Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  If that was so, it was a shame, I thought. Such a girl deserved a long, leisurely, silly wedding.

  Grofe said, “I remember it. Not since that night, though. Let’s see.” He strode out of the kitchen, out of the house, I followed him and Quaven followed me, protesting. We came to the haybarn and Grofe went up a ladder. As I came up after, Quaven gave a yank back on my leg. I kicked him in the face.

  There, in the man’s crude cubby, were all my possessions. They lay in disarray but not too badly damaged, although the jeweler’s rouge was smeared experimentally around the inside of the linen bag. The glass blanks had been too incomprehensible even to destroy, and the secret of the bow stick was intact.

  Grofe said he was sorry for the inconvenience. He offered to pay—in kind, not cash—for whatever was broken. I gathered it up and told him I needed nothing except my knife, which had been appropriated. He went down the ladder to Quaven, and there were words between them. When Grofe came up again, he had the knife, slightly blade-nicked but otherwise usable.

  He watched me pack all away, with measure in his eyes. “I’m sorry my man did that,” he said. “You can’t trust anybody these days.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “For instance,” Grofe continued. “We owe you a lot. I admit it. But still, I don’t trust you at all.”

  I waited for him to go down the ladder first, expressing somewhat the same sentiment. “It is not necessary that you do trust me,” I said at last “Or that I trust you, thank the Three. All I want is to be quit of you people.”

  “You’ll take food, though,” he said. “I like to pay what’s owed, and all we have to pay now is in food.”

  I thought of the kitchen heaped with plates, and I remembered Mistress Grofe’s buttered marrows. I followed the man back into the kitchen. Quaven was nowhere around.

  Grofe made me up a large napkin filled with things that would travel—hard sausage, breadsticks, and cheese—and as I was tying it onto my pack a young man of about my age came from the front room into the kitchen, slamming the door in his excitement and sliding on the tiles. “Twelve,” he said. “We have twelve men and twelve good horses, to leave at moonrise, day after tomorrow.”

  He was waving a bag—a small bag with three holes cut into it as eyes and mouth are cut into a pumpkin.

  Grofe didn’t look at me immediately. The young man did, with dawning uncertainty. He put the bag into his pocket.

  I cleared my throat. “How long have you people been doing this to each other?” I asked Master Grofe as controlledly as I could. “I mean, raiding and killing each other at harvesttime?”

  The tall farmer glowered but still didn’t look at me. “Ekesh has been raiding us for years outa count. And, of course, we retaliate. We have to.” Then he did look at me, “have to. I’m broken. Destitute. Without cash I won’t make it through another year.”

  I dropped the wrapped napkin on the floor and turned to go, but though I was through with him, he wasn’t through with me. “By God’s Three Faces, you jug-handled ass! You got a right to be holy about it, don’t you? You didn’t have anything to start with. And you could have got my money back—you had the chance and you didn’t.”

  I hadn’t known about the money then, of course, but what I said to him was, “I couldn’t run with that and your daughter, too,” and then I closed the door behind me.

  Later, after a dry day without a job, a handout, or a wood to snare in, with the dog following behind me as hungry as I was, I wished I had dropped my pride instead of the napkin of food.

  Between the last work and this, my king, has fallen a freeze, the late corn harvest, and what I am tempted to call a plague of religion. You know the sort of event I mean—it begins with the revival of old prayers and ends with villagers cutting the fingers off their own children to bury beside the old circle “altars.” It is very Zaquash, this periodic eruption of bloodletting, and deep-rooted in the peasantry. They feel that the little digit will stand for the child itself and that the parent who is willing to sacrifice his own get to the earth will encourage the spirits of nature to reciprocate. The year has been so unlucky that the people are desperate, and I fear that this season there have been more than fingers put under the earth.

