Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  The harborers weren’t keeping up. He stopped and looked back. His own dogs and men were moving along, as he’d told them to do, but the Phocas pack (his heart had sunk when he saw them at the meet; useless, the lot of them, disobedient, reckless, forever getting ahead or chasing off after rabbits) were hanging back, and he could hear a lymer yelping. Stupid creature; it could see the boar and couldn’t understand why it couldn’t get at it.

  “Maritz,” he called out, “nip back and tell the Phocas lads to move their bloody dogs. We haven’t got time for stragglers.”

  The huntsman ran off and didn’t come back. For a moment, Jarnac wasn’t sure what to do, a very rare experience for him. Properly speaking, he should press on and leave the Phocas pack to their own devices — it was what King Fashion would’ve done — but he couldn’t quite bring himself to abandon them, thereby tacitly accusing the Phocas of incompetence. It’d be fair comment, but bad diplomacy. With a sigh, aware he was doing the wrong thing, he turned back and went to see what the problem was.

  Easy enough. One of the Phocas lymers had managed to force itself about halfway through the briar tangle before getting completely laid up. It was yelping in panic and frustration, tugging at the brambles tangled in its ears, snarling at the boar; two more of the Phocas dogs were struggling to join it; a third had been intercepted by Maritz and one of the Phocas people, but was putting up a very convincing fight, dragging on its collar, scrabbling for traction with all four paws. The boar, meanwhile, was looking very unhappy. The stuck lymer’s muzzle was only about a foot and a half away from its snout; there was a solid fuzz of grown-in bramble in the way, enough to keep three men with staffhooks busy for an hour, but that didn’t seem to count for very much as far as the boar was concerned. It could smell enemy, right up close. Its instincts were telling it: attack, run away, but do something instead of just standing there. All in all, Jarnac reflected, I couldn’t have designed a worse mess if I’d had a month to think about it and half a dozen clerks to help out with the geometry.

  King Fashion would’ve left the Phocas to sort out their own mess, but never mind. The priority was to get the dog out of the briars without it or anybody else getting ripped up by the boar. There was one obvious answer, but he kept dodging away from it like a nervous fencer. It was a fine boar, a trophy animal; it was beautiful, and he didn’t want to have to murder it just to rescue someone else’s stupid, badly trained dog. It would be on his conscience. But then, so would the dog, and anyone or anything else that got mangled or killed because of his scruples. He swore, then called over his shoulder for his heavy bow.

  In Jarnac’s terms, this meant the hundred-and-fifty-pounder, a monstrous deflexed recurve made of laminated buffalo horn, rock maple and boar backstrap sinew. Bending it involved crouching like a frog and springing up into the draw, so as to use every last scrap of back and thigh muscle to supplement the force of the arms and chest. They’d strung it for him before they left the house, using the big press in the tack room (when unstrung, it bent back on itself the wrong way, like a horseshoe). He nocked an arrow, looked the boar in the eyes, wound himself up, drew and loosed.

  At five yards, there wasn’t much danger that he’d miss. The arrow caught the boar in the fold of skin where the throat met the chest; at a guess, he’d say it went in a good handspan. The boar looked at him, blinked — he noticed the fine, long eyelashes, like a girl’s — and folded up like a traveling chair. First it sank to its knees, its backside pointing up in the air. Then the strength in its joints evaporated and it rolled slowly onto its side, its feet lifting off the ground. Two muscle spasms stretched its back, and then it was perfectly still.

  He lowered the bow. “Get that fucking dog out of there,” he said.

  They approached with staffhooks, but he yelled at them; no point in killing the boar if they mutilated the dog with a missed slash. He told them to put their gloves on and pull the briars apart. Then he walked away. He felt utterly miserable, and he wanted not to be there.

  As soon as they’d rescued the dogs, they cut the boar out, hocked it and slung it on a pole. Maritz tried to tell him the weight, but Jarnac shut him up; he didn’t want to know. It had been a trophy boar, and now it was just pork; fine, it’d make good dinners for the farm workers, who didn’t see meat very often, and it wouldn’t be trampling any more growing crops. He didn’t want to think about it, or what he’d just done. He wanted to go home.

