Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

That had the effect of reducing her to tears, which was rather more than Miel could take. Besides, it was all completely fatuous; the Mezentines were camped at the foot of the mountain, and pretty soon all contracts, agreements, promises and plans would be null and void forever. It occurred to him to wonder whether she appreciated that. Absurd irony: to cherish an unthinkable ambition for a lifetime, to attain it through a small miracle (she hadn’t said where the money had come from; a legacy, presumably) only to have it swept away by a huge, unexpected, illogical, ridiculous monstrosity of a war. Of course, he couldn’t help thinking, here’s my chance to be a hero; I could promise her any damn thing — five hundred prime dairy cows, a brand-new barn, a new plow and a team of twenty milk-white horses — and of course I’ll never have to pay up, because in a very short time we’ll all be dead. Oh, the temptation!

  He spent the rest of her visit dealing with strictly domestic matters. Because of the siege, it wasn’t possible for the steward of the home farm to send the usual supplies of provisions for the household up to the town house; it was therefore necessary to buy food for the staff, something that the Ducas hadn’t done for generations. He authorized the extravagance with all due solemnity, and also agreed to a general washing and airing of curtains and bedlinen. (“Might as well get it all done while you’re not at home,” she’d said, “so it won’t be a nuisance to you.” He appreciated the thought, at any rate.) After a slight hesitation, she asked if she could take down the big tapestry, which she knew she shouldn’t touch without express permission, but it had got in a dreadful state, with dust and all. There was a slight catch in her voice when she asked him that, but she was, after all, a rather emotional woman.

  When she’d gone, he took a fresh sheet of paper (she’d brought a ream with her up from the house, since he was running low) and wrote his usual letters: to Orsea, conversational and slightly desperate; to Jarnac, asking him if he’d mind taking the riding horses to his stables for the time being, since he was concerned that they weren’t getting enough exercise; to Veatriz, six pages, which he read over slowly before tearing them into small pieces and feeding them methodically into the fire. Not long after he’d finished that task, a guard told him he had another visitor: Vaatzes, the Mezentine, if he could spare a moment to see him.

  “I think I might be able to fit him in,” Miel replied gravely. The guard went away, and Miel got up to pour some wine from the jug into a decanter. There was a bowl of fresh apples, a new loaf and some seed-cakes, which the housekeeper had brought. The Ducas recipe for seed-cake was as old as the city itself and even more closely guarded; Miel had never liked it much.

  Vaatzes looked tired, which was hardly surprising; he was thinner, and he grunted softly when he sat down. Then he yawned, and apologized.

  “That’s all right,” Miel said. “I imagine they’re keeping you busy right now.”

  Vaatzes nodded. “It sounds bad saying it,” he replied, “but I’ll almost be glad when the attack comes, and there’s nothing else I can do. At the moment I keep thinking of slight modifications and improvements, which means breaking down four hundred sets of mountings just to put on an extra washer or slip in another shim. I know for a fact that all the artillery crews hate me. Don’t blame them, either.”

  Miel shook his head. “You just wait,” he said. “Once they attack, you’ll have your work cut out.”

  “Not really,” Vaatzes said. “I’m not a soldier, I’m just a mechanic. As soon as the bolts start flying I intend to find a deep, dark cellar and barricade myself in.”

  “Very wise,” Miel said. “And you’ve done your bit already, God knows. But I suppose it’s your war as much as ours, given the way they treated you. You want to get back at them, naturally.”

  Vaatzes frowned. “Not at all,” he said. “I’ve got one hell of a grudge against a small number of officials in the Foundrymen’s Guild and Compliance, but I love my city. What I want most in the whole world is to go home and carry on with my old life. That’s not going to be possible, but it still doesn’t mean I suddenly hate everybody I used to love, and that I’ve stopped believing in everything that I used to live by. No, I’m helping you because it’s my duty, because you people rescued me when I was dying and gave me a home and a job to do; and because nobody else has a use for me. I’d have thought you of all people would’ve understood about duty.”

