Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  That would’ve been a good place to finish; a well-planned, controlled encounter, practically textbook. Instead, he found himself facing two men with spears, at precisely the moment when someone else way off to his right shot him in the shoulder with an arrow.

  It skidded off, needless to say, without piercing the steel of the pauldron. But he wasn’t expecting the impact — about the same as being kicked by a bullock — and it made him drop his sword. His first thought was to get his feet out of the way of the falling sharp thing; he skipped, found he was off balance from the impact of the arrow, and staggered like a drunk. One of the two Cure Hardy stabbed him in the pit of the stomach with his spear. Again the armor held good, but he lost his footing altogether and fell over backward, landing badly. All the breath jarred out of his lungs, like air from a bellows, and he saw his enemy take a step forward; he could visualize the next stage, the foot planted on his chest and the spearpoint driven down through the eyeslot of his helmet, but instead the other man stepped over him and went away. Some time later, thinking it through for the hundred-and-somethingth time, he realized that his opponent had assumed the spear-thrust had killed him.

  He lay still and quiet while men, enemies and friends, walked and ran around and over him; someone trod on his elbow, someone else stepped on his cheek, but his helmet took the weight. He knew he was too terrified to move. He’d seen animals behave in exactly the same way: a hare surrounded by four hounds, crouching absolutely still; a partridge with a broken wing, dropped by the hawk after an awkward swoop, lying in the snow with its eye two perfect concentric circles. Someone had told him once that predatory animals can only see movement; if the quarry stays still, they lose sight of it. He hoped it was true, because he had no other option.

  Some time later, a hand reached down and pulled him up. His legs weren’t working and he slumped, but someone caught him and asked if he was all right. The voice was Vadani, not the intonation of someone addressing his Duke; he muttered, “Thanks, I’m fine,” and whoever it was let go of him and went away.

  He shook his head like a wet dog and looked up. Directly in front of him the sun was rising; in front of it he could see a smaller, thinner fire rising from a Cure Hardy tent. There were many men in front of him, only a few behind, and most of the bodies on the ground, still or moving slightly, were Cure Hardy. Valens wasn’t a man who jumped to conclusions, but the first indications were hopeful. Probably, they’d won.

  In which case — he scrabbled in his memory for the shape of the battle — in that case, the dismounted cavalry should by now have stove in the enemy flank, allowing his infantry to roll them up on to their camp, where the heavy cavalry should have been waiting to take them in rear. That would be satisfactory, on the higher level. More immediately relevant, the enemy survivors and stragglers would tend to be squeezed out at either end, and once they were clear of the slaughter they’d turn east, which was the direction he was facing. He turned round, but he couldn’t see anybody coming toward him. That was all right, then.

  Someone — a Vadani infantryman in a hurry — shouted at him, but he didn’t catch what the man had said. Immediate dangers; mostly from Cure Hardy knocked down or wounded, if he got in their way. His people would, of course, notice sooner or later that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Battles had been lost at the last moment because a general had been killed, or was believed to be dead. Wearily, and worried about the pain and weakness in his ankle (he’d turned it over when he fell), he started to run after the main body of his men. He went about five yards, then slowed to an energetic hobble.

  It was just as well that someone recognized him. There was shouting, men turning round and running toward him, like the surge of well-wishers who greet an athlete as he crosses the finishing line; as though he’d done something wonderful, just by still being alive. “What happened to you?” someone roared in his ear, as overprotective hands grabbed and mauled him. “Are you all right? We thought —”

  “I’m not. What’s happening?”

  “Like a bloody charm. Rolled them up like a carpet.”

  Suddenly, Valens found that he no longer cared terribly much. “That’s good,” he said. “What’s the full picture? I’ve been out of it.”

  Someone made a proper report; someone else kept interrupting, with conflicting but mostly trivial information. Valens tried to summon the clear diagram back into his mind, but it was crumpled and torn, he couldn’t put it all together. For some reason, that ruined any feeling of accomplishment he might have had. Not like a hunt, where you have the tangible proof of success, dead meat stretched out on the grass. There were plenty of dead bodies, but in war they aren’t the point. Success is vaguer, more metaphysical. Perhaps for the first time, Valens admitted to himself that he found the whole business revolting, even a relatively clean victory, as this appeared to be. His mind slipped on the idea, because war was his trade, as the Duke of the Vadani; but he felt a phrase coalesce in his mind: given the choice between killing animals and killing people, I’d rather kill animals.

  The fighting was still going on, bits and pieces, scraps of unfinished business; but that could all be left to sergeants and captains. He allowed information to slide off him, like water off feathers. Then someone said: “And we got the chief, Skeddanwhatsit.”

  Valens looked up; he was being escorted back to the camp by half a dozen men whose names he ought to know but couldn’t remember offhand. “Fine,” he said.

  “He’s back at the camp.”

  It took Valens a moment to realize that they meant the man was still alive. Now that was interesting. “Good,” he said. “I’ll see him in an hour. Find an interpreter.”

