Devices and Desires

Chapter Eight

To his surprise, Valens was curious. He'd expected to feel scared, horrified or revolted, as though he was getting ready to meet an embassy of goblins. Maybe I don't scare so easily these days, he thought; but he knew he was missing the point.

'Well,' he said, 'we'd better not keep them waiting.'

He nudged his horse forward; it started to move, its head still down, its mouth full of fat green spring grass. It was a singularly graceless, slovenly animal, but it had a wonderful turn of speed.

'I've never met one before, what are they like?' Young Gabbaeus on his left, trying to look calm; Valens noticed that he was wearing a heavy wool cloak over his armour, and the sleeves of a double-weight gambeson poked out from under the steel vambraces on his forearms. Curious, since Gabbaeus had always insisted he despised the heat; then Valens realised he'd dressed up extra warm to make sure he wouldn't shiver.

'I don't know,' Valens replied, 'it's hard to say, really. I guess the key word is different.'

'Different,' Gabbaeus repeated. 'Different in what way?'

'Pretty much every way, I suppose,' Valens replied. 'They don't look anything like us. Their clothes are nothing like ours. Their horses-either bloody great big things you'd happily plough with, or little thin ponies. Like everything; you expect one thing, you get another. The difficulty is, there's so many of them-different tribes and sects and splinter-groups and all-you can't generalise till you know exactly which lot you're dealing with.'

'I see,' Gabbaeus said nervously. 'So you can't really know what to expect when they come at you.'

Valens grinned. 'Trouble,' he said. 'That's a constant. It's the details that vary.'

According to the herald, Skeddanlothi and his raiding party were waiting for them on the edge of the wood, where the river vanished into the trees. Valens knew very little about the enemy leader; little more than what he'd learned from a couple of stragglers his scouts had brought in the day before. According to them, Skeddanlothi was the second or third son of the High King's elder brother. He'd brought a raiding-party into Vadani territory in order to get plunder; he wanted to marry, apparently, and his half of the takings was to be the dowry. The men with him presumably had similar motives. If they were offered enough money, they'd probably go away without the need for bloodshed.

'Beats me,' Gabbaeus went on, 'how they got here at all. I thought it was impossible to get across the desert. No water.'

Valens nodded. 'That's the story,' he said. 'And fortunately for us, most of the Cure Hardy believe it; with good reason, because raiding parties go out every few years, and none of them ever come back. They assume, naturally enough, that the raiders die in the desert.' He yawned; it was a habit of his when he was nervous. 'But there is a way. Some clown of a trader found it a few years ago. Being a trader, of course, she didn't tell anybody, apart from the people in her company; then one of their caravans got itself intercepted by one of the Cure Hardy sects.'

'Wonderful,' Gabbaeus said.

'Actually, not as bad as all that.' Valens yawned again. It was a mannerism he made no effort to rid himself of, since it made him look fearless. 'The Cure Hardy are worse than the traders for keeping secrets from each other. I think it was the Lauzeta who first got hold of it; they'd rather be buried alive in ant-hills than share a good thing with the Auzeil or the Flos Glaia. Even within a particular sect, they don't talk to each other. Something like a safe way across the desert is an opportunity for one faction to get rich and powerful at the expense of the others. Sooner or later, of course, the High King or one of his loathsome relations will get hold of it, and then we'll be in real trouble. Meanwhile, we have to deal with minor infestations, like this one. It's never much fun, but it could be worse; sort of like the difference between a wasps' nest in the roof and a plague of locusts.'

Gabbaeus had gone quiet. Valens made an effort not to smile. A first encounter with the Cure Hardy was rather like your first time after boar on foot in the woods. Most people survived it, but some didn't.

Valens had done it before, six or seven times; so he wasn't too disconcerted when their escort turned up. How they did it he had no idea; they seemed to materialise out of thin air. One moment the Vadani had been alone on a flat moor; the next, they were surrounded by armoured horsemen. Valens made no effort to stifle a third yawn. He knew from experience that it impressed the Cure Hardy, too.

Not Lauzeta, he decided. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe not. The Lauzeta, who wore long coats of hardened leather scale and conical helmets with nasals and aventails, were clever, imaginative fighters; tremendous speed and flexibility based on innate horsemanship and constant practice.

This lot, on the other hand, wore coats of plates over fine mail, and their rounded helmets had cheek-pieces and articulated neck-guards. At a guess, that made them Partetz or Aram Chantat; he knew nothing about either sect beyond the basics of fashions in armour, and he didn't want to think about how the secret of the safe passage had penetrated right down to the far south. At least they'd be one or the other, rather than both. The Partetz and the Aram Chantat hated each other even more than the Auzeil, the Cler Votz, the Rosinholet or the Flos Glaia. On balance, he decided, he'd rather they were the Partetz.

They were, of course, the Aram Chantat. Their demands were simple: four hundred thousand gold thalers, or two million in silver, and five hundred horses, at least half of them brood mares. Delivery (their interpreter spoke tolerably clear Mezentine, with a firm grasp of the specialist vocabulary of the extortion business) within three days, during which time the raiding party would be left to forage at will; once payment had been made, they undertook to leave Vadani territory within a week, causing no further damage (provided that they were kept supplied with food, wine and fodder for the horses). Nobody said anything about what would happen if the demands weren't met. No need to go into all that.

Valens replied that he'd think it over and send his answer before daybreak. The horsemen watched him go, then vanished.

'So,' Gabbaeus asked, after they'd ridden halfway back to the camp, 'what are you going to do?'

