Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  “Oh.” Maniacis looked at him thoughtfully. “So, what’re you here bothering me for?”

  Psellus perched on the edge of the table and picked up a counter. On the reverse, a nude fat woman of indeterminate age was presenting a muscle-bound warrior with a garland apparently woven from turnip-tops, while in the background smoke rose from a distant mountain. Underneath was the legend The Eremian threat averted. He raised an eyebrow and put it back where he’d found it. “A bit previous, surely,” he said.

  Maniacis shrugged. “Not pure silver, either. Don’t suppose you noticed, but where it rubs on the table, like the edges of the laurel crown and the chubby bird’s tits, the copper’s starting to show through. Last year’s issue were called in early and we got these instead, a week ago. They were supposed to go into service as part of the grand victory celebrations, but…” He shrugged. “That’s how tight things are,” he said. “We needed the silver, so we pulled the old ones early and put these ones out ahead of time. Tempting providence if you ask me, but there it is, there’s a war on.”

  Psellus wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “I had no idea things were so bad,” he said.

  “Oh, they aren’t really,” Maniacis said with a sigh. “Really, it’s all to do with cashflow and housekeeping. The money’s mostly there, but we’re under orders to try and keep to within this year’s budget. If we start breaking into next year’s money, it looks very bad in Assembly. So, to tide things over, we’re having to scratch about for loose change to bridge the gap.”

  “I see,” Psellus said. “How’s it going?”

  Maniacis shook his head. “We lost the battle some time ago,” he said. “So now we’re having to borrow money from foreigners; the merchants, banks in the old country, even the Cure Doce. We’ll pay it all back as soon as the new fiscal year starts, of course, but they’ll screw us rotten for interest. That’s politics for you. Your bloody Foundrymen, running scared of the Drapers.”

  “We didn’t start it,” Psellus replied automatically. “Well, anyway, I’m here to make things worse for you. We’ve got to expedite supplies for the new army, so I’m here on the scrounge.”

  Maniacis clicked his tongue. “Not sure I can help you,” he said. “How much do you need?”

  When Psellus told him, he opened his eyes wide and blinked.

  “I know,” Psellus said. “It’s a lot of money.”

  Maniacis rested his chin on his fingertips and thought for a moment. “There’s no way I can raise that much just by fiddling the books,” he said. “Either we borrow it from the savages or you’ll have to go to Assembly for a levy.”

  “Can’t do that,” Psellus said immediately. “For one thing it’d take too long. For another — like I said, I’m out of touch, but I can’t see it getting through without blood on the floor.”

  “Quite so.” Maniacis shook his head. “With so many workers taken out and put on war work, production generally’s right down the drain. That’s not all; all the available shipping’s tied up ferrying men and supplies, so goods are piling up in the warehouses with no ships to carry them. If we don’t deliver, we don’t get paid. This war’s bloody terrible for business, which is the exact opposite of how it was supposed to be. If I was a Foundryman, I’d be looking for heads to roll on my management committee.”

  “Be that as it may,” Psellus said sharply, “looks like you’ll need to raise a loan. How long’s that going to take?”

  Maniacis shrugged. “Not very long, actually,” he said. “Just so happens, we’ve negotiated a line of credit with our new best friends, just in case things look like they’re getting out of hand. Luckily they have plenty of money and their interest rates are not at all bad.”

  Psellus caught something in his friend’s tone of voice. “There’s a catch, isn’t there?”

  “Depends how you look at it,” Maniacis replied, with a humorless grin. “The way we’re viewing it in this department, there isn’t a problem, but we can see how other people — you lot, for instance — might not like it very much. Which is why we haven’t got around to telling anybody yet.”

  Something dropped into place, and Psellus winced, as though he’d turned his ankle or cut himself. “It’s the Vadani, isn’t it?” he said. “That’s who you’re borrowing all this extra money from.”

