Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Skeddanlothi shrugged. 'We move around,' he said. 'If we win, we get good grazing for two years, three maybe. If we lose, we have to go into the bad land, where the grass is thin and there's very little water. But that makes us fight harder the next time we go to war.'

  Valens stood up. He was disappointed. 'These people are stupid,' he said. 'Make him tell you where this secret way across the desert is. Do what it takes; I don't want him for anything else.'

  He made a point of not looking back as he left the tent; he didn't want to see terror in the prisoner's eyes, if it was there, and if there was something else there instead he knew it wouldn't interest him. He went back to his tent, drank some more water and called a staff meeting in two hours.

  My own fault, he thought. I wanted them to be more than just savages. I wanted him to tell me that the girl's father had sent him on a quest for something-her weight in gold, or five hundred milk-white horses, or even the head of the Vadani Duke in a silver casket; I could have forgiven him for that. But instead they're just barbarians, and they killed my poor cousin. I can't put that in a letter, it's just crude and ugly. He put his feet up on the bed, closed his eyes. Useful information: a map, or the nearest thing to it that could be wrung out of the savage on the log; a map marked with the name and territory of each sect-no, that wouldn't be any use, not if they moved round all the time. All right; a list, then, the names of all the sects; he was sure there wasn't a definitive list anywhere, just a collation from various scrappy and unreliable sources. What else; what else, for pity's sake? He had a specimen, for study; if he had a talking roebuck or boar or partridge he could interrogate for information likely to be useful to the hunter-he could think of a great many things he'd like to ask a roebuck: why do you lie up in the upland woods at night and come down the hill to feed just before dawn? When do you leave the winter grazing and head up to the outer woods for the first sweet buds? But torturing data out of a savage was a chore he was pleased to leave to others, even though he knew they wouldn't get the best, choicest facts, because they didn't have the understanding. The truth is, Valens realised, you can only hunt what you love. Chasing and killing what bores or disgusts you is just slaughter, because you don't want to understand it, get into its mind.

  (My father never understood that, he thought; he hunted, and made war, because he liked to win. I'm better at both than he ever was.)

  He sent orders, hustling out the intrusive thoughts. Soon he'd be on duty again, holding the full picture in his mind. Wasn't there some tribe or sect somewhere who believed that the world was an image in the mind of God; that He thought, or dreamed, the whole world, and things only existed so long as He held them in mind? There were, of course, no gods; but you could see how a busy man might like to believe in something like that.

  An hour later a doctor came bothering him about his ankle. He managed to be polite, because the man was only doing his job; besides, there was something on his mind that wouldn't go away. It took him a long time to realise what it was; the problem buzzed quietly like a trapped fly in his mind all through the staff meeting, disrupting the pattern he was trying to build there like a bored dog in a room full of ornaments. In fact, it was the constant barrage of names (people, places) that finally showed him where it was.

  After the staff had dispersed, he called for two guards and went to the tent where the prisoner was being held. Skeddanlothi was in a sorry state. He lay on his face on the ground, his back messy with lash-cuts, his hair slicked with blood. He didn't look up when Valens came in.

  'We got the list,' said one of the guards. 'At least, we got a list, if you see what I mean. Could be a load of shit he thought up out of his head, just to be ornery'

  Valens had forgotten about the list; which seemed rather reprehensible, since so much pain and effort had gone into procuring it.

  'Difficult bastard,' the guard went on-was he making conversation, like someone at a diplomatic reception? 'He really doesn't like it when it hurts, but each time you've got to start all over again, if you follow me. We've had to bust him up quite a bit.'

  'That's all right,' Valens said. 'You cut along and get some rest, write up your report.'

  They left; changing shifts, quite usual. Valens went over and sat on the log. The prisoner didn't move, so he tugged on the chain once or twice.

  'I wanted to ask you,' he said. 'What does your name mean?'

  He hadn't expected a reply straight away, so a guard had to apply a little pressure. He repeated the question. It took three tries before the prisoner spoke.

  'What the hell do you want to know that for?'

