by K. J. Parker
He realized he was looking in a mirror. It was an old one, spattered with patches of dark gray tarnish, and in it all he could see was the face of an idiot. But that was all very well. It was also a reasonably lifelike portrait of the Ducas; and if it came to his word against somebody else’s, who was Orsea going to believe?
He looked away; because on any other subject there could be no possibility of a doubt, but where Veatriz was concerned, he had to admit that he simply didn’t know. Orsea had a memory too; he could remember when it was unthinkable that the Sirupati heiress would marry anybody except the Ducas, and wasn’t it a bizarre but wonderfully convenient coincidence that the Ducas should be completely besotted with the girl? He knew Orsea better than anybody else, far better than she did. It was highly unlikely that a day passed when Orsea didn’t remember that.
Or he could kill himself, and slide out of the problem that way. On balance, it’d be better than defecting to the enemy, but he didn’t want to. Besides, what became of him really didn’t matter; it wasn’t nearly as simple as that. He couldn’t think of escaping, by treachery or death or running away and joining a camel-train to the Cure Hardy, if it meant leaving her in mortal peril.
(Mortal peril; hero language again. He cursed himself for an idiot. Heroism wouldn’t help here, because this wasn’t a last-ditch battle against the forces of evil, it was a bloody stupid mess. You can’t defeat messes with the sword, or by feats of horsemanship, endurance or strategy. You’ve got to slither your way out of them, and slithering simply wasn’t part of his armory of skills.)
Or I could simply wait and see what happens; and as and when the letter shows up, I can tell the truth.
He stared at that thought for a long time; it was also a mirror, in which he saw himself. I’m Miel Ducas. I tell the truth, because I’m too feckless to lie. He shook his head; that was too easy, and he didn’t believe it. I can’t lie in the same way a fish can’t breathe air. I was bred to do the right thing, always.
The right thing would be to tell Orsea the truth, if the letter comes into his hands. But the right thing would mean that the disaster falls on Veatriz, who did the wrong thing, and that can’t be allowed to happen. I did the right thing concealing the letter — it’d have been wrong to burn it straight away, because that would have been a betrayal of Orsea. Bloody shame I hid it where someone could find it, but that’s simply incompetence, not a moral issue.
I’m Miel Ducas, and for the first time in my life I don’t know what to do.
She found him in the cartulary, of all places. He was standing on a chair, tugging at a parchment roll that had got wedged between two heavy books. If he tugged any harder, she could see, half the shelf would come crashing down.
“Orsea,” she said.
He jumped, staggered and hopped sideways off the chair, which fell over. She wanted to laugh; he’d always had a sort of catlike grace-in-clumsiness, an ability to fall awkwardly off things and land on his feet. As he turned and saw her, he looked no older than sixteen.
“You startled me,” he said.
“Sorry.” She smiled; he grinned. He’d never quite understood why she seemed to like him most when he did stupid things. He felt like a buffoon, nearly falling off a chair, but her smile was as warm as summer. “What were you doing up there, anyway?”
He frowned. “Your father had a map of the Cleito range,” he said. “I remember him showing it to me once, years ago. I thought it might be in here somewhere.”
The Cleito; that was where Miel had ambushed the Mezentines. “It wouldn’t be here,” she replied. “Have you looked in the small council room? He always used to keep his maps there.”
The expression on his face told her it hadn’t occurred to him to do that. “Thanks,” he said. “That’s where it’ll be. Good job you told me, or I’d have pulled the place apart looking for it.”
That had come out sounding like an accusation rather than praise, but they both knew what he’d meant by it. She carried on smiling, but she was doing it deliberately now. “Have you got a moment?” she asked.
“Of course.” As he looked at her his face was completely open; and she was planning on leading him — not into a trap exactly, but to a place he probably wouldn’t want to go. For a brief moment she hated herself for it. “Let’s go into the garden,” he said, as she hesitated. “I think it’s stopped raining.”
