Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  He closed his eyes. I might as well soak the palace in lamp-oil and set light to it, he told himself. I’ve just been thinking how stupid Orsea is, and I’ve proved I’m worse than him. To bring the war here; unforgivable. I shouldn’t even think it, in case they can read minds; they seem to be able to do pretty much everything else.

  He sighed. No point hating the Mezentines; you might as well hate the winter, or lightning, or disease, or death. As far as he knew — he actually paused and thought about it for a moment — he didn’t hate anybody; not even Orsea, though at times he came quite close. Hate, like love, was an indulgence he didn’t need and refused to waste lifespan on —

  (Correction, he admitted; I hated Father sometimes. But that was inevitable, and besides, I should be proud of myself for the elegant economy of effort. Hatred and love only once, and both for the same person.)

  In any event; hate and anger wouldn’t make anything better. His fencing instructor had taught him that; they make the hand shake, they spoil your concentration. The most you can ever feel for your opponent, if you want to defeat and kill him, is a certain mild dislike.

  He picked the pen up.

  You never got my last letter [he wrote]. So that settles that, and we needn’t discuss it.

  I don’t know where the wet oak leaves business comes from; can’t have been anything I said. As a matter of fact, I despise getting wet, particularly in the morning. The smell of damp cloth drying out depresses me and gives me a headache. I like bright sunlight, cool breezes, tidy blue skies without piles of cloud left scattered about, moonlit nights — I like to be able to see for miles in every direction. Not quite sure where I stand on the issue of forests; I like them because that’s where the quarry tends to be, and every bush could be hiding the record buck or the boar the farmers have been telling me about for weeks. But I don’t like the tangle, or the obstruction. You can’t go fast in a forest, and you can’t see. I like to flush my quarry out into the open. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work like that.

  Veatriz, I need to ask you something. Do you think there’s going to be a war? I don’t know how much Orsea’s told you, or even how much he knows himself; but the Mezentines have raised a large army, and it looks horribly like they mean to use it against Eremia. I’d like to say don’t be scared, but I can’t. If you haven’t talked to Orsea about it, maybe you should. And — I’m going to have to be obnoxious for a bit, so bite your tongue and don’t yell at me — the truth is, I have my doubts about how Orsea’s likely to handle this. I think Orsea is a good man, from what I’ve heard about him. He’s brave, and conscientious, he cares very much about doing his job and not letting his people down. That’s why I’m worried. You see, I believe that if the Mezentines invade, Orsea would rather die than run away and desert his people; which is all very well, and I’d like to think I’d do the same in his shoes, though I wouldn’t bet money on it. I’m not a good, noble man, like he is. If I’d been good and noble, I’d be dead by now.

  I’m still writing this letter; you haven’t read it yet; so the waves of furious anger and resentment I can feel coming back at me off the paper must just be my imagination. Yes, I know. How dare I criticize Orsea, or suggest… We both know what you’re thinking. But listen to me, please. Your place is at your husband’s side, yes, right. But

  Valens stopped writing. He knew that if he finished the sentence, he could be condemning the Vadani to war and death. Why would he want to do something like that?

  I want you to know that, if things go badly — you don’t know the Mezentines like I do, once they start something, they don’t give up — if things go badly, I can protect you, both of you, if you come here. I don’t know how, exactly, but you can leave that to me. I can do it, and I will. Piece of cake.

  There; now you see what I mean about getting the quarry out in the open. You do it by bursting in, making a noise, waving your arms, yelling, making a complete exhibition of yourself, being as loud and as scary as you possibly can.

  This is going very badly. I’m not thinking. For a start, even if you’re prepared to do as I say, how are you going to persuade Orsea? He doesn’t know you and I are

  (Valens hesitated for a very long time.)

  friends; so why on earth would he want to come here, to the lair of his traditional enemy and all that? I can see him, he’s looking at you as though you’ve gone soft in the head. He’s asking himself, why’s she saying this, what on earth makes her think we’d be safer with the bloody Vadani than we are here? And besides, I couldn’t ever do that, it’d be betraying my people.

  Veatriz, I’m worried. I’m scared, and I can’t make the fear go away. Please, at least think about it. The Mezentines aren’t savages, but they’re very different from us, they think in a completely different way.

  I have no right to make this sort of proposition to you; it’s worse than making a pass at you, in some ways. Most ways, actually. But if you think I’ve been wicked and hateful and manipulative, you just wait and see what I“m going to say next. Namely: I know you love Orsea, and your place is with him, and you’d never do anything to hurt him. But which do you think is the better option: Orsea good and brave and keeping faith with his people and dead, or Orsea ashamed, dishonored and alive?

  I’m your friend. I want to keep you safe. If, when, if the Mezentines get to Palicuro (in case you don’t know it, it’s a small village on the main east-west road, about seventeen miles from Civitas; inn, smithy, little village square with an old almond tree in the middle), I want to ask you to think very carefully about what I’ve suggested. It’s the only thing I’ll ever ask you to do for me. Please.

