Devices and Desires (2 page)

Distracted as he was by the distant view of the top of her head, Valens couldn’t help being slightly curious about that. Everyday
Mezentine technology was so all-pervasive you could scarcely turn round in the castle without knocking some of it over. Every
last cup and dish, from the best service reserved for state occasions down to the pewter they ate off when nobody was looking,
had come from the Republic’s rolling mills; every candle stood in a Mezentine brass candlestick, its light doubled by a Mezentine
mirror hanging from a Mezentine nail. But extra-special cutting-edge didn’t make it up the mountain passes very often, which
meant they had to make do with rumors; the awestruck whispers of traders and commercial travelers, the panicky reports of
military intelligence, and the occasional gross slander from a competitor, far from home and desperate. If the little bald
man had brought a miracle with him (the ten-thousand-mark kind, rather than the three-hundred-hour variety), Valens reckoned
he could spare a little attention for it, though his heart might be broken beyond repair by even the masters of the Solderers’
and Braziers’ Guild.

The miracle came in a plain wooden crate. It was no more than six feet long by three wide, but it took a man at each corner
to move it — a heavy miracle, then. Two Mezentines with grave faces and crowbars prised the crate open; out came a lot of
straw, and some curly cedar shavings, and then something which Valens assumed was a suit of armor. It was man-high, man-shaped
and shiny, and the four attendants lifted it up and set it down on some kind of stand. Fine, Valens thought. Father’ll be
happy, he likes armor. But then the attendants did something odd. One of them reached into the bottom of the crate and fished
out a steel tube with a ring through one end; a key, but much larger than anything of the kind Valens had seen before. It
fitted into a slot in the back of the armor; some kind of specially secure, sword-proof fastening? Apparently not; one of
the attendants began turning it over and over again, and each turn produced a clicking sound, like the skittering of mice’s
feet on a thin ceiling. Meanwhile, two more crates had come in. One of them held nothing more than an ordinary blacksmith’s
anvil — polished, true, like a silver chalice, but otherwise no big deal. The other was full of tools; hammers, tongs, cold
chisels, swages, boring stuff. The anvil came to rest at the suit of armor’s feet, and one of the Mezentines prised open the
suit’s steel fingers and closed them around the stem of a three-pound hammer.

“The operation of the machine…” Valens looked round to see who was talking. It was the short, bald man, the grand secretary.
He had a low, rich voice with a fairly mild accent. “The operation of the machine is quite straightforward. A powerful spiral
spring, similar to those used in clockwork, is put under tension by winding with a key. Once released, it bears on a flywheel,
causing it to spin. A gear train and a series of cams and connecting rods transmits this motion to the machine’s main spindle,
from which belt-driven takeoffs power the arms. Further cams and trips effect the reciprocating movement, simulating the work
of the human arm.”

Whatever that was supposed to mean. It didn’t look like anybody else understood it either, to judge from the rows of perfectly
blank faces around the tables. But then the key-turner stopped turning, pulled out his key and pushed something; and the suit
of armor’s arm lifted to head height, stopped and fell, and the hammer in its hand rang on the anvil like a silver bell.

Not armor after all; Valens could feel his father’s disappointment through the boards of the table. Of course Valens knew
what it was, though he’d never seen anything like it. He’d read about it in some book; the citizens of the Perpetual Republic
had a childish love of mechanical toys, metal gadgets that did things almost but not quite as well as people could. It was
a typically Mezentine touch to send a mechanical blacksmith. Here is a machine, they were saying, that could make another
machine just like itself, the way you ordinary humans breed children. Well; it was their proud boast that they had a machine
for everything. Mechanizing reproduction, though, was surely cutting off their noses to spite their collective face.

The hammer rang twelve times, then stopped. Figures, Valens thought. You get a dozen hits at a bit of hot metal before it
cools down and needs to go back in the fire. While you’re waiting for it to heat up again, you’ve got time to wind up your
mechanical slave. Query whether turning the key is harder work than swinging the hammer yourself would be. In any event, it’s
just a trip-hammer thinly disguised as a man. Now then; a man convincingly disguised as a trip-hammer, that’d be worth walking
a mile to see.

