’s been flexed a few times too often.

  14

  The unmaking [he read] is the crown, the very flower of the hunt; therefore it follows that it must be conducted solemnly, seriously and with respect. There are two parts thereof, namely the abay and the undoing. First, let the carcass be turned on its back and the skin of the throat cut open most carefully up the length of the neck, and let cuts be made through the flesh to the bone. Let the master of the hunt approach then, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, and let the huntsmen sound the death on their horns; thereafter let the hounds first and then the lymers be loosed so that they might tear at the neck before they are coupled up, that the taste thereof might quicken them to the chase thereafter. Then let a forked stick with one arm longer than the other be set up in the earth beside the carcass, and let the master with his garniture split the skin from throat to vent…

  Valens frowned. The book, with its brightly colored pictures and carefully pumiced margins, had cost him the price of a small farm; but all they’d done was loosely paraphrase Cadentius, leaving a few bits out and dressing up other bits in fancy prose. For a start, the lengthwise cut was part of the undoing, not the abay; and whoever wrote this had no idea what a garniture was.

  He sighed, closed the book and stood up. The woman in the red dress had sworn blind that it was the last known surviving copy of a rare early text attributed to Polinus Rex, but Polinus was three hundred years earlier than Cadentius, who’d been the first to have the master roll up his sleeves. He’d been had; twenty good-weight thalers he’d never see again, and still the woman in the red dress hadn’t brought a letter…

  Through the window he could see the raindrops dripping from the pine-branches. It was a hunting day, but there wasn’t any point going out in this; there’d be no scent in the wet, the mud would make the going treacherous, the deer would be holding in the high wood where there’d be precious little chance of finding them. The sharpness of his disappointment surprised him; the rain would stop soon, there would be other days, the deer would still be there next week, but every day lost was a precious thing stolen from him, a treat held just out of reach to tease him. Instead, he’d have to read letters, convene the council, do work. He smiled; he could hear his eight-year-old self saying it, not fair. To which one of many voices replies: life isn’t fair, the sooner you learn that, the better.

  It wasn’t fair that she hadn’t written back; it had never been this long before, and it was no good saying there hadn’t been a suitable courier, because five women in red dresses had been and gone (a velvet cloak, a set of rosewood and whalebone chessmen, a pair of pointy-toed shoes, very latest style, a marquetry box to keep things in, and finally the bloody useless book), all from Eremia, all without a letter. And on top of that, it was raining.

  On a table beside the window lay a pile of documents; routine reports, mostly, from his prefects, agents and observers, making sure he knew the facts before anybody else did. He sat down and picked one off the top of the heap. The handwriting was steep and cramped, and he recognized it — his man in Lonazep, with a full account of the landing of the Mezentine mercenary army. He’d had the gist already, but there would be a great deal to be gleaned from the details, from the descriptions of the staff officers to the number of barrels of arrows. He read it, then read it again; the information was good and solid, but he couldn’t get his mind to bite on it. He smiled, because he could picture his father sitting at this very table (back then, of course, it was downstairs in the small anteroom off the great solar; but the daylight lasted longer here in the West Tower), wading through his paperwork with palpable growing impatience, until he jumped up from his chair and stormed out of the room to go and look at the horses or the dogs. Somehow he’d always managed to absorb just enough from his reports to stay sharp, but he’d always lived in and for the present, content or resigned to react to each development as it came. He’d been the same when playing chess, too; he’d never quite come to terms with the idea that the point of the game was to trap the enemy king, rather than slaughter the opponent’s pieces like sheep. That thought brought back the first time Valens had ever beaten him. It was an ambiguous memory, because even now he couldn’t call it to mind without an automatic smirk of pride; he’d used his father’s aggression against him, lured him into checkmate with the offer of a gaggle of defenseless pawns, pinned him in a corner with his only two surviving capital pieces, while his father’s queen, bishops and knights stood by, unused and impotent. But he also remembered the disbelief, followed by the hurt, followed by the anger. They hadn’t spoken to each other for two days afterward.

  A report from Boton about a meeting between Duke Orsea and representatives of the Cure Hardy. Well; he knew about that. Orsea had picked the wr
ong sect to make eyes at, and the whole thing had been a waste of time. A report from Civitas Eremiae about the Mezentine defector, Vaatzes; what he was up to was still unclear, but he’d got money from somewhere to set up a factory, and was buying up bloom iron, old horseshoes, farm scrap iron of all kinds; also, he’d hired half the blacksmiths and carpenters in the city. Valens raised an eyebrow at that. If he’d heard about it, he was pretty sure the Mezentines had too, and surely such reports would confirm their worst fears about defectors betraying their precious trade secrets. If this Vaatzes had deliberately set out to antagonize the Republic, he couldn’t have gone about it better. Valens went back a line: broken scythe blades, rakes, pitchfork tines, hooks, hammers, any kind of scrap made of hardening steel; also charcoal in enormous quantities, planed and unplaned lumber. The steel suggested weapons; the lumber sounded more like building works. He folded down a corner of the dispatch and moved on.

  Petitions; he groaned aloud, allowing himself the indulgence of a little melodrama, since there was nobody else there to see. Not just petitions; appeals, from the general assizes and the marches assizes and the levy sessions; appeals on points of law and points of fact, procedural irregularities (the original summons recited in the presence of eight witnesses rather than the prescribed seven; how that could possibly invalidate a man’s case he had no idea, but that was the law), limitations and claims out of time. He could just about have endured a morning in court, with a couple of clever speakers to entertain him, but the thought of sitting at a table and fighting his way through a two-inch wedge of the stuff made him wince.