Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  It was almost the same group, dull, drinking, composed of three men, although there were dirty plates piled at the bar’s end. It took me more than a glance to realize that these three were the men I had led from the maple woods of Satt to these Ekesh lakes.

  In that same moment, a part of my mind spoke up from below (I know no better way to put it, sir) to tell me that I also knew their mirror image across the wooden bar wall. Without moving, I turned my eyes back to the right-hand door.

  The shoulders of one of the men gave him away. The tip of a spur, seen out of the comer of my eye as indeed it had been seen before, as I ran for my life and for that of young Jannie… I could not be certain, and yet I was certain.

  From the left door came a sigh that slid into a groan. Grofe, almost certainly. From the right came some tired laughter. I stood between the two, and what my course of action was to be I had no idea.

  If I had owed Master and Mistress Grofe anything for their marrows, pastries, cider, and the half acceptance that had come with it, I had paid that debt already. With Commerey, sitting silent and square as a rock behind an untouched ale, I had no connection, though even now he had my sympathy. I had just gotten one man into the hands of the Guard and I strongly suspected he would die in those hands. I wanted no more part of this.

  Yet there were the three men who had stolen Grofe’s income; kidnapped his daughter, perhaps to kill; tried in a sprightly manner to kill me; and ended by waking a young man from his sleep only to murder him. I disapproved heartily and wished them every sort of unsuccess if only they didn’t drag me down with them. I might have gone quietly into the left side, waked up my Satt friends, and explained to them who their neighbors were, but then I would be committed again. I might have even more quietly walked away.

  Instead, I decided to let the moment create itself. I stood and I waited, and I watched the wooden partition and the two doors flanking it with the same aimless attention I had paid to the bricks of the observatory.

  My eyes were scratchy. My ankle made itself known.

  “Here, boy,” said the barmaid, coming out from the bar into the left side and approaching me by that door. “Don’t block the door that way. What is it you want?”

  Three sets of eyes on the left side of the bar lifted casually, drawn by voice and movement. Three sets of eyes on the right did also, and the door was clear and open between the residents’ bar and the locals’ bar. The Satt farmers were quicker to react, though only by an instant. I heard Commerey’s chair falling backward and then Grofe’s bellow. I grabbed the barmaid by her arm and flung her out into the street.

  “They’re going to fight!” I told her, and she in turn took hold of my wrist.

  “How by perdition do you know that?” she shouted in my ear, “You haven’t even been inside!”

  I slipped her grip and jumped back into the place, closing the door behind me. When she pounded, I jammed a ladder-back chair beneath the knob. I did not want to have to carry this lass on my back as I had Jannie; the barmaid was bigger than Jannie, and I was not fresh.

  The Satt men were over the bar and shoving through the partition door, which the avengers were trying to brace as I had braced the outer door. The little deal pine bar door, however, had no knob, and a blow of Commerey’s huge shoulder splintered both it and the barstool. He stumbled into the room and was hit on the head by a one-pint beer crock. The avenger with the spurs was standing on the bar, displaying a knife that looked much like a shaving razor. The third, less limber or more saddle sore, attempted to climb the bar but gave up and decided to enter the fray from behind, through the hallway. Past me.

  I did not recognize this fellow, but he must have recognized me, for he took out another of those thin-bladed, Rezhmian-work razors and sliced upward at my groin. I skidded backward so that the thing sparkled an inch from my face, and as my thigh encountered the chair I had used to brace the door, I knew I was in trouble. I kicked his elbow as I came down on the caned seat, but he did not drop the razor; he circled it above his head and brought it down at my face.

  Both my hands had grasped the chair arms to control my fall, and I used that support to launch myself, feet first, at his head. The blade sliced my shirt, but I put both boot heels into his chin hard enough to throw him against the end of the partition, which resounded.

  Still the man kept his razor and still he flailed it at me. I parried his arm once more, tried to grab the thing, failed, suffered a cut hand and then as he bent with the force of his strike, I saw below my hand the back of his head and his neck. I struck down with the heel of my hand as heavily as I could, and I knew immediately I had killed a man.

