Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  The War Commission liked to refer to themselves as the Department of Necessary Evil (there were other names for them around the Guildhall, none of which were used to their faces). As befitted an anomaly in an otherwise standardised world, they cultivated a slightly eccentric manner; accordingly, it was their custom when the weather permitted to meet in the open air, in the cloister garden. It was an undeniably pleasant spot: a square garden enclosed by the cloister walls, with a fountain in the centre of the lawn, and raised flowerbeds at the edges. Grapevines and wisteria were trained on the walls, and a quincunx of elderly fig trees provided shade in the middle. According to people who knew about such things, the garden was one of the oldest parts of the Guildhall complex, dating back to before the Reformation. That made sense; it had a distinctly effete feel about it. You could picture the nobles and scribes of the old Republic strutting on the lawn, waited on by obsequious footmen in extravagant livery.

  Necessary Evil didn't indulge itself to quite that extent; there were no brocade coats or powdered wigs, no string quartet scratching out incidental music in the background. Instead, the fourteen commissioners sat in a semicircle of ornately carved chairs facing the fountain. Secretaries and clerks hovered around them, setting up folding desks, topping up inkwells, sharpening pens. Two flustered-looking men were trying to stand up an easel for a large framed map; two more were struggling with a huge brass lectern that must have weighed four hundredweight. There was a pleasant hum of chatter, like distant bees.

  The only member of Necessary Evil that Psellus knew by sight was the assistant secretary, who was also vice-chairman of the Foundrymen's standing committee on doctrine and specifications. He was easy to spot from a distance by his perfectly bald, slightly pointed head. In the event, he saw Psellus first and beckoned him over. His name was Zanipulo Staurachus, and Psellus had disliked him for thirty years.

  'Well,' Staurachus said, in a loud whisper, 'a fine state of affairs you've landed us in.'

  Ever since they were apprentices together, Psellus had been trying to figure out a way of coping with Staurachus. Being an optimist at heart, he still hadn't given up hope.

  'Presumably I've got to brief you about Vaatzes,' he said.

  'Formality, really. We need to be able to minute having interviewed you. But tell me, why did the bloody fool do it? I've read his assessments, and I'm pretty sure I met him once. Wouldn't have thought he was the type.'

  Psellus thought for a moment. 'I'm not entirely sure there is a type,' he replied. 'I think that what people do depends a lot on what's done to them first.'

  'I'm not talking about the defection,' Staurachus said. 'Really, that's our fault for letting him get away. But what possessed him to go fooling about building stupid mechanical toys in the first place? If he was that way inclined, someone should've picked up on it years ago, and we could've done something about it, and all this nonsense would've been avoided. You realise this war business is playing right into the Consolidationists' hands, just when there's three seats on General Council up for grabs.'

  Psellus frowned. 'I didn't know that,' he said.

  'Of course you didn't. It's not the sort of thing someone like you ought to know. But I'm telling you now, because obviously this stupid war is going to change everything, and I need all our people to focus on the issues. I mean, Eremia doesn't matter, in the long run, but if Consolidation manages to get an overall majority on General Council, that's a disaster.'

  Psellus hated having to agree with Staurachus; insult to injury. 'But assuming we win the war-' he said.

  'Of course we'll win,' Staurachus interrupted. 'It's how we win that matters. Frankly, it couldn't have come at a worse time, with me being the only Foundryman on this commission. Which,' he added, scowling, 'is where you come in.'

  'Me?'

  Staurachus nodded. 'I know you won't have figured it out for yourself, because you've only got ten fingers for counting on; but the rules say there should be sixteen commissioners in time of war, and we're two short. I'm proposing we co-opt you for the duration.'

  'Me?' Psellus repeated. 'Why?'

  'Well, because you're Foundry, obviously. And you know the background, you've researched the Eremians, specialised local knowledge and so forth. That's what I'll tell the others, anyhow. There shouldn't be any bother. The other co-optee will probably be either Ropemakers' or Linen Armourers', and we've got to be seen to be even-handed in appointments.'

  'It's a great honour,' Psellus said flatly. 'But I don't think… What about Curiatzes? Or Crisestem,' he added, in a burst of happy inspiration. 'He's got the background, and he's ambitious.'

