Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Behind him, somebody shouted; then someone else shouted back, a dog yelped, high and frightened, other dogs joined in. Something was crashing through thick cover. Immediately, Jarnac snapped out of his self-indulgent sulk. Everything was going wrong at once. Somehow, against all the odds and all the rules, they'd found another boar-a big one, by the sound of it-right on top of the one he'd murdered. That was impossible, of course, because you didn't get two fully grown boars this close together, but apparently it had happened, and his line was all screwed up. Disaster; there were men and dogs in front of a bolted boar, right in the danger zone. It was the worst thing that could happen. Without stopping to think, he hurled himself at the source of the noise, tugging at his sword-hilt (but the stupid thing was binding in the scabbard and wouldn't come out). All he could see in his mind's eye was the boar coming up behind the men who'd strayed ahead. They wouldn't know what was happening, they wouldn't have time to turn round, let alone get out of the way. He couldn't think of anything to do, except get to the boar before it hurt anybody, and kill it.

  Pelhaz and Garsio were shouting, dead ahead; dogs were barking all round. He charged straight into trees, branches bashed him across the face, clubbed his shoulders. He couldn't see more than five yards in front, and he suspected he was losing his sense of direction (so easily done in thick cover, no matter how experienced you were). He tried to pull himself together, plot the boar's likely course from the sounds around him, but there didn't seem to be a pattern. One moment he was sure he could hear it crashing about on his left; then it was behind him, then over on the right. For one crazy, horrifying moment he wondered if there were half a dozen of them, not just one. And then he saw it.

  Not for long. A black shape slipped past him, glimped between the trunks of two skinny oaks. He saw enough to identify it: a six-year-old, but huge for its age, running flat out (that rather ludicrous straight-backed seesaw run, like a lame man sprinting). He hadn't seen the tusks, but he didn't care about stuff like that right now. Desperately he tried to reassemble the positions of men and dogs in his mind, and adjust for straying. If he was right and not just thinking wishfully, the boar was on a slanting course that led it away from the end of the line that had got ahead of itself; in which case, the men would be safe and probably the dogs too.

  It occurred to him to blow a dead stop, which was what he should have done as soon as the wretched animal broke cover. Better late than never; he sounded his horn, caught his breath, and tried to think.

  Horn-calls answered him, and at last he was able to plot the positions of his men. The Phocas were well behind (out of harm's way; good); his own men were in front, but over on the right, away from the boar. The dogs could be anywhere, thanks to the panic and the confusion, but he could hear the huntsmen calling them back. With any luck, none of them were so hot on the scent that they'd disobey the calls. Jarnac closed his eyes and thanked whoever was in charge of destiny that day. He didn't deserve it, but he seemed to have got away with it.

  More horn-calls, some shouting; the line was pulling itself together. Garsio was calling for him; he shouted back, to give his position. Another shout; he recognised the captain of the Phocas contingent. He made sure the line was re-formed and perfect before he called out instructions for Maritz and Pelhaz to pass on to the under-captains. By now, the boar could be well in front, but from what he'd seen of it he was pretty sure it wouldn't veer off the line it'd been on, not unless it found a new source of danger or an unpassable obstacle. Suddenly he laughed. Everything possible had gone wrong, he'd fucked it all up worse than he'd ever done in his entire life, and even so he'd found a cracking good pig for the Duke, and every prospect of presenting it, on time, exactly where it was supposed to be. It was enough to make you die of despair; if the universe could reward such gross incompetence with success, how could he ever trust it again?

  Ziani was feeling cold.

  He wouldn't have noticed the chill, or the clamminess of his wet clothes, if he hadn't been so bored; but he had nothing else to occupy his mind except his misfortunes, so inevitably he dwelt on them. This wasn't how he'd imagined it'd be.

  For the first few minutes he'd stood completely still in his assigned spot, poised like a fencer waiting for his enemy's initial strike. But those first few minutes had passed and large animals hadn't come streaming at him out of every bush. He'd familiarised himself with the terrain; then he'd looked up at the treetops, then down at the mush of rotting leaves under his feet; then he'd counted all the trees he could see. Nothing had happened. He was bored. If this was hunting, they could shove it.

