Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  'Naturally.' The man's face slumped into a long, narrow grin. 'You do realise,' he said, 'I haven't got the faintest idea where your country is, or what it's called, or what you do there, or anything. In the City we have this vague concept of the world as being like a fried egg, with us as the yolk and everywhere else slopped out round the edges.'

  'Interesting,' Orsea said. 'Well, my country is called Eremia Montis, and it's basically a big valley cradled by four enormous mountains; we raise sheep and goats and dairy cattle, grow a bit of corn; there's a good-sized forest in the eastern corner, and four rivers run down the mountains and join up to make one big river in the bottom of the valley. There's something like a quarter of a million of us-less now, of course, thanks to me-and till recently we had this ghastly long-standing feud with the duchy on the other side of the northern mountain, but that was all patched up just before I became Duke. We've got loads of fresh air and sky, but not much of anything else. That's about it, really. And I'm Orsea Orseolus, in case you were wondering; and you did tell me your name, but I've forgotten it.'

  The man nodded. 'Ziani Vaatzes,' he said. 'Just fancy, though; me talking to a real duke. My mother'd be so proud. Not that she'd have known what a duke is. Where I come from, dukes are people in fairy-tales who fight dragons and climb pepper-vines up to heaven.'

  'Oh, I do that all the time,' Orsea said. 'When I'm not losing battles. So,' he went on, 'tell me a bit about all these wonderful machines you're going to build for us. You said something just now about a waterwheel. What's that?'

  'You're joking, aren't you? You don't know what a water-wheel is?'

  Orsea shrugged. 'Obviously some kind of wheel that can travel on water. Not much use to us, because the river flows down the mountain, clearly, and there's nowhere in that direction we want to go. Still, it must be terribly clever, so please tell me all about it.'

  Ziani explained to him about waterwheels, and how the Mezentines used the power of the river Caudene to drive all their great machines. He told him about the vast artificial delta in the middle of the City; scores of deep, straight mill-races governed by locks and weirs, lined with rows of giant wheels, undershot and overshot in turn, and the deafening roar of regulated, pent-up water exploited to perfection through the inspired foresight of the Guilds. He explained about the City's seventeen relief aqueducts, which drew off flood-water in the rainy season and circulated reserve current when the pressure was low in summer; about the political dominance of the hydraulic engineers' Guild; about the great plan for building a second delta, worked out to the last detail two centuries ago, still running precisely to schedule and still only a third complete.

  'Are you serious?' Orsea interrupted. 'There's thousands of your people working on a project that'll never do anybody any good for another four hundred years, but they're happy to spend their whole lives slaving away at it.'

  'What's so strange about that?' Ziani replied. 'When it's finished, it'll double our capacity. We'll be able to build hundreds of new factories, providing tens of thousands of jobs for our people. That means a hundred per cent increase in productivity; we'll be able to supply goods to countries we haven't even discovered yet. It's an amazing concept, don't you think?'

  Orsea looked at him. 'You could say that,' he said.

  'You don't sound all that impressed.'

  'Oh, I'm impressed all right,' Orsea said. 'Stunned would be nearer the mark, actually. You're using up people's lives so that in four hundred years' time you can make a whole lot of unspecified stuff to sell to people who don't even know you exist yet. How do you know they'll want the things you're planning to make for them?'

  'Easy,' Ziani said. 'We'll find out what they need, or what they want, and then we'll make it.'

  'Supposing they've already got everything they want?'

  'We'll persuade them they want something else, or more of the same. We're good at that.'

  Orsea was quiet for a while. 'Strange,' he said. 'Where I come from, we organise the things to suit the people, or we try to; it doesn't usually work out as well as we'd like, but we do our best. You organise the people to suit the things. By the sound of it you do it very well, but surely it's the wrong way round.'

  Ziani looked at him. 'I guess I'd be more inclined to agree with you,' he said, 'if you'd won your battle. But you didn't.'

  There was a long silence. 'You're a brave man, Ziani Vaatzes,' Orsea said.

  'Am I?' Ziani shrugged. 'Yes, I suppose I am. I wonder when that happened? Didn't used to be. I suppose it must've been when they took my life away from me. Anyway, that's waterwheels for you. Did you say something a while ago about something to eat?'

