by K. J. Parker
“Splendid,” Daurenja said. “And another insult for good measure.” He cleared his throat; brisk, businesslike, calling the meeting to order. “As the challenged party, you have the choice of weapons. Of course we’re limited by what’s available, but I do happen to have a case of rather fine rapiers – Mezentine, first export quality…”
Valens smiled. “I bet you do.”
“That’s settled, then.” He dropped on to his hands and knees, a remarkable movement, like putting away a folding chair, and fished out a long rosewood box from under his camp bed. “The man I bought them from said they’re plunder from Civitas Eremiae. There’s a monogram on the escutcheon on the lid – look, there, you can just make it out. That’s the Phocas, isn’t it?”
Valens reached out his foot and gently kicked the lid open. “Buying plunder,” he said. “That’s just about your level. And that’s the Erylas, not the Phocas.”
“Of course, you’re quite right,” Daurenja replied smoothly. He picked the two swords out of the box and presented Valens with the hilts. Valens snatched the nearest one, not bothering to look at it. “That’s the splendid thing about Mezentine rapiers,” Daurenja said. “Since they’re all identical, you don’t have to worry about finding one with the right balance. I see you favour placing the middle finger in front of the cross. Unfashionable these days, but if it was good enough for Ferro…”
Valens sighed, an oh-for-pity’s-sake noise, and left the tent. As Daurenja started to follow him, Veatriz moved quickly to block his way. “If you hurt him…”
Daurenja smiled. “I wasn’t planning to,” he said mildly. “But really, it’s up to him. I’m afraid I can’t undertake to let myself get killed for your sake. Let’s both of us hope his injuries have slowed him down.”
(She thought: if he really loved me…)
She said: “You manipulated him. You’ve been planning this. You want—”
“You can have absolutely no idea what I want”, and it was as if someone totally different had spoken, a man standing behind him she hadn’t seen before. “Listen,” he added gently, so very gently; you could imagine the owner of that voice tapping a cranefly in his hands, so careful not to break its fragile wings. “The Alliance needs its best general, and unfortunately, that happens to be me. Your husband is the duke, and of course he has my loyalty and my service, but right now I can only do my duty, to him and the Alliance, by replacing him, until the siege is over and the war has been won. After that, I’ll go away, I promise you. I won’t be needed here any more and I have other things to do. But until then…” He smiled, and she had to fight not to trust him. “I’ll do my very best not to hurt him,” he said kindly. “You have my word of honour.”
She looked at him, and saw something completely artificial, something like Ziani Vaatzes’ mechanical doll, except that this one, this unique type, had built itself. She understood, then. Daurenja was the better general, the best the Alliance had. He would take the City, succeeding where Valens would most likely fail, because he needed to, in order to move on to the next stage of his development. Therefore the monster had to be stopped, right now, before he could grow and spread. At the same time, she recognised that Valens had left her, putting his duty ahead of her, as a good duke should. When he came back from the fight with the monster’s blood on his hands, he’d try and make her believe he still loved her exactly the same way, that nothing had changed, but neither of them would ever believe it. It would be as if he hadn’t ridden to Civitas Eremiae to save her and drag his people into the war; he’d be absolved of that by renunciation and sacrifice, which was of course the right path for the duke to follow. But the man who’d loved her would never come back from the duel.
“I hope he kills you,” she said calmly.
“Of course you do,” he replied. “Nobody can blame you for that. And now you’ll have to excuse me. I mustn’t keep them all waiting any longer.”
He left the tent. She stayed where she was. It was her duty to be there, watching the fight; Valens needed his witness, regardless of the outcome. But she stayed where she was.
“There you are,” Valens said, as the tent-flap parted. “I was starting to wonder where you’d got to.”
Daurenja took a few steps forward, the crowd of bewildered onlookers shrinking away from him as he moved. Then he stopped, like a ship dropping anchor. Valens noticed he’d shifted his grip on the rapier: two fingers in front of the cross now, instead of just one. He wants to be me, he thought, right down to the smallest detail.