  A short, round woman whose red dress didn’t suit her complexion at all was half-killing her elderly gray palfrey, making it lug her not insignificant weight all the way up the long uphill road to Civitas Eremiae. She’d come to sell perfumes, flower essences and herbal remedies to the Duchess at extortionate prices. She came away smirking.

  In the heel of her shoe was a little piece of folded parchment. It was sharp-edged and it chafed like hell, but she didn’t mind; she was riding rather than walking, and besides, it would make it possible for her to sell perfumes, flower essences and herbal remedies to the Duke of the Vadani for an absurdly large sum of money. Her feet hurt anyway, because of the corns.

  The Duchess had asked her to wait while she wrote the reply, and she’d been expecting to be kept hanging about for a long time; she’d made a little nest of cushions for herself in the handsome window-seat in the small gallery (such a good view down across the valley) and she’d brought a book — The Garden of Love in Idleness; very hard to get hold of a copy, especially one with quality pictures — but she’d hardly had time to open it when the Duchess came back again. She’d looked tense and unhappy, but that was her business.

  The woman in the red dress didn’t take her shoe off until she reached the inn at Palicuro (miserable little place, and some clown had cut down the almond tree). She was a thoughtful woman, careful and attentive to detail, so she packed her shoes with lavender overnight. The Vadani Duke was reckoned to be a good mark and a cash customer; he wouldn’t want his letter smelling of hot feet.

  An hour or so after the woman in the red dress reached the bottom of the mountain, a team of carpenters, stonemasons and guardsmen set about installing the first batch of the new war engines on the ramparts of Civitas Eremiae.

  It was a bitch of a job. The stupid things were heavy, but their wooden frames weren’t robust enough to allow them to be hauled about on ropes and cranes (the little Mezentine had been very fussy about that) so they had to be manhandled up the stairs, and they were an awkward shape. There wasn’t anywhere you could hold on to them easily, and unless you shuffled along a few inches at a time, you barked your shins on the legs of the stand. It was the general consensus of opinion that if the little Mezentine had had to install the things himself, he’d have given a bit more thought to stuff like that; also, that the engines themselves were a compl
ete waste of public money, since nobody in their right mind would ever dream of attacking Civitas, which was universally acknowledged to be impregnable; and only a born idiot like Duke Orsea would’ve been gullible enough to buy such a load of old junk in the first place. Still, what could you expect from someone who spent all his time pig-hunting when he should be running the country?

  Forty-seven of the things — they’d been delivered fifty, but there was simply no way of fitting fifty onto the top platform of the old gate tower, there just wasn’t room, and if only people would take the time to measure up for a job before starting, it’d make life so much easier for the poor sods who had to do the actual work — eventually sat in their cradles overlooking the road, like elderly wooden vultures waiting for something to die. In theory they were adjustable for windage and elevation — you made the adjustments by knocking in a series of little wedges until you’d got the angle, but you just had to look at it to know it wouldn’t actually work in practice — and the range was supposedly up to three hundred yards. Word was that the Duke had upped the order to two hundred, proving the old saying about fools and their money, not that it was actually his money, when you stopped and thought about it.

  The installation crews finished their work, stood shaking their heads sadly for a while, and went away. Tomorrow they had the equally rotten job of fetching up the arrow things to shoot out of them. Stupid. It wasn’t like there was going to be a war anyway, not now that this Valens character was in charge of the Vadani. Another rich bastard who spent all his time chasing pigs. What they all saw in it was a mystery.

  Just as it was beginning to get dark, Ziani Vaatzes climbed up the long stair and stood on the top platform for a while. He’d come to inspect the scorpions, set his mind at rest, but instead he looked down at the road, dropping steeply away into the valley.

  It was a great pity, he thought, and if there had been any other way he’d have taken it. But he’d had no choice, no more than a dropped stone has a choice about falling. He hadn’t started it. It wasn’t his fault.

  18

  Captain Beltista Eiconodoulus of the First Republican Engineers — the title was, he felt, meaningless, since the unit had been arbitrarily formed only three days ago — was afraid of maps. Something inside him went cold when a superior officer summoned him and unrolled one. We’re here, the enemy is over here, this is the road, here are the mountains, bit of rough ground between here and here; he would stand rather awkwardly and try and look eager and intelligent, but the fear would start to grow in his mind like an abscess under a tooth, until he could feel it with every heartbeat. The diagram became the focus of all the terrible possibilities that inevitably arise in a war — the mistakes, the enemy’s superior knowledge or ability, the unforeseen and the negligently omitted, the things left undone and the things done to hurt and deceive. He felt as though he was looking at a sketch, such as artists make before they mix their paint and trim their brushes, a study for what was about to happen. Somewhere (that mess of brown rings representing mountains, that stipple of short lines signifying marshes, that bridge, that apparent plain) was the place where he would meet the contingency he hadn’t prepared for or couldn’t prepare for, and when he arrived there, as and when, there’d be confusion, terror, pain and death.

  “You’ll take this road to begin with,” he was told. “They call it the Butter Pass, for some reason. Follow it up as far as this ridge here, then branch off along this track — it’s a bit rough, apparently, but they assure me it’s fit for wheeled traffic; you might want to take bridging and road-building equipment just in case — and follow it round all the way up to here. You can then double back along this pass here, which’ll bring you out north of the city. By then, our main expeditionary force will be here, Palicuro, and we’ll be able to establish a line of communication and put you in the picture. That’s about it for now. Questions?”

