Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  My teacher looked bleakly down at me and smoothed his smooth hair further. “Zhurrie, lad,” he said in heavy Zaquash, “I can see now your life to be a bushel of trouble packed down.”

  He led me onto the deer track on the other side of the road, the one that ran behind our unwitting criminals.

  I had a great deal of fun creeping up upon our enemies. The temperature in these shadows had maintained winter’s last carpet on the ground, but it was too warm to crunch beneath foot. Powl was equally as quiet as I but less amused, being more concerned about the condition of his boots in the soppy, thawing snow.

  “I begin to see why you keep me dressed like a peasant,” I whispered to him, for my tailored jacket was impeding my movement considerably. He did not answer.

  It was not a difficult approach, for our quarry had their ears and eyes fixed on the stripe of road before them. Up until now I had had hopes—fears, actually—that they would turn out to be mere road menders, or honest laborers retired for a midday nap. But as we came within thirty feet of them, I could hear them talking, and their subject was our disappearance, and whether it was worth following us along our shortcut for purposes of overtaking. The man to the left (my side) believed it was worth the extra effort, while his partner demurred.

  They were no good at waiting; they wiggled constantly, and I spied the flash of a dagger in the hand of Powl’s man. “Should we run at them?” I mouthed to Powl.

  “Not unless they see us.” He crawled forward on his hands and feet, exactly like a cat, and a feline interest began to illumine his smooth face. He no longer worried about his cuffs.

  I kept pace with him, expecting to be noticed at any moment, but much to my surprise we crawled all the way to the men’s rag-booted feet without notice. They had meanwhile decided the game was not worth the candle and were setting back to wait for easier prey.

  Powl gave me the nod.

  I had never hit a man who was down on the ground, or tried to hit one (except, of course, for Powl), and out of sportsmanship I tapped the fellow on the shoulder so he should at least know I was there. He turned without any particular alarm and craned up his head at me, and then with a bellow he floundered up, swinging the knob-headed club at me. I hopped in before it and was at his right side as it swung. From behind him I grabbed his right hand and pinched until he dropped his weapon, and I locked that hand over his left arm with my own left and slid my other hand over his right shoulder, under his chin, and around his jawbone. He struggled, but I had him nicely and I was very proud of myself.

  Powl, who had casually kicked his opponent in the jaw before the man could rise, came now and stood before me. “Fine, my lad. But what will you do with him now?”

  “Take him to the provincial marshal?” I hazarded. “I don’t think the authority of the Sordaling Constabulary extends so far out.”

  The fellow struggled harder. Though he could not get rid of me, he could lift me off my feet. Powl stood before us and watched for a few moments, one hand cupping the other elbow, chin resting on two fingers. For the first time, he looked amused by the affair.

  “Nazhuret, I have spent many years of my life avoiding involvement with officialdom in all aspects, high and low. It is far more of a grief than simple roadside cutthroats, and if you wish to survive free and happy you will follow my example.”

  “Then what do I do with him?” I asked, my voice bouncing as I bounced. My prisoner next tried to step on my foot.

  Powl stepped in and put one hand on each of the fellow’s broad shoulders. “Listen to me, assassin,” he said in his most arrogantly clean accent. “You will come to a bad end in this occupation. You are not suited for it. You have not the brain.”

  For a moment the man stopped struggling, and he stared stupidly at Powl, with his ruffles and piping and his snow-stained cuffs. Then, lifting his hand straight from the man’s shoulder, Powl cracked him across the face open-handed, and the robber fell senseless from my grip into the slush.

  I stuck my right hand into my jacket front, for Powl’s slap had glanced off the man’s jaw onto the hand, which had gone numb. I thanked my teacher very politely for his help.

  That spring, we graduated from the idiom of South Zaquash to the old language itself, though the ban upon its pronunciation in the Kingdom of Velonya still was in effect. Powl said the knowledge of this old mama’s tongue would change my way of looking at my own native country.

