Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  I don’t think he was sure what had happened, but his brown, Zaquash face set in belligerent wrinkles. “I wouldn’t try that against a man, you great monkey,” he said, as though I had only raised a fist to him. Perhaps that was all he saw.

  There had been four of them—I could account for the other two—and they had been angry. They had taken two silver candlesticks and a naming bowl, and the life of an eighteen-year-old boy, though he had not opposed them in any manner. None of the Commereys had.

  “I can tell you why them’s hot about,” said Quaven, speaking loudly into Master Commerey’s grief. “It was ’cause this fellow ’mong us.”

  Briefly Grofe described my part in the business, leaving out the episode of tossing the horse over my shoulder. I climbed the stairs, stepping around the children, and allowed Commerey to peer out at me through blank eyes, and through the door I saw the body of the boy laid out on two chairs, with a basin and rags below him and one candle for light.

  “You can track them?” he asked me, and I could only say that I had so far.

  He was a big man, square-faced, with less Zaquash about him than Quaven but more than Grofe. “Then track for me, too,” he said.

  At about dawn Commerey called my attention to a hemispherical stone, knee-high, set into the earth beside the roadway. “Ekish Territory line marker,” he said. The other riders at my back grunted as though he had said something of real meaning.

  I sat down on the meaningful stone. “Territory line marker? How does that affect our chase?” I asked the big man. “We had no legal authority before, so we haven’t less now.” Commerey got down from his horse and stood beside me. He looked down sharply.

  “More tired you get, less you sound like a local man, Zural. Where you come from?”

  I felt chastened and foolish as well as bone-weary. The farmer was right, so I dropped the accent entirely. I told him I had been raised in Sordaling City, and when that didn’t suffice, that I had been raised as a servant at the Royal Military School. There was no lie in that, and it was enough.

  Grofe answered my question. “Beyond this marker, lad, Satt Territory gives way to Ekesh. It was Ekesh avengers struck us, so we’re going in the right direction, that’s all.”

  “How do you know they were Ekesh, Master Grofe?” I asked him. Grofe spoke with energy, but his back was wilted and his hands heavy on his horse’s withers.

  He snorted, and so did the horse. “Would have to be! Don’t ask idiot questions.” He pushed the beast forward again.

  The differences among the various Zaquash territories are not obvious to outsiders, and their inability to hold common cause is still less comprehensible. If it were not that way, I imagine Velonya itself would remain a small country on the middle-western border of the continent.

  Forgive my impudence, my king. This paper will not easily erase, and my manuscript comes too slowly for me to toss the page. I am forced to rely on impulse and honesty.

  It was bright morning, and our grim troop cut through populated neighborhoods. I wondered if our errand was written across our faces and what the Territorial Guard would do with us if they found us out. If we found the avengers, we could either turn them in to their own constables or perform a forced extradition, carrying them back across the line. Either way, I knew Powl would not approve of my role in this, but I felt pressed by the situation. Ekesh is the Zaquash word for lake land, and on that morning we passed by many of the waters that made the place famous: cool, finger-shaped, hemmed in iris and cattails, and of the same clear green as fine glass held edge-on to the light. The panfish of Ekesh (called that because they are the shape of a pan, complete with long handle) have orange-red spots over their gills, and in the translucent waters they looked like sparks darting. Dragonflies of many metallic colors crowded the air in their last attempt that year to do whatever it is dragonflies do, and the hummingbirds, looking much like the dragonflies, fought each other over the season’s last twinberry blooms. In the daze of my constant walking, I forgot my errand, I forgot the banging of the horses’ hooves behind me, I forgot even that my foot had been pierced and now was well inflamed.

  I can see why your forefathers lusted to possess little Ekesh Territory, my king, though Satt is richer and Morquenie has the port. Though I felt neither the strength nor the desire to conquer these round fields (for they plow in circles), green waters, and all the armored dragonflies, still I wished even then to return to Ekesh, on any other errand than man-hunting.