  'Exactly. So I chose you instead. Because,' Staurachus explained, 'you're not bright enough to be a nuisance, and you generally do as you're told. Now get over there and make your presentation. Try and make it good; I want something decent from you, if I'm going to get them to accept you.'

  Up to that point, Psellus hadn't really hated Ziani Vaatzes, except in an objective way. The abominator had inspired in him more curiosity than hatred. Now, though…

  Mostly through force of habit, he made the best job he could of presenting the facts to the commission and fielding their awkward questions. There wasn't anything he couldn't handle, and the only overt hostility came from a Ropemaker and was therefore to be expected. He disarmed the annoying man by admitting that Compliance had indeed made several reprehensible errors of judgement in their handling of the case. Since this wasn't true and everybody knew it, the Ropemaker wasn't in any position to make capital out of it; he accepted the admission with a grunt and sat down again. As soon as Psellus had been dismissed and had sat down in the chair set out for him next to the fountain (a fine spray, deflected off the marble rim, fell on his collar, but he managed to ignore it), Staurachus got up and proposed that he be co-opted. The motion was seconded by a Carpenter and passed, twelve to one with a Shipwright abstaining. Duly elected, Psellus was led by a clerk across the lawn to a fortuitously empty chair next to Staurachus, on the left wing of the semicircle. The chief commissioner got up and recited a formal welcome. It was all as smooth and quick as slipping on ice.

  Psellus spent his evening clearing out his old office and moving to his new one, which was just off the main gallery of the cloister, and about a third smaller than the one he'd just vacated. That meant there wasn't room for his old desk and chair, but somehow he wasn't heartbroken about that. It was a ghastly mess, of course; inevitably, Crisestem would get his old job at Compliance, at least until this ridiculous war was over. He tried to focus on the fact that his promotion was good for the Foundrymen and for Didacticism in general; somewhat marginal, once you'd balanced a seat gained on Necessary Evil against control of Compliance lost to the Tailors and Consolidation. If the war went wrong, needless to say, he'd be finished (which was rather like saying that if the sun failed to rise one morning, the world would be very dark. The Republic's wars never went wrong. Hadn't ever gone wrong yet.).

  It was just after midnight by the time he'd finished arranging his books and sorting his files, and it occurred to him that he hadn't had anything to eat for a very long time not since he was in Compliance, in fact, and that was easily a lifetime ago. He wasn't in the least hungry, but he knew what missing meals did to his digestion. The dining room would be closed by now, but the buttery over in Foundrymen's Hall stayed open all night; stale bread, thick, slightly translucent yellow cheese and a small soft apple if he was lucky. Probably Necessary Evil had its own private, secret canteen where you could get plovers' eggs and mashed artichoke at three in the morning, but nobody had mentioned it at the meeting. Presumably you had to serve a probationary period before you were trusted with a map reference and a key.

  Foundrymen's Hall was two quadrangles down and one across. It was twenty-five years since he'd first walked under its modest arch, knees weak and guts twisted into a knot. He'd got used to it since then; now it was just a building, ever so slightly shabby if you knew where to look. He didn't get lost in
the corridors any more, and when nervous young men asked him the way, he answered clearly and immediately without having to think, the way you move your hand. A day would come when his name would be written up on one of the honours boards in the downstairs lobby-he'd never see it, of course, because he'd be dead-and some terrified youth waiting to be collected and shown to his new desk would stare up at it and wonder without really caring who the hell he'd been, and what he'd done. When that day came, he'd be the sixth Psellus on the boards, and of course the last. There were no annotations beside those gilded names, so nobody would ever know, unless they had occasion to delve back through ancient minute-books and cross-reference with the archives of memoranda, that he was the man who destroyed Eremia Montis by getting up out of a chair; a neat trick, though he wasn't quite sure how he'd come to achieve it. It's something to ensure that your name will live for ever, even if the reason why gets lost along the way.

  There were half a dozen men in the buttery when he got there; he recognised the faces of two sessions clerks but couldn't remember their names, and the other four were strangers. He declined the vegetable soup (twenty-five years, and he'd never seen or heard of anybody having the vegetable soup; it was universally shunned, like leprosy, but all day every day there was a black cauldron full of it, simmering like a dormant volcano over the fire) and risked a pear instead of an apple.