  Maniacis looked at him. “You’re perfectly at liberty to speculate,” he said. “I’m not saying anything. But if you want money for your grocery bill, I’d be obliged if you kept your face shut and your wild guesses to yourself.” He looked away and said to the wall: “One thing the Vadani have got plenty of is silver. All they’ve got to do is dig it out of the sides of the mountains. The bad thing is, we’ve run projections of what the final cost is likely to be, once we’ve taken Civitas Eremiae and finished the mopping-up. I won’t bore you with details, but it’s going to be tight. So much so that I don’t see us being able to pay back these emergency loans next year or any time soon. In fact, unless we get lucky and find treasuries stuffed with gold and silver in the ruins of Orsea’s palace, we’re going to be in hock to our new best friends for a very long time. Now I don’t understand politics, I’m proud to say, so I don’t have to bother my silly little head about the implications of that. Instead, I can leave it to the likes of you, so you can start planning ahead. I seem to remember an old proverb about holding a wild boar by its bollocks; holding on is no fun at all, but letting go would probably be worse.” He sighed, leaned back, stretched. “Let me have a formal writ of requisition as soon as you can,” he said. “While you’re doing the paperwork, I’ll talk to my bosses and we can get everything set up. You know,” he added sourly, “if only your precious Guildsmen had put locks on your office windows, none of this mess would’ve happened in the first place.”

  General Melancton received the news that the supply train had been dispatched and was on its way with a mixture of relief and skepticism. He’d been taught in war school that fighting on two fronts is a bad thing, and of the two enemies he currently faced, the Mezentine Guilds worried him slightly more than the Eremians. He was, after all, allowed to kill the Eremians, assuming he could get close enough without being shot to ribbons by the artillery the Perpetual Republic had assured him he’d never have to face. Also, he felt confident that he could predict how they were likely to behave. The Guilds, on the other hand, were something he couldn’t begin to understand. The one thing he knew about them was that if it suited them to do so, they’d strand him in the mountains without supplies or send him to his certain death without a second thought. It was a shame the savages were so poor; on balance, he’d far rather be fighting for them.

  He sat in his tent studying the map. The ill-fated Captain Eiconodoulus had told him a few things about Mezentine cartography before they’d shipped him back home, and Melancton was inclined to take the captain’s word over his employers’. This meant that he was obliged to rely increasingly on his scouts, the Cure Hardy light cavalry. He’d have preferred a company of properly trained surveyors from home, but there wasn’t time to send for any; and the Cure Hardy, possibly because they were nomads and therefore used to constant and painstaking reconnaissance, seemed to be doing a perfectly adequate job. It didn’t matter at all that he didn’t like them much; and he only disliked them because he found them more or less impossible to understand, even though they spoke quite passable Mezentine. But he couldn’t figure out what they wanted; why they were here, risking their lives on behalf of him and his employers. Money didn’t seem to interest them, in the same way fish aren’t interested in music. They weren’t here for the glory, he was pretty sure of that. In his time in the military he’d come across men who went to the wars simply because they liked to fight, but the Cure Hardy took great and laudable pains to avoid the enemy. Therefore they remained a mystery, one of very many, and that bothered him, on the rare occasions when he had time and leisure to dwell on it.

  Today, however, they had particularly interesting news. There was a path (
maybe thirty years ago it could have been called a road, but a lot of heather can grow and a lot of dirt and rock can be washed away in thirty years) that appeared to lead round the side of the foothills of Civitas Mountain, bypassing the obvious place for a final pre-siege pitched battle; and as far as the scouts could see, this path was completely clear of the enemy. Melancton was a realist, with a healthy distrust of cleverness. Someone with pretensions to tactical genius would be thinking in terms of fooling the enemy into making a stand at the obvious place by feinting at it with cavalry and light infantry, while sending the bulk of his army round by the cunning path to take them from the rear and slaughter them like sheep. As far as he was concerned, that would be a first-class way to lose the war at a stroke; something would go wrong with timing or communications, he’d find himself losing the pitched battle through lack of numbers while his encirclement party walked straight into an ambush on the hidden path. He stroked his beard and scowled. He was getting too old to play games.

  He looked up. His chief of staff, Tachista Pantocrator, had arrived with the duty roster, which meant it was noon already and he still hadn’t made up his mind. “Tachista,” he said, “if you were Duke Orsea, what’d you be most worried about?”