  “That old thing.” Miel laughed. “It’s actually one of our family’s titles: the Ducas, Lord of the Mesogaea, Baron Hereditary of the Swan River, Master of the East Marches, Slave of Duty. Always made me laugh, that, but in fact it’s true; the Ducas is the second most powerful man in this country, but everything he does every day, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, is pretty well dictated to him by duty. It’s not something I ever think about, the way fish don’t think about water.”

  Vaatzes studied him for a moment, as though making an assessment. “Duke Orsea’s taken over running the war himself,” he said. “Someone called the lesser Phocas is in charge of supplies and administration, and your cousin Jarnac’s in command of the defense of the walls. There’s a man called something Amyntas supposedly commanding the artillery, but I haven’t met him yet. I think he’s quite happy for me to get on with it; which is stupid, since I don’t know the first thing about military science.”

  Miel grinned. “Neither does Tarsa Amyntas,” he said. “He was famous for a week or so about fifteen years ago, when he killed a lot of Vadani in the war; hand-to-hand fighting in a forest, if I’m thinking about the right man. Since then, he’s mostly spent his time composing flute-music and trying to grow strawberries in winter. Military command in this country goes according to birth, rank and position. It’s a miracle we’re still here.”

  “It seems to have worked,” Vaatzes said mildly. “Take you, for instance. You won a battle.”

  “That seems to be a matter of opinion,” Miel said.

  “No, it’s a fact. You were outnumbered — what, ten to one? It was something ridiculous like that. You outplanned and outfought the best professional commander money can buy. And I don’t suppose it was just natural talent or beginner’s luck,” he added, with a small grin. “It’s because you were born and brought up to do a particular job, just like sons follow their fathers in the Guilds. I’ll bet you were learning about logistics and reading up old battles at an age when most kids are learning their times tables.”

  “Sort of,” Miel said. “But I’m nothing special, believe me. It was just luck; and besides, I threw it all away by pulling back too early. At any rate, that seems to be what Orsea thinks, and the opinion of the Duke is the only thing that matters to the Ducas. Says so somewhere in the book of rules.”

  Vaatzes frowned at him. “Your family has a rule-book?” he said.

  Miel laughed. “No, it’s a figure of speech. Though, since you mention it, there is a Ducas code of honor, all properly written down and everything. The Five Transcendent Precepts, it’s called. My great-great-” — he paused and counted on his fingers — “great-great-grandfather made it up and had it carved on a wall, on the left by the main hall door as you go in. I had to learn it by heart when I was eight.”

  “Really? What does it say?”

  “Can’t remember, to be honest with you. Not all of it, anyhow. Let’s see: do your duty to your Duke, your family, your tenants and servants, your people and your country. That’s one. Never question an order or give an order that deserves to be questioned, that’s two. Three…” He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the chisel-cuts in the yellow stone. “Three is something like true courtesy dignifies the receiver and the giver. Four is, remember always that the acts of the Ducas live forever. Five — well, you get the general idea. Pretty intimidating stuff to force on an eight-year-old.” He frowned slightly. “You’re laughing,” he said. “Which is fair enough, it’s all pretty ridiculous stuff, but —”

  “Actually,” Vaatzes said, “I was thinking, that’s something you and me have in commo
n. Except when I was eight years old, I was learning the specifications of the Foundrymen and Machinists’ Guild. At least all your rules of conduct make some sort of sense. The specifications are just a whole list of measurements and dimensions. But really they amount to the same thing; stuff you’ve got to live by, like it or not, because that’s what we stand for. I can still remember them all, believe it or not. On my ninth birthday I had to go to the Guildhall along with all the other kids in my class and stand on a platform in the Long Gallery, and three scary old men tested us; it felt like hours, and we’d been told beforehand that if we got anything even slightly wrong, that’d be it — out of the Guild forever, which would’ve been the next best thing to a death sentence. Were we nervous? I can feel the sweat now, running down inside my shirt. And I was desperate for a pee — I’d gone about a dozen times while we were waiting in the lodge — but of course there was nothing I could do except stand with my legs crossed hoping nobody’d notice.”

