Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Another pause, and everything so quiet you could hear the patter of water-drops from the fountain. 'The answer,' the expert said, 'is of course their neighbours, the Vadani. Eremia Montis has just emerged from a long and particularly nasty border war with the Vadani; and that's the direction I'm asking you to look in for help in cracking this nut. There may be peace right now, but the Eremians and the Vadani hate each other to bits, always have and always will. If you want the Eremians, you're going to have to get the Vadani on your side first. At the very least, they've got generations of experience of fighting the Eremians. They also have money, from the silver mines. The first stage, therefore, will have to be diplomacy rather than straightforward military action. Everything will depend on the Vadani; and the only way you can do business with them is through their chief, Duke Valens. He's your first objective.' The expert relaxed slightly, aware that he'd done his job and not left anything out. 'To brief you on him, I'd like to call Maris Boioannes of the diplomatic service.'

  Psellus sat up a little straighter. He knew Boioannes, or had known him a long time ago. A man stood up in the front row of seats, but he could only see his back; he had to wait until he'd made his way up to the lectern before he could get a look at his face.

  Curious, how the changes of age surprise us. The Maris Boioannes he remembered had mostly been objectionable on account of his appearance: a tall man, with a perfect profile, a strong chin and thick black hair, a revoltingly charming smile, deep and flashing brown eyes. You knew you never stood a chance when Boioannes was around. This man oddly enough, the smile was still there, although the chin had melted and the hair was thin, palpably flicked sideways to cover a bald summit as prominent as Civitas Eremia as described by the previous speaker. Deprived of its natural setting, however, the smile was weak and silly. You could easily despise this man, which would make you tend to underestimate him. Probably why he'd done well in the diplomatic service.

  'Duke Valens Valentinianus,' Boioannes said (his voice was the same; still rich and warm. He looked different once he'd started to speak), 'is almost certainly the most capable duke to rule the Vadani in two centuries. He's intelligent, he's firm, decisive; he's a good leader, highly respected; still very young, only in his early twenties, but that's not so uncommon among the mountain tribes, where life expectancy is short and prominent men tend to die young. He's well educated, by Vadani standards, with a firm grasp of practical economics; he reads books for pleasure-we know what he reads, of course, because his books all come from the Republic; we've compiled a list from the ledgers of his bookseller, and it'll be worth your while to take a look at it. He has an enquiring mind, maybe even a soul. He's not, however, an effete intellectual. We're still working on a complete schedule of all the men he's had executed or assassinated since he came to power, but I can tell you now, he's quite ruthless in that way. Not a storybook bloodthirsty tyrant, shouting "off with his head" every five minutes; there are several well-authenticated instances where he spared someone he really ought to have disposed of, gave him a second and even a third chance. It's notable, however, that in each of these cases he took full precautions to make sure that the offender couldn't do any serious harm while on licence, so to speak. He's an excellent judge of character, and he has great confidence in his own judgement. He believes in himself, and the people believe in him too. All in all, a most efficient and practical ruler for a nation like the Vadani.'

  Boioannes paused and drank a little water. He still had that mannerism of using only his index and middle fingers to grip the cup. 'As far as weaknesses go,' he went on, 'we haven't found any yet, though of course we're working on it. He's depressingly temperate as far as wine and women are concerned; his only indulgence appears to be hunting, which is a big thing among both of the mountain nations. Buying him isn't really an option, since the revenue from the silver mines is more than a tribal chief would know what to do with; also, he doesn't seem to show any interest in conspicuous expenditure-no solid gold dinner services, priceless tapestries, jewel-encrusted sword-hilts. He draws only a very moderate sum from the profits of the silver mines, and lives well within his means. Currently, therefore, the most productive line of approach would seem to be intimidation; but we have an uncomfortable feeling that it could go badly wrong, and force him into a genuine alliance with his neighbour. What we need to find, therefore, is a crack in the armour. We're confident that there is one-there always is-and given time we know we can find it. Much depends, therefore, on how much time we have available. That's for you to tell us. What we're fairly certain we can't do is simply rely on his instinctive hatred for the Eremians. Common sense would seem to be the keynote of this man's character, and an ability to ignore or override emotional impulses that conflict with what his brain tells him is the sensible thing to do. He'll know straight away that if we come to him and propose an alliance against Eremia, the whole balance of power in the region will be irrevocably changed. Remember, his father started the peace process with Eremia and he saw it through; not through fear, or because he doesn't hold with war on principle, but because he realised that peace was the sensible thing, in the circumstances.'

  Psellus' attention started to wander; he wasn't really interested in the Vadani Duke. Instead, he opened his mind to a picture of a mountaintop (he'd never seen a mountain, except as a vague fringe at the edge of a landscape, hardly distinguishable from banks of cloud) with all those impossible defences-the walls, the narrow spaces, above all the desperate gradient. He knew that Civitas Eremia would fall, because the Republic had promised that it would, but as an engineer he could only see the problems, not the solution to them. He felt as if he'd heard the beginning of a story, and the end, but not the middle. Not by assault; not by siege; if they wanted to get inside the gates, they'd have to persuade someone in the city to open them for them.

