Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  only to be kept oiled. It amused him sardonically that it was considered a freeman’s right to carry a sword to pierce men, whereas for carrying a bow to pierce the beasts of the field a man could forfeit both hands.

  One art Powl never mastered nor tried to master was that of cooking, so I slit, gutted, butchered, and roasted the victims of our morning’s or night’s effort while Powl lectured me on the subject of national politics.

  On this subject I was as ignorant and as fascinated as is a well-raised maiden about copulation. I had felt myself more informed of events at school than I did now, years later, but after Powl opened up the court world to me, I saw I had always been a chick in the egg.

  He had a story about each of the (then) four dukes: Garmen of Hight, who kept a small army of pretty boys at his side; Andermit, with his palace where all furniture was red and white; Shandaff, who was not enough of a peasant at heart to be an effective noble; and Leoue of the bee colors: yellow and black. The Duke of Leoue had been King Ethelbhel’s field marshal and now was that of his son. Leoue always was first in the reckoning.

  My teacher spoke no direct criticism of most men, and very little praise of any sort, unless there is criticism inherent in reporting that a man favors small children, or has execrable taste in domestic design.

  I knew already that Leoue had a reputation for using his men’s lives rather liberally, and I asked whether Powl considered him a good and just commander. In reply he told me, at unnecessary length, how Eydl, late Duke of Norwess, and he had despised one another so thoroughly that their anger had spiced the court for twenty years.

  I realized I had once again asked the wrong sort of question, the sort that only leads to others.

  About the late king, Powl spoke more directly and with more respect. King Ethelbhel had been a magnetic leader, with high ideals and a great concern for the position of his country amid the civilized nations. His love for Velonya was jealous, like a man’s love may be for a beautiful wife. Perhaps Powl implied that like that sort of love, Ethelbhel’s jealousy caused his inamorata difficulties, or perhaps I only imagined he implied that.

  Ethelbhel had had more touch of the student than was usual among Velonya’s monarchs, and he had both endowed universities and sprinkled his own court with scholars. His favorite study, however, was Old Velonyan history, and he was firmly contemptuous of both science and foreign influence. Actually, he had drawn little distinction between the two.

  King Ethelbhel would have liked to conquer for the sake of Velonyan grandeur, but as Felinka was savage and Rezhmia a source of contagion, he could not have loved what he had conquered, and Powl suggested that was why his campaigns usually had failed.

  I let Powl nibble his grouse breast clean before I suggested that it was simpler to admit that the Rezhmian Red Whips and the Rezhmian leadership might have been better at the time than ours. I knew little enough about the Felink campaign, except it had lost us many ships and men, but I had studied the southern fiasco.

  “Perhaps,” said my teacher, wiping his lips on the napkin he carried, a magical napkin that never seemed to get soiled, however often used, “though you expose your ignorance in speaking of the Red Whips as being in any sense obedient to

  Rezhmia. But still I think the personal analysis is meaningful. In the new king, Rudof, we have in a way the blossoming of Ethelbhel’s intellectual striving.” He folded the napkin, although he would use it again in only ten seconds.

  “Velonya has never had a ruler as broadly educated as this young man. He can read fair Allec, and at court he keeps (so I have heard) a Rezhmian translator. He acted very cleverly in the matter of closing the sea war with Felink, though a lesser man might have dug in his heels out of wounded pride. Rudof does not curl up like a bug dislodged when his ideas are challenged.”

  This was slippery: implicit criticism of the old king in the form of faint praise of the new. I grinned behind my roasted parsnips, more certain than ever that Powl had cut his teeth on state documents. “What a fine monarch, Powl,” I said, straight-faced. “You yourself might have had charge of his education!”

  Powl’s gray eyes, flat as a fish’s, looked at me. “Yes, Nazhuret, you have discovered me. Every afternoon when I leave you, I hotfoot it west to the city of Vesinglon and review with the king his multiplication tables. It is the reward of my life.”