  'Curious,' Valens said. 'I'm looking for-I don't know, some little glimmer of light. A chink in the wall I can peep in through. What does your name mean? Come on, it can't hurt you to tell me.'

  'I can't.'

  Valens sighed. 'There's some taboo on saying your name to outsiders. Once they know your name, they can steal your soul or something.'

  The other man laughed. 'No, that's stupid,' he said. 'But there's no word for it.'

  'Ah.' Valens nodded to a guard. 'You know,' he said, 'I believe this man hasn't had anything to drink for several hours. Get him some water.'

  He took the cup, which was nearly full; he emptied a third on to the ground. 'Paraphrase,' he said.

  'What?'

  'Well,' Valens said, 'what's the closest you can get, in our language?'

  Skeddanlothi was looking at the dark brown dust, where the water had soaked away. 'It's a kind of bird,' he said. 'But they don't live north of the desert.'

  'Describe it.'

  Hesitation. Valens poured away a little more water.

  'It's small,' the man said. 'Bigger than a thrush but smaller than a partridge.'

  'You mean a pigeon.'

  'No, not a pigeon.' The prisoner, as well as being in agony and despair, was also annoyed. 'It's a wading bird, with a long beak. Brown. It feeds in the mud.'

  'I see,' Valens said. 'Pardon me saying so, but it sounds an odd creature to name a great warrior after. I assume your parents wanted you to grow up to be a great warrior.'

  'It's the bird of our family,' Skeddanlothi said. 'All the families have a bird.'

  'I see. Like heraldry.'

  'No.' Almost petulant. 'We follow a bird. Each family follows a different one.'

  'Follow,' Valens repeated. 'You mean, you choose one as a favourite.'

  'No, follow.' Petulant to angry now. 'When the grazing is used up and goes bad, we follow our family's bird, the first one we see. We follow it for a day, from dawn to sunset, and where it stops to roost is where we move to.'

  'Good heavens,' Valens said. 'But supposing it just flies round in circles.'

  'If it stops, we drive it on.'

  'Makes sense,' Valens said. 'And a wader would always fly to water, of course. Do all the families follow water-birds?'

  But that was all; even pouring away the last of the water and the guard's best efforts earned him nothing more, which was frustrating, and by then there wasn't enough left to justify further expense of time and energy. It was the glimmer of light he'd been looking for, but it had gone out. He drew his finger across his throat; the guard nodded. Valens went back to his tent and gave orders to break camp and move out.

  'It's not an interrogation,' Miel Ducas said, 'or anything like that.'

  The Mezentine still looked apprehensive. 'But you want him to ask me questions?'

  'Let's say we want you to talk to someone who speaks your own language.' They'd reached the gate. Like all forge gates everywhere, it was almost derelict; the latch had long since gone, replaced by a length of frayed rope, and the pintles of the hinges on one side had come halfway out of the wood. There was probably a knack to opening it without pulling several muscles, but Miel wasn't a regular visitor. 'Basically, so you can see how much we know about, well, metalworking and things; and the other way about.'

  The Mezentine shrugged. 'If you think it'll help,' he said.

  'The
key is always to establish'-Miel grunted as he heaved at the gate-'communication. No point talking if you can't understand.'

  All forge gates open on to identical yards. There must have been a time, two or three hundred years ago, when all the blacksmiths in the world decided it would be a splendid thing to pave their yards with handsome, square-cut flagstones. Once this had been done, a great decline of resources and enthusiasm must have set in-you'll search in vain in the history books for any reference to the cause of it, but the evidence is there, plain as day; those proud, confident flags are all cracked up now. Grass and young trees push up through the fissures, kept in check only by the seepage of tempering oil and a very occasional, resented assault with the hook. Ivy and various creepers grow up through the scrap pile, their hairy tendrils taking an uncertain grip in the rust. Worn-out and broken tools and equipment wait patiently through the generations for someone to find time to fix them. There's always a tall water-butt with moss on one side, close to the smithy door, which has scraped a permanent furrow where it drags. There's always a mound of perfectly good coal, inexplicably left out in the wet to spoil.

