Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Motion carried; orders issued to the commander in chief, requisitions to the Treasurer's office and other parties concerned; vote of thanks to Commissioner Psellus, as minuted.

  What was I doing, Psellus asked himself, as he climbed the stairs back to his office; was I trying to stop the war? Somebody thought so, and now we've got a firm date. I didn't think that was what I was trying to do. I don't know any more. It's as though this war's alive now. It's crawled in from wherever wars come from, like bees getting in through a thin place in the thatch, and already it's too big and too clever to be stopped.

  The sooner it starts, the sooner it'll be over and I won't have to think about it any more.

  'Where the hell have you been?' Cantacusene said, as Ziani limped through the factory gate. He'd been measuring out timber for the scorpion frames; a boxwood rule in one hand, a nail in the other. 'They've been saying you're dead.'

  'Don't you believe it,' Ziani replied, and Cantacusene wondered what'd made him so cheerful. 'If you think a wild pig could succeed where the Guild tribunal and the compliance directorate failed, you're a bigger fool than I took you for. How's it going? Did they get that problem with the sear-plate bolts sorted out?'

  Cantacusene nodded. 'We're ahead of the book,' he said, with more than a hint of pride. 'You said run four shifts, so I've been keeping them going flat out. Haven't been home since you've been away.'

  'Fine. Good.' Ziani wished he'd put a bit more sincerity into that, but too late now. 'The good news is, the Duke has just doubled the order. He wants a hundred.'

  'That's all right,' Cantacusene said. 'At this rate, he can have them in a week.'

  'At this rate maybe,' Ziani said, and he set off for the long gallery. Cantacusene dropped the rule and dashed after him. 'But this rate's too bloody slow. Day after tomorrow at the very latest, he'll be back asking for two hundred in a fortnight. I'm planning for two hundred and fifty in ten days.'

  Cantacusene stopped. He had a stitch and he was out of breath. 'Impossible.'

  'No.' Ziani hadn't stopped. Cantacusene set off again. 'Perfectly possible. We just need more men. I stopped off at Calaphates' place and told him to get his men out recruiting. Also, he's seeing to materials; we're all right for timber, but we'll need more quarter-inch iron plate. It can be done, you'll see.'

  'Why two hundred and fifty?'

  'Because that's what it'll take to defend this city,' Ziani replied, as though it was perfectly obvious. 'Two hunded and fifty is the minimum number, we should have seventy-five more but I've got an idea about that. If only we'd had time to build a rolling mill, I wouldn't be relying on bloody merchants for my quarter plate.' He shook his head. 'Everything's going quite well,' he said. 'You never know, we might just get there.'

  He left Cantacusene at the gallery door, and headed straight for the forge, where the springs were being tempered. It was the stage in the process where things were most likely to go wrong, he knew perfectly well; ideally, that was where he needed to be for the next week or so, judging each spring by eye as it lifted orange off the fire. The lead-baths took all the skill out of drawing the temper, but he was still obliged to trust Eremians for the hardening pass. The thought of that worried and annoyed him, but he had no choice.

  The heat in the forge was overwhelming. As instructed, they'd laid in an extra half-dozen double-action bellows, which meant ten fires were running on a hearth designed for five. There was water all over the floor, and a pall of black smoke from the tempering oil wreathed the roof-beams like summer morning mist in a forest. He watched them for quarter of an hour; one man on each fire worked the bellows, another splashed water from a ladle around the hearth-bed and tue-iron to keep them from overheating, while the third used tongs to draw the spring slowly backwards and forwards through the tunnel of ash and clinker that covered the roaring red heart of the fire. When the orange heat had soaked all the way through the whole spring, so that it seemed to glow from the inside, the tong-worker fished it out like an angler landing a fish and dipped it full-length in the upright oil-filled pipe. The oil lit, raising a sheet of flame as long as a man's arm, and almost immediately put itself out; as soon as the oil had stopped bubbling, out it came; a rod up through the middle of the coil to carry it by, and across the room it went to the great iron trough full of molten lead, where another man picked it.off the rod with tongs and dunked it under the scum of the lead-bath to temper.

