Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  Veatriz. It hit him like a punch in the face. If, somehow, Orsea had persuaded himself or been persuaded that there was some kind of ridiculous plot, then he must think Veatriz was right at the heart of it — conspiring with her lover, the Vadani Duke, to lure him to his death. Only, Orsea couldn’t be that stupid. Orsea would never believe anything like that.

  Just as Orsea would never ignore letters from his best friend.

  He was already on his feet before the idea had taken shape in his mind. His instincts were telling him, you can’t just sit here, you’ve got to get out and do something; rescue her, rescue both of them. It’s your job, it’s your duty. He made himself sit down again. The Ducas doesn’t break out of prison; for one thing it’d be dreadfully inconsiderate, since it’d be bound to cause trouble for servants and dependents, who’d be assumed to have arranged or assisted his escape. Instead, the Ducas writes a letter to the Duke, explaining all the silly misunderstandings; the Duke believes him, out of respect for the Ducas honor; everything is cleared up and put right. Unfortunately, the system presupposed a competent Duke, a man of intelligence and sound judgment, who wasn’t pathetically insecure and morbidly jealous about his wife.

  He sat down and wrote a letter.

  Orsea —

  This is ridiculous. I think I know what they’ve been telling you, and it simply isn’t true. If you’ll just come and see me for five minutes, I can prove it, and we can sort it all out. You owe me that.

  He was about to sign it, but why bother? Nobody else on earth could have written that letter. He folded it, went to the door and called for a page. Nobody came, and that was a shock for the Ducas. Servants had always been there, all through his life. You didn’t need to look; they’d be there, like component parts of a great machine. If the Ducas lifted up a plate, shut his eyes and dropped it, there’d be someone in the right place to catch it before it hit the floor. He called again, and waited. Eventually, a harassed-looking guard trotted up.

  “Where is everybody?” Miel asked.

  The soldier looked at him. “On the towers, or the roofs,” he said. “Watching. Didn’t anybody tell you? The Mezentines are attacking.”

  * * *

  “Please,” said Jarnac Ducas, with a hint of desperation. “Really, there’s nothing you can do here, and I can’t guarantee your safety. Please go back to the council room. That’s where you’re needed.”

  Don’t lie to me, Orsea thought, I’ve had enough lies from your family already. “I’m the Duke,” he said, “I should be here, on the front line. Where else should I be?”

  Jarnac recognized the line; it was from a stirring speech made by Duke Tarsa IV, a hundred and seventy years ago. Probably Orsea didn’t realize he was quoting. “Inside,” he replied, “where it’s safe. Look,” he added, suddenly blunt, “if you’re up here and you get killed or badly hurt, it’ll totally fuck up our morale. If they get up on the wall I’ll send for you; that’s when you’ll need to be seen. Just standing around dodging scorpion bolts, that’s no bloody good to anybody.”

  And that’s me told, Orsea thought rebelliously, but of course Jarnac was right. Not only did he sound right, he looked right, head to toe, in his no-nonsense open-face bascinet, brigandine coat over a light mailshirt, munitions arm and leg harness. You could believe in him, six foot five of lean muscle. He could’ve stepped straight off the pages of The True Art of War, or A Discourse of Military Science. He made Orsea feel about twelve years old.

  “Fine,” he said, “but you call me as soon as they get to the foot of the wall. That’s an order.”

  “Understood,” Jarnac said crisply; turned away, turned back impulsively. “There’s one thing you can do,” he said, in a voice more urgent and apprehensive than Orsea had ever heard him use before. “Something that’d really help.”

  “What?”

  Jarnac stepped right up close, something the lesser Ducas had probably never done before in the history of the family. “You can release Miel and send him up here to take over from me,” he said, with an edge to his voice that made Orsea step away. “He’s the man you need, not me. He’s good at this stuff.”

  He doesn’t know, Orsea realized. “I can’t,” he said. “Look, I promise I’ll explain; but it simply can’t be done, you’ve got to believe me.”