He led the way down the single flight of stairs. He always scampered down stairs, there was no other word for it. A duke shouldn’t scamper, of course. She smiled again, at the back of his head, without realizing she was doing it.
The garden glistened after the rain, and she could smell wet leaves. That was almost enough to choke her.
“So?” he asked briskly. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing.” The answer came out in a rush, instinctive as a fish lunging at a baited hook. “Only,” she went on, rallying her forces into a reserve, and paused for effect. “Orsea, I’m worried. About the war.”
The look on his face was unbearable; it was guilt, because he’d let war and death come close enough to her to be felt. He was going to say, “It’s all right,” but he didn’t, because he didn’t tell lies.
“Me too,” he mumbled. “That’s why I was looking for that stupid map. General Vasilisca thinks —”
The hell with General Vasilisca. “Orsea,” she said (she used his name like a rap across the knuckles). “What’s going to happen to us if they get past the scorpions?”
He took a deep breath, put on his serious face, which always annoyed her. “In order to do that,” he said, slowly, looking away; he always looked so pompous doing that, “they’d have to mount a direct assault, with artillery support. But our artillery would take out their artillery before they could neutralize the walls, which means their infantry would have to attack in the face of a scorpion bombardment. Basically, we’d be killing them until we ran out of bolts. It’d be thousands, maybe tens of thousands —” He stopped. He looked like he wanted to be sick. “Their army wouldn’t do it, for one thing. They’re mercenaries, not fanatics. They’d simply refuse.”
“Orsea,” she said.
“And even if they were crazy enough to do it,” he went on, ignoring her, “they’d still have to conduct a conventional assault — scaling ladders and siege towers, against a full garrison, and the best defensive position in the world. There’s every likelihood that we’d beat them off, provided they don’t have artillery control. It’s simple arithmetic, actually, there’s tables and formulas and stuff in the books; the proper ratio of attackers to defenders necessary for taking a defended city. I think it’s five to one, at least. And of course, we’ve got much better archers than they have.”
“Orsea,” she said again, and the strength leaked out of him. “What’d happen to us, if they won?”
He looked away, and she knew he was beaten already, in his mind. Part of her was furious at him for being so feeble, but she knew him too well. He didn’t believe they could win, because he was in command. In a secret part of her mind, she offered thanks to Providence for Miel Ducas, who was twice the man Orsea was, and who (on balance) she’d never loved. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the really horrible thing about this war, I don’t actually know why they’re doing it. You’d think they might have the common good manners to let us know, but apparently not.”
(He knew why, of course. The huntsman doesn’t send heralds or formal declarations of war to the wolf, the bear or the boar. Their relationship is so close, there’s no need to explain.)
She came closer to him, but there was no tenderness in it. Instead, she felt like a predator. “I want you to listen to me,” she said.
He looked bewildered. “Sure,” he said.
“If the war goes badly,” she said, and stopped. Her mouth felt like it was full of something soft and disgusting. “If things go wrong, I don’t want to stay here and be killed. I don’t. I was a hostage all those years, because Father had to play politics to kee
p us going when the Vadani were closing in all the time, and every day when I woke up and realized where I was, I knew that if something went wrong, I could be killed and that’d be that. I was just a child, Orsea, and I had to live with that all the time. I was frightened. I can’t stand being frightened anymore. It’s not noble and strong to be brave when you can’t fight and defend yourself. I was brave all those years, for Father and the Duchy, and I won’t do it again. If the Mezentines are going to take the city, I don’t want to be here. I want to run away, Orsea, do you understand? Me getting killed won’t make anything better for anybody. I want to escape. Can you understand that?”
He was staring at her, and she thought of the old fairy tale where the handsome young hunter marries a strange, wild girl from outside the village, and on the wedding night she turns out to be a wolf-spirit disguised as a human. “You want to leave,” he said, very quietly. “Fine.”
