Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Instead, he drew his knees up under his chin and stared at the wall. There was a tapestry there; he'd been staring at it for some time before he noticed it, because it was exactly where it should be, where it always had been in relation to where he was likely to be sitting. It was the tapestry that always hung on the back wall of his writing-room, back at the Ducas house. He smiled, though its presence hurt him, and for the first time in twenty years he took a moment to look at it.

  He'd grown up with it, of course, because everything in the Ducas house had always been there, certainly as long as he could remember. It was relatively recent by Ducas standards, certainly no more than eighty years old; Neo-Classical Primitive, if you insisted on being technical, which meant the figures were lean and angular, their elbows and knees bent and pointed, their heads in profile, their lips curled in a frozen smile, their hands and feet unnaturally small. In the centre, a unicorn was kneeling at the feet of a girl (she was flat-chested and her neck was freakishly long, which was the Neo-Classical Primitive way of telling you she was supposed to be pretty), while behind a nearby bush, half a dozen men lurked with spears and drawn bows. They weren't actually looking at the unicorn, because of artistic conventions, but it was pretty obvious what was going to happen next. Above and below the main scene ran borders crowded with running hounds-tiny heads, little stubby legs, stupidly long, thin bodies-in between exuberant growths of twisted, distorted flowers. He'd never really looked at it before, because if he had he'd have seen how terrifying it was, with its hideous, misshapen creatures and its message of treachery and death. It was supposed to be an allegory of courtly seduction; in Neo-Classicism, most things were. He wondered: which one is me, the girl or the hunters? The unicorn is Orsea, of course (it looked like a long, thin goat with a spike stuck in its head); I suppose I must be the girl, and the hunters in the bush are whoever's behind all this…

  Somebody or other; he found he really wasn't interested in who it might be. Could be anybody, the Phocas, the Nicephorus, there were a dozen great families who traditionally sought to overthrow the Ducas at least once a generation.

  It was a pursuit without malice, carried out between natural enemies who respected each other; no apology given or sought. Nine of the greater Ducas had been executed for treason; according to family tradition, six of them had been innocent, falsely accused by rival houses. In return, the Ducas had contrived to bring down eight of the Phocas, six of the Perdicas, seven of the Tzimisces… It was a way of keeping score, like a championship or a league, with so many points for an execution, so many for a banishment and so on. It was one of those things, and you really couldn't feel resentful about it, just as the dove doesn't resent the falcon, though it does its very best to avoid it.

  The letter, though; someone had found it (they'd found it, the captain had said; but he'd have known if the Duke's men had come to search the house). The whole point was that nobody knew about that hiding-place but him. The only possibility was a servant, someone who'd worked in the Ducas house for a long time, who'd come across it by accident while cleaning or tidying. That was a possibility he didn't want to think about; far better that it should be the Phocas than somebody he trusted. Besides, it didn't matter. As soon as he was able to talk to Orsea, he'd be able to explain everything; and besides, Orsea would know that ridiculous story the captain had told him couldn't possibly be true, because in order to believe it, Orsea would have to believe that Veatriz was part of the conspiracy, and that was, of course, impossible-

  Veatriz. It hit him like a punch in the face. If, somehow, Orsea had persuaded himself or been persuaded that there was some kind of ridiculous plot, then he must think Veatriz was right at the heart of it-conspiring with her lover, the Vadani Duke, to lure him to his death. Only, Orsea couldn't be that stupid. Orsea would never believe anything like that.

  Just as Orsea would never ignore letters from his best friend.

  He was already on his feet before the idea had taken shape in his mind. His instincts were telling him, you can't just sit here, you've got to get out and do something; rescue her, rescue both of them. It's your job, it's your duty. He made himself sit down again. The Ducas doesn't break out of prison; for one thing it'd be dreadfully inconsiderate, since it'd be bound to cause trouble for servants and dependants, who'd be assumed to have arranged or assisted his escape. Instead, the Ducas writes a letter to the Duke, explaining all the silly misunderstandings; the Duke believes him, out of respect for the Ducas honour; everything is cleared up and put right. Unfortunately, the system presupposed a competent Duke, a man of intelligence and sound judgement, who wasn't pathetically insecure and morbidly jealous about his wife.

