Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  For a target he had a sack, lying on its side, stuffed with rags, straw and general rubbish. He'd painted a circle on it with whitewash, and at fifteen yards (which was as far back as you could go in the cellar before you bumped up against a wall) he could hit the circle four times out of six, thanks to the Mirror, a picture he'd seen in a book many years ago, dogged perseverance and a certain degree of common sense. One time in five that he loosed the arrow, the string would come back and lash the inside of his left forearm. He had a huge purple bruise there, which meant he had to keep his sleeve buttoned all day in case one of the men noticed. He'd made up a guard for it out of offcuts of leather, but it still hurt. Meanwhile, the inside of his right forefinger tip was red and raw, and there wasn't much he could do about that.

  But nevertheless; progress was being made, and if he could get to the stage where he hit the whitewash circle six times out of six, that'd be good enough (that word again) for his purposes. Whether or not the opportunity would present itself when the time came was, of course, entirely outside his control. It depended on the whim of a hunted animal and the choices and decisions of an unascertained number of hunters, beaters and other unknowns, following rules he was struggling to learn out of a book and didn't really understand. It'd be sheer luck; he hated that. But if he got the chance, at least he'd be prepared to make the most of it. Hence King Fashion, the Mirror, the steel bow and archery practice.

  Yesterday he'd forgotten to eat anything. Stupid; there was plenty of food, a woman brought it in a basket every morning and left it in the lodge. Calaphates had seen to that-a curious thing to do, almost as if he was concerned about Ziani's well-being. And he'd asked about it, the last two times he'd visited: are you sure you're eating properly, as though he was Ziani's mother.

  Just looking after his investment, Ziani told himself as he lined up the leather in the shear. All these people care about is how much money I can make for them. If I don't eat and I get sick, I can't work. That explains it all.

  He fed the edge of the hide in under the top blade of the shear, making sure it was in line. He'd drawn the shape on to the leather with a stick of charcoal because that was all he had to mark up with. Because of that, the lines were far too thick, allowing too great a margin of error, so he had to concentrate hard to see the true line he needed to follow. There was far too much play in the shear for his liking (he'd had to buy a shear, because there hadn't been time to make one; it was Mezentine-made, but very old and bent by years of brutal mishandling). He hated every part of this sloppy, inaccurate work, but it had to be done, just in case the opportunity arose.

  'You there?'

  Cantacusene. He glanced up at the high, narrow window, but he was kidding himself. Back home, there were clocks to tell the time by. Here, they seemed to be able to manage it by looking at the sun; but the slim section of grey and blue framed by the window had no sun in it. He had an idea that Cantacusene was early this morning, but he couldn't verify it. God, what a country.

  'Yes, come through.' He smiled. By unspoken agreement, they didn't use each other's names. Cantacusene couldn't very well call him Ziani, and Master Vaatzes would've been ridiculous coming from a man who'd been peening rivets and curling lames for the nobility when Ziani was still learning to walk; for his part, he didn't understand Eremian industrial etiquette and couldn't be bothered to learn. With goodwill and understanding on both sides and a certain degree of imagination, they'd so far managed to bypass the issue completely.

  'Are you early?' he.asked, as Cantacusene shuffled in.

  'A bit. We need to get a move on. We've still got half the greaves and cuisses and all the gorgets to do.'

  Ziani shrugged. 'I've cut out the gorget lames, they're ready for you. I'll have the greaves and the cuisses by dinnertime.'

  Cantacusene looked at him; a curious blend of admiration, devotion and hatred. He could more or less understand it. A few days ago, Ziani had known nothing about the subtle art of making boiled leather armour, and Cantacusene had been back on his familiar ground, where he knew the rules. He hadn't presumed on that superiority, but it was pretty clear he'd relished it while it lasted. Now, here was Ziani cutting out a thick stack of lames before breakfast, as well or better than Cantacusene could have done it. A god would feel unsettled, Ziani thought, if a mortal learned in a week how to make rain and raise the dead.

  'That's all right, then,' Cantacusene said. 'I'll get a fire laid in.'

  'Already done,' Ziani said. 'You can get on with nailing up while the water boils.'

