The Escapement Read online

  “You knew his weapon wouldn’t work?”

  “Not at all.” Ziani shook his head. “It works perfectly, if you make a tube without a flaw in the weld. But there was a cold spot – I actually did try and warn him about it, but only because I knew he wouldn’t listen. And then I saw it all quite clearly, in my mind, exactly the way it eventually happened.”

  They paused on the landing, and Ziani looked down over the banister at the entrance hall below. “My father always wished he’d been a clerk,” he said. “He thought it must be the grandest thing, to work with clean hands all day, in a place like this. Of course, he never saw the inside of this place, but he’d heard stories. He used to tell me about it; got it completely wrong, of course. He said there were gold statues, twice lifesize…”

  “There were, once,” Psellus said. “About a hundred years ago. But they moved them into the main chapterhouse one time when the roof cracked and the rain got in. They should have gone back after the repairs were completed, but nobody ever got around to it. Actually, I think the council rather liked having them all to themselves.”

  Ziani nodded. “Get them put back,” he said. “Dad would’ve liked that.”

  “Very well.”

  Ziani said: “I’d appreciate that.” And then: “I gather you’re taking orders from me. I wasn’t quite sure where we stood.”

  Psellus shrugged. “It’s my impression that you still command the allied army. And the gates of the City are open, as you insisted. If you want the furniture moved about, I’m hardly going to argue.”

  Ziani smiled. “Very soon, though,” he said, “the army’s going to go away, escorting the savages to the border. Then what?”

  Psellus walked on, and Ziani took a long stride to keep up with him. “The question doesn’t arise,” he said. “You don’t want to give orders or rule the City. You just wanted to come home. And here you are.”

  “That’s right,” Ziani said. “But will you let me?”

  “No,” Psellus said gently. “After everything you’ve done, naturally you can’t stay here. In due course you’ll be declared a public enemy and sentenced to death – in your absence, I sincerely hope; but by then you’ll be far away where we can’t reach you. I think you mentioned the Old Country just now; I think that would be a very good idea. After what happened in the war, I don’t suppose we’ll be very popular over there for a great many years. Your idea of starting a factory sounds eminently sensible. You do seem to have a flair for it. And perhaps,” he added, with a faint smile, “you’ll find another Daurenja to help you. I don’t really believe you’ll ever be complete without someone like that at your side.”

  Ziani was silent for a moment. “What exactly do you think of me?” he said.

  “Now there’s a question.” Psellus stopped, frowned, thought for a long time. “I believe you were the victim of the most atrocious cruelty,” he said, “from the person you loved most in all the world. I believe the City you love treated you shamefully, that you suffered a monstrous injustice, and that the system that so abused you is worthless, being founded on a lie.”

  Ziani shook his head, but said, “Go on.”

  “When I was investigating your case,” Psellus continued, “I asked myself from time to time, what would I have done in your position? And the answer, of which I am ashamed, was that I’d have submitted to my fate, furiously angry but far too weak to resist. But you resisted; and since then I’ve watched you with a sort of horrified fascination, because what you’ve done has been evil – there’s a word whose meaning I don’t know any more – and it’s what I’d have done if I’d had the strength.”

  “Would you?” Ziani grinned. “I don’t think so.”

  “Curiously, I do. You gave back evil for evil; well, perhaps. Your callous indifference to the deaths of thousands; that must be evil, surely. Or perhaps you simply used the fundamental evil inside all of us to achieve something that nobody could reasonably object to: the setting right of an injustice, the overthrow of a bad system of government, the breaking of a lie.” He sighed, as though he was disappointed with himself. “I can’t find it in myself to blame you for anything you’ve done to the Republic,” he said. “I imagine the Eremians and the Vadani would see things differently; but they’ve been fighting each other for generations, and the peace between them was founded on that poor, weak man Duke Orsea. I don’t imagine it’d have lasted very long after Duke Valens’ death, or even until then. And then they’d have brought themselves to more or less the state they’re in now, or worse. As for the savages, they came here to take the entire country for themselves; they’d have wiped us out, and presumably the Vadani and the Eremians as well, in due course. No,” he went on, his voice firmer, “you didn’t make the evil, you only used it, and your motives and objectives were understandable, good even; which leads me to the unpleasant conclusion that there is no such thing as good or evil, or else that they’re mixed together so completely that you can’t have one without the other – like an alloy, I suppose you could say, like bronze is copper and tin, but in order to extract the tin you have to destroy the bronze. I think that what you’ve done is so horrible that I can’t really get my mind around the true scope of it, and it’d have been far better for the world if you’d never been born. But I can’t blame you for it.”

  Ziani shrugged. “Most of that’s too deep for me,” he said. “And I’m not proud of what I did. But the Republic took my life away and I had to get it back; I did it as little harm as I could to get what I needed; and as for the others, the Eremians and the rest of them, they’re only savages anyway; like you said, they’d have slaughtered each other sooner or later, so no harm done.”

  For some reason, Psellus laughed. “You know,” he said, “the way you put it makes my gorge rise, but it’s not very different from what I just said. I suppose that proves my point. No, the difference is basically the difference between you and Daurenja.”