  It was many years before that happened.

  We passed a town, the name of which eludes me. The roofs, however, were of clay, orange-red, the color of the spots on the panfish. We spoke to no one. No one prevented or delayed us.

  The tracks I was following did not leave the road as we passed the town, though there were signs that the lame horse stood in one place awhile, and water was spilled on the earth. Two or three miles beyond there rose a birch wood, not too heavy or dark, and there our avengers finally showed some individuality, for the horse under imperfect control went off onto a slim path to the left, and none of the others left the road this time to bring it back.

  I told the riders I thought we were near the end of the hunt, and five men looked down on me with faces white and expressionless as the moon. They swayed in their saddles. Commerey’s eyes were fixed on nothing.

  I had thought I was the weariest man there, having jogged while they rode astride. But I was young, and also I had lost neither cash crop nor family the night before. Politely as I knew how, I asked for two men to take the wood’s track while I led the rest forward. Grofe’s son and Quaven did so, the Zaquash under protest.

  Under broad noon we came to a declivity so sharp the road itself tacked left and right for the safety of carts and wagons. Down below was a palisade town all of wood, of no great age by the looks of it, and in the center of the town lay a lake like a mouse’s eye, perfectly round, perfectly brown. Most riding horses left the road here and scuttled down quickly through the grass, but the lame horse I followed had taken the slower way. At the bottom they formed together again and entered through the open gateway of the town.

  “Shelbruk,” Commerey named the place, and he sat on his horse as though he were broken of his last idea.

  I leaned against the wood of the palisade. “Well, there it is, good men. The avengers are in Shelbruk, unless they’ve already left again, and I doubt that. I have tracked for you night and day, and shown you the tracks as I went. I cannot also decide what you are to do about them.”

  Grofe and Commerey looked down at me and said nothing. “Well, can I? I know neither your laws nor your customs.” The hired man looked at Grofe and Commerey and shifted his buttocks on the saddle. Then they pushed past me through the gateway.

  I had nothing—not my blankets, not my change of clothes, not my optical blanks or grinders. I sat by the clean well that overlooked the lake that Shelbruk Town had dirtied, and I dared to look at my foot. The wound had begun to seep and looked like it would be grateful for the sun, so I sat on the stone curb, that foot cocked up on the other thigh, and watched the poorer housewives and maids-o’-work draw water.

  Most had carts with little donkeys, a few had carts with large dogs, and the unfortunate few had only strong backs. They carried their supplies in metal buckets of the sort used elsewhere to store milk. The lake well was so popular on this fine day that I was convinced there was no piped water in all of Shelbruk, a conviction I now know was false. Very few of the women accomplished their errand without much stopping for fan-waving and talk, and even a beggar with a silly face and an ugly foot was not beneath their notice. I learned that the cabbage worm was very bad and the price of worsted impossible and heard four separate guesses as to the father of the baby of some lass named Nishena. One old lady returned to her home and prepared me a sage and rosemary compress to draw the pus and keep the flies off. I decided that day that I liked the company of women, and I have never changed in that.

  My pack, poo
r as it was, was a territory away, and I had run all night and all morning. I could smell myself. I borrowed a small bucket from one of the lakeside laundresses, filled it with water, and took myself down a lonely alley to wash in a spot of reflected sun. In lieu of soap I used the compress.

  I had finished upon the person of Nazhuret and was assaulting his shirt and trousers when I heard hoofsteps approaching around the comer of a brick building. Hurriedly, I donned the trousers and before I had time to do more, a man led a horse my way.

  The horse was a shining gray of quality, somehow familiar. The man was lean and dark and dressed in grimy velvet, too warm for the day. He recognized me as I recognized him as the fellow who had stopped me on the road the previous summer.

  He stopped, his face hidden in shadows, then led on again, until he and the horse’s head shared my square of sunlight. He slid down the wall, regardless of his clothing, and, squatting on his heels, pulled out a long pipe. This he filled and lit: a laborious process. I went back to squeezing herby water through the wool of my shirt.