“I suppose we’d better get started,” Daurenja said. “Do you want to bother with seconds and marshals? Strictly speaking—”
Valens lunged. As he committed his body to the movement, he knew he’d got it wrong; he could hear the sergeant click his tongue, too much left shoulder, but of course he was out of time. Daurenja raised an eyebrow as he sidestepped, not bothering to raise his sword, though Valens had left himself open to a lethal riposte. He recovered to the back guard as quickly as he could, but it was a scramble, open and shameful.
“No seconds, then,” Daurenja said pleasantly. “That’s fine.”
Immediately, he changed shape; there was no perceptible movement. Now he was straight-backed, his feet just under a shoulders’ width apart, right foot pointing at Valens, left foot behind and at ninety degrees; his sword-arm held out at shoulder height, very slightly bent at the elbow. He was a fencing-manual illustration of the circular fight, unbreachable defence, every attack countered in time, with two dimensions of distance.. The sergeant hadn’t even tried to teach him the circular fight; it was far too difficult to learn, unless the student was really committed. Instead, he’d been taught the linear fight – low right hand, all major developments in double time, a debate rather than a conflict of inflexible assertions. Suddenly, without fear but with depressing certainty, Valens realised he’d made a very bad misjudgement. The only way you could win against the circular fight was if your enemy made a mistake.
Daurenja smiled at him, and he felt a furious urge to lunge again. That, of course, was what Daurenja wanted him to do. As he lunged, pursuing the straight line, Daurenja would take a small step, not back but sideways, his feet following the invisible circle, and as he stepped and Valens’ sword punctured the empty air where he’d just been, all he’d need to do was poke gently, and Valens’ own momentum would drive him on to the sword-point, a plank hammering itself against a nail. So, he couldn’t attack, and Daurenja wouldn’t attack, because the circular fight is all defence and reaction; all he could do was stand in the back guard (which you can’t do for very long before cramp sets in, and a fencer with cramp is as good as dead), hesitating, unable to do anything, ridiculous, a joke…
He felt his back twinge. Weeks lying in bed; even when he was in the peak of condition, he couldn’t have held this contorted stance for very long. He knew what he had to do: relax his hand, let the sword drop from it like an apple from a tree, then take two steps back and apologise, because there was no way he could carry on with the fight, let alone win it. The only other choice was to lunge, keep on lunging until Daurenja stuck him and he died, and that was no choice at all. He scrabbled through the archives of his mind, every exhibition bout he’d ever seen, every stupid book he’d ever read, for some ploy or trick that could beat the circular fight: all the special plays, for the advanced class only, the volte, the pass in single time, the boar’s thrust. Absolutely nothing.
Oh well, he thought; and he leaned forward a little, bending his right knee, extending his arm, edging himself forward into distance, until the needle tip of Daurenja’s sword was so close to his face that it blurred. It was ridiculous, but it was the only thing he could come up with: tempt him beyond endurance until he attacked, and then, in the thousandth of a second available, try and think of something. He saw his face, reflected, distorted, in the polished cup guard of Daurenja’s sword. So much distortion, he could barely see the grotesque red swelling around the wound: lies that rectify, two wro
ngs making a right, necessary—
Daurenja moved his hand. It was just a little twitch. The proper name for it was the stramazone; using the tip of the rapier to scratch a cut. No force; but the pain of the sharp point in the inflamed mound around the wound stunned him. He heard his sword clatter on the ground – his eyes were closed – and a fraction of a second later, the ground hit him. The other noise was someone screaming. He had a pretty good idea who that was; but he didn’t associate the sound with himself particularly. His brain seemed to clench tight, and that was forcing the air out of him, a simple mechanical process.
“Get the doctor,” a voice said; a calm, safe voice, a sensible friend not yielding to panic. He thought: I’ve lost. That’s Daurenja’s voice, and I’m grateful to him for making them get the doctor. Then the pain flooded out that thought too, and there was no space left in his head for anything.
