K Parker: Devices and Desires

She paused, considering her reply. 'Actually, it's quite dull, mostly. It's not like I get to go out and see things, and one guest wing's pretty like another.'

(And, she didn't say, there's always the thought of what might happen if things go wrong.)

'I guess so,' he said. 'Well, I hope it hasn't been too boring here.'

'Boring?' She looked at him. 'I wouldn't say that. Going hunting with your father was-'

'Quite.' Valens managed not to wince. 'I didn't know he'd dragged you out with him. Was it very horrible?'

She shook her head. 'I've been before, so the blood and stuff doesn't bother me. It was the standing about waiting for something to happen that got to me.'

Valens nodded. 'Was it raining?'

'Yes.'

'It always rains.' He pulled a face. 'Whenever I hear about the terrible droughts in the south, and they're asking is it because God's angry with them or something, I know it's just because Dad doesn't go hunting in the south. He could earn a good living as a rain-maker.'

She smiled, but he knew his joke hadn't really bitten home. That disconcerted him; usually it had them laughing like drains. Or perhaps they only laughed because he was the Duke's son. 'Well,' she said, 'that was pretty boring. But the rest of it was…' She shrugged. 'It was fine.'

The shrug hurt. 'Any rate,' he said briskly, 'you'll be home for harvest festival.'

'It's not a big thing where I come from,' she replied; and then, like an eclipse of the sun that stops the battle while the issue's still in the balance, the chamberlain came out to drive them all into the Great Hall for singing and a recital by the greatest living exponent of the psaltery.

Valens watched her being bustled away with the other women, until an equerry whisked him off to take his place in the front row.

Ironically, the singer sang nothing but love-songs; aubades about young lovers parted by the dawn, razos between the pining youth and the cynical go-between, the bitter complaints of the girl torn from her darling to marry a rich, elderly stranger. All through the endless performance he didn't dare turn round, but the thought that she was somewhere in the rows behind was like an unbearable itch. The greatest living psalterist seemed to linger spitefully over each note, as if he knew. The candles were guttering by the time he finally ground to a halt. There would be no more socialising that evening, and in the morning (early, to catch the coolest part of the day) she'd be going home.

(I could start a war, he thought, as he trudged up the stairs to bed. I could conspire with a disaffected faction or send the keys of a frontier post to the enemy; then we'd be at war again, and she could come back as a hostage. Or maybe we could lose, and I could go there; all the same to me, so long as…)

He lay in bed with the lamp flickering, just enough light to see dim shapes by. On the opposite wall, the same boarhounds that had given him nightmares when he was six carried on their endless duel with the boar at bay, trapped in the fibres of the tapestry. He could see them just as well when his eyes were shut; two of them, all neck and almost no head, had their teeth in the boar's front leg, while a third had him by the ear and hung twisting in mid-air, while the enemy's tusks ripped open a fourth from shoulder to tail. Night after night he'd wondered as he lay there which he was, the dogs or the pig, the hunters or the quarry. It was one of the few questions in his life to which he had yet to resolve an answer. It was possible that he was both, a synthesis of the two, made possible by the shared act of ripping and tearing. His father had had the tapestry put there in the hope that it'd inspire him with a love of the chase; but it wasn't a chase, it was a single still moment (perhaps he couldn't see it because it didn't move, like the ring hanging from the rafter); and therefore it represented nothing. Tonight, it made him think of her, standing in the rain while the lymers snuffled up and down false trails, his father bitching at the harbourers and the masters of the hounds, the courtiers silent and wet waiting for the violence to begin.

The peace won't last, they said. They gave it three months, then six, then a year; just possibly three years, or five at the very most. Meanwhile, Count Sirupat's third daughter married the Prince of Boha (bad news for the shepherds, the lumber merchants and the dealers in trained falcons, but good for the silver miners and refiners, who were the ones who mattered), and his fourth daughter married her third cousin, Valens' fourth cousin, the Elector of Spalado.

Father celebrated Valens' nineteenth birthday with a hunt; a three-day battue, with the whole army marshalled in the mountains to drive the combes and passes down to the valley, where the long nets were set up like lines of infantry waiting to receive a cavalry charge. On the morning of the third day, they flushed a magnificent mountain boar from the pine woods above the Blue Lake. One look at the monster's tusks sent the master hurrying to find the Duke; it'd be nothing short of treason if it fell to anybody else. But the Duke was right up the other end of the valley; he came as quickly as he could, but when he got there the boar had broken through, slicing open two guardsmen and half a dozen hounds, and was making a run for it across the water-meadows. If it made it to the birch forest on the other side of the water, they'd never find it again, so if the Duke didn't want to miss out on the trophy of a lifetime, he was going to have to address the boar on horseback. As far as Valens' father was concerned, that wasn't a problem; he galloped off after the boar, leaving his escort behind, and caught up with it about three hundred yards from the edge of the forest, in a small dip littered with granite outcrops. The boar didn't want to stop and turn at bay. It could see safety, and all it had to do was run faster than a horse. The Duke managed to slow it up with an arrow in the left shoulder, but the thought of bringing down such a spectacular animal with the bow didn't appeal to him in the least. Anybody could drain its strength with half a dozen snagging hits and then dispatch it tamely, like a farmer slaughtering the family pig. The Duke needed it to still be dangerous when he faced it down the shaft of a number four spear, or else it'd be a waste. So he urged on his horse and managed to overtake it with fifty yards or less to go. The boar was slowing down, favouring its wounded side, as he surged past it and struck with his lance. The strike was good, catching the boar just behind the ear and killing it outright.

But in order to get in close he'd pulled his horse in too tight; when the boar dropped, the horse couldn't clear it in time and stumbled, throwing its rider. The Duke fell badly, landing in a nest of granite boulders. His shoulder was smashed and so was his right eye-socket, and when he tried to get up, he found he couldn't move. The dogs had caught up by then and swarmed over him to get to the boar; behind them came the front-riders, who saw what had happened and tried to lift him, until his roars of pain frightened them and they put him down again. It was dark by the time a surgeon arrived from the castle, and the lamps wouldn't stay lit in the rain and wind. Later, they said that if they'd got to him earlier, or if the huntsmen hadn't tried to move him, or if the surgeon had been able to see the full extent of the damage, it might have been different; as it was, there was very little they could do.

Valens wasn't there when it happened. He'd stayed back from the main hunt, pretending he had a headache; then, just after they'd driven the square spinney, he'd been knocked down by an old fat sow nobody had realised was there. As it happened he'd suffered nothing more than a bruised shin and a mild scat on the head; but by then he'd had about as much of his extended birthday as he could take, and lay groaning and clutching his knee until they'd loaded him on the game cart and driven him back to the castle. When they brought Father home, Valens had been lying on his bed reading a book (a twelve-thousand-line didactic poem about bee-keeping). Everyone was sure his father was going to die, so Valens was hustled down into the courtyard, where they'd rigged up a tent so they wouldn't have to risk taking the Duke up the narrow spiral stairs of the gatehouse.