  That night, when his guest had been fed and clothed and found somewhere to sleep, Orsea expected he'd dream about the great river, squeezed into its man-made channels, turning all those thousands of wheels. Instead, he found himself back in that same old place again, the place he always seemed to end up when he was worried, or things were going on that he didn't understand; and that same man was there waiting for him, the one who'd always been there and who seemed to know him so well. All his life, it seemed to him, the man had been ready for him, a patient listener, a willing provider of sympathy, always glad to give him advice which never seemed to make sense. Tonight the man told him, when he'd finished explaining, that he had in fact won the battle; and he took him to the top of the mountain, to the place where you could see down into the valley on one side, and out as far as the sea on the other, and he'd shown him the city burning, and great clouds of smoke being carried out to sea on the wind. He reached out and caught one of the clouds (he could do that sort of thing; he was very clever); and when he opened his fist, Orsea could see that the cloud was made up of thousands and millions of half-inch steel rods, three feet long and sharpened at one end. So you see, the man said, it turned out all right in the end, just as you designed it. I imagine you're feeling a certain degree of satisfaction, after six hundred years of planning and hard work.

  Not really, Orsea replied. All I wanted to do was go home.

  The man smiled. Well, of course you did, he said. That's all any of us want; but it's the hardest thing there is, that's why we had to work so hard and be so cunning and resourceful. And you mustn't mind the way he talks to you. Where he comes from, they naturally assume they're better than foreigners, even foreign dukes and princes. But you wanted to see the waterwheels, didn't you? They're just here.

  He pointed, and Orsea could see them, but they didn't look quite how he'd imagined them. They were crowded together up close, so that each one touched the one next to it, and the gear-teeth cut into them meshed, so that each one drove its neighbour. All down the river-bank, as far as he could see; but it was the wrong way round, like he'd tried to tell the stranger.

  That's not right, he said. The river should be driving the wheels, but it's the other way round.

  Chapter Four

  'Orsea said you wanted to learn about the world,' Miel said. 'Is that right?'

  The path was too steep and uneven for horses; even the badly wounded were walking, or being carried. Miel was wearing his riding-boots-he'd brought ordinary shoes, suitable for walking in, but they'd been in a trunk with the rest of his belongings in the supply train, and he didn't fancy going down the mountain and asking the Mezentines if he could have them back. The boots were extremely good for their intended purpose, which wasn't walking; close-fitting, thin-soled and armoured with twelve-lame steel sabatons, attached to the leather with rivets. The heads of those rivets were starting to wear through the pigskin lining and chafe his heels and the arches of his feet, and he could feel every pebble and flint through the soles as he walked. As if that wasn't enough to be going on with, he'd been given the job of being nice to the Mezentine he'd done his best to persuade Orsea to lynch. It could be seen as a backhanded compliment, but Miel wasn't in the mood.

  'If it's no trouble,' the Mezentine said. 'I'm afraid I'm rather ignorant about everything outside the City. Most of us
are; I think that's a large part of the problem.'

  Miel shrugged. 'Same with us,' he said. 'We know exactly as much about your people as we care. Not the best basis on which to start a war.'

  'I guess not.' The Mezentine sounded faintly embarrassed to hear a high officer of state implying a criticism of policy. Quite right, too; but it's always galling to be taught good manners by an enemy.

  The Ducas had rules about that sort of thing. Be specially polite to people who annoy you. True feelings are for true friends. Miel particularly liked that one because it meant you could convert trying situations into a kind of game; the more you disliked a person, the politer you could be. You knew that each civility was really a rude gesture in disguise, and you could therefore insult the victim like mad without him ever knowing.

  'I'm forgetting my manners,' Miel said. 'You only know me as the bloodthirsty bugger who tried to have you killed. I'm Miel Ducas.'

  'Ziani Vaatzes.'

  'Pleased to meet you.' Miel thought for a moment, then frowned. 'Do all Mezentine names have a z in them?'

