Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  15

  They were saying in chapter that the war had gone to sleep. They were saying that paying, feeding and sheltering forty thousand men, keeping them away from the shops and the women, was a horrendous waste of effort, energy and money if they weren’t going to be set loose against anybody any time soon. They were saying that Necessary Evil had lost its nerve, and its grip.

  Psellus still hadn’t found out why everything had suddenly ground to a halt. The soldiers had arrived, Vaatzes was in Eremia (up to no good there, by all accounts), and there was no earthly reason he could see why the war shouldn’t be over and done with inside a month, if only they’d get it started. Some of the voices around the Guildhall were saying it was because there were another forty thousand on the way (Psellus happened to know this was true); others that the enemy capital was impregnable; that Eremia had signed a secret treaty with the Vadani, the Cure Doce, the Cure Hardy, all three simultaneously; that someone in Ways and Means had made a mistake and there was only just enough food left in the country to feed the soldiers for a week; that the real object of the war wasn’t Eremia after all; that the Carpenters and Joiners were planning a military coup, and that’s what the army was really for; that the soldiers had found out about the defenses of Civitas Eremiae and were striking for double pay and death benefit. Necessary Evil’s response was to look smug and stay quiet. As one of its members, trying to guess which of the rumors was true, Psellus found this attitude extremely annoying.

  Mostly, though, he was bored. He had nothing to do. Even the memos had stopped coming. There were no meetings. For a while he’d sat in his office, afraid to leave it in case he missed a message ordering him to a briefing where everything would be explained. Then he’d tried writing to his colleagues and superiors, asking what was going on, but they never answered him. He tried a series of surprise visits to their offices, but they were never there. Finally he’d taken to wandering about the Guildhall on the off chance of running into one of them. That was a waste of time, too. Nobody had seen them recently, or knew anything about what they were up to. When he went out to the camp where the soldiers were billeted, he was turned away at the gate by the sentries. Over their shoulders he could see the peaks of thousands of tents, thin wisps of smoke rising straight up into the windless sky. He could smell the soldiers from two hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see them. It was like a party to which all the other children in his class had been invited.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if the war wasn’t his fault.

  After a while (he’d lost track of time rather) he decided to alter his perspective. He resolved to look at it all from a different angle. After years of stress and overwork, he told himself, he was having a holiday. He still had his office, his rank, all the things he’d fought for over the years — better still, he’d been promoted, from Compliance to Necessary Evil. If they needed him, they’d find him. Meanwhile, until the call came, he was at liberty to indulge himself.

  With what, though? He hadn’t had more than an hour’s continuous free time since he was twenty-one, and pleasure is something you can easily lose the knack of, if you allow yourself to get out of practice. Not that he’d exactly been a libertine in his remote youth; you didn’t get to be a Guild official by drinking and chasing girls, so he hadn’t ever done any of that; and it was simple realism to admit that it was probably too late to start now. He applied his mind, sitting in his office one cold gray morning. What did people do for pleasure, apart from drinking and being obnoxious to women?

  What indeed. In Mezentia, not much that he could think of. Abroad, in less favored countries, they rode to hounds, flew falcons, jousted, fenced; but the Perpetual Republic had outgrown that sort of thing. What else? They read books, looked at works of art, listened to music. That sounded somewhat more promising. There were works of art, he was pretty sure; the Sculptors and Painters produced them, and (a quick glance at the relevant memo) their productivity had risen last year by an admirable six-point-three percent. But (he remembered) four fifths of their output went for export, mostly to the Vadani and the Cure Doce, and wherever the remaining one fifth ended up, it wasn’t anywhere he was allowed to go. Music: the Musicians amalgamated with the Ancillary & Allied Trades a century ago. Their harp was still just about visible among the quarterings on the Guild’s coat of arms, but he couldn’t remember ever having met a Guild musician. There were people who played pipes and fiddles and little drums at private functions, but they were strictly amateurs, and the practice was officially frowned upon. That left literature, by default. For literature, you had to apply to the Stationers and Copyists. Like the Sculptors, they catered mostly for the export market, but the Guild had a retail outlet in a small alley off Progress Square. It was where you went to buy copies of Guild decrees and regulations, set books for the further examinations, commentaries and cribs to the more complex specifications; and, occasionally (usually as the result of a canceled export order), literature. He’d been there himself half a dozen times over the years, most recently to look for a wedding present for a mildly eccentric cousin who liked poetry — it was very much the sort of place where you went to buy things for other people, not for yourself.

