Devices and Desires (75 page)

Miel frowned. “That’s supposed to be ironic, presumably.”

“No,” Vaatzes said.

“Ah.” Miel shrugged. “Sorry. No disrespect. But even the Ducas never came up with anything as sappy as that.”

“I think it’s a good story,” Vaatzes said. “Please, don’t ever get me wrong. I haven’t changed who I am, just because I’m
in exile.”

Miel sighed. “It’s all very well you saying that,” he said. “I mean, I’m the same as you. Orsea may have had me arrested and
locked up in here, but he’s still the Duke and my best friend, and if he honestly thinks this is where I should be, then fine.
I happen to believe he’s wrong, and once things are sorted out, we can go back to how we were. But in your case…” He shook
his head. “What you did was absolutely harmless, there was nothing wrong about it, you hadn’t hurt anybody, and they were
going to kill you for it. You can’t accept that, and you can’t still have any faith in the society that was going to do that
to you.”

Vaatzes looked at him for a moment. “I was guilty,” he said. “And they caught me, and I deserved to be punished. But there
were other considerations, which meant I couldn’t hold still and die. It wasn’t up to me, the choice of whether or not to
hold still and take what was coming to me. If I’d been a free agent…” He shook his head slowly. “If there hadn’t been those
other considerations, of course, I’d never have broken the law in the first place, so really it’s a circular argument.”

Miel, not surprisingly, didn’t understand. “If that’s really how you feel,” he said, “what on earth prompted you to design
and build all those war engines that’re going to mow down your people in droves? No, don’t interrupt; it’s not like we came
to you and asked you, let alone threatened you with torture if you refused. You offered. What’s more, you offered and we refused,
so you had to go to all the trouble of getting a private investor to put up the money and everything. That simply doesn’t
make any sense, does it?”

“Like I said,” Vaatzes said quietly, “there are other considerations.” He broke eye contact, looked out of the window. “If
you’re standing on a ledge and someone pushes you, it’s not your fault that you fall. The whole thing has been out of my hands
for a very long time now. It’s a great shame, but there it is. You’d be doing the same as me, in my shoes.”

Miel decided not to reply to that; when someone insists on willfully being wrong, it’s bad manners to persist in correcting
him. “Thank you for coming to see me,” he said.

Vaatzes looked at him and grinned. “No problem,” he said. “For what little it’s worth, I’m absolutely positive you haven’t
done anything wrong. Also for what it’s worth, I’d like to thank you for everything you’ve done to help me. Without you, I
don’t know what I’d have done. I wish I could repay you somehow, but I can’t.” He stood up. “I wish there was something I
could do.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Miel said.

Don’t worry about it,
he’d said; Ziani thought about that as he walked home. Technically, it was absolution, which was probably what he’d gone
there to obtain. Query, however: is absolution valid if it’s obtained through deceit, fraud and treachery?

Irrelevant; he didn’t need the Ducas’ forgiveness, any more than he’d have needed it if he’d been pushed off a ledge and fallen
on him, breaking his arm or leg. In that case, he’d have been no more than a projectile, a weapon in the hand of whoever had
pushed him. There are all sorts of ways in which people are made into weapons; what they do once they’ve been put to that
use is not their fault. A man can’t work in an arms factory unless he believes in the innocence of weapons.

As he cleared the lower suburbs and approached the wall, he became aware of a great deal of activity; a great many people
walking fast or running, not aimlessly or in panic but with an obvious, serious purpose. Some of them were hurrying up the
hill, toward the center of town and the palace. Most of them, however, were coming down the hill, heading for the wall or
the gate. Fine, he thought; something’s about to happen, we’re about to get under way at last. He allowed himself a moment
(there might not be another opportunity) to consider his feelings, which he’d learned to trust over the years. He realized
that he felt, on balance, content. A great deal was wrong about what had happened and what was about to happen, but he was
satisfied that he bore no blame for any of it. His part had been carried out with proper, in some respects elegant efficiency;
and he was reasonably confident that it would all come out right, barring the unforeseen and the unforeseeable. He checked
progress achieved against the overall schematic. There was still a long way to go, but he’d come a long way already. Most
of all, everything was more or less under control. Suddenly, without expecting to, he laughed. The Eremian workers at the
factory had an expression,
good enough for government work,
meaning something like,
by no means perfect, but who cares, it’ll do.
It had always annoyed him when he’d heard them using it; right now, however, it was entirely appropriate. Very soon now,
by the sound of it, there’d be plenty of government work on both sides of the city wall. He, of course, preferred to see things
in terms of tolerances; what could and could not be tolerated in the context of the job that needed to be done. By those criteria,
he’d passed the test and could go home with a quiet mind.