  “Right,” he said aloud.

  Maritz scampered up beside him, anticipating new instructions. Jarnac’s mind was a blank, but he said, “Get the line back together, we’ll push through anyhow. You never know, there may be something.” He hoped there wouldn’t be. He’d just broken the contract between hunter and quarry, so that nothing could go right for him from now on, all for the sake of the stupid Phocas’ useless dog.

  He wasn’t really taking notice as they drove the rest of the wood. Usually, when beating out a cover, he was aware of everything; he heard every snapped twig, saw every movement, every gradation of color and texture, every detail of bark, lichen and moss. The slightest thing snagged his attention — the call of a jay, sunlight in a water-drop hanging from a leaf, the smell of leaf mold, the taste of sweat running down his face. When the hunt was on and the next pace forward might bring him to the quarry, he felt so alive he could hardly bear it. All that had gone, though, and there was nothing left in it except a long walk over rough ground.

  They dragged themselves through a dense tangle of holly, out onto the third lateral ride. As soon as he was on the path, in the open, he realized that the line had gone to hell. There were dogs in front, dogs behind, men everywhere, chaos. Under normal circumstances he’d have been beside himself with rage. He grinned. Like it mattered.

  Behind him, somebody shouted; then someone else shouted back, a dog yelped, high and frightened, other dogs joined in. Something was crashing through thick cover. Immediately, Jarnac snapped out of his self-indulgent sulk. Everything was going wrong at once. Somehow, against all the odds and all the rules, they’d found another boar — a big one, by the sound of it — right on top of the one he’d murdered. That was impossible, of course, because you didn’t get two fully grown boars this close together, but apparently it had happened, and his line was all screwed up. Disaster; there were men and dogs in front of a bolted boar, right in the danger zone. It was the worst thing that could happen. Without stopping to think, he hurled himself at the source of the noise, tugging at his sword-hilt (but the stupid thing was binding in the scabbard and wouldn’t come out). All he could see in his mind’s eye was the boar coming up behind the men who’d strayed ahead. They wouldn’t know what was happening, they wouldn’t have time to turn round, let alone get out of the way. He couldn’t think of anything to do, except get to the boar before it hurt anybody, and kill it.

  Pelhaz and Garsio were shouting, dead ahead; dogs were barking all round. He charged straight into trees, branches bashed him across the face, clubbed his shoulders. He couldn’t see more than five yards in front, and he suspected he was losing his sense of direction (so easily done in thick cover, no matter how experienced you were). He tried to pull himself together, plot the boar’s likely course from the sounds around him, but there didn’t seem to be a pattern. One moment he was sure he could hear it crashing about on his left; then it was behind him, then over on the right. For one crazy, horrifying moment he wondered if there were half a dozen of them, not just one. And then he saw it.

  Not for long. A black shape slipped past him, glimpsed between the trunks of two skinny oaks. He saw enough to identify it: a six-year-old, but huge for its age, running flat out (that rather ludicrous straight-backed seesaw run, like a lame man sprinting). He hadn’t seen the tusks, but he didn’t care about stuff like that right now. Desperately he tried to reassemble the positions of men and dogs in his mind, and adjust for straying. If he was right and not just thinking wishfully, the boar was on a slanting course that led it away from the end of th
e line that had got ahead of itself; in which case, the men would be safe and probably the dogs too.

  It occurred to him to blow a dead stop, which was what he should have done as soon as the wretched animal broke cover. Better late than never; he sounded his horn, caught his breath, and tried to think.

  Horn-calls answered him, and at last he was able to plot the positions of his men. The Phocas were well behind (out of harm’s way; good); his own men were in front, but over on the right, away from the boar. The dogs could be anywhere, thanks to the panic and the confusion, but he could hear the huntsmen calling them back. With any luck, none of them were so hot on the scent that they’d disobey the calls. Jarnac closed his eyes and thanked whoever was in charge of destiny that day. He didn’t deserve it, but he seemed to have got away with it.