  He sat down and wrote a letter. Orsea-

  This is ridiculous. I think I know what they've been telling you, and it simply isn't true. If you'll just come and see me for five minutes, I can prove it, and we can sort it all out. You owe me that.

  He was about to sign it, but why bother? Nobody else on earth could have written that letter. He folded it, went to the door and called for a page. Nobody came, and that was a shock for the Ducas. Servants had always been there, all through his life. You didn't need to look; they'd be there, like component parts of a great machine. If the Ducas lifted up a plate, shut his eyes and dropped it, there'd be someone in the right place to catch it before it hit the floor. He called again, and waited. Eventually, a harassed-looking guard trotted up.

  'Where is everybody?' Miel asked.

  The soldier looked at him. 'On the towers, or the roofs,' he said. 'Watching. Didn't anybody tell you? The Mezentines are attacking.'

  'Please,' said Jarnac Ducas, with a hint of desperation. 'Really, there's nothing you can do here, and I can't guarantee your safety. Please go back to the council room. That's where you're needed.'

  Don't lie to me, Orsea thought, I've had enough lies from your family already. 'I'm the Duke,' he said, 'I should be here, on the front line. Where else should I be?'

  Jarnac recognised the line; it was from a stirring speech made by Duke Tarsa IV, a hundred and seventy years ago. Probably Orsea didn't realise he was quoting. 'Inside,' he replied, 'where it's safe. Look,' he added, suddenly blunt, 'if you're up here and you get killed or badly hurt, it'll totally fuck up our morale. If they get up on the wall I'll send for you; that's when you'll need to be seen. Just standing around dodging scorpion bolts, that's no bloody good to anybody.'

  And that's me told, Orsea thought rebelliously, but of course Jarnac was right. Not only did he sound right, he looked right, head to toe, in his no-nonsense open-face bascinet, brigandine coat over a light mailshirt, munitions arm and leg harness. You could believe in him, six foot five of lean muscle. He could've stepped straight off the pages of The True Art of War, or A Discourse of Military Science. He made Orsea feel about twelve years old.

  'Fine,' he said, 'but you call me as soon as they get to the foot of the wall. That's an order.'

  'Understood,' Jarnac said crisply; turned away, turned back impulsively. 'There's one thing you can do,' he said, in a voice more urgent and apprehensive than Orsea had ever heard him use before. 'Something that'd really help.'

  'What?'

  Jarnac stepped right up close, something the lesser Ducas had probably never done before in the history of the family. 'You can release Miel and send him up here to take over from me,' he said, with an edge to his voice that made Orsea step away. 'He's the man you need, not me. He's good at this stuff.'

  He doesn't know, Orsea realised. 'I can't,' he said. 'Look, I promise I'll explain; but it simply can't be done, you've got to believe me.'

  'I see.' Jarnac's massive head drooped on his neck for a moment, and then he was himself again. 'In that case, with your permission, I really must get back to the tower. I will send for you,' he added, 'you've got my word on that.'

  Once Orsea had gone, Jarnac bounded up the stairs to the top platform of the tower. His staff were waiting for him, anxious to point out things they'd noticed-a unit of arch
ers previously misidentified as engineers, tenders full of scorpion ammunition, a banner that could be the enemy general staff. Jarnac pretended to listen and nodded appreciatively, but the buzzing swarm of detail didn't penetrate. He was staring at the enemy; a single swarming, crawling thing trudging unhappily up the steep road to his city, with the intention of killing him.

  Jarnac Ducas had fought in seventeen military engagements; the first, when he was just turned sixteen, had been against the Vadani, a trivial cavalry skirmish on the borders that had sucked in infantry detachments that happened to be in the vicinity and had turned into a vicious, indecisive slog-ging-match; the most recent, Miel's raid against the Mezentines. He'd missed the scorpion-cloud and the massacre, and he'd felt bad about that ever since. He'd been reading approved military texts since he was ten, at which age he'd also started to train with weapons (the sword, the spear, the poll-axe, the bow, the halberd); ten hours a week of forms, four hours a week sparring. By his own estimation, he was eminently qualified to lead a full regiment of heavy cavalry, as befitted his place in the social order. Never in his worst dreams had he ever imagined himself in sole command of the defence of Civitas Eremiae. That was something that simply couldn't happen.