  His cousin had got married seven years ago, but the shop was exactly as he remembered it. The front part was given over to stationery, both export and domestic quality. There were ink-wells in gold, silver, silver plate, brass and pewter; writing-sets, plain, fancy and presentation grade, loose or boxed. There was paper in staggering quantities, all types and qualities, from pads of four-times scraped scraps sewn up with sacking twine, to virgin linen-pulp contract-and-conveyance paper, to the very best mutton and calf vellum. He counted thirty different inks before he lost interest and gave up; and if you didn’t like any of them you could buy loose ingredients to make your own: oak-apple gall ready dried and powdered; finest quality soot, candle not chimney, and any number of specialist pigments for emphasizing the operative words in legal documents or illuminating capitals. There were trays of twenty different cuts of pen nib (types one to six export only; seven to thirteen restricted to copyists only, on proof of good standing; the rest available to the public at large); goose-quills in gray, black, barred or white and dainty little bronze knives to cut them with; sand-shakers, seals, wax-holders, seal-edge-smoothers (to round off splodged edges), bookmarks, erasing pumice in three grades and four handy sizes, binding needles and the finest flax thread, roll-covers in solid brass or tinplate with brass escutcheons for engraving book titles on. A few surreptitious glances at the price-tickets showed that nearly all this stuff was not for domestic consumption, but then, very little of what the Guilds produced was.

  And in the back quarter of the shop there were books. Last time there had been five bookcases, but one of them had been taken out to make way for a display of chains and hasps for chained libraries. Three of the shelves were Guild publications, carefully divided up into numbered and coded categories. The fourth was marked Clearance, and half its shelves were empty.

  A quick look round just in case somebody he knew was watching him; then Psellus began to browse. The Mirror of Fair Ladies, newly and copiously illustrated; tempting, but how would he explain it away if someone caught him with it? A Dialogue of King Fashion and Queen Reason caught his attention, mostly because of the pictures of animals being slaughtered in various improbable ways, but the text was in a language he didn’t understand. A Garland of Violets turned out to be an anthology of inspirational verse by or about great Guildsmen from history; so did A Calendar of Heroes and Line, Rule and Calipers, but without illuminations or pictures. He was tempted by Early Mannerist Lyric Poetry, a parallel text in Mezentine and Luzanesc, but a previous owner had paved the Mezentine side of each page with clouds of notes and extracts from the commentaries, presumably for some exam, so that it was barely legible. He was considering the practicalities of re-covering The Mirror of Fair Ladies in plain brown paper when he caught sight of a name, and held his breath.

&
nbsp; Elements of Chess, by Galazo Vaatzes.

  It was an ancient, tatty book, perhaps as much as thirty years old. The lettering on the spine wasn’t Guild cursive or italic, and the binding was rough and uneven: pitched canvas stuck onto thin wood (packing-crate lath, maybe) with rabbitskin size, the sort they used in the plaster works. A homemade book, rather like one he’d seen recently. It fell open at the flyleaf: Elements of Chess: being a memorial of various innovations and strategies collected or invented by Me, Galazo Vaatzes; herein recorded for the benefit of my son Ziani, on the occasion of his fourth birthday. Followed by a date; he’d been out by a year. The book was thirty-one years old.

  Back in his office he laid the two books on his desk, side by side: two acts of love, one by a father to his son, the other (he assumed) by a husband to his wife. Between them they were trying to tell him something (the purpose of a book is to communicate) but he wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  One of them, the abominator’s awkward and labored love poetry, had a nice, clean provenance, but how had the other one got here? Someone had brought it in, on its own or together with other books, and sold it. His first thought was the liquidator of confiscated assets; but there had been a specific order against confiscation in the Vaatzes case (why was that?), and all the chattels at the Vaatzes house had reverted to the wife as her unencumbered property. So; maybe Ziani Vaatzes had sold it himself at some point, when he needed money, as so many people did from time to time. Entirely plausible, but he doubted it (unless Ziani hadn’t got on with his father, and therefore had no qualms about getting rid of the book). He could have given it to a friend as a present, and the friend disposed of it.

  He looked again. The younger Vaatzes was a better craftsman than his father, but at least the old man hadn’t purported to write poetry. Just for curiosity’s sake, he played out one or two of Galazo Vaatzes’ gambits in his mind (memories of playing chess with his own father, who never managed to grasp the simple fact that children need to win occasionally) and found them unexpectedly ingenious. After the first four or so, they became too complicated for him to follow without a board and a set of pieces in front of him, but he was prepared to take their merits on trust. The seventh gambit was annotated, in handwriting he knew. At some point, Ziani had found a flaw in his father’s strategy and made a note of it to remind himself.

  Do engineers usually make good chess-players? He thought about that. He could think of one or two — his father, his uncle — but he’d never been any great shakes at the game himself; the data was inconclusive. The effort involved in making the book; there was something in that, he felt sure. Was it a family tradition, the making of books out of scrounged and liberated materials? Interesting if it was (and had the person who sold this one also disposed of further generations of the tradition; only one shop in Mezentia, but perhaps all the rest had already been bought by the time he got there). He found himself back at that strange moment of disposal. Who had sold the book, and why?

  Wherever I go, he thought, he follows me; like a ghost haunting me, trying to tell me something. As to why he would choose me to confide in; mystifying, but perhaps simply because there’s nobody else with the inclination — and, of course, the leisure — to listen. He closed his eyes, and found himself watching a chess game, father against son; father winning, unable to defy his principles and lose on purpose, angry that his son is such a weak opponent; he wants his son to beat him, but refuses to give anything away. The father is, of course, Matao Psellus, and the son is poor disappointing Lucao, who never really liked the game anyway (and so he applied himself to a different but similar game, whose gambits and ploys have brought him here).