  Mostly, he was unhappy because he was completely out of his depth (he stooped down, picked up a bit of twig, and started breaking it up into little bits). He didn't understand the rules or the procedures, he couldn't see the pattern, and he didn't like being outdoors. None of any of this, he realised, had anything to do with him. That was where he'd made his mistake; believing he could incorporate this mechanism into his own. But it wasn't compatible. It was all about something else (What? Getting food? Controlling dangerous pests? Having fun?) and he couldn't get a handle on it. He should be in the factory, making things.

  He took an arrow out of his home-made, sadly unorthodox quiver, and played with it for a while. It was a wretched artefact by any standards: thirty inches of unevenly planed cedarwood dowel, with a crudely forged and excessively heavy spike socketed on one end. He'd underestimated arrow-making; he'd assumed that if the Eremians could do it, it must be easy. Not so. The dowel was rubbish to start with, but his sad blob of iron made it worse. He fitted it to the bowstring anyway, for something to do.

  In his imagination, it had been quite different. He'd pictured all of them hurrying along together, shoulder to shoulder down a trail of smashed branches and scuffed earth, following the pig, That was how it was supposed to be in the books-except, he realised, there were two distinct methods of hunting, and he'd assumed they'd be doing parforce and instead they were doing the other one, bow-and-stable. His plan wouldn't work doing it this way. He was wasting his time.

  Nothing he could do about it now, though. He made a wish that there wouldn't be any pigs in the wood, and that they could all go home soon. From there, he set to worrying-what if he didn't hear them calling the whole thing off, or they forgot about him, left him standing in the middle of all these ridiculous trees, without the faintest idea where he was? Easily done, he would imagine; he was a stranger, a foreigner, a gatecrasher who'd invited himself along. Why should they remember him, or bother to let him know it was time to move on?

  Noise, somewhere sort of close. He'd learned that noises in a forest are deceptive, and you can't accurately judge distance or direction by them. The forest was full of noisy things. Apart from the humans and their horrible savage dogs, there were animals-deer, badgers, God knows what else-and birds, not to mention creaking and groaning trees. He'd heard stories, back home, about the dangers of forests; how the tops of tall, thin trees can snap off in the wind and get laid up in the branches of their neighbours thirty feet or so up in the air, held only by tangles of twig and creeper, so that any damn thing (a breeze, a careless movement, a shout, even) might be enough to dislodge them and bring them crashing down, entirely without warning. Foresters called them widow-makers, he remembered, and sometimes they were so deceptively hidden that even the canniest and most wary lumberjack was caught out and flattened. He peered upward again, just in case. All he could see was branches and an untidy mess of foliage. There could be wagons, ships, even houses up there, masked by the leafy swathes, and he'd never see them till it was too late.

  He was concentrating so hard on scanning the treetops for hidden terrors that he nearly missed it all.

  First, the noise. It sounded comical, high-pitched, a furious squealing, mingled with the desperate yapping of dogs, and it seemed to be coming from all around him. He'd heard pigs before: pigs in sties in alleys and entries and snickets (pig-rearing in the City fell in that uncomfortable deb
atable zone between forbidden and disapproved of); pigs snuffling, grunting, complaining and being killed. This noise was similar but somehow wrong-because it was out of place, he realised; pigs lived in cities, not out in the wilderness, among the stupid trees-and the dog noises confused the issue hopelessly. His best guess, however, was that the pig was about seventy yards distant and heading away from him at speed.

  The boar burst out at him through the twisted branches of a blown-sideways mountain ash; an enormous blurred monstrosity, a cruel parody of the useful, harmless Mezentine pig. Its way of running was hopelessly inefficient, a seesaw motion (it didn't seem able to bend its back, so it didn't so much run as bounce), but horribly quick. It had the flat, wet, soppy nose of a proper pig, but there was coarse black hair all over its face, and four huge yellow teeth.

