Devices and Desires (78 page)

Somebody or other; he found he really wasn’t interested in who it might be. Could be anybody, the Phocas, the Nicephorus,
there were a dozen great families who traditionally sought to overthrow the Ducas at least once a generation. It was a pursuit
without malice, carried out between natural enemies who respected each other; no apology given or sought. Nine of the greater
Ducas had been executed for treason; according to family tradition, six of them had been innocent, falsely accused by rival
houses. In return, the Ducas had contrived to bring down eight of the Phocas, six of the Perdicas, seven of the Tzimisces…
It was a way of keeping score, like a championship or a league, with so many points for an execution, so many for a banishment
and so on. It was one of those things, and you really couldn’t feel resentful about it, just as the dove doesn’t resent the
falcon, though it does its very best to avoid it.

The letter, though; someone had found it (
they’d
found it, the captain had said; but he’d have known if the Duke’s men had come to search the house). The whole point was
that nobody knew about that hiding-place but him. The only possibility was a servant, someone who’d worked in the Ducas house
for a long time, who’d come across it by accident while cleaning or tidying. That was a possibility he didn’t want to think
about; far better that it should be the Phocas than somebody he trusted. Besides, it didn’t matter. As soon as he was able
to talk to Orsea, he’d be able to explain everything; and besides, Orsea would know that ridiculous story the captain had
told him couldn’t possibly be true, because in order to believe it, Orsea would have to believe that Veatriz was part of the
conspiracy, and that was, of course, impossible —

Veatriz. It hit him like a punch in the face. If, somehow, Orsea had persuaded himself or been persuaded that there was some
kind of ridiculous plot, then he must think Veatriz was right at the heart of it — conspiring with her lover, the Vadani Duke,
to lure him to his death. Only, Orsea couldn’t be that stupid. Orsea would never believe anything like that.

Just as Orsea would never ignore letters from his best friend.

He was already on his feet before the idea had taken shape in his mind. His instincts were telling him,
you can’t just sit here, you’ve got to get out and do something; rescue her, rescue both of them. It’s your job, it’s your
duty.
He made himself sit down again. The Ducas doesn’t break out of prison; for one thing it’d be dreadfully inconsiderate, since
it’d be bound to cause trouble for servants and dependents, who’d be assumed to have arranged or assisted his escape. Instead,
the Ducas writes a letter to the Duke, explaining all the silly misunderstandings; the Duke believes him, out of respect for
the Ducas honor; everything is cleared up and put right. Unfortunately, the system presupposed a competent Duke, a man of
intelligence and sound judgment, who wasn’t pathetically insecure and morbidly jealous about his wife.

He sat down and wrote a letter.

Orsea —

This is ridiculous. I think I know what they’ve been telling you, and it simply isn’t true. If you’ll just come and see me
for five minutes, I can prove it, and we can sort it all out. You owe me that.

He was about to sign it, but why bother? Nobody else on earth could have written that letter. He folded it, went to the door
and called for a page. Nobody came, and that was a shock for the Ducas. Servants had always been there, all through his life.
You didn’t need to look; they’d be there, like component parts of a great machine. If the Ducas lifted up a plate, shut his
eyes and dropped it, there’d be someone in the right place to catch it before it hit the floor. He called again, and waited.
Eventually, a harassed-looking guard trotted up.

“Where is everybody?” Miel asked.

The soldier looked at him. “On the towers, or the roofs,” he said. “Watching. Didn’t anybody tell you? The Mezentines are
attacking.”

*    *    *

“Please,” said Jarnac Ducas, with a hint of desperation. “Really, there’s nothing you can do here, and I can’t guarantee your
safety. Please go back to the council room. That’s where you’re needed.”

Don’t lie to me,
Orsea thought,
I’ve had enough lies from your family already.
“I’m the Duke,” he said, “I should be here, on the front line. Where else should I be?”

Jarnac recognized the line; it was from a stirring speech made by Duke Tarsa IV, a hundred and seventy years ago. Probably
Orsea didn’t realize he was quoting. “Inside,” he replied, “where it’s safe. Look,” he added, suddenly blunt, “if you’re up
here and you get killed or badly hurt, it’ll totally fuck up our morale. If they get up on the wall I’ll send for you; that’s
when you’ll need to be seen. Just standing around dodging scorpion bolts, that’s no bloody good to anybody.”