  He was right. All the traits I was taught were typical of the Zaquashlon peasantry were actually built into the structure of their language. In Zaquash questions are asked in a determined (to my ears), descending tone, while declarative statements

  rise into the sky and stay there. The word for boat is a grammatic variant of the word for man. The word for horse is the plural of the word for woman. Goats driven are called “a braid.” The same word is shared by “north” and “black,” which in some usages means “left” as well. These are not poetic turns of phrase, sir, but the basic use of the language.

  To me, a Velonyan raised, Zaquash sounded incomprehensible, half-witted, and sly. What is our immediate impression of the territories’ peasantry? Sly, half-witted, and incomprehensible. Once one begins to understand the tongue, however, their responses seem more consistent, and it is very amusing how they think of us.

  They call us “wrapped in maps”: astonishing phrase. The actual term for a nobleman, paitsye (you hear it every day in the southern territories, even among those who have no real Zaquash at all), is “hut-crusher.”

  It is a language tailored to survive in secret: a language of resistance. When Powl and I spoke it together, I am not sure we weren’t rebels.

  I went into Sordaling with my fortnight’s product in wooden boxes, packed in milkweed fiber. Powl sent me by myself. I was surprised at how much such pleasant work brought, even counting the cost of the very clearest optical blanks. One could do better as an optician than as a lieutenant in the King’s Horse. Of course, lieutenants don’t expect to stay lieutenants. Opticians remain what they are.

  I was much less terrified of human society by now, though still I felt alien, and when a man on a horse cantered up the quiet road behind, I took one look to be sure he was not a brigand and then let him come.

  He passed politely enough, glancing down his right shoulder at me in my coarse linen. Then he stopped and pushed his mare sideways across the road.

  The mare was a fair gray and beautiful, though rather thin. The man was much thinner and dressed in a finery of lace and ruffles dirtier than the skin of the horse. At a distance of ten feet I could smell the man: woodsmoke, sweat, and cheap scent. He was wearing a sword, but that was no military blade. It was a needle with a jeweled, cupped handle. A dagger, also like a needle, was worn jauntily through a velvet chevron across one shoulder.

  He was dark and looked as dirty as his ruffles. He stared at me with an intensity close to anger. “Zhurrie,” he said at last in the voice of a heavy pipe-smoker, “You have certainly changed.”

  I don’t claim the skill of remembering everyone I have met. The face was familiar, but there were hundreds of boys at Sordaling School while I was there, and the way in which he played the dagger around the fingers of one black-nailed hand was very distracting.

  “I don’t remember you,” I said, and then repeated the phrase in Velonyan, hoping he would not recognize the outlawed language I had spoken in.

  He smiled, and his teeth were in better shape than his face. “Because you don’t know me, my friend. Only I know you.”

  Melodramatically, the rider then kicked his mare back into a gallop and left me in a shower of spring mud.

  It had been almost three years since I had been recognized. I returned to the observatory in a sweat, heart pounding.

  It was a beautiful spring and summer, except that Powl took to hitting me brutally. Three times within a week he knocked me cold and left me on the grass. I would come to my senses and go in (once with a mouth full of blood, from a split lip an
d a tooth broken and left in the tongue) to find him in the single chair, nose to a book.

  Mechanics of the Horse. Savage Art of the Sekret Wastes—in Allec. (Powl had a wide, taste in scholarship.) Civil Mechanics of the Warrior-Poet.

  Powl now was without warmth in our sparring, without pity. I asked him why he hurt me so, and he answered it was because he could.

  Of course he could knock me down; he was my teacher. “Your teacher for too long, to be enduring this inadequacy,” he replied.

  I reminded him he was a head taller and a hand longer in the arms than I. “Excuses disgust me,” answered Powl.

  I stood before him drooling pink, pressing on my jaw to slow the swelling, and he said to me, “There is something wrong with you, Nazhuret. Not with your skills—I have seen to your skills—something intimately wrong. You should not let me beat you this way.”

  I agreed with him, but the alternative seemed to be to walk out, in rancor and empty-handed. I did not want to believe he meant me to do this.

