by K. J. Parker
Well, it got better eventually. One day she got up off the floor, crawled to the wall and slumped against it. A day or so later, I came back from getting in logs to find her sweeping the floor. That’s all she did for a long time: cleaning, tidying, housework. Ridiculous; but I just left her to it. I didn’t even try talking to her. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed all the bloodstains away with a bucket of water and a bit of rag.
The food ran out. I didn’t want to leave her, but I had to go. I took the cart and went out to the nearest farm; I knew I could get there and back in a day. It was dark when I got home, and when I came through the door she asked me where I’d been. I told her. We didn’t talk anymore that night. She’s never said what happened; at least, not to me. But I found a piece of paper; she wrote it all down, about four sentences. Just the facts.
I know what she wrote is true, by the way. It was the cut that proved it; the fact that it ran from right to left. Framea and my daughter are right-handed, like me; we all are, in our family. But Daurenja’s left-handed — at least, he favors the left hand, though he’s practically ambidextrous. They say it’s a sign of great intelligence, don’t they?
22
“Quite right,” a voice said behind them. “Or that’s what I’ve always told myself.”
Daurenja was awake. He’d tried to wriggle himself into a tolerable sitting position, but instead had flopped over on his side, so that he seemed as though he was talking to the ground. The gag, which he’d somehow contrived to work loose, hung round his neck like a stockman’s muffler, and he looked like a clown; but Miel had to grab hold of Framain’s arm to stop him charging over and beating him unconscious.
“My father didn’t like me being left-handed,” Daurenja went on conversationally. “He thought it was some kind of defect. I got tired of getting bashed every time I picked up a spoon, so I learned how to use my right hand too. I think he did me a favor. Having to do everything cack-handed all those years taught me dexterity.”
Miel couldn’t look at him; he was too busy restraining Framain. “Is it true?” he asked. “What he just … ?”
“Every word.” Nothing in his tone of voice except whole-hearted corroboration. “The boy caught me raping his sister. I was holding the knife to her throat so she’d stay quiet; it was bad luck he woke up when he did. I jumped up and swiped at him; like a fool, I’d forgotten I still had the knife in my hand. But that’s not an excuse. If I hadn’t been holding it, I expect I’d have killed him bare-handed.”
Miel hesitated, then asked, “Why?”
“Why kill him? To shorten the odds.” An explanation of the obvious to a slow-witted person. “I had to escape. I knew I could handle either of the men on his own, but both together might’ve been a problem. One from two leaves one. A great strength of mine is the ability to see straight to the crux of the problem.”
Miel could feel Framain’s grip tighten on his arm, but now he was holding him up rather than back.
“If you meant to ask, why did I rape the girl …” A laugh, dry as sand. “Story of my life, really. Just when I think I’ve found the right place to be, the right work to do, my heart lets me down.Always the same. Love has always been my undoing.”
Miel glanced over his shoulder. She wasn’t there.
Framain caught his eye and shook his head. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “Just leave her alone.”
It occurred to Miel that this probably wasn’t true, but he made a conscious decision not to do anything about it.
“We need him to get us to the Vadani,” Framain said quietly. Miel assumed he was talking to himself.
“That’s right,” Daurenja said. “You need me. For which,” he added, “I’m grateful. I’ve got no illusions about myself, there’s an unpleasant side to my nature and I can’t help it. But I always find a way to put things right. It’s my rule that I live by. Mostly, all I can do is send money; which is fine when you’re dealing with peasants and innkeepers, but this time I wanted to go that extra step further. That’s why it’s taken me so long, in your case. It’s taken me a while to find something valuable enough to give you.” He sounded like an indulgent uncle. “As soon as I got it, I came here as fast as I could. You being captured by the Mezentines was sheer luck; it meant I could save you; added bonus. I went to the house, you see, and as soon as I got there and saw the place had been turned over I figured out what’d happened. It was obvious they’d bring you to the Loyalty. Anyway, it’ll be a weight off my mind. All this time it’s been bothering me to death. Really, I had no choice about killing the boy; it had to be done, but I’m sorry. Soon we’ll be all square again, and I can move on.”