  Matao Psellus never wrote a book for his son. It would never have occurred to him to do anything of the sort. Yet here were two books, two acts of stifled love, like water bursting through a cracked pipe and soaking away into the dirt. As he studied them, Psellus felt sure he could sense the presence of a third, whereby the chess-book had come into his hands, but he couldn’t quite make it out — he could see the end result, but not the workings of the mechanism by which that result was achieved.

  Ariessa Vaatzes; she needed money, and she knows he’s never coming back. Even so, he thought, even so. She might have sold his clothes, which were replaceable, or the furniture, or anything else. What would she have got for it? He’d paid two doubles and a turner, the price of three spring cabbages; suppose she’d got half of that, or a third. You can eat cabbages but not a book, said a small, starved voice in his mind. It had a point, he was prepared to concede, but he was sure there was more to it than that.

  It was all beside the point, since Vaatzes would be dead soon, along with all the Eremians and quite a few of those invisible soldiers he wasn’t allowed to see. He put one book away, opened the other, put his feet up on the desk (holiday, remember) and tried to visualize a chessboard.

  “Lucao.” The voice came from above and behind. “I’m glad to see we’re not working you to death.”

  He sat up sharply, dragging his feet off the desk. The book shot onto the floor, and the spine burst. “Zanipulo,” he said. “There you are at last. I’ve been trying to talk to you for ages.”

  “Quite,” Staurachus replied. “Well, here I am. Meeting in ten minutes, in the cloister. Perhaps you didn’t get the memo.”

  “Memo?” Psellus looked up at him stupidly, as though he’d never heard the expression before. “No, I haven’t seen any memos.” As he said it, he caught sight of a piece of paper on the desk that hadn’t been there when he left to go shopping. It said MEMORANDUM at the top in big square letters. “Sorry, I —”

  “Just as well I checked,” Staurachus said, and left.

  Psellus snatched at the paper; his sleeve fanned up a breeze that wafted it just beyond the reach of his fingers, off the desk onto the floor. He sighed, stooped and retrieved it.

  The war had woken up, apparently. No explanation, just as there’d been none when it was canceled, or adjourned. He read the memo again, just in case he’d missed something. Ten minutes; he could just about reach the cloister if he ran.

  “Splendid,” said Jarnac Ducas. A big smile split his handsome, suntanned face, curling the ends of his mustache down over the corners of his mouth. He tapped the lower plate of a gorget with his knuckle; it sounded like someone knocking at a door.

  “There’s still two sets of cuisses to do,” Ziani said, watching him, “but they’ll be ready in plenty of time. I’ll bring them with me on the day, shall I?”

  Just the faintest of frowns, until Jarnac remembered that Ziani was invited to the hunt. “Yes, why not? That’ll be fine. Excellent work. You must let me know how much I owe you.”

  Behind him, Cantacusene was standing awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as though being in the presence of a scion of the Ducas was more honor than he could endure. Extraordinary, the attitude of these people. What puzzled Ziani was the fact that he himself had never shown the slightest degree of deference or respect to any of them, not even Miel Ducas or the Duke, and nobody had seemed to notice. Because he was a foreigner, presumably.

  “I’ve been reading the books you lent me,” Ziani went on — another slight frown; Jarnac had forgotten he’d sent round copies of King Fashion and the Mirror. “Fascinating stuff. I’m looking forward to it.”

  “Splendid.” Jarnac’s smile widened. It was entirely possible that he genuinely enjoyed giving pleasure to others less fortunate than himself, provided it was one of his own pleasures, and he wouldn’t have to go without in order to do so. “So we may make a huntsman of you yet, then.” He looked away, back at the sets of newly buffed and polished armor laid out on the long table. He really did seem pleased (why am I surprised? Ziani thought).

  “I’ll have it sent round this evening, if that’s convenient,” he said. “Obviously there may need to be a few adjustments for fit and so forth.”

  Jarnac nodded; probably he wasn’t listening. It was difficult being
in the presence of somebody this large. He wasn’t just taller and broader than anyone Ziani had ever seen before; it was as though he used space in a different way, as though he was used to a much bigger world and hadn’t quite adjusted to living among midgets. “Excellent work,” he said, “first rate. And I’ll be seeing you on the day, of course. Can’t promise anything — you never can, in hunting — but I’ve been setting aside the beeches up above the long lake, we haven’t been in there with the lymers or the wolfhounds, and the farmers reckon there’s been at least one big boar rootling about round there. I’ll be sending someone up to feed the outer covers, see if we can’t draw a hog or two out from the thick stuff in the middle. They won’t stick around during the day, of course, but at least there’ll be a trail for the dogs to follow.”

  Ziani smiled pleasantly. He had an idea that Jarnac talked mostly to himself, through the medium of his listeners. It would be nice, however, if he could make him go away, so he could get on with his work. “Would you like to see round the factory?” he said. “We’ve just finished putting in a new treadle saw; I believe it’s the only one of its kind outside Mezentia.”

  Infallible. It’s a curious fact that boring people seem to have a mortal fear of being bored by others. Jarnac thanked and congratulated him once again, reminded him to send in his bill as soon as possible, and strode away, ducking to avoid the beams and the doorframe.