  It's going to kill me, Ziani told himself-it wasn't an upsetting thought, somehow-but instead the boar jack-knifed past him (bounce-bounce, like a leather ball), crushing bushes and briars as it went by like a ship ploughing through a heavy sea. It passed him no further than six feet away; as it departed, Ziani could see its jaws chomping up and down, the absurdly oversize teeth rubbing furiously together like someone trying to start a fire with dry sticks. It looked lethal and ridiculous, and it sounded like an outraged customer demanding to see the manager.

  It was almost out of Ziani's little patch of clearing when the dogs showed up. They were running so fast he could barely make out their shapes, beyond an impression of long, flexible bodies contorted by extraordinary effort; and when they jumped at the boar they seemed to flow, like water poured at a height. His eye and brain weren't sharp enough to register how many of them there were; they were too quick for that. But one of them had sprung on to the boar's table-wide back; another was being dragged along underneath it by its teeth clamped in its venerable dewlap; another was curled round the boar's front legs like ivy, skittering frantically backwards as it tried to bite into a ham much wider than the full gape of its long, pointed jaws. Ziani had seen hate occasionally, and if anyone had asked him, he'd have stated confidently that it was a uniquely human emotion; but he'd never seen anything like the way the dogs hated the boar. There was a diabolical agility to it that almost amounted to grace, but the absolute commitment of their fury was terrifying.

  Compared to the dogs, the boar was slow, rigid and oafish; but it was strong. With a short, apparently slight movement of its neck and shoulders, it lifted up one of the dogs and threw it straight up in the air, like a man spinning himself a catch with an apple. The dog's back arched, all four legs scrambled at empty air; it came down in a tangle of holly laced with briars and ground elder, sprang up again and shot itself like an arrow or a scorpion bolt at the boar's head. Another dog was tearing at the boar's ear, and yet another was trying to bite its nose. The boar made another of those short movements, and one of the dogs yelped-it was shriller than any human scream-and fell sprawling on its back, its belly ripped open like a burst seam.

  The dogs were losing, but they didn't seem to care. They were too light to slow the boar's momentum, and their weapons were too slight to penetrate its armour. The boar dragged them, four of them with their jaws locked in it, through the middle of a holly-clump, like someone wiping mud off his shoes in long grass. One of them was pulled off, but rolled over, jumped, vaulted over the boar's back and disappeared underneath it again, all in one movement. Such a degree of recklessness was almost beyond Ziani's capacity to believe; until that moment, he'd have said he was the only living thing in the world capable of it.

  Which reminded him. It wasn't perfect, but it might do. He only had this moment, which wouldn't come again. He bent the bow, pushing with his left arm and pulling with his right, and stared down the arrow.

  Miel Ducas had run into a tree. It was an unspeakably stupid thing to do and until a moment ago he'd have sworn it wasn't physically possible for a grown man with adequate eyesight not to notice a big, broad sweet chestnut dead ahead of him on a reasonably clear path. But he'd managed it, somehow.

  After a dazed moment when he couldn't remember anything, he picked himself up off the ground, yelled angrily at the pain in his shins and jaw, and tried to sell himself on the idea that it hadn't happened. At least nobody had seen him.

  One consequence of his deplorable lapse was that he'd lost the bloody boar. It had been there right in front of him, a black hairy bum heaving obscenely up and down on the edge of his vision, just slow enough that he could keep pace with it if he ran like a lunatic. Wasted effort that had turned out to be. He leaned against his enemy the tree and listened.

  Not too far away, he could hear squealing, and the furious yelping of dogs. If he ran fast, he could probably catch up (except that he couldn't run fast, because his leg hurt); or he could walk, or hobble, following the trail, and hear about the outcome from somebody else.

  He decided his leg didn't hurt so much after all, and started to run.

  The pitch and intensity of the yelping had changed. Jarnac could've interpreted it without thinking; Miel wasn't nearly as good, but he reckoned the dogs had caught up to the boar, but the boar hadn't yet turned at bay. That was bad. A boar in that mood could easily gut or trample a dog, and God help any human who got in its way. What should've happened, if King Fashion had been running the show, was that the dogs should've chased the boar without catching up with it, until they were outside the forest and in the open. From the edge of the wood the ground fell away in a long, gentle slope all the way to the river. The boar would head for the river-bed, wade deep into the water and there turn at bay-a stupid thing to do, since it could be quickly and safely dispatched, but they all did it, bless them. That was how Jarnac had planned it, no question, but something must've gone wrong.

