Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  “You can’t abdicate,” she said. “You know that.”

  “I’m the Duke because I’m married to you,” he said.

  “I think it’s a stupid question,” she said. “And there won’t be an invasion, because they’ve got no reason to invade. It won’t make money for them if we’re all dead. And as long as you’re like this, you’re no good to anybody.”

  She didn’t wait to see if he turned round. She crossed the lawn to the arch that led back into the cloister, straight up the stairs to the little solar. Most of all, she hated Valens, because he hadn’t answered her letter, and instead she had to reply to her insufferable sister, who thought there was going to be an invasion, because that was what they were saying in the market at Durodrice, wherever the hell that was. (If there was an invasion, she thought, could they escape to Durodrice, among the peaceful, cowlike Cure Doce? Would they take them in, or would they be afraid of the Mezentines?) She had a good mind to sit down right now and write to Valens, telling him she didn’t want to hear from him anymore. It was wrong, anyway, this secret correspondence; she ought to put an end to it before it was found out, and people got the wrong idea. Would Valens protect them? Protect them both? The boy she’d spoken to would, but he wasn’t the man who wrote to her about Mannerist poetry and the hover of the peregrine and the blind carter whose dog opened gates for him. She knew him too well. He’d protect both of them, just as he’d rescued Orsea in the Butter Pass, even if it brought the Mezentines down on him and lost him his duchy. He’d do it, for her, but she’d lose him; and if she lost him, she’d have nothing; except Orsea.

  I love Orsea, and I could never love anybody else. But would that be enough? If I had nothing else?

  Ziani was tired; he felt like he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for a year, though in fact it was only a few days; only since Jarnac Ducas had placed his order. Since then he’d been up at first light each day, cutting sixteen-ounce leather on the saddler’s shear, ready for when Cantacusene arrived. He cut out the pieces, Cantacusene nailed them to the formers, did the boiling, shaping and tempering; when Cantacusene went home in the evening, Ziani did the riveting, assembly and fitting. They were getting on well, ahead of schedule. When he’d finished work for the day on the hunting armors, he went round the main shop, checking the men’s progress on the first batch of scorpions — they were turning out well, too, even the lockwork and the springs. After that, he’d sit in the tower and read — either King Fashion, or the equally seminal and tedious Mirror of the Chase; he couldn’t make up his mind which of them he hated more, but he now knew two thirds of both of them by heart — before finishing up the day with an hour’s archery practice in the cellar.

  He was doing well with the archery. This was perhaps the most surprising thing of all, since he’d never held a bow in his life before he left Mezentia. Because he had no money to buy one with and didn’t know how to make one, he’d had to re-invent the bow from scratch. A bow, he realized, is just a spring. He knew how to make springs, so that was all right. He had no idea whether there was such a thing as a steel bow; but he went across to the forge after the men had gone home, drew down a length of broken cart-spring into a long, elongated diamond, worked each end down to a gentle distal taper, shaped it till it looked like pictures he’d seen in books, and tempered it to a deep blue. His first attempt at a string was three strands of fine wire, which cut his fingertips like cheese. Luckily, King Fashion had a bit to say about bowstrings; they should be linen, he reckoned, rather than hemp. He made his second string out of twelve strands of strong linen serving thread; and when it broke, the top limb of the bow smacked him so hard under the chin he blacked out for quite some time. His next attempt, eighteen strands, seemed to be strong enough, and hadn’t broken yet.

  Whether or not the thing he practiced with was a bow in any conventional sense of the term, it did seem to work. He was using three-eighths cedar dowel for arrows; he knew you were meant to tie or glue bits of feather on the ends, but he didn’t have any feathers, and the arrows seemed to go through the air quite happily without them. He cut his arrows at thirty inches, because that was as far as he could draw them without them falling off the bow.