  He allowed himself a little smile. Of course, how silly of him not to see it earlier. The old saying: no city, however massively fortified, is impregnable to a mule carrying chests of gold coins. Treachery, that old faithful, would see them through.

  Boioannes had stopped talking; people were standing up and chatting, so the meeting must be over. He wished he knew a bit more about Necessary Evil protocols; at the end of a meeting, were you supposed to hurry straight back to work, or did you linger, mix and network? He wished he was back somewhere where he knew the rules.

  'Good briefing, don't you think?' Staurachus had materialised next to him, like a genie in a fairy-tale popping up out of a bottle.

  He nodded. 'I've certainly learned quite a bit,' he said.

  Staurachus rubbed his eyes. Of course, he wasn't getting any younger, and all this extra work would be tiring to a man of his age. Somehow you don't expect frailty in your enemies, only your friends; you imagine that their malice makes them immune. 'So how do you think we should proceed?'

  'Get hold of someone inside the city and pay them a lot of money'

  Staurachus smiled. 'Very good,' he said. 'And who do you think would be a good prospect?'

  Psellus shrugged. 'I don't know a lot about them,' he said, 'but from what I've heard, I'd say the Merchant Adventurers. Mind you,' he added quickly, 'that's just off the top of my head. I'd need to know a bit more in the way of background. I mean, do the Eremians allow their women to go wandering about the place at night on their own?'

  'Who knows?' Staurachus raised his hands in a vague, all-purpose gesture of dismissal. 'We have people working on that side of things, cultural issues and what have you. It's standard operating procedure to compile a complete profile in these cases.'

  Reassuring, Psellus thought; we'll wipe them out, but the file will be preserved for ever somewhere in the archives. A kind of immortality for them, every aspect of their culture scientifically recorded in the specified manner. 'That's good,' he heard himself say. 'At any rate, we've got to try it before we risk an assault against those defences.'

  Staurachus shrugged. 'If it comes to that, I don't think it'll prov
e to be beyond our resources. We're blessed with advantages that few other nations have in war; we have the best engineers in the world, and our armies are made up of well-paid foreigners. Arguably, the harder the assault proves to be, the better the demonstration to the rest of the world.'

  'I suppose so,' Psellus said. 'But it'd probably be better to try treachery first. For one thing, we could forget all that business about having to get the Vadani on our side.'

  'Ah yes.' Staurachus smiled a little. 'You knew Boioannes at school, didn't you? Or was it later, in vocational training?'

  'Both.'

  'The diplomatic service see things from a slightly different angle,' Staurachus said tolerantly. 'They have their pride, same as the rest of us. They like to believe they're useful. We listen to what they can tell us, but we don't usually tend to follow their recommendations.'

  At the end of his first day in Necessary Evil, Psellus felt an overwhelming need for a bath. As a Guild officer of senior executive rank, he was entitled to use the private bath in the main cistern house, instead of having to pitch in at the public bathhouse on the other side of the square. It was a privilege he valued more than any other, since he'd always been diffident about taking his clothes off in front of other people (I have so much, he often told himself, to be diffident about: so much, and a little more each year); and besides, the water in the cistern house was always pleasantly warm, instead of ice-cold or scaldingly hot.

  His luck was in; nobody else was using it, and quite soon he was lying on his back lapped in soothing warmth, gazing up at the severely geometrical pattern of the ceiling tiles. As he relaxed, he mused on treachery. Staurachus had sounded as though he already had a plan for the betrayal of Civitas Eremiae; probably involving the Merchant Adventurers, either directly or indirectly. His question, therefore, had been by way of a test; fair enough, since Staurachus was his sponsor, and one likes to reassure oneself that one's protege is worth putting one's name to. But there'd been something about his old enemy's manner that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and it referred back, he was sure, to the big question: why had Staurachus chosen him, of all people?

  There was a saying-Cure Hardy, he rather thought-that when making a sacrifice to the gods, you should offer the best animal in the herd, preferably someone else's. He paused his train of thought, and tried to work out which herds he belonged to. Foundrymen's; Didactics; no enlightenment there. Compliance; yes, but he wasn't Compliance any more. What else? Who would his failure and disgrace reflect badly on? When he failed-

  But how could he possibly fail? He couldn't, because the Republic couldn't lose a war. It might just conceivably lose a battle. It might even, under circumstances too far-fetched to be readily imagined, lose an army. The war might drag on for a year, or twenty years. The Republic would, however, inevitably win. Furthermore, as Staurachus had said himself, a military disaster wasn't necessarily a failure. A nation that wins a great victory frightens its neighbours; a nation that suffers a devastating defeat and then goes on to win the war, hardly noticing its losses, terrifies them to the point where both aggression and resistance are unthinkable. It wouldn't matter to the Republic if it lost fifty thousand men in one engagement, since all its armies were made up of hired foreigners. Indeed, the simple fact that dead men don't need to be paid had helped the Republic on several occasions in the past to regard bloody defeats with a measure of equanimity. No, failure wasn't possible. No matter how hard one tried, it simply couldn't be done.

