Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  Nevertheless, he told himself; I am the Duke, and therefore duty’s slave. Never mind. He broke the seal on the first one and tried to concentrate.

  Alleged: that Marcianus Lolliotes of Ascra in the Dalmatic ward beginning in the time of Duke Valentinius on occasions too numerous to particularize entered upon the demesne land of Aetius Cassinus with the intention of cutting hay, the property of the said Cassinus. Defended: that the said land was not the demesne land of the said Cassinus, having been charged by the said Cassinus’ grandfather in the time of Duke Valentius with payment to the great-grandfather of the said Lolliotes of heriot and customary mortmain, which payments were duly made but without the interest thereto pertaining; accordingly, the said Lolliotes having an interest in the said land, there was no trespass; further or in the alternative…

  It took him a long time, and he had to check many cross-references in many books before he managed to get it all straight in his mind, but he got there in the end. As usual, it was nobody’s fault, both of them were sort of right and slightly wrong, and there wasn’t a clear-cut or obvious solution, because the law was outdated, contradictory and sloppily drawn, made up on the spot by his great-great-grandfather, probably because he was bored and wanted to go outside in the fresh air and kill something rather than sitting indoors. Wearily, Valens uncapped his ink-well, dipped the nib and started to write. It didn’t have to be fair copy; he had secretaries to do the bland, beautiful, cursive law-hand that needed to stay legible for centuries. But the sheer effort of writing made his wrist and forearm ache, and although he knew what he wanted to say, it was hard to keep everything in order; the points, facts and conclusions strayed like willful sheep and had to be chased back into the fold. He lost his way twice, had to cross out and go back; the pen dropped a big fat blot and he’d swept his sleeve across it before he noticed. When finally it was done he read it through twice (once silently, once aloud) for errors and ambiguities; made three corrections; read it through again and realized one correction was actually a mistake; corrected the correction, read it through one more time, sprinkled and blew off sand, put it on the corner of the desk for the copyist to deal with later. Last step: he made a note in the margin of the relevant page of his copy of the Consolidated Digest, in his smallest writing (can’t charge for heriot in 3d generation, statute barred after 2d, but reliefs apply in equity), to save himself the effort of doing all the research if the point happened to come up ever again. It was a good practice, recommended by several authors on jurisprudence, and he’d wasted more time looking for notes he’d made eighteen months ago but forgotten exactly where or under what than he’d have spent looking it all up from scratch.

  (Just think, he told himself; men scheme and betray and murder so as to get to be kings and dukes, and this is what they end up doing all day long. Serves them right, really.)

  Mercifully, the next three petitions weren’t nearly so bad. Two of them were points he knew, and there was already an annotation on the relevant page of the book for the third — not his writing, or his father’s; his grandfather, maybe, or his great-uncle, during his father’s short but disastrous regency. Possibly on a better day he’d have checked for himself rather than take the unknown writer’s word for it; possibly not. The fifth petition made up for the three easy ones; it was something to do with uses on lives in being and the perpetuity rules, which he’d never been able to understand, and there was a barred entail, a claim of adverse possession and the hedge-and-ditch rule thrown in for good measure. He could have been outside in the fresh air killing something (wry smile for his earlier self-righteousness) but he fought his way through to the end, realized he still couldn’t make head or tail of it, and decided to split the difference: farmer Mazaninus could have the north end of the field and farmer Ischinus could have the south end, and they could share the bloody water and like it. Enough justice for one day. Too much fun is bad for the soul.

  Perhaps, he thought (the ink-bottle was still uncapped, he had plenty of paper left), he should write to her again — no mention of the fact that she hadn’t replied to his last letter, just something bright and witty and entertaining, the sort of thing he could do well, for some reason he’d never been able to grasp. If what he’d said the last time had offended her, maybe it’d be the right thing to pretend that letter had never been written; they could start again, talking about Mannerist poetry, observations on birds and flowers, the weather. But if he knew her (he’d only talked to her once, but how could there be anybody in the world he knew better?) she wouldn’t sulk if he’d offended her, or break off entirely; she’d tell him he was wrong, stupid, insensitive, horrible, but she’d write back, if she possibly could. So maybe she couldn’t.

