by K. J. Parker
So she was going home, then. The irony; at last he was talking to her, and tomorrow she was going away. Further irony; it had been his father himself who’d brought them together; Valens, come over here and talk to the Countess Sirupati. Father had been towering over her, the way the castle loomed over the village below, all turrets and battlements, and he’d been smiling, which accounted for the look of terror in her eyes. Valens had wanted to reassure her; it’s all right, he hasn’t actually eaten anybody for weeks. Instead, he’d stood and gawped, and then he’d looked down at his shoes (poulaines, with the ridiculous pointy toes). And then she’d asked him about the mechanical blacksmith.
He pulled himself together, like a boy trying to draw his father’s bow. “I’m not really the right person to ask,” he said. “I don’t know a lot about machines and stuff.”
Her expression didn’t change, except that it glazed slightly. Of course she didn’t give a damn about how the stupid machine worked; she was making conversation. “I think,” he went on, “that there’s a sort of wheel thing in its chest going round and round, and it’s linked to cogs and gears and what have you. Oh, and there’s cams, to turn the round and round into up and down.”
She blinked at him. “What’s a cam?” she asked.
“Ah.” What indeed? “Well, it’s sort of…” Three hours a week with a specially imported Doctor of Rhetoric, from whom he was supposed to learn how to express himself with clarity, precision and grace. “It’s sort of like this,” he went on, miming with his hands. “The wheel goes round, you see, and on the edge of the wheel there’s like a bit sticking out. Each time it goes round, it kind of bashes on a sort of lever arrangement, like a see-saw; and the lever thing pivots, like it goes down at the bashed end and up at the other end — that’s how the arm lifts — and when it’s done that, it drops down again under its own weight, nicely in time for the sticky-out bit on the wheel to bash it again. And so on.”
“I see,” she said. “Yes, I think I understand it now.”
“Really?”
“No,” she said. “But thank you for trying.”
He frowned. “Well, it was probably the worst explanation of anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”
She nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “But at least you didn’t say, oh, you’re only a girl, you wouldn’t understand.”
He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Tactically (four hours a week on the Art of War, with General Bozannes) he felt he probably had a slight advantage, a weak point in the line he could probably turn, if he could get his cavalry there in time. Somehow, though, he felt that the usages of the wars didn’t apply here, or if they did they shouldn’t. Odd; because even before he’d started having formal lessons, he’d run his life like a military campaign, and the usages of war applied to everything.
“Well,” he said, “I’m a boy and I haven’t got a clue. I suppose it’s different in Mezentia.”
“Oh, it is,” she said. “I’ve been there, actually.”
“Really? I mean, what’s it like?”
She withdrew into a shell of thought, shutting out him and all the world. “Strange,” she said. “Not like anywhere else, really. Oh, it’s very grand and big and the buildings are huge and all closely packed together, but that’s not what I meant. I can’t describe it, really.” She paused, and Valens realized he was holding his breath. “We all went there for some diplomatic thing, my father and my sisters and me; it was shortly before my eldest sister’s wedding, and I think it was something to do with the negotiations. I was thirteen then, no, twelve. Anyway, I remember there was this enormous banquet in one of the Guild halls. Enormous place, full of statues and tapestries, and there was this amazing painting on the ceiling, a sea-battle or something like that; and all these people were in their fanciest robes, with gold chains round their necks and silks and all kinds of stuff like that. But the food came on these crummy old wooden dishes, and there weren’t any knives or forks, just a plain wooden spoon.”
Fork? he wondered; what’s a farm tool got to do with eating? “Very odd,” he agreed. “What was the food like?”
“Horrible. It was very fancy and sort of fussy, the way it was put on the plate, with all sorts of leaves and frills and things to make it look pretty; but really it was just bits of meat and dumplings in slimy sauce.”