Miel had closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them again. “We’ve got to take him to Duke Valens,” he told Framain. “We can’t just kill him, out here in the wilderness. He should be tried and executed. Killing him ourselves would be no better than murder, it’s what he’d do. You do see that, don’t you?”
“If they were going to kill me, they’d have done it by now.” Daurenja sounded weary, almost bored. “But if you take me to the Vadani, I can put things right. That’s all I ask.”
“I’ll gag him,” Miel said.
“Wait a moment.” Framain sounded different. “What do you mean, you’ve found something valuable?”
“Just that.” A pleasant voice. “Surely you’ve grasped by now, the porcelain idea’s no good anymore, it’s been overtaken by events. Even if we cracked the colors problem tomorrow, we couldn’t use it. You can’t run a successful factory in the middle of a war, in occupied territory, with the enemy promising to kill every Eremian they can find. No, what I’ve got is bigger than porcelain, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Valens will give every last thaler he’s got for it; and if that’s not enough, we can sell it to the Mezentines. It’s a weapon, you see. It’ll make all their scorpions and mangonels and onagers and siege engines obsolete overnight. There’s just one step more I need to fix and I’m ready. We’ll be partners again, just like before. Finally, we’ll both get what we wanted when we started out. Come on, Framain, you know me. I do a lot of very bad things from time to time, but I’m not a liar. I needn’t have come for you at all. I could’ve left you there. But you know I always pay my debts.” Daurenja paused for a moment, and Miel couldn’t help marveling at the spectacle: a man bound and hobbled like a colt for gelding, talking to the ground, but sounding like a kind-hearted lord cajoling a proud, stubborn tenant into accepting charity. He could see now how a weak man like Framain wouldn’t have the audacity to kill him. “Or you could cut my throat right now,” Daurenja went on, “and for all I know you might make it safely into Vadani territory; you might find Valens’ column, and he might take you in. He might even let you earn your keep as a clerk; you can write legibly, after all, and where there’s an army there’s always bookkeepers. Or you could join the Vadani court as my honored guest. Did I mention I’m the second most important man in the duchy these days? Well, maybe third most important right now. But I’m expecting a promotion very soon.” He sighed. “You owe it to her, you know,” he said. “She deserves some kind of a life, and what’s she got to look forward to, now the porcelain idea’s fallen through? She’s too old to marry, no dowry, no family. Wasn’t the whole point of the exercise to give her the kind of future she deserves? I know you by now, Framain, you’re a dreamer and a realist at the same time. Nothing’s going to bring your son back, but quite unexpectedly you’ve got a real chance to get what you wanted all along. Or you could kill me in a fit of pique and carry on fending for yourself. But that’s never been your strongest suit, has it?”
Framain was silent for a long time. When he eventually spoke, he said, “Tell me about this weapon.”
Daurenja laughed. “With pleasure. It’ll be a simple thing, like an iron log with a hole down the middle, but it’ll smash down walls and kill men by the thousand; oh, and an idiot or a cripple could work it just as well as the strongest man alive. I’
m an engineer; I’m the best there is, it’s a gift I was born with. I’m a genius maker-of-things who’s spent his life looking for something worth making. When I’ve finished, it’ll be perfect. Everybody in the world will want it, more than anything else; more than love. And I risked my life to find you and beg you to accept a half-share in it, as a gift. Just for once, Framain, do something intelligent.”
Before Miel could react, Framain had jumped to his feet. As he marched across the hollow he stooped to pick something up — a stone, presumably, there wasn’t anything else it could be. He crouched, swung his arm and bashed the side of Daurenja’s head; there was a solid noise, like a maul striking an oak wedge.
“I hate the sound of his voice,” Framain said distantly. “Could you possibly find me a bit of rag? I’m going to gag him properly this time.”
Miel looked but couldn’t find anything. Framain got impatient; he tore another strip off Daurenja’s shirt and used that.