  Not bad, Ziani thought, though he was a little concerned that the oil in the quenching tubes was running a bit too hot. He watched a man pause to wipe his face on his sleeve, dragging a white furrow through the smear of wet soot. Sweating near the lead-bath was asking for trouble; a spot of water on the molten lead would make it spit, enough to blind you if your luck was out. They were learning quickly, which was what he needed. Another man was coughing through the quench-smoke. One of the bellows had a slight leak, and whistled as it drew. It wasn't the ordnance factory, of course; it resembled the real thing like a child's drawing. But all he needed was two hundred and fifty scorpions by the time the Mezentines arrived. That was all. Anything else would be mere finish and ornament. They were going to make it; which meant that the design had moved on from here, and now everything depended on his colleague and dear friend Falier back in Mezentia; so far away, so hard to control at such distance, so fragile and governed by so tenuous a connection. But he knew Falier, in ways he could never know the Eremians; he trusted him to do the job he'd given him. After that, the weight of the design would pull everything into shape, just as it is its own weight that brings down a felled tree, and all the woodsmen do with their ropes and wedges is guide the lie.

  He left the forge and headed for the fitting room, to see the fitting of the lockplates into the frames. So he was dead, was he? If only. He thought of the boar, dragging the dogs along with it. He remembered Miel Ducas stooping in mid-leap to slash a hinge in its spine with his falchion. It had been, he recognised, a moment of glorious, extraordinary grace, forced on an unwilling and unlikely man by honour, fear, courage and duty. That was Ducas' problem: his life was too complicated, and all his actions were stained with a contradictory mixture of motives. If only he'd had a simple job to do, he could've been a productive and efficient man, for an Eremian. As it was, he'd be useful, and that was all that mattered. Ziani considered for a moment the slender connecting rod that joined the Ducas and Falier and Duke Orsea and his Duchess and all the other little parts of the mechanism, and smiled to think that so many disparate people had something so vital in common. Almost he wished he could tell them; but that, of course…

  When he had time, after he'd done his rounds and made sure everything was running smoothly, he took a quarter of an hour to do a few calculations, see how close his estimate would be. The variables were, of course, only rough reckonings, in some cases little more than guesses; nevertheless, he felt reasonably sure that by the time the Mezentines arrived to assault the city, he should have enough scorpions available to allow them to be placed at sixteen-yard intervals right along the city wall; that meant he could put just under twenty thousand bolts in the air every hour (ordinary fence-palings and vine-props with a folded sheet-iron tip; all in hand). Only a third of what the Eremians had faced in the battle, but precisely the right number for his purposes.

  He smiled to himself, and thought of Falier.

  He'd had to buy two tablecloths, two sets of matching napkins, two dozen pillowcases embroidered with songbirds, a dozen tapestry cushions and a rug. He hated them all at first sight, and as soon as she'd gone, he sent for his chamberlain and ordered him to take them away.

  'Give them to somebody,' he said.

  'Very good,' the chamberlain replied. 'Who?'

  Valens considered. 'Who don't you like?'.

  'Sir?'

  'Think of somebody you hate very much.'

  The chamberlain's turn to consider. 'My wife's mother's sister,' he said. 'She's got a small white dog she's trained to walk on its hind legs. It's got its
own little silver drinking bowl and everything.'

  'Perfect,' Valens said, with grim satisfaction. 'Tell her they're from me, and hint I may be coming to dinner.'

  He'd never seen his chamberlain grin before. Well, it was good to make somebody happy.

  It was nearly mid-morning. The sun had burnt the last of the dew off the grass, but the wind was rising. It would've been a good day to fly the goshawks, or try for duck on the long lake. He had something else to do, however, and he wanted to make the most of it.

  Each time he opened a letter from her, he was afraid, in case it was the last. I can't write to you any more-he'd seen those words in his mind's eye a thousand times, he knew the shape of the letters by heart. When the day came and he saw them traced for real on parchment, it'd be like coming back to a familiar place; a runaway slave recaptured and dragged home, a criminal brought to the town gallows. This time he was stiff with fear, because it'd been so long since she'd written, because she'd missed a letter. Staring at the small, squat packet in the exact centre of his reading table, he felt like he was walking up a wounded boar in dense briars, waiting for it to charge. He thought of all the risks he chose to take, in the hunt, in war, knowing that the worst that could happen was that he'd be killed. There are circumstances where staying alive could be worse than that.