To the best of his recollection, Valens had never wanted anything in his entire life. Things had come his way, a lot of them; like the loathsome pointy-toed poulaines, the white thoroughbred mare that hated him and tried to bite his feet, the kestrel that wouldn’t come back when it was called, the itchy damask pillows, the ivory-handled rapier, all the valuable junk his father kept giving him. He’d been brought up to take care of his possessions, so he treated them with respect until they wore out, broke or died; but he had no love for them, no pride in owning them. He knew that stuff like that mattered to most people; it was a fact about humanity that he accepted without understanding. Other boys his age had wanted a friend; but Valens had always known that the Duke’s son didn’t make friends; and besides, he preferred thinking to talking, just as he liked to walk on his own. He’d never wanted to be Duke, because that would only happen when his father died. Now, for the first time, he felt what it was like to want something — but, he stopped to consider, is it actually possible to want a person? How? As a pet; to keep in a mews or a stable, to feed twice a day when not in use. It would be possible, of course. You could keep a person, a girl for instance, in a stable or a bower; you could walk her and feed her, dress her and go to bed with her, but.… He didn’t want ownership. He was the Duke’s son, as such he owned everything and nothing. There was a logical paradox here — Doctor Galeazza would be proud of him — but it was so vague and unfamiliar that he didn’t know how to begin formulating an equation to solve it. All he could do was be aware of the feeling, which was disturbingly intense.
Not that it mattered. She was going home tomorrow.
“Slimy sauce,” he repeated. “Yetch. You had to eat it, I suppose, or risk starting a war.”
She smiled, and he looked away, but the smile followed him. “Not all of it,” she said. “You’ve got to leave some if you’re a girl, it’s ladylike. Not that I minded terribly much.”
Valens nodded. “When I was a kid I had to finish everything on my plate, or it’d be served up cold for breakfast and lunch until I ate it. Which was fine,” he went on, “I knew where I stood. But when I was nine, we had to go to a reception at the Lorican embassy —”
She giggled. She was way ahead of him. “And they think that if you eat everything on your plate it’s a criticism, that they haven’t given you enough.”
She’d interrupted him and stolen his joke, but he didn’t mind. She’d shared his thought. That didn’t happen very often.
“Of course,” he went on, “nobody bothered telling me, I was just a kid; so I was grimly munching my way through my dinner —”
“Rice,” she said. “Plain boiled white rice, with noodles and stuff.”
He nodded. “And as soon as I got to the end, someone’d snatch my plate away and dump another heap of the muck on it and hand it back; I thought I’d done something bad and I was being punished. I was so full I could hardly breathe. But Father was busy talking business, and nobody down my end of the table was going to say anything; I’d probably be there still, only —”
He stopped dead.
“Only?”
“I threw up,” he confessed; it wasn’t a good memory. “All over the tablecloth, and their Lord Chamberlain.”
She laughed. He expected to feel hurt, angry. Instead, he laughed too. He had no idea why he should think it was funny, but it was.
“And was there a war?” she asked.
“Nearly,” he replied. “God, that rice. I can still taste it if I shut my eyes.”
Now she was nodding. “I was there for a whole year,” she said. “Lorica, I mean. The rice is what sticks in my mind too. No pun intended.”
“Oh yes.” She didn’t sound happy about it, which struck him as odd. He’d never been outside the dukedom in his life. “In fact, I’ve spent more time away than at home.”
Well, he had to ask. “Why?”
The question appeared to surprise her. “It’s what I’m for,” she said. “I guess you could say it’s my job.”
“Job?”
She nodded again. “Professional hostage. Comes of being the fifth of seven daughters. You see,” she went on, “we’ve got to get married in age order, it’s protocol or something, and there’s still two of them older than me left; I can’t get married till they are. So, the only thing I’m useful for while I’m waiting my turn is being a hostage. Which means, when they’re doing a treaty or a settlement or something, off I go on my travels until it’s all sorted out.”