Stunned silence for a moment or so, followed by loud, nervous applause. The little grand secretary stood up, smiled vaguely
and sat down again; that concluded the demonstration.

Ten minutes after he got up from the table, Valens couldn’t remember what he’d just eaten, or the name of the trade attaché
he’d just been introduced to, or the date; as for the explanation of how the heavy miracle worked, it had vanished from his
mind completely. That was unfortunate.

“I was wondering,” she repeated. “Did you understand what that man said, about how the metal blacksmith worked? I’m afraid
I didn’t catch any of it, and my father’s sure to ask me when I get home.”

So she was going home, then. The irony; at last he was talking to her, and tomorrow she was going away. Further irony; it
had been his father himself who’d brought them together;
Valens, come over here and talk to the Countess Sirupati.
Father had been towering over her, the way the castle loomed over the village below, all turrets and battlements, and he’d
been smiling, which accounted for the look of terror in her eyes. Valens had wanted to reassure her; it’s all right, he hasn’t
actually eaten anybody for weeks. Instead, he’d stood and gawped, and then he’d looked down at his shoes (poulaines, with
the ridiculous pointy toes). And then she’d asked him about the mechanical blacksmith.

He pulled himself together, like a boy trying to draw his father’s bow. “I’m not really the right person to ask,” he said.
“I don’t know a lot about machines and stuff.”

Her expression didn’t change, except that it glazed slightly. Of course she didn’t give a damn about how the stupid machine
worked; she was making conversation. “I think,” he went on, “that there’s a sort of wheel thing in its chest going round and
round, and it’s linked to cogs and gears and what have you. Oh, and there’s cams, to turn the round and round into up and
down.”

She blinked at him. “What’s a cam?” she asked.

“Ah.” What indeed? “Well, it’s sort of…” Three hours a week with a specially imported Doctor of Rhetoric, from whom he was
supposed to learn how to express himself with clarity, precision and grace. “It’s sort of like this,” he went on, miming with
his hands. “The wheel goes round, you see, and on the edge of the wheel there’s like a bit sticking out. Each time it goes
round, it kind of bashes on a sort of lever arrangement, like a see-saw; and the lever thing pivots, like it goes down at
the bashed end and up at the other end — that’s how the arm lifts — and when it’s done that, it drops down again under its
own weight, nicely in time for the sticky-out bit on the wheel to bash it again. And so on.”

“I see,” she said. “Yes, I think I understand it now.”

“Really?”

“No,” she said. “But thank you for trying.”

He frowned. “Well, it was probably the worst explanation of anything I’ve ever heard in my life.”

She nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “But at least you didn’t say, oh, you’re only a girl, you wouldn’t understand.”

He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Tactically (four hours a week on the Art of War, with General Bozannes) he felt
he probably had a slight advantage, a weak point in the line he could probably turn, if he could get his cavalry there in
time. Somehow, though, he felt that the usages of the wars didn’t apply here, or if they did they shouldn’t. Odd; because
even before he’d started having formal lessons, he’d run his life like a military campaign, and the usages of war applied
to
everything.

“Well,” he said, “I’m a boy and I haven’t got a clue. I suppose it’s different in Mezentia.”

“Oh, it is,” she said. “I’ve been there, actually.”

“Really? I mean, what’s it like?”

She withdrew into a shell of thought, shutting out him and all the world. “Strange,” she said. “Not like anywhere else, really.
Oh, it’s very grand and big and the buildings are huge and all closely packed together, but that’s not what I meant. I can’t
describe it, really.” She paused, and Valens realized he was holding his breath. “We all went there for some diplomatic thing,
my father and my sisters and me; it was shortly before my eldest sister’s wedding, and I think it was something to do with
the negotiations. I was thirteen then, no, twelve. Anyway, I remember there was this enormous banquet in one of the Guild
halls. Enormous place, full of statues and tapestries, and there was this amazing painting on the ceiling, a sea-battle or
something like that; and all these people were in their fanciest robes, with gold chains round their necks and silks and all
kinds of stuff like that. But the food came on these crummy old wooden dishes, and there weren’t any knives or forks, just
a plain wooden spoon.”

Fork? he wondered; what’s a farm tool got to do with eating? “Very odd,” he agreed. “What was the food like?”