  The Mezentine-no, at least do him the courtesy of thinking of him by his name; Vaatzes grinned. 'It does seem like it sometimes,' he said, 'but it's not like there's a law or anything. Actually, I believe it's a dialect thing. Back in the country we originally came from, I'd be something like Tiani Badates. A singularly useless piece of information, but there you are.'

  'Quite so. What was it Orsea said you did, back home? Some kind of blacksmith?'

  Vaatzes laughed. 'Not really,' he said. 'I was a foreman at the ordnance factory.'

  'Fine. What's a foreman?'

  'The answer to that,' Vaatzes said, 'depends on who you ask, but basically, I walk up and down the place all day making sure the workers in each shop are doing the work they're supposed to be doing, and making a proper job of it. A bit like a sergeant in an army, I suppose.'

  'I see,' Miel said. 'And have you been doing it long?'

  'Six years. Before that, I was a toolmaker.'

  'Like I said, 'Miel put in. 'A blacksmith.'

  'If you like. Actually, my job was to make the jigs and fixtures for the machines that made the various products. It was all about knowing how things work, and how to make them do what you want.'

  'That sounds more like my job,' Miel said; and he realised that he wasn't being nearly as polite as he'd intended. 'But I'm supposed to be telling you things, not the other way round. What would you like to know?'

  'Well.' Vaatzes paused. 'We could start with geography and put in the history where it's relevant, or the other way round. Whatever suits you.'

  'Geography. All right, here goes.' Miel cast his mind back a long way, to vague recollections of maps he'd paid too little attention to when he was a boy. 'Your city stands at the mouth of a gulf, on the east coast of the continent. On the other three sides you've got plains and marshes, where the rivers drain down from these mountains we're walking up. You'll have observed that the eastern plain-where the battle was-separates two distinct mountain ranges, the north and the south. Eremia Montis is a plateau and a bunch of valleys in the heart of the northern mountains; in the southern range live our closest neighbours and traditional enemies, the Vadani. There's not a lot of difference between us, except for one thing; they're lucky enough to have a massive vein of silver running through the middle of their territory. All we've got is some rather thin grass, sheep and the best horses in the world. With me so far?'

  'I think so,' Vaatzes said. 'Go on.'

  Miel paused for breath; the climb wasn't getting any easier. 'South of the Vadani,' he said, 'is the desert; and it's a wonderful thing and a blessing, because it forms a natural barrier between us and the people who live in the south. If it wasn't for the desert we'd have to build a wall, and it'd have to be a very high one, with big spikes on top. The southerners aren't nice people.'

  'I see,' Vaatzes said. 'In what way?'

  'Any way you care to name,' Miel replied. 'They're nomadic, basically they live by stealing each other's sheep; they're barbaric and cruel and there's entirely too many of them. If I tell you we prefer your lot to the southerners, you may get some idea.'

  'Right,' Vaatzes said. 'That bad.'

  'Absolutely. But, like I said, there's a hundred miles of desert between them and us, so that's all right. Now then; above us, that's to the north of Eremia Montis, you've got the Cure Doce. They're no bother to anybody.'

  'I know about them,' Vaatzes interrupted. 'That's where most of our food comes from.'

  'That's right. They trade wheat and beans and wine and God knows what else for your trinkets and stuff. We sell them wool and horses, and buy their barley-and their disgusting beer. To the best of my knowledge, they just sort of go on and on into the distance and fade out; the far north of their territory is all snow and ice and what's the word for it, tundra, until you reach the ocean. I have an idea the better quality of falcons come from up there somewhere, but you'd have to ask my cousin Jarnac about that sort of thing. Anyway, that's geography for you.'

  'Thank you,' Vaatzes said. 'Can we stop and rest for a minute? We don't have mountains where I come from, just stairs.'

  'Of course,' Miel said; he'd been walking a little bit faster than he'd have liked, so as to wear out the effete City type, and his knees were starting to ache. 'We can't stay too long or we'll get left behind, but a minute or two won't hurt. History?'

  'Please.'