  With the tips of his forefingers, he prised apart the fold until the seal split neatly down the middle. A few crumbs of broken wax fell away as he bent the stiff parchment back on itself (like the unmaking of the quarry, he thought). Her handwriting was even smaller than usual, and for a moment he wasn't sure he'd be able to read it-now that would be a devilish refinement of torture, worthy of the stories of the punishments reserved for damned souls in hell, to have a letter from her and not to be able to make out what it said. Veatriz Sirupati to Valens Valentinianus, greetings.

  Well, he'd found; the wolf, the bear, the boar were here, ready for him. It'd be churlish to keep them waiting. You never replied to my last letter.

  He frowned. 'Yes I did,' he said aloud. 'You're the one who didn't write back.' I suppose there could be several different reasons. I offended you; I was putting pressure on you, breaking the rules of our friendship; I brought Orsea into it, when this has always been just you and me. Or perhaps you're just tired of me and bored by my letters. If it's any one of those, I'd understand.

  For a moment he felt as if he'd lost his balance and was about to fall. Then he realised: fear had made him stupid, and it was perfectly obvious what had happened. His letter to her, or her reply, had gone astray. Somebody, some fat woman in a red dress, had lost it or forgotten about it or used it to start a fire or pad a shoe where it rubbed her heel. For a moment he wanted to do something about that; send his guard to arrest every woman in a red dress in the country and have them all thrown in a snake-pit, to teach them respect. But I haven't got a snake-pit, he reminded himself, and it'd take too long to build one and collect enough snakes to fill it.

  He read the rest of the letter. It felt cold, because it was all based on error. It irritated him, as though he'd corrected her mistake but she carried on regardless, missing the point, refusing to listen to him. That was wrong; in fact, she was saying things he'd never thought she'd ever say, things that changed the world for ever, but he found it very difficult to get past the frustration. He made an effort and cleared his mind of it; but the damage had been done. A letter from her had been wasted because of a misunderstanding, and all the things she could have said in it would have to wait till next time, or the time after that. He felt cheated, and had to remind himself that it wasn't her fault.

  Someone was standing in the doorway. 'Go away,' he snapped, then pulled a face. 'No,' he said, 'it's all right, take no notice. What is it?'

  Stellachus, his chief of intelligence. 'You sent for me,' he said apologetically.

  'Did I? Yes, I did. Come in and close the door.'

  Valens put his hand over the letter. If Stellachus noticed, he didn't show it.

  'The Mezentine defector,' Valens said. 'The one who went to Eremia. Apparently he's dead.'

  Stellachus frowned. 'I see,' he said. 'May I ask…?'

  Valens told him about the austringer's report of what he'd heard in the inn. 'Find out if it's true,' Valens went on. 'It sounds a bit unlikely, but I expect there's something behind it. Also, I don't seem to have seen anything recently about what's going on in Mezentia. Last I heard, they'd got a bloody great big army sitting around doing nothing, and that's not the way they like to do business. If you can get me accurate numbers, that'd be very good; also, they must be feeding them on something, and I want to know where all those supplies are coming from. And when you've done that,' he added with a grin, 'I'd better see the chiefs of staff. Get someone to round them up for mid-afternoon, all right?'

  Stellachus bowed formally and went away, leaving him with the letter. His mind was clogged up with distractions (troop movements, supply routes, frontiers and lines on maps) and he felt as though the field had gone on ahead and left him behind. The world was tightening around him, he could feel it; it was a bad time not to be able to concentrate.

