by K. J. Parker
Well, he thought, so there it is. Mind you, if this is being in love, I don’t think much of it.
He glanced at the clock — beautiful, huge, Mezentine; the craftsmen of the Republic excelled at clockwork, not just timepieces but automata, gadgets, mechanical toys. In three-quarters of an hour he had to go and see his future wife. Someone had made an appointment for them to take a stroll in the herb garden. It would be at its best at this time of the evening, stinking of lavender, bay and night-scented stock. At their last encounter they’d talked quite civilly for some considerable time about sparrowhawks; a day’s falconry was being arranged, or would be as soon as Jarnac Ducas came back from the wars (sulfur; why?), he being recognized as the finest falconer, apart from Valens himself, in the duchy. It was a treat he was looking forward to intensely; and once it was over, he planned on making a public announcement about leaving the city for the duration of the war.
The Mezentines would burn it to the ground, of course. Presumably they would loot it scrupulously clean first; in which case, his father’s tapestry would be taken away and sold, which at least meant it would survive. He’d very nearly made up his mind to take it with him, but space on the carts was going to be very tight indeed and it’d set a bad example. He smiled; he’d seen it in passing for most of his life, but he’d never actually looked at it. That was as bad as continually dipping into a book but never actually sitting down and reading it from beginning to end; or like being in love with someone since he was seventeen but never admitting it, even to himself, until it was finally, definitively, too late to do anything about it.
But so what? You heard all sorts of good, positive things about love; they wanted you to believe that you couldn’t be happy without it. That was plain stupid, like saying you could never know true happiness unless you learned to play the flute. In any event, he knew all about love. He’d learned it like a school lesson, irregular verbs or dates of coronations, when he’d sat in his father’s room staring at the tapestry because he couldn’t bear to look at the man lying on the bed.
So, he thought, the hell with it. He still had forty minutes.
He jumped up, opened the long triangular cupboard in the corner of the room and took out a case of practice rapiers(Mezentine, a little too heavy, with three-ring hilts and bated points). Then he clattered down the stairs into the courtyard, wondering who would be unlucky enough to be the first to meet him.
There was a special pleasure in the irony; Orsea was sitting on the stone bench, watching the sunset.
“Hello,” Valens called out cheerfully. “I hoped I might find you. Any good at fencing?”
Orsea turned his head, saw him and stood up. Excellent manners. “What, you mean swordfighting with rapiers?”
“Yes.”
Orsea shook his head. “Pretty hopeless, actually. Of course, they tried to teach me when I was a kid, but I never had the —”
“Fine. Catch.” Valens threw him one of the foils; he grabbed at it, knocked it up in the air and managed to catch it on the second bounce. “Come over to the old stable with me, we’ll have half an hour’s sparring.”
Orsea frowned. “No, really,” he said. “I’m dreadful at it.”
“I’ll teach you,” Valens replied. “I’m a pretty good instructor, though I do say so myself.”
By rights they should have worn face-masks, padded jackets and heavy left-hand gloves with the palms reinforced with chainmail. But it would have taken time to fetch them, and there was no need. Valens was too good a fencer to get hit, or to hit his opponent dangerously. So they fought in shirtsleeves, like men trying to kill one another. Valens demonstrated the lunge, the pass, the stromazone (a flick across the enemy’s face with the point of your sword, designed to cause painful superficial cuts). Orsea turned out to be every bit as bad as he’d said he was, and Valens poked him in the ribs, slapped him about with the flat, tripped him, knocked the foil out of his hand, drew blood from his ear and lower lip with little wrist-flips, and loosened one of his teeth by punching him in the face with the knuckle-bow of his hilt. There was no reason to it apart from the sheer joy of hurting and humiliating him, showing him up for the clown he was, goading him into losing his temper and thereby laying himself even more open to attack. In the last objective, Valens failed. The more he was hit, the more guilty Orsea seemed to get, the more painfully ashamed of his lack of skill and ability. At last, having knocked his foil out of his hand and across the stable (“That’s called the beat in narrow measure,” he explained helpfully) and kicked his knees out from under him so that he was left kneeling on precisely the spot where Valens had had to learn the four wards as a boy — it had to be that place and no other; it took him a full minute to herd Orsea onto it — he lowered his foil, held out his other hand and pulled Orsea to his feet.
“You’re getting there,” he said encouragingly, “but there’s still quite a way to go. We can make this a regular thing, if you like; once a week, or twice even, if you’d rather.”
“It’s very good of you to offer,” Orsea said, wiping blood out of his fringe, “but I know how busy you must be right now with other —”
He yelped; Valens had just stung the edge of his cheek with another flick. “Steady on,” he shouted. “I haven’t got my sword.”
“So you haven’t,” Valens replied. “I’d go and fetch it if I were you.”
Orsea backed away a couple of steps, then turned his back as he crossed the stable and retrieved the sword. I could do it now, Valens thought; I could put the tip of my sword under my boot and snap off the button and stab him through the neck. There’s nobody to see, everybody would believe it was a horrible accident. There’d have to be at least a month of formal mourning; we’d postpone the wedding, and then maybe there’d be a hitch; and she’d be a widow …
“Ready?” he called out.
