Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  He saw the cranes, jigs and fixtures, but nobody was doing anything. There was one cart drawn up in position, one iron sheet dangling from a crane. A man was leaning on the crossbar of an auger; another held a long spanner for tightening the retaining bolts; and standing next to him, Daurenja.

  He guessed before Daurenja spoke. “Thought you might like to be here when we finished the last cart,” Daurenja said, beaming like an idiot. They’d already drilled the holes, done the alignment, inserted the bolts. Some kind of ceremony, then. Well, presumably it was good for morale, or something like that. He looked round and saw Duke Valens, looking uncomfortably cold in a long gray coat, surrounded by bored-looking officials. He hoped there wouldn’t be any speeches.

  Daurenja nodded to someone he couldn’t see. The crane winch creaked as it took the strain, lifting the iron sheet a few inches. Two men pressed against it, moved it slightly to line up the projecting bolt-ends with the holes in the sheet. The man with the spanner stepped forward; someone passed him the nuts and he wound them on — finger-tight to begin with, then tightening them all in turn with the long wrench. Nobody seemed particularly inspired or overawed, even when the spannerman put his weight on the long handle for the last time, straightened his back and stepped away. The job was finished, successfully and on time. So what?

  The Duke stood up and began to speak. Not a speech, any more than his own mumbled, preoccupied words to his workers were speeches; he was giving the order for the evacuation to begin, commands without explanations — schedules, details of who should report where and when, rules and prohibitions. The Vadani listened in complete silence.

  “… utmost importance that we shouldn’t take anything with us we won’t immediately need; food, clothes, blankets, tools, weapons, and that’s it. For security reasons I can’t tell you which direction we’ll be heading in. You’ll find that out soon enough in any case. Don’t worry about how long the food’s going to last. We’ve got supply points already in place, plenty for everybody so long as we’re careful; don’t go loading your wagons down with a year’s supply of salt fish and dried plums, you’ll only slow yourselves down, and anybody who can’t keep up the pace is going to get left behind, as simple as that.”

  The silence was amazement, fear, a little anger (but not at Valens), but mostly they were listening carefully so they could do exactly as they were told. Remarkable, Ziani thought. Just think about that for a moment. He stands up and says they’re going to have to leave their homes, all their things, all the places they know, their work, all the components that make up the mechanisms of their lives. Prospects of ever coming back: uncertain at best,probably none. Some people, of course, couldn’t accept something like that. Some people would refuse, or at least they’d go with the full intention of coming back, even if they had to make a bit of trouble along the way.

  (He thought of the rosewood box and the burr reamer; there’s more than one way of refusing to go along.)

  Yet here were the Vadani; careless, inept craftsmen, the sort of people who can’t be taught why it’s morally wrong to use a chisel as a screwdriver, but so flexible, so trusting that they’ll pack up a few scraps of their lives in a steel-plated cart and take to the cold, windy road, just because the Duke thinks it’s the best idea in the circumstances. It could only be faith; and hadn’t he had faith, in the Guilds, the doctrine of specifications, the assertion that perfection had been found and written down? Could you get the Mezentines to leave their city, pile onto wagons and leave everything behind to be burned, looted, trashed by savages? Of course, the Guilds would never give such an order. They’d prefer to stay in the city and burn with it. In the end, for a Mezentine, it comes down to place: knowing one’s place and staying there, if the worst comes to the worst fighting to the death to get back there. For the Vadani, it must be different somehow, presumably because they’re primitives, more pack animals than men. That had to be it. No other explanation could account for it.

  Silence broke his train of thought. Valens had stopped talking, and the dead quiet that followed had a curious quality about it. In other places his speech would’ve been received with shouts and cheers, or there’d have been trouble. No such reaction from the Vadani, just as the foreman doesn’t get a round of applause after handing out the day’s assignments. He’d given them their instructions, and that was all there was to it. No enthusiasm, no grumbling, not even any discussion. People started to walk away. A man clambered up onto the newly plated cart, as the ostlers backed the horses into the traces. He’d go home, load his few permitted possessions, then go to the place where he’d been told to go, pick up his neighbors’ things, a few passengers, elderly, sick, babes in arms, and set off to join the convoy. Remarkable; except for one enormous difference, which Ziani cursed himself for only just spotting. They weren’t leaving home, because they were taking home with them. To them it wasn’t a place; it was people.