  The hell with this, he thought. He frowned, took a new sheet of paper, and started to write: to Lelius Lelianus, alias Nustea Cordatzes, timber merchant in Civitas Eremiae and his best spy in Eremia. Query: any rumors circulating anywhere about the Duchess, ructions in the Duke’s household, society scandals, unexplained disappearances of Merchant Adventurers. Urgent. That one he wrote out himself, rather than adding it to the pile for copying.

  Outside, the rain had slowed to a fine drizzle. He went down two flights to his wardrobe, quickly put on an oilskin cloak, big hat and waxed boots, collected a bow and quiver from the ascham (an old self-bow that wouldn’t come apart in the wet) and left the castle by the north-end postern, heading for the dew-ponds. There might be duck there, though strictly speaking ducks didn’t start for a month (but what’s the point in being supreme and final judge of appeals if you can’t bend the rules in an emergency?), and he hadn’t shot for weeks.

  The air smelled wet. It had been an unusually dry summer, so the rain hadn’t sunk in to what passed for soil in the high marches. Water trickled down from his hair into his eyes, like tears, and he mopped it away with the back of his hand. Nobody had been this way for several days; the footprints in the softened dirt of the track had baked into puddled cups, filling with rain. He brushed past a low branch, spraying water. A drop landed on his tongue, and he spared some attention to taste it. I’m a different man outside, he thought; not better, but different.

  The path down to the ponds was steep, slicked with dust turned to mud; he had to dig his heels in to keep upright, and the soles of his boots were too smooth (some hobnails would deal with that, if he remembered later). The light below the treeline was gray and faintly misty, and he could smell the leaves and the wet leaf-mold. He was aware of the silence, until something crashed away twenty yards or so to his left; a pricket buck, probably (he’ll keep, he thought, and made an entry in his mental register). There weren’t any duck, which was probably just as well for his conscience. He stood under a crooked beech tree for half an hour, listening to the rain and watching for ducks flighting in for the evening feed, but nothing showed; so he shot a big old crow out of the upper branches and went home.

  They had told her that Orsea was in the arbor behind the chestnut tree. She called his name a few times, but he didn’t reply, so she assumed he’d gone back inside. Then she caught sight of a flash of blue through the curtain of trailing vine. He hadn’t answered her because he was asleep.

  Like an old man, she thought, snoozing in the afternoon. Orsea never slept during the day; indeed, he resented sleep on principle, the way people resent paying taxes. It wasn’t fair, he’d told her once, that nature only gave you a very short time on earth, and then saw fit to steal a third of it back from you. At one time he’d tried to train himself to make do with less of it — like a devious banker, he’d said, clipping little bits off the edges of coins. If he learned how to get by on seven hours a night instead of eight, he’d told her, at the end of a year he’d have gained fifteen days. Suppose he lived another forty years; that’d be over eighteen months, absolutely free. But it hadn’t lasted, of course. He struggled through six weeks of the new regime, yawning and drifting off into daydreams, and then issued a revised opinion. Scrounging extra time by neglecting a vital
function like sleep was counterproductive. For every waking hour gained you sacrificed two or three spent in a daze halfway between concussion and a bad hangover. In fact, eight hours wasn’t really enough. Nine hours, on the other hand; nine hours would lose you eighteen months, theoretically speaking, but the extra energy and zest you’d get from being properly rested would mean you’d fit more activity into your voluntarily truncated life than you’d manage to wring out of your unnaturally extended one.

  He was asleep now, though; dead to the world, with his head cradled on his arms, his face buried in the extravagant sleeves of his blue slash-cut doublet. Men say that the sight of a man asleep touches a woman’s maternal instinct; for once, she thought, men might have a point. He looked about twelve years old, his hair scrambled, the tip of his nose visible in the crook of his elbow. She felt a deep-seated urge to tuck a blanket round him.