Orsea turned to face him. He looked very pale and rather scared, and he was holding the foil all wrong. “Ready,” he said.
“Right. Now,” Valens went on, lowering his foil until the tip rested on the flagstones, “I want you to lunge at me. Straight at my face’d be best. There’s an old saying in fencing; the way to a man’s heart —”
Orsea lunged. At least, he took a giant stride forward at the same time as he stuck his arm out in front of him, but his foot caught in a crack where the damp had forced up a flagstone, and he stumbled forward, off balance, all his weight in front, windmilling both arms to keep from going over. Valens took the regulation step back and left, preparing for the volte he’d been planning, but Orsea’s wildly swishing foil came out of nowhere, and the tip smacked on the flagstones, knocking off the button, before hitting him in the mouth. Valens felt the jagged edge of the broken foil slice along the length of his bottom lip like a knife.
Orsea, balance regained, was staring at him. “I’m so sorry,” he was saying. “I think I tripped on something, I didn’t mean …”
Valens stepped back a pace — force of habit, to maintain a wide distance — and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Perfectly all right,” he muttered. “In fact, I’d have been filled with admiration if you’d done it on purpose.” But you couldn’t have, he didn’t add. “That’s the stromazone, by the way, what I was telling you about earlier. Nothing like a bit of pain to break the other man’s concentration.”
Orsea lowered his sword. “Maybe we should …”
“What, when you’re just starting to get the hang of it?”Valens lunged; a slow, lazy move, slovenly, better signposted than the main road to Mezentia, but Orsea didn’t move or parry or do anything. The button hit him in the hollow between the collar-bones, the softest and surest target of all on an unarmored man; the blade, being a foil, bent like a bow. “On the other hand,”Valens said, moving the sword away, “that’s probably enough for one day. If you fence when you’re starting to get tired, accidents can happen.”
He sucked his lip until his mouth was full of blood, then spat. It was surprising how much it hurt, a l
ittle scratch like that. “Are you all right?” Orsea was saying. He nodded.
“Which isn’t to say,” he said, “that it won’t be awkward, so close to the wedding. Don’t suppose I’ll be getting much kissing done with a mouth full of stitches.”
If a man could die of embarrassment … Then Orsea would be dead, and no need to murder him. Valens started to smile, but the pain checked him. Snap off the button and stab him through the neck; well. Accidents can happen.
“I really am sorry,” Orsea was bleating. “I did tell you, I’m absolute rubbish at fencing.”
“You were,” Valens amended. “Now you’re slightly better at it.” He reached out and pulled the damaged foil from Orsea’s hand. “Might as well ditch the pair of them,” he said. “This one’s not worth mending, and the other one on its own’s no good. I never liked them much anyway.”
Orsea opened his mouth; he didn’t need to speak, it was obvious what he’d been going to say. His first impulse had been to offer to pay for a replacement pair, but then he’d remembered that he hadn’t got any money, apart from the allowance Valens made him. Buying a man something with his own money would be a uniquely empty gesture. “It can’t be fixed, then?” he said instead.
Valens shook his head. “You’d need to re-temper the whole blade,” he said. “Forget about it. One less piece of junk to agonize over leaving behind.”
(As he said that, he tried to remember if Orsea knew about the evacuation. But yes, he did; he’d been at the staff meeting. Of course, there was no guarantee that he’d been paying attention.)
“Suppose I’d better go and get cleaned up,” he said. “I’m supposed to be meeting the princess in about ten minutes.”
He walked out of the stable, not noticing whether Orsea followed him or not. As he crossed the yard, he realized he was still holding his foil. He stuck it point downward in a stone urn full of small pink flowers and made his way into the main hall. Ten minutes; he sent someone to find the surgeon, and sat down on a bench.
“Don’t ask,” he said, when the surgeon arrived.
“I wasn’t going to. Was it clean?”
Valens nodded. “Hurry up,” he said, “I’ve got a date with a girl.”
“This is going to hurt a lot,” the surgeon said, threading his needle. “Don’t bother being brave just for my benefit.”
“I won’t,” Valens said.
He managed not to scream, even so (the Duke is always brave, always for his own exclusive benefit). The surgeon snipped off the end of the thread with a little silver knife. “Taking them out won’t be much fun either,” he said. “But there shouldn’t be much of a scar. Be more careful next time.”
His clothes were covered in blood, of course. He dragged himself back up to the tower room, changed and slumped down again. He was late for his appointment (whatever the right word was for half an hour of diplomatically mandated flirtation) and the cut was hurting like buggery. Still, it’d be a good way to get the conversation going.
“You’ve hurt your mouth,” she said, as soon as she saw him. It was practically an accusation.
“Yes,” he replied. “My own silly fault.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I got careless handling the goshawk you gave me, and she swiped me.”
She frowned. “You should bathe the cut in distilled wine,” she said, “to stop it getting infected. I’m surprised, though. I had hoped I’d trained her better than that.”
“Not her fault,” Valens said. “I’m just lucky she didn’t strike for the eyes.”
“That would have been very bad,” she said. “You should have her killed.”
