Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  “We’re not fussy,” the other uncle said. “Something cold will do fine.”

  The girl laughed, and Valens realized he wanted to laugh too. “I know where there’s a rack of smoked venison,” he said, “if anybody’s interested. I sent it for curing about a week ago, so it ought to be just right.”

  “Perfect,” said an uncle, with the sort of heartfelt sincerity Valens had never expected to hear in a diplomatic exchange. “There wouldn’t happen to be any pickled cabbage to go with that, would there?”

  “Don’t be silly, Uncle.” She was looking straight at him; in fencing it would be the imbrocata, the thrust angled down from a high guard. “These people aren’t savages, of course there’s pickled cabbage. Please excuse him,” she went on, “he forgets his manners when he’s hungry.”

  “Carausius,” Valens said, and another courtier took off for the doorway. “Well,” he went on, “so far we don’t seem to have covered ourselves in glory.”

  The bald man shrugged. “It’s understandable that we know so little about each other,” he said. “Fortunately, ignorance is easily cured.”

  “In that case,” Valens said, steepling his fingers in front of him, “is it really true that you believe fish are the devil incarnate?”

  One thing the intelligence reports had got right. It wasn’t the business about long hair and beards (that, the bald man explained, was the Rosinholet) or the stuff about being someone else’s dream (a minority belief among the Flos Glaia, the girl explained, who also believed that the earth orbited the sun, rather than the other way about) or the carpets — the Aram Chantat bought all their carpets from the Lauzeta, during rare truces in their otherwise incessant wars — or ravens being unlucky or women holding their reins in both hands. But it was absolutely true that the Aram Chantat weren’t much good at metalwork or carpentry, and that in consequence they had to buy anything made of metal or wood from the Perpetual Republic.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad,” one of the uncles was saying, “if we could trade with them direct, but we can’t, none of their traders will come out that far, obviously, because of the impossibility of crossing the desert with wagons. So we have to get what we need from the Flos Glaia, who get it from the Rosinholet, who get it from someone else; it all comes through Lonazep, and we think that some of it’s carried by sea at some point, because we’re sick of opening barrels and finding everything inside’s been spoiled by soaking in salt water. Anyhow, the whole thing’s ridiculous, and of course by the time it reaches us, the price …” He sighed passionately. “It’s lucky we’ve got something that people want,” he said, “or I don’t know how we’d manage.”

  “Salt,” the other uncle explained, before Valens could ask. “Which we dig out of the ground every fourth year when we cross the salt flats on our way back from summer pasture. Unfortunately, though, the Lauzeta have taken to mining the same deposits; there’re a lot more of them than there are of us, and they’ve got more transport, so the surface deposits are pretty well all worked out. Obviously, that means we’re going to have to go down deeper, but if we do that, it’ll change everything; it’d mean leaving a permanent presence there, not to mention fighting off the Lauzeta when they go by that way every third year. And it goes without saying, we don’t know the first thing about underground mining.”

  “We do,” Valens said crisply. “In fact, we’re very good at it.” Someone he didn’t recognize was standing next to him, pouring wine into a glass. “But I’m sure you know all about that.”

  “The silver mines, yes,” the bald man said. “And we would, of course, be grateful for any advice or help you may care to offer us.” He paused, and Valens guessed he was trying to judge whether the time was right to ask for something else; something, presumably, that he wanted rather more. Maybe he decided against it, because he shrugged his shoulders and went on, “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We haven’t decided yet whether increasing our salt production and continuing to depend on trading with the Republic is the right course for us to follow. There are other options we could explore.”

  “Like leaving where you are now and settling somewhere else.” Valens nodded. “Which is why you’re here, I suppose.”

  The bald man and the uncles exchanged glances. “Indeed,” the bald man said. “Though I should stress that we’re still keeping an open mind about it. But yes, Eremia would suit us very well.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Valens said, “ever since Carausius told me what you had in mind, and there are a couple of things — I’m sure you’ve already considered them, but …”

  The bald man nodded slightly. “Go on, please.”