  Though I feel myself to be in some senses a personification of Zaqueshlon, still I have stood against this blood excess for all my adult life. It is against the law, against religion, and against the essence of Nazhuret, inside and out. I am sick of it, sir, and sick of opposing an ignorance as limitless as the ground I walk on. I don’t know if all my philosophy, my science, rhetoric, vehemence and slapdash heroics have changed one thing. Not in twenty years.

  Forgive me one more dramatic digression, sir. And please don’t send troops to cut the fingers off the fathers in retribution. That was my first impulse, too, and it is exactly the wrong response.

  It is my own belief that the earth spirits need no special propitiation. Having only to wait, they receive us all in the end. Even more ironical is that I have dug amid the circle ruins myself (thereby reinforcing in the local minds the conviction that old Nazhuret is both spirit-touched and simple besides), and beneath the good grass and the sad little digits I have uncovered old bits of weaponry and grommeted leather, which lead me to believe that the altars were no more religious in nature than are the fortifications of Settimben Harbor. By the angle of the blades and the size of one little horsebit (you see, I theorize from very little evidence) I am inclined to date these structures from the last strong Rezhmian occupation of the area, no more than five hundred years ago. I cannot believe that whatever dark southern soldiery happened to die in these places have any possessive interest in the fingers of Zaquash babies. I know very little about the last occupation, but I do know something about the dead. It seems to me sometimes that this whole territory with its suspicious people and all their

  condemnable customs are only the offspring of Velonya’s and Rezhmia’s mutual and faithful hate: children a man is ashamed to have engendered.

  My pen runs on about children today because they are dancing under my window. In the mud. They are loud and not well kept—three of the four were orphans too convenient for the public mood, and the last had a father who was very willing to trade her for a spell of good luck. What I shall feed them I do not know, unless I return to my earlier habits and go poaching in the royal preserves. I cannot believe I ever made as much noise as these creatures.

  I did not walk south with the deliberate attempt to outrun the snow. Every Velonyan born knows the winter is inevitable.

  I believe that knowledge makes of us the stolid, sour people we are. I went south because I had started out south, and nothing I did or saw on the road was so pleasant that I wanted to turn back and experience it over again.

  During that dark end of autumn I fitted my first pair of spectacles for a wealthy farmer’s wife who had been reduced to touch to tell corn flour from bean flour. Her cooking was thereby much improved, and with the money I thereby made I was able to buy more blanks in Grobebh Township, multiplying my material wealth. I seem to remember, however, that the expenses of food and lodging while in that metropolis just about returned me to my natural state of indigence. I could formulate a natural law from this.

  That year, like this, had its late-autumn madness, and its theme was werewolves. I sat in the inn along Brightwares Street, toasting my feet at the fire and attending to rust along the blade of my hedger (and yes, I had used it to cut hedges more than once this season; I am no Rezhmian warrior to think I keep my soul in a stick of metal, but if I did think so, I hope my soul would be sturdy enough for work), and I listened to four men discuss the nature and habits of the wolfman.

  Two opined that he had hair all over and two thought not. Three agreed that he had rather the shape of both creatures—man and beast—and had the choice of human or animal locomotion at will, but the dissenter was firm that a werewolf was a wolf in all respects except when he wasn’t, when he could not be told from a m
an. That his teeth were immense, strong, and pointed there was no arguing against, nor did any dispute the fact that he ate meat, and human meat by choice.

  I added nothing to this discussion, having never seen a werewolf or even a wolf, but as a stranger to the neighborhood I felt a certain relief that my own teeth were small, blunt, and slightly irregular along the bottom row.

  The small kernel that sprouted all this fancy was that three people from around Grobebh had disappeared since harvest. One, the twenty-year-old son of a goldsmith, had vanished from this same inn only a month before and never made it the four blocks to his home. On that same eventful night the wife of a rental cart man disappeared from her bed, leaving her husband and a young child behind. The consensus was that the monster had eaten the man and buried the young woman to consume later, or vice versa, for it could scarcely be supposed that even a werewolf could consume two grown people in one night.