  The shear was even more sluggish today than usual. It munched the leather rather than slicing it, chewing ragged, hairy edges instead of crisp, square-sided cuts. Ziani quickly diagnosed the problem as drift and slippage in the jaw alignment. He could fix it, but he'd have to take the shear apart, heat the frame and bend it a little. A sloppy cut, on the other hand, was no big deal in this line of work, since the shrinkage turned even a perfectly square-shorn edge into a rounded burr in need of facing off with a rasp. There was something infuriating about seeing poor work come out indistinguishable from good work. Tolerating it was practically collaborating with evil.

  The greaves were one big piece rather than lots of small lames put together, but their profile was all curves; a misery to cut, even when the shear had still been working properly. He knew how to design and build a throatless rotary shear, Mezentine pattern, that would handle the curved profiles effortlessly, but there wasn't time. It was horribly frustrating, and he felt ashamed of himself. But it was better work than the Duchy's foremost armourer could've done. That was no consolation whatsoever.

  The men were turning up for the start of their day. They would be cutting and joining wood to make scorpion frames, forging the joining bands, filing and shaping the lockwork. Other hands than mine, he thought, and he wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not. They would be doing his work, while he was wasting his time cutting and riveting leather to protect an aristocrat and his hangers-on from pigs with big teeth. It was hard to relate that to the invisible machine. Faith was needed, and he'd never really believed in anything much, apart from the two things he'd lost, and which were all that mattered.

  Cantacusene was whistling. He did it very badly; so badly, in fact, that Ziani stopped work to listen. If there was a tune involved, he couldn't detect it. He found he was grinning. Cantacusene and music, even horribly mutilated music, didn't seem to go together.

  'You're in a good mood,' he said, when Cantacusene came in to collect the next batch of cut-out pieces.

  'What makes you say that?'

  Ziani shrugged. 'I don't know,' he said.

  Cantacusene hesitated; apparently he had something on his mind, but was uncertain as to whether he could or should talk about it. Ziani turned back to the shear. It would have been quicker to take it to bits and straighten it after all. He hated the shear, and everything it stood for; at that moment, all the evil in the world resided in its bent and misused frame. There's a certain comfort in knowing who your enemies are.

  'If you must know,' Cantacusene said, 'my wife's coming home today'

  'Is that right?' Ziani said to the shear. 'She's been away, then?'

  'Yes.' He couldn't see Cantacusene's face, and the word was just a word. 'She's in service, see. Ladies' maid. The family's been away out east for three months.'

  'Ah,' Ziani said. 'So that's why you're in a good mood.'

  'Well, yes.' There was obviously something in his manner that was annoying Cantacusene, keeping him there talking when he should be next door, nailing bits of leather to bits of wood. 'I missed her, see. I don't like it when she's got to go away. But she doesn't want to leave the family. Been with them fifteen years.'

  'Well,' Ziani said, 'if you don't like her going away, you should tell her to pack it in. I should think you could do without her wages, now you're working here.'

  'Like I said, she wouldn't want to let the family down.'

  Ziani didn't answer, and he hunched his
shoulders a little to show that it was none of his business. But Cantacusene didn't seem to be able to read body language. 'You married?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  'Kids?'

  'A daughter,' Ziani replied.

  Silence; then Cantacusene said: 'Must be hard on you, then.'

  'Yes,' Ziani said. 'And I don't suppose I'll ever see them again.'

  'I couldn't handle that,' Cantacusene said.

  'No.' Ziani let go of the shear handle. It was important that the line be cut straight, since the lame had to sit true. 'Nor me.' He turned round slowly. 'It's difficult,' he said. 'It's fortunate I'm an engineer, really. Otherwise…' He shrugged. 'What time's she due back?'

  'Not till this evening,' Cantacusene said. 'Look, I'm sorry. Didn't mean to upset you or anything.'

  'No, of course.' Ziani smiled, though his face felt numb. 'If you want to knock off early, you go ahead.'

  'That's all right. Like I said, she's not back till late.'

  'Suit yourself.' It felt like all the poison in his blood was sinking into his toes and fingers. 'If you change your mind, go on anyway.'

  'Thanks.' Cantacusene frowned, as if considering a puzzle. 'I'd better be getting on,' he continued. 'If we lay into it, we can have the greaves finished today'

  'Fine.' Ziani turned his back on him, laid his hand on the shear handle. He heard footsteps, and then the whistling, far away and still terrible. He drew the handle toward him, feeling the slight spring in the leather as the blade cut it.