'I'm not sure yet,' Valens answered.

Back at his camp, he sent for the people he wanted to see, and put guards on the tent door so he wouldn't be disturbed. Just after midnight, most of the staff officers left. Two riders were sent back on the road to Civitas Vadanis. Their departure wasn't lost on the Aram Chantat scouts, who reported back to their leaders. Around three in the morning, they saw a great number of watch-fires being lit on the far side of the camp, where the horse-pens were, and sent word back to Skeddanlothi to prepare for a sneak attack at first light.

The messengers never got there. They were intercepted by the Vadani light cavalry, dismounted and covering the left flank, and efficiently disposed of. An hour later, the scouts sent another message to say that the heavy cavalry had mounted up and ridden due west, which they took to mean a wide encircling movement. Valens let them through. They reached Skeddanlothi an hour and a half before dawn. He drew up his forces in dead ground below his camp, facing west, to surprise the heavy cavalry when they arrived.

They never did, of course. What the scouts had seen was the horses being led away by their grooms. The heavy cavalry, also dismounted, came up on the east side of the camp and launched a sudden, noisy attack that took the Aram Chantat reserves completely by surprise. Someone had the presence of mind to send riders to the main army on the west side, who came scrambling back just in time to be taken in flank and rear by the light cavalry and the infantry.

It was still a tricky business. The Cure Hardy were on horseback, Valens' men were on foot; it was still too dark for accurate shooting, and the coats of plates and mail took some piercing. Valens told his archers to aim for the horses rather than the men, and sent up his infantry to engage Skeddanlothi's personal guard.

If the Cure Hardy had been huntsmen, they'd have understood what Valens was up to; let the dogs face the boar, while the hunters come at it from the side. Valens led the infantry himself, because they were going to have to face the boar's tusks. As always on these occasions, as soon as he'd given the word to move up he found he was almost paralysed with fear; his stomach muscles twisted like ropes and he wet himself. But it was his job to stay three paces ahead of the line; if you don't keep your place, nobody knows where you are, and you're liable to come to harm. At the same time as he was forcing his legs to move, he was struggling to hold the full picture in his mind: movements of men and horses, timings, closures and avoidances. Forty yards across open ground in the pale, thick light, and then someone stood out in front of him, a man who wanted to kill him. He let go of the grand design and concentrated on the job in hand.

Fighting six hundred enemies in four dimensions over thirty-five acres is one thing; fighting one man within arm's length is something else entirely. Someone had told him once, the first thing to do is always look at the other man's face, see who you're up against; once you've done that, keep your eyes glued to his hands. Whether it was good advice or not Valens wasn't sure, but he followed it anyway, because it was the only method he knew. On this occasion, the other man was big and broad, but the look on his face and the puckering of his eyes told Valens that he'd been asleep and wasn't quite awake yet. He had a spear in his right hand and a round shield on his left arm; he was maybe inclined to hide behind the shield, conceding distance and therefore time. It was therefore essential that the other man should attack first; this, however, he was annoyingly reluctant to do, and a whole second passed while the two of them stood and looked at each other. That wasn't right; so Valens took a half-step forward, just inside the other man's reach; he recognised the mistake, but he wasn't watching where Valens put his feet. He lunged, spear and shield thrust forward together in a semi-ferocious hedging of bets. Valens stepped forward and to the right with his back foot-a fencing move he'd learned from the tiresome instructor when he was a boy-grabbed the back rim of the shield with his left hand and twisted as hard as he could from the waist. His enemy was a stronger man but he hadn't been expecting anything like that; he stumbled forward, and Valens stabbed him in the hollow just below the ear, where the ear-flap of the helmet left a half-finger-width of gap. The whole performance took less time than sneezing, and not much more effort. The dead man's forward momentum pulled him obligingly off Valens' sword, so that a half-turn brought him neatly back on guard.

That would've been a good place to finish; a well-planned, controlled encounter, practically textbook. Instead, he found himself facing two men with spears, at precisely the moment when someone else way off to his right shot him in the shoulder with an arrow.

It skidded off, needless to say, without piercing the steel of the pauldron. But he wasn't expecting the impact-about the same as being kicked by a bullock-and it made him drop his sword. His first thought was to get his feet out of the way of the falling sharp thing; he skipped, found he was off balance from the impact of the arrow, and staggered like a drunk. One of the two Cure Hardy stabbed him in the pit of the stomach with his spear. Again the armour held good, but he lost his footing altogether and fell over backwards, landing badly. All the breath jarred out of his lungs, like air from a bellows, and he saw his enemy take a step forward; he could visualise the next stage, the foot planted on his chest and the spearpoint driven down through the eyeslot of his helmet, but instead the other man stepped over him and went away. Some time later, thinking it through for the hundred-and-somethingth time, he realised that his opponent had assumed the spear-thrust had killed him.

He lay still and quiet while men, enemies and friends, walked and ran around and over him; someone trod on his elbow, someone else stepped on his cheek, but his helmet took the weight. He knew he was too terrified to move. He'd seen animals behave in exactly the same way: a hare surrounded by four hounds, crouching absolutely still; a partridge with a broken wing, dropped by the hawk after an awkward swoop, lying in the snow with its eye two perfect concentric circles. Someone had told him once that predatory animals can only see movement; if the quarry stays still, they lose sight of it. He hoped it was true, because he had no other option.

Some time later, a hand reached down and pulled him up. His legs weren't working and he slumped, but someone caught him and asked if he was all right. The voice was Vadani, not the intonation of someone addressing his Duke; he muttered, 'Thanks, I'm fine,' and whoever it was let go of him and went away.