  “I see.” Jarnac’s massive head drooped on his neck for a moment, and then he was himself again. “In that case, with your permission, I really must get back to the tower. I will send for you,” he added, “you’ve got my word on that.”

  Once Orsea had gone, Jarnac bounded up the stairs to the top platform of the tower. His staff were waiting for him, anxious to point out things they’d noticed — a unit of archers previously misidentified as engineers, tenders full of scorpion ammunition, a banner that could be the enemy general staff. Jarnac pretended to listen and nodded appreciatively, but the buzzing swarm of detail didn’t penetrate. He was staring at the enemy; a single swarming, crawling thing trudging unhappily up the steep road to his city, with the intention of killing him.

  Jarnac Ducas had fought in seventeen military engagements; the first, when he was just turned sixteen, had been against the Vadani, a trivial cavalry skirmish on the borders that had sucked in infantry detachments that happened to be in the vicinity and had turned into a vicious, indecisive slogging-match; the most recent, Miel’s raid against the Mezentines. He’d missed the scorpion-cloud and the massacre, and he’d felt bad about that ever since. He’d been reading approved military texts since he was ten, at which age he’d also started to train with weapons (the sword, the spear, the poll-axe, the bow, the halberd); ten hours a week of forms, four hours a week sparring. By his own estimation, he was eminently qualified to lead a full regiment of heavy cavalry, as befitted his place in the social order. Never in his worst dreams had he ever imagined himself in sole command of the defense of Civitas Eremiae. That was something that simply couldn’t happen.

  “Get the engines wound up,” he said, not looking round to see who received the order. Whoever was responsible for doing it would know what to do. “They’re good to three hundred and fifty yards, is that right?”

  Someone assured him that it was, not that the information was necessary. Some weeks earlier, a party of workmen had hammered a row of white stakes into the ground in a straight line, precisely three hundred and forty-nine yards from the wall. As soon as the enemy crossed the staked line, the scorpion crews were going to loose their first volley. The engineers who installed the machines had carefully zeroed them to that range, so that the first cloud of bolts would land on the line, with a permitted tolerance of six inches either way. The enemy advance guard, marching purposefully up the hill in good order, were already as good as dead. It was the unit behind them Jarnac was thinking about.

  The key would be the mobile scorpion batteries; he could see them, though the enemy had done their best to disguise them as ordinary wagons. If he could neutralize the Mezentine scorpions, he reckoned he could kill one man in three before they reached the base of the wall. Take away a third, and the enemy army wasn’t strong enough to take the city; there were definitive tables of odds in the military manuals that told you the proportion by which the attackers needed to outnumber the defenders in order to secure victory. Jarnac had a copy of A Discourse of Military Science tucked inside the front of his brigandine, with a bookmark to help him find the place. The critical figure was one in three; simple arithmetic.

  Now then, he thought. The skirmish line advances, I wipe them out; while our engines are rewinding, they push forward the mobile batteries so that they’re in range. I loose a volley that gets rid of all their scorpion crews, but when we’re all down again, they send up replacement crews to span and align their scorpions. If I’m quick, maybe I’ll get those crews too, but there’ll be a third wave, and a fourth. Sooner or later they’ll get off their shot; I’ll lose crewmen, which’ll slow down my rate of fire as I replace them. Whoever runs out of scorpion crewmen first will lose t
he war. And that’s all there is to it.

