Devices and Desires (47 page)

“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?”

“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 ready 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.”