Orsea arrived at the wall expecting to see one of his nightmares. Instead, he found the seventh infantry drawn up in parade
order, and the captain saluting him.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“They’ve started to climb the road,” the captain told him. “Come and see for yourself.”

Jarnac Ducas joined him on top of the gatehouse tower. Preoccupied as Orsea was with thoughts of the end of the world, he
couldn’t help noticing that Jarnac’s unerring dress sense had chosen exactly the right outfit for the occasion: a coat of
plates backed in blue velvet over a shirt of flat, riveted mail; plain blued-steel arm and leg harness; an open-face bascinet
with a mail aventail; simple mail chausses over strong shoes; workmanlike Type Fifteen sword in a plain leather scabbard.
Is there, Orsea wondered, a book where you can look these things up:
Arms and Armor for Formal Occasions: A Guide for the Well-Dressed Warrior.
He wouldn’t be the least surprised, he decided, if there was.

“Nothing either way as yet,” Jarnac told him. “See down there, you can just make them out.” (Jarnac pointed; Orsea couldn’t
see anything.) “That’s their heavy artillery, the stuff we really don’t know anything about. According to the Mezentine fellow,
Vaatzes, they could have engines that could drop five-hundred-weight shot on the walls from about halfway up the road; which’d
be a disaster, obviously, we’d have to send out a sortie to deal with them and that’d be simply asking for trouble. But, apparently,
the platforms and carriages for that kind of engine are too wide or too fragile or something to be set up on the road — because
of the gradient, presumably — so it’s possible they won’t be able to use them at all unless they stop halfway up and spend
several days building a special platform. Nothing to stop them doing that, of course, unless we’re brave enough or cocky enough
to send out a night sortie. Alternatively, they could drag the heavy artillery round the back of the city and set it up roughly
where the advance party of scorpions was supposed to be — where it would’ve been if we hadn’t intercepted it, I mean. In fact,
that’s the only scenario we can think of which’d explain why they wanted to station scorpions there in the first place: to
lay down a suppressing barrage to cover them while they get the heavy engines set up. Of course, you’d expect them to change
the plan because of what happened, but you never know, they may decide to press on regardless. Basically, it’s too early to
say anything for certain.”

That seemed to cover the situation pretty well, though Orsea felt he ought to be asking penetrating questions to display his
perfect grasp of it. But the only thing he really wanted to know was whether, at some point between now and the start of the
actual assault, Jarnac would be slipping off home to change into something else; or whether he’d got a full wardrobe of different
armors laid out ready in the guard tower. He wished he didn’t dislike Jarnac so much, particularly since he was going to have
to rely on him; that made him think of Miel, which had the effect of freezing his mind. “Carry on,” he heard himself say.

He toured the walls, of course, and anxious-looking officers whose names tended to elude him jumped up and saluted him wherever
he went. They pointed things out to him, things he couldn’t quite make out in the distance — high points where the enemy might
put observers or long-range engines, patches of dead ground where a whole division could lurk unseen, secret mountain trails
that could be useful for raids and sorties — and he knew that he ought to be taking it all in, building each component into
a mechanism that would serve as a weapon against the enemy. But there was too much of everything for his mind to grasp. The
only thing he knew for certain was that he was slowly seizing up, as fear, shock and pain coagulated and set inside him. The
enemy would build their platform and their engines would grind down the walls at their leisure, smashing Vaatzes’ hard-earned,
expensive scorpions into rubbish before they’d had a chance to loose a single shot. When that task had been completed to their
perfect satisfaction, the enemy would advance, entirely safe, to the foot of the wall; their scorpions would clear away the
last of Jarnac’s defenders, the ladders would be raised, the enemy would surge in like a mighty white-fringed wave; and all
the while, Miel (who could have saved the city) would watch from his tower window, and Veatriz would watch from hers; maybe
they’d be watching when he was killed, maybe they’d see him fall and be unable to do anything…