  (He paused for a moment to consider the sheer scale of the enterprise he was committing himself to. Not tens of deaths but hundreds, not hundreds but thousands, not thousands but tens of thousands; each death caused by a wound, a tearing of flesh, smashing of bone, pouring out of blood, an experience of intense pain. He’d seen death several hundred times, the moment when the light went out in the eyes of an animal because of some action of his, at which point the shudders and twitches were simply mechanical, no longer controlled by a living thing. Each of those deaths he could justify in terms of meat harvested, crops preserved from damage, honor given and respectfully taken — there were times when he found it hard to believe any of those justifications, but he knew somehow that what he was doing was clean and legitimate. Now he was going to see death on a scale he couldn’t begin to imagine, and the justification — which should have been self-evident — seemed elusive. Why kill ten thousand Mezentines, he asked himself, when the outcome is inevitable and the city is doomed to fall? Why should any human being kill another, given that the flesh and the hide are not used, and no trophy is taken? All he could find to shield himself with against these thoughts was a banal they started it, and the illogical, incredible fact that unless he killed them, all of them, they were going to wreck his city and murder his people. Because there’s no alternative; it was a reason, not a justification, on a par with a parent’s because I say so, something he had to obey but could neither understand nor respect. It was no job for a gentleman, even though it was the proper occupation of the lesser Ducas — but not to command, not to be in charge and accept responsibility. He hadn’t been born to that; Miel had, and that was what he was there for. Except that he wasn’t; why was that? he wondered.)

  They were closing; they were only yards from the white posts; they were the quarry walking into the snare. Jarnac took a deep breath, sucked it in, found it impossible to let it go, because when he did so, he’d be saying the word, loose, that would kill all those people. Could he really do that, exterminate thousands of creatures with just one word, like a god or a magician in a story?

  “Loose,” he said, and the scorpions bucked all along the wall. The sounds they made were the slider crashing home against the stop, a thump of steel on wood, and the hiss of the bolt forcibly parting the air. All around him, men were exploding into action, arching their backs as they worked frantically at windlasses, swirling and flickering like dancers as they picked up and loaded bolts, jumped clear as the sear dropped and the slider flew forward again. He pressed against the battlement and looked down, in time to see the cloud of bolts lift, a shimmering, insubstantial thing that fell like a net. The enemy were flattened like trampled grass, as if an invisible foot was stamping on them. They weren’t people, of course; they were blades of grass, or ants, or bees swarming; not a thousand creatures who resembled him closely but one composite, collective thing, belonging to the species enemy. The bolt-cloud lifted again and blurred his view.

  Something about it was wrong; at least, the enemy weren’t acting in the way he’d been expecting. They’d sent forward another wave, but it was walking, scurrying right into the path of the bolts. He saw the invisible foot stamp it flat, and there wasn’t another wave behind it. He realized what it meant: Vaatzes the Mezentine had improved the design of the windlasses, or something of the kind. These scorpions could be reloaded faster than the ones the Mezentines made, which meant their timings for their planned maneuvers were all wrong; accordingly, instead of sending their people into a neat, safe interval between volleys, they’d placed them right under the stamping foot. Jarnac felt sick; it was a wicked, treacherous thing to do, to trick the enemy into destroying his own people on such an obscene scale. He turned his head away, and saw an engineer hanging by his hands from a windlass handle, every ounce of bodyweight and every pound of strength compressed into desperate activity.

  He forced himself to look back at the view below, as though it was a punishment he knew he deserved. They’d been moving their scorpions up; now they were trying to stop them before they vanished under a net of bolts. The enemy was a bubbling stream now, swirling and breaking around tiny black pebbles, swept against their will into a weir of flying pins. Most of all, it was an utterly ludicrous spectacle; and beyond it he could see the familiar copses, spinneys, chases and valleys of his home, places he knew down to the last deer-track and split tree. It was an impossibility; what was that word the Mezentine had used, to describe something that shouldn’t be possible, outside any definition of tolerance? It was an abomination.

  After a while he got used to it, or at least he blunted the significance of what he was watching. It took four abortive and costly experiments before the Mezentines figured out the timing of the Eremian scorpion winches; the fifth time they were successful. It was a strange kind of success — seconds after their scorpions had been advanced into position, every man in the moving party was dead — but it constituted a victory, because the rest of their army started cheering, a sound so incongruous that it took Jarnac several seconds to figure out what it was. The sixth wave managed to span and align the engines before they died. The seventh —

  But Jarnac had been practicing for that. As soon as the sliders had slammed home, he raised both arms and yelled. Nobody could make out what he was saying, of course, but they’d been through the drill twenty times, anticipating this moment. As Jarnac dropped to his knees and shoved his shoulders tight against the rampart wall in front of him, he couldn’t look round and see if the rest of his men were doing the same. He hoped they were; a heartbeat later he heard the swish, and that was when he closed his eyes. The clatter, as the enemy’s scorpion bolts pitched all around him, was loud enough to force any kind of thought out of his head, and he forgot to give the next order. Fortunately, they didn’t need to be told.