  He’d asked one or two, just to show he was smart and had been listening; but the map told him everything he needed to know.

  He went back to his tent, summoned his lieutenants, fired off a string of orders while the key points were still fresh in his mind. He hardly knew the men he gave the orders to, but if the recruiters back home and the Mezentines had confidence in them, he supposed they must be all right. He’d find out soon enough, in any case.

  Really, he told himself, I’m just a wagon-master, delivering goods. And there’s the enemy to consider, of course, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. He steadied his mind with a series of tried and tested departure rituals. He carefully packed up his writing-desk, checking to make sure the paper-box was full and that there was a good supply of soot and oak-gall for making ink (running out of materials to write orders with in the middle of a battle would be a singularly stupid way to die, he’d always felt). He loaded his clothes, spare boots, books of tables and tolerances, food, bandages and medicines methodically into his pack. He checked his armor, joint by joint and strap by strap. Finally, he moved everything to the middle of the floor of his tent, in a neat pile, ready for the muleteers to collect and load. Twenty-seven years of soldiering and he was still alive and he hadn’t caused a defeat or a disaster yet; if there was a reason for that (it was a question he remained open-minded about) it was probably attention to detail and the methodical approach.

  As soon as they were under way (he didn’t like the look of the road; it was dusty, which obscured visibility, and the ruts and potholes were already beginning to gnaw away at the temper of his cart axles), he made a start on the next step in his customary procedure: to consider the purpose of his mission, and to make it as simple as possible, so he’d be able to keep sight of it. Fortunately, in this instance that was straightforward enough. All he had to do was deliver his cargo, one hundred and fifty Mezentine war machines, to the place on the map marked with an X. There was other stuff once he’d got there — unpack the machines, assemble them, tune them, assemble the carriages and the mobile platforms and install the machines on them — but he had a bunch of Mezentine civilians along to do all that, so his involvement would be limited, in effect, to nodding to them and saying, “Go.” Once he’d done that, of course, there’d be new orders, but that’d be another day.

  The next step was, of course, to plan a daily routine. He’d found that if you broke the day up into small pieces, it was easier to control (hardly a startlingly new discovery, but as far as he was concerned, it was one of the great truths of human existence); accordingly, he preferred his days dismantled into units of one hour. He could hold an hour comfortably in his mind without straining. Sometimes he wondered who’d invented the hour. A genius, whoever it was; the hour was a perfect tool for handling and controlling the world, ranking alongside fire, the wheel and the axe.

  These exercises kept his mind engaged and unavailable for worry and panic as far as the first night’s stop, at which point he was able to hand over to fatigue, which put him gently to sleep until an hour before first light, when his day began. That first hour of the day was essential, as far as he was concerned. It bore the weight of the rest of the day like an arch. In it, he woke up, drew up his duty rosters and assignment schedules, studied his map and his intelligence reports; all the components of the armor that would protect him against chaos and failure.

  The final stage of his early-morning procedure, and the one that always caused the most amusement to his subordinates, involved the rolling of two densely woven rush mats around a green half-inch stick, which fitted upright into a slot in a heavy piece of board. Mats and stick together simulated perfectly, so he’d been reliably informed, the human neck, viewed as an objective for the swordsman. If he performed the cut neatly and accurately each time, he could get three days’ cutting practice out of each mat, but he was a realist and always made sure he had a plentiful supply. He was, after all, a soldier; which is a euphemism for a man who kills other men by slashing at them with a sharp edge.

  Because his men didn’t know him well yet, he didn�
�t attract an audience for cutting practice on the first morning. Information travels quickly through an army, however; by the third morning, he performed a distinctly botched cut in the presence of two lieutenants, two sergeants, half a dozen enlisted engineers and the captain of muleteers, all of whom had managed to find legitimate reasons for calling on him a quarter of an hour before the scheduled start of the daily briefing. He no longer minded. He didn’t object to being laughed at behind his back, so long as he had control of the subject matter.

  “You should try it,” he chided a young lieutenant whose face he didn’t like, although he was probably the most competent of the junior staff. “Warms up the muscles, helps concentration, good mental and physical discipline. In fact, I’d make it compulsory if we could source enough mats.”

  The lieutenant had the inherent good sense not to reply, and Eiconodoulus wished he could remember what the man was called. He was razor-sharp when it came to faces, but a martyr to names. He hoped there’d be time to learn them all.

  It was a rather fraught meeting; mostly his own fault, because they’d reached the point where they had to turn off (according to the map) but there was no sign of the track they were meant to follow. Everything else was there, as duly and faithfully recorded: a slight horn in the mountain wall, and under it a gully, the perfect place for a track, except there wasn’t one.

  “Maybe it’s an old map and the road’s just got a bit worn away,” suggested one of the lieutenants (big, square man with a short beard, too old to be a lieutenant, too ineffectual to be promoted, but reasonably bright nevertheless). “It’s surprising how quickly a track can heal up, if you see what I mean. But —”