“I’m sorry,” Daurenja was saying. “I really didn’t want to cause him so much pain, but you’ll appreciate, I had to stop it somehow.” He smiled. It was almost charming. “My fault,” he said. “I overestimated him, as a fencer.”
She heard herself thank him; and later, she thought: a compassionate man, resourceful, he stopped the fight without doing any lasting damage. I owe him my husband’s life. A good man; he turned pain to his advantage, but he used it to save the life of his enemy. What was the phrase? Necessary evil.
She didn’t go back to the tent. She told herself it was because she didn’t want to get under the feet of the doctors while they were treating him, but that was nonsense, of course. It was just a scratch, by all accounts, all it needed was cleaning and a light dressing. She told herself: I don’t want to be there, he won’t want me to see him lying there, beaten. That was a good reason, but not the true one.
Instead, she wandered through the camp, not bothering to notice how people stared at her, got out of her way. The truth was – it was stupid, she could hardly believe it, but she had to accept it; the truth was, she couldn’t love him any more, not now that he’d been beaten, by that creature. He’d chosen, as he had to do, between her and his duty; he’d made the right choice, even though it meant breaking the wings of their love, but on the strict understanding that he’d win, that the victory over evil would justify the betrayal. She thought about that. Suppose you did a bad, terrible thing, for the right reason, the end amply justifying the means, but then you failed. The good evaporates, leaving the evil behind. He’d risked death, risked her only chance of happiness, their unborn child’s future, everything, in order to stop the monster, but he hadn’t stopped the monster, if anything he’d made it stronger. The intention was good enough, but the outcome was disastrous, and so…
So, instead, she’d thanked the monster for sparing him, but what he’d given back to her was spoiled, unacceptable; and Daurenja had done the right, the noble thing, but he’d turned it into waste and evil. It was ridiculous, but it had happened.
She went back to the tent. The doctor was just leaving. “He’s asleep,” he said. “Try not to wake him up. God only knows what possessed him to go fighting a duel in his condition.”
“So it was the wound, then,” she said. “Why he lost, I mean.”
The doctor looked blank. “I really couldn’t say,” he said. “It can’t have helped, anyway. The main thing is, there’s no real harm done, it’s just a—”
“Thank you.”
The doctor flinched, as though she’d hit him. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said cautiously. “Meanwhile, if there’s any problems, send for me.”
She stepped aside to let him pass, but when he’d gone she turned away. The last place she wanted to be was in the tent, with him.
16
His authority confirmed, General Daurenja held a briefing for the sappers and miners. It was dark by the time it finished, which fitted the schedule perfectly.
While the meeting was going on, the quartermasters’ division went round the camp gathering up every lantern they could find, filling them with fresh oil and trimming the wicks. Another detail reported to the foot of the machine trench, where the carpenters had spent the day putting up a large holding pen. At dusk, the stockmen drove in four hundred draught oxen. A rumour quickly spread that the oxen were going to be slaughtered, butchered and salted down to supplement the dwindling meat ration, and a crowd gathered, firmly convinced they’d be giving away offal and tripe. Instead, they were pressed into service yoking the oxen into one enormous team. It soon turned out that nobody knew how this was to be done; the general had given the order, presumably in the belief that someone had the knowledge and the necessary equipment, and it was only when the animals had been paired up and driven under their individual yokes that the full depth of the problem became apparent. The drovers pointed out, loudly and often, that oxen had to be yoked to a rigid beam, such as a cart-pole. The staff major who’d just discovered, much to his annoyance, that he was apparently in charge of this stage of the operation pointed out that he didn’t have a pole or a beam or a tree-trunk long enough to yoke two hundred pair to, because it was impossible that such a thing should exist. The drovers asserted that that wasn’t their fault; if someone had asked them earlier, they’d have told them it couldn’t be done. The major replied that it could be done, because it had to be done, because the general had given an order; then, rather more calmly, he said that he was sure he’d heard somewhere about huge teams of oxen being used to drag enormous stone blocks on sledges, so it was possible, and presumably a stonemason would know about that sort of thing. Consulted on the point, the stonemasons said that they’d heard of such a thing, but none of them had done it themselves or talked to anybody who’d ever seen it done. One mason, dissenting, said that he’d heard that six hundred oxen had been used to drag the lintel stones when they built the municipal flour-mill in Mezentia; if the major wanted advice, all he had to do was take a walk down the trench, swim the ditch, climb the embankment, knock on the City gates and ask to speak to the clerk of works.
