Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  “Orsea.” She stopped, making him stop too. “Don’t talk rubbish. You don’t know anything about Guild politics, so please don’t pretend you’re the world’s greatest authority —” She broke off, wondering why on earth she was talking to him like this. “Let’s drop it, all right?” she said. “It’s not a subject I like thinking about, the war and what’s going to happen to us.”

  “All right.” At least he hadn’t apologized, this time. He seemed to have the idea that an apology fixed everything, as though she wanted a husband who was always in the wrong. He’d apologize for sunset if he thought darkness offended her. “So,” he was saying, “what do you think? About them, I mean, the Cure Hardy? They aren’t anything like the ones who came to see us.”

  “Aren’t they? I didn’t meet them.”

  “Not a bit like,” he said. “For a start, they eat proper food. When they came to Eremia, they were all vegetarians, and they didn’t drink booze, either.”

  “Different tribe, presumably,” she said.

  “Obviously. But I wouldn’t have thought one lot would be so different from the others. Still, Valens seems to be handling them pretty well. There’s a man who always does his homework.”

  “He reads a lot,” Veatriz said.

  “Really? Well, that’d account for it. Anyhow, I’m assuming it’s pretty well done and dusted. It’s about time he got married, after all.”

  When she’d stopped she hadn’t really been aware of where she was. Now she looked round; they were in the top lobby of the Great Hall, directly under a huge, slightly faded tapestry (hunting scene, needless to say). “Never met the right girl, presumably,” she said.

  He laughed. “I don’t suppose that’s got anything to do with it. I’ve always assumed it was a case of keeping his options open, politically.”

  “Fine. I’m going back to our room now, if that’s all right with you.”

  (She called it their room, as if it was just a bed and a chair and a small mirror on the wall; in fact it was a whole floor of the North Tower, not much smaller than their apartments back in the palace at Civitas Eremiae. Too much space, not too little.)

  “Oh.” He stood there, directly under the flat, snarling dogs and the bustling huntsmen; cluelessness personified. “Right. I’ll see you later, then.”

  She left him. Too busy, she thought, as she trudged across the courtyard toward the North Tower, far too busy; too much important needlework screaming out for my attention. Presumably the savage girl had been taught needlework, along with all the other civilized accomplishments. In which case, she decided, there was some justice in the world, after all.

  The room was pretty much as she’d left it. Someone had come in and tidied up, and the curtains were drawn neatly and tied back with those loops of tasseled rope which she hated so much. She sat down in her chair; there, on the window-ledge in front of her, was her embroidery frame, with the silks laid out ready in a row, and her red velvet pincushion. She looked at them in blank confusion, as if she couldn’t remember what they were for. Then she stood up again and crossed to the big linen press at the foot of the bed. She lifted the lid and several layers of sheets, pillowcases; hidden — why had she hidden it? — was a rectangular rosewood box, her writing case. She lifted it out and hesitated, as a maid might do if she was thinking about stealing it from her mistress. Then she took it over to the window, brushed the embroidery silks onto the floor, opened the box and picked up a sheet of paper.

  The silence had lasted a very long time; long enough for a cook to chop an onion, or a smith to peen over the head of a rivet. Much longer and it’d constitute an act of war. So …

  “Well,” Valens said, straightening his back a little, “how was your journey?”

  She looked up at him. She was sitting on the stone bench in the middle of the knot garden. She’d been examining the rosemary bush as though she was planning to write a report on it.

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “A bit of an ordeal, I imagine.”

  “I’m used to traveling about.” She frowned. “Can we go to your mews, please? I’d like to make sure my hawk’s being properly looked after.”

  Her hawk, then; not a present after all. “Certainly,” he said; then he thought of something. “Tell you what,” he said. “If we go back through there, the way we came, we’re going to have to wade through all your people and all my people, and they’ll be staring politely at us to see how it’s going, and it’ll take forever and be extremely tiresome. But if we go through that doorway over there, we can take a short cut through the back scullery into the kitchens, round the back of the charcoal store and out into the mews. Saves time; also, it’ll puzzle that lot out there half to death. Would that be all right, or would you rather go the long way round?”