  'Get the engines wound up,' he said, not looking round to see who received the order. Whoever was responsible for doing it would know what to do. 'They're good to three hundred and fifty yards, is that right?'

  Someone assured him that it was, not that the information was necessary. Some weeks earlier, a party of workmen had hammered a row of white stakes into the ground in a straight line, precisely three hundred and forty-nine yards from the wall. As soon as the enemy crossed the staked line, the scorpion crews were going to loose their first volley. The engineers who installed the machines had carefully zeroed them to that range, so that the first cloud of bolts would land on the line, with a permitted tolerance of six inches either way. The enemy advance guard, marching purposefully up the hill in good order, were already as good as dead. It was the unit behind them Jarnac was thinking about.

  The key would be the mobile scorpion batteries; he could see them, though the enemy had done their best to disguise them as ordinary wagons. If he could neutralise the Mezentine scorpions, he reckoned he could kill one man in three before they reached the base of the wall. Take away a third, and the enemy army wasn't strong enough to take the city; there were definitive tables of odds in the military manuals that told you the proportion by which the attackers needed to outnumber the defenders in order to secure victory. Jarnac had a copy of A Discourse of Military Science tucked inside the front of his brigandine, with a bookmark to help him find the place. The critical figure was one in three; simple arithmetic.

  Now then, he thought. The skirmish line advances, I wipe them out; while our engines are rewinding, they push forward the mobile batteries so that they're in range. I loose a volley that gets rid of all their scorpion crews, but when we're all down again, they send up replacement crews to span and align their scorpions. If I'm quick, maybe I'll get those crews too, but there'll be a third wave, and a fourth. Sooner or later they'll get off their shot; I'll lose crewmen, which'll slow down my rate of fire as I replace them. Whoever runs out of scorpion crewmen first will lose the war. And that's all there is to it.

  (He paused for a moment to consider the sheer scale of the enterprise he was committing himself to. Not tens of deaths but hundreds, not hundreds but thousands, not thousands but tens of thousands; each death caused by a wound, a tearing of flesh, smashing of bone, pouring out of blood, an experience of intense pain. He'd seen death several hundred times, the moment when the light went out in the eyes of an animal because of some action of his, at which point the shudders and twitches were simply mechanical, no longer controlled by a living thing. Each of those deaths he could justify in terms of meat harvested, crops preserved from damage, honour given and respectfully taken-there were times when he found it hard to believe any of those justifications,' but he knew somehow that what he was doing was clean and legitimate. Now he was going to see death on a scale he couldn't begin to imagine, and the justification-which should have been self-evident-seemed elusive. Why kill ten thousand Mezentines, he asked himself, when the outcome is inevitable and the city is doomed to fall? Why should any human being kill another, given that the flesh and the hide are not used, and no trophy is taken? All he could find to shield himself with against these thoughts was a banal they started it, and the illogical, incredible fact that unless he killed them, all of them, they were going to wreck his city and murder his people. Because there's no alternative; it was a reason, not a justification, on a par with a parent's because I say so, something he had to obey but could neither understand nor respect. It was no job for a gentleman, even though it was the proper occupation of the lesser Ducas-but not to command, not to be in charge and accept responsibility. He hadn't been born to that; Miel had, and that was what he was there for. Except that he wasn't; why was that? he wondered.)

  They were closing; they were only yards from the white posts; they were the quarry walking into the snare. Jarnac took a deep breath, sucked it in, found it impossible to let it go, because when he did so, he'd be saying the word, loose, that would kill all those people. Could he really do that, exterminate thousands of creatures with just one word, like a god or a magician in a story?

