Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  I’m turning into Orsea, he thought. Maybe it’s something that comes with being in charge. As his men filed past, he scanned the top of the ridge on both sides. If there was an ambush waiting up there, they’d missed their chance. He’d got away with it after all.

  Once they’d taken up position at the canyon neck, there was a great deal to be done. The lancers dismounted and started felling trees to build the roadblock, while the designated specialists in each unit unloaded and spread the caltrops and snagging wires they’d brought with them from the city. Miel couldn’t recall offhand whose suggestion the caltrops had been, though he had a nasty feeling it’d been his. They were crude, put together in a hurry; a wooden ball the size of a large apple, with eight two-inch spikes sticking out in all directions. Wouldn’t it be the most delicate irony if the battle turned against him and those spikes ended up buried in the frogs of his own horses’ hoofs, as a painful lesson in poetic justice to anybody who presumed to use weapons of indiscriminate effect against the Mezentines?

  Once the preparations had been made, he pulled all his men back into cover, and settled down to wait. He knew this would be the hardest part of the job, a lethal opportunity to shred his own self-confidence to the point where he’d order the retreat sounded the moment a single Mezentine appeared in the distance. He almost wished he was the one being ambushed, since at least he wouldn’t have to cope with the anticipation.

  When the enemy finally arrived, of course, he was looking the other way. Worse; he was on foot, in a small holly grove, taking a last pre-battle piss. He heard the creak of an axle, followed by shouting; more shouting, as he fumbled numbly with his trousers (no mean feat of engineering for a man wearing plate cuisses) and battled his way out of the holly, stumbling on exposed roots and fallen branches as he tried to get back to where he’d left his horse. He mounted badly, twisting his ankle as he lifted into the saddle, winding himself as he sat down. There were screams among the shouts now, and a clattering of steel like blacksmiths trying to work the metal too cold. For a split second his sense of direction deserted him and he couldn’t remember where the battle was.

  His horse scrambled awkwardly out onto the road, and there was nobody there; he turned his head in time to see the last of his men joining in a full-blown charge. They could’ve waited for me, he thought, unfairly and incorrectly; he followed them, a shamefaced rearguard of one. Before he reached them he passed five dead men and nine sprawled horses, all Eremians. Wonderful omen.

  Immediately he saw what the problem was. Quite properly, whoever had taken command while he was away urinating had seen an opening in the enemy front and thrown a full charge at it. Also quite reasonably, he hadn’t expected the level of success that in the event he’d achieved. The charge had gone home and then gone too far, like an unbarred spear into a charging boar. The risk now was of being enveloped from the sides. Miel looked round in desperation for the horn-blower to sound the disengage. He found him almost straight away; lying on the ground, covered from the waist down by his fallen horse. He was dead, of course; and the horn lay beside him where he’d dropped it. At least one horse had trodden on it, crumpling it up like stiff paper.

  Not so good, then. He sat still, frantically trying to decide what to do, painfully aware that the battle had slipped away from him, like a cat squirming out of a child’s arms. Common sense urged him to stay out of the fighting, but he was the Ducas, and his place was in the thick of it. Muttering to himself, he pushed his horse into a half-hearted canter and, as something of an afterthought, drew his sword.

  A horseman was closing on him; not an Eremian, therefore an enemy. He spurred forward to meet him, but the rider swerved away. Miel realized he was an archer, one of the Cure Hardy scouts. He pulled his horse’s head round, determined to be at least a moving target, but the enemy was more concerned with getting away; he had his bow in his right hand and his left was on the reins. Before Miel could decide whether or not to do anything about him, the archer slumped forward on his horse’s neck, dropped his bow and slid sideways out of the saddle. His foot snagged in his stirrup-leather just as his head hit the ground. His helmet came off and a tangle of long, dark hair flowed out like blood from a wound. He was being dragged. With each stride of the horse his head was jerked up, only to bump down again and bounce off a stone or the lip of a pothole. After a few yards, the horse slowed down; his foot came free from the stirrup, he rolled over a couple of times and came to rest. The side of his head was white with dust, like a fine lady’s face-powder, blood blotting through it in a round patch, like blusher. The stub of a broken-off arrow stuck out of his neck, just above the rolled edge of his breastplate.

  Miel looked up. He’d forgotten that, as he was moving into position, he’d dismounted his own archers and sent them to command the tops of the ridges that flanked the road. His own tactical skill impressed him. His archers were already in position, and because the attacking cavalry had forced the enemy out of the way and over to the sides, they had a clear view with minimal risk of dropping stray shots into their own men. If he’d planned it that way, it would have been a clever and imaginative tactic. Planned or not, though, the archers had turned a potential disaster into the makings of a famous victory. The arrows were driving the enemy back into the center of the canyon, where they were coming up against the Eremian cavalry; crushed between arrows and lances, like ears of wheat between two grindstones, they were gradually being ground away. In the distance he heard louder, shriller yells, from which he gathered that battle had been joined on the other side of the canyon.