  As I had predicted, he now unfolded his napkin and used it again. “And I do not mean to paint you too rosy a picture of the new king. Like his father, he is a man with a temper, and being the only son, he has been terribly spoiled. Cross his will at your peril.”

  I denied any intention of crossing the will of the King of Velonya, and I took a second helping of boiled vegetables.

  The new king, I now learned, did not get along with his wife, Chelemut of Low Canton. Between them it was not merely the lack of sympathy common to youngsters who were wed sight unseen. They really could not get along together, according to Powl, and had not had a moment’s communal peace since their wedding six years before. Powl insisted that the situation was beyond remedy, for one could not mix the swarthy pride of Merecanton with Velonya’s redheaded temperament. He chewed his dinner thoughtfully and gazed at the fire, as though he knew a lot about Low Canton. Or about temperament.

  But now there was a son and heir, a crawling mite named Eylvie after his grandfather, and Rudof’s chain might be loosed.

  I mentioned my old black letter, Baron Howdl, hoping for the truth finally about the disappearance of his daughter, or at least for some nasty gossip to validate my dislike of the man, but Powl only sighed and tossed into my plate all the bones for picking and the roots he had found not worth his while. (This was our habit, at my instigation. I hated to see food wasted when I was hungry. I was always hungry.) “No, Nazhuret, I have not bothered myself with barons,” he said.

  More than once, on that summer holiday, Powl reminded me that our ignorant insularity regarding the Rezhmian people was more than equaled by their passionate dislike of us, on no better grounds. And about the Felink he said that it was unlikely any treaty between our peoples would be a lasting success, because we had never tried to understand the way they thought, nor had they tried to understand what six months of snow do to a people. He walked on, laughing at the thought. Powl had a rich laugh, slightly edged in effect. “If you thought that Zaquash was an odd way of speaking, lad, you ought to investigate the Felink tongue.”

  As on this trip we had drifted back to our birth language, I suggested that we do that, but Powl only shook his head. “I haven’t the skill for it,” he said, but I knew he was lying, and under the late summer sun I felt cold all through.

  When we returned to the observatory, Powl was bronzed and I had stripes of red and brown all over my face. (It is my curse to spend all summer sunburned and all winter snow-burned, my king, thus adding an unusually garish coloring to my unusual appearance.) I spent all of one day on a thorough clothes-washing and then moped through a day of heavy rain, perfecting my calligraphy.

  Next day was cool and breezy, with a very bright smell in the air. Powl came up the hill rather late and set me one of my tasks of contemplation.

  This time I was to understand how grief comes to the freeman as well as to the slave. I nodded, and politely I went out into the oak copse, which was not as green as it had been, and I sat with my back against a tree, though I could hear everything Powl was doing in the observatory, and when he left, my ears followed him down the hill.

  After he was gone, I came in and was not surprised to find the tables of the observatory bare, except for my winter shirts and trousers; my walking stick; my out-of-fashion gentry clothes; my dowhee; and the sword I broke three years before, now rebladed.

  There was a letter:

  My dear Nazhuret,

  Please lock the place and leave the keys on the root where you have so often sat outside. I will fetch them before they have a chance to rust away, but I will not be back here soon. Live carefully, my son.
You have been the best thing in my life.

  Powl

  Obedient to the last, I left the key on the oak root. I also left him my bag of marbles, for it was all the gift I could make. As I started away, now red-nosed as well as burned red, I remembered that there was a half regal buried under that same oak root and that Powl had left me no money. I dug it out of the soaked earth and then, remembering my teacher more clearly, I placed it on the bag of marbles.

  After I wrote those previous words, sir, I crawled out the window and ran away. I don’t know why it is that when one (read “I”) dredges up some old and private loss it is exactly those persons he feels closest to whose presence he cannot bear. After scratching down the substance of Powl’s dismissal of me—sweetly worded but still a dismissal—I left a message of five words on a scrap of paper and took myself to a stranger’s grainfield under a high, gray, dribbling sky, where I gathered in the amaranth crop as though my future depended on it. The poor tiller must have thought I was desperate for coppers.