  She frowned. “Why wouldn’t I want my uncles to know where I’ve gone?” she said.

  A slow smile crept over Valens’ face, like evening shadows climbing a hillside. “Why indeed?” he said. “We’ll go and see how your hawk’s settling in, shall we?”

  Carausius, he noticed with mild amusement, was visibly disconcerted to see him back so soon. The bald man just bowed. The uncles were talking to some people, and didn’t seem to have noticed. Valens led the way; she kept pace with him, as though it was a secret race and she was pacing herself for the final sprint. They went the long way round, and Valens kept himself amused by pointing out various features of interest: the long gallery, the avenue of sweet chestnuts, the fountain, the equestrian statue of his grandfather —

  “Sculpted by Ambrosianus Bessus,” she interrupted, “and cast in only three sections, using a lost-wax technique previously unknown outside the Republic.” She nodded, as though awarding herself bonus marks.

  “I never knew that,” Valens said. “Well, there you go. Can’t say I like it much myself. He’s sitting too far back in the saddle, and if you ask me, that horse’s got colic. Still …”

  She frowned. “It’s the greatest achievement of classical Vadani sculpture,” she said reprovingly. “I went to a lecture about it while I was at the university.”

  “Did you? Good heavens.” Valens shrugged. “When I was twelve, my friend Jovian and I snuck out one night when everybody was at a banquet and painted it bright green. It took half a dozen men a week to scrub all the paint off, and they never did figure out who’d done it.”

  Her frown tightened into a bewildered scowl. “Why did you do that?” she said.

  Valens blinked. “Do you know, I’m not sure after all this time. Maybe we thought it’d look better green.”

  “The action of verdigris on bronze statues produces a green patina,” she said hopefully. “Presumably —”

  “That’s right, I remember now.” He looked away and pointed. “That squat, ugly thing over there is the clock tower. At noon every day two little men come out, they’re part of the mechanism, and one of them belts the other one over the head with a poleaxe. The Mezentines gave it to my father shortly after I was born. Unfortunately it keeps perfect time, so we’ve never had an excuse to get rid of it.”

  The frown had settled in to stay on her forehead, and she made no comment, not even when Valens pointed out the obscene weather-vane on top of the East Tower. It’s a gag, he told himself, a practical joke or something; and if I ever find out who’s responsible, I solemnly undertake to decorate the Great Hall with their entrails come midsummer festival. “That’s the kennels over there,” he heard himself say, “and the stables next to it, and that gateway there leads to the mews.” She was looking ahead; seen from the side, her neck was long, slender and delicate, her shoulders slim. “Did you really train that goshawk yourself?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “I tried it myself once, but I failed. I kept it awake for three days and nights, and then I fell asleep. I knew it was going to beat me in the end. Then I turned it over to the austringer, and he had it coming in to the lure in less than a week. I think they can tell if you’ve got the
strength of will or not.”

  “I followed the directions in a book,” she replied. “I didn’t find it particularly difficult.”

  Plausible, Valens thought. Perhaps the hawk was stupid enough to try telling a joke, and she looked at it. Fifty years of this, or let the Mezentines have the duchy. Too close to call, really.

  They’d put her wretched bird in the dark room at the end of the mews. She approved; after the trauma of the journey, a day in complete darkness and silence would settle it down. It should not be fed until midday tomorrow, she said; then it should be flown to the lure for no more than five minutes, and after that it should be given two-thirds of its usual ration. She would feed it herself tomorrow evening. Now, perhaps he’d be kind enough to show her the other hawks.

