Devices and Desires (26 page)

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 onto 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 onto 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 honor 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 realized,
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 realize 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 onto 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 favorite.”

“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.