Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

“Not yet,” said King Rudof, and now he turned full to me. “I want the right to advise you in turn, Nazhuret. About this Arlin fellow, with all his perils and his lacks. I understand your concern. I do not ask you to give up your search. But…”

  The word trailed off, and King Rudof rolled his weight from one boot heel to the other thoughtfully. “But don’t show to the world this desperation I see in your face. Not among these men of the court, of the army. This friend of yours may be as… different as you say, and your concern as pure as a nunnery under snowfall, but men will not see it as such. Do not be obvious.”

  “Obvious about what, sir?” I asked, for at that moment I was convinced the king knew Arlin’s secret.

  He gave a tight smile. “That you love him. That you have a long loyalty together.”

  I changed my mind. The king was not omniscient, but instead jealous. Of me. This was more terrifying to know than words can tell. I had difficulty following all King Rudof said after that: to the effect that Arlin was neither popular among

  the men nor trusted by the officers. That I was not to be smudged by the same soot as he. That I was not to grieve for him in public.

  I could feel my ears burning like the side lamps of a coach. I came very close to revealing Arlin’s great secret in disappointment that the king should think ill of Arlin. Think ill of him for the wrong reasons, that is. Dirt and dishonesty were enough of a social handicap.

  I had a strong notion that once the king knew Arlin was a woman escaped from a monstrous father, both his ire and his jealousy would disappear. But though it was my notion it was not my secret, so I bowed out and let him think what he would.

  One more day had passed with equally tender weather, and I knew I had to leave the royal hospitality before the good and regular meats seduced me (or before the king decided to keep me on a chain), when King Rudof sent for me once again. The messenger had difficulty finding me, as I was sitting on new grass outside the town proper, stripped to my trousers alone and staring at the trunk of a beech tree. Sitting in the belly of the wolf, in fact. I had chosen to retreat there because in that state I felt myself outside the rush of time, and time was telling me that I had failed and that Arlin was dead.

  I did not appreciate the disturbance, but speaking face or no, I was not such a fool as to show my resentment to the King of Velonya.

  Rudof had made a quaint sort of court in the public room of his inn, with no more accoutrement than a one-yard-square gilded seal of his authority and a ladder-back chair with arms. In this setting, separated from his military accompaniment, he was dispensing high and low justice to the few territorials who dared approach him.

  I found myself amid what had to be a civil case, by the way in which two well-dressed burghers were glaring at one another and by the relaxed interest shown by all but the two involved parties. The king himself had a glint of amusement in his green eyes, like that of a man having to solve a question of precedence between two sleeve dogs. But though he smiled, and though he let rise one eyebrow, still he was being the king, not to be mistaken for any other young man who had an interest in foreign travel and who shot little arrows into the bottom of his landlord’s mattress.

  I was led through the assembled crowd and past the open space that the king’s authority had created around him. He gave me the sort of look one student gives another when in the presence of outsiders. “We have a boundary dispute, Nazhuret. It seems we have had it for three generations.”

  I had glanced at the two disputants already: One was tall, bald, and dressed in gray woolens, and the other was shorter, heavier, and dressed with a nod toward fashion. Neither bore any stamp of Rezhmian blood. “You desire assist with translation, my king?” I asked him, making a leg as formally as I knew how.

  He grinned at me. “A week with our party and already you cease talking like a normal man. No, Nazhuret, it is not translation nor even the eviction of rowdy drunks I demand of you, and certainly not the stilted speech of a chamberlain’s assistant.”

  I wondered how on earth the king had learned I was a tavern bouncer. Was I watched, and if so, how had I not noticed, for I notice most things? Had there been complaints from the men?

  Before I had had time to reply, the king startled me further by adding: “It is pure wisdom I want in this case, lad. Wisdom free from the constraints of legal precedent or political advantage. That is why I chose you.”

