Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  But Orsea shook his head. “This isn’t what we were going to talk about,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t.” Miel tried to recall what the meeting was supposed to deal with. “Ambassadors from the Cure Hardy,” he remembered. “Arriving some time next week.”

  “Yes,” Orsea replied. “Well, they’re early. Turned up this morning. Suddenly appeared out of nowhere, according to Cerba.”

  “Who?”

  Slight frown. “Cerba Phocas, the warden of the southern zone. Your second cousin.”

  Miel shrugged. Practically everybody above the rank of captain was his second cousin. “Right,” he said. “Sorry, you were saying. Hang on, though —”

  “In fact,” Orsea continued, “one of his patrols took them for bandits and arrested them, which is a great way to start a diplomatic relationship.”

  Don’t laugh, Miel ordered himself. “Well, at least it shows our border security’s up to scratch,” he said. “But what were they doing on Cerba’s patch? I thought they’d be coming up the Lonazep road.”

  “Don’t ask me,” Orsea said, standing up. “I suppose they must’ve wandered off the road and got lost. I don’t think it’d be tactful to ask them. Anyhow, I’ve rescheduled the meeting for just after early vespers; we can go straight in to dinner as soon as it’s over. God knows what we’re going to give them to eat.”

  They discussed the agenda for the meeting for a while. Miel did his best without being too obvious about it, but Orsea refused to cheer up. A pity; establishing proper grown-up diplomatic relations with the Cure Hardy was easily the biggest success of Orsea’s reign so far, and he’d mostly brought it about by his own efforts; choosing and sending presents, writing letters, refusing to be put off by the lack of a reply or even the disappearance of his messengers. Also, Miel couldn’t help thinking (though he’d made himself promise not to entertain such thoughts), if the Republic actually was considering an invasion of Eremia, a rapprochement with their barbarous southern neighbors couldn’t come at a better time. Given the Mezentines’ paranoia about the Cure Hardy, it wouldn’t take much in the way of dark hints and artful suggestion to persuade them that Orsea had concluded an offensive and defensive alliance with the savages, and that war with Eremia would open the door to limitless hordes of Cure Hardy tribesmen, poised to flood down out of the mountains like volcanic lava. That alone might be enough to avert an invasion, provided that the Mezentines didn’t think too long or too hard about how such hordes might be expected to cross the uncrossable desert.

  As soon as he could get away without being rude, Miel left the long solar and crossed the quadrangle to the east apartments. At least, he thought, the Cure Hardy had taken his mind off the letter for a while.

  “It’s all right,” Miel whispered to Orsea, as they took their seats in the lesser day-chamber, behind a table the size of a castle door. “I sent the kitchen steward to the market, and he bought up all the game he could find: venison, boar, hare, mountain goat, you name it. Also, he’s doing roast mutton, guinea fowl, peahen and rabbit in cider. There’s got to be something in that lot they’ll eat.”

  “Marvelous,” Orsea said. “And plenty of booze too, I hope.”

  Miel shuddered slightly. “Enough to float a coal barge. Wine, beer, porter, mead, cider…”

  “Then we should be all right,” Orsea said, with a faint sigh of relief. “At least something’ll go right. Are you nervous?”

  “Petrified.”

  “Same here. Right, we’d better have them in and take a look at them.”

  Miel nodded to the chamberlain, who slid noiselessly away and returned with the fascinating, exotic guests. Miel and Orsea stood up; Miel bowed slightly, Orsea nodded.

  There were five of them. Miel’s first impression was simple surprise. He’d been expecting — what, savages in animal skins with rings through their eyebrows, something like that. Instead, he saw five old men in identical plain brown robes, loose at the neck and full in the sleeve, some kind of coarse wool; they had sandals on their feet, and rather splendid silk sashes round their waists. Their faces reminded him irresistibly of hawks, on the bow-perch in a mews; the same bright, round eyes, the stillness of the head, the set expression. All five of their faces were tanned and deeply lined; they all wore short white beards, and their hair was cropped close; one of them was bald, with a slightly pointed head. They bowed too; if pressed, Miel would have said they were trying to copy their hosts’ manner of greeting.