The discussion was interrupted by the arrival of a colonel of engineers from the general’s staff, who wanted to know what the hold-up was. On being told the reason, he ordered the major to think of something, and left quickly.
At this point, someone remembered the chain.
Nobody knew what it was or what it had once been used for. They’d found it in the ruins of a burnt-out transport depot beside the Lonazep road, and the most popular theory was that the Mezentines had made it for their customers in the Old Country, part of the payment for the services of the mercenaries they’d hired for the attack on Civitas Eremiae. For some reason it had never got to Lonazep; instead, it had been left in a shed, as often happens to awkward consignments, until the war overtook it and deprived it of significance and purpose. General Daurenja had read about it in some report and ordered that it should be sent to Civitas Vadanis to be broken up for scrap; it was four hundred yards long, each link weighing fifty pounds, all steel, so hard a file could scarcely cut it. The problem of shifting it had been passed around the transport executive like a hot coal until the commander of an Aram Chantat infantry division, with a point to prove in some long-forgotten argument, undertook to see to it. He sent two regiments to the depot site, where his men struggled for five days with rollers and levers to lay the chain out in a straight line. Then the regiments lined up beside the chain, and on the word of command, each man bent down and lifted up one link. It took them two days to get the chain back to the camp, at which point the commander, who’d forgotten about his undertaking, reassigned the regiments to other duties.
The major wasn’t keen on the idea. For one thing, there was the obvious problem of shifting the thing. Furthermore, there was the matter of the weight, which he anticipated would burden the oxen so much that they wouldn’t be able to do the job they’d been brought there for. Also, how were the yokes to be attached to the chain, and who was going to lift it up while it was being attached? In any case, the chain was, by definition, not
a rigid beam; if a flexible beam would suffice, they might as well use rope and have done with it.
By now, however, the idea of the chain had taken hold in the minds of the senior engineers, who started suggesting solutions to the problems he’d raised, disagreeing with each other and all shouting at once. Why not a flexible beam, they wanted to know; and the drovers, when this question was put to them, replied that they’d specified rigid beams because that was all they’d ever used, but for all they knew a flexible beam might work, though they wouldn’t be held responsible if it didn’t. The stockmen disagreed fundamentally among themselves on the weight issue, one faction maintaining that an extra hundredweight or so was nothing to a good ox, the other asserting that it’d take six hundred oxen just to pull the chain. Bringing the chain and lifting it was dismissed as a trivial concern, especially by the Vadani miners. The camp was overflowing with Aram Chantat, they said, who sat around all day doing nothing while brave Vadani dug in the trenches and got shot at. Let them do it, and make themselves useful for a change.
Faced with this difference of opinion, the major referred the matter to General Daurenja, who expressed deep concern that the issue hadn’t been addressed earlier, deplored the fact that they were now severely behind schedule, and ordered the major to use the chain. Taking this order as his authority, the major sent for three regiments of the Aram Chantat and an additional hundred oxen.
It was now pitch dark, and every third man in the Aram Chantat contingent was issued with a lantern, so he could walk beside the chain-carriers and light the way. The shortest, straightest route was right through the middle of the camp, and the Mezentine observers on the embankment reported that the enemy were holding some kind of festival, involving a torchlight procession. This was taken as an indication that it would be a quiet night, and four of the five artillery batteries were allowed to stand down and go home.