He shook his head like a wet dog and looked up. Directly in front of him the sun was rising; in front of it he could see a smaller, thinner fire rising from a Cure Hardy tent. There were many men in front of him, only a few behind, and most of the bodies on the ground, still or moving slightly, were Cure Hardy. Valens wasn't a man who jumped to conclusions, but the first indications were hopeful. Probably, they'd won.

In which case-he scrabbled in his memory for the shape of the battle-in that case, the dismounted cavalry should by now have stove in the enemy flank, allowing his infantry to roll them up on to their camp, where the heavy cavalry should have been waiting to take them in rear. That would be satisfactory, on the higher level. More immediately relevant, the enemy survivors and stragglers would tend to be squeezed out at either end, and once they were clear of the slaughter they'd turn east, which was the direction he was facing. He turned round, but he couldn't see anybody coming toward him. That was all right, then.

Someone-a Vadani infantryman in a hurry-shouted at him, but he didn't catch what the man had said. Immediate dangers; mostly from Cure Hardy knocked down or wounded, if he got in their way. His people would, of course, notice sooner or later that he wasn't where he was supposed to be. Battles had been lost at the last moment because a general had been killed, or was believed to be dead. Wearily, and worried about the pain and weakness in his ankle (he'd turned it over when he fell), he started to run after the main body of his men. He went about five yards, then slowed to an energetic hobble.

It was just as well that someone recognised him. There was shouting, men turning round and running toward him, like the surge of well-wishers who greet an athlete as he crosses the finishing line; as though he'd done something wonderful, just by still being alive. 'What happened to you?' someone roared in his ear, as overprotective hands grabbed and mauled him. 'Are you all right? We thought-'

'I'm not. What's happening?'

'Like a bloody charm. Rolled them up like a carpet.'

Suddenly, Valens found that he no longer cared terribly much. 'That's good,' he said. 'What's the full picture? I've been out of it.'

Someone made a proper report; someone else kept interrupting, with conflicting but mostly trivial information. Valens tried to summon the clear diagram back into his mind, but it was crumpled and torn, he couldn't put it all together. For some reason, that ruined any feeling of accomplishment he might have had. Not like a hunt, where you have the tangible proof of success, dead meat stretched out on the grass. There were plenty of dead bodies, but in war they aren't the point. Success is vaguer, more metaphysical. Perhaps for the first time, Valens admitted to himself that he found the whole business revolting, even a relatively clean victory, as this appeared to be. His mind slipped on the idea, because war was his trade, as the Duke of the Vadani; but he felt a phrase coalesce in his mind: given the choice between killing animals and killing people, I'd rather kill animals.

The fighting was still going on, bits and pieces, scraps of unfinished business; but that could all be left to sergeants and captains. He allowed information to slide off him, like water off feathers. Then someone said: 'And we got the chief, Skeddanwhatsit.'

Valens looked up; he was being escorted back to the camp by half a dozen men whose names he ought to know but couldn't remember offhand. 'Fine,' he said.

'He's back at the camp.'

It took Valens a moment to realise that they meant the man was still alive. Now that was interesting. 'Good,' he said. 'I'll see him in an hour. Find an interpreter.'

'He speaks Mezentine,' someone said. 'Quite well, actually.'

Catching them alive; that was an interesting idea. Worth the effort, because you could talk to them, and learn from them. He remembered the conversation he'd had the previous day, riding to the parley. 'Find that young clown Gabbaeus and fetch him along,' he said. 'He was dead keen to meet a real Cure Hardy.'

Nobody said anything for long enough to make words unnecessary. Pity; the boy was a second cousin, and he remembered him from years back (from before It happened, before Father died and everything changed; why is it, Valens wondered, that I tend to think of that time as real life, and everything that's happened since I became Duke as some sort of dream or pretence?). He made a resolution to have Skeddanlothi's throat cut, after he'd finished chatting with him. Barbaric and unfair, but so was his second cousin getting killed in a stupid little show like this.

Once they'd brought him to his tent, they left him alone for a while (he had to shout at them a bit, but they got the message). Slowly, taking his time over each buckle and tightly knotted point, he took off his armour. It was a ritual; he had no idea what it meant or why he found it useful. As usual, it had taken a degree of abuse. The middle lame on the pauldron that had turned the arrow was bent, so that the unit no longer flexed smoothly; if he'd tried to strike a blow, it'd probably have jammed up. The armourer would fix it, of course, and he'd have a word or two to say about the fit. There was a small dent in the placket of the breastplate where that man had stuck him with his spear. A couple of rivets had torn through on the left cuisse. It pleased him to be able to shed his bruised steel skin, like a snake, and have his smooth, soft, unmarked skin underneath. The simple act of taking off forty pounds of steel is as refreshing as a good night's sleep, inevitably makes you feel livelier; each limb weighs less, takes less effort to move; it's like being in water, or suddenly being much younger, fitter and stronger. Each shedding of the skin marks a stage in growth, even if it's only death avoided one more time; each time I get away with it, he thought, I really ought to come out of it a deeper, wiser, better person. Shame about that.

A page came in, properly diffident, and left behind a plate of bread and cheese and a big jug of water. He'd forgotten the cup, but Valens grinned and drank from the jug, putting the spout in his mouth and swallowing. He ate the cheese and most of the bread, instinctively moved his hand to sweep the leftovers on to the floor for the dogs-but there weren't any, not here-and put the plate down on the bed. His ankle was throbbing, but he knew it was just a minor wrench, something that'd sort itself out in a day or so. His shoulder and arm would be painful tomorrow, but they hadn't stiffened up yet. He got to his feet and went to find the prisoner.