  Miel laughed. “When I was that age I had to go up in front of everybody when we had company for dinner and recite poetry — Mannerist stuff, mostly, which I never could be doing with. If I did all right and remembered it all and didn’t gabble, Father’d give me a present, like a new hood for my sparrowhawk or a new pair of riding gloves; but if I got it wrong and showed him up he’d be absolutely livid for days; wouldn’t speak to me, just looked past me as though I didn’t exist. I never could see the point of it, because the guests must’ve been bored stiff — who wants to hear a snot-nosed kid reciting sonnets about dew-spattered ferns? — and he’d be mortified if I wasn’t absolutely perfect, and I hated it, of course. But apparently it was one of those things you had to do, so we all did it. Like you and your measurements, I suppose.”

  Vaatzes nodded. “There’s a difference, though,” he said. “To you it was all just a waste of time; a stupid, pointless chore but you did it out of duty. For me — I can honestly say, when I got off the platform and I realized I’d passed, it was the proudest moment of my life. I felt I belonged, you see; I’d earned my place.”

  “That’s good,” Miel said, after a light pause. “You were quite right to feel that way.”

  “I thought so,” Vaatzes said. “It’s like the story we were all told at school, about the man whose name was put forward for membership of General Council; there were twenty vacancies, and he’d been nominated by his co-workers, so he went along to the interview, feeling nervous as hell. Anyhow, that evening he comes home, and he’s grinning like an idiot; so his wife looks at him and says, ‘You got it, then,’ and he grins a bit more and says, ‘No.’ ‘So why’re you smirking like that?’ she says. ‘I’m happy,’ he replies. ‘Happy? What’re you happy about, you didn’t make it.’ And he beams at her and says, ‘I’m happy for the City, because if I didn’t get it, it means there’s twenty men in Mezentia who’re even more loyal and wise and clever than I am; isn’t that fantastic?’ ”

  Miel frowned. “That’s supposed to be ironic, presumably.”

  “No,” Vaatzes said.

  “Ah.” Miel shrugged. “Sorry. No disrespect. But even the Ducas never came up with anything as sappy as that.”

  “I think it’s a good story,” Vaatzes said. “Please, don’t ever get me wrong. I haven’t changed who I am, just because I’m in exile.”

  Miel sighed. “It’s all very well you saying that,” he said. “I mean, I’m the same as you. Orsea may have had me arrested and locked up in here, but he’s still the Duke and my best friend, and if he honestly thinks this is where I should be, then fine. I happen to believe he’s wrong, and once things are sorted out, we can go back to how we were. But in your case…” He shook his head. “What you did was absolutely harmless, there was nothing wrong about it, you hadn’t hurt anybody, and they were going to kill you for it. You can’t accept that, and you can’t still have any faith in the society that was going to do that to you.”

  Vaatzes looked at him for a moment. “I was guilty,” he said. “And they caught me, and I deserved to be punished. But there were other considerations, which meant I couldn’t hold still and die. It wasn’t up to me, the choice of whether or not to hold still and take what was coming to me. If I’d been a free agent…” He shook his head slowly. “If there hadn’t been those other considerations, of course, I’d never have broken the law in the first place, so really it’s a circular argument.”

  Miel, not surprisingly, didn’t understand. “If that’s really how you feel,” he said, “what on earth prompted you to design and build all those war engines that’re going to mow down your people in droves? No, don’t interrupt; it’s not like we came to you and asked you, let alone threatened you with torture if you refused. You offered. What’s more, you offered and we refused, so you had to go to all the trouble of getting a private investor to put up the money and everything. That simply doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

  “Like I said,” Vaatzes said quietly, “there are other considerations.” He broke eye contact, looked out of the window. “If you’re standing on a ledge and someone pushes you, it’s not your fault that you fall. The whole thing has been out of my hands for a very long time now. It’s a great shame, but there it is. You’d be doing the same as me, in my shoes.”

  Miel decided not to reply to that; when someone insists on willfully being wrong, it’s bad manners to persist in correcting him. “Thank you for coming to see me,” he said.

  Vaatzes looked at him and grinned. “No problem,” he said. “For what little it’s worth, I’m absolutely positive you haven’t done anything wrong. Also for what it’s worth, I’d like to thank you for everything you’ve done to help me. Without you, I don’t know what I’d have done. I wish I could repay you somehow, but I can’t.” He stood up. “I wish there was something I could do.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Miel said.