“What are you going to do?” Miel asked quietly.
Framain sagged, like a man who’s just put down a load that was too heavy for him to carry. “He’ll take us to the Vadani,” he said.
“Do you believe what he said? About this weapon?”
“Yes.” Slowly, Framain sat down again. “Yes, it makes a lot of sense, actually. I think I told you how preoccupied he was, for a while before it happened. I had an idea his mind was on something else. Presumably, this weapon of his.”
“And you think he’ll share it with you?”
Framain nodded. “I believe the offer’s genuine. That’s quite in character. He thinks people are like machines. If they break down, they can be fixed.” He sighed. “If he’s taught me one thing, it’s that there’s no such thing as evil.” He laughed. “Doesn’t that seem like an odd conclusion to draw, from my dealings with something like that? But it’s true, I’m sure of it. What I mean is, it’s possible for someone to do the sort of things he’s done and still regard himself as a more or less normal human being; he thinks to himself, I’ve done something wrong, but it’s fine, I can put it right. If there really was such a thing as evil, he couldn’t think like that. No, it’s not that easy — some people are monsters, they’re evil through and through; you tell yourself that so you can make sense of the world. It’s like believing in a religion, a god and a devil, all good on one side, all bad on the other. But that’s not how it is. Instead, you’ve got people who are capable of doing things that you can’t even bear to think about; for bloody certain you can’t ever forgive them. But they can still feel guilt and shame, they can still fall in love, try and do the right thing, appreciate what the right thing is — and then they cheerfully go and do the next unbelievably bad thing, and it all goes round again. So you tell yourself, it’s because they’re not right in the head, it’s an illness, they aren’t in control of what they do. That’s another easy way round it, and of course it isn’t true. And then you get people like me; and people like you, as well. It should be up to us to kill men like him on sight, like wolves, but we don’t. We talk ourselves into believing that it’d be wrong, which is just that same old belief again, an excuse for not facing something we can’t understand. I don’t know,” he added, slumping forward. “You heard what he said? My heart lets me down, love’s always been my undoing. I knew he was in love with her — you can call it obsessed or besotted if you like, but that’s just flavors of words. I’d been aware of it for some time. I knew she’d never have anything to do with him, because of how he looks, because he’s a freak. I thought sooner or later he’d say something and she’d bite his head off; I was worried his work would suffer, or he’d up and leave, and I needed him to mix the colors for the porcelain. I didn’t realize I was supposed to kill him, murder him in his sleep or put mercury in his beer, because if I let him live something terrible would happen.” He was crouched forward, his head in his hands. “And when you came, it was just the same. When you came back with the sulfur, because of her; I should’ve smashed your head in with a hammer, instead of pulling you out of the bog. You’ve done almost as much harm as he did, and all for love. What am I supposed to do, sit up on the roof with a bow and arrow and shoot everybody who comes within bowshot? All I ever wanted was to have some money, like I was born to.”
Miel thought for a long time. “Seems like you might get it after all.”
Framain laughed again; practically a sob. “That’s why I maintain there’s no evil,” he said. “Because I’m not an evil monster, am I? But I’m no different to him. I’m going to take his offer, because — well, like he said, my son’s dead, that can’t be helped now, and I do want the money.”
In order to earn his commission in the Duke’s household cavalry, Nennius Nennianus had mortgaged the sixty-seven acres of apple and pear orchards his dead uncle had left him, spent nine years as a garrison lieutenant in the coldest, remotest station on the frontier and done nothing while his childhood sweetheart despaired of waiting for him and married a middle-aged lumber contractor. Three months after achieving his lifelong ambition, he found himself in charge of, responsible for and to blame for a scene from any officer’s nightmare: a column of wagons with their wheels off and their guts hanging out, stranded in plain view on a hillside with the enemy expected any moment.