  When I came home again I had determined to write no more in this history. I had good excuses: I was occupied, the story was well finished where I had left it, my king already had heard the rest anyway, it became unacceptably ambiguous from this point…

  A hundred good excuses.

  Today came the first snow, and my spell of temperament has cooled with it. I am ready to continue.

  Never before the day I left the observatory had I been free of command: not at school and not with Powl. But in the last six months of my training, control had so softly drifted from my teacher to myself that I suffered now no uncertainty, no panic, no decay into playing marbles and talking to myself. I slept in the woods and continued to head south, the direction in which I had been going on a day’s promenade three years before.

  I was alone, though—as alone and untouchable as a bubble in glass—and I was unhappy. To say true, I grieved. I remember that wet maple autumn as particularly glorious: bright conflagration, with the gold leaves and the leaves of that bluish red that is the color glass turns when gold is added to it. The time was as quiet as glass, too—as though I had put a glass cup over each ear and heard only the noise of my own blood.

  For two days I did not hunt—finding it a harder thing to release the bowstring for my own belly alone than I did when I was feeding my teacher as well—but in our northern woods there is nothing in the autumn but meat and perhaps cattails, if one can find them, so in the end I was forced to hear a rabbit scream for me alone.

  It rained a very chilly rain and I cut pine boughs and heaped them in order like shingles, as Powl had taught me. I got wet anyway. The little vine maples under the trees made red stripes, their layers as cleanly horizontal as so many small horizons, and among them wandered fogs like little living things. Like slow birds, perhaps. Many times in those first days I found myself with legs tucked in and hands hid in my woolen shirt, lost in the black wolf of Gelley. It was not by my will that I sat like that, taut and empty, any more than a sick man babbles by will or an old man talks to himself. My self-collection began to stretch a shadow over me, and I wondered if I should not fight it, as Powl had had me fight most of my natural inclinations.

  He was not there to ask.

  I skirted a number of villages as a wild beast might have done, though the smell of bread in the air drove me mad. I was not finished with grieving, not finished with staring at nothing, and I had nothing to say to any human being.

  On the third day the rain and mist let up. I was walking through very low country, where the road was crossed by waterways as often as by deerpaths. The mud envied me my clogs and strove mightily to remove them with my every step.

  Odd enough, the sound it made each time I broke its grip was dry and hard, like a stick snapping. That percussion followed me through the morning until noon, when the sun stiffened the road’s fabric.

  I smelled horse, I smelled leather, and I smelled great shovelsful of disturbed soil, much like the smell of Powl’s earth closet. Around a forested comer the road slanted down, and as I followed it the air lost the sunlight and grew wet again.

  There I saw the beast itself, blowing and moaning, trapped past its chestnut belly in mud. It was fat, squat, and short-legged for its mass, and laid out flat on the road, its long face glistened with terror sweat. Where it had struggled against the sucking, remnants of its harness were flung out in the morass like water snakes. The cart it had been pulling was half gone behind it, with only one yellow, mud-caked wheel rising free. There was no human form in sight.

  I could see the great crack across the left of the road, where a plate of earth, hard above but mucky under, had broken and canted and sailed off entirely into the ditch, dropping the beast into sediment more than a yard deep and without solidity. For a man it would have been a sloppy, infuriating sort of joke. For a light horse it would have led to panic and perhaps injury getting out. For this cobby, stub-legged fellow, it was slow death.

  It had been there a while already, by the pale, dried earth speckling its back and by the immovability of its defeated head. The breath whistling in and out of the horse’s nostrils made me think of thirst; though it was trapped in treacherous water, there was nothing for it to drink. Nor had I anything to give it; in this desolation of rain and puddles, I had not thought to fill a bottle.