  'Loose,' he said, and the scorpions bucked all along the wall. The sounds they made were the slider crashing home against the stop, a thump of steel on wood, and the hiss of the bolt forcibly parting the air. All around him, men were exploding into action, arching their backs as they worked frantically at windlasses, swirling and flickering like dancers as they picked up and loaded bolts, jumped clear as the sear dropped and the slider flew forward again. He pressed against the battlement and looked down, in time to see the cloud of bolts lift, a shimmering, insubstantial thing that fell like a net. The enemy were flattened like trampled grass, as if an invisible foot was stamping on them. They weren't people, of course; they were blades of grass, or ants, or bees swarming; not a thousand creatures who resembled him closely but one composite, collective thing, belonging to the species enemy. The bolt-cloud lifted again and blurred his view.

  Something about it was wrong; at least, the enemy weren't acting in the way he'd been expecting. They'd sent forward another wave, but it was walking, scurrying right into the path of the bolts. He saw the invisible foot stamp it flat, and there wasn't another wave behind it. He realised what it meant: Vaatzes the Mezentine had improved the design of the windlasses, or something of the kind. These scorpions could be reloaded faster than the ones the Mezentines made, which meant their timings for their planned manoeuvres were all wrong; accordingly, instead of sending their people into a neat, safe interval between volleys, they'd placed them right under the stamping foot. Jarnac felt sick; it was a wicked, treacherous thing to do, to trick the enemy into destroying his own people on such an obscene scale. He turned his head away, and saw an engineer hanging by his hands from a windlass handle, every ounce of bodyweight and every pound of strength compressed into desperate activity.

  He forced himself to look back at the view below, as though it was a punishment he knew he deserved. They'd been moving their scorpions up; now they were trying to stop them before they vanished under a net of bolts. The enemy was a bubbling stream now, swirling and breaking around tiny black pebbles, swept against their will into a weir of flying pins. Most of all, it was an utterly ludicrous spectacle; and beyond it he could see the familiar copses, spinneys, chases and valleys of his home, places he knew down to the last deer-track and split tree. It was an impossibility; what was that word the Mezentine had used, to describe something that shouldn't be possible, outside any definition of tolerance? It was an abomination.

  After a while he got used to it, or at least he blunted the significance of what he was watching. It took four abortive and costly experiments before the Mezentines figured out the timing of the Eremian scorpion wi
nches; the fifth time they were successful. It was a strange kind of success-seconds after their scorpions had been advanced into position, every man in the moving party was dead-but it constituted a victory, because the rest of their army started cheering, a sound so incongruous that it took Jarnac several seconds to figure out what it was. The sixth wave managed to span and align the engines before they died. The seventh-

  But Jarnac had been practising for that. As soon as the sliders had slammed home, he raised both arms and yelled. Nobody could make out what he was saying, of course, but they'd been through the drill twenty times, anticipating this moment. As Jarnac dropped to his knees and shoved his shoulders tight against the rampart wall in front of him, he couldn't look round and see if the rest of his men were doing the same. He hoped they were; a heartbeat later he heard the swish, and that was when he closed his eyes. The clatter, as the enemy's scorpion bolts pitched all around him, was loud enough to force any kind of thought out of his head, and he forgot to give the next order. Fortunately, they didn't need to be told.

  They got their next volley off just in time. Before his own bolt-cloud had pitched, a thin smear of enemy bolts sailed, peaked and dropped around him. He heard yells, a scream or two; he didn't look round, but couldn't help catching sight of a man with a bolt through his shoulder, in the hollow above the collar-bone; he overbalanced and fell backwards off the ledge. Jarnac leaned forward over the rampart-someone yelled at him but he took no notice-and saw confusion and an opportunity where the enemy scorpions were drawn up. It was an advantage; they'd have to bring up new crews now, and they'd run straight into the centre ring of the target and be killed. Before they died, they'd have spanned the windlasses and loaded the bolts, so that their successors could slip the sears and launch the volley. I'm killing men at an incredible rate, Jarnac told himself, but there's still too many of them. As he watched the new crews run forward, work frantically and die, he knew he was wasting his time. Might as well fight the grass, he thought; you can fill a dozen barns with hay, and all you're doing is encouraging it to grow.