  It was like an abcess: full of poison, under the skin, swelling, ready to burst. It was a disease lying latent in his blood, breeding and eating him. It was the worst thing in the world. It was love, and that idiot Cantacusene had reminded him of it, after he'd done so well to put it away where he couldn't see it.

  Almost certainly, he knew, Cantacusene would die because of him; and his wife, the ladies' maid who spent so much precious time away, not knowing how little there was of it left. Each nail the poor fool drove through the leather into the wood brought his own death a little nearer. That wasn't so bad, Ziani reflected. Only a coward is afraid of dying for himself; the true terror in death, the fear that crawls into the mind and stays there for ever, comes from the lethal mixture of death and love, the knowledge that dying will bring unbearable pain to those we love, those who love us. Death is to be feared because of the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason.

  Not the shear, after all. Reaching down to turn the half-cut lame, Ziani admitted to himself the pre-eminently obvious fact that he'd been denying ever since Compliance came for him in the early hours of the morning when everything went wrong. All the evil in the world, all the harm and suffering it's possible to come to, are concentrated in one place; in love. If there was no love, there'd be no fear in death, no pain in loss, no suffering anywhere. If he could string his steel bow and nock an arrow and kill love with a single shot to the head, it'd go down in history as the day mankind was rescued from all its torments and miseries; if he could meet love face to face down the narrow shaft of a spear, like a hunter standing up to the charging boar, wolf or bear, if he could kill the monster and set the people free from all evil, then the Eremians wouldn't have to die, or the Mezentines, or the Vadani or the Cure Hardy or the Cure Doce or all the other nations of victims whose names he didn't even know yet. In old stories there are dragons who burn cities, gigantic bulls from the sea and boars with steel tusks, terrible birds with the heads of women and the bodies of lions, and a hero kills them; it's so simple in stories, because once the monster is dead the pain is over and done with. The monster has a heart or a brain or lungs that can be pierced, it's a simple mechanical problem of how to get a length of sharp steel through the hide and the scales and the armour. But love hovers over the dying, it lies coiled waiting to strike at the exile, the lover betrayed or unrequited, it chains men to the places where they can't bear to be, forces them to endure all tyrannies, injustices and humiliations rather than run away and leave the ones they love, the ones who love them; it baits its trap with everything good in the world and arms it with everything bad; and it survives, thriving on its own poisons, growing where nothing else can live; an infestation, a parasite, a disease.

  Cantacusene misses his wife, he thought; me too. And it's likely I'll never see her again, but because of love I'm building a machine that'll smash cities and slaughter nations and bring to an end the magnificent, glorious, holy Perpetual Republic of Mezentia; all simply so that one day I might be able to go home and see her again, see them both, my wife and my daughter. Such a little thing to ask, such a simple operation for a machine to perform. Every day in cities, towns, villages all over the world, men come home to their wives and children. A simple thing, it's nothing at all, for everybody else but not for me. I've got to breach the city wall, bash through the gates, pick my way over the dead bodies of millions, just to reach my own front door and get home. So much easier and more sensible to give up, start again, stay here in Civitas Eremiae and get a job; but I don't have that choice, because of love. Instead, I have the machine, and faith that love will prevail, because love conquers all.

  Someone came in and asked him to go and look at the scorpion frames. Ziani followed him, not really aware of who he was or what he wanted. He saw them, squat and ugly and botched, inherently flawed, abominations in every sense of the word. He measured a few of them at random with the yard and the inside callipers and the dogleg callipers. They were sloppy and only fitted where they touched, but they were within tolerance (because he was working on a completely different set of tolerances now). He looked at them, drawn up like a squad of newly levied troops, awkward, horrible. In his mind's eye he gave them locks, springs, sliders, winches, and saw that they were abominations, but they would do what had to be done. He loved them, because they would slaughter the hireling Mezentine army by the tens of thousands, they would defend the citadel of Eremia for a time, and then they would fail.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They were saying in chapter that the war had gone to sleep. They were saying that paying, feeding and sheltering forty thousand men, keeping them away from the shops and the women, was a horrendous waste of effort, energy and money if they weren't going to be set loose against anybody any time soon. They were saying that Necessary Evil had lost its nerve, and its grip.