  “Daurenja? What’s he got to do with it?”

  “Only that he was an evil man who kept trying to do good things, and you were a good man doing evil. As I understand it, Duke Orsea spent his life trying to do the right thing, and by any objective criteria he caused just as much harm as you did. And Duke Valens; I see him as a man made up equally of good and evil who chose the good side believing that you can part copper and tin and still have bronze; and so he did more damage than anybody, in the end. And as for myself… Well,” he said, “I can’t have you arrested and put to death as long as your army’s camped outside the City, which spares me from forcing myself to acknowledge that I wouldn’t want to do it if I could. There are times when it’s a great relief not to be able to do the right thing, or your duty, or whatever you want to call it.”

  Ziani was silent for a while. Then he said: “That was a good speech, for something you just made up on the spur of the moment.”

  Psellus smiled. “I used to read a lot of books,” he said, “on days when work was quiet and there wasn’t a lot to do. Dizanes on forensic and political oratory. Six fat volumes, I found them wedged under the legs of a wobbly table in the Coopers’ library.” He stopped; they were standing outside a door. “You think that just because I made it into a speech, I can’t really mean it.”

  “If it was what you really thought, you wouldn’t have needed to dress it up.”

  They were standing outside a door.

  “What I think doesn’t matter,” Psellus said abruptly. “I’m not important. We’re here.”

  Ziani nodded; then he said: “I can’t stay here, then?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a pity, considering what I’ve been through to get back here.”

  “Yes,” Psellus said. “But if you really want to stay, you’ll have to kill us all. I believe you’d be capable of it, but there’d be no point; it wouldn’t be your home any more. And besides, it’s not what you really want, is it?”

  “I want it to be how it was,” Ziani replied angrily. “What the hell is so
difficult about that?”

  “Accept the compromise,” Psellus said gently. “You had to come this far to get it; you could never have trusted any deal we made with you, especially while Boioannes was still in power. Take what you came for and go, while you still can.”

  Ziani breathed out; it was as though he’d been holding that breath for a very long time. “No choice, then,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Oh well, then,” Ziani said, and he put his hand to the latch.

  She said: “So what are you going to do now?”

  Valens leaned back in his chair, as though he was melting into it. “I’d like to go home,” he said, “to Civitas Vadanis. I’d like to look after my people, try to be a good duke. I’d like to hunt twice a week in the season, business and weather permitting. I’d like to be a good father to our child. I’d like to spend as much time as I can with my wife, though I don’t suppose it’ll ever be enough.” He closed his eyes. “Is that really so unrealistic?”

  She looked at him. The wound was healing fast, in spite of what Daurenja had done, though there’d always be the second scar; and the third, on the inside. “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied. “As much as I always have, ever since I first saw you. I’ve never stopped loving you, and I’ve never loved anyone else.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Is that enough?”

  “It’s all anyone could ask,” she replied.

  He nodded. “When did I lose you?” he asked.

  She hesitated, then said, “When you let that man beat you.”

  “Oh.” He thought about that for a moment, then said: “Was that all? You can’t love a man unless he always wins?”

  But she shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “I loved Orsea, and he never won anything.”

  “I see.” Valens was massaging the swollen place under the scar. It had become a habit; he probably didn’t know he was doing it. “So you can’t love me unless I always win, is that it?”

  She sighed. “It’s a very stupid reason,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t think there’s good or bad reasons for loving someone, or stopping loving them. But it’s a little bit hard to understand.”

  She stood up, turned her back on him. “I think it’s because…” She didn’t speak for a while. “I think it’s because my life kept going wrong, and each time you came and rescued me. From Civitas Eremiae; and before that, when I was stuck in that awful excuse for a life with Orsea, and your letters gave it some kind of meaning.” She kept her voice level; it took some doing. “I loved the man who wrote the letters. I loved the man who rode into the battle, just for me, even though it meant the end of everything he cared about. I loved the man who fought the Mezentines to save his people. The thing is, though,” she added, “I think that man’s only one part of you, and I think Daurenja killed him. The man who’s left is the awkward boy who kept staring at me when I was sixteen, and I never really loved him. Not like I loved Orsea.”

  Valens nodded. “And if I’d won the duel and killed Daurenja? Then it’d all have been all right.”

  “I did try and stop you, remember.”

  He grinned. “I thought it was because you were afraid he’d kill me.”

  “That’s right.” She couldn’t help letting just a little bit of the bitterness through. “One way or another, I thought he’d kill you, and I was right. If you’d listened to me, if you’d put me first instead of doing the right bloody thing, there’d have been no fight and you’d still be…” She shook her head. “You can’t expect me to explain something I don’t understand myself.”