  For a target he had a sack, lying on its side, stuffed with rags, straw and general rubbish. He’d painted a circle on it with whitewash, and at fifteen yards (which was as far back as you could go in the cellar before you bumped up against a wall) he could hit the circle four times out of six, thanks to the Mirror, a picture he’d seen in a book many years ago, dogged perseverance and a certain degree of common sense. One time in five that he loosed the arrow, the string would come back and lash the inside of his left forearm. He had a huge purple bruise there, which meant he had to keep his sleeve buttoned all day in case one of the men noticed. He’d made up a guard for it out of offcuts of leather, but it still hurt. Meanwhile, the inside of his right forefinger tip was red and raw, and there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  But nevertheless; progress was being made, and if he could get to the stage where he hit the whitewash circle six times out of six, that’d be good enough (that word again) for his purposes. Whether or not the opportunity would present itself when the time came was, of course, entirely outside his control. It depended on the whim of a hunted animal and the choices and decisions of an unascertained number of hunters, beaters and other unknowns, following rules he was struggling to learn out of a book and didn’t really understand. It’d be sheer luck; he hated that. But if he got the chance, at least he’d be prepared to make the most of it. Hence King Fashion, the Mirror, the steel bow and archery practice.

  Yesterday he’d forgotten to eat anything. Stupid; there was plenty of food, a woman brought it in a basket every morning and left it in the lodge. Calaphates had seen to that — a curious thing to do, almost as if he was concerned about Ziani’s well-being. And he’d asked about it, the last two times he’d visited: are you sure you’re eating properly, as though he was Ziani’s mother.

  Just looking after his investment, Ziani told himself as he lined up the leather in the shear. All these people care about is how much money I can make for them. If I don’t eat and I get sick, I can’t work. That explains it all.

  He fed the edge of the hide in under the top blade of the shear, making sure it was in line. He’d drawn the shape onto the leather with a stick of charcoal because that was all he had to mark up with. Because of that, the lines were far too thick, allowing too great a margin of error, so he had to concentrate hard to see the true line he needed to follow. There was far too much play in the shear for his liking (he’d had to buy a shear, because there hadn’t been time to make one; it was Mezentine-made, but very old and bent by years of brutal mishandling). He hated every part of this sloppy, inaccurate work, but it had to be done, just in case the opportunity arose.

  “You there?”

  Cantacusene. He glanced up at the high, narrow window, but he was kidding himself. Back home, there were clocks to tell the time by. Here, they seemed to be able to manage it by looking at the sun; but the slim section of gray and blue framed by the window had no sun in it. He had an idea that Cantacusene was early this morning, but he couldn’t verify it. God, what a country.

  “Yes, come through.” He smiled. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t use each other’s names. Cantacusene couldn’t very well call him Ziani, and Master Vaatzes would’ve been ridiculous coming from a man who’d been peening rivets and curling lames for the nobility when Ziani was still learning to walk; for his part, he didn’t understand Eremian industrial etiquette and couldn’t be bothered to learn. With goodwill and understanding on both sides and a certain degree of imagination, they’d so far managed to bypass the issue completely.

  “Are you early?” he asked, as Cantacusene shuffled in.

  “A bit. We need to get a move on. We’ve still got half the greaves and cuisses and all the gorgets to do.”

  Ziani shrugged. “I’ve cut out the gorget lames, they’re re
ady for you. I’ll have the greaves and the cuisses by dinnertime.”

  Cantacusene looked at him; a curious blend of admiration, devotion and hatred. He could more or less understand it. A few days ago, Ziani had known nothing about the subtle art of making boiled leather armor, and Cantacusene had been back on his familiar ground, where he knew the rules. He hadn’t presumed on that superiority, but it was pretty clear he’d relished it while it lasted. Now, here was Ziani cutting out a thick stack of lames before breakfast, as well or better than Cantacusene could have done it. A god would feel unsettled, Ziani thought, if a mortal learned in a week how to make rain and raise the dead.

  “That’s all right, then,” Cantacusene said. “I’ll get a fire laid in.”

  “Already done,” Ziani said. “You can get on with nailing up while the water boils.”