  “He speaks Mezentine,” someone said. “Quite well, actually.”

  Catching them alive; that was an interesting idea. Worth the effort, because you could talk to them, and learn from them. He remembered the conversation he’d had the previous day, riding to the parley. “Find that young clown Gabbaeus and fetch him along,” he said. “He was dead keen to meet a real Cure Hardy.”

  Nobody said anything for long enough to make words unnecessary. Pity; the boy was a second cousin, and he remembered him from years back (from before It happened, before Father died and everything changed; why is it, Valens wondered, that I tend to think of that time as real life, and everything that’s happened since I became Duke as some sort of dream or pretense?). He made a resolution to have Skeddanlothi’s throat cut, after he’d finished chatting with him. Barbaric and unfair, but so was his second cousin getting killed in a stupid little show like this.

  Once they’d brought him to his tent, they left him alone for a while (he had to shout at them a bit, but they got the message). Slowly, taking his time over each buckle and tightly knotted point, he took off his armor. It was a ritual; he had no idea what it meant or why he found it useful. As usual, it had taken a degree of abuse. The middle lame on the pauldron that had turned the arrow was bent, so that the unit no longer flexed smoothly; if he’d tried to strike a blow, it’d probably have jammed up. The armorer would fix it, of course, and he’d have a word or two to say about the fit. There was a small dent in the placket of the breastplate where that man had stuck him with his spear. A couple of rivets had torn through on the left cuisse. It pleased him to be able to shed his bruised steel skin, like a snake, and have his smooth, soft, unmarked skin underneath. The simple act of taking off forty pounds of steel is as refreshing as a good night’s sleep, inevitably makes you feel livelier; each limb weighs less, takes less effort to move; it’s like being in water, or suddenly being much younger, fitter and stronger. Each shedding of the skin marks a stage in growth, even if it’s only death avoided one more time; each time I get away with it, he thought, I really ought to come out of it a deeper, wiser, better person. Shame about that.

  A page came in, properly diffident, and left behind a plate of bread and cheese and a big jug of water. He’d forgotten the cup, but Valens grinned and drank from the jug, putting the
spout in his mouth and swallowing. He ate the cheese and most of the bread, instinctively moved his hand to sweep the leftovers onto the floor for the dogs — but there weren’t any, not here — and put the plate down on the bed. His ankle was throbbing, but he knew it was just a minor wrench, something that’d sort itself out in a day or so. His shoulder and arm would be painful tomorrow, but they hadn’t stiffened up yet. He got to his feet and went to find the prisoner.

  They had him in a small tent in the middle of the camp; he was sitting on a big log, which Valens thought was odd until he saw the chain; a steel collar round the poor bastard’s neck, and the end of the chain attached to the log by a big staple. Someone brought him one of those folding chairs; he gauged the length of the chain and added to it the fullest extent of the prisoner’s reach, put the chair down and sat on it. Two guards stood behind him.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Valens.”

  Skeddanlothi looked at him.

  “My people tell me,” Valens went on, “that I won the battle, and that your lot have been wiped out to the last man.” He paused. The other man was looking at him as though he was the ugliest thing in the world. “I don’t suppose that’s strictly true, there’ll be one or two stragglers who’ll have slipped outside the net, but they won’t get far, I don’t suppose. If it’d help, we’ve counted” — he took out a slip of paper he’d been given — “let’s see, five hundred and twenty-three dead, seventy-two captured; if you’re fond of round numbers, I make that five unaccounted for. If you like, you could tell me how many you started the day with, and then I’d know for sure.”

  Skeddanlothi didn’t like, apparently. Valens hadn’t expected him to.

  “We rounded up a few of your scouts the other day,” he went on, “and they said you came out here to steal enough to get married on. Is that right?”

  No reply; so he leaned back a little in his chair and gave one of the guards some instructions. The guard moved forward; Skeddanlothi jumped up, but the guard knelt smoothly down, grabbed a handful of the chain and yanked hard. Skeddanlothi went down on his face, and the guard pressed his boot on his neck.

  “Keep going till he says something,” Valens called out. “He’s no bloody use if he just sits there staring.”

  It was quite some time before Skeddanlothi screamed. Valens had the guard apply a few extra pounds of pressure, just to convince him that he couldn’t stand pain. Then he asked the guard to help him back onto his log, and repeated the question.

  “Yes,” Skeddanlothi said; he was rubbing his neck, not surprisingly. “It’s the custom of our people.”

  “To win honor and respect, I suppose,” Valens said.

  “Yes.”

  “Presumably,” Valens went on, “most of the time you raid each other — the Aram Chantat against the Partetz, the Doce Votz against the Rosinholet, and so forth.”

  This time, Skeddanlothi nodded.

  “That’s interesting,” Valens said. “To most of us, you’re all just Cure Hardy. We don’t think of you as a lot of little tribes beating each other up. To us, you’re hundreds of thousands of savages, penned in by a desert.” He paused. “Why do you fight each other like that?”

  Skeddanlothi frowned, as though the question didn’t make sense. “They are our enemies,” he said.

