K Parker - Devices and Desires

The rapiers had come in their own dear little case, oak with brass hinges and catches. They were superb examples of Mezentine craftsmanship-the finest steel, beautifully finished and polished, not a filemark or an uncrowned edge-but the balance was hopeless and the side-rings chafed his forefinger. He told the armourer to pay for them and hang them on a wall somewhere where he wouldn't have to look at them. Then he went to bed.

The next day was better; in fact, it was as good as a day could be, because, after the servants had taken away his bath and he was drying his hair, a page came to tell him that a woman was waiting to see him; a middle-aged woman in a huge red dress with sleeves, the page said, and pearls in her hair. Valens didn't smile, but it cost him an effort. 'Show her into the study,' he said.

He hadn't met this one before, but it didn't matter; the huge red dress was practically a uniform with the Merchant Adventurers these days, and the delicate, obscenely expensive pearl headdress told him all he needed to know about her status within the company. He gave her a pleasant smile.

'You've brought a letter,' he said.

She started to apologise; it was late, because she'd been held up at the Duty Diligence waiting for a consignment of five gross of sheep's grease that hadn't arrived, and by the time it finally showed up it was too late to go on that night so she cut her losses and took her twenty-six barrels of white butter to Lonazep instead, because in this heat they wouldn't keep as far as the Compassion Grace, and of course that meant it was just as quick to go on up the mountain to Pericordia where she'd made an appointment to see some bone needles, two hundred gross at a good price but the quality wasn't there, so rather than go back down the mountain empty-handed she nipped across to Mandiritto to buy more of that nine-point lace, and that was when it decided to rain-

'That's quite all right,' Valens said. 'You're here now. Can I have the letter, please?'

She looked blank for a moment, then nodded briskly. 'Of course, yes.' From her satchel (particularly magnificent; tapestry, with golden lions sitting under a flat-looking tree) she took out a stiff packet of parchment about the size of her hand, and laid it down on the table.

'Thank you,' Valens said, and waited.

She smiled at him. 'My pleasure, of course,' she said. 'Now, I don't suppose you've got a moment, I know how terribly busy you must be…'

He wanted to say yes straight away and save having to listen, but that wouldn't do at all; his hands were itching to get hold of the letter-not open it, not straight away, just hold it and know it was there-but he folded them in a dignified manner on the table and listened for a very long time, until she finally got to what she wanted. It turned out to be nothing much, a licence to import Eremian rawhide single bends, theoretically still restricted by the embargo but nobody took any notice any more; he got the feeling she was only asking so as to have a favour for him to grant. He said yes, had to repeat it five times before she finally accepted it, and once more to get her out of the door without physical violence. He managed not to shout, and kept smiling until she'd finally gone. Then he sat down and looked at the letter.

It had started eighteen months ago, pretty much by accident. A trader had been caught at the frontier with contraband (trivial stuff; silver earrings and a set of fine decorated jesses for a sparrowhawk); instead of paying the fine, however, she'd claimed Eremian diplomatic immunity and pleaded the peace treaty, claiming she was a special envoy of the Duchess, and the trinkets were privileged diplomatic mail. Probably, it was her ingenuity that impressed the excise inspector. Instead of smiling and dropping hints for the usual bribe, he decided to call her bluff; he impounded the goods and sent to the Duke for verification through the proper diplomatic channels. Valens' clerk wrote to the proper officer in Eremia Montis, and in due course received a reply from the keeper of the wardrobe, enclosing a notarised set of diplomatic credentials and a promise that it wouldn't happen again. It wasn't the sort of thing Valens would normally expect to see, even though the original request had been written in his name, and he supposed he must have signed the thing, along with a batch of other stuff. But the reply was brought for him to see by a nervous-looking clerk, because there was something written in at the bottom, just under the seal.

The handwriting was different; it was, in fact, practically illegible, all spikes and cramped squiggles, not the fluent, graceful hand of a clerk. It was a brief note, an unaccountable impulse frozen in ink, like a fly trapped in amber; are you, it asked, that boy who used to stare at me every evening when I was a hostage in Civitas Vadanis? I've often wondered what became of you; please write to me. And then her name; or he assumed it was her name, rather than two superimposed clawmarks.

It had taken him a long time to reply, during which he considered a wide range of issues: the possibility of a trap designed to create a diplomatic incident, the real reason he'd never married, the paradox of the atrocious handwriting. Mostly, however, he hesitated because he didn't know the answer to the question. He remembered the boy she'd referred to, but the memory brought him little except embarrassment. He thought of the boy's strange, wilful isolation, his refusal to do what was expected of him, his reluctance to ride to the hunt with his father; he resented all the opportunities the boy had wasted, which would never come again.

So; the correct answer would be no, and the proper course of action would be to ignore the scribbled note and the breach of protocol it represented, and forget the whole matter. That would have been the right thing to do. Luckily, he had the sense to do the wrong thing. The only problem now was to decide what he was going to say.

He could think of a lot of things, enough for a book; he could write for a week and only set out the general headings. Curiously, the things he wanted to write about weren't anything to do with her. They were about him; things he'd never told anybody, because there was nobody qualified to listen. None of those things, he knew, would be suitable for a letter from one duke to another duke's wife. So instead he sat down one morning in the upper room with no windows, and tried to picture the view from the battlement above the gatehouse, looking west over the water-meadows toward the long covert and the river. Once he'd caught the picture, flushed it from his mind and driven it into the nets of his mind's eye, he thought carefully about the best way to turn it into words. The task took him all morning. In the afternoon he had meetings, a lawsuit to hear, a session of the greater council postponed from the previous month. That evening he tore up what he'd written and started again. He had no possible reason to believe that she'd be interested in what he could see from his front door, but he worked through four or five drafts until he had something he was satisfied with, made a fair copy, folded it and sent for the president of the Company of Merchant Adventurers. To make his point, he entrusted the request for a meeting to six guards, suggesting they deliver it some time around midnight.

The wretched woman came, fully expecting to die, and he asked her, as sweetly as he could manage, to do him a favour. Members of her company were forever popping (good choice of word) to and fro across the border-yes, of course there was an embargo, but there wasn't any need to dwell on it; would it be possible, did she think, for one of them to pass on a letter to one of her Eremian colleagues? It was no big deal (he said, looking over her head towards the door, outside which the armed guards were waiting) but on balance it'd probably be just as well if the whole business could be treated with a certain amount of the businesslike discretion for which the company was so justly famous. And so on.