  The shear was even more sluggish today than usual. It munched the leather rather than slicing it, chewing ragged, hairy edges instead of crisp, square-sided cuts. Ziani quickly diagnosed the problem as drift and slippage in the jaw alignment. He could fix it, but he’d have to take the shear apart, heat the frame and bend it a little. A sloppy cut, on the other hand, was no big deal in this line of work, since the shrinkage turned even a perfectly square-shorn edge into a rounded burr in need of facing off with a rasp. There was something infuriating about seeing poor work come out indistinguishable from good work. Tolerating it was practically collaborating with evil.

  The greaves were one big piece rather than lots of small lames put together, but their profile was all curves; a misery to cut, even when the shear had still been working properly. He knew how to design and build a throatless rotary shear, Mezentine pattern, that would handle the curved profiles effortlessly, but there wasn’t time. It was horribly frustrating, and he felt ashamed of himself. But it was better work than the Duchy’s foremost armorer could’ve done. That was no consolation whatsoever.

  The men were turning up for the start of their day. They would be cutting and joining wood to make scorpion frames, forging the joining bands, filing and shaping the lockwork. Other hands than mine, he thought, and he wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. They would be doing his work, while he was wasting his time cutting and riveting leather to protect an aristocrat and his hangers-on from pigs with big teeth. It was hard to relate that to the invisible machine. Faith was needed, and he’d never really believed in anything much, apart from the two things he’d lost, and which were all that mattered.

  Cantacusene was whistling. He did it very badly; so badly, in fact, that Ziani stopped work to listen. If there was a tune involved, he couldn’t detect it. He found he was grinning. Cantacusene and music, even horribly mutilated music, didn’t seem to go together.

  “You’re in a good mood,” he said, when Cantacusene came in to collect the next batch of cut-out pieces.

  “What makes you say that?”

  Ziani shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Cantacusene hesitated; apparently he had something on his mind, but was uncertain as to whether he could or should talk about it. Ziani turned back to the shear. It would have been quicker to take it to bits and straighten it after all. He hated the shear, and everything it stood for; at that moment, all the evil in the world resided in its bent and misused frame. There’s a certain comfort in knowing who your enemies are.

  “If you must know,” Cantacusene said, “my wife’s coming home today.”

  “Is that right?” Ziani said to the shear. “She’s been away, then?”

  “Yes.” He couldn’t see Cantacusene’s face, and the word was just a word. “She’s in service, see. Ladies’ maid. The family’s been away out east for three months.”

  “Ah,” Ziani said. “So that’s why you’re in a good mood.”

  “Well, yes.” There was obviously something in his manner that was annoying Cantacusene, keeping him there talking when he should be next door, nailing bits of leather to bits of wood. “I missed her, see. I don’t like it when she’s got to go away. But she doesn’t want to leave the family. Been with them fifteen years.”

  “Well,” Ziani said, “if you don’t like her going away, you should tell her to pack it in. I should think you could do without her wages, now you’re working here.”

  “Like I said, she wouldn’t want to let the family down.”

  Ziani didn’t answer, and he hunched his shoulders a little to show that it was none of his business. But Cantacusene didn’t seem to be able to read body language. “You married?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Kids?”

  “A daughter,” Ziani replied.

  Silence; then Cantacusene said: “Must be hard on you, then.”

  “Yes,” Ziani said. “And I don’t suppose I’ll ever see them again.”

  “I couldn’t handle that,” Cantacusene said.

  “No.” Ziani let go of the shear handle. It was important that the line be cut straight, since the lame had to sit true. “Nor me.” He turned round slowly. “It’s difficult,” he said. “It’s fortunate I’m an engineer, really. Otherwise…” He shrugged. “What time’s she due back?”

  “Not till this evening,” Cantacusene said. “Look, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to upset you or anything.”

  “No, of course.” Ziani smiled, though his face felt numb. “If you want to knock off early, you go ahead.”

  “That’s all right. Like I said, she’s not back till late.”

  “Suit yourself.” It felt like all the poison in his blood was sinking into his toes and fingers. “If you change your mind, go on anyway.”

  “Thanks.” Cantacusene frowned, as if considering a puzzle. “I’d better be getting on,” he continued. “If we lay into it, we can have the greaves finished today.”