  More horn-calls, some shouting; the line was pulling itself together. Garsio was calling for him; he shouted back, to give his position. Another shout; he recognized the captain of the Phocas contingent. He made sure the line was re-formed and perfect before he called out instructions for Maritz and Pelhaz to pass on to the under-captains. By now, the boar could be well in front, but from what he’d seen of it he was pretty sure it wouldn’t veer off the line it’d been on, not unless it found a new source of danger or an unpassable obstacle. Suddenly he laughed. Everything possible had gone wrong, he’d fucked it all up worse than he’d ever done in his entire life, and even so he’d found a cracking good pig for the Duke, and every prospect of presenting it, on time, exactly where it was supposed to be. It was enough to make you die of despair; if the universe could reward such gross incompetence with success, how could he ever trust it again?

  Ziani was feeling cold.

  He wouldn’t have noticed the chill, or the clamminess of his wet clothes, if he hadn’t been so bored; but he had nothing else to occupy his mind except his misfortunes, so inevitably he dwelt on them. This wasn’t how he’d imagined it’d be.

  For the first few minutes he’d stood completely still in his assigned spot, poised like a fencer waiting for his enemy’s initial strike. But those first few minutes had passed and large animals hadn’t come streaming at him out of every bush. He’d familiarized himself with the terrain; then he’d looked up at the treetops, then down at the mush of rotting leaves under his feet; then he’d counted all the trees he could see. Nothing had happened. He was bored. If this was hunting, they could shove it.

  Mostly, he was unhappy because he was completely out of his depth (he stooped down, picked up a bit of twig, and started breaking it up into little bits). He didn’t understand the rules or the procedures, he couldn’t see the pattern, and he didn’t like being outdoors. None of any of this, he realized, had anything to do with him. That was where he’d made his mistake; believing he could incorporate this mechanism into his own. But it wasn’t compatible. It was all about something else (What? Getting food? Controlling dangerous pests? Having fun?) and he couldn’t get a handle on it. He should be in the factory, making things.

  He took an arrow out of his homemade, sadly unorthodox quiver, and played with it for a while. It was a wretched artifact by any standards: thirty inches of unevenly planed cedarwood dowel, with a crudely forged and excessively heavy spike socketed on one end. He’d underestimated arrow-making; he’d assumed that if the Eremians could do it, it must be easy. Not so. The dowel was rubbish to start with, but his sad blob of iron made it worse. He fitted it to the bowstring anyway, for something to do.

  In his imagination, it had been quite different. He’d pictured all of them hurrying along together, shoulder to shoulder down a trail of smashed branches and scuffed earth, following the pig. That was how it was supposed to be in the books — except, he realized, there were two distinct methods of hunting, and he’d assumed they’d be doing parforce and instead they were doing the other one, bow-and-stable. His plan wouldn’t work doing it this way. He was wasting his time.

  Nothing he could do about it now, though. He made a wish that there wouldn’t be any pigs in the wood, and that they could all go home soon. From there, he set to worrying — what if he didn’t hear them calling the whole thing off, or they forgot about him, left him standing in the middle of all these ridiculous trees, without the faintest idea where he was? Easily done, he would imagine; he was a stranger, a foreigner, a gatecrasher who’d invited himself along. Why should they remember him, or bother to let him know it was time to move on?

  Noise, somewhere sort of close. He’d learned that noises in a forest are deceptive, and you can’t accurately judge distance or direction by them. The forest was full of noisy things. Apart from the humans and their horrible savage dogs, there were animals — deer, badgers, God knows what else — and birds, not to mention creaking and groaning trees. He’d heard stories, back home, about the dangers of forests; how the tops of tall, thin trees can snap off in the wind and get laid up in the branches of their neighbors thirty feet or so up in the air, held only by tangles of twig and creeper, so that any damn thing (a breeze, a careless movement, a shout, even) might be enough to dislodge them and bring them crashing down, entirely without warning. Foresters called them widow-makers, he remembered, and sometimes they were so deceptively hidden that even the canniest and most wary lumberjack was caught out and flattened. He peered upward again, just in case. All he could see was branches and an untidy mess of foliage. There could be wagons, ships, even houses up there, masked by the leafy swathes, and he’d never see them till it was too late.