The problem was his training. Nine years on the frontier had taught him how to deploy soldiers as easily as he moved his own fingers, but nothing he’d learned in theory or from bitter experience had prepared him for dealing with carpenters. Plead with them; they assume you’re weak. Yell at them; they look shocked and walk away. Can’t bribe them; you’ve got nothing they want. They reminded him of the old gray sow on his uncle’s farm; lure it with apples, drag on it with a rope, break sticks across its back, and all you’d do was make it more stubborn.
The chief carpenter (not that they had a coherent hierarchy or chain of command; each time he tried to talk to them, he found himself facing someone new) was explaining it to him. They’d done as the Duke ordered and cut and shaped new timbers for the knackered carts out of green wood. As they’d predicted all along, green wood simply wouldn’t take the load; it splintered, or it split, or the heads of the nails pulled through. They’d wasted their time, and the carts were just as busted as they’d been when they started, if not more so. Suggestions? The carpenter paused for thought and internal debate. It might be possible to cut timbers out of half the carts and use them to bodge up the other half, but he was fairly sure it wouldn’t work. He’d try it, if so ordered, but he didn’t hold out much hope; and by then, of course, half the carts would be fucked up beyond all possibility of salvage. Other than that, he had nothing constructive to offer.
There must be something you can do. Nennius considered saying it, but decided to save his breath. Instead, he thanked the carpenter with the stately politeness peculiar to soldiers talking to thoroughly obnoxious civilians, and walked away before he lost his temper completely.
Sitting on a stone, staring up at the crest of the mountain ridge where the enemy would be most likely to come from, he tried to figure out where he’d gone wrong and was forced to the conclusion that he hadn’t. He found the thought profoundly disturbing. An error on his part could probably be put right — if not by him, by someone cleverer and more capable. An impossible situation, on the other hand, was beyond fixing, therefore desperate and quite likely fatal. The infuriating thing was that on the frontier, he’d have known exactly what to do next. Fall the men in, load as much as they could carry on their backs and start walking to wherever it was they were supposed to go to. The only sensible course; but that wasn’t what he’d been told to do. His orders were simple and clear; as soon as the wagons have been mended, bring them on and catch us up. It was like being thrown in the sea with weights tied to your feet, with orders to save yourself but on no account to swim.
Below in the valley, he could just make out a group of deer, coming down out of a small copse to drink in the river. Eight hundred yards? Nine? Not so easy to j
udge distance in this terrain. Visibility, on the other hand, wasn’t a problem. He could see, and be seen, for miles. He felt an obligation to be busy with something military; he should be scanning the slopes above him, figuring out the route the attacking enemy would be most likely to take, planning the details of his hopeless, pointless final defense. Manhandle the derelict wagons into the shuttered-square formation he’d been told about in the briefing, to force the enemy to storm an iron-plated fortress under withering volleys from the archers. He could do that. If he fought the defense with determination, ingenuity and passion, he could probably hold out for two days, by which time the water would run out and make his efforts irrelevant. There was a riverful of water in the valley, but he only had a finite quantity of barrels. Then again, a skillful negotiator could wrangle favorable terms of surrender, if he wasn’t facing an enemy you couldn’t trust as far as you could spit. On the frontier he’d have made the effort. Here, he simply couldn’t see the point.
Suddenly, he realized that four dots he’d been staring at for the last five minutes were, in fact, moving. They were coming down the slope — not following his projected optimum route, but maybe they weren’t as good at tactics as he was — eleven or maybe twelve hundred yards away. Deer; no, because deer saunter. Only horses plod.
Having perceived the enemy approach, proceed immediately to place your command in a posture of defense. He stood up (his back twinged from careless sitting) and looked around. A few of the men had seen the specks already; they were motionless and staring, as though they’d heard tales about horses but never imagined they’d actually get to see one. The rest of them were drifting slowly through the motions of their appointed futile tasks, resigned, bored and deep-down convinced that the enemy wouldn’t come and they’d all get out of this mess in one piece. Maybe they aren’t the enemy after all, Nennius told himself. They could just be travelers (in a war zone, in the middle of nowhere), or shepherds, or messengers from Valens come to tell him that the rest of the army had just won an overwhelming victory, and the war was over.