  “All right. First, if you occupy Eremia, you risk starting a fight with the Mezentines; second, will Eremia be big enough? Moving around all the time as you do —”

  “You’re right,” the girl interrupted him. The bald man lifted his head but said nothing. One of the uncles looked away. “We have considered both of them,” she went on, “and we don’t see a problem. If the Mezentines want to mess with us, let them try. And yes; Eremia on its own would be too small. But there’s plenty of empty space here, in your country, where nobody lives. And then there’s the plain that separates you from the Mezentines —”

  Sharp intake of breath; Valens couldn’t tell whether it came from the bald man or an uncle. She frowned. “Anyway,” she said, “there are possibilities. And we’re planning for the long term, after all.”

  Valens leaned back a little in his chair. “You do realize,” he said, “that my country is at war with the Republic. If you’re dependent on them for all your manufactured goods, like you say, maybe you ought to be a bit circumspect about forming an alliance with us.”

  “We don’t trade with them, though,” she replied crisply. “Not directly. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they only had a very sketchy idea of who we are or where we live. The impression I get is that they can’t be bothered to differentiate between savages.”

  The word made Valens want to smile. Time, he decided, to change the subject. “At any rate,” he said, “I’m glad we managed to sort out the business about the fish. Talking of which, it’s about time we had something to eat. Carausius, can you possibly find out what’s taking them so long?”

  During the meal (smoked venison, cold roast lamb; acceptable) he sat between the bald man and an uncle. The bald man wanted to talk about Mezentine Guild politics, and the uncle seemed fascinated by the technicalities of deep-level mine-working.

  “I’m not the man you should be asking,” Valens said, during a brief lull in the barrage of artfully phrased questions. “It just so happens we’ve got a topflight Mezentine engineer with us, he’d know all about that sort of thing. Carausius,” he said, leaning across the table, “where’s Ziani Vaatzes? I haven’t seen him for a day or so.”

  “He’s not here,” Carausius replied with his mouth full (and him a diplomat; for shame). “If you remember, he’s away at the mines, looking into that thing we were discussing.”

  “Ah.” Valens caught himself before he frowned. Probably not a good idea to let their guests know that the celebrated Vadani mines, in which they were clearly deeply interested, were just about to be sabotaged to stop them falling into Mezentine hands. “Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  So much for showing off his rare and valuable possessions; he wondered whether he should keep Vaatzes in a glass cabinet, mounted on a little rosewood stand, for visitors to admire.

  “Excuse me,” the uncle said. “If you’re at war with the Mezentines, why have they sent you a mining engineer? I hadn’t realized they were so altruistic.”

  “Defector,” Carausius explained.

  “The only specimen in captivity,” Valens added, realizing as he said it that the joke wasn’t very good. “He came to us after the fall of Civitas Eremiae.”

  The bald man was very interested in that. “I wasn’t aware that the Mezentines allowed defection,” he said. “In fact —”
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  “They don’t,” Carausius said. “It was the Eremians’ decision to grant this Vaatzes asylum that led to the war.”

  “And you’ve allowed this man to come here.” It was the first thing she’d said for some time. She was wedged in between Carausius and a fat soldier whose name Valens could never remember, and she’d been eating with a single-minded ferocity that Valens couldn’t help finding impressive. “Not a good idea, surely.”

  “We’d already declared war by the time we picked him up,” Valens explained, “so we had nothing to lose by it. He’s worth having, I’m sure of it. He organized the defense of Civitas Eremiae, made one hell of a good job of it. For a while, it looked like they were going to win.”

  “You declared war.” She was looking at him past Carausius’ arm and shoulder. “I thought they attacked you.”

  Valens froze. The unspoken question wasn’t one he wanted to answer to anybody, but her least of all. “It was only a matter of time,” he said briskly. “A preemptive strike seemed worth trying; they were weak after the losses they took during the siege, the political will seemed to be failing. I miscalculated. I don’t think it made much difference, one way or another.”