  Within, the avenger with the other razor still was on the bar, holding off Grofe and his son with his weapon and his feet. The other avenger was flat out on his back, and Commerey was braced on hands and knees, shaking his head like a sick cow. I heard a little silver sound in the distance. A whistle.

  “Out!” I shouted. “Guard! Guard! Guard!” I shouted, and by the third iteration of the name, even dazed Commerey was knocking me aside in his hurry. They issued out the door as close as flies in a cloud, and even the avenger with the knife ran with them. I limped along behind.

  The Satt men had left their horses in the inn stableyard, but evidently they had left them saddled, for they were charging back again before I had made half the distance. Grofe cantered past me, his son half stopped and then thought better of it, but massive Commerey brought his beast to a halt before me and plucked me up by the neck of my damp, gaping shirt.

  Shelbruk went by me at a great rate, with cobbles looming large enough to break a horse’s leg or a man’s head. I had a mouthful of red horsehair before I found a secure position on the pommel in front of the rider. We flew past the market, empty and echoing, and made a clangor over the flagstones around the well. I heard the Guards’ whistles again and again, but I saw no uniforms, and we were out the town gates before any thought to close them on us.

  If they had any intention of closing the gates.

  “You’re bleeding freely, lad,” said Commerey, I was surprised that a man so recently brained would have attention to spare for that, and after glancing at my hand I told him it was not a bad cut but that razors make for long bleeding.

  I looked behind as we climbed the steep hill over the town. No one seemed to be following, least of all the avenger with the knife.

  “Did you kill that man I tripped over in the hall?” Commerey asked me, and I admitted I had. It sounded impossible to me, even as I said it. It felt like a lie in my mouth.

  “I’m indebted to you, then,” he answered me. “He’s the one shot my Coln right through the heart.”

  He put me down on the road where we had left Quaven and Commerey’s boy, and once again I was put to tracking, like a dog. I found signs that the two had come out again, shuffled a while in the roadway, and then pushed their mounts carefully into the undergrowth. There was nothing in these marks Grofe or Commerey might not have seen himself, had they had the patience or the vision to look.

  My Satt men’s horses did their own share of aimless circles and impatient pawing as the riders discussed whether to wait for the boys or to leave. Grofe’s opinion, as best I remember, was that pursuit would come eventually and we ought to ride on. Commerey believed the Shelbruk Guard was glad to have seen the tail of us and that we should wait.

  As they disputed the matter (never asking me my opinion, though I was the one who had had to kill, and the one without a horse under me), the two missing members pressed out of the woods, dragging briars. For a moment all the weary men stared at one another. “We got the maggot. We buried him,” said Quaven, and for another silent moment all drank in the excitement of this boast and swagger, and their tired eyes glowed. Then they began to laugh and pound each other on the back.

  I stood in the middle of the road, the legs of the sweating horses all around me. I called for Quaven to repeat what he had said, to explain what they had done to the man w
ith the broken knee.

  “We took his Ekesh heart out of his Ekesh body!” The hired man’s face was gray, aside from two red circles directly under his eyes. His eyes grinned and glittered, but he was so tired he was leaning backward against the reins, dragging his horse’s head in. The beast was even more tired and did not complain.

  The boy chimed in, “He was lying on his fucking bed with his fucking wife cluck-clucking over him. Dad, and that’s it where we did him. Like a hog, he was. A big, long hog.” He was no more than sixteen years old—Jannie’s age—and his voice was filled with glee and horror and exhaustion.

  Commerey said nothing in return. He was looking instead at me—the only one to do so. “What would you have us do, walk him into Shelbruk, to be patted on the back? They killed my son.”

  “He didn’t kill your son. He had a broken leg. He was helpless.”

  “It’s all the same,” he said to me, his heavy face without expression. “My boy was helpless.”