  A very unpleasant picture formed in his mind: Orsea, with sword drawn, diving into the melee to rescue the dogs. It was one of the classic heroic deeds in boar-hunting. Jarnac had done it loads of times (but Jarnac knew what he was doing). If the opportunity presented itself, Orsea wouldn't hesitate for an instant.

  (Years ago, when he was a boy nagging to be allowed to go on his first hunt, Miel had been taken to see an old man who worked in the stables. The old man had opened his shirt and showed off a long pink scar that ran from his neck to his navel; to this day, they'd told him afterwards, nobody could explain how the man had survived. He'd been the lucky one, that day.)

  Perhaps, Miel told himself as he ran, perhaps someone with a cool head, common sense and a good eye will put an arrow in the stupid pig before Orsea gets there. Disappointing for poor Orsea, but at least he'll still be alive this evening, and I won't have to tell Veatriz.

  Another sound: a man's voice, high and very scared, yelling for help. Miel swore and tried to run faster, but this would be a very bad time to collide with another tree. He made himself slow down, just as his spear caught in a low branch and was ripped out of his hand.

  Very bad, because he couldn't stop and go back for it. He had his falchion, of course. He'd never killed a boar with a close sword, though he'd seen it done twice. Mostly when he went hunting, they didn't find anything. Hell of a time for his luck to change.

  He saw the dog first. It was almost but not quite dead, shivering. He managed to jump over it without slowing down, and that was when he saw the boar.

  Now it had turned at bay, and he could see why. Some fool, some criminal incompetent, had contrived to stick an arrow in its hind leg. Worst possible thing you could do. The front leg, fine; a boar goes down like a sack of turnips if you nail its front leg, you can stroll up to it and kill it at your ease. An arrow in the back leg stops it running, so it has to turn at bay, but the motive force for its attack is the forequarters and chest. Whoever had shot that arrow had made the boar as dangerous as it could possibly get.

  He might have known. Lying on his side, with nothing between him and the boar but a screen of twisting, snapping dogs, was the stupid bastard foreigner. He didn't seem to be hurt, no blood; Miel had seen total b
lind panic often enough in circumstances like these to know he'd simply frozen. He'd done it himself, once. A bow, lying just out of arm's reach, completed the evidence for the prosecution.

  Just as well I'm here, Miel thought sadly.

  'It was extraordinary,' Jarnac was saying. 'Never seen anything like it in my life.'

  Miel scowled at him. 'It was bloody stupid,' he said, 'that's all. Half an inch out and you'd have brought me home hanging off a long stick, along with the boar.'

  Jarnac shook his head. 'Ignore him,' he said, 'he's being modest. When I say it was the neatest bit of work I've seen in the hunting field for ten years, you know I'm not exaggerating. It was bloody stupid as well, of course, but that's Miel for you. Never could resist showing off.'

  Miel tried to shift, but a sharp spike of pain stopped him. 'How could I have been showing off?' he said. 'I didn't know you two were there watching. I thought it was just me and him, or else I'd have left it to you to deal with the stupid animal.'

  'Where is he?' Veatriz interrupted. 'The foreigner, I mean.'

  Miel sighed. 'Upstairs,' he said, 'in the Oak Room. Well,' he went on unhappily, 'I couldn't very well leave him to fend for himself, when he'd just come that close to being ripped up. From what I gather, he lives on his own in that factory place of his, and he's in no fit state to look after himself.'

  'It was his own stupid fault,' Orsea put in, helping himself to another drink. 'Would've served him right, at that. Jarnac, whatever possessed you to invite him in the first place?'

  Jarnac shrugged. 'He seemed to want to come,' he replied. 'I mean, he spun this yarn about how he needed to see what hunting's actually like if he was going to be making hunting armour; which is drivel, of course; Cantacusene and his father and his father before him have been fitting our family out every year for a century, and none of them ever came within a mile of a boar or a buck unless it was sausages. But he really did seem fearfully keen, and I couldn't see any harm in it…'