  'History,' Miel said, 'is pretty straightforward. A thousand years ago, or something like that, the mountains were more or less empty, and the ancestors of the Eremians and the Vadani were all one people, living right down south, other side of the desert. When the nomads arrived, they drove us out. It's one of the reasons why we don't like them very much. We crossed the desert-there's lots of good legends about that-and settled in the mountains. Nothing much happened for a while; then there was the most terrific falling-out between us, meaning the Eremians, and the Vadani. Don't ask me what it was all about, but pretty soon it turned into a civil war. We moved into the north mountains and started calling ourselves Eremians, and the civil war stopped being civil and became just plain war. This was long before the silver was discovered, so both sides were pretty evenly matched, and we carried on fighting in a force-of-habit sort of way for generations.'

  Vaatzes nodded. 'Like you do,' he said.

  'Quite. Then, about three hundred years ago, your lot turned up out of the blue; came over the sea in big ships, as you presumably know better than I do. To begin with, our lot and the Vadani were far too busy beating each other up to notice you were there. It was only when your traders started coming up the mountain and selling us things that we realised you were here to stay. No skin off our noses; we were happy to buy all the things you made, and there was always a chance we could drag you in on our side of the war, if the Vadani didn't beat us to it. Really, it was only-no offence-only when you people started throwing your weight about, trying to push us around and generally acting like you owned the place, that we noticed how big and strong you'd grown. Too late to do anything about it by then, needless to say.'

  'When you say throwing our weight about…'

  Miel stood up. 'We'd better be getting along, or they'll be wondering where we've got to. Throwing your weight about; well, it started with little things, the way it always does. For instance: when your traders arrived-they came to us back then, we didn't have to go traipsing down the mountain to get ripped off by middlemen-the first thing they had a big success with was cloth. Beautiful stuff you people make, got to hand it to you; anyhow, we'd say, That's nice, I'll take twelve yards, and the bloke would measure it off with his stick, and we'd go home and find we hadn't got twelve yards, only eleven and a bit. Really screws it up when you're making clothes and there's not quite enough fabric. So we'd go storming back next day in a fine old temper, and the trader would explain that the Mezentine yard is in fact two and a smidge inches shorter than the Eremian yard, on account of a yard being a man's str
ide, and the Eremians have got longer legs. Put like that, you can't object, it's entirely reasonable. Then the trader says, Tell you what, to avoid misunderstandings in the future, how'd it be if you people started using our measurements? We'd say we weren't sure about that, and the trader would explain that he buys and sells all over the place, and it'd make life really tiresome if he had to keep adapting each time he came to a place that had its own weights and measures; so, being completely practical, it'd be far easier for us to change than it'd be for him; also, if he's got to spend time consulting conversion charts or cutting a special stick for Eremian yards, that time'd have to be paid for, meaning a five or ten per cent rise in prices to cover additional costs and overheads. Naturally we said, Fine, we'll use your yard instead of ours; and next it was weights, because there's eighteen ounces in the Eremian pound, and then it was the gallon. Next it was the calendar, because a couple of our months are a few days shorter, so we'd arrange to meet your people on such-and-such a day, and you wouldn't show up. You get the idea, I'm sure.

  'Didn't take long before everything was being weighed and measured in Mezentine units, which meant a whole lot of us didn't have a clue how much of anything we were buying, or how much it was really costing us, or even what day of the week it was. Sure, all just little things, one step at a time, like a man walking to the gallows. But the time came when we stopped making our own cloth because yours was cheaper and better; same for all the things we got from you. Then out of the blue the price has shot right up; we complain, and then it's take it or leave it, we've got plenty of customers but you've only got one supplier. So we gave in, started paying the new prices; but when we tried to even things up by asking more for what we had to sell, butter and wool and so forth, it's a whole different story. Next step, your people are interfering in every damn thing. The Duke appoints someone to do a job; your traders turn round and say, We can't work with him, he doesn't like us, choose someone else; and by the way, here's a list of other things you do which we don't approve of, if you want to carry on doing business with us, you'd better change your ways. We're about to tell you where you can stick your manufactured goods when suddenly we realise that your people have been quietly buying up chunks of our country; land, live and dead stock, water rights, you name it. Investment, I believe it's called, and by a bizarre coincidence you use the same word for besieging a castle. So there we were, invested on all sides; we can't tell you to go and screw yourselves without getting your permission first. Throwing your weight around.'