  Translator, he thought. We need a translator, or how the hell are we going to understand each other?

  While he was cursing himself for overlooking this vital point, the bald man cleared his throat with a soft cough and said, “Thank you for agreeing to see us.” His pronunciation was excellent received Mezentine; his voice deep, his accent noticeable but not in the least intrusive. He had a little stub of a nose and small, almost translucent ears. “We apologize,” he went on, “for arriving early; we had already embarked on our journey when our guide pointed out to us a more direct road, which we followed. We hope we have not inconvenienced you.”

  “Not at all.” Orsea was sounding nervously cheerful; at least, Miel could construe nerves in his tone of voice. He’d known Orsea too long to be able to judge whether anybody else would pick up on it. The savages didn’t seem at all apprehensive, as though they did this sort of thing every day before breakfast. “We’re delighted to meet you, and thank you for coming. My name is Orsea Orseolus, and this is my adviser Miel Ducas.”

  The bald man dipped his head, and recited his name and those of his colleagues. They slipped through Miel’s mind like eels, but he’d never been good with names; he fancied the bald man was called something like Carlaregion; he didn’t have a clue what it’d look like written down.

  Orsea bowed again; they bowed back. Orsea tried some vague gestures to get them to sit down, which eventually they did. Something about the chairs bothered them, but they didn’t say anything.

  “Perhaps,” the bald man said, “we should get down to business. You would like to establish a formal diplomatic mission to the Biau Votz.”

  Miel blinked. Surely they hadn’t got the wrong savages, after all? Or was Biau whatsit the name of their capital city; except nomads don’t have cities. In that case, what was the whatever he’d just said? Some name they called their leader?

  Orsea said, “Yes, absolutely.” Miel knew he was confused too, and trying hard not to show it. Was one of the savages smiling?

  “We would, of course, be happy to forge this historic link,” the bald man went on. “However, there are various issues that we should perhaps address at this stage; matters you may not be aware of, which might influence your decision. If you have already considered these points, please forgive us.”

  He paused. Really, Miel thought, they’re far more polite than I expected. “Please go on,” Orsea said. The bald man nodded, then looked at the man on his left, who said: “We must confess, we are a little puzzled why you should have chosen us, rather than, say, the Flos Glaia or the Lauzeta. Not that we do not appreciate the honor of being the first sect of the Cure Hardy to open a dialogue with your people; but our circuit brings us to the edge of the desert only once every twenty years, and in the interim we spend most of our time in the Culomb and Rosinholet valleys — by our calculations, some eight hundred miles from the nearest point on your border. With the best will in the world, communications between us and yourselves would be difficult. We should point out that the sects through whose circuits your envoys would need to pass are nearly all hostile to us, and accordingly we would not be able to guarantee their safety outside our own circuit. Furthermore,” the man went on, frowning slightly, “although naturally we have only a sketchy and incomplete knowledge of your economic position, we have to ask whether any regular trade between yourselves and us would be worth the effort. The cost of transporting bulk foodstuffs, for example, would be prohibitive; likewise heavy goods such as metal ores or timber. As for luxury goods…
”

  Sects, Miel thought; he must mean tribes, something like that. We thought the Cure Hardy were all one tribe, but maybe there’s loads of them, all different; and we’ve picked the wrong one.

  “Your points are well made,” Orsea was saying; the savage had stopped talking, there had been a brief, brittle silence. “However, I must confess, we hadn’t really thought as far ahead as trade and so on. Really, all we’re trying to do at this stage is, well, get to know each other. One step at a time is what I’m getting at.”

  “Of course.” The savage nodded very slightly. “Forgive us if we were unduly forward. Naturally, we welcome any overtures of friendship, and of course our two nations have much to offer each other above and beyond mere material commerce. In any event, we have clarified the position as far as we are concerned.”