“Horrible. It was very fancy and sort of fussy, the way it was put on the plate, with all sorts of leaves and frills and things
to make it look pretty; but really it was just bits of meat and dumplings in slimy sauce.”

To the best of his recollection, Valens had never wanted anything in his entire life. Things had come his way, a lot of them;
like the loathsome pointy-toed poulaines, the white thoroughbred mare that hated him and tried to bite his feet, the kestrel
that wouldn’t come back when it was called, the itchy damask pillows, the ivory-handled rapier, all the valuable junk his
father kept giving him. He’d been brought up to take care of his possessions, so he treated them with respect until they wore
out, broke or died; but he had no love for them, no pride in owning them. He knew that stuff like that mattered to most people;
it was a fact about humanity that he accepted without understanding. Other boys his age had wanted a friend; but Valens had
always known that the Duke’s son didn’t make friends; and besides, he preferred thinking to talking, just as he liked to walk
on his own. He’d never wanted to be Duke, because that would only happen when his father died. Now, for the first time, he
felt what it was like to want something — but, he stopped to consider, is it actually possible to want a person? How? As a
pet; to keep in a mews or a stable, to feed twice a day when not in use. It would be possible, of course. You could keep a
person, a girl for instance, in a stable or a bower; you could walk her and feed her, dress her and go to bed with her, but.…
He didn’t want
ownership.
He was the Duke’s son, as such he owned everything and nothing. There was a logical paradox here — Doctor Galeazza would
be proud of him — but it was so vague and unfamiliar that he didn’t know how to begin formulating an equation to solve it.
All he could do was be aware of the feeling, which was disturbingly intense.

Not that it mattered. She was going home tomorrow.

“Slimy sauce,” he repeated. “Yetch. You had to eat it, I suppose, or risk starting a war.”

She smiled, and he looked away, but the smile followed him. “Not all of it,” she said. “You’ve got to leave some if you’re
a girl, it’s ladylike. Not that I minded terribly much.”

Valens nodded. “When I was a kid I had to finish everything on my plate, or it’d be served up cold for breakfast and lunch
until I ate it. Which was fine,” he went on, “I knew where I stood. But when I was nine, we had to go to a reception at the
Lorican embassy —”

She giggled. She was way ahead of him. “And they think that if you eat everything on your plate it’s a criticism, that they
haven’t given you enough.”

She’d interrupted him and stolen his joke, but he didn’t mind. She’d shared his thought. That didn’t happen very often.

“Of course,” he went on, “nobody bothered telling me, I was just a kid; so I was grimly munching my way through my dinner
—”

“Rice,” she said. “Plain boiled white rice, with noodles and stuff.”

He nodded. “And as soon as I got to the end, someone’d snatch my plate away and dump another heap of the muck on it and hand
it back; I thought I’d done something bad and I was being punished. I was so full I could hardly breathe. But Father was busy
talking business, and nobody down my end of the table was going to say anything; I’d probably be there still, only —”

He stopped dead.

“Only?”

“I threw up,” he confessed; it wasn’t a good memory. “All over the tablecloth, and their Lord Chamberlain.”

She laughed. He expected to feel hurt, angry. Instead, he laughed too. He had no idea why he should think it was funny, but
it was.

“And was there a war?” she asked.

“Nearly,” he replied. “God, that rice. I can still taste it if I shut my eyes.”

Now she was nodding. “I was there for a whole year,” she said. “Lorica, I mean. The rice is what sticks in my mind too. No
pun intended.”

He thought about that. “You sound like you’ve been to a lot of places,” he said.

“Oh yes.” She didn’t sound happy about it, which struck him as odd. He’d never been outside the dukedom in his life. “In fact,
I’ve spent more time away than at home.”

Well, he had to ask. “Why?”

The question appeared to surprise her. “It’s what I’m for,” she said. “I guess you could say it’s my job.”

“Job?”

She nodded again. “Professional hostage. Comes of being the fifth of seven daughters. You see,” she went on, “we’ve got to
get married in age order, it’s protocol or something, and there’s still two of them older than me left; I can’t get married
till they are. So, the only thing I’m useful for while I’m waiting my turn is being a hostage. Which means, when they’re doing
a treaty or a settlement or something, off I go on my travels until it’s all sorted out.”