  Cantacusene came out when he heard the yard gate scritch. He was almost unnaturally clean (blacksmiths aren't called that for nothing) and he looked painfully nervous, as if he'd been chosen to be a human sacrifice. His greeting was splendidly formal, and he was wearing his best apron.

  'This is the man I was telling you about,' Miel said. 'I hope you've thought up some good questions.'

  Cantacusene looked as though someone had just walked up to him and yanked out one of his teeth. 'I'll do my best,' he said. 'Please, come in. There's wine and cakes.'

  Indeed there were, and Miel tried to be polite about fishing a flake of dark grey scale out of his cup before drinking from it. It tasted like eggs beaten in vinegar.

  The place looked pretty much the same as it had the last time he'd been there; as though it had been burgled by someone with a grudge against the owner. There were tools lying about on the benches and the floor, a hopeless jumble of hammers, stakes, tongs, setts, fullers. On the floor were chalked patterns for various pieces of armour, their meticulously drawn details scuffed by feet passing in a hurry. Every surface was thick with black grime; everything glistened with spilt drops of water and new rust. Here, Miel said to himself, our guest will feel at home.

  But he didn't, by the looks of it. He had the air of a man who is trying hard not to give offence by showing disapproval. Cantacusene picked up on that straight away; the poor man was in pain, obviously. Miel felt bad about torturing him like this, but it had to be done, apparently.

  'What I thought,' Cantacusene said, mumbling, 'was that we could start off…' His words dwindled away as he looked at the expression on Vaatzes' face. 'Sort of like a trade test,' he said. 'If you think that'd be in order.'

  Miel waited for a response from the Mezentine, who just stood registering distaste. 'That sounds like a good idea,' he said. 'What did you have in mind?'

  Cantacusene's test would be to make a perfect circle, precisely one foot in diameter, out of quarter-inch plate. 'Feel free to use whatever you like,' he added nervously. 'If you think that'd be-'

  'Fine,' Vaatzes said. 'Material?'

  Cantacusene picked up a three-foot square of steel and offered it to him. It didn't mean anything to Miel, of course (except he noticed that someone had recently made a job of scrubbing the rust off it with a wire brush; like a woman being visited by her mother-in-law, he thought), but Vaatzes studied it for some time, turning it over in his hands and pinching at the edges with his fingers.

  'Have you got callipers?' he asked.

  'Callipers,' Cantacusene repeated. 'Yes, of course.'

  He dug a pair of callipers out of a pile of junk and handed them over. Vaatzes took three or four measurements and handed them back. 'Dividers,' he said, 'or a bit of string and a nail, if you haven't got any.'

  Cantacusene had some dividers; also files, a chest-drill and bits, a rule (Vaatzes stared at it in horror for a couple of seconds) and various other things Miel had never heard of. Vaatzes took them and laid them out on the floor, like a huntsman displaying the day's bag; the files in order of length, and so on. With the dividers he measured a foot off the rule, then knelt on the floor and scribed his circle on the plate-he did it three times, but Miel could only see one scribed mark. Next he stood up, clamped the plate upright in the leg-vice, and started to drill holes all round the circle with the chest-drill. This took a very long time. Miel soon lost interest and sat down to read the book he'd had the wit to bring with him. Each time he looked up, he saw Cantacusene rooted to the spot, watching like a dog at a rabbit-hole.

  When Vaatzes had finished drilling the ring of holes, he laid the plate on the bed of the anvil and cut through the web between the holes with a small cold chisel. This freed something that looked like a gear-wheel. Next he wiped his finger through the nearest accumulation of soot, rubbing black into the thin graven line left by the dividers; then he fixed the gear-wheel thing in the vice and picked up a file. Miel went back to his book.

  He'd almost finished it when he heard Vaatzes say: 'I'm sorry' He looked up. Vaatzes was holding up what looked to him like a steel platter. He handed it to Cantacusene as if it was something revolting and dead.