  “Smells good,” he said, though the stink of his smoking overwhelmed all other odors. Then, as I wrung the shirt out, he added, “So. No more the goblin, Zhurrie?”

  Wet-headed, dressed in rags, and with one boot off, I can’t imagine that I ever looked more like a goblin than at that moment. I looked into his face for irony and could not decide whether I had found it. I put the wet shirt back on and stood up. So did he.

  I asked him who he was, and he answered, “You don’t remember Arlin, Nazhuret? No? Well, it was a very long time ago. You were young.”

  “Then so were you, sir. Were you at the school? I don’t remember an Arlin. But there were so many boys.” I carried my dirty water out with me, lest I muddy the fine horse’s hooves. Arlin followed.

  “But I remember you, despite those numbers,” he said.

  The alley was narrow, and I was forced to lead. “I think I am hard to forget,” I told him, and behind me I heard both a squeak of leather and a sharp laugh.

  “How vain we have become,” said Arlin. He was mounted already, and as I turned to explain that my remark was the reverse of vanity, he pushed past me and trotted off.

  In deep chagrin I spilled the water on a stretch of pavement that looked in need of it, and I considered how good I was at embarrassing myself. If I never spoke again, I would never feel the need to apologize.

  I went looking for my Satt territorial flock, wondering if I had done right in abandoning them at the city gate. They might have met their enemy and been killed by them. They might have fallen asleep in their saddles and be sitting at the end of some blind avenue, all three of them and their horses, snoring.

  I decided I would try the offices of the Territorial Guard in case Grofe and Commerey had decided to trust to that authority. I inquired of a grocer, and passed three sleeping dogs and a well-attended puppet theater in which two dolls were

  engaged in hanging another by the neck. The unfortunate victim was raised clean off the stage platform by the suspending rope, and the hand supporting him was withdrawn (in fearful symbolism for the vital force, I suppose).

  The effect was unsettling, and discovering that the guard office was on a quiet street immediately behind the puppeteers turned it into an omen. Though Powl had no faith in omens, he had had less faith in policemen, and again I wavered, a few feet from the gold letters spelling EKESH.

  As I stood there, too tired for decision, a man came stumping and sighing along toward me. He yawned. He scratched a stubbly face. Though I could not trace my memory back to Arlin of the gray horse, I had no trouble with this man, for I had seen him only twelve hours ago—or had seen his boot, his breeches, his jacket, and his hand as they pursued me over fields of stubble, and the lungs that now yawned and sighed had been screaming as his horse went up and over.

  His hair was as new-chick yellow as my own. I hadn’t expected that, but then a bag over the head will conceal a great deal. His eyes were blue, and he was very tired. So was I.

  I felt a great reluctance to be the tool of vengeance, even of a very justified vengeance. At the same time, I could not forget the weeping of the Commerey household over the body of a boy not yet grown. It was true I had been the cause of the Zaquash avengers’ murderous anger, but had I not acted, perhaps it would have been Jannie, not yet grown, who was dead now.

  I took a middle line. I stepped in front of the yawning fellow and said to him, “I recognize you.”

  He recognized me at least equally well. He squawked, swung a random fist, and turned to run back the way he had come.

  I had gone two steps in pursuit when his mood changed on him and he skidded and tripped on the cobbles, turned, and came straight at me with a dagger that was half a sword in length.

  The attack had neither art nor science, but at that moment I would have traded a great deal of art and most of science for two sound feet or even an hour’s sleep. I watched my right hand parry the blade near the hilt and the left help carry it out beyond my body. I had my left hand over his, so I continued my spinning motion until I had taken him around and into the wall of the Territorial Guard itself. He smashed the timbers with face, elbow, and knife together, and the dagger stuck firmly into one black firwood upright. Because I was not sure of my footing, I slipped and broke his arm at the elbow before I thought to release it. He stood where he had been slammed, howling of the pain.