  They got their next volley off just in time. Before his own bolt-cloud had pitched, a thin smear of enemy bolts sailed, peaked and dropped around him. He heard yells, a scream or two; he didn’t look round, but couldn’t help catching sight of a man with a bolt through his shoulder, in the hollow above the collarbone; he overbalanced and fell backward off the ledge. Jarnac leaned forward over the rampart — someone yelled at him but he took no notice — and saw confusion and an opportunity where the enemy scorpions were drawn up. It was an advantage; they’d have to bring up new crews now, and they’d run straight into the center ring of the target and be killed. Before they died, they’d have spanned the windlasses and loaded the bolts, so that their successors could slip the sears and launch the volley. I’m killing men at an incredible rate, Jarnac told himself, but there’s still too many of them. As he watched the new crews run forward, work frantically and die, he knew he was wasting his time. Might as well fight the grass, he thought; you can fill a dozen barns with hay, and all you’re doing is encouraging it to grow.

  It was the twelfth wave that did the damage. He timed it as well as he could, but maybe the twelfth-wavers were faster or better-trained, or maybe his men were getting tired; just as he was about to yell, “Cover!” the bolts came down. It was like sea-spray breaking over a wall; and once he was up and on his feet again, he saw that half his crews were dead. The other half loosed their volley; he was leaning over the back edge of the walkway, yelling for fresh crewmen. They arrived in time to look up at a cloud of bolts. As the remaining engines returned fire he called again. The bolts overshot most of them as they scrambled into the cover of the wall, and they found engines spanned and ready to loose. That’s a thought, Jarnac said to himself, and cursed his stupidity for not thinking of it before; loose alternately, in two shifts. He didn’t need to give an order, they were doing it anyway. Another Mezentine volley pitched; he estimated that only a quarter of their engines were manned and operating. The trouble was, a quarter was plenty. Not only were they killing men, the bolts were stabbing into the timber frames of the engines, gouging out gobbets of splintered wood (the Mezentines, of course, made
their frames out of steel). A return volley, and more men running up the stairs, jumping, vaulting over the piled-up dead, leaping at the windlass handles, ripping bolts out of nearby corpses to load the slider because it was quicker than stooping to load from the stack. Jarnac waited for the enemy reply. It didn’t come.

  He waited a little longer, then sprang to his feet and peered over the battlement. The main body of the enemy army was advancing, pouring round, past and over the line of engines, each with its grove of spitted dead men. Jarnac didn’t understand; had they run out of artillerymen after all, or were they simply sick and tired of watching? It didn’t matter; they were advancing into the killing zone — he heard the crash of the sliders, watched the enemy go down. He saw a whole line crumple and flatten, and the line behind them march on over them without stopping. The next volley pitched and slaughtered, but by then three other lines were out of the line of fire. Simple, when you thought about it. With his scorpions he could kill a quarter of the Mezentine army before they came within bowshot of the wall. But a quarter wouldn’t be enough. He didn’t need to open his copy of the Discourse and look it up on the table. He could do the sums in his head.

  Someone, a junior staff officer of some kind, was standing a few yards away, gawping at the dead; half-witted, mouth open, arms dangling at his sides. Jarnac yelled to him but he didn’t seem to hear, so he jumped up, grabbed his shoulder and shook him.

  “Go to the palace,” he said. “Fetch the Duke.”

  He had to repeat it twice, and then the man picked up his feet and ran, sliding in pooled blood, tripping on scorpion bolts and dead men’s legs. That chore done and promise fulfilled, Jarnac turned back to the pointless task of killing ten thousand men.