  'I did the best I could,' he said. 'But the drill-bits are blunt, the files are soft as butter, there's no light in here and the plate isn't an even thickness. And,' he went on, 'I made a botch of it. It's twenty years since I did any serious hand-filing, so I guess I'm out of practice.'

  'It's perfect,' Cantacusene said.

  Miel looked at him. He had the expression of someone who's just seen a miracle, a revelation of the divine.

  'It bloody well isn't,' Vaatzes said. 'I can't measure it, of course, but I'd say the tolerance is no better than two thousandths, if that. And if you call that a square edge, I don't.'

  Miel saw Cantacusene staring at him; he looked utterly miserable. 'It's better than I could do, anyway' Cantacusene said. 'Look, I'll show you.'

  He took the drill and made a hole in the middle of the platter, passed a length of steel rod through it and clamped the rod in the vice; then he laid his fingers on the edge and set it spinning. 'Perfect,' he repeated. Miel looked at it; it was as though the spinning disc was absolutely still.

  'I'll try again if you like,' Vaatzes said. 'Maybe if I took it outside, where I could see better.'

  Miel had seen more than enough pain in his life, but rarely such suffering as Cantacusene went through as the day wore on. Next he asked Vaatzes to make a square; then to draw out a round bar on the forge into a triangular section; then to make six identical square pegs, to fit perfectly into the square hole on the back of the anvil. Each time, the outstanding quality of the result seemed to hurt him like a stab-wound, and Vaatzes' escalating self-reproaches were even worse. Miel excused himself at one point, went up the hill to a friend's house and borrowed another book; it was going to be a long day. He got the impression that Cantacusene had set himself the task of finding something the foreigner couldn't do better than he could, and that he knew he was going to fail, and that his whole world was coming apart. Miel enjoyed reading and listening to tragedy, but only when it came with the author's guarantee that it wasn't real.

  An hour before sunset he decided to call a halt to the butchery. By that point, Cantacusene had the Mezentine doing sheet-work, which was, of course, Cantacusene's speciality in his capacity as Armourer Royal. There had been a note of desperation close to hysteria in his voice when he gave Vaatzes the specifications: a left-hand shell gauntlet, fluted in the Mezentine style, with four articulated lames over the fingers, the cuff moving on sliding rivets. Here at least Miel could understand some of the technical language; he had a pair of gauntlets to exactly that specification, for which Cantacusene had charged him nine silver thalers. He remembered thinking what a bargain they were at that price, when he took delivery. Accordingly, he marked his place, closed the
book and shuffled discreetly close to watch.

  Vaatzes started with a sheet of steel plate-not the one Cantacusene provided him with, because he looked at it and said it wasn't even; too thick at the top, too thin in the middle. So instead he scrabbled about in the scrap pile like a terrier, until he found a rusty offcut he reckoned would just about do, at a pinch. He traced the pattern on to it with chalk, cut it out on the shear, stopped cutting to take the shear to bits, make and fit a new pivot pin, clout the frame with a hammer, walk round it several times, stooping down and squinting, clout it a few more times, put it back together again (because he couldn't be expected to do accurate work on a shear that was completely out of line); next he formed the component parts on the anvil and the swage block (it was impossible, he declared, to do anything at all with either of them; if only he had a lathe, he could at least make a decent ball stake. Cantacusene went white as a sheet and stood opening and closing his hands) and punched the holes, having first stripped down and reworked the punch; then he did the fluting, half an hour of tiny woodpecker taps, quick as the patter of falling rain, his left hand constantly moving the work while his right hand fluttered like a hummingbird's wing (it was worthless, he declared as he held up the finished shell, because the flutes were uneven in depth and spacing, and the ridges weren't sharply defined); he cut the slots for the sliding rivets with the blunt drill and the butter-soft files; finally, more in sorrow than anger, he adjusted the fit of the moving parts, peened the rivets so that everything glided perfectly, declared it was hopeless, cut the rivets off with a chisel and did them again. Then he handed the gauntlet to Cantacusene, who took it as though it was his own heart, torn out with tongs through his smashed ribs.