And that’s me told,
Orsea thought rebelliously, but of course Jarnac was right. Not only did he sound right, he looked right, head to toe, in
his no-nonsense open-face bascinet, brigandine coat over a light mailshirt, munitions arm and leg harness. You could believe
in him, six foot five of lean muscle. He could’ve stepped straight off the pages of
The True Art of War,
or
A Discourse of Military Science.
He made Orsea feel about twelve years old.

“Fine,” he said, “but you call me as soon as they get to the foot of the wall. That’s an order.”

“Understood,” Jarnac said crisply; turned away, turned back impulsively. “There’s one thing you can do,” he said, in a voice
more urgent and apprehensive than Orsea had ever heard him use before. “Something that’d really help.”

“What?”

Jarnac stepped right up close, something the lesser Ducas had probably never done before in the history of the family. “You
can release Miel and send him up here to take over from me,” he said, with an edge to his voice that made Orsea step away.
“He’s the man you need, not me. He’s good at this stuff.”

He doesn’t know,
Orsea realized. “I can’t,” he said. “Look, I promise I’ll explain; but it simply can’t be done, you’ve got to believe me.”

“I see.” Jarnac’s massive head drooped on his neck for a moment, and then he was himself again. “In that case, with your permission,
I really must get back to the tower. I will send for you,” he added, “you’ve got my word on that.”

Once Orsea had gone, Jarnac bounded up the stairs to the top platform of the tower. His staff were waiting for him, anxious
to point out things they’d noticed — a unit of archers previously misidentified as engineers, tenders full of scorpion ammunition,
a banner that could be the enemy general staff. Jarnac pretended to listen and nodded appreciatively, but the buzzing swarm
of detail didn’t penetrate. He was staring at the enemy; a single swarming, crawling thing trudging unhappily up the steep
road to his city, with the intention of killing him.

Jarnac Ducas had fought in seventeen military engagements; the first, when he was just turned sixteen, had been against the
Vadani, a trivial cavalry skirmish on the borders that had sucked in infantry detachments that happened to be in the vicinity
and had turned into a vicious, indecisive slogging-match; the most recent, Miel’s raid against the Mezentines. He’d missed
the scorpion-cloud and the massacre, and he’d felt bad about that ever since. He’d been reading approved military texts since
he was ten, at which age he’d also started to train with weapons (the sword, the spear, the poll-axe, the bow, the halberd);
ten hours a week of forms, four hours a week sparring. By his own estimation, he was eminently qualified to lead a full regiment
of heavy cavalry, as befitted his place in the social order. Never in his worst dreams had he ever imagined himself in sole
command of the defense of Civitas Eremiae. That was something that simply couldn’t happen.

“Get the engines wound up,” he said, not looking round to see who received the order. Whoever was responsible for doing it
would know what to do. “They’re good to three hundred and fifty yards, is that right?”

Someone assured him that it was, not that the information was necessary. Some weeks earlier, a party of workmen had hammered
a row of white stakes into the ground in a straight line, precisely three hundred and forty-nine yards from the wall. As soon
as the enemy crossed the staked line, the scorpion crews were going to loose their first volley. The engineers who installed
the machines had carefully zeroed them to that range, so that the first cloud of bolts would land on the line, with a permitted
tolerance of six inches either way. The enemy advance guard, marching purposefully up the hill in good order, were already
as good as dead. It was the unit behind them Jarnac was thinking about.

The key would be the mobile scorpion batteries; he could see them, though the enemy had done their best to disguise them as
ordinary wagons. If he could neutralize the Mezentine scorpions, he reckoned he could kill one man in three before they reached
the base of the wall. Take away a third, and the enemy army wasn’t strong enough to take the city; there were definitive tables
of odds in the military manuals that told you the proportion by which the attackers needed to outnumber the defenders in order
to secure victory. Jarnac had a copy of
A Discourse of Military Science
tucked inside the front of his brigandine, with a bookmark to help him find the place. The critical figure was one in three;
simple arithmetic.