  The next two days I could not fight, but after that I made a resolution that no attack would get under my guard, and at our next sparring I whipped myself to a trembling alertness. I deflected twenty-two strikes in a row, and then Powl kicked me in the throat.

  I squatted down and cried like a baby, choking on the phlegm of my sobs. “I can’t block them forever,” I said or tried to say. “No one could.” Powl brushed past me toward the observatory. “No. I’m glad you finally realize that,” he said.

  When we were not fighting, he was as affable and as egalitarian as ever.

  In the previous dark of winter I had spent many hours sitting or walking slowly, mind open. Now the long days seemed to impress activity on every moment, and Powl decided once more to slow me down. “This day,” he said one very warm morning, “is dedicated to freedom. Not that you are to think about the quality of freedom; you are to realize it, Nazhuret. Go out into the cool of the pines and spend the day in self-collection. Until it is dark.”

  Cool of the pines or no, it was a sweaty day’s work, and my problems—with Powl’s brutality, with the man on the road who had recognized me, with my own fecklessness—endlessly intruded themselves. I was too tired to eat supper.

  The next morning, earlier than was his wont, my teacher climbed the hill and sent me out again—this time not to think about my own particular and infinite freedoms. I was sure my joints had caught a chill. I was certain I was going insane.

  The next day and the next he sent me out without any instruction, and I was in great pain of body.

  It rained, and though the trees broke the body of the downpour, the noise in the leaves was trancing. Maddening. It was like the pain in each member of my abused body and the throb in my jaw where the tooth had been cracked open. At the same time the pain, and the shining black-green of the wet needles and the dusty live stink of the forest saved me from the attack of my own thoughts. I had outlived the ability to think and drifted high above the trees, where lenses of water filled the soft air, infinite in number and careless of their own destiny.

  Then I fell, too, through and out of my own body. Fell without an end, careless, like the droplets, of destiny. It was an experience like death and unlike it, and it did not upset me in the least.

  I noticed I was wet and so I got up, though I needed two saplings to complete the effort. I went back to the observatory, the rain washing my greasy face.

  Powl was adjusting the new slatted wooden cover for the telescope slot. It did not work as well as expected, so there were pots scattered around the expensive equipment. Once again the large metal tub from the earth closet had been emptied and called into play.

  I helped with the other rattail line. When it was adequately fixed I said, “Powl, I won’t be able to use this arms training you have given me. Not occupationally, I mean.”

  He glanced at me sidelong. I remember his face was pink and his wary eyes glistening. “Why? You’re not that bad. You can take on thieves and untrained vagabonds, at any rate.”

  I sat on the platform chair, leaving my teacher to stand. “Yes, but I… It is like a bird that takes off because it is frightened. The dog that feels a wagon wheel roll against its back and is up before the touch becomes crushing.

  “You have taught me to be the bird, the dog, Powl. Could the dog be paid to move that perfectly once an hour, for bread sopped in gravy? Would the bird shoot into the sky on command? I think as a man-at-arms I would soon be no different than any other dull, blundering door guard. It would be a waste.”

  I did not look at my teacher. “And… and I think it would do me a violence, also.”

  Powl sat next to me, on the floor so I could not see his face. “Well, that is certainly how I see it, too, Nazhuret. I was afraid I would have to tell you as much, and then maybe all hell would break loose. People don’t like to work as hard as you have worked without a reward.”

  I laughed. “Then,” Powl continued very calmly, as though not interested, “what will you be?”

  The rain on the roof was like a cavalry. The rain in the pots was like cavalry drums. “I don’t think I’ll be anything, Powl. I have lost the art of being things. I will instead do things. Make breakfast. Grind lenses. Wash clothes.”

  Powl nodded. “Infinite freedom.”

  “And infinite teaching,” I answered, not meaning to flatter.

  Powl was biting his hand; I could see that, from behind and above him. “What is it I have taught you?” he asked me.

  I had my answer ready. “You have taught me to be still, so that I could move properly. You have taught me to listen, so that I can speak properly. You have taught me to see, so that I might not always be seen.”