  He remembered Jarnac Ducas when he saw him: a huge man, far too much material for one human being, like a double-yolked egg. He remembered his annoying manner, his knack of coming too close and talking a little bit too loud; his vast smile, his insufferable good humor.

  “Broad Street’s clear and moving freely.” Boomed into his face, like the blast from a forge. “There’s a bottleneck in the Haymarket, of course, only to be expected, but I’ve got some men down there directing traffic. We’ll stagger the departures, naturally, so I’m not expecting any problems there.”

  “Excellent,” Valens said, trying not to meet those ferociously blue, shallow eyes. He wasn’t sure why. For all his size, volume and intrusiveness, there wasn’t anything intimidating about Jarnac. Maybe it was just fear of bursting out laughing, and giving offense. “You’ve got it all under control, then. That’s good.”

  Jarnac Ducas soaked up praise like a sponge; it made him grow even bigger. “Just one other thing,” he said. “What about you? Your party, I mean. I don’t seem to have any details down in the manifest …”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Valens replied. “I’ll be riding with the rearguard, and we’ll be escorting my wife and her people. Tell you what,” he added. “You could do me one last favor.”

  “Of course.” Big, expectant eyes, like a dog watching you at mealtimes.

  “I’d like you to ride with Orsea and his lot,” Valens said. “Unless you’ve made other arrangements.”

  Jarnac grinned, as though he’d been given the treat he’d been hoping for. “I’d be happy to,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on them for you.” As he said it, a thought must’ve crossed his mind; the frown was there and gone again as fast as a twitch. Valens had a fair idea of what the thought must have been: that it wasn’t Orsea he wanted specially guarded … Not that it mattered what Jarnac Ducas thought about anything.

  “Fine, thanks,” Valens said, “carry on.” That had the desired shooing effect; Ducas bowed and strode away. It was enough to exhaust you, just watching him walk. There was a man who went through life like someone forcing his way through a tangle of briars, powering through the obstacles by sheer determined energy, not caring too much if the thorns caught and snagged him. A rare breed, fortunately.

  There was something he’d forgotten to do. What was it, now? Ah yes. Pack.

  The Duke, of course, wasn’t bound by his own orders and could therefore take with him whatever the hell he liked, even if it meant filling up half the carts in the convoy with superfluous junk. He could be absolutely certain that nobody would object. They’d naturally assume that whatever the Duke chose to take with him had, by definition, to be essential — velvet gowns, porcelain dinner services, stuffed bears’ heads, whatever. With that in mind,Valens rammed two clean shirts, a pair of trousers, two pairs of boots and a scarf into a satchel, and filled another small bag with books. He opened the closet where his armor was stored, and saw that his business harness wasn’t there; someone else had packed it for him, so that was all right. He looked round the tower room at his possessions; he knew
each of them so well that he could close his eyes and picture them, or describe them in detail from memory, down to the last chip and scratch. Not to worry. The Mezentines could have them, and welcome. As a very last afterthought, he grabbed the cheap and nasty hanger the stallholder in the market had given him, and tucked it under his arm. He supposed it had brought him luck when the Mezentine raiding party had attacked; either the hanger, or something else. Anyway, he took it.