  Psellus still hadn't found out why everything had suddenly ground to a halt. The soldiers had arrived, Vaatzes was in Eremia (up to no good there, by all accounts), and there was no earthly reason he could see why the war shouldn't be over and done with inside a month, if only they'd get it started. Some of the voices around the Guildhall were saying it was because there were another forty thousand on the way (Psellus happened to know this was true); others that the enemy capital was impregnable; that Eremia had signed a secret treaty with the Vadani, the Cure Doce, the Cure Hardy, all three simultaneously; that someone in Ways and Means had made a mistake and there was only just enough food left in the country to feed the soldiers for a week; that the real object of the war wasn't Eremia after all; that the Carpenters and Joiners were planning a military coup, and that's what the army was really for; that the soldiers had found out about the defences of Civitas Eremiae and were striking for double pay and death benefit. Necessary Evil's response was to look smug and stay quiet. As one of its members, trying to guess which of the rumours was true, Psellus found this attitude extremely annoying.

  Mostly, though, he was bored. He had nothing to do. Even the memos had stopped coming. There were no meetings. For a while he'd sat in his office, afraid to leave it in case he missed a message ordering him to a briefing where everything would be explained. Then he'd tried writing to his colleagues and superiors, asking what was going on, but they never answered him. He tried a series of surprise visits to their offices, but they were never there. Finally he'd taken to wandering about the Guildhall on the off chance of running into one of them. That was a waste of time, too. Nobody had seen them re
cently, or knew anything about what they were up to. When he went out to the camp where the soldiers were billeted, he was turned away at the gate by the sentries. Over their shoulders he could see the peaks of thousands of tents, thin wisps of smoke rising straight up into the windless sky. He could smell the soldiers from two hundred yards away, but he couldn't see them. It was like a party to which all the other children in his class had been invited.

  It wouldn't have been so bad if the war wasn't his fault.

  After a while (he'd lost track of time rather) he decided to alter his perspective. He resolved to look at it all from a different angle. After years of stress and overwork, he told himself, he was having a holiday. He still had his office, his rank, all the things he'd fought for over the years-better still, he'd been promoted, from Compliance to Necessary Evil. If they needed him, they'd find him. Meanwhile, until the call came, he was at liberty to indulge himself.

  With what, though? He hadn't had more than an hour's continuous free time since he was twenty-one, and pleasure is something you can easily lose the knack of, if you allow yourself to get out of practice. Not that he'd exactly been a libertine in his remote youth; you didn't get to be a Guild official by drinking and chasing girls, so he hadn't ever done any of that; and it was simple realism to admit that it was probably too late to start now. He applied his mind, sitting in his office one cold grey morning. What did people do for pleasure, apart from drinking and being obnoxious to women?

  What indeed. In Mezentia, not much that he could think of. Abroad, in less favoured countries, they rode to hounds, flew falcons, jousted, fenced; but the Perpetual Republic had outgrown that sort of thing. What else? They read books, looked at works of art, listened to music. That sounded somewhat more promising. There were works of art, he was pretty sure; the Sculptors and Painters produced them, and (a quick glance at the relevant memo) their productivity had risen last year by an admirable six-point-three per cent. But (he remembered) four fifths of their output went for export, mostly to the Vadani and the Cure Doce, and wherever the remaining one fifth ended up, it wasn't anywhere he was allowed to go. Music: the Musicians amalgamated with the Ancillary Allied Trades a century ago. Their harp was still just about visible among the quarterings on the Guild's coat of arms, but he couldn't remember ever having met a Guild musician. There were people who played pipes and fiddles and little drums at private functions, but they were strictly amateurs, and the practice was officially frowned upon. That left literature, by default. For literature, you had to apply to the Stationers and Copyists. Like the Sculptors, they catered mostly for the export market, but the Guild had a retail outlet in a small alley off Progress Square. It was where you went to buy copies of Guild decrees and regulations, set books for the further examinations, commentaries and cribs to the more complex specifications; and, occasionally (usually as the result of a cancelled export order), literature. He'd been there himself half a dozen times over the years, most recently to look for a wedding present for a mildly eccentric cousin who liked poetry-it was very much the sort of place where you went to buy things for other people, not for yourself.