  'Congratulations,' someone said in his ear. He looked round.

  'Thank you,' he said gravely. 'You're having the salt pork.'

  'I always do when I come in here. It's disgusting, but I'm too set in my ways to change.'

  They sat down at a table in the corner furthest from the hatch. 'What are you doing up at this hour, Stall?' Psellus asked. 'You're never up late.'

  'It's all your fault,' replied Stali Maniacis, his oldest and only friend. 'You get it into your head to declare war on some tribe nobody knows anything about, so naturally they send for the treasurer, and he sends for me. I've spent the last eight hours shuffling jetons around, trying to find some money for you to hire your soldiers with.'

  'Ah,' Psellus replied. 'Any luck?'

  Maniacis nodded. 'Pots of money,' he said. 'It's there, you can go down the cellars with a lamp and look at it, all heaped up on the floor. The problem's finding it on paper. Backdated appropriations and contingency reserves and five-year retentions and God only knows what. Your best bet, if you really want this war of yours, is to hire a bunch of pirates to break in and steal it. Cut through all the formalities, and we can write it off as hostile action, make our lives a whole lot easier. So,' he went on, 'rank and power at last. How did you manage it?'

  Psellus shrugged. 'I didn't get out of the way quick enough, I suppose.'

  'Balls. The lightness of the foot deceives the eye. One moment you were the failure responsible for a fuck-up in Compliance, next thing you're magically transfigured into a god of war, and nothing will be your fault ever again. Don't tell me you haven't been cooking this up for months.'

  'If only,' Psellus said. 'It was nothing to do with me.'

  'All right. So who, then?'

  'Staurachus.'

  'Oh.' Maniacis pulled a face. 'Him. Fine. So presumably this is all part of some magnificently intricate manoeuvre on behalf of the greater glory of Didacticism.' He shook his head. 'Don't see it myself, but then I wouldn't expect to. What's your new office like?'

  'Small.'

  'View?'

  'You can just about see a corner of the cloister garden, if you lean out and crane your neck a bit.'

  'Better than the glassworks, though.'

  'True.'

  Maniacis frowned. 'You really aren't very happy about this, are you? What's the problem? Feeling out of your depth?'

  'I'm used to that,' Psellus said. 'I've been a politician now for fifteen years, I wouldn't know my depth if I fell in it. But I'm sure there's something I've missed, and I don't know where.'

  'You always were a worrier.'

  'Yes,' Psellus said. 'But it probably doesn't matter. That's what's so good about war, it papers over all the cracks. If we scrape Eremia Montis off the map, none of the fiddling little details will matter any more.' He yawned. 'I think I'll go to bed,' he said. 'I expect tomorrow is going to be a long and interesting day'

  'Going home?'

  Psellus shook his head. 'I'll sleep in the lodge,' he said. 'I can't face all those flights of stairs at this time of night.'

  'Count yourself lucky,' Maniacis grumbled. 'I've still got three projections to do. I don't imagine I'll be finished much before dawn. Next time you declare war, do you think you could do it around nine in the morning? Some of us have to work for a living, you know.'

  'If you call shuffling brass discs round a chequerboard work,' Psellus replied. It was, of course, an old debate between them, as thoroughly rehearsed as a wedding dance. It could be started with a word, or stopped immediately and put on one side, bookmarked, to be continued later at some more opportune time. 'Now I suppose you're going to say it's all my fault that you've got to go scrabbling about trying to find the money to pay for all of this.'

  Maniacis frowned. 'All of what?'

  'The war, of course.'

  'Oh.' Somehow Psellus felt he'd said something unexpected. 'No, we're used to that,' Maniacis went on. 'You politicals say the word, all we've got to do is click our fingers and the money appears out of thin air. I mean, it's not like we've got anything else to do.'

  It was synthetic, because it was always synthetic between them, like an exhibition bout between prizefighters; this time, though, he noticed a certain edge in his friend's voice, a slight reluctance to look him in the eye. But that was strange, since Stali wouldn't ever be genuinely upset with him because of work. Something he'd said was rattling about in his mind loose, but he couldn't place it. Because he was so tired, probably.