  That was a cue for the bald man to resume his interrogation about Guild politics, and this time Valens was only too happy to talk. She carried on looking at him for some time, then went back to savaging the smoked venison.

  She eats like a dog, she thought. She holds the meat still with her claws, grips it with her teeth and tears it.

  It was hard to see the top table from where she was sitting; harder still to observe her in a proper, scientific fashion without being caught staring. Orsea’s head was in the way, and the man next to her, some buffoon, kept trying to talk to her about music. Watching out of the corner of her eye was giving her a headache.

  Stupid, she thought. “Orsea,” she said, “is there any bread?”

  He looked round, moving his head just enough so that she could see. “It’s migrated up the other end of the table,” he said. “Hang on, I’ll try and catch someone’s eye.”

  It was stupid, of course, because she wasn’t the one who should be making these observations. He was up there with the subject; it should be his job to observe, and report back to her in a long, detailed letter. Instead, she was down here, among the other ornamental courtiers, having to crane her neck and grab fleeting glimpses. Not scientific.

  At least she wasn’t wearing authentic tribal costume. Actually, they’d done a pretty good job of dressing her up as a human being, and to her credit she carried off the imposture well. Training, probably, hours of patient coaching, like the manning of a hawk; teaching her to sit still, to keep quiet, not to jump up and run about the room. Someone had told her that they’d sent her away to somewhere quite grand and exotic to be schooled in civilized behavior — reasonable enough, when you thought about it, and considering what they had to gain from the deal. But they hadn’t managed to stop her ripping up her food like an animal.

  Veatriz smiled at that, and made a point of cutting the last of her cold roast lamb with the utmost precision; thumb and two fingers only on the back of the knife, just as she’d been taught when she was little. A young lady doesn’t saw, your grace, she slices. Not that perfect table manners had done her much good in the long run.

  Orsea had shifted in his seat again, and now all she could see was the wretched woman’s shoulder. Red; the color suited her fishbelly complexion, but hadn’t anybody thought to tell her what a red dress meant in these parts? She smiled, thinking of women in red dresses; women in red dresses who brought letters, once upon a time. I would give good money, she said deliberately to herself, to know if that face came out of a pot. Must have, she decided. If it was her natural color, they must’ve been keeping her in a dark cellar for the last six months, like blanching chicory. Nice metaphor, if only she had a use for it; the forcing, blanching and bringing on of vegetables for the table.

  She frowned, and the boring man sitting next to her must’ve wondered what he’d said wrong. All very unfair, of course. Probably she was a very nice person, if you got to know her. Someone had told her (she could never remember people’s names at these stupid receptions) that she’d been carrying that big hawk when they first arrived. How much would a bird like that weigh? You’d need forearms like a farrier to support that much weight. No; cousin Jarnac had told her once (at just such a reception, sitting next to her and being boring when she really didn’t want to listen) that hawks were surprisingly light, something to do with aerodynamics and hollow bones. She’d had to carry hawks herself, of course, on formal days, but she hadn’t really noticed how heavy they were. She’d been too busy worrying about whether they were going to huff their wings unexpectedly in her face or bite her.

  All politics, of course. They’d dressed her in the hawk, just as they’d dressed her in the red outfit, and the polite conversation and the musical appreciation and the civil and mercantile law, until she was practically an artifact rather than a human being; a mechanical toy, like the clockwork dolls the Mezentines make, but instead of a spring to make her go, deep inside there was a little sharp-clawed predator who tore at her food …

  She was standing up. Veatriz couldn’t see, because of Orsea’s stupid chin, but she and the other savages were on their feet; now Valens and his fat chancellor were standing too (rules of precedence to be observed in everything); they were leaving. She lost sight of them behind a thicket of heads, and then there was a tantalizing glimpse of them in the gap between the end of the table and the door; the pack had fallen behind, and she was walking next to Valens as the door opened and they escaped.

