Lens of the World

by R. A. MacAvoy

  I think I started to sob. “No! I don’t know. I’ve never been there. Am I the only one in the civilized world who doesn’t know where my own teacher lives?”

  Arlin only answered, “There is no civilized world,” and squeezed her horse faster.

  We went very fast, over hills and running streams that caused the mare to dance; sometimes I think Arlin pushed straight through the woods without a path. Branches of swamp maple and willow scratched my face and must have done worse to Arlin. The mare’s breathing made the drum sound of horses that are working to capacity, but so springy she went it was as though she had no weight and we had no weight on her.

  We came out of trees onto a road. “Now you know where we are, don’t you?” said Arlin, and I stared around me.

  “No. Where are we?”

  Again she gave me a distrustful glance. “We’re on Sankhill, just south of town. Of Sordaling.”

  “So quick? This took me weeks on South Road.”

  “South Road is a great loop, and you were walking and working and nosing about, weren’t you? Believe me, this is Sankhill.”

  “I’ve never been here,” I admitted, and as we pressed along the road—a real road this time—self-pity made me add, “I’ve never had a horse, nor freedom to use my own feet. I’ve been in walls all my life, Arlin, until my teacher left me last autumn. I’ve only been places for the past six months!”

  “Just like a monk,” she said over the mare’s smooth gallop.

  “Exactly a monk,” I snapped back. “The level of my worldly ignorance cannot easily be overestimated.” Nor that of the damage that ignorance could do, I added silently.

  Arlin refused to be drawn into bickering. “Well, we’re less than an hour from Daraln House. If the horse holds up.”

  I almost fell off. “Less than… then maybe the king has gotten to him already!”

  “I doubt it.” She shook her head with confidence. “He’s encumbered. He is not Sordaling bred, and he has not a horse like Sabea under him.”

  After a quarter mile we turned again, and I thought perhaps I had seen this comer, with its collection of cottages and its courier office. “Without the horse, of course, we’d have no hope.”

  This seemed such an unnecessary thing to announce that I asked what was in her mind to say it.

  “I thought perhaps… that you might be angry with me for my behavior last night. Flinging myself in front of the great boar like that. Making you come after.”

  “You didn’t make me come after. It didn’t occur to me to be angry.” The horse rocked us a few more paces and I added, “Besides, I hadn’t time.”

  Now I knew where we were. I had been along this stretch many times. By God, I had been here with Powl, going to the Sordaling Library. To our left was my very own hill, with the ugly square building somewhere atop it, where Powl had found the astronomer swinging in suicide. Where I had seen Powl swinging by one hand from a string, his bright shoe buckles twinkling, a bright button twinkling in his hand.

  “It’s been six months you’ve been gone?”

  “More like eight.” I answered.

  “And now you’re coming back to your walls. Your teacher. To die with him?”

  “That’s not what I intend,” I answered shortly, but it was only a half truth; my intentions were blank. Arlin gave a big sigh, like one of the mare’s breaths, and again pulled us left off the road and into the trees.

  This was Velonya proper, at last: wet muck and standing water, pulling the mare’s feet with every stride and covering us with spatters. We could not outrun the mosquitoes.

  We came upon a man in the uniform of the local militia (born and bred enemies of the Sordaling students) and splashed by him. He shouted and flashed a pike, but neither threw it nor left his position in the wet brush to chase us.

  “Daraln seems to be surrounded by the poppuls,” whispered Arlin. “The redhead must have sent a courier ahead. You may find… he may be…”

  I said nothing.

  The mare took a low fence and we erupted out of the woods onto a sunny lawn, scattering sheep. The house before me—close before me—was rectangular and modern, of red brick. It was not large for an earl’s dwelling, even for one of his lesser dwellings. Its garden of perhaps ten acres was fronted by a tall hedge with an intricately worked gate. Arlin took us from the back around the side and to the front door of the neat, symmetrical house. The mare had to be spun in a circle three times, as though she had forgotten how to stop.

  I staggered over the grass and through a rose border just coming into bud. As I swayed on the threshold of the double, paneled door (edged by glass surmounted by a fan of glass), the wax cloth burden on its rope slid down the front of me and broke open.

  I tried to call out and could not. I raised my hand to pound and the door opened and there was Powl looking at me inquiringly with a very calm face.

  “Nazhuret,” he said, and the sound of his voice was a dream and a wound to me. “You don’t look very good.” Then his eyes slid down to the bloody package unrolling at his feet.

  “What’s this you brought me?” He leaned over and with one manicured nail prodded the monster’s horn.

  He was dressed in sedate dark blue, with silver piping, and he had a waistcoat of subdued brocade. I noted—or my little observer noted—that I had been right about my teacher. Given idleness, he tended to become plump. But his head was the same: bald back to the center, smooth, and his face and expression and movement smooth.

  “Powl, I’ve betrayed you. Through my stupidity I’ve betrayed you, and the king has had a fit of rage and you are condemned.”

  He pulled at the fibrous horn, lifting the skin around it, and he whistled. “This is indeed something different, and you did very well to bring it to me.”