Most of all she wanted to hit him, for being so annoying. “I want us to leave,” she shouted at him. “You don’t think I’d go without you? Don’t be so stupid. I want us to get out of here before it’s too late. Leave the Ducas and the Phocas and the great lords to defend the city, if they really feel they have to. I care about the people, of course I do, but there’s nothing you or I can do to help them, and if we’re killed, we’re dead. That’d be pointless.” She took a deep breath, ignoring the look on his face. “Orsea, I want you to care about us for once, for you and me. Two more dead bodies rotting in the sun won’t make any difference to the world, but we could escape, go somewhere. I don’t care about not being the Duchess anymore. I don’t care what I do. But staying here just because —”
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” he said.
She closed her eyes, because she wanted to scream. “Fine,” she said. “Just suppose we do the wrong thing, for once in our lives. Well, that’d be awful, wouldn’t it? We might get into trouble for it, something bad might happen to us. Something worse than getting killed by the Mezentines.”
She was losing control of herself, she could feel it, and he’d never seen her do that before. Of course not. He hadn’t been there, the second time her father had sent her away, and they had had to drag her out of the house. She’d clung to the doors and the newel-post of the stairs with both hands; her nurse had had to prise her locked fingers apart.
“Where could we go?” he said, in a tiny voice, strained through bewilderment, horror and disgust. “There isn’t anywhere. Nobody’d have us.”
“They don’t have to know it’s us,” she spat at him. “Come on, who the hell is going to recognize you and me? We could go…” She hesitated. “We could go to the Vadani. It’s the last place anybody would think to look for us. I could get a red dress.”
He grinned feebly. “You’re too young to be a trader.”
“My sister’s a bloody trader,” she said, far more forcefully than made sense. “She’s over there now. She’ll help us, she’s got pots of money. Maybe even the Duke, Valens.” A tiny hesitation, as though she had to think before she remembered his name. “I don’t know, maybe it’d be expedient for him to shelter us. Doesn’t matter. I’d rather sleep in doorways than be dead, wouldn’t you?”
In the fairy tale, the young huntsman had loved his exotic bride very much; but when her lovely face melted and stretched and shrunk into the wolf’s mask, he’d grabbed his falchion from the wall and cut off her head with one swift stroke. It had never occurred to him that he might be able to live with the wolf, who probably (on balance) loved him very much. That possibility hadn’t occurred to her when she first heard the story; probably to nobody else who’d ever been told it. Not enough room in one cottage for two predators.
“Actually,” he said, “no.”
“Orsea!” (And she wanted to laugh, because she realized she sounded just like her mother.) “That’s just posturing. Besides,” she went on, trying to pull back out of the muzzle and the long ears and the round black eyes, “if you really want to do what’s best for your people, you’ve got to stay alive. Once the Mezentines have gone away, they’ll need you more than ever.”
“The few that’re left.”
“Yes, that’s right, the few that manage to hide or run away; but you can help them, you can’t help the rest of them, they’ll be dead.” Her head was splitting; she could hardly hear herself think. And she wasn’t putting the argument across terribly well. It had come too late, like cavalry returning from looting the enemy camp to find that the battle’s been lost while they were away. “If you love me,” she said.
He looked at her. He wasn’t at bay anymore, he’d just given up. Sometimes an animal does that, according to King Fashion; he stands and looks at you, and that’s the time to jump in and kill him. A heartbeat or so before she asked the question, the answer would have been yes (shouted so loud, with such furious intensity, they could’ve heard it in Mezentia). Now, because of the question, the answer would be, on balance, no.
“Fine,” she said, and walked out.
Boiled down to productivity figures, which was how he liked it, things were going very well. Workforce increased by forty percent, productivity up sixty percent; they were actually turning out finished scorpions faster than the ordnance factory at home. Not that it could last, because pretty soon they’d run out of timber and quarter plate and spring steel and three-eighths rod — by his most recent calculations, ten days before the city fell — but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t as though he was planning on building a career here.
