Devices and Desires Read Free

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