  “Why?”

  It took Skeddanlothi a moment to answer. “They always have been. We fight over grazing, water, cattle. Everything.”

  Valens raised his eyebrows. “Why?” he said. “By all accounts, it’s a huge country south of the desert. Can’t you just move out of each other’s way or something?”

  Skeddanlothi shook his head. “Most of the land is bad,” he said. “The cattle graze a valley for three years, the grass stops growing. So we have to move away until it comes right.”

  “On to somebody else’s land,” Valens said.

  “Land doesn’t belong to anybody,” Skeddanlothi said, “it’s just there. We drive them off it, they have to go somewhere else. When it’s all eaten up, we have to move again. Everybody moves.”

  Valens thought for a moment. “You all move round, like the chair dance.”

  Skeddanlothi scowled. “Dance?”

  “We have this children’s game,” Valens explained. “The dancers dance round in a ring, and in the middle there’s a row of chairs, one for each dancer. When the music stops, everyone grabs a chair. Then one chair gets taken out, and the dance starts again. Next time the music stops, everyone dives for a chair, but obviously one of them doesn’t get one, so he’s out. And so on, till there’s just one chair left, and two dancers.”

  Skeddanlothi shrugged. “We move around,” he said. “If we win, we get good grazing for two years, three maybe. If we lose, we have to go into the bad land, where the grass is thin and there’s very little water. But that makes us fight harder the next time we go to war.”

  Valens stood up. He was disappointed. “These people are stupid,” he said. “Make him tell you where this secret way across the desert is. Do what it takes; I don’t want him for anything else.”

  He made a point of not looking back as he left the tent; he didn’t want to see terror in the prisoner’s eyes, if it was there, and if there was something else there instead he knew it wouldn’t interest him. He went back to his tent, drank some more water and called a staff meeting in two hours.

  My own fault, he thought. I wanted them to be more than just savages. I wanted him to tell me that the girl’s father had sent him on a quest for something — her weight in gold, or five hundred milk-white horses, or even the head of the Vadani Duke in a silver casket; I could have forgiven him for that. But instead they’re just barbarians, and they killed my poor cousin. I can’t put that in a letter, it’s just crude and ugly.

  He put his feet up on the bed, closed his eyes. Useful information: a map, or the nearest thing to it that could be wrung out of the savage on the log; a map marked with the name and territory of each sect — no, that wouldn’t be any use, not if they moved round all the time. All right; a list, then, the names of all the sects; he was sure there wasn’t a definitive list anywhere, just a collation from various scrappy and unreliable sources. What else; what else, for pity’s sake? He had a specimen, for study; if he had a talking roebuck or boar or partridge he could interrogate for information likely to be useful to the hunter — he could think of a great many things he’d like to ask a roebuck: why do you lie up in the upland woods at night and come down the hill to feed just before dawn? When do you leave the winter grazing and head up to the outer woods for the first sweet buds? But torturing data out of a savage was a chore he was pleased to leave to others, even though he knew they wouldn’t get the best, choicest facts, because they didn’t have the understanding. The truth is, Valens realized, you can only hunt what you love. Chasing and killing what bores or disgusts you is just slaughter, because you don’t want to understand it, get into its mind.

  (My father never understood that, he thought; he hunted, and made war, because he liked to win. I’m better at both than he ever was.)

  He sent orders, hustling out the intrusive thoughts. Soon he’d be on duty again, holding the full picture in his mind. Wasn’t there some tribe or sect somewhere who believed that the world was an image in the mind of God; that He thought, or dreamed, the whole world, and things only existed so long as He held them in mind? There were, of course, no gods; but you could see how a busy man might like to believe in something like that.

  An hour later a doctor came bothering him about his ankle. He managed to be polite, because the man was only doing his job; besides, there was something on his mind that wouldn’t go away. It took him a long time to realize what it was; the problem buzzed quietly like a trapped fly in his mind all through the staff meeting, disrupting the pattern he was trying to build there like a bored dog in a room full of ornaments. In fact, it was the constant barrage of names (people, places) that finally showed him where it was.

  After the staff had disperse
d, he called for two guards and went to the tent where the prisoner was being held. Skeddanlothi was in a sorry state. He lay on his face on the ground, his back messy with lash-cuts, his hair slicked with blood. He didn’t look up when Valens came in.

  “We got the list,” said one of the guards. “At least, we got a list, if you see what I mean. Could be a load of shit he thought up out of his head, just to be ornery.”

  Valens had forgotten about the list; which seemed rather reprehensible, since so much pain and effort had gone into procuring it.

  “Difficult bastard,” the guard went on — was he making conversation, like someone at a diplomatic reception? “He really doesn’t like it when it hurts, but each time you’ve got to start all over again, if you follow me. We’ve had to bust him up quite a bit.”

  “That’s all right,” Valens said. “You cut along and get some rest, write up your report.”

  They left; changing shifts, quite usual. Valens went over and sat on the log. The prisoner didn’t move, so he tugged on the chain once or twice.