  My teacher crowed. “Glib! Glib, Nazhuret, but entirely accurate.” He slapped his knee, but still he did not turn his head to mine. “I shall have to remember that one. But let me be serious for a moment. “Lad, out of my own experience let me advise you to avoid… to avoid grabbing on to things: ideas, possessions, even other people. Anything you own is going to cut into your perfect freedom.”

  I held my soggy, coarse shirt away from my body. “Possessions, Powl, do not seem to be my most threatening temptation. So I am to stay a beggar?”

  “You have that honor, yes,” said Powl, in all his fine linen and piping, “And another thing: I repeat you must stay out of the reach of officialdom, for with what you now know it will be deadly to you. Do not touch the police, the military, for even with your innocent heart you will wind up hanged. Especially with your innocent heart!

  “Someday, too, the world’s respect is going to try you.”

  “I’m sorry?” He looked so sorrowful saying these words.

  “It will… try to seduce you, even you. Eschew it, Nazhuret. You are as much a lord as any man can be, sitting there in your homespun, teaching your teacher philosophy.”

  I had opened my mouth to reply, but Powl was up and walking. My abrupt, eccentric teacher was through the outer door without another word. I still had not seen his face.

  Two days later I knocked Powl unconscious and I could not wake him up for long, anxious minutes. As I looked down at him lying in the mud of the last rainstorm, it came to me that my teacher was not a strongly built man, and not very young, either. I dragged him inside and undressed him and began to wash his clothes.

  Powl sat up as I was wringing out his pleated shirt. The first words he said were, “Nazhuret, I have never desired any personal ascendancy over you.”

  I giggled, partly from relief that he was not dead. “I know. I know. But it is inevitable, you know, master.”

  “I will not permit ‘masters.’ You know that.”

  He lay down again, stifling a groan. “I have worked three years to awake in you an inner… an inner authority that no other can supersede. Only one man in ten thousand possesses that. It is perfect. It is deadly.”

  He rolled toward me. “You cannot give your allegiance to anyone, Nazhuret: king or prelate or…”

/>   “Or teacher,” I concluded for him, and I arranged his shirt on a hanger. “What a joke,” I muttered aloud. “My problem all through life was that I was incapable of committing this authority of mine to anyone. That’s why I hung on at the school for years, unwilling to take a master.”

  “I will not permit masters!” he repeated. I think he had a bad headache.

  “Until I came here.” I looked over at the man on the bed, who had refused for so long to allow me to be owned by him. “That particular incapability ended here. And, Powl, don’t denigrate me too strongly for my humility. I think you would not have liked it had I argued, contradicted you, and refused your instructions.”

  “Of course not,” said Powl. “I would have been insupportable. You were just an ignorant boy.”

  After that he took a long nap.

  That summer, Powl taught me to hunt. By “hunting” I do not mean the sport of venery, but rather the job of putting meat in one’s mouth: snaring rabbits, for example. Venery is a grand passion among the great. Snaring rabbits is mostly against the law, but beggars will always do it, as it is preferable to starvation.

  Powl had no particular feeling for the chase, but he was remarkably efficient at it. His skill with twine and with the small, light bow was hardly credible; it made me doubt for the first time that the man was mansion-born. It would have been simpler for me had I been brought up in the country, or had the man not first taught me for three years to observe the forest world harmlessly. The shock I received each time a rabbit screamed, lung-pierced, tended to depress my appetite.

  In the warm weather we went on a vacation, or at least for me it seemed a vacation. We bivouacked for weeks unbroken, carrying only sticks, sacks, and dowhees, looking like peasants except that Powl wore neat doeskin breeches that kept out every sort of thorn. Our walking sticks were of imported tropical grasswood, which around Sordaling City was the latest rage among laborers in easy circumstances, its gold-and black-mottled weightlessness being much admired. Ours were slightly heavier than the usual because they had had the walls within the length hollowed out, and within them rested slim little bows made of foil-blade billets: Powl’s invention. These were lighter and more concealable than wood, and needed