  There was a murmur in my ears, likely of astonished voices. Or perhaps it was a growl of outrage from the king’s attendants. Or perhaps it was the blood beating in my ears. I shook my head.

  “I’m not fit for such matters, sir. I have never—”

  “The case is this,” said King Rudof, rising from his chair. He spoke well, as for a large audience. He sounded pleased with himself. “These gentlemen own orchards, having inherited them in tail-male through many generations. Until their grandfathers’ time, the boundary between their plantations was a small river, called the Newtabank, which also irrigated both properties. This body of water meandered as rivers will, and each year the loops of its meander cut farther and farther away from the straight. As rivers will.” The king glanced at me one of his deadly charming glances. He was deep in his

  judicial role and conscious of his own immersion. He wanted me to know he was conscious of it. His attendants chuckled appreciatively, as though the glance had been for them.

  The king ran one elegant hand through his orange hair. “Though this process complicated the boundary, it was agreed that the Newtabank meandered east as much as it did west, and so there was equality in its alteration.”

  The peasant with the tailoring mumbled, “It is north and south it meanders, Your Majesty,” but everyone affected not to hear him.

  “Five years ago, the river, for reasons unknown, changed its course altogether and flows entirely on what was Master Grisewode’s property.”

  Master Grisewode, who was the man in gray, looked modestly at the floorboards.

  For that reason, a few years ago another… judiciary… decided that the boundary ought to be set due east from a particular spot in the river where it is about to change course.” The king folded himself into his ladder-back seat of judgment once again, glanced at each of us in the court, and continued, “Do you approve of that resolution, Nazhuret?”

  I shrugged and answered that the decision sounded like an arbitrary compromise, as worthy as any of its breed.

  “Exactly, my lad. And again like the usual way with its breed, it has led to greater strife than the original condition. For both of these men have paced the distance—which is something like three-quarters of a mile—holding the village’s one needle compass in hand, and yet when Master Nazeken essays this, he finds a copse of twenty prime apple trees and a dozen chestnuts to be entirely on his side of the boundary, while when Master Grisewode does the same, this valuable vegetation is found to be inarguably his.”

  “Have you tried a boundary walker allied with neither party, sir?”

  The king looked at me over his tented fingers, seemingly bored beyond boredom. I doubted the authenticity of his expression. “We did, Nazhuret. This morning. He went twice. Three times, really, if we count the time he got lost.

  “And once he replicated Grisewode and once he nearly replicated Nazeken. So what do we do, my prodigy?”

  I felt both peasants staring at my back in wonder as well as the cold, concealed hostility of a good dozen courtiers. I wished fervently that the king would remember that though I was only the height of a standard ground-floor window, still I had as many years under my belt as he did.

  “If the king would deign to walk the course himself,” I said, “then no one would doubt the accuracy of his footprints.”

  Rudof chuckled and leaned back in his chair, “In other words, be as arbitrary as the river. No, Nazhuret. I called you in seeking a solution out of human reason, one we might extend to other uses in other times. To create a precedent, in fact.”

  I felt sweat pric
kling the back of my neck and I saw the hostility of the courtiers harden into contempt behind their eyes. I closed my own eyes to examine the problem better.

  “I understand, sir. First I must go to my pack, and then I must be shown the place in question.”

  King Rudof opened his leaf-colored eyes wide and for a moment was without act or role. “Bring the man’s pack here,” he said to no one in particular, and there was a small but intense storm among the onlooking officials to see first, who was low enough in status to accomplish the task, and second, who knew where my pack might be.

  The king reclaimed his composure and cleaned one fingernail with another. “Actually, Nazhuret, any solution that may be extended to a generality must be discovered without… without recourse to this one, meaningless apple orchard.”

  “I disagree,” I said, more shortly than I should have spoken to the king, but I was already pondering the tolerances of fine glass etching and wondering whether fish glues would attach metal to leather. “Get me a few long, dark hairs,” I commanded, probably as haughtily as the king himself. “Straight and not too heavy. Human better than horse.”