  Pantocrator thought for a moment. “Losing,” he said.

  Not as silly an answer as it sounded. “What’s the most likely way you’d lose?” he asked.

  “Easy. Sheer weight of numbers.”

  Melancton nodded slowly. “So you’d be thinking it’d be nice to even things up by slaughtering a few thousand of the bastards before they even get to the city.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “No. But we’re contemplating what’s losing you sleep.”

  “I see. Well, in that case, I’d be scared stiff of throwing away such advantages as I’ve got.”

  That made sense too. “And your best advantage?”

  “Geography,” Pantocrator replied immediately. “Superb defensive site, impregnable walls, and now I’ve got something approaching parity in artillery.”

  “So if you’re smart,” Melancton said, “what’re you going to do?”

  “Spend my time on the defenses of the city, and laying in as much food and materials as I can before the siege starts.”

  Melancton smiled. “And you’re not going to risk wasting men in a field battle out in the open, when they’ll be much harder to kill standing behind your wonderful city walls.”

  “I’d have to be stupid, wouldn’t I?”

  “Of course. In that case, tell the scouts to check out a day’s march along the main road. I don’t think they’re going to come out to play. I think they’ll stay in the city and wait for us until we’re at the foot of their rotten hill. What do you think?”

  Pantocrator shrugged. “That’s what I’d do, probably,” he said. “But then, I lack imagination. You said so in my last assessment.”

  “Fuck imagination,” Melancton replied.

  Hardening steel was the real problem. They’d run out of ordinary plain iron too, but the city was full of the stuff, in various shapes and forms. With the backing of the Ducas, Ziani had organized platoons of soldiers with nothing better to do into browsing parties, scouring the streets for frivolous and non-essential ironwork — door-hinges, gates, railings, lamp-standards, fire-dogs, boot-scrapers, sign-brackets, anything that could be drawn down, jumped up or hammer-welded together to make up bar stock. Hardening steel, on the other hand, had always been a rare and expensive commodity. Cart springs were the obvious resource, but he’d already stripped the city bare of them; likewise pitchfork tines, spade and shovel blades, they were even prising perfectly good horseshoes off soundly shod hoofs just to feed the furnaces. As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, they were eking out the hardening steel by pattern-welding it into billets two to one with wrought iron, so that each twelve-by-three-by-three that went to be drawn through the plates into spring wire had been forge-welded, twisted, folded and welded again and again like the finest swords of ancient heroes. If you looked closely at the finished wire you could actually see the patterns — pool-and-eye, maidenhair, hugs and kisses. It was ludicrous and a truly desperate way of going about things, but they had no choice. Pattern-welded springs, though; if that wasn’t an abomination, then the term had no meaning.

  As he shuttled between the factory and the ramparts where the scorpions were being set up, Ziani felt like a newlywed wife getting ready to entertain her in-laws to dinner for the first time. He wanted everything to be perfect for the Mezentines when they arrived. Every scorpion had to be aligned exactly in its cradle and zeroed at each of the set distances, the dampening struts clamped down tight, the sliders and locks greased, every nut and wedge retightened after twenty trial shots. He had a team of four hundred volunteers doing nothing all day but retrieving shot bolts from the targets and bringing them back up to the wall. He wanted to be everywhere, doing everything himself; instead he had to watch half-trained, half-skilled Eremians doing each job more or less adequately, which was torture. Finally, he decided he’d had enough. If he had to watch one more thread being stripped or cradle-truss warped out of line, he’d go mad. With a tremendous effort he turned his back on the lot of them and walked slowly down the stairs to the street.

  Someone was waiting for him; a tall, broad, bald man with a ferocious gray mustache. “You Vaatzes?” he asked.

  It was too stupid a question to risk replying to, so he nodded. “Who’re you?”

  “Framea Orudino, sergeant-at-arms to the lesser Ducas,” the bald man replied, puffing his chest out like a frog. “You wanted fencing lessons. I’ve been trying to find you all day, but nobody knew where you’d got to.”