“That’s…” That’s barbaric, he was about to say, but he knew better than that. He knew the theory perfectly well (statecraft, two hours a week with Chancellor Vetuarius), but he’d never given it any thought before; like people getting killed in the wars, something that happened but was best not dwelt on. “It must be interesting,” he heard himself say. “I’ve never been abroad.”
She paused, considering her reply. “Actually, it’s quite dull, mostly. It’s not like I get to go out and see things, and one guest wing’s pretty like another.”
(And, she didn’t say, there’s always the thought of what might happen if things go wrong.)
“I guess so,” he said. “Well, I hope it hasn’t been too boring here.”
“Boring?” She looked at him. “I wouldn’t say that. Going hunting with your father was —”
“Quite.” Valens managed not to wince. “I didn’t know he’d dragged you out with him. Was it very horrible?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been before, so the blood and stuff doesn’t bother me. It was the standing about waiting for something to happen that got to me.”
Valens nodded. “Was it raining?”
“Yes.”
“It always rains.” He pulled a face. “Whenever I hear about the terrible droughts in the south, and they’re asking is it because God’s angry with them or something, I know it’s just because Dad doesn’t go hunting in the south. He could earn a good living as a rainmaker.”
She smiled, but he knew his joke hadn’t really bitten home. That disconcerted him; usually it had them laughing like drains. Or perhaps they only laughed because he was the Duke’s son. “Well,” she said, “that was pretty boring. But the rest of it was…” She shrugged. “It was fine.”
The shrug hurt. “Any rate,” he said briskly, “you’ll be home for harvest festival.”
“It’s not a big thing where I come from,” she replied; and then, like an eclipse of the sun that stops the battle while the issue’s still in the balance, the chamberlain came out to drive them all into the Great Hall for singing and a recital by the greatest living exponent of the psaltery.
Valens watched her being bustled away with the other women, until an equerry whisked him off to take his place in the front row.
Ironically, the singer sang nothing but love-songs; aubades about young lovers parted by the dawn, razos between the pining youth and the cynical go-between, the bitter complaints of the girl torn from her darling to marry a rich, elderly stranger. All through the endless performance he didn’t dare turn round, but the thought that she was somewhere in the rows behind was like an unbearable itch. The greatest living psalterist seemed to linger spitefully over each note, as if he knew. The candles were guttering by the time he finally ground to a halt. There would be no more socializing that evening, and in the morning (early, to catch the coolest part of the day) she’d be going home.
(I could start a war, he thought, as he trudged up the stairs to bed. I could conspire with a disaffected faction or send the keys of a frontier post to the enemy; then we’d be at war again, and she could come back as a hostage. Or maybe we could lose, and I could go there; all the same to me, so long as…)
He lay in bed with the lamp flickering, just enough light to see dim shapes by. On the opposite wall, the same boarhounds that had given him nightmares when he was six carried on their endless duel with the boar at bay, trapped in the fibers of the tapestry. He could see them just as well when his eyes were shut; two of them, all neck and almost no head, had their teeth in the boar’s front leg, while a third had him by the ear and hung twisting in mid-air, while the enemy’s tusks ripped open a fourth from shoulder to tail. Night after night he’d wondered as he lay there which he was, the dogs or the pig, the hunters or the quarry. It was one of the few questions in his life to which he had yet to resolve an answer. It was possible that he was both, a synthesis of the two, made possible by the shared act of ripping and tearing. His father had had the tapestry put there in the hope that it’d inspire him with a love of the chase; but it wasn’t a chase, it was a single still moment (perhaps he couldn’t see it because it didn’t move, like the ring hanging from the rafter); and therefore it represented nothing. Tonight, it made him think of her, standing in the rain while the lymers snuffled up and down false trails, his father bitching at the harborers and the masters of the hounds, the courtiers silent and wet waiting for the violence to begin.