  Quaven kicked his resistant horse forward. In his right hand was a cavalry saber he had not owned earlier in the day. “I’ve had enough of this weasel,” he said, and he shook the blade in the air at me. The horse, not cavalry-trained, began to dance sideways.

  “Fold it up, Quaven, the man’s been a friend to us,” said Grofe, and he pushed his horse between the steel and myself. The hired man still was drunk on his violent success, however, and though he slid the weapon away, he spat in my direction.

  “I won’t ride with him. He’s another filthy Ekesh and I don’t want him following anymore.”

  Grofe bristled. “Where did you get the power to say who rides and who doesn’t, plow-pusher? I hire you to—”I interrupted. “I haven’t been riding at all, as you might remember, Master Grofe. And as for following—I led, not followed you to this day’s work, and I’m very sorry I did so, for it’s been a nasty one. So I will bid you good day here and hope our ways do not intersect again.”

  I retraced the path the horses had made in the brush until I was far enough from the road that I no longer heard their many-hooved progress. I followed a narrow path for a few miles, back west and south toward Satt according to the sun, and then my travels caught up with me and I curled where I was and slept.

  I awoke cold in the dark of night, with deer leaping over me.

  It took me three days to retrace the path I had run in half of one night and a morning, and those three days are of a piece in my memory. I might have been under one of the lakes of Ekesh, so odd was the autumn light and shadow and so poor and unconnected was I. No pack to carry and a foot that reminded me momently how bad I had abused it.

  I took my time walking, avoided the traveled road, and when I was hungry I set a snare of birchbark and caught a rabbit. After an hour of trying to start a fire without any tools at all, I gave up, stuffed the beast in my shirt, and went on. I ate cattails from one of the countless ponds instead. That night I lay on a bed of fir, covered by more branches, but I was a shade too cold to sleep. The moon was first quarter and not yet set, and I wondered if it would be wiser to use the next few hours in forward progress. The straight road was only a mile or so below, and I had no qualms about using it at this dead time. But when that astronomical body finally rolled on and under, it would leave me in greater cold and greater darkness, without even the comfort of a fir bed. I stared out at the white stripe of the path from my hiding, until the stripe took on a life of its own. I had never seen a ghost, but it seemed appropriate I would see one tonight. Perhaps it would have a broken neck.

  So weary was I that the apparition inspired very little fear in me, and after I had stared at it for some minutes, the floating glow took on a horizontal appearance. Soon it formed the lineaments of a white dog, and then it had the face of a white dog, very round-cheeked and pointy-eared, and the dog seemed to be laughing at me.

  The ghost sniffed, snorted, and took one step closer.

  My first thought was that hounds from Shelbruk Town had found me out, but then common sense took over and I realized that people do not track with fuzzy, sharp-nosed dogs like this one: the sort of dog that would have a curled plume of a tail. No, it was the smell of the dead rabbit that drew the beast on.

  Even I could smell that odor, both from my clothes where I had worn the carcass like a cummerbund, and from where it lay now at my feet, as useless to me as ever. Dead rabbit grows old quickly.

  I picked the corpse up by the hind feet, and with that movement of my white arm, the white dog vanished. I threw the rabbit to where the dog had been, wiped my hand on the fir boughs, and closed my eyes determinedly. In a few seconds I heard the crunch of bones. I must have fallen asleep then, for when I woke again the moon had gone on, but pressed back to back against me was the soft, odorous, and very warm white dog. I did not object.

  The next morning he was not there, but the earth was pocked with dogprints half the size of my own hands. A number of the nearby trees, also, had known the dog’s attentions.

  That day threatened rain, but before it could fall I came to a farmhouse and offered to split wood in exchange for tinder and a flint. I was more wary of the farm wife than she was of me, but in the end I broke so much oak to hearth size that she offered me dinner and a place in the kitchen to sleep as well as the fire tools. I took the dinner gratefully, but so disillusioned about my kind was I that I chose to sleep in the cow byre.

