Carausius, can you possibly find out what's taking them so long?'
During the meal (smoked venison, cold roast lamb; acceptable) he sat between the bald man and an uncle. The bald man wanted to talk about Mezentine Guild politics, and the uncle seemed fascinated by the technicalities of deep-level mine-working.
'I'm not the man you should be asking,' Valens said, during a brief lull in the barrage of artfully phrased questions. 'It just so happens we've got a topflight Mezentine engineer with us, he'd know all about that sort of thing. Carausius,' he said, leaning across the table, 'where's Ziani Vaatzes? I haven't seen him for a day or so.'
'He's not here,' Carausius replied with his mouth full (and him a diplomat; for shame). 'If you remember, he's away at the mines, looking into that thing we were discussing.'
'Ah.' Valens caught himself before he frowned. Probably not a good idea to let their guests know that the celebrated Vadani mines, in which they were clearly deeply interested, were just about to be sabotaged to stop them falling into Mezentine hands. 'Any idea when he'll be back?'
So much for showing off his rare and valuable possessions; he wondered whether he should keep Vaatzes in a glass cabinet, mounted on a little rosewood stand, for visitors to admire.
'Excuse me,' the uncle said. 'If you're at war with the Mezentines, why have they sent you a mining engineer? I hadn't realized they were so altruistic.'
'Defector,' Carausius explained.
'The only specimen in captivity,' Valens added, realizing as he said it that the joke wasn't very good. 'He came to us after the fall of Civitas Eremiae.'
The bald man was very interested in that. 'I wasn't aware that the Mezentines allowed defection,' he said. 'In fact-'
'They don't,' Carausius said. 'It was the Eremians' decision to grant this Vaatzes asylum that led to the war.'
'And you've allowed this man to come here.' It was the first thing she'd said for some time. She was wedged in between Carausius and a fat soldier whose name Valens could never remember, and she'd been eating with a single-minded ferocity that Valens couldn't help finding impressive. 'Not a good idea, surely.'
'We'd already declared war by the time we picked him up,' Valens explained, 'so we had nothing to lose by it. He's worth having, I'm sure of it. He organized the defense of Civitas Eremiae, made one hell of a good job of it. For a while, it looked like they were going to win.'
'You declared war.' She was looking at him past Carausius' arm and shoulder. 'I thought they attacked you.'
Valens froze. The unspoken question wasn't one he wanted to answer to anybody, but her least of all. 'It was only a matter of time,' he said briskly. 'A preemptive strike seemed worth trying; they were weak after the losses they took during the siege, the political will seemed to be failing. I miscalculated. I don't think it made much difference, one way or another.'
That was a cue for the bald man to resume his interrogation about Guild politics, and this time Valens was only too happy to talk. She carried on looking at him for some time, then went back to savaging the smoked venison.
She eats like a dog, she thought. She holds the meat still with her claws, grips it with her teeth and tears it.
It was hard to see the top table from where she was sitting; harder still to observe her in a proper, scientific fashion without being caught staring. Orsea's head was in the way, and the man next to her, some buffoon, kept trying to talk to her about music. Watching out of the corner of her eye was giving her a headache.
Stupid, she thought. 'Orsea,' she said, 'is there any bread?'
He looked round, moving his head just enough so that she could see. 'It's migrated up the other end of the table,' he said. 'Hang on, I'll try and catch someone's eye.'
It was stupid, of course, because she wasn't the one who should be making these observations. He was up there with the subject; it should be his job to observe, and report back to her in a long, detailed letter. Instead, she was down here, among the other ornamental courtiers, having to crane her neck and grab fleeting glimpses. Not scientific.
At least she wasn't wearing authentic tribal costume. Actually, they'd done a pretty good job of dressing her up as a human being, and to her credit she carried off the imposture well. Training, probably, hours of patient coaching, like the manning of a hawk; teaching her to sit still, to keep quiet, not to jump up and run about the room. Someone had told her that they'd sent her away to somewhere quite grand and exotic to be schooled in civilized behavior-reasonable enough, when you thought about it, and considering what they had to gain from the deal. But they hadn't managed to stop her ripping up her food like an animal.
Veatriz smiled at that, and made a point of cutting the last of her cold roast lamb with the utmost precision; thumb and two fingers only on the back of the knife, just as she'd been taught when she was little. A young lady doesn't saw, your grace, she slices. Not that perfect table manners had done her much good in the long run.
Orsea had shifted in his seat again, and now all she could see was the wretched woman's shoulder. Red; the color suited her fishbelly complexion, but hadn't anybody thought to tell her what a red dress meant in these parts? She smiled, thinking of women in red dresses; women in red dresses who brought letters, once upon a time. I would give good money, she said deliberately to herself, to know if that face came out of a pot. Must have, she decided. If it was her natural color, they must've been keeping her in a dark cellar for the last six months, like blanching chicory. Nice metaphor, if only she had a use for it; the forcing, blanching and bringing on of vegetables for the table.
She frowned, and the boring man sitting next to her must've wondered what he'd said wrong. All very unfair, of course. Probably she was a very nice person, if you got to know her. Someone had told her (she could never remember people's names at these stupid receptions) that she'd been carrying that big hawk when they first arrived. How much would a bird like that weigh? You'd need forearms like a farrier to support that much weight. No; cousin Jarnac had told her once (at just such a reception, sitting next to her and being boring when she really didn't want to listen) that hawks were surprisingly light, something to do with aerodynamics and hollow bones. She'd had to carry hawks herself, of course, on formal days, but she hadn't really noticed how heavy they were. She'd been too busy worrying about whether they were going to huff their wings unexpectedly in her face or bite her.
All politics, of course. They'd dressed her in the hawk, just as they'd dressed her in the red outfit, and the polite conversation and the musical appreciation and the civil and mercantile law, until she was practically an artifact rather than a human being; a mechanical toy, like the clockwork dolls the Mezentines make, but instead of a spring to make her go, deep inside there was a little sharp-clawed predator who tore at her food…
She was standing up. Veatriz couldn't see, because of Orsea's stupid chin, but she and the other savages were on their feet; now Valens and his fat chancellor were standing too (rules of precedence to be observed in everything); they were leaving. She lost sight of them behind a thicket of heads, and then there was a tantalizing glimpse of them in the gap between the end of the table and the door; the pack had fallen behind, and she was walking next to Valens as the door opened and they escaped.
Well. It was high time the young couple spent some time together, to get to know each other. They'd probably go for a walk round the knot garden, while the diplomats and the representatives and the whole Vadani government lurked discreetly in the covered cloister, penned in like sheep waiting to be dipped. They would walk round the knot garden, and she would go through her paces like a well-trained four-year-old jennet at a horse fair, and the fate of nations would be decided by how well she made small talk. Meanwhile (everybody else was getting up now) the Duchess Veatriz Sirupati would go back to her room and embroider something.
'Can someone explain to me,' Orsea was saying-to her, presumably-'what all that was in aid of?'
He could be so infuriating; but she kept her temper. 'Oh come on,' she said. 'Don't you know who those people are?'
Orsea shrugged. 'Someone told me they're ambassadors from the Cure Hardy, but that's got to be wrong. The Cure Hardy are-'
'Savages.' She nodded. 'That's them,' she said. 'And the female is going to marry Valens.'
It was a moment before Orsea spoke. 'Nobody tells me anything,' he said.
'Yes they do, but you don't listen.' She sighed, as though the whole thing was quite tedious. 'It's all to do with trade agreements and cavalry,' she said. 'And it's high time he got married and churned out an heir.