  Ziani grinned. “You found me,” he said. “Right, let’s get to it. What do I have to do?”

  Orudino studied him for a moment, as though he was a consignment of defective timber. “Follow me,” he said.

  Orudino led him down the inevitable tangle of narrow, messy streets, alleys and snickets until they reached a gray door in a sand-yellow brick wall. To Ziani’s surprise, the door didn’t open into a beautiful secret garden or a cool, fountain-strewn courtyard. Instead, they were inside a building that reminded him of all the warehouses he’d ever seen. The walls were bare brick, washed with lime. The floor was gray stone flags, recently swept. In one corner was a stout wooden rack, in which he saw about a dozen matching pairs of long, thin swords.

  “Foils,” Orudino explained. “The point’s been blunted and wrapped in twine, so it can’t hurt you, unless you get stuck in the eye. But I’m good enough not to hit where I don’t want to, and you’ll never be good enough to hit me unless I want you to, so there’s no problem.”

  Ziani decided he didn’t like Sergeant Orudino, but that hardly mattered. “What comes first?” he asked.

  “We’ll get you standing right,” the sergeant said. “Now then. Over there, see, painted on the floor are two footprints. Put your feet on them, and that’s your basic stance.”

  Orudino was bored, making the little speeches he’d made hundreds of times before, plodding through the stages of the lesson like a mule turning a flywheel. That was unfortunate, because Ziani found the whole business completely alien, and needed to have each step explained and demonstrated over and over again. The footwork in particular he found almost impossible to master; it was almost as bad as dancing, and he’d never been able to dance. Maybe he could have managed it if he’d been able to look down and see where he was putting his feet, but the sergeant wouldn’t let him, on the grounds that in a real fight he’d need to keep his eyes fixed on the other man’s sword-point to the exclusion of everything else. So Ziani stumbled, blundered, tripped over his feet, fell over twice, with nothing to spur him on but his rapidly burgeoning hatred for the loud, pompous, bullying bald man with the bored voice and the supercilious grin. If anything, he loathed his condescending praise on the rare occasions when something went right more than his martyred patience with the bungles and m
istakes. He kept himself going by chanting in his head, if this shithead can do it, so can I; and slowly, gracelessly, he tightened up the tolerance, while his arms and legs and wrists and forearms and neck and back screamed pain at him, and the tip of the sergeant’s foil stung him like a wasp.

  He learned the four wards (high, side, low, middle); the steps ordinary and extraordinary; the advance, the retreat, the pass, the lunge; the wide and the narrow measure; the counter in time and double time; the disengage, the block, the beat; the mastery of the enemy sword and the slip-thrust, the stop-thrust, the tip-cut and the sidestep riposte in time. He learned to feint and to read feints, to wait and to watch, to move hand and foot together, to keep his kneecap over his toe in the lunge, to fend with his left hand and to close to disarm. Orudino killed him six dozen times, with thrusts to his throat, heart, stomach and groin, with draw-cuts and tip-cuts and the secret cut of the Ducas (a wrap with the false edge to sever the knee-tendon). Every death was a chore to the sergeant, and most of them were disappointments, because a child of twelve should have been able to master the relevant defense by now.

  “You’re thrashing about like a landed fish,” the sergeant said, as Ziani lunged at him and missed. “It’s no good if you can’t land a thrust where it’ll do some good. Come over here, I’ll show you.” He led Ziani to the middle of the floor, where a piece of string hung from a rafter. From his finger he pulled a heavy ring, brass with a little silver plate still clinging to it, and tied it to the string. Then, with a mild sigh, he lunged. The tip of his foil passed through the middle of the ring without touching it.

  “Right,” he said sadly. “You try.”

  Hopeless, of course. A couple of times he managed to swat the string, like a kitten batting at wool. Otherwise he missed outright. The sergeant laughed, took down the ring and replaced it with a small steel hoop about the size of an outstretched hand. “Come on,” he said, “you ought to be able to hit that”; but Ziani tried and couldn’t. The best he could do was slap into the string, setting the hoop swaying.