  On the threshold, he paused. It was a rule of his life that, every time he packed to go away, he forgot something. He wondered, with a sort of detached interest, what it’d turn out to be this time. All of it, said a voice in his head, and that was entirely possible. He’d known all his life but never admitted that his claim that he’d never been in love had always been a lie. There were things in this room, possessions, that he loved far more than any human he’d ever known. He loved the silver niello of his Mezentine falchion for its startling beauty; the comfort and loyalty of his favorite hat, the company of his favorite books, every memory he shared with the things that had been his companions when people were too uncertain and dangerous to allow himself to become attached to them. Suddenly he realized that he’d never see or hold or use them again, and the pain staggered him, freezing his legs and loosening his knees. His breath caught and his eyes blurred — you idiot, crying over things — and for a moment he didn’t dare move, because if he turned his back they’d all be lost, forever. Wasn’t there an old story about the man who went down to hell to rescue his girl from death; and the lord of the dead told him he could take her, so long as he never took his eyes off her until they were both safely back in the light? Turning away from them now would be the end of them; just things, wood and metal, cloth, leather, paint, ink, artifacts and manufactures, irreplaceable, precious, inert, dead. I’d give my life for them if it’d help, he realized, with surprise and shame, but unfortunately that option isn’t available. For some reason he thought of Vaatzes, the Mezentine. He remembered him telling how he’d escaped by jumping through a window and running, taking nothing with him but the clothes he was wearing. Curious how he’d never appreciated the implications of that before: to leave behind every familiar thing — your shoes, your hat, the spoon you ate with, your belt, your hairbrush, everything. A man gathers a life around him like a hedgehog collecting leaves on its spines; what sticks to you defines you, and without them you’re bare, defenseless, a yolk without a shell. To leave home, and take nothing with him except people. I guess that means I’ve never really liked people very much. Sad to think that that was quite probably true.

  He turned and walked away, leaving the door open; no point in shutting it, the Mezentines could press a thumb on a latch and push. Turning your back on love is the only freedom.

  Mezentius was waiting in the courtyard, holding his horse for him, while the escort sat motionless in their saddles. As he reached up for the reins, his horse pushed back its hind legs and arched its back to piss, clearly not aware that this was a solemn and momentous occasion. He stepped back just in time to avoid being splashed, and nobody laughed.

  He mounted, checked the girth and the stirrup leathers. The Mezentines would probably burn and raze the palace to rubble; he knew every inch of it by heart, but the day would come, if he lived so long, when he’d find he couldn’t picture it anymore in his mind; he’d forget the covered alley that led from the stable yard to the well court, the half-moon balcony at the top of the back stairs, the alcove in the laundry, the attic room where the big spider had scared him half to death when he was five. The pain of love is how slowly it dies. “Well,” he said. “We’d better be going.”

  As evacuations go, it was virtually flawless. Everybody did as they were told, and the plan turned out to have been a good one, efficient and practical as a well-designed machine. By twilight, the last cart had rumbled under the gatehouse, echoing for a couple of seconds. The rearguard of three hundred riders stayed behind, to put the required distance between themselves and the convoy; they left an hour after sunset, making out the road by memory and contrast in the shadows. They left lamps and fires burning, as canny householders do to make thieves think somebody’s at home.

  The last man to leave Civitas Vadanis was Mezentius. When the evacuation was first planned, he’d made a point of asking to be duty officer, with the task of locking the palace gates at sunset and bringing the Duke the key. Instead of doing that, however, he went to the throne room and left a letter on Valens’ chair. It was addressed to a minor Mezentine official by the name of Lucao Psellus. When he rejoined the rearguard, Valens didn’t ask him for the key, which saved him the effort of pretending he’d dropped it.

  18

  The fifth time she asked him, he answered.

  He was exhausted, after a morning shifting sacks of charcoal up from the fuel cellar. Each sack weighed close on a hundredweight, and he’d had to wrestle them one at a time up the winding spiral stairs. He’d asked Framain why he’d chosen such a hopelessly impractical place to store bulk fuel, and how on earth he’d managed to get it down there. No explanation.

  Twenty-six sacks. Sweat had cut white canals through the thick black crust of grime on his forehead and face. Everything smelled and tasted of the stuff; his nose was blocked with it, and his eyes were streaming. So, naturally, she chose that time to come and sit next to him, as he slumped against the wall, too weary to move a yard to get to the water jug.

  “Tell me what happened at Civitas Eremiae,” she asked.