  “Fine.” Ziani turned his back on him, laid his hand on the shear handle. He heard footsteps, and then the whistling, far away and still terrible. He drew the handle toward him, feeling the slight spring in the leather as the blade cut it.

  It was like an abcess: full of poison, under the skin, swelling, ready to burst. It was a disease lying latent in his blood, breeding and eating him. It was the worst thing in the world. It was love, and that idiot Cantacusene had reminded him of it, after he’d done so well to put it away where he couldn’t see it.

  Almost certainly, he knew, Cantacusene would die because of him; and his wife, the ladies’ maid who spent so much precious time away, not knowing how little there was of it left. Each nail the poor fool drove through the leather into the wood brought his own death a little nearer. That wasn’t so bad, Ziani reflected. Only a coward is afraid of dying for himself; the true terror in death, the fear that crawls into the mind and stays there forever, comes from the lethal mixture of death and love, the knowledge that dying will bring unbearable pain to those we love, those who love us. Death is to be feared because of the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason.

  Not the shear, after all. Reaching down to turn the half-cut lame, Ziani admitted to himself the preeminently obvious fact that he’d been denying ever since Compliance came for him in the early hours of the morning when everything went wrong. All the evil in the world, all the harm and suffering it’s possible to come to, are concentrated in one place; in love. If there was no love, there’d be no fear in death, no pain in loss, no suffering anywhere. If he could string his steel bow and nock an arrow and kill love with a single shot to the head, it’d go down in history as the day mankind was rescued from all its torments and miseries; if he could meet love face to face down the narrow shaft of a spear, like a hunter standing up to the charging boar, wolf or bear, if he could kill the monster and set the people free from all evil, then the Eremians wouldn’t have to die, or the Mezentines, or the Vadani or the Cure Hardy or the Cure Doce or all the other nations of victims whose names he didn’t even know yet. In old stories there are dragons who burn cities, gigantic bulls from the sea and boars with steel tusks, terrible birds with the
heads of women and the bodies of lions, and a hero kills them; it’s so simple in stories, because once the monster is dead the pain is over and done with. The monster has a heart or a brain or lungs that can be pierced, it’s a simple mechanical problem of how to get a length of sharp steel through the hide and the scales and the armor. But love hovers over the dying, it lies coiled waiting to strike at the exile, the lover betrayed or unrequited, it chains men to the places where they can’t bear to be, forces them to endure all tyrannies, injustices and humiliations rather than run away and leave the ones they love, the ones who love them; it baits its trap with everything good in the world and arms it with everything bad; and it survives, thriving on its own poisons, growing where nothing else can live; an infestation, a parasite, a disease.

  Cantacusene misses his wife, he thought; me too. And it’s likely I’ll never see her again, but because of love I’m building a machine that’ll smash cities and slaughter nations and bring to an end the magnificent, glorious, holy Perpetual Republic of Mezentia; all simply so that one day I might be able to go home and see her again, see them both, my wife and my daughter. Such a little thing to ask, such a simple operation for a machine to perform. Every day in cities, towns, villages all over the world, men come home to their wives and children. A simple thing, it’s nothing at all, for everybody else but not for me. I’ve got to breach the city wall, bash through the gates, pick my way over the dead bodies of millions, just to reach my own front door and get home. So much easier and more sensible to give up, start again, stay here in Civitas Eremiae and get a job; but I don’t have that choice, because of love. Instead, I have the machine, and faith that love will prevail, because love conquers all.

  Someone came in and asked him to go and look at the scorpion frames. Ziani followed him, not really aware of who he was or what he wanted. He saw them, squat and ugly and botched, inherently flawed, abominations in every sense of the word. He measured a few of them at random with the yard and the inside calipers and the dogleg calipers. They were sloppy and only fitted where they touched, but they were within tolerance (because he was working on a completely different set of tolerances now). He looked at them, drawn up like a squad of newly levied troops, awkward, horrible. In his mind’s eye he gave them locks, springs, sliders, winches, and saw that they were abominations, but they would do what had to be done. He loved them, because they would slaughter the hireling Mezentine army by the tens of thousands, they would defend the citadel of Eremia for a time, and then they would fail.