  It is incumbent upon the Ducas always to fight in the front rank, always to be the best… Query, however: is the Ducas obliged to fight in the front rank even if nobody’s watching? The battle was coming along very nicely without him, thanks to the timely intervention of the archers, and the sheer aggression of the horsemen. The charge had long since foundered and lost all its momentum. The knights and lancers were no longer moving. Instead they were standing in their stirrups, bashing down on the helmets and coats of plates of the enemy infantry, who were too tightly cramped together to be able to swing back at them with anything approaching lethal force. With a considerable degree of reluctance, he pushed his horse forward into the fighting.

  It reminded him of a thrush cracking snail-shells against a stone. His fellow knights were whirling and swinging their swords, flattening their delicately honed edges against the cheap munitions plate of the enemy footsoldiers. Even the swords of the Phocas, the Suidas, the Peribleptus couldn’t cut into sixteenth-inch domed iron sheet. Farm tools or hammers would probably have been more use, but noblemen didn’t use such things. Instead, they tried to club the enemy to the floor with their light, blunt swords; it was perfectly possible, provided you hit hard enough and took pains to land your blows on the same spot. Cursing the aimless stupidity of it all, Miel Ducas dug his spurs into his horse’s side and forced the poor creature into a clumsy, unwilling canter.

  He saw the enemy. Things weren’t going well with them. Tidemarks of dead bodies showed where they’d tried to scramble up the slope to get at the archers, only to find out by trial and error that it couldn’t be done. Instead, they’d tried to go back, and that, presumably, was when they’d discovered that the other end of the canyon was blocked. There were thousands of them, all the scouts had agreed on that, but just now their vast weight of numbers was working against them. Jammed together as their flanks cringed away from the archers, most of them were useless to their commander; they were a traffic jam, obstructing the passage of orders and intelligence from one end of the canyon to the other. It occurred to Miel that if he’d only had another couple of thousand men, he could probably kill enough of them from this position to end the war. But that wasn’t the case; and at any moment, the sheer pressure of men trying to get away from the spearhead of knights wedged into their center would explode up the canyon sides and flush away his archers, albeit with devastating loss of life… Entirely against his will and be
tter judgment, he spared a moment to consider that. Ever since childhood he’d trained with weapons, as a nobleman should; he’d fought with the quintain and the pell, sparred with his instructors, shot arrows into targets both stationary and moving. In due course he’d put the theory into practice, against the Vadani, in what proved to be the last campaign of the war, and afterward in border skirmishes and police actions against brigands and free companies. All his life he’d learned to fight a target — a wooden post wrapped in sacking, a sack dangling from a swinging beam, a straw circle with colored rings painted on it, an exposed neck or forearm, the gap beside the armpit not covered by the armor plates. It hadn’t ever worried him, until now. He paused to consider how deeply troubled he was, now that he was in command, and all these deaths and mutilations were by his order and decision. It troubled him, he discovered, but not enough.

  Devastating loss of life; the sides of the canyon could be covered with dead men, packed close enough together that if it rained, the dust wouldn’t get wet, and it’d still only be three thousand dead, maybe four, and that wouldn’t be enough to end the war or even affect it significantly. It was an extraordinary thought; he could litter the landscape as far as the eye could see with the most grotesque obscenities he could imagine, and it wouldn’t actually matter all that much, in the great scheme of things. He considered the duty of the Ducas, and the beneficial effect on morale that the sight of their commander in the thick of the fighting would have on his men, and thought, to hell with that. He’d had enough. What he needed most of all was a horn-blower.

  What he got was a couple of Mezentines. Two infantrymen who’d squeezed and wriggled their way past, through, under, over the heaped corpses of their friends were running toward him, yelling what he assumed was abuse. Dispassionately, he assessed them from the technical point of view. Their defenses consisted of kettle-hats, mail collars and padded jacks reaching just below the waist. They were armed with some form of halberd (were those glaives or bardisches? He ought to know, but he always got them mixed up). Calm, determined and properly trained in the orthodox school of fencing they’d be formidable opponents, worthy of six pages of detailed drawings and explanatory text in the manual. As it was, they were a chore.

  He rode at them, pulled left at the last moment, overshot the neck with a lazy thrust and severed the appropriate vein with a long, professional draw-cut. He felt blood on his face, which saved him the bother of turning his head to look. He could, of course, let the other man go, but that would be failing in his duty. He stopped his horse, dragged its head round and rode down the second man, hamstringing him with a delicate flick of the wrist as he passed him on the right. As chores went it hadn’t exactly been arduous, but he felt annoyed, imposed upon; he was a busy man with a battle to stop, and he didn’t have time for indulgences.

  He found a horn-blower and ordered the disengage followed by the withdrawal in good order. The horn-blower looked at him before he blew. The effect was immediate. The archers vanished from the ridgetops, the knights and lancers wheeled and cantered away, leaving the butchered, stunned enemy staring after them. Pursuit, he knew, wouldn’t be an issue. He asked the horn-blower if there was a recognized call for “back the way we came.” Apparently there was.