  Don’t worry about it, he’d said; Ziani thought about that as he walked home. Technically, it was absolution, which was probably what he’d gone there to obtain. Query, however: is absolution valid if it’s obtained through deceit, fraud and treachery?

  Irrelevant; he didn’t need the Ducas’ forgiveness, any more than he’d have needed it if he’d been pushed off a ledge and fallen on him, breaking his arm or leg. In that case, he’d have been no more than a projectile, a weapon in the hand of whoever had pushed him. There are all sorts of ways in which people are made into weapons; what they do once they’ve been put to that use is not their fault. A man can’t work in an arms factory unless he believes in the innocence of weapons.

  As he cleared the lower suburbs and approached the wall, he became aware of a great deal of activity; a great many people walking fast or running, not aimlessly or in panic but with an obvious, serious purpose. Some of them were hurrying up the hill, toward the center of town and the palace. Most of them, however, were coming down the hill, heading for the wall or the gate. Fine, he thought; something’s about to happen, we’re about to get under way at last. He allowed himself a moment (there might not be another opportunity) to consider his feelings, which he’d learned to trust over the years. He realized that he felt, on balance, content. A great deal was wrong about what had happened and what was about to happen, but he was satisfied that he bore no blame for any of it. His part had been carried out with proper, in some respects elegant efficiency; and he was reasonably confident that it would all come out right, barring the unforeseen and the unforeseeable. He checked progress achieved against the overall schematic. There was still a long way to go, but he’d come a long way already. Most of all, everything was more or less under control. Suddenly, without expecting to, he laughed. The Eremian workers at the factory had an expression, good enough for government work, meaning something like, by no means perfect, but who cares, it’ll do. It had always annoyed him when he’d heard them using it; right now, however, it was entirely appropriate. Very soon now, by the sound of it, there’d be plenty of government work on both sides of the city wall. He, of cours
e, preferred to see things in terms of tolerances; what could and could not be tolerated in the context of the job that needed to be done. By those criteria, he’d passed the test and could go home with a quiet mind.

  Orsea arrived at the wall expecting to see one of his nightmares. Instead, he found the seventh infantry drawn up in parade order, and the captain saluting him.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “They’ve started to climb the road,” the captain told him. “Come and see for yourself.”

  Jarnac Ducas joined him on top of the gatehouse tower. Preoccupied as Orsea was with thoughts of the end of the world, he couldn’t help noticing that Jarnac’s unerring dress sense had chosen exactly the right outfit for the occasion: a coat of plates backed in blue velvet over a shirt of flat, riveted mail; plain blued-steel arm and leg harness; an open-face bascinet with a mail aventail; simple mail chausses over strong shoes; workmanlike Type Fifteen sword in a plain leather scabbard. Is there, Orsea wondered, a book where you can look these things up: Arms and Armor for Formal Occasions: A Guide for the Well-Dressed Warrior. He wouldn’t be the least surprised, he decided, if there was.

  “Nothing either way as yet,” Jarnac told him. “See down there, you can just make them out.” (Jarnac pointed; Orsea couldn’t see anything.) “That’s their heavy artillery, the stuff we really don’t know anything about. According to the Mezentine fellow, Vaatzes, they could have engines that could drop five-hundred-weight shot on the walls from about halfway up the road; which’d be a disaster, obviously, we’d have to send out a sortie to deal with them and that’d be simply asking for trouble. But, apparently, the platforms and carriages for that kind of engine are too wide or too fragile or something to be set up on the road — because of the gradient, presumably — so it’s possible they won’t be able to use them at all unless they stop halfway up and spend several days building a special platform. Nothing to stop them doing that, of course, unless we’re brave enough or cocky enough to send out a night sortie. Alternatively, they could drag the heavy artillery round the back of the city and set it up roughly where the advance party of scorpions was supposed to be — where it would’ve been if we hadn’t intercepted it, I mean. In fact, that’s the only scenario we can think of which’d explain why they wanted to station scorpions there in the first place: to lay down a suppressing barrage to cover them while they get the heavy engines set up. Of course, you’d expect them to change the plan because of what happened, but you never know, they may decide to press on regardless. Basically, it’s too early to say anything for certain.”