  He straightened his mind. He had the rest of the morning and the first half of the afternoon to reply to her letter-not long enough, but the first priority was to get a reply on its way as soon as possible, to make sure she wasn't fretting. It's all right; my previous letter didn't reach you would probably be enough, but he couldn't quite leave it at that, though perhaps he should. Then he'd need to think hard about the Mezentines-he'd let that slip, worrying about not having heard from her-but he needed the intelligence reports first, so it could wait a little while. Then there were other considerations, basic housekeeping: money, for one thing, and stocks of flour and oil and honey and the like, duty rosters and mobilisation times, musters and resources. It'd be nice if he didn't have to see to every last detail himself…

  Rain again, and he couldn't help smiling as he remembered what she'd written. For some reason, summer rain falling on oak leaves always makes me think of you. I have no idea why, since the one time I saw you (that I can remember), we were both indoors and it was quite unbearably hot. Maybe I went out with the hunt one time, and we sheltered from the rain under an oak tree, but if so, I can't remember that, either. To put this observation in context, the sound of horses on a hot day puts me in mind of my father, and I can't smell onions without thinking of my mother. The last example can have no possible significance whatsoever. My mother hated onions, except when cooked for a long time in a stew.

  There was going to be a war, and she was going to be caught up in it. The realisation made him stop dead, as though he'd walked into a wall. If the Mezentines laid siege to Civitas Eremiae there'd be no more women in red dresses bringing him letters; and she… He scowled. The Mezentines were strange, cold people but they weren't savages. They didn't butcher civilians, or sell them into slavery. Nevertheless, there was going to be a war, and there wasn't anything he could do about it. What he could do (had to do) was keep the war from seeping through into his own territory, because it was a simple fact of life that nobody ever beat the Mezentines at anything. If half of what he'd heard about the army mustering outside Mezentia was true, this was more than a punitive expedition or a judicious redefining of buffer zones and frontiers. The one aspect of the matter he wasn't quite clear about was the reason behind it; but the Mezentines were under no obligation to explain to anybody, before or after the fact.

  Even so…

  Predictably, Stellachus was in the old library. He'd annexed the two small rooms at the back-nobody could remember what they'd been built for, and Valens' father had used them to store and display his collection of hoods and jesses-and he spent most of his time there, when he wasn't out trying to look busy. He glanced up in surprise as Valens walked in, and just possibly (his reactions were quick, as befitted a fencer) he pushed a small book he'd been reading under a sheaf of worthy-looking papers.

  'Sorry to barge in,' Valens said,
with a slight grin. 'Just a quick thought, before the meeting. You passed the word round, I take it.'

  Stellachus nodded twice. 'They're all on notice to attend,' he said.

  'Splendid.' Valens sat down, reached across the table, lifted the papers. The Garden of Love in Idleness, according to the small book's spine. He covered it up again. 'The Mezentines,' he said. 'We both know that army's headed for Eremia. What's bothering me rather is why.'

  Stellachus did his best to look wise. 'Retribution, presumably. Duke Orsea's unprovoked attack.'

  Valens shrugged. 'Hardly necessary,' he said. 'It was a massacre, and if the Mezentines lost any men, I haven't heard about it. That army they've put together must be costing them a fortune. They don't spend money for fun.'

  'To make sure nothing of the sort ever happens again,' Stellachus said. 'Last time, the Mezentines won an easy victory because of their war machines. They had plenty of time to deploy them, and the machines came as a complete surprise to Orsea and his people. Next time, they won't walk so obligingly into the trap.'

  'Possibly,' Valens said, rubbing his palms together slowly. 'And from their point of view, the Eremians are irrational, stupid; it's only been five minutes since they got out of that crippling war with us, and what do they do? They pick on the most powerful nation in the world. People that stupid are capable of anything, and next time they might get incredibly lucky.' He frowned. 'They might be thinking that way if they were us,' he said. 'I mean, if they had a king or a duke who could make decisions on a whim. But they aren't like that. Everything's got to be debated in committees and sub-committees and special assemblies and general assemblies. For which we should be eternally grateful, since it means they move slowly and cautiously. Everything's political with them, unless it goes right down deep under the politics to something really fundamental. If it was just a good-idea-at-the-time thing, it'd never get through. One party'd be in favour, all the other parties would be against, and you'd be able to hear them debating it from halfway across the desert.' He shrugged. 'Don't you agree?'