  I had no lenses preground for distance except those of my own collapsible telescope, so I had to sacrifice it. I am sure the loss was good for my soul. I worried whether the lens miter I carried was accurate enough, but it had been good enough to

  correct vision, so I proceeded, cutting a grove and then another perpendicular to it, into which I inserted the hairs. The fish glue went around the outside of the lens, and then my telescope was remade with a compass mounted on an enclosed shelf below the tube, and a half-silvered minor superimposing the image of the needle upon the view seen through the lens.

  As an effort of workmanship I have to call it a god-awful piece of shit. I make no apologies for the language, sir. I have never made a worse scientific instrument. Nor have I ever made an instrument with such an audience around me.

  When I considered myself done I was respectfully led to the place from which the border was legally defined. To my astonishment it was a large, pointy granite rock in the middle of a river rushing with all winter’s thaw. I gaped at Grisewode and then at Nazeken. “Why did you decide on that inaccessible place to define your boundary?” I asked them. “That was stupidity!”

  Grisewode winced. “We did not, my lord. It was the lord circuit justice himself who decided the rock was of central importance.”

  I looked from the man in gray woolens to Nazeken, who nodded with no more irony in his expression than his opponent had shown. Behind us, King Rudof laughed. I paced the bank tip and down, figuring how much upstream lead I must give myself swimming in order to arrive at the stone when I reached the center. I guessed I had about a half-and-half chance of surviving the effort.

  King Rudof stepped forward. “Build a bridge,” he said, not too loudly. Two long hours later, a sturdy wooden footbridge crossed the gap, and I strode over it with my freakish telescope, the cynosure of all local eyes.

  The same light that brought in the distant line of trees threw another image over it through the half-silvered prism: that of compass face and the needle that floated on it. Both pictures were dim, but it was possible to align the black hair that cut vertically up the lens with the needle and the scoring on the compass face that indicated east. Once I had found the particular piece of the skyline that met these qualifications, I began to bring the thing down to human level.

  Here the images were more difficult, but at last, by holding my breath, I was able to line up needle, hair, and scoring over die image of a broken tree beside a path, which was as far as viewing went from this point, looking directly east.

  “I need a man with a hammer and some stakes!” I called out, with no clear idea of to whom I issued this command. As it happened, it was the king, and soon he had the job assigned; my opposite on the bank of the river moved to the spot where I pointed him to, and when I saw his stake at the juncture of my compass and lens, I bid him drive it. The fellow moved away as I raised my lens, reestablishing my lines and wishing devoutly for a tripod. Every so often I bellowed and he hammered, and I drove him left or right constantly for adjustment. After a few hundred feet it became necessary to institute a system of couriers to relay my corrections and refill his arms with stakes. Twice he disappeared down the bed the river had abandoned and twice he appeared again farther out and drove in a stake at the bankline. After a good hour of labor I had seen him wield his hammer a good hundred times, and each time my needle and hairline and scoring superimposed his stake, and the last one was driven in at the foot of the broken tree.

  I put down the telescope, certain that my eyes would remain one bulged and one screwed tight until the end of my life. “If there is farther to go, we shall have to start again at the other side of the tree, for that’s the end of visibility in this direction.”

  The king was standing at my end of the bridge, his arms akimbo, gazing up at me on my rock like the latest in novelties. “We are splendidly amused, lad! Now you must tell me how you did it.”

  I slid down the side of the rock and handed him the telescope. “Just look, sir. It will explain itself.”

  The king scuffled up to the rock’s rounded top, almost losing the instrument in the process. Long legs were not made for scrambling. I watched him adjust the thing as I had done and replicate the face I had been making all these minutes. Finally he said, “Be kind to me, Nazhuret. I see only chaos here.”