They had him in a small tent in the middle of the camp; he was sitting on a big log, which Valens thought was odd until he saw the chain; a steel collar round the poor bastard's neck, and the end of the chain attached to the log by a big staple. Someone brought him one of those folding chairs; he gauged the length of the chain and added to it the fullest extent of the prisoner's reach, put the chair down and sat on it. Two guards stood behind him.

'Hello,' he said. 'I'm Valens.'

Skeddanlothi looked at him.

'My people tell me,' Valens went on, 'that I won the battle, and that your lot have been wiped out to the last man.' He paused. The other man was looking at him as though he was the ugliest thing in the world. 'I don't suppose that's strictly true, there'll be one or two stragglers who'll have slipped outside the net, but they won't get far, I don't suppose. If it'd help, we've counted'-he took out a slip of paper he'd been given-'let's see, five hundred and twenty-three dead, seventy-two captured; if you're fond of round numbers, I make that five unaccounted for. If you like, you could tell me how many you started the day with, and then I'd know for sure.'

Skeddanlothi didn't like, apparently. Valens hadn't expected him to.

'We rounded up a few of your scouts the other day,' he went on, 'and they said you came out here to steal enough to get married on. Is that right?'

No reply; so he leaned back a little in his chair and gave one of the guards some instructions. The guard moved forward; Skeddanlothi jumped up, but the guard knelt smoothly down, grabbed a handful of the chain and yanked hard. Skeddanlothi went down on his face, and the guard pressed his boot on his neck.

'Keep going till he says something,' Valens called out. 'He's no bloody use if he just sits there staring.'

It was quite some time before Skeddanlothi screamed. Valens had the guard apply a few extra pounds of pressure, just to convince him that he couldn't stand pain. Then he asked the guard to help him back on to his log, and repeated the question.

'Yes,' Skeddanlothi said; he was rubbing his neck, not surprisingly. 'It's the custom of our people.'

'To win honour and respect, I suppose,' Valens said.

'Yes.'

'Presumably,' Valens went on, 'most of the time you raid each other-the Aram Chantat against the Partetz, the Doce Votz against the Rosinholet, and so forth.'

This time, Skeddanlothi nodded.

'That's interesting,' Valens said. 'To most of us, you're all just Cure Hardy. We don't think of you as a lot of little tribes beating each other up. To us, you're hundreds of thousands of savages, penned in by a desert.' He paused. 'Why do you fight each other like that?'

Skeddanlothi frowned, as though the question didn't make sense. 'They are our enemies,' he said.

'Why?'

It took Skeddanlothi a moment to answer. 'They always have been. We fight over grazing, water, cattle. Everything.'

Valens raised his eyebrows. 'Why?' he said. 'By all accounts, it's a huge country south of the desert. Can't you just move out of each other's way or something?'

Skeddanlothi shook his head. 'Most of the land is bad,' he said. 'The cattle graze a valley for three years, the grass stops growing. So we have to move away until it comes right.'

'On to somebody else's land,' Valens said.

'Land doesn't belong to anybody,' Skeddanlothi said, 'it's just there. We drive them off it, they have to go somewhere else. When it's all eaten up, we have to move again. Everybody moves.'

Valens thought for a moment. 'You all move round, like the chair dance.'

Skeddanlothi scowled. 'Dance?'

'We have this children's game,' Valens explained. 'The dancers dance round in a ring, and in the middle there's a row of chairs, one for each dancer. When the music stops, everyone grabs a chair. Then one chair gets taken out, and the dance starts again. Next-time the music stops, everyone dives for a chair, but obviously one of them doesn't get one, so he's out. And so on, till there's just one chair left, and two dancers.'

Skeddanlothi shrugged. 'We move around,' he said. 'If we win, we get good grazing for two years, three maybe. If we lose, we have to go into the bad land, where the grass is thin and there's very little water. But that makes us fight harder the next time we go to war.'

Valens stood up. He was disappointed. 'These people are stupid,' he said. 'Make him tell you where this secret way across the desert is. Do what it takes; I don't want him for anything else.'

He made a point of not looking back as he left the tent; he didn't want to see terror in the prisoner's eyes, if it was there, and if there was something else there instead he knew it wouldn't interest him. He went back to his tent, drank some more water and called a staff meeting in two hours.

My own fault, he thought. I wanted them to be more than just savages. I wanted him to tell me that the girl's father had sent him on a quest for something-her weight in gold, or five hundred milk-white horses, or even the head of the Vadani Duke in a silver casket; I could have forgiven him for that. But instead they're just barbarians, and they killed my poor cousin. I can't put that in a letter, it's just crude and ugly. He put his feet up on the bed, closed his eyes. Useful information: a map, or the nearest thing to it that could be wrung out of the savage on the log; a map marked with the name and territory of each sect-no, that wouldn't be any use, not if they moved round all the time. All right; a list, then, the names of all the sects; he was sure there wasn't a definitive list anywhere, just a collation from various scrappy and unreliable sources. What else; what else, for pity's sake? He had a specimen, for study; if he had a talking roebuck or boar or partridge he could interrogate for information likely to be useful to the hunter-he could think of a great many things he'd like to ask a roebuck: why do you lie up in the upland woods at night and come down the hill to feed just before dawn? When do you leave the winter grazing and head up to the outer woods for the first sweet buds? But torturing data out of a savage was a chore he was pleased to leave to others, even though he knew they wouldn't get the best, choicest facts, because they didn't have the understanding. The truth is, Valens realised, you can only hunt what you love. Chasing and killing what bores or disgusts you is just slaughter, because you don't want to understand it, get into its mind.