Part of the torment was knowing that there was still enough time. He could send a runner to the captain of the East Tower;
Miel could be here beside him in a few minutes, to forgive him and take over and make everything all right again. But he couldn’t
do that; because Miel had betrayed him, Miel and Veatriz — the truth was that he didn’t know what it was they’d done, or how
Duke Valens came into it; all he knew was that he could never trust either of them again, and without them he was completely
useless, a fool in charge of the battle of life against death. It was like the nightmares he had now and again, where he was
a doctor about to perform surgery, and he suddenly realized he didn’t have the faintest idea what he was supposed to do; or
he’d agreed to act in a play but he hadn’t got round to learning his lines, and now he was due to go on in front of a hundred
people. The officers carried on telling him things he ought to know, but it was as though they were speaking a foreign language.
We’ve had it,
he thought; and his mind started to fill up with images of the last time, the field of dead men and scorpion bolts.
It’s all my fault,
he told himself,
I’m to blame for all of it; nobody else but me.

Once the tour of inspection was over, he went back to Jarnac’s tower and asked him what was happening. Jarnac pointed out
the heavy engines — he could see them for himself now — being dragged up the slope by long trains of mules. Ahead of them
trudged a dense mass of men; the work details, Jarnac explained, who’d be building the platform for the engines.

“I see,” Orsea said. “So what should we be doing?”

He could see a flicker of concern in Jarnac’s eyes, as if to say
what’re you asking me for?
“Well,” he said, “as I mentioned earlier, we have the option of launching a sortie. We can try and drive off the work details,
or kill them, or capture or destroy the heavy engines. It’s our only way of putting the engines out of action before they
neutralize our defenses — assuming, of course, that they’re capable of doing that. We’ve never seen them in action, or heard
any accounts of what they can do, so we’re guessing, basically. But if we launch the sortie, we’ll be taking quite a risk.
To put it bluntly, I don’t think we’d stand any more of a chance than we did the last time we took on the Mezentines in the
open. Our scorpions can’t give us cover down there, and we’d be walking right up to theirs; and even if you leave the scorpions
out of it completely, we’d be taking on their army in a pitched battle. I don’t think that’d be a good idea.”

Jarnac stopped talking and looked at him; so did a dozen or so other officers, waiting for him to decide. He could feel fear
coming to life inside them (
the Duke hasn’t got a plan, he can’t make up his mind, he’s useless, we’re screwed
). He knew he had to say something, and that if he said the wrong thing it could easily mean the destruction of the city.

“Fine,” he said. “No sortie. We’ll just sit it out and wait and see.”

The silence was uncomfortable, as though he’d just said something crass and tactless, or spouted gibberish at them.
I’ve lost them,
he thought,
but they’ll obey my orders because I’m the Duke.
Their excellent loyalty would keep them from ignoring him and doing what they thought should be done, what they knew was
the right course of action; they’d fail him by loyalty, just as Miel had failed him by treachery. Ah, symmetry!

But he’d given the order now; fatal to change his mind and trample down what little confidence in him they had left. Amusing
thought: here was the entire Mezentine army coming up the mountain specially to kill him, well over thirty thousand men all
hungering for his blood; even so, in spite of their multitudes, he was still his own worst enemy.

Jarnac cleared his throat. “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to run the scorpion crews through a few more drills,” he
said. “We’ve got time, I’m fairly sure, and —”

“Yes, do that,” Orsea snapped at him. “I’ll get out of your way, you’ve got —” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence. He
headed for the stairs. People followed him; he ought to know who they all were, but he didn’t. He had no clear idea of where
he was going, or what he was going to do next.