  She was a large, kindly woman with many children and a mild sort of husband who came in from the last harvest late and approved of my work without suspicion. They told me they had enough for my hands to do for a good month, and money to take away when I left, but the contact with Satt versus Ekesh had soured me on farm families. I turned the job down.

  I wish with all my heart, my king, that I remembered the name of these people, instead of Grofe’s.

  That night the rain came down hard, but the byre of ten cows was steaming warm. I wrapped myself in straw and listened to the beating on the roof and the breathing of the cows and the squeaking of many mice. Before long one of the squeaks became a squeal, which ended in a snap, followed by butcherly crunching. I crawled up though my bedding and out into the aisle, where I beheld my white dog, catching mice by moonlight. I had to reassure myself that there were no hens asleep on the ground before I returned to bed, and with the dog curled beside me, it was almost too warm.

  The next day was wet but not cold, and I steamed like a cow myself, in my coarse woolens. I found with some difficulty my own prints where the cut through to Satt Territory joined the Ekesh southern road, and I was back in Satt by midday.

  Behind me down the muddy trail paced the dog again. First I felt him and then I heard him and last I turned and saw him in full daylight for the first time.

  He was very dirty, more gray than white, and the tail I had always imagined as a high plume hung sodden behind him, almost touching the mud. (If I had been a dog at that moment, hungry and on a mud road going nowhere much, my tail

  would have looked much like that.) His feet were large and his legs long, like sticks, but his ruff was very elegant and his eyes grinned.

  On impulse I bent to him and made the usual kissing noises that men make to attract dogs, and the result was that he was gone from the path entirely.

  When I could see before me the road down which I had followed the horse and up which I had led the Satt farmers, it was twilight already. I left the path and made a few of my birchbark snares and then a bed of pine branches, the softer fir not

  being available. I heard a howl and a growl and a snap that told me the dog was yet with me, had discovered one of my snares, and had disposed of it. He was a large dog. The tree I used as a pillow had a squirrel’s cache of walnuts and hazelnuts in it, which I robbed and cracked in my hand. The next beast to fall into one of my snares was perhaps the same squirrel that had fed me, and I felt slightly dishonorable about eating it, but almost at the same moment I caught another rabbit in my one remaining trap, so I cooked the rabbit and threw the squ
irrel to my dog.

  My dog, I say, though I could not even touch him.

  It was bright morning when I came to the tree where my pack had been laid, and only then did I remember it had been brought to the farmhouse. I went after it.

  There were horses and wagons tied in back of the building, crowded as a wedding. I went past them to the kitchen.

  Quaven came to the door. I heard voices in conversation behind him, but there was nothing to be seen in that room but tables piled high with food. “We don’t need you today,” he said, and made to close the door in my face. My temper was almost ragged, and I gave the closing door such a blow that Quaven skidded half across the kitchen.

  “No doubt you don’t, but I need my pack, if you please,” I answered him, and when he came on with his fists waving, I spun him to the floor and sat on him. “My pack,” I reminded him. “Optical supplies. Glass blanks. One grasswood stick.”

  “I don’t know anything about a pack,” he said, and then he began to call for his master. Grofe came.

  “He forced his way in,” said Quaven, as loud as he could with my weight on his stomach. Master Grofe looked at me coolly and without decision.

  “Why shouldn’t he come in, Quaven? We owe the lad much.”

  “All I want from you, master, is my pack, which I left here.” I stood up. The kitchen was filled with food, as for a wedding.

  “I never saw it!” shouted Quaven, standing also. “I never, ever!”

  To Grofe I said, “He had it when he brought my boots. Someone has it now.”

  For a moment the dark man stood still and silent, and I could hear someone laugh in the room behind. As at a wedding.

  Was it the older son who was marrying, so soon after the catastrophe of the raid? Or could it be Jannie? Sixteen was old enough for a girl to wed. Barely old enough. Perhaps they felt it important to wed her off now, before the story of her abduction could spread.