  He sighed; not for effect. “What happened to the city, or —”

  “I know what happened to the city. What about you?”

  He shook his head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I’m not quite sure myself. The short answer is, I was in prison when the city fell.”

  “Oh.”

  “Charged with treason,” Miel went on. “I think,” he added. “Nobody ever got around to telling me; and it’s a fair bet that if you’re locked up and nobody’ll tell you why, it’s treason of some sort. It’s a pretty vaguely defined term,” he added. “It can mean more or less what you want it to.”

  “I see.” Either no emotion, or something kept firmly under control. “What had you done?”

  “Ah.” Miel smiled. “I concealed evidence of a possible threat to national security. Which probably is treason, when all’s said and done. Or if it isn’t, it ought to be.”

  She was frowning at him, as if to say that it wasn’t something to make jokes about. Quite right, too.

  “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  He leaned forward, elbows on knees, to ease the ache in his back. “When I was a boy,” he said, “my family sort of arranged that I’d marry this girl, daughter of another noble family. The usual thing: land came into it somewhere, and grazing rights, and equities of redemption on old mortgages. The silly thing was, I really liked her; ever since I could remember. I think she liked me too.”

  “You think?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t seem important,” he confessed. “We were going to get married, come what may. I assumed she liked me; the point is, she knew the score as well as I did. We were born to it. In our families, you didn’t even think of choosing who you were going to marry. It’d be like trying to choose who you wanted to be your uncle.”

  “I see. And did you marry her?”

  Miel shook his head. “She was in line to succeed to the duchy,” he said. “I knew that, of course, but it was all very remote and unlikely. A lot of people had to die in a very precise order before it could be her turn. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. Suddenly, she was the heiress to the duchy. Obviously she couldn’t be the duke herself, but whoever she married would get the throne. Which is why I couldn’t marry her after all. Lots of political stuff; basically, all hell would break loose if a Ducas got to be duke; it’d scare the living daylights out of half a dozen other great houses who we’d been feuding with on and off for centuries. So they married her to
the Orseoli family instead — sufficiently noble, but political nonentities, the perfect compromise candidate. Coincidentally, Orsea and I had been friends practically from birth.” He grinned. “My family used to ask me why I bothered hanging out with riff-raff like the Orseoli, who’d never amount to anything. They were absolutely livid when Orsea succeeded to the title.”

  She nodded. “What’s this got to do with treason?” she asked.

  “Ah.” Miel rubbed his forehead, feeling the charcoal dust grinding his skin like cabinet-maker’s sand. “I guess you could say I was Orsea’s chief minister and closest adviser. The truth is, Orsea’s a lovely man but he was a useless duke. Always trying to do the right thing, always getting it wrong and making a ghastly mess. I did my best to straighten things out. When the war came, and the Mezentine showed up and started building the war-engines for us, I was pretty much in charge of the defense of the city. I’m no great shakes as a general, but the Mezentine’s catapult things really had given us a sporting chance. I honestly thought we might get away with it.”

  “And?”

  Miel hadn’t realized he’d paused. “Then it turned out that Orsea’s wife — the girl I was supposed to have married, but didn’t — she was …” He hesitated. Words were too clumsy, sometimes; treacherous, too, always trying to twist around and mean something slightly different. “I came across a letter,” he said, “which proved that she’d been writing to Valens, the Vadani duke, and he’d been writing back; for quite some time, by the look of it. Well, you know our history with the Vadani. There was other stuff in this letter, too; I didn’t really know what to make of it, but it was obvious enough that it’d cause a hell of a lot of trouble for her if Orsea ever saw it. And it wasn’t just her I was thinking of,” he added briskly. “I knew Orsea would be shattered; he really did love her, you see, and he’d never quite believed she loved him — which she did, I’m sure of it, but Orsea’s got such a low opinion of himself. Anyhow, it was as much for his sake as hers. I put the letter away somewhere safe, where nobody would ever find it. Why I didn’t burn the stupid thing I’ll never know, but there you are. My fault, for being an idiot.”