  “First play with the focal length until you see at least some of the distant scenery, sir, and then you will notice the needle of the compass superimposed upon—”

  “I see, I see,” he cut me off, and in another moment he began to issue the hoots of a small boy in small boy’s delight. “Rare! Marvelous! Tell me, Nazhuret: Just how accurate is this device?”

  I answered that I had no idea. That perhaps it was of no use at all. That I had just now made it up, in answer to the problem at hand. I was chivvied and thumped and bullied by the king in his great good humor and practically carried under one arm

  as he strode out to march the course of stakes and measure them against Grisewode’s line and Nazeken’s. Mine cut smartly between them.

  “This is good evidence of a kind—of the human kind,” said King Rudof, bending down to eye the straightness of our new boundary. “And my own decision certainly would have been a compromise between the two advantageous measurements. Just so. I declare your decision true and valid and the matter settled.”

  Grisewode looked stunned and Nazeken was blinking, but neither of them seemed about to dispute with the king. I felt obliged to lend the spyglass to each man in turn and explain it to him, urging him to look back along the stakes to the rock and noting that the compass showed due west. Each nodded and thanked me and handed it back, and I am sure neither saw a thing nor cared to.

  (Though I have used this method since more than once, sir, I still regard it as more of a convenience than an increase in accuracy of measurement, for I cannot be sure of the inaccuracies in the positioning of the compass attachment, nor the stresses along the length of the tube.)

  Our little experiment must have used up all the time King Rudof had promised to the villager judicial system, but he was very taken with it. He walked alone with me and played with the telescope all the way back to town.

  I had the distinct feeling I was out on a class break with one of my more lighthearted school fellows as the King of Velonya larked about me, telling me that a hawk was coming toward us south-southeast and that our own steps were largely westerly, though very winding. This feeling of camaraderie with the king, though sweet and inescapable, frightened me to the core, I japed and grinned and wished I were anywhere else on earth.

  Perhaps he knew it—after all, he claimed to read me so well—for as we came up out of the orchard to where the village lay in sunlight, his tone grew more restrained and he laid his hand on my shoulder. “First, Nazhuret, I thought you an elegant brawler, with the usual small man’s p
ugnacity. I was wrong: You are not pugnacious. I am not even sure you are small. Next, you showed yourself as a monk, and then as a tracker, a translator, a petardist, and finally an inventor. Just what are you?”

  The question was affectionately spoken, and I have only reason to be grateful he left out the term bugger-boy, for it seems I showed that as well. The best answer to any such monster of a question is silence, but silence must have offended the king, so I said the first true thing that came into my head.

  “I am the lens of the world, sir,” I said.

  King Rudof had been about to leap off a six-inch prominence of stone when I spoke, and though he finished his leap, he almost came down in a pile of limbs. His comely face, orange-rimmed, stared as though I had just cursed him, or exploded, or turned into stone. He raised a finger and pointed at me. “You…”

  I was now so terrified that it was only the presence of the rest of our party, coming down the path discreetly behind us, that prevented me from fleeing the king and his damning finger. What could have shocked him so? The sentiment I had expressed was original, but not of the sort to lead to violence.

  “Not only I, of course, sir. We are each of us the lens by which the world is able—”

  The finger shook and cut off my words. “No. Stop. Let me think.”

  He thought very fiercely, his anger flaring through his fair face like the colors of certain fish I have seen. Out of the comer of my eye I could see the procession of our followers draw near and then back away again. “The pattern is almost complete. But I should have known the moment you first spoke, man, when your first words, were to command me to cease being a fool.”

  I certainly did remember that but had strongly hoped the king had forgotten.

  “And then you told me you would not serve, and afterward taught me my own business in a hundred little ways, and most of all, you made me eat out of your hand while doing it.

  “You lied to me, Nazhuret of Sordaling, when you told me you had no master. You wear his brand across your brow for the world to read. Tell me now his name: the man who taught you, who created what you are out of a half-breed peasant boy and called you lens of the world.”