  Even so; as they walked back to the main building, he couldn’t help wondering how she’d felt, when they came to her and told her she’d be marrying the Vadani duke. Unless it had been her idea in the first place, of course; but assuming it hadn’t. (Come to that, how had Veatriz felt when they told her she was to marry Orsea? But she loved him, so it was quite different.) Had she frowned and asked, who? Had she made a scene, or just nodded her head? Had she asked questions, or waited for the briefing? She must have known she was going to marry someone foreign and strange, or else why had they sent her away to be educated and refined? Had she complained about that, or welcomed it? As part of your training, you will be required to tame a hawk. He thought of himself, shuffling and stretching up and down the chalk line in the stables, learning to fence like a gentleman, his fingertips still raw after an hour’s rebec practice. His education had taught him to excel at those things he hated most; at some point, he’d struck the balance between detesting them for their own sake and taking pleasure in his hard-won skill and accomplishments, to the point where what he did no longer mattered, so long as he did it well. They’d trained him, and then been surprised because he’d never fallen in love.

  (Or that was what they thought. Likewise, they’d never found out that, all the time he was learning to fence elegantly with the rapier, the smallsword and the estock, he was paying a guardsman with his own money to teach him how to fight properly with a Type Fourteen infantry sword. When they’d sent her away to the university, had she asked, How will learning civil and mercantile law help me make the Vadani duke fall in love with me? She could probably fence, too. At least, he wouldn’t put it past her. The question was, had someone had to sit up with her three days and nights in a row before she mastered the basics of the high, low and hanging guards?)

  For want of anywhere else to go, Valens led them back to the formal solar. As he opened the door, he surprised half a dozen servants busy cleaning. They froze and stared at him for a moment, like crows taken unaware on carrion, or thieves caught robbing the dead; then they retreated backward, clinging fiercely to their brooms and dusters, and let themselves out through the side door.

  “If it’s convenient,” the bald man said, “now might be a good time to discuss exchange rates.”

  9

  The first thing he saw was smoke. It rose in the air like a feather stuck in the ground, a black plume fraying at the edges, a marker pointing down at the exact spot. Ziani had grown up with smoke, of course. In Mezentia, every morning at six sharp, fifteen thousand fires were laid in and lit in forges, furnaces, kilns, ovens, mills and factories in every street in the city; by half past six, the sky was a gray canopy and the alleys and yards stank of charcoal and ash. Every sill and step had its own soft blanket of black dust, every well and sewer had a gray skin, and everybody spat and sneezed black silt. The smell of smoke was something he’d missed without even realizing.

  There had to be a river, of course. He saw it eventually, a thin green line dividing the mountains from the flat brown plain. A little further on, he could make out towers, which were probably no more than planked-in scaffolding, and the spoil heaps. He’d never seen a mine before in his life.

  Before long, he began to see tree stumps; hundreds of them, thousands. A few wore sad garlands of coppice shoots, their leaves grimy with black dust. Others had died long ago, and were smothered in grotesque balls and shelves of bloated white fungus. Deprived of the shelter of the canopy of branches, the leaf mold that had once carpeted the floor of the lost forest had dried out into powdery dust, which the wind was diligently scouring away. Soon it would be down to bare rock, like a carpenter stripping off old varnish. Nothing much seemed able to take root in it, apart from a few wisps of yellow-white grass and the occasional sprawl of bramble.

  “All this was cleared years ago.” Carnufex, the man Valens had sent along to look after him, had obviously noticed him gawping at the tree stumps and figured out his train of thought. “I can’t remember offhand exactly how much charcoal they get through every day, but it’s a lot. Something of a problem, actually. We aren’t marvelously well off for trees in this country at the best of times. In the old days, of course, they could supply all the charcoal we needed just from coppicing, but when Valens’ father made us double our production, the only way we could keep up with our quotas was clear-felling. I think they’re carting the stuff in from Framea now — which is also a problem, since it’s only a few hours from the Eremian border, and if the Mezentines wanted to come and cause trouble …” He shrugged. “Not that it matters much anymore,” he added.

  “All I was thinking,” Ziani lied, “was where we’re going to get our timber from; for building the frames, and the firewood for burning out the props.”

  “Ah.” Carnufex nodded. “All taken care of. It’ll be along in a day or so; twelve cartloads, and there’s more if you need it. The only problem was getting hold of a dozen carts. Anything with wheels on is a problem right now, for obvious reasons.”