  My own opinion was that the people of Grobebh Township were a naive lot and that these simultaneous disappearances could be explained much better without recourse to a werewolf at all. I felt no need to disabuse them, however. I wrapped the blade again and toasted the soles of my boots in the ashes.

  The other disappearance had taken place only a week before, and as it was singular and involved a much-loved grandmama who sold sweets every market day, was not subject to the same explanation. Still, it seemed to me that in a place the size of Grobebh, people would fall out of sight now and then. If they had not had their hearts set on a monster, they would have been dredging the canals for the old dame by now.

  I was considering buying a pint of hot ale, knowing it would be the end of my evening if I consumed it, when the door was dramatically thrown open and a lean figure stepped into the light and announced that there were wolfprints on the wet pavement all around the building.

  The voice and figure belonged to Arlin, my friend of the elegant horse and dirty haberdashery, and my heart sank with his every word, for I knew or thought I knew what had made those prints. They were made by my poor, faithful, fearful dog, who would neither leave me nor let himself be touched, and would come under no roof but that of a barn. By the time I reached the door it was pressed solid with bodies, all of them taller than I. There were many loud exclamations, and I heard men stepping out left and right from the door. Then I heard them returning, more quickly than they had gone.

  “The size of a man’s foot,” was said, and another added, “And the scrape of its claws, did you see? Like iron.”

  The potboy came trotting out from behind the bar, and when faced with my own problem, he leaped lightly onto a tabletop and peered over all heads. I followed him.

  There they were, a few soppy dogprints surrounded and obliterated by the booted feet of the men. The day’s rain was turning to snow. As it didn’t seem likely I would be able to elbow my way through, I leaped for a crossbeam and swung out the door, coming down in the middle of attention. “I think that’s only my dog’s prints you’re looking at,” I said to the innkeeper, who stood nearest me. “He… follows me.”

  The innkeeper rubbed his hands on his apron while snow fell on his bald head. I was a stranger and badly dressed, but I was a paying customer. “Your dog? The brute that made those tracks must be larger than you are.”

  I considered this and answered that he was. Upon being further questioned I explained that he was the sort of dog with a curly tail and fuzzy face and was very timid. White, or nearly so.

  The snow was falling harder, and my explanation had dampened the crowd’s enthusiasm. We returned within, where Arlin had ensconced himself in a chair by the fire and was amusing the potboy with dagger tricks, and spinning a saber blade around his fingers.

  I did such things when I was a boy; we all did at the school, but I had given them up back in the days of the swan boats on Kauva Riven. I certainly had never been as good as this young man. He watched me watching him.

  “Do you remember me now, Zhurrie?” he asked through a wheel of spinning steel.

  I admitted I did not, but that I remembered the period in my school career when we had all been crazy for such dangerous games as this. He grinned in return and answered that some stayed crazy.

  Arlin had a face of some character and elegance, but starvation was written over it, perhaps merely of food, perhaps of a more subtle sort. His were the classical features of Velonya, overwritten by black eyes and sallow skin. My own coloring belonged with his features, to create in him the image of aristocracy.

  Unlike myself, he did not temper the accent of Velonya when traveling in Zaquash territories, and that face, that voice, and those spinning blades all together served to make him an impressive figure to the peasants. They gave him room.

  I told him I couldn’t thank him for what he had done upon entering the inn, that with the autumn hysteria upon us, he might have caused a poor dog’s death, and all for his own amusement.

  The dagger came down in the wood of the table between us and stuck. “So you don’t believe in werewolves?” asked Arlin, with no expression in face or voice.

  It was not a question I could answer. Powl had disbelieved in werewolves, blood-sucking foxes, and witches of all variety, but I thought his attitude inconsistent for a man of science. “I have never seen a werewolf,” I said to Arlin, over the knife. “I have seen a dog.”

  The thin man stared at me for a good count of ten, as though he could make no sense of my words. Slowly he worked the dagger out of the wood of the table. “You have become something strange as a werewolf yourself, Nazhuret,” he said, and then turned his attention to the next table, where a game of Does-o was being set up. He put away all his cutlery and slid down the bench and into the game.