  “Orsea,” she said. He didn’t stir, so she came closer. “Orsea.”

  At least he didn’t snore. She could never have endured a snorer. Her brother had snored so badly, all through her early years, when he slept at her end of the great solar, no barrier to the excruciating noise except a tapestry screen, that her first thought when they told her he was dead was that now she’d be able to sleep at night. False optimism; by the time she’d driven his face out of her dreams, her father’s had replaced it. Lately, she’d dreamed about Orsea, dead on the battlefield or hanging by his hair from the low branches of a tree.

  “Orsea,” she said. He twitched a little, like a pig. She smiled, and sat down beside him. When he was so fast asleep that her voice didn’t stir him, it meant he’d wake up of his own accord quite soon. She could wait. She could sit and read the letter from Maiaut, and get that particular chore out of the way.

  Maiaut to Veatriz: greetings.

  Or not. It was a warm, mellow autumn day, too pleasant to spoil with echoes of the most annoying of all her sisters. There was something about Maiaut, even on paper, that made her want to break things. That was, of course, unreasonable. It wasn’t Maiaut’s fault that she was a widow; and there was nothing inherently wrong with a noblewoman in reduced circumstances putting on the red dress and trekking around the world buying and selling things. It had taken her away from home, and it meant that her visits to Civitas Eremiae were pleasantly infrequent, though not nearly infrequent enough. She made enough money at it, God only knew (there were times, black times in the middle of the night when her dreams stabbed her awake, when she suspected that Maiaut had considerably more money than she did; and wouldn’t that count as high treason, being richer than your Duchess?), and it gave her plenty of scope for her exceptional gift for whining.

  Maiaut to Veatriz, greetings.

  Well, here I am in Caervox. It’s a nasty, smelly place. The water in the public reservoir is green on top and there are green squiggly things living in it; probably explains why the people here don’t wash. The food tastes like armpit. I’m stuck here for another three days at least, probably more like five, because I’m waiting for a mule-train from Corsus, and the Cure Doce muleteers are the laziest people on earth. Also the most careless, so they may not arrive at all, or else they’ll turn up without the cargo, having dropped it down a crevasse or lost it crossing a river. If by some miracle they do eventually show up, I’ll be taking fifteen hundred rolls of gaudy, stringy carpet with me south to Herulia; sell enough of it there for a grubstake, and move on to Civitas Vadanis by slow, easy stages. At least the Vadani pay in silver and I won’t be lumbered with anything bulky or heavy, though of course the western passes are swarming with bandits.

  “Orsea,” Veatriz said loudly, and still he didn’t move. She resented him for not waking up and saving her from Maiaut’s letter.

  Mind you, bandits are likely to be the least of my troubles crossing the border, if the latest rumors are true. They were saying in Durodrice that there could be a war, Eremia against the Republic. I told them don’t be silly, the war’s been and gone, but they reckon there’s going to be another one. I asked them, how could they possibly know that? Of course, you can’t get a straight answer out of these people. It makes doing business with them very trying indeed. They just smile at you and look dumb and innocent, or gabble away among themselves.

  “Triz,” said a voice beside her. “Where did you appear from? I didn’t see you come.”

  There were times when she’d wondered if she really loved him; because if she did, why did she feel hot and panicky when she saw Valens’ name on the top line of a letter? And there were times like this, when it was so obvious she loved him, it was surprising how passers-by could see them together and not grin. She’d never doubted him like that. She knew exactly what and how Orsea felt, as though there was a little window in the side of his head and she could read all his thoughts written up on a blackboard.

  “You were fast asleep,” she said.

  He groaned. “What’s the time? I only came out here so I could concentrate on this wretched report. I tried reading it indoors but people kept coming up and talking to me, so I slipped out here.”

  “About an hour after noon,” she said. “Hungry?”

  He shook his head. He was never hungry when he’d just woken up. “I’ll have something later. I’ll need to see Miel about this purchase order business; we can have something together.”