  Considering what he was and who’d sent him, Carnufex could have been a lot worse. He was a short, stocky man, about fifty-five years old, with a great beak of a nose, a soft and cultured voice, small bright eyes and snow-white hair. He was never tired, hungry, frightened or angry (come to think of it, during their three-day journey Ziani had never once noticed him fall out of line for a piss, or take a drink of water from his canteen). Most of the time he hung back with the escort cavalrymen (he had been a soldier himself before he was transferred to the mines) and kept up an unremitting torrent of the filthiest jokes Ziani had ever heard, including some he couldn’t begin to understand, even with an engineer’s instinct for intricate mechanisms. He was, of course, there to watch Ziani as much as to help him, but that was understandable enough.

  “We won’t need that much in the way of lumber,” Ziani replied. “How about the steel I asked for? I know that’s likely to be difficult.”

  Carnufex smiled. “Not likely. By a strange coincidence, my wife’s kid brother’s the superintendent of the steel depot at Colla Silvestris. At least,” he added innocently, “he is now; used to be a clerk in the procurement office, but he got a surprise promotion about two hours after I got this commission. A buffoon, but he does as he’s told. With any luck, your steel should be there waiting for you when we arrive.”

  Ziani was impressed. When he’d talked to the previous superintendent, he’d been told there wasn’t that much steel in the whole duchy. “That’s handy,” he said.

  “I always knew young Phormio’d come in useful for something eventually,” Carnufex replied. “I could never begin to imagine what it might be, but I had the feeling. Oh, while I think of it,” he added, “you were asking about skilled carpenters. I’ve found you some.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Ziani said. “How did you manage that?”

  The smile again. “I had a dozen seconded from the Office of Works, thanks to the new chief clerk there. My brother-in-law, actually.”

  Ziani nodded. “Your wife has a large family.”

  “Bloody enormous.”

  An hour later, Ziani could see gray patches standing out against the sandy brown of the mountain; also he could hear faint tapping noises, like an
army of thrushes knocking snail-shells against stones. The closer to the mountain they came, the louder the noise grew, and before long he could see them, hundreds of tiny moving dots swarming up and down the side of the slope. “How many men work here?” he asked.

  “Between eight and nine hundred, usually,” Carnufex replied. “Just over two hundred underground, the rest breaking up, cleaning and smelting ore, maintenance, supply, that sort of thing. In fact, we’re short-handed, we could do with half as many again. It’s a pity nobody pointed out to Valens’ father that if you want to double output, it might be a good idea to take on a few extra hands. But there,” he added, with a mildly stoical shrug, “we have a curious idea in this country that anything can be achieved provided you shout loud enough at the man in charge.”

  “I see,” Ziani said. “Does it work?”

  “Oddly enough, yes.”

  The tapping was getting steadily louder. It seemed to be coming from every direction (the sound, Ziani rationalized, was echoing off the mountainside) and he wondered if it was like that all the time. “What are those big timber frames?” he asked, pointing.

  “They’re the drop-hammers,” Carnufex replied. “You see where the streams come down off the mountain? They’re banked up into races, and they turn those big waterwheels you can just see there, behind those sheds. The wheel trips a cam which lifts and drops a bloody great beam with an iron shoe on the end, which smashes the ore up into bits; then it gets carried down onto the flat — you can see the big heaps of the stuff there, look — and it gets broken up even finer by a lot of men with big hammers. Then it’s got to be washed, of course, so it’s carted back up the hillside and shoveled into the strakes — look, do you see the lines of conduits coming down the slope? They’re open-topped, made of planks, and they carry the millstreams downhill to turn the wheels and eventually join up with the river. You can see they’re dammed up at various stages; the dams are called strakes, and as the ore’s washed down by the stream, each one filters out different grades of rubbish, so that when it reaches the bottom it’s mostly clean enough to go in the furnace. That’s the trouble with this seam; there’s plenty of it, but it’s full of all kinds of shit that’s got to be cleaned out. Biggest part of the operation, in fact, preparing the ore.” He grinned. “I expect this all looks a bit primitive to you, after what you’re used to.”