(My father never understood that, he thought; he hunted, and made war, because he liked to win. I'm better at both than he ever was.)

He sent orders, hustling out the intrusive thoughts. Soon he'd be on duty again, holding the full picture in his mind. Wasn't there some tribe or sect somewhere who believed that the world was an image in the mind of God; that He thought, or dreamed, the whole world, and things only existed so long as He held them in mind? There were, of course, no gods; but you could see how a busy man might like to believe in something like that.

An hour later a doctor came bothering him about his ankle. He managed to be polite, because the man was only doing his job; besides, there was something on his mind that wouldn't go away. It took him a long time to realise what it was; the problem buzzed quietly like a trapped fly in his mind all through the staff meeting, disrupting the pattern he was trying to build there like a bored dog in a room full of ornaments. In fact, it was the constant barrage of names (people, places) that finally showed him where it was.

After the staff had dispersed, he called for two guards and went to the tent where the prisoner was being held. Skeddanlothi was in a sorry state. He lay on his face on the ground, his back messy with lash-cuts, his hair slicked with blood. He didn't look up when Valens came in.

'We got the list,' said one of the guards. 'At least, we got a list, if you see what I mean. Could be a load of shit he thought up out of his head, just to be ornery'

Valens had forgotten about the list; which seemed rather reprehensible, since so much pain and effort had gone into procuring it.

'Difficult bastard,' the guard went on-was he making conversation, like someone at a diplomatic reception? 'He really doesn't like it when it hurts, but each time you've got to start all over again, if you follow me. We've had to bust him up quite a bit.'

'That's all right,' Valens said. 'You cut along and get some rest, write up your report.'

They left; changing shifts, quite usual. Valens went over and sat on the log. The prisoner didn't move, so he tugged on the chain once or twice.

'I wanted to ask you,' he said. 'What does your name mean?'

He hadn't expected a reply straight away, so a guard had to apply a little pressure. He repeated the question. It took three tries before the prisoner spoke.

'What the hell do you want to know that for?'

'Curious,' Valens said. 'I'm looking for-I don't know, some little glimmer of light. A chink in the wall I can peep in through. What does your name mean? Come on, it can't hurt you to tell me.'

'I can't.'

Valens sighed. 'There's some taboo on saying your name to outsiders. Once they know your name, they can steal your soul or something.'

The other man laughed. 'No, that's stupid,' he said. 'But there's no word for it.'

'Ah.' Valens nodded to a guard. 'You know,' he said, 'I believe this man hasn't had anything to drink for several hours. Get him some water.'

He took the cup, which was nearly full; he emptied a third on to the ground. 'Paraphrase,' he said.

'What?'

'Well,' Valens said, 'what's the closest you can get, in our language?'

Skeddanlothi was looking at the dark brown dust, where the water had soaked away. 'It's a kind of bird,' he said. 'But they don't live north of the desert.'

'Describe it.'

Hesitation. Valens poured away a little more water.

'It's small,' the man said. 'Bigger than a thrush but smaller than a partridge.'

'You mean a pigeon.'

'No, not a pigeon.' The prisoner, as well as being in agony and despair, was also annoyed. 'It's a wading bird, with a long beak. Brown. It feeds in the mud.'

'I see,' Valens said. 'Pardon me saying so, but it sounds an odd creature to name a great warrior after. I assume your parents wanted you to grow up to be a great warrior.'

'It's the bird of our family,' Skeddanlothi said. 'All the families have a bird.'

'I see. Like heraldry.'

'No.' Almost petulant. 'We follow a bird. Each family follows a different one.'

'Follow,' Valens repeated. 'You mean, you choose one as a favourite.'

'No, follow.' Petulant to angry now. 'When the grazing is used up and goes bad, we follow our family's bird, the first one we see. We follow it for a day, from dawn to sunset, and where it stops to roost is where we move to.'

'Good heavens,' Valens said. 'But supposing it just flies round in circles.'

'If it stops, we drive it on.'

'Makes sense,' Valens said. 'And a wader would always fly to water, of course. Do all the families follow water-birds?'

But that was all; even pouring away the last of the water and the guard's best efforts earned him nothing more, which was frustrating, and by then there wasn't enough left to justify further expense of time and energy. It was the glimmer of light he'd been looking for, but it had gone out. He drew his finger across his throat; the guard nodded. Valens went back to his tent and gave orders to break camp and move out.

'It's not an interrogation,' Miel Ducas said, 'or anything like that.'

The Mezentine still looked apprehensive. 'But you want him to ask me questions?'

'Let's say we want you to talk to someone who speaks your own language.' They'd reached the gate. Like all forge gates everywhere, it was almost derelict; the latch had long since gone, replaced by a length of frayed rope, and the pintles of the hinges on one side had come halfway out of the wood. There was probably a knack to opening it without pulling several muscles, but Miel wasn't a regular visitor. 'Basically, so you can see how much we know about, well, metalworking and things; and the other way about.'

The Mezentine shrugged. 'If you think it'll help,' he said.

'The key is always to establish'-Miel grunted as he heaved at the gate-'communication. No point talking if you can't understand.'