With three day shifts and two night shifts, the place was never quiet. That was something he missed, the peace and solitude of his room at the top of the tower, when everybody had gone home and he had the place to himself. There was a different kind of solitude now, but it had no nutritional value. Still, it wouldn’t be for long.
Instead of the tower room (too many people knew to look for him there) he’d taken to hiding in the small charcoal store. Which was ludicrous; he was in charge of the place, it was his factory, he had no business hiding anywhere from anybody. But there were times when he needed to think, work out figures, deal with small modifications to the design, improvements or fixes. Also, he was sick to death of Eremians (so pale, so stupid).
After several false starts he’d contrived to smuggle a chair down there. He was working on a plan to get a table to go with it, and maybe even a better lamp, but it was still in its early stages. For now, he had the chair to sit in, and the wan light of a reed wick floating in thrice-reused tallow. Strip off the garbage, and what more could a man ask?
He knew the answer to that, and he was working on it (but all in good time). The immediate concern was the wire-drawing plates, which were going to have to be either refurbished or replaced within the next three days. It was a ridiculous, fatuous thing to have to think about. In the real world, in the City, all he’d need to do was send a requisition down to the stores for two eighteen-by-tens of inch plate. But there was no such thing as inch plate in Civitas Eremiae. Instead, he’d have to take six men off the forge and set them to bashing down a bloom of iron by hand. Six man-days wasted, and that was before they started trying to punch the holes.
If only we weren’t at war with the Mezentines, we could send out for inch plate from the Foundrymen’s; and in the City, when they said inch, they meant inch, not inch-and-a-thirty-second-in-places-and-twenty-nine-thirty-seconds-in-others. Really, he was doing the world a service, because a nation that can’t read a simple caliper isn’t fit to survive.
But… He scowled into the darkness. A wide tolerance, a whole sixteenth of an inch of abomination didn’t actually matter in this case, because a wire-plate is just a primitive chunk of iron with a hole in it (he wanted it to matter, but it didn’t). Even so, six man-days lost would cost the defenders a scorpion. One scorpion could loose twelve bolts a minute, seven hundred bolts an hour. At an estimated thirty percent efficiency rating, the wire-plates would save the lives of two hundred and thirty Mezentines —
/> He heard a boot scrape on the stairs, and looked up. Just when he’d thought he was safe, but apparently not. “I’m in here,” he called out, “did you want me for something?” It seemed they didn’t, because there was no reply. That was all right, then.
He tried to go back to his calculation, seven hundred divided by three, but he’d lost the thread. The lamp guttered. He pulled out his penknife and set off to trim the wick, crunching and staggering awkwardly on the piles of charcoal underfoot.
The wick was fine; must just have been a waft of air from somewhere. He straightened up, and heard another soft crunch, just like the ones he’d been making himself as he clambered over the charcoal heaps.
Of course, he had no time to shape a plan or design a mechanism. Instead, he stooped, grabbed the lamp and threw it as hard as he could. For a very short moment it was a tiny comet in the darkness, then a little ball of fire, then nothing. He heard the tinkle of the lamp breaking, and another noise, a soft grunt.
He had his penknife, one thin inch of export-grade Mezentine steel; and he had the darkness, and the sound of crushed charcoal. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be everything.
If he moved, the hunter would hear him; and the other way round, of course, but the hunter presumably had fearsome weapons and great skill. He tried to think his way into the enemy’s mind. He would have to be quick, both to hear and to act. He waited.
As soon as he heard the soft grinding, squashing noise of charcoal underfoot, he took a step — sideways, to the right, a random choice, but unpredictability was his best ally against the hunter’s approach, which would be methodical and progressive. He reached out as far as he could with his left hand, keeping his right close to his body. Each time the hunter moved, he took a step of his own. The hardest part was controlling his breathing. Fear made him want to pant; instead he drew in air as smoothly as a good workman turning the lathe carriage handle to keep the cut fine, and let it go at precisely the same rate. That actually helped a little; the fog in his head started to clear, and he could see his thoughts, big and slow as a ship drifting in moonlight.