  “Oh, I understand,” he replied gently. “The man you thought you loved never really existed. I wrote him, like a character in a book; I made him up when I wrote you those letters. It was so hard, it took me a whole day to write one. I guess I always knew you’d never love the man I really am. He’d never have ridden to Civitas Eremiae, and screwed up everything for his people, just to save one woman. I had to invent him, too; just like I invented my father’s perfect son, who never really existed. There was a real Valens Valentinianus once; he was a stroppy boy who hated hunting and fencing and hated his father, and loved a girl he saw once. When my father died he had to go, because there was a country to be governed; and I suppose I must’ve thought, if I can’t be me, I might as well be someone perfect – the good duke, the world’s best huntsman, the ideal of pure courtly love; and after that, the great leader in adversity, and then the avenger, though I was never really comfortable with him.” He laughed again, and went on: “The strange thing is, I’ve been the imaginary man so long, I don’t know how to be anything else. And, as you say, Daurenja killed him, just because he was better at swordfighting. It’s a hell of a thing, for your entire conception of good and evil to depend on the outcome of a fencing match. If I won, my ideas of right and wrong are vindicated. If I lose, I must’ve been wrong all along. And I lost.” He closed his eyes again. “So what are you planning to do now?”

  “Nothing,” she said, as she sat down and picked up her embroidery. “Nothing of any importance. What I’ve been doing my whole life.”

  A courier rode to Civitas Vadanis with the news that the war was over. No, the City hadn’t fallen; in fact, the Mezentines were now friends and trusted allies against the Aram Chantat, who’d turned out to be the real enemy all along. After a certain initial surprise, the news proved to be popular, because the war was over, and surely that was all that mattered. Besides, the duke was very wise, and had their best interests at heart. If that was what he’d decided, it had to be the right thing to do.

  After he’d delivered the message, the courier gave another letter to the captain of the citadel guard. He wasn’t happy about it. He tried to get out of it on the grounds that he didn’t take orders from Engineer Vaatzes. But the courier told him that General Vaatzes was the commander-in-chief now, and they all had to respect the chain of command.

  So the captain took six men and went down to the cells, where the Mezentine prisoner Boioannes was being held. First, they gave him a letter. He thanked them and said he’d read it later. No, they said, read it now. So he read it; and when he’d done that, before he could say anything, they threw him down on the floor and the captain stabbed his eyes out with a saddler’s needle. Then (carefully following the instructions in the letter; they were very specific) he used the needle to puncture Boioannes’ eardrums. That was all he felt he could do, so he left the rest of the orders to his men; they cut off the prisoner’s hands, being careful to cauterise the wounds with a hot iron afterwards, and then his tongue.

  The rest of Vaatzes’ letter said:

  After you’ve done that, you will give him food and water every day for the rest of his life, which I trust will be very long. I won’t be there to enforce this, but you’ll have no choice, since he’ll be incapable of doing anything for himself, and you won’t be able to bring yourself to let a helpless man starve to death. You should bear in mind the fact that he was the sole cause of the war; he started it to further his political ambitions, and he is directly responsible for everything your people have suffered. Keep him safe and well. By the time you read this, I will have promised my wife to spare his life and see to it that he wants for nothing.

  There was an announcement: by joint declaration of the commander-in-chief and Duke Valens, with the concurrence and goodwill of Chairman Psellus, Miel Ducas had been appointed Duke of Eremia, with immediate effect.

  While the announcement was being read out, Duke Miel married some woman nobody had ever heard of, in a perfunctory ceremony conducted by a clerk, promoted to the rank of chief registrar of Eremia for the occasion. The few people who witnessed the ceremony said afterwards that they found the whole business too bizarre to understand. The bride was neither young nor beautiful; in fact, her face was quite hideous because of a scar and a broken nose and jaw that hadn’t been properly set. As for her rank and birth, she was nobody a
t all, the widow of some provincial squire. Afterwards there was no reception, no speeches, no scattering of coins or conspicuous donations of food to the poor (true, there weren’t any poor to be found, unless you counted soldiers and camp followers, but it was the look of the thing), and the happy couple walked away unescorted, not even holding hands. It was unworthy of the Ducas, they said, and an insult to the Eremian people, who deserved a little pageantry and splendour to raise their morale after the misery of the war and the occupation.

  The new duke’s first official act was widely regarded as equally ill-omened. Instead of announcing measures to alleviate conditions for the refugees, or plans to rebuild Civitas Eremiae, or any of the things that were expected of him, Duke Miel chose to inaugurate his reign by granting a monopoly in perpetuity for the manufacture and sale of fine porcelain, along with a grant of land in the mountains somewhere, to some minor nobleman called Framain. No explanation was given, a further proof of arrogance. People with long memories seemed to recall rumours of some kind of liaison between the duke and Framain’s daughter. Later it emerged that Framain had been General Daurenja’s business partner, and this went some way towards reconciling popular opinion; Daurenja, already much admired by the Eremian people during his lifetime, had won a lasting place in their hearts by his heroic death (if only he’d survived, they said, we’d have taken the City and lived like princes on the spoils for the rest of our lives). Even so, as many influential figures pointed out, it was a most unhealthy precedent. None of the duke’s predecessors had ever granted monopolies. Power had clearly gone to his head; hardly surprising, given his family history, and what had the Ducas ever done for the ordinary people?

  “They’re in there,” Psellus said.

  “Thank you,” Ziani replied. He’d known, without having to be told.

  Psellus hesitated. “I imagine you’d like me to go now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course. Will you see me again before you leave?”