All forge gates open on to identical yards. There must have been a time, two or three hundred years ago, when all the blacksmiths in the world decided it would be a splendid thing to pave their yards with handsome, square-cut flagstones. Once this had been done, a great decline of resources and enthusiasm must have set in-you'll search in vain in the history books for any reference to the cause of it, but the evidence is there, plain as day; those proud, confident flags are all cracked up now. Grass and young trees push up through the fissures, kept in check only by the seepage of tempering oil and a very occasional, resented assault with the hook. Ivy and various creepers grow up through the scrap pile, their hairy tendrils taking an uncertain grip in the rust. Worn-out and broken tools and equipment wait patiently through the generations for someone to find time to fix them. There's always a tall water-butt with moss on one side, close to the smithy door, which has scraped a permanent furrow where it drags. There's always a mound of perfectly good coal, inexplicably left out in the wet to spoil.

Cantacusene came out when he heard the yard gate scritch. He was almost unnaturally clean (blacksmiths aren't called that for nothing) and he looked painfully nervous, as if he'd been chosen to be a human sacrifice. His greeting was splendidly formal, and he was wearing his best apron.

'This is the man I was telling you about,' Miel said. 'I hope you've thought up some good questions.'

Cantacusene looked as though someone had just walked up to him and yanked out one of his teeth. 'I'll do my best,' he said. 'Please, come in. There's wine and cakes.'

Indeed there were, and Miel tried to be polite about fishing a flake of dark grey scale out of his cup before drinking from it. It tasted like eggs beaten in vinegar.

The place looked pretty much the same as it had the last time he'd been there; as though it had been burgled by someone with a grudge against the owner. There were tools lying about on the benches and the floor, a hopeless jumble of hammers, stakes, tongs, setts, fullers. On the floor were chalked patterns for various pieces of armour, their meticulously drawn details scuffed by feet passing in a hurry. Every surface was thick with black grime; everything glistened with spilt drops of water and new rust. Here, Miel said to himself, our guest will feel at home.

But he didn't, by the looks of it. He had the air of a man who is trying hard not to give offence by showing disapproval. Cantacusene picked up on that straight away; the poor man was in pain, obviously. Miel felt bad about torturing him like this, but it had to be done, apparently.

'What I thought,' Cantacusene said, mumbling, 'was that we could start off…' His words dwindled away as he looked at the expression on Vaatzes' face. 'Sort of like a trade test,' he said. 'If you think that'd be in order.'

Miel waited for a response from the Mezentine, who just stood registering distaste. 'That sounds like a good idea,' he said. 'What did you have in mind?'

Cantacusene's test would be to make a perfect circle, precisely one foot in diameter, out of quarter-inch plate. 'Feel free to use whatever you like,' he added nervously. 'If you think that'd be-'

'Fine,' Vaatzes said. 'Material?'

Cantacusene picked up a three-foot square of steel and offered it to him. It didn't mean anything to Miel, of course (except he noticed that someone had recently made a job of scrubbing the rust off it with a wire brush; like a woman being visited by her mother-in-law, he thought), but Vaatzes studied it for some time, turning it over in his hands and pinching at the edges with his fingers.

'Have you got callipers?' he asked.

'Callipers,' Cantacusene repeated. 'Yes, of course.'

He dug a pair of callipers out of a pile of junk and handed them over. Vaatzes took three or four measurements and handed them back. 'Dividers,' he said, 'or a bit of string and a nail, if you haven't got any.'

Cantacusene had some dividers; also files, a chest-drill and bits, a rule (Vaatzes stared at it in horror for a couple of seconds) and various other things Miel had never heard of. Vaatzes took them and laid them out on the floor, like a huntsman displaying the day's bag; the files in order of length, and so on. With the dividers he measured a foot off the rule, then knelt on the floor and scribed his circle on the plate-he did it three times, but Miel could only see one scribed mark. Next he stood up, clamped the plate upright in the leg-vice, and started to drill holes all round the circle with the chest-drill. This took a very long time. Miel soon lost interest and sat down to read the book he'd had the wit to bring with him. Each time he looked up, he saw Cantacusene rooted to the spot, watching like a dog at a rabbit-hole.

When Vaatzes had finished drilling the ring of holes, he laid the plate on the bed of the anvil and cut through the web between the holes with a small cold chisel. This freed something that looked like a gear-wheel. Next he wiped his finger through the nearest accumulation of soot, rubbing black into the thin graven line left by the dividers; then he fixed the gear-wheel thing in the vice and picked up a file. Miel went back to his book.

He'd almost finished it when he heard Vaatzes say: 'I'm sorry' He looked up. Vaatzes was holding up what looked to him like a steel platter. He handed it to Cantacusene as if it was something revolting and dead.

'I did the best I could,' he said. 'But the drill-bits are blunt, the files are soft as butter, there's no light in here and the plate isn't an even thickness. And,' he went on, 'I made a botch of it. It's twenty years since I did any serious hand-filing, so I guess I'm out of practice.'

'It's perfect,' Cantacusene said.

Miel looked at him. He had the expression of someone who's just seen a miracle, a revelation of the divine.

'It bloody well isn't,' Vaatzes said. 'I can't measure it, of course, but I'd say the tolerance is no better than two thousandths, if that. And if you call that a square edge, I don't.'

Miel saw Cantacusene staring at him; he looked utterly miserable. 'It's better than I could do, anyway' Cantacusene said. 'Look, I'll show you.'

He took the drill and made a hole in the middle of the platter, passed a length of steel rod through it and clamped the rod in the vice; then he laid his fingers on the edge and set it spinning. 'Perfect,' he repeated. Miel looked at it; it was as though the spinning disc was absolutely still.

'I'll try again if you like,' Vaatzes said. 'Maybe if I took it outside, where I could see better.'