“Certainly not,” Valens said. “She’s a very fine hawk.”
“Yes. Even so.”
He smiled. It hurt to smile at her, not entirely because of the stitches. “Besides,” he said, “that’d be a poor way to treat a wedding present.”
She frowned again. She seemed to be finding him rather hard going. “The hawk isn’t my wedding present to you,” she said. “My official present is two divisions of light cavalry, and my personal gift will be a suit of lightweight scale armor, a riding sword and a warhorse.”
“Oh,” Valens said. “You’ve spoiled the surprise.”
She looked at him as though he was talking a language she didn’t know. “The gifts are specified in the marriage contract,” she said. “I’m sorry, I assumed you’d have read it.”
“That’s right, I remember now.” He could still taste blood in his mouth. It made him feel hungry. “Anyway, let’s talk about something else. This is the herb garden.”
“I know.”
“Of course you do. That one over there’s mint; that’s rosemary, and oregano.”
“Basil.”
“Sorry, basil, you’re quite right. You know your herbs, then.”
She nodded. “I read a book about them. We don’t use herbs much at home, they’re too hard to get hold of. Most of our meat is salted to preserve it, or smoked or dried. As well as common salt, we use wild honey and saltpeter, both of which are fairly abundant in our territory.”
“I see,” Valens said. “Interesting,” he lied. “You must find the meat here pretty bland, in that case.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Tell me …” He racked his brain for something to ask her about. “Tell me what sort of food you eat in your country.”
She raised her thin, long eyebrows. “Well,” she said, “we are, as you know, a nomadic society. Accordingly, most of our food is provided by our livestock. We eat beef and mutton, cheese and other dairy products, and game, of course.”
“How about bread? Vegetables?”
“We gather a wide variety of fruit,” she went on, as though he hadn’t interrupted, “and wild honey, which we use for a great many things besides preserving. We get a certain amount of flour from the Mezentines in trade, but it’s still very much a luxury; for one thing, it’s heavy and bulky to carry in any quantity. Nuts and berries —”
“And what you mostly trade with is salt,” he broke in. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
She paused, as though his interruption had made her lose her place. “Salt, some hides and furs,” she said. “But salt mostly.”
“That’s …” Valens couldn’t think of a suitable word, so he shook his head. “Changing the subject rather,” he went on, “there’s one thing I’m a bit curious about. How did you actually find out about us, in the first place, I mean? Because, to be honest, I’d never heard of your people, except as a name.”
Disapproval all over her face; clearly not diplomatic. “You’d have to ask my uncles,” she said. “Similarly, I’d never heard of the Vadani until I was told I was to marry you. However, I trust I have now made amends for my ignorance. I have put a considerable amount of effort into my studies.”
“I can see that,” Valens said. “And you’ve done really well.”
“Thank you.” She hesitated, then said: “Now there are three things I should like to ask you about, if that would be in order.”
Valens shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“Very well.” The way she paused reminded Valens of several experienced public speakers he’d listened to over the years. “If any of these questions strike you as offensive or impertinent, please say so. First, I should like to know why, at your age and in your position, you are still unmarried. Second, given that you are the absolute ruler of this country, why are you allowing your advisers to pressure you into a marriage that clearly holds little attraction for you. Third, I would be most interested to know your reasons for going to war with the Mezentine Republic.”
Valens shut his eyes for a moment. What the hell, he thought.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Would you like to hear the truth?”
She looked at him.
“Fine. Look, can we sit down for a moment?”
She nodded. “The pain from your injury is fatiguing you,” she said.
“Yes.” He
sat down on the arm of a stone bench. She settled next to him like a bird pitching on a branch.
“The goshawk didn’t attack you, did it?” she said.
He laughed. “No. I made that up, sorry. No disrespect intended to your hawk.”
Her mouth tightened a little; if we were already married, he thought, I don’t suppose I’d be getting off so lightly. “Very well,” she said. “What did happen?”
“I got carved up a little by a jealous husband.”
“I see. I take it the man in question will be punished.”
“Not necessary.”
She scowled. “He drew the blood of his ruler,” she said firmly. “There can be no clemency in such a case.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Valens said.
“If you wish. You were about to answer my questions.”
“So I was.” He looked away, took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “When I was seventeen, I saw a girl. She was a guest here. I fell in love with her, but not long afterward she married someone else. After that — I don’t know, there wasn’t anything conscious about it. I stopped thinking about her as soon as I heard about her marriage. My father had just died, I had a lot of other things on my mind. I suppose I was glad of an excuse not to have to concern myself with all that stuff.”
“That seems plausible enough,” she acknowledged. “My second question …”
“Why now, you mean? Well, various reasons, really. Mostly, to be frank, we need this alliance. We’ve — I’m sorry, I’ve got the country into a pretty awful mess, and it looks as though you’re our way out. Also …” He shivered. “It’s been a long time since I was a seventeen-year-old kid. Everybody grows up eventually.”
She was looking at him again. “I don’t think I understand what you mean,” she said.
“Don’t you? Well.” He smiled. “Not entirely sure I know myself. Let’s just say it’s taken me a long time to come to terms with it, but I got there in the end.”