Now then, he thought. The skirmish line advances, I wipe them out; while our engines are rewinding, they push forward the
mobile batteries so that they’re in range. I loose a volley that gets rid of all their scorpion crews, but when we’re all
down again, they send up replacement crews to span and align their scorpions. If I’m quick, maybe I’ll get those crews too,
but there’ll be a third wave, and a fourth. Sooner or later they’ll get off their shot; I’ll lose crewmen, which’ll slow down
my rate of fire as I replace them. Whoever runs out of scorpion crewmen first will lose the war. And that’s all there is to
it.

(He paused for a moment to consider the sheer scale of the enterprise he was committing himself to. Not tens of deaths but
hundreds, not hundreds but thousands, not thousands but tens of thousands; each death caused by a wound, a tearing of flesh,
smashing of bone, pouring out of blood, an experience of intense pain. He’d seen death several hundred times, the moment when
the light went out in the eyes of an animal because of some action of his, at which point the shudders and twitches were simply
mechanical, no longer controlled by a living thing. Each of those deaths he could justify in terms of meat harvested, crops
preserved from damage, honor given and respectfully taken — there were times when he found it hard to believe any of those
justifications, but he knew somehow that what he was doing was clean and legitimate. Now he was going to see death on a scale
he couldn’t begin to imagine, and the justification — which should have been self-evident — seemed elusive. Why kill ten thousand
Mezentines, he asked himself, when the outcome is inevitable and the city is doomed to fall? Why should any human being kill
another, given that the flesh and the hide are not used, and no trophy is taken? All he could find to shield himself with
against these thoughts was a banal
they started it,
and the illogical, incredible fact that unless he killed them, all of them, they were going to wreck his city and murder
his people.
Because there’s no alternative;
it was a reason, not a justification, on a par with a parent’s
because I say so,
something he had to obey but could neither understand nor respect. It was no job for a gentleman, even though it was the
proper occupation of the lesser Ducas — but not to command, not to be in charge and accept responsibility. He hadn’t been
born to that; Miel had, and that was what he was there for. Except that he wasn’t; why was that? he wondered.)

They were closing; they were only yards from the white posts; they were the quarry walking into the snare. Jarnac took a deep
breath, sucked it in, found it impossible to let it go, because when he did so, he’d be saying the word,
loose,
that would kill all those people. Could he really do that, exterminate thousands of creatures with just one word, like a
god or a magician in a story?

“Loose,” he said, and the scorpions bucked all along the wall. The sounds they made were the slider crashing home against
the stop, a thump of steel on wood, and the hiss of the bolt forcibly parting the air. All around him, men were exploding
into action, arching their backs as they worked frantically at windlasses, swirling and flickering like dancers as they picked
up and loaded bolts, jumped clear as the sear dropped and the slider flew forward again. He pressed against the battlement
and looked down, in time to see the cloud of bolts lift, a shimmering, insubstantial thing that fell like a net. The enemy
were flattened like trampled grass, as if an invisible foot was stamping on them. They weren’t people, of course; they were
blades of grass, or ants, or bees swarming; not a thousand creatures who resembled him closely but one composite, collective
thing, belonging to the species
enemy.
The bolt-cloud lifted again and blurred his view.

Something about it was wrong; at least, the enemy weren’t acting in the way he’d been expecting. They’d sent forward another
wave, but it was walking, scurrying right into the path of the bolts. He saw the invisible foot stamp it flat, and there wasn’t
another wave behind it. He realized what it meant: Vaatzes the Mezentine had improved the design of the windlasses, or something
of the kind. These scorpions could be reloaded faster than the ones the Mezentines made, which meant their timings for their
planned maneuvers were all wrong; accordingly, instead of sending their people into a neat, safe interval between volleys,
they’d placed them right under the stamping foot. Jarnac felt sick; it was a wicked, treacherous thing to do, to trick the
enemy into destroying his own people on such an obscene scale. He turned his head away, and saw an engineer hanging by his
hands from a windlass handle, every ounce of bodyweight and every pound of strength compressed into desperate activity.