Miel had seen more than enough pain in his life, but rarely such suffering as Cantacusene went through as the day wore on. Next he asked Vaatzes to make a square; then to draw out a round bar on the forge into a triangular section; then to make six identical square pegs, to fit perfectly into the square hole on the back of the anvil. Each time, the outstanding quality of the result seemed to hurt him like a stab-wound, and Vaatzes' escalating self-reproaches were even worse. Miel excused himself at one point, went up the hill to a friend's house and borrowed another book; it was going to be a long day. He got the impression that Cantacusene had set himself the task of finding something the foreigner couldn't do better than he could, and that he knew he was going to fail, and that his whole world was coming apart. Miel enjoyed reading and listening to tragedy, but only when it came with the author's guarantee that it wasn't real.

An hour before sunset he decided to call a halt to the butchery. By that point, Cantacusene had the Mezentine doing sheet-work, which was, of course, Cantacusene's speciality in his capacity as Armourer Royal. There had been a note of desperation close to hysteria in his voice when he gave Vaatzes the specifications: a left-hand shell gauntlet, fluted in the Mezentine style, with four articulated lames over the fingers, the cuff moving on sliding rivets. Here at least Miel could understand some of the technical language; he had a pair of gauntlets to exactly that specification, for which Cantacusene had charged him nine silver thalers. He remembered thinking what a bargain they were at that price, when he took delivery. Accordingly, he marked his place, closed the book and shuffled discreetly close to watch.

Vaatzes started with a sheet of steel plate-not the one Cantacusene provided him with, because he looked at it and said it wasn't even; too thick at the top, too thin in the middle. So instead he scrabbled about in the scrap pile like a terrier, until he found a rusty offcut he reckoned would just about do, at a pinch. He traced the pattern on to it with chalk, cut it out on the shear, stopped cutting to take the shear to bits, make and fit a new pivot pin, clout the frame with a hammer, walk round it several times, stooping down and squinting, clout it a few more times, put it back together again (because he couldn't be expected to do accurate work on a shear that was completely out of line); next he formed the component parts on the anvil and the swage block (it was impossible, he declared, to do anything at all with either of them; if only he had a lathe, he could at least make a decent ball stake. Cantacusene went white as a sheet and stood opening and closing his hands) and punched the holes, having first stripped down and reworked the punch; then he did the fluting, half an hour of tiny woodpecker taps, quick as the patter of falling rain, his left hand constantly moving the work while his right hand fluttered like a hummingbird's wing (it was worthless, he declared as he held up the finished shell, because the flutes were uneven in depth and spacing, and the ridges weren't sharply defined); he cut the slots for the sliding rivets with the blunt drill and the butter-soft files; finally, more in sorrow than anger, he adjusted the fit of the moving parts, peened the rivets so that everything glided perfectly, declared it was hopeless, cut the rivets off with a chisel and did them again. Then he handed the gauntlet to Cantacusene, who took it as though it was his own heart, torn out with tongs through his smashed ribs.

'I'll polish it if you want,' Vaatzes said, 'but it'd be a waste of soap. Useless.'

Cantacusene turned it over a few times, slipped it on to his left hand, flexed his fingers, turned his wrist; the five wood-louse sections moved up and down like the skin of a breathing animal. He took it off and gave it to Miel, who could hardly bear to touch it. He'd seen more than enough for one day.

'Well,' he said. The gauntlet was still on his hand; somehow he didn't want to take it off. He could hardly feel it. Part of him was thinking, nine thalers; he had the grace, catching sight of Cantacusene's face, to feel ashamed of himself for that.

Getting out of the forge wasn't something that could be achieved gracefully; he thanked Cantacusene as best he could and walked away, leaving the gate open because he couldn't face fussing with it. All he wanted to do was leave behind the worst embarrassment he'd ever had to endure.

They'd been walking for ten minutes, up through the winding alleys, before he felt safe to say anything to the Mezentine.

'Was that necessary?' he said.

'How do you mean?'

Perhaps the man simply didn't understand; but that wasn't very likely. He might be all sorts of things, but he wasn't a fool. The whole thing had been deliberate, from start to finish. 'You might as well have cut his throat or bashed his head in.'

'What?' Vaatzes frowned. 'Did I do something wrong?'

More than anything he'd ever wanted in his life, Miel wanted to hit the Mezentine. Nothing else would do but to smash his face until the cheekbones and jaws and teeth were beyond recognition as human. But if he did that, he'd have lost.

'You had to make your point,' he said. 'But did you have to be so bloody cruel about it?'

'You wanted to see some metalwork.'

Miel looked at him. 'Were you getting your own back?' he asked.

Slowly, Vaatzes shook his head. 'You needed to be convinced,' he said. 'That I'm what I claim to be, and I can do what I say I can. Now you are. I'm sorry if your blacksmith got caught up in the machinery, but I didn't start it. Besides,' he went on, 'his whole setup was a joke.'

'Not to him,' Miel said.

Vaatzes waved the objection away. 'It's not a subjective issue,' he said. 'There's a right way to do things and a wrong way, and his was wrong. Everything was wrong about it. Tools useless and jumbled up all over the place; no decent workspace; nothing calibrated or even straight, every single thing out of true.' He shook his head. 'If I hurt him, he deserved it. It was his shop, so it must be his fault. It's an abomination.'

Miel was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'Oh.'

Vaatzes laughed. 'You think that word's a bit odd, coming from me.'

'I wouldn't have imagined you'd think in those terms.'