  Back into the cover of the trees, back down the deer-trails they should have taken the first time, back to the forest road, and they were safe. The archers joined them almost immediately. Their captain rode over and announced that his losses were fewer than twenty killed, a handful injured. Miel thanked him and rode on; he hadn’t actually thought about it, or asked for a similar report from the captains of the knights and the lancers. That reminded him that he hadn’t given any thought to the fate of the other half of his army, the men who’d blocked the far end of the canyon. Before he could ask anyone or send a scout, they appeared out of the trees in front of him. He could see riderless horses being led by their reins — how many? A dozen? Twenty? But their captain seemed in good spirits.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Wonderful,” Jarnac replied, his voice comically muffled as he lifted off his helmet. “Couldn’t have gone better if we’d rehearsed it with them beforehand. Your end?”

  Miel nodded. “I think we should get out of here,” he said. “I’m not inclined to push my luck any further today.”

  Jarnac grinned at him. “Quite right,” he said. “It never does to be greedy, and the rest’ll keep for another day. I couldn’t see it all, of course, but I’m fairly sure our score’s up into four figures. If only we’d brought another three squadrons, we could’ve had the lot.”

  Miel nodded and drew away from his cousin. He felt exhausted, angry and very sick. He cast his mind back to another massacre, when the scorpion bolts had curtained off the sun and it had been Eremians rather than Mezentines carpeting the dirt. That had been easier to bear, somehow.

  The exuberance of his men had worn off by the time they reached the city; they were quiet as they rode in through the gate, too tired to care about much more than getting out of their armor, washing off the smell of blood and going to sleep. Even Jarnac (who’d insisted on riding beside him for much of the way) had stopped singing; instead he was whistling softly, and Miel couldn’t make out the tune. There were a hundred and sixteen dead to own up to; mostly lancers, but of the twelve knights, one was the younger brother of the lesser Phocas (a brash, arrogant boy whom Miel had always disliked). The guilt of a victory is different from the guilt of a defeat, but no less depressing.

  He gave the necessary orders to dismount, stand down and dismiss the army; a quick run-through his mental check-list, and he concluded that he’d done everything that was required of him and the rest of the day was his own. He went home; the streets were nearly empty, and there were only a few old women and drunks to stop and stare at the blood-spattered horseman in full armor, plodding up the cobbled street with his reins long and his horse’s head drooping. Grooms were waiting at the gate to help him down and take the horse inside. The housekeeper and one of the gardeners helped him out of his armor.

  “Where’s Bucena?” the gardener asked; and Miel realized that he hadn’t seen Bucena Joac, his squire, the head gardener’s nephew, since shortly before the ambush. He didn’t know whether the boy was alive or dead, so he couldn’t answer the question. The two servants drew their own conclusions from his silence; they didn’t say anything, which made for an awkward atmosphere. At any other time, Miel would’ve run out and looked to see if Bucena had come home; if not, he’d have found out what had become of him before stopping to shed his armor or wash his face. Instead, he told the housekeeper, “I need a bath. Soon as possible.”

  He fell asleep in his bath, and woke up shivering in the cold water. Someone was banging on the door, which wasn’t a suitable level of behavior for the Ducas house. He demanded to know who was making that abominable noise.

  It was the porter, and he had the butler, the sergeant and the housekeeper with him. Some men had come from the palace to talk to the Ducas. They had a piece of paper with a big red seal at the bottom. Apparently, they wanted to arrest him.

  21

  The debate that followed the attack on Melancton’s expeditionary force was unexpectedly subdued, as if neither major faction was sure what to make of it. Tactically, as the Drapers were quick to point out, it had been a disaster. Melancton had walked into a trap and been utterly humiliated; the enemy had come and gone with hardly a scratch. Strategically, as the Foundrymen immediately replied, it was something and nothing; the fact that the Eremians had committed so few men to the attack and had withdrawn so quickly, neglecting opportunities for slaughter that could have been exploited at affordable cost, argued that they had no stomach for the war and a deep-seated timidity that more or less guaranteed success to the invasion. The body-count could be taken either way. The Drapers said that Melancton had wasted three thousand lives through sheer fecklessness. The Foundry-men said that three thousand was still well within budget, given th
at the harrying attacks they’d anticipated as the army advanced through the hostile terrain of Eremia hadn’t materialized; indeed, if the pre-invasion casualty estimates were compared with actual reported losses, the invasion was comfortably in credit. Furthermore, the expeditionary force had been left in full possession of the field, and had resumed its march on Civitas Eremiae. By virtue of forced marches, Melancton had made up the lost time and was currently slightly ahead of schedule. Both sides were perfectly correct in their assertions, and neither faction even tried to dispute the other’s arguments or statistics. A motion from the Clockmakers to dismiss Melancton wasn’t even put to a vote, since (as Chairman Boioannes had pointed out in his opening remarks) there was no alternative candidate for overall command of the expedition who would be acceptable to the men themselves. A motion of censure was passed by a narrow majority, but it was agreed that it would be counterproductive and damaging to morale to publish it until the war was over and safely won, at which point it would be irrelevant; accordingly, it was agreed that it should lie on the file indefinitely.