  As the afternoon wore on, Miel found it increasingly hard to concentrate. Reading between the lines, he was fairly certain that his earlier guess had been right; there were any number of different tribes of Cure Hardy, and they’d somehow managed to get in touch with the wrong one. That was annoying, to say the least, but the thing needn’t be a complete disaster. If they were tactful and managed not to give too much away, they ought at the very least to be able to get some useful background information, enough to help them figure out which tribe they really wanted to talk to. From what he’d managed to glean so far, Miel thought either the Lauzeta or the Aram Chantat — although, confusingly, the Lauzeta were apparently mortal enemies of the Biau Votz, the Aram Chantat hated the Lauzeta like poison (not, as far as he could make out, vice versa), and both the Biau Votz and the Aram Chantat were best friends with the Rosinholet, who hated everybody else in the whole world. It might, Miel decided, be a good idea to find out a whole lot more before venturing on any serious diplomatic initiatives.

  At least the invitation to dinner went down well. At the mention of food, the savages became quite animated, and one of them even smiled. A good feed and a few drinks might liven them up a bit, Miel thought, loosen their tongues and get them to relax a little. So far they’d been so stiff and formal that he wondered if they were really savages at all.

  “May we venture to ask,” one of them was saying as they made their way to the great hall, “how matters stand between yourselves and the Republic of Mezentia? Our own relations with the Mezentines have been few and perfunctory, but cordial nonetheless.”

  Miel didn’t manage to hear Orsea’s reply to that, because at that moment the bald man asked him something about Eremian horse-breeding. Apparently, the horses he’d seen since he crossed the border were quite like the ones back home, which were different from the horses raised by most of the other sects. Miel answered as best he could, but he didn’t know the technical stuff the bald man seemed to be after. He tried to remember if his cousin Jarnac had been invited to the dinner; he’d know all about it, if he was there. Meanwhile, the bald man was telling him a lot of stuff he didn’t really want to know about horse-breeding back home; he let his attention wander as they crossed the front courtyard, until the bald man said, “Of course, we are only a small sect, we muster barely nine hundred thousand men-at-arms, and so our pool of brood mares is far smaller than that of the larger sects, such as the Lauzeta or the Doce Votz —”

  “Excuse me,” Miel said. “Did you say nine hundred thousand?”

  The bald man nodded. “It is our small size that enables us to follow such a wide circuit. The larger sects are confined to more circumscribed areas, since they need to graze eight, even ten times that number. We can subsist, therefore, where they cannot, and they are not tempted to appropriate our grazing, since it would be of no use to them. Accordingly —”

  “This is the great hall,” Orsea interrupted. “If you’d like to follow me.”

  There was something vaguely comic about the savages’ reaction to being inside it; from time to time, when they thought no one was looking, they’d crane their necks and snatch a quick look at the roof-beams, as if they were worried it was all about to come crashing down on their heads. Fair enough, Miel reckoned, if they lived their entire lives in tents. If anything else about their surroundings impressed them, they gave no sign of it, and that made Miel wonder if their ingenuous remarks about their few but cordial contacts with the Republic were the truth and the whole truth. They’d be forgiven for regarding the great hall of the castle as no big deal if they were familiar with the interior of the Guildhall…

  Before Miel took his place at the table, he made a show of beckoning to the hall steward. When the man came over to him, he leaned in close and whispered, “Get me something to write on.” Luckily, the steward knew him well enough not to argue; he disappeared and came back a moment later with a dripping pen and a scrap of parchment, hastily cut from the wrapping of a Lowland cheese. Resting against the wall, Miel scribbled, Orsea, there are millions of them. “Give this to the Duke when the guests aren’t looking,” he muttered to the steward; then he sat down next to the bald man.

  “This is a most impressive building,” the bald man said, without much sincerity. “Are the cross-pieces of the roof each made from a single tree, or are they spliced together in some way?”

  Miel had no idea, but he said, “A single tree, they were brought in specially from the north,” because he reckoned that was what the man would want to hear. Maybe it was; he didn’t pursue the subject further. Instead, he asked what sort of timber the table was made out of. Miel didn’t know that either, so he said it was oak; at which point, the servers started bringing in the food.