  I did not have that pint of ale after all, for the discovery of the pawprints had worried me, and I might simply have risen and left the inn, hoping the dog would follow, had it not been that to leave now, after having paid for my bed (by the hearth), would have been to raise suspicion that I myself was a werewolf. Instead I sat alone and paid attention equally to the sounds of the tap and of the card game and to the silence of snow outside. Perhaps half an hour later Arlin leaned over again and whispered in my ear, “There is a gray wolf outside in the street, staring in at the door with his tongue hanging from his mouth.”

  I looked over his shoulder and out the window, not moving my head. “That’s he. That’s only my dog.”

  Arlin examined his cards, gave a bid, and answered me quietly, “No sign of a curly tail.”

  I had to admit there wasn’t. “It curls only when he’s happy,” I whispered.

  The man sniggered. “It’s a wolf,” he said for my ears only and returned to the game. Shortly after this I saw the dog dart away, white against the white snow slop, and a heavy horse came by pulling the town’s snow drag to clear the street.

  Arlin was talking to—no, lecturing—the townsmen on the subject of the court of our young king. He would have us know that things had changed in the few seasons of Rudof’s monarchy: that new titles had risen and old blocs of power had been

  broken. He had created three earldoms out of the ruin of the old House of Norwess, to which there had been no heir, and was ennobling dozens of hot-handed young blades and sending them out on missions of discovery: some north, to the Seckret fur routes; some south, to study at the schools of the walled city of Rezhmia; and some past the Felinkas to find for Velonya new islands to stamp on the maps.

  I had a strong sympathy with the man whose deeds Arlin was recounting, for it seemed to me he was employing men to do all the things a healthy youth would want to do himself.

  And further (according to this lean and grimy authority), the king had put his court on wheels, or even horseback on the rougher roads, and insisted on obtaining the latest information with his own ears and eyes, through Old Velonya, across the territories and to the dry-land borders, where the Red Whips had broken his father’s expansionary drive. Six weeks in the springtime and six in the autumn. Free a
s a lark.

  It was great fun, and not only for the young king. Great opportunities for young men with ambition—young men after the young king’s heart.

  Arlin was calling my name now, asking me why I did not go forth and find my king an island.

  As I had not spoken to any man or woman in the room since the incident at the door, and as I was not dressed in a manner that suggested I had easy intercourse with swords and velvet and blood horses, there was a general public startlement, and a dozen pair of eyes were turned down to the ashes. To me.

  I had not been paying strict attention, trying instead to bring together into one image Arlin’s view of King Rudof and my teacher’s. I closed my eyes and heard the question again from memory.

  “I would have more success at finding an island than some, I suppose,” I answered. When Arlin merely pulled his brow and stared at me, I thought to add, “Having a knowledge of telescopes—being an optician, I mean.

  “But though adventure is all well and good, I’d rather be at peace with my wife—if I were a king. If I were Rudof.”

  My explanations seemed only to make things more murky and the public attention closer, so I put the question back to Arlin. “Why is a young hotblood like yourself, sir, not engaged among the king’s progress?”

  “Oh, I am,” he said very lightly. “Off and on, I am.” And he dealt the cards.

  I didn’t know the rules of Does-o; then and now card games have only served me as a cure for insomnia. I watched the men idly, noting only that Arlin was a great bluffer, and when he bet gold the others abandoned their silver to him without matching him to see his hand. Perhaps it was the influence of the spinning blades, or the knowledge that this man had seen King Rudof face to face.

  I could not tell the strategy nor the plays, save when coins were shoved from one side of the table to the other, but at the same time my ignorance of the game freed my eyes, so that I noticed when the red trey fell into his lap instead of joining the others slid across the table to the sorter. With four men playing Does-o, the absence of a card is not immediately evident, and with the various rounds of picking and discarding, its subsequent reappearance as part of a favorable hand caused no comment.