  She nodded, hurt; but he was looking dozy and creased, and she knew he hadn’t meant it to sound the way it came out. “What’s the report about?” she asked. “Something important?”

  “Unfortunately,” he said. “Those horrible machines the Mezentines used on us. The exile, that chap we found, he reckons he can build them for us, loads of them and quickly. The committee’s agreed and placed an order.”

  “Can they do that?” she asked. “Without you agreeing, I mean?”

  He smiled. “No they can’t,” he said, “which is why I’ve got to read their report and then sign it. Then they’ll be able to. In practice I leave them to it, they know all about this sort of stuff, far more than I do, so I’d be stupid not to do as they say. So the decision’s been made already, but I’ve still got to plow my way through it.”

  “Can’t you just sign it and pretend you’ve read it?”

  He laughed, as though she’d meant it as a joke. “He offered me something like it before,” he said, “the day we found him, in fact. I turned him down. To listen to him talk, he was going to turn the whole of Civitas into one huge factory. Now he’s back again, apparently, and he’s got Sorit Calaphates putting up the money and an old tanner’s yard, which he’s —”

  “Sorit Calaphates?” she interrupted. “Lycaena’s father?”

  Orsea thought for a moment. “That’s right,” he said. “I’d forgotten you knew the family. How is Lycaena, by the way?”

  “Haven’t seen her for a while.” She hesitated, but the hesitation was too obvious; he’d noticed it. “Careo was wounded in the war,” she said. “He lost an arm, and he was in pretty bad shape for a while. But last time I heard he was on the mend; they’ve gone back to his uncle’s place out on the Green River while he gets his strength back.”

  “Ah,” Orsea said, and for a moment she saw that terrible look in his eyes; something new to feel guilty about, ambushing him in his safe place, like the hunters in bow-and-stable. “Anyway,” he went on, “that’s what this report’s about; and even if I could say no now that the council’s approved it, I wouldn’t.” He shook his head, like a horse plagued with flies in summer. “I hate the thought of those machines, after what they did to us. I can’t get those pictures out of my head, all those dead men pinned to the ground, and the ones who weren’t dead yet… But if there’s going to be an invasion —”

  “Which there won’t be,” she said.

  “If there’s going to be an invasion, and if this wretched man can make them for us, so we can put them up on the ramparts and shoot down at the road; just think, Triz, it could be the difference between surviving and being wiped out. So of co
urse we’ve got to have them, even if it’s an evil, wicked thing.” He turned his head away so he wasn’t looking at her; as if he could pass on the infection through his eyes. “People used to think,” he said, “that there were gods who punished you if you did bad things, and sometimes I wonder if they’re not still up there, in the clouds or on top of Crane Mountain or wherever it was they were supposed to live. It’d be a joke if they were, don’t you think? But if they really are still there, it’d be better if they only had me to pick on for arming the city with scorpions, rather than all of us. It all comes from my mistake, so —”

  “You should hear yourself,” she said. “Really, Orsea. This is so stupid.”

  He shook his head again. “I keep having these dreams,” he said. “I’m at this place my uncle Achima took me to once, when I was a kid. It’s on a hilltop in the Lanceta; there’s a river winding round the bottom of the hill, really peaceful and quiet, you can see for miles but you won’t see another human being. But years ago — a thousand years, Uncle Ach said — it was a great castle; you can still make out ditches and ramparts and gateways, just dips and humps in the ground now, with grass growing. In my dream, I’m climbing up this hill and I’m asking my uncle who built it, and he says nobody knows, they all died out so long ago we don’t know a thing about them; and when I get to the top and look down, it’s not the Lanceta any more, it’s here; and then I realize that I’m seeing where Civitas used to be, before the Mezentines came and killed us all, till there weren’t any of us left; and they only came because of me —”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “It’s just a dream.”

  He turned a little more; his back was to her. “Anyhow,” he said, “that’s why I’ve got to read the stupid report.”

  “I see,” she said. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have woken you up if I’d known.”

  “Triz…” He was still looking away, so she couldn’t see. “If I abdicated, do you think Miel would make a good Duke?”