  After he'd finished his bath, Psellus went to his room. He slumped on the bed (his calves and knees ached pitifully, because of all the unaccustomed standing and walking) and put his hands behind his head. Normally he'd read a little before going to sleep; a few pages of early Mannerist poetry, perhaps, or Pogonas' On Details; something wholesome, orthodox, approved and gently soothing in its familiarity. Tonight, anything like that would be too bland to have any effect. He sat up again, scanned the titles on the shelf that stood against the wall and, on a whim, pulled down a very old, fat, squat book he hadn't looked at in years.

  He made up for that now with a brief inspection. The covers, bound in plain off-white vellum gradually losing its translucence with age, were about the size of his palm; width, the length of his thumb. On the spine a previous owner had written, in ink now brown and faded with light and age, Orphanotrophus, concerning the measurement of small things, between the first and second backstraps of the binding. It was, he reflected, an accurate but misleading description. He let the book sit in his palm. The binding, still tight after four hundred years, nevertheless allowed a slight gap between the pages about a third of the way in. He opened it at that point, and stared for a moment at the tiny, precise handwriting. He'd forgotten that the book was written in what he believed was called copy minuscule-perfect, but very, very small, so that although he could read it without difficulty it made him feel dizzy, as if gazing too long at something a very long way away. He read: In considering this same virtue which we call tolerance, namely the virtue that seeks ever to diminish and make small its own substance, we should most diligently consider wherein lies the true end of an endeavour: whether it be the perfection of the act of making, or of the thing made. For to value and cherish fine small work in the making of a worthless thing were folly, and but little to be regarded against the making of an useful thing, though basely and roughly done, save that in such act of making there is an effect of making fine worked upon the maker: so that each thing made small and fine by such making refines the hand that wrought it. Thus a man of great arts continually exercising his skill upon the perfection of fine things, though they be but idle and nothing worth, gains therefrom, besides material trash, a prize of great value, namely that same art of making small and fine, or rather the augmentation thereof by practice and perfection. Let a man therefore turn his hand to all manner of vain and foolish toys, so that thereby he shall make good his skill for when he shall require of it to serve a nobler purpose.

  Psellus lifted his head and rubbed his eyes. Thirty-five years ago, he remembered, he'd sat in a badly lit room the size of an apple-crate, staring dumbly at this very same page on the eve of his Theory of Doctrine exam. Addled with too much concentration and too little sleep, he'd read it over three or four times before he finally got a toehold in a crevice between its slabs of verbiage, and hauled himself painfully into understanding. Not long afterwards he'd dozed off, woken to see the sun in the sky, and run like a madman to the examination halls just in time to take his place… But the great force of providence that looks after idle students in the hour of their trial had been with him that day. Out of the whole of that fat, dense book, which he'd been meaning to get around to reading for two years and opened for the first time the previous evening, the learned examiners had seen fit to set for construction and comment the one and only paragraph he'd managed to look at before sleep ambushed him. Accordingly, he scored ninety marks out of a hundred, thereby earning his degree and with it the chance of a career in Guild politics.

  Maybe that was why the book had fallen open at that page. He frowned, as a tiny spark flared in his memory. Vaatzes the abominator had owned a copy of this book, and had, apparently, misunderstood it. In spite of everything, he leaned his head back and grinned like a dog. Let a man therefore turn his hand to all manner of vain and foolish toys, the book said, and the poor literal-minded fool, striving to improve his mind to the level of his betters by reading the classics, had gone away and done as he'd been told, and got caught at it into the bargain. As a result, he'd earn himself a footnote in history as the man who brought about the eradication of an entire tribe by his failure to construe an archaic usage in a set text. It'd make a good joke, if it wasn't for all the deaths it would cause.

  He put the book back in its place and took down Azotes' Flowers of Didacticism instead.

  The next morning there was another meeting in the cloister garden. It wasn't on the schedule, which was posted every week on the chapterhouse door; ha
lf a dozen pages had spent a nervous hour just after dawn scurrying through the Guildhall rounding up Necessary Evil and shepherding them here, puzzled and irritable and speculating about the nature of this urgent new development.

  When the stipulated quorum had gathered, Maris Boioannes of the diplomatic service asked leave to address the meeting. Before he started to speak, however, he picked a sack up off the ground, balanced it on the ledge of the rostrum while he opened it, and took out of it something the size and shape of a large melon, wrapped in dark brown sailcloth. It wasn't a melon.

  'This,' he said, letting the thing dangle from his hand by the hair, 'used to be Auzida Razo, our chief of section among the Merchant Adventurers in Eremia.' He paused. The thing was dripping on to the neat, short grass. 'I have reason to believe,' he went on, 'that the covert stage of this operation is over.'

  Chapter Eleven

  'Auzida Razo,' Orsea repeated. 'I know the name.'

  One of the drawbacks to sending your enemy a head by way of a gesture is that you're left with the rest of the body. Orsea had insisted on seeing it. Miel wasn't sure why; he believed it was because Orsea had always had a tendency to be squeamish. Since he'd ordered the wretched woman's execution, he felt he should punish himself by viewing her decapitated trunk. If that was the reason, it was confused, irrational, hard for anyone else to understand and quite in character.