  'Bed for me,' he said, standing up. 'Have fun with your projections.'

  Maniacis said something vulgar, and he left. All the way down the stairs and across the back courtyard he tried to work out what it was that didn't fit. Something was wrong; something small and trivial, of course.

  The lodge porter opened up a guest room for him; slightly smaller than a prison cell, with a plain unaired bed, a wash-stand, an empty water jug, one elderly shoe left behind by a previous visitor. He undressed, snuffed the lamp and lay down on top of the threadbare coverlet, his hands folded on his chest like a corpse laid out for embalming. Directly overhead was the old dorter, a survival from the days when the Guildhall was still a religious house; in consequence, the ceilings of these rooms were all vaulted, though of course you couldn't see anything in the dark. One of the rooms still had traces of the old painted stucco, devotional scenes from a religion nobody remembered any more. Probably not this one; Psellus had seen them once, years ago, but they were just people standing about in the flat, stylised poses of pre-Reformation religious painting. Authentic but entirely lacking in artistic merit; it'd probably be kinder to chip them off and whitewash over the top. It'd be miserable, he reckoned, to be the ghost of a god, pinned to the mortal world by one crumbling and indistinct fresco.

  (And in Eremia shortly… Did the Eremians have any gods? He had an idea they'd believed in something once, but they'd grown out of it. Just as well, probably. If you eradicated a religious people, would their gods survive even with nobody to pray to them? And if so, what would they find to do all day?)

  He closed his eyes, like a fencer moving from First guard to Third.

  'Civitas Eremiae,' said the expert, 'is the highest city in the known world. It's built on the peak of a mountain; the walls are founded on solid rock, so you can forget about sapping, undermining or tunnelling your way in. They have an excellent system of underground cisterns, with never less than six months' supply of water. There's also a substantial communal granary, likewise underground. That means a siege would present us with enormous difficulties as regards supply. They have plenty of water and food in store at all times; if we wa
nted to lay siege to them and starve or parch them out, we'd have to carry water and food for our men up the mountain. There's just the one road, narrow and winding back and forth. Even if we kept up a continual relay, we couldn't shift enough supplies in one day along that road for more than seven thousand men, way too few to maintain an effective blockade. To be blunt: we'd be dead of hunger and thirst long before them, and we'd also be outnumbered two to one. Unless someone can think of a way round those problems, a siege is out of the question. If you want to take Givitas Eremiae, it'll have to be by way of direct assault; and the longest an army capable of doing that could last up there would be forty-eight hours. Talking of which; the very least number of defenders we'd be likely to come up against would be fifteen thousand infantry on the walls. The city has never been taken, either by siege or storm. If you contrived somehow to get through the gate or over the wall, that's where the fun would start. The whole place is a tangle of poxy little alleys and snickets; from our point of view, one bottleneck and ambush after another. There are some thatched roofs, a handful of wooden buildings; not enough for a decent fire to get a foothold on. Artillery isn't going to be much help to you. In order to get it up the approach road, you'd have to break it down completely and rebuild it once you're in position, but you'd be wasting a lot of sweat and effort for nothing. The slope's so aggressive, you'd be hard put to it to find a level footprint for anything bigger than a series five scorpion; but nothing less than a full-size torsion catapult's going to make any kind of a mark on those walls. The same goes for battering rams and siege towers-and maybe this is an appropriate moment to point out that the main strength of the Eremian military is archers. Put the picture together and I think you'll agree, you've set yourself a difficult job.'

  Thoughtful silence. After a nicely judged pause, the expert went on: 'Maybe you're wondering why a poor and relatively primitive bunch like the Eremians have gone to such extraordinary lengths to fortify their city. It's worth dwelling on that for a moment. Consider the drain on national resources, both material and manpower, involved in building something like that. The Eremians keep a few slaves, true. Not many, though; all that work was mostly done by free Eremian citizens, in between their daily chores and the seasonal demands of the sheep and goats. Why bother? you're asking yourselves. They must've been afraid of somebody, but it wasn't us.'