  There, in the doorway, stood a man in the green, epauleted uniform of a captain of the Territorial Guard. Powl’s words to me rang loud in my mind: “Do not touch the police… for you will wind up hanged.” He looked down at me coldly enough, and I—like the man I had just injured—considered the chances of turning and running. I had twisted my sore foot on the cobbles.

  “You were very lucky, lad,” said the captain, and his mouth spread in a chilly grin. “If you hadn’t slipped sideways he would have spitted you.”

  I knew immense relief, and felt called upon to explain. “Captain, this man kidnapped a woman from Satt Territory last night. I believe his friends also—”

  “What is that to me?” asked the captain, and his grin shut down. “My authority is Ekesh. You’ll have to get the Satt Guard to file for extradition. If you have names, residences, occupations, all that.” The Territorial Guard captain was very large, as usually they are, and casually he reached over and lifted the avenger by the hair and looked into his face. “Edd Gellik,” he said. “I am not surprised.” The man chose to leave some of that hair behind as he staggered off, clutching his broken arm.

  The captain put a silver whistle in his mouth, and within ten seconds the fleeing man was surrounded by guards as large as the captain.

  “There is no legal impediment, however, in arresting him for deadly assault.” The wintry smile came back. “Nor, for that matter, for destruction of official Ekesh territorial property.” They had pulled him down, with no regard for his injury, and he screamed as they bound him and dragged him into a doorway. I felt faintly sick, and faintly sorry I had allowed the day’s events to progress to this. But I could not plausibly have explained away an armed attack with a captain of the Territorial Guard as witness to it.

  I followed them in and wrote out for them my account of what had happened. All present seemed surprised that I could write. I stated that I had approached the man, uttered the words “I recognize you,” and was immediately assaulted with a

  dagger, which I evaded to the detriment of my ankle. No more than that was required. To me it seemed an inadequate document, but the Guard captain was pleased enough to dismiss me with the advice to let the Satt Guard take care of Satt business from now on.

  I took to the streets again with very little peace of mind. I knew enough about law in the Velonyian-controlled Zaquash territories to guess that the penalty for armed assault was likely to be more than a few years in confinement. The man called Gellik might go to a labor gang. Might die in a labor gang was almost to say the same thing. Or he might die at
the end of a rope.

  Had the Guard captain blinked at the wrong moment, or had I not had the fortune to appear to have slipped, it might have been myself awaiting one of these ends. A short result to Powl’s long labor.

  The puppet show in the market had folded and gone. The grocer and his fellows were packing. I asked a baker if I might help him load, in exchange for one of his unsold bread rolls. He was a portly man, and it was obvious he didn’t think I had enough size to be of real help, but he allowed me to amuse myself, and I spent the middle of the afternoon in the odor of brown crusts and raisins. He gave me six large poppyseed rolls in a bag made from a single sheet of folded white paper.

  Though poppyseed rolls are a specialty of Ekesh, I had never seen such a container before, and was as taken with its simplicity and cleanness as I was by the speckled treasure within. I ate of one and examined the other’s cleverness while I looked for some place to rest my abused foot.

  The sign proclaimed the place to be an inn and the door was open, though no sound of activity leaked out. It came to me, fresh from my success at the little market, that I might be equally able to lift things over my head in here and win a glass of something to go with the bread rolls. I was very thirsty.

  Though it was quiet inside, it was not empty. Both the inn residents’ bar and the locals’ bar had groups of men sitting over ale, and the barmaid, slouched in the doorway between the two, stared out toward the street, oblivious to both sets of customers.

  I entered the shadow of the front hall and glanced at the two doors before me, unsure which was which. No sign informed me, of course. It seems to be a rule of territorial hostels that the stranger must guess which room was designed for his use, or else inquire of the spirits of the air.

  Three dull-looking men occupied the right-hand chamber. None was eating, so it was impossible to tell whether they were residents of the inn or locals desiring a glass. One had his head in his hand, while the other two were drawing in beer spillings on the bar itself. I turned to the other door.