  He was concentrating so hard on scanning the treetops for hidden terrors that he nearly missed it all.

  First, the noise. It sounded comical, high-pitched, a furious squealing, mingled with the desperate yapping of dogs, and it seemed to be coming from all around him. He’d heard pigs before: pigs in sties in alleys and entries and snickets (pig-rearing in the City fell in that uncomfortable debatable zone between forbidden and disapproved of); pigs snuffling, grunting, complaining and being killed. This noise was similar but somehow wrong — because it was out of place, he realized; pigs lived in cities, not out in the wilderness, among the stupid trees — and the dog noises confused the issue hopelessly. His best guess, however, was that the pig was about seventy yards distant and heading away from him at speed.

  The boar burst out at him through the twisted branches of a blown-sideways mountain ash; an enormous blurred monstrosity, a cruel parody of the useful, harmless Mezentine pig. Its way of running was hopelessly inefficient, a seesaw motion (it didn’t seem able to bend its back, so it didn’t so much run as bounce), but horribly quick. It had the flat, wet, soppy nose of a proper pig, but there was coarse black hair all over its face, and four huge yellow teeth.

  It’s going to kill me, Ziani told himself — it wasn’t an upsetting thought, somehow — but instead the boar jackknifed past him (bounce-bounce, like a leather ball), crushing bushes and briars as it went by like a ship plowing through a heavy sea. It passed him no further than six feet away; as it departed, Ziani could see its jaws chomping up and down, the absurdly oversize teeth rubbing furiously together like someone trying to start a fire with dry sticks. It looked lethal and ridiculous, and it sounded like an outraged customer demanding to see the manager.

  It was almost out of Ziani’s little patch of clearing when the dogs showed up. They were running so fast he could barely make out their shapes, beyond an impression of long, flexible bodies contorted by extraordinary effort; and when they jumped at the boar they seemed to flow, like water poured at a height. His eye and brain weren’t sharp enough to register how many of them there were; they were too quick for that. But one of them had sprung onto the boar’s table-wide back; another was being dragged along underneath it by its teeth clamped in its venerable dewlap; another was curled round the boar’s front legs like ivy, skittering frantically backward as it tried to bite into a ham much wider than the full gape of its long, pointed jaws. Ziani had seen hate occasionally, and if anyone had asked him, he’d have stated confidently that
it was a uniquely human emotion; but he’d never seen anything like the way the dogs hated the boar. There was a diabolical agility to it that almost amounted to grace, but the absolute commitment of their fury was terrifying.

  Compared to the dogs, the boar was slow, rigid and oafish; but it was strong. With a short, apparently slight movement of its neck and shoulders, it lifted up one of the dogs and threw it straight up in the air, like a man spinning himself a catch with an apple. The dog’s back arched, all four legs scrambled at empty air; it came down in a tangle of holly laced with briars and ground elder, sprang up again and shot itself like an arrow or a scorpion bolt at the boar’s head. Another dog was tearing at the boar’s ear, and yet another was trying to bite its nose. The boar made another of those short movements, and one of the dogs yelped — it was shriller than any human scream — and fell sprawling on its back, its belly ripped open like a burst seam.

  The dogs were losing, but they didn’t seem to care. They were too light to slow the boar’s momentum, and their weapons were too slight to penetrate its armor. The boar dragged them, four of them with their jaws locked in it, through the middle of a holly-clump, like someone wiping mud off his shoes in long grass. One of them was pulled off, but rolled over, jumped, vaulted over the boar’s back and disappeared underneath it again, all in one movement. Such a degree of recklessness was almost beyond Ziani’s capacity to believe; until that moment, he’d have said he was the only living thing in the world capable of it.