  “We have a serious shortage of timber,” the bald man said. “Traditionally, we cut lumber from the forests of the Culomb valley in the seventh year of our circuit. Recently, however, the Doce Votz have laid claim to that part of the valley and forbidden us to fell any standing timber. This leaves us in an unfortunate position. Dogwood, hazel and ash, in particular…”

  Miel nodded politely, while scanning the incoming dishes. The steward had done a good job at short notice. As well as the venison, boar, hare, mountain goat, roast mutton, guinea fowl, peahen and rabbit in cider, there was partridge, rock grouse (just coming into season), collar dove and whole roast goose. He nodded to the steward, who nodded to the servers.

  “Excuse me,” said the bald man. He looked embarrassed. So did his colleagues. “Excuse me,” he repeated, “but we do not eat meat.”

  “But —” Orsea said; then he checked himself, and went on: “What can we get for you?”

  “Some cheese, perhaps.” The bald man stressed the word, as if he wasn’t sure his hosts had ever heard of it. “And some plain bread and fruit, if possible.”

  “Of course.” Credit where it was due, Orsea was taking it in his stride. “What would you like to drink? We’ve got wine, beer —”

  Just a trace of a frown. “We do not drink intoxicants,” the bald man said. “Plain water would suit us very well.”

  “Plain water,” Orsea repeated. “Fine.” He waved to the steward, and said, “Take all this away, fetch us some bread and cheese, apples and some jugs of water.”

  “Certainly, sir,” the steward said, and handed him the scrap of parchment. Miel wasn’t sure, because the bald man partly obstructed his view, but he had an idea that Orsea flinched when he read it. He dropped it beside his plate. Some time later, Miel noticed, while Orsea was talking to the man on his other side, the savage quietly picked it up, glanced at it and tucked it into his sleeve.

  The dinner didn’t last long, since there wasn’t much to eat and the visitors didn’t care for music or dancing, either. Orsea himself took them to their quarters, allowing Miel to escape from the great hall and beat a hasty retreat to the security of his office, the main attraction of which was a tall stone bottle of the distilled liquor the Vadani made from mountain oats. It went by the curious name of Living Death, and Miel reckoned it was probably the only thing in the world that might do some good.

  He’d swallowed three fingers of the stuff and was nerving hims
elf for another dose when Orsea came in, without knocking; he crossed to the empty chair, dropped into it like a headshot doe, and groaned.

  “Come in,” Miel said. “Take a seat.”

  “Thanks,” Orsea replied. “Miel, have you still got any of that disgusting Vadani stuff that tastes like etching acid?”

  Miel pushed the small horn cup across the table; he was a loyal subject, and could drink straight from the bottle when he had to.

  “I’m fairly sure,” Orsea said slowly, after he’d taken his medicine, “that there wasn’t anything else we could’ve got wrong; I mean, as far as I can see, we’ve got the complete set. If I missed anything, though, we could have a stab at it tomorrow morning early, before they set off.”

  Miel thought for a moment. “We didn’t actually kill any of them,” he said, “or set fire to their hair.”

  “True.” Orsea leaned forward and reached for the bottle. “But that’d just be gilding the lily. We did enough, I reckon.”

  “It didn’t go well.”

  “Not really.” Orsea passed the bottle back, and they sat in silence for a while.

  “What bugs me, though,” Miel said, “is why they came up from the south, instead of down the Lonazep road.” He had a certain amount of trouble with the word Lonazep. “It’s all very well saying they got lost, but they were early. If they’d got lost, they should’ve been late.”

  “Wish they had got lost,” Orsea said. “Permanently.”

  Another silence; then Miel said: “Well, now we know what the Cure Hardy look like.”

  “Miserable lot,” Orsea said. “Always complaining. Didn’t like their rooms much, either. Oh, they didn’t say anything, but I could tell.”

  Miel suggested various things they could do. “And besides,” he went on, “it doesn’t actually matter, does it? You heard them. Won’t be back this way for another twenty years. By which time,” he added brightly, “we’ll all’ve been massacred by the Mezentines.”