  There on the yet-solid bank were the marks of sticks or shovels, where someone had tried to dig the beast a path out. Behind it was a black-soaked heavy rope, with which perhaps they had tried to rope and pull it out. Now there was no one.

  I wondered where they had gone and what new attack they would attempt next. I looked at the horse, the tilted cart, and the broken harness, and I mused.

  He grunted at me like a pig, very sadly.

  There was an ax in the cart as well as a load of root vegetables; the driver must have been very certain no one would rob him in his absence. Or very distraught.

  I took the ax and went into the low woods, where the trees were so thick few got enough light, and they clawed at one another’s branches and rose too thin. I picked a spindling pine and I hacked it through at my waist level, and then had ten minutes of dangerous work shaking it to free it from its neighbors so it would fall where I wanted.

  It fell in the opposite direction, actually, but I was out of its path smartly. I had underestimated the tree’s bulk and was forced to chop again to remove the heavy end of the bole, and then raise another sweat cleaning off the biggest branches. In the end I could drag it and lift one end (the light end) off the ground. I hauled it to the road and lifted the light end over the floor of the cart, extending it like a blackboard pointer over the mud-trapped animal, which lifted its head dully to look. I took the rope with me and found it to be very heavy, stiff, and hard to grab, with all the grime. I climbed the tree to its end, which bobbed but held up my weight, and I lowered myself the three feet to the horse’s back.

  The creature sank no farther; evidently it was standing firm under all that mire. I attempted to run the rope under the big brown belly, but it was too wide, and the mud was not firm enough to dig. I had to settle for tying a bowline around its neck. I ran that rope over the trunk end and wrapped it once. Inch by inch I shortened the line between the horse and the sapling until the heavy end rose over the road and the horse was half choked with the tension.

  Like my patron spirit the monkey (though I had never seen a monkey), I climbed four-legged to the other end of my lever and then began to leap up and down on it. The natural spring of the sapling made this an interesting occupation, and the beasts strangled screams added urgency.

  I thought perhaps I was only hastening the horse’s demise, for that neck now looked as long as any blood horse’s and the tongue seemed to be swelling in its gaping mouth, but then it began to thrash as well as scream and one front hoof broke surface, looking improbably round and delicate for a beast that size. It struck and splashed and was joined by its fellow, and then the mud released with a sound of great bad hu
mor, and the horse was up on its hind legs and crashing forward again onto the edge of the road.

  It gave way. Like the piece beside it, it proved treacherous, and the horse sank into mud again. This time the undercut was not so deep, however, and the fragments of wagon-compressed earth remained underfoot, where they could be of use. The horse swam its front legs and heaved its rear and was out on the roadway, steaming.

  The tree was bobbing up and down like a fishing pole, and with each bob it pulled the horse’s head up. I went to release it and found the rope hopelessly jammed. I had to hack it apart at the knot with the ax.

  Now what? The beast was free but in trouble still. It shivered, and each of its knees had a tendency to buckle. It was important to get it home, to the amenities a cart horse expected (so much more than the amenities I was used to expecting): blankets, mash, clean straw, and possibly a roof overhead. But which way was home?

  If the cart had been going away, then home was the way I was going. If the cart had been returning, then home was behind me. But there was nothing behind me for many miles, and besides, the load of roots indicated it was on its way to market. No one buys mangel-wurzels in that quantity for personal consumption. I was at least three-quarters certain the direction was south, but if I were wrong, the poor exhausted beast might not have it in it to do the walk twice.

  As I mulled the problem, the horse began to walk, dragging me behind it.

  It had immense strength for a horse so weary and so badly treated by life. I could no more turn or stop it with my rope tied to its headstall (to the best of my memory the bit was broken through) than I could have pulled it out of the muck by hand. I could have left it to its journey, but having so far taken charge of the horse, I felt reluctant to let it go.