  Well. It was high time the young couple spent some time together, to get to know each other. They’d probably go for a walk round the knot garden, while the diplomats and the representatives and the whole Vadani government lurked discreetly in the covered cloister, penned in like sheep waiting to be dipped. They would walk round the knot garden, and she would go through her paces like a well-trained four-year-old jennet at a horse fair, and the fate of nations would be decided by how well she made small talk. Meanwhile (everybody else was getting up now) the Duchess Veatriz Sirupati would go back to her room and embroider something.

  “Can someone explain to me,” Orsea was saying — to her, presumably — “what all that was in aid of?”

  He could be so infuriating; but she kept her temper. “Oh come on,” she said. “Don’t you know who those people are?”

  Orsea shrugged. “Someone told me they’re ambassadors from the Cure Hardy, but that’s got to be wrong. The Cure Hardy are —”

  “Savages.” She nodded. “That’s them,” she said. “And the female is going to marry Valens.”

  It was a moment before Orsea spoke. “Nobody tells me anything,” he said.

  “Yes they do, but you don’t listen.” She sighed, as though the whole thing was quite tedious. “It’s all to do with trade agreements and cavalry,” she said. “And it’s high time he got married and churned out an heir. Presumably they haven’t got around to telling the savages that they’re marrying into a war; that’ll be a nice surprise on their wedding night. Probably they’ll be delighted, I gather the Cure Hardy enjoy a nice war.”

  “It’d be a stroke of luck for us,” Orsea said seriously. “Have you any idea how many of those people there are? Millions of them. We found that out when —”

  “Orsea, what are you talking about?”

  “Manpower,” Orsea replied, frowning slightly, his mind elsewhere. “What we call the Cure Hardy is actually loads of different tribes; nomads, always on the move. And there’s a lot of them; hundreds of thousands. If Valens is going to stand a chance against the Republic, what he needs most is a very large army, because as far as I can tell, where the Mezentines hire their mercenaries from, the supply is practically unlimited. If he can tap into the Cure Hardy for reinforcements, he may actually have a chance of making a game of it.”

  A game of it.
There had been a time when she’d loved him for a reason, rather than merely from force of habit, merely because they’d grown into each other, like briars growing into a tangle. She could still remember it, though: the belief that he was a good man, determined to do the best he could in the impossible situation he’d been thrust into. The trouble was, he’d always done his best and every time he’d failed, his failures leading to disaster and misery on a scale that mere malice could never have achieved. Deep inside somewhere, overgrown by tangled briars, he was still there; but recently she’d begun to feel that reaching him was more effort than it was worth. All sorts of other things had grown up through her love, especially since Eremia fell and they’d come here; there was pity, guilt, a sense of duty; there was Valens …

  “And how would that help us exactly?” she said, eager to find something to disagree with him about. “It’d just mean the war going on forever and ever, wouldn’t it?”

  Orsea frowned. “On the contrary,” he said. “If the Mezentines see that Valens has got powerful allies —”

  “You’re blocking the way,” she pointed out. “People are trying to get past.”

  “What? Oh.” He hesitated, trying to decide whether to shrink back and let them pass or to head for the exit. She decided for him by walking away. He followed her; she could hear his voice close behind her saying, “If Valens makes an alliance with these people —”

  “You really think the Mezentines see things that way?” she said without looking round. “Don’t you realize, if they gave up because Valens made friends with the Cure Hardy, that’d be admitting they were afraid, they’d never ever do that. Really, after all you’ve been through with them, I’d have thought you’d understand them a little better than that.”

  He’d caught up with her, bobbing along beside her like a friendly dog, or a small boy in the market trying to sell her baskets. He could be so irritating sometimes, she wanted to shoo him away with a whisk of her mane. “I don’t think it’s like that anymore,” he was bleating, “I really do believe things have changed, with the balance of power in the Guilds shifting toward the Foundrymen again and —”