The peace won’t last, they said. They gave it three months, then six, then a year; just possibly three years, or five at the very most. Meanwhile, Count Sirupat’s third daughter married the Prince of Boha (bad news for the shepherds, the lumber merchants and the dealers in trained falcons, but good for the silver miners and refiners, who were the ones who mattered), and his fourth daughter married her third cousin, Valens’ fourth cousin, the Elector of Spalado.
Father celebrated Valens’ nineteenth birthday with a hunt; a three-day battue, with the whole army marshaled in the mountains to drive the combes and passes down to the valley, where the long nets were set up like lines of infantry waiting to receive a cavalry charge. On the morning of the third day, they flushed a magnificent mountain boar from the pine woods above the Blue Lake. One look at the monster’s tusks sent the master hurrying to find the Duke; it’d be nothing short of treason if it fell to anybody else. But the Duke was right up the other end of the valley; he came as quickly as he could, but when he got there the boar had broken through, slicing open two guardsmen and half a dozen hounds, and was making a run for it across the water-meadows. If it made it to the birch forest on the other side of the water, they’d never find it again, so if the Duke didn’t want to miss out on the trophy of a lifetime, he was going to have to address the boar on horseback. As far as Valens’ father was concerned, that wasn’t a problem; he galloped off after the boar, leaving his escort behind, and caught up with it about three hundred yards from the edge of the forest, in a small dip littered with granite outcrops. The boar didn’t want to stop and turn at bay. It could see safety, and all it had to do was run faster than a horse. The Duke managed to slow it up with an arrow in the left shoulder, but the thought of bringing down such a spectacular animal with the bow didn’t appeal to him in the least. Anybody could drain its strength with half a dozen snagging hits and then dispatch it tamely, like a farmer slaughtering the family pig. The Duke needed it to still be dangerous when he faced it down the shaft of a number four spear, or else it’d be a waste. So he urged on his horse and managed to overtake it with fifty yards or less to go. The boar was slowing down, favoring its wounded side, as he surged past it and struck with his lance. The strike was good, catching the boar just behind the ear and killing it outright. But in order to get in close he’d pulled his horse in too tight; when the boar dropped, the horse couldn’t clear it in time and stumbled, throwing its rider. The Duke fell badly, landing in a nest of granite boulders. His shoulder was smashed and so was his right eye-socket, and when he tried to get up, he found he couldn’t move. The dogs had caught up by then and swarmed over him to get t
o the boar; behind them came the front-riders, who saw what had happened and tried to lift him, until his roars of pain frightened them and they put him down again. It was dark by the time a surgeon arrived from the castle, and the lamps wouldn’t stay lit in the rain and wind. Later, they said that if they’d got to him earlier, or if the huntsmen hadn’t tried to move him, or if the surgeon had been able to see the full extent of the damage, it might have been different; as it was, there was very little they could do.
Valens wasn’t there when it happened. He’d stayed back from the main hunt, pretending he had a headache; then, just after they’d driven the square spinney, he’d been knocked down by an old fat sow nobody had realized was there. As it happened he’d suffered nothing more than a bruised shin and a mild scat on the head; but by then he’d had about as much of his extended birthday as he could take, and lay groaning and clutching his knee until they’d loaded him on the game cart and driven him back to the castle. When they brought Father home, Valens had been lying on his bed reading a book (a twelve-thousand-line didactic poem about beekeeping). Everyone was sure his father was going to die, so Valens was hustled down into the courtyard, where they’d rigged up a tent so they wouldn’t have to risk taking the Duke up the narrow spiral stairs of the gatehouse.
“It’s not good.” The Chancellor’s face was streaked with rain, drops of water running off the spikes of hair plastered to his forehead. Like tears, Valens thought, but really only rainwater. “Truth is, the doctor can’t say how bad it is, not without a proper examination; but I think we should assume the worst.” He looked harassed, like a man late for an appointment who has to stop and chat with someone he daren’t offend. “Which means there’s a great deal to be done, and not much time. The main thing, of course, is to secure the succession.”
It was as though he was talking a different language. “I don’t understand,” Valens said.