Vaatzes stopped walking and looked at him. 'The thing you need to understand,' he said, 'if you want to understand what I have to offer-if you want to understand me, even; the one thing that matters is the principle of tolerance.'

The word didn't fit at all. Miel repeated it. 'Tolerance.'

Vaatzes nodded. 'That's right. Do you know what it means, to an engineer?'

Miel shrugged. 'I thought I did, but maybe I don't.'

'Tolerance,' Vaatzes said, 'is the degree something can differ from perfection and still be acceptable. It's not always the same. For one job, it could be three thousandths of an inch, and for something else it could be half a thousandth. The point is, if you want to make something that's good, you need your tolerance to be as small as possible. That's the key, to everything. It's what the Guilds are built on, it's everything Mezentia stands for. Precision; tolerance. We try and get as close to perfection as we possibly can, and we don't tolerate anything less than that.' He smiled. 'Your man back there,' he said, 'I don't suppose he even thinks in those terms. If it just about works and it sort of fits, it's good enough.' Miel thought about his gauntlets, which had saved his hands in half a dozen battles. 'We don't tolerate the word enough,' Vaatzes went on. 'Either it's good or it isn't. Either a line is straight and a right angle's a right angle, or it's not; it's true, or out of true. True or false, no grey areas. Do you see what I mean?'

'Fine,' Miel said. 'Which are you?'

Vaatzes laughed. 'Oh, I'm all right,' he said. 'I've never had any doubts on that score. You mean, if I believe so strongly in the Mezentine way, how come they were going to kill me for abomination?'

Miel didn't say anything.

'The trouble is,' Vaatzes went on, 'the Guilds have lost their way. They've become…' He made a vague gesture. 'I'm not quite sure how to put it. I suppose you could say they've become too tolerant.'

'What did you say?'

'They tolerate a lie,' Vaatzes said. 'The lie is that their specifications, which are written down in the books and can't be changed, ever, are perfect and can't be improved on. And that's wrong. Obviously it's wrong. We can do better, if only we're allowed to. That's what I mean; their tolerances are too great. They make it an article of faith that you can't cut this line closer than one thousandth, when it's actually possible to shave that by half. That's the real abomination, don't you think?'

Miel didn't say anything for a while. 'And that makes it all right for you to humiliate perfect strangers.'

Vaatzes shrugged. 'Either he'll learn from it and be a better craftsman, now he's seen there's a better way; or else he won't, in which case he isn't fit to be in the trade. I remember my trade test, when I was an apprentice. Actually, it was the same as your man back there set me, to file a perfect circle. But it had to be right. The tolerance was one thousandth of an inch, which is the thickness of a line scribed with a Guild specification dogleg calliper. The material was half-inch plate, and the edge had to be chamfered to exactly forty-five degrees, in accordance with a Guild half-corner square. If you got it right, you passed and got your Guild membership.'

Miel nodded. 'What happened if you got it wrong? Did they burn you at the stake or something?'

Vaatzes shook his head. 'The finished piece is measured with the Guild's prescribed gauges; basically, a hole the right size cut into a big half-inch sheet. It has to be an exact fit-they test it with a candle. If light shows through, or if a speck of soot finds its way into the join, you fail. If that happens, there's a sort of ceremony. They put you in a cart, with your work hung round your neck on a bit of string, and on Guild meeting day, when everybody goes to the Guildhall to hear the speeches, they drive you round and round the town square from noon to sunset. People don't jeer or throw things at you, it's worse than that. It's dead quiet. Nobody says anything, they just stare. For that half a day, you're completely-I don't know what the right word is. You're completely separate, apart; you're up there and they're down below looking at you, like you're everything that's wrong in the world, captured and brought out so they can all have a good look at you and see what evil looks like, so they'll know it if they meet it again. Then, at sunset, they get you down off the cart in front of everybody, and Guild officers take your piece of work and they kill it; they bash it with hammers, they bend it and fold it over stakes, and finally they heat it up white hot in a furnace until it melts, and they pour the melted metal into sand, so it can't ever be made into anything else ever again.'

It took Miel a moment to find his voice. 'And that happened to you?'

'Good God, no,' Vaatzes said. 'I passed. It's incredibly rare, someone not passing; I think it's happened two or three times in my lifetime. Which goes to show, the system works. It's a bit harsh, but it makes for good workmanship.'

'And what happens to people who fail? Do they get thrown out of the City?'

'Of course not. They learn their lesson, and the next year, they take the test again. Nobody's ever failed twice.'

'Fine,' Miel said. 'I wouldn't recommend you trying to introduce that system here. I don't think that sort of thing would go down well.'

'Of course not. You've got a long way to go, I can see that.'

Miel took Vaatzes back to his room. He had to make his report to the Duke, he said, and then the decision would be made about whether to accept his offer. 'We'll try not to keep you in suspense any longer than necessary,' he told him. Then he went to find Orsea, thinking long thoughts about the nature of perfection.

The Duke in council considered his report, together with a written submission from the Armourer Royal, who gave his opinion that the Mezentine possessed skills far in advance of anything known to the Vadani, and recommended in the strongest possible terms that his offer should be accepted. Further submissions were heard from the exchequer, the trade commissioners, the Merchant Adventurers and other concerned parties, after which the meeting debated the issue, with special reference to the effects of the aftermath of the recent war, the manpower position, the need to remodel the Duchy's defences and other pertinent factors. At the conclusion of the debate, the Duke and his special adviser Miel Ducas retired to consider their decision. After a brief recess, the Duke announced that the Mezentine's offer was rejected.