  “Powl!” I shouted, and my voice cracked. “You must run! He is on his way now!”

  Fowl stood up again and looked for something with which to wipe his hands. He settled on my shirt. “Nazhuret, you bring me no news. And no, you didn’t betray me. I never told you to keep your training a secret.”

  He stood in the doorway but did not invite me in. “But you told me to avoid officialdom. Especially the court. I didn’t know why then, but—”

  “And you don’t know why now.” He had almost raised his voice. “I gave you good advice, but not for the purpose of hiding me from the king. I do not hide from the king.” Powl took one step forward in his mirror-finished shoes. “Because,” he said, “it may interest you to know that I am not and never have been a traitor to the crown.”

  My emotion broke free then. “But the crown’s certainly a traitor to you, Powl Inpres, Earl of Daraln, Viscount Korres!” I threw the titles at him like insults, because he had never given them to me. “Either you run from him now or you’re a dead man. And me beside you.

  “We can break the surround easily—hell, they’re only poppuls. You and I can do it easily, and in the forest nothing but hounds can find us, and I think in the past year I have even learned to handle hounds.”

  “No.” He shut me up with one word. As always, “Nazhuret, no and no. I am not a dead man, and I forbid you to waste my effort in you by getting yourself killed.”

  I stepped closer. “Too bad. You can’t forbid me things anymore. You finished with me, remember. You said leave the key.”

  His expression changed, but still I could not read it. “And you resent that, Nazhuret? You do. But I think it was necessary; you needed… other teachers. Tell me this: Is King Rudof after your blood, too?”

  My laugh was ugly, and I stared at the messy burden at my feet. “He has refused to let anyone touch me. He has treated me with indulgence, lenience, privilege—I’ve never heard of the like! It has driven me mad!”

  When I raised my eyes again to Powl, his were wide, blazing. In his face was a sort of intent awe. He began to nod.

  It was as though my teacher had discovered a new planet in the skies, “He has? Has he!”

  He paced th
e length of the entry stoop and glanced up again. “And who is this with you, Nazhuret?” His gaze, politely inquisitive, rested on Arlin, who was glaring at him and walking her mare.

  “That is Arlin. A good friend of mine from Sordaling,” I said.

  “I am glad to have your acquaintance, madam,” Powl said, and bowed gracefully.

  Arlin started and snorted and croaked a laugh, “You’re right, Zhurrie. He is a magician.”

  “I never told her to call you that!” I blurted to Powl, but he was down on one knee and into the remains of the beast again.

  Arlin came close, the mare’s head bending with hers. “The villagers believed it a dragon. Zhu—Nazhuret killed it for them last night. He didn’t want to waste the time from coming here, but I kidnapped him and he did it.”

  “An appropriate action,” muttered Powl, who was regarding the foot with delight.

  I was made furious by the ease with which Powl had been able to distract her from the need of the moment. Her distraction distracted me. “It’s your pig as much as mine, fellow. I remember prying your rapier out of its snout.” Powl regarded none of this bickering, and I took advantage of his absorption to look around me.

  The garden was simple, largely lawn and roses, and scattered here and there were wooden implements, wheels, and platforms that might be children’s toys and might be the instruments of Powl’s own playtimes. “In the past winter I have seen some things,” I found myself saying, “that might change your ideas of what is real. What is possible.”

  Powl chuckled, weighing a tush in his hand. “I change those ideas daily, Nazhuret. Probably I don’t believe at all what I did when we parted company.”

  My gaze rested on a particular wood and wheeled contraption that was clearly a child’s wagon. It had dried flower heads scattered within it. It made me catch my breath.

  Powl noted, without lifting his head, “No, lad. That belongs to the housekeeper’s brat. I have no hidden family. And we are alone here today. Not even servants,” he said, and as he spoke I heard hooves on the road, followed by the blare of a comet.

  I drew my dowhee and stepped forward off the stones.

  “Put that thing away, Nazhuret, or I’ll send you off the place,” Powl said in his most headmasterly tones. I merely shook my head and caused him to sigh.

  “Think of your friend. Is she to perish because you cannot control your temper?”

  I looked at Arlin, who had been turning her head from Powl to myself and back again. Immediately she stalked away, the reins in her hand. “Don’t think to use me, Daraln,” she said, and her arrogance more than matched his. “I’m no part of this and in no danger.”

  Powl sighed again, and with audible restraint he said, “Nazhuret, I have an idea of what is to happen here, and it doesn’t include your attacking the King of Velonya with a gardening tool. You must trust me, because I am trying to save my life, among other things.”

  I dropped my arm, glared, tried to speak, and only began to cry. Weeping out of fear: I had never heard of such a thing before. I lifted brimming eyes to see that Powl was not looking at me, nor at anything. He was, in fact, standing upright and open-eyed in the belly of the wolf. I put the dowhee on the ground and sat beside it.

  Soon I could feel the beat of hooves through the sun-warmed earth, and immediately after that came a pattern of black and white stripes flashing vertically through the scrolls of the gate: legs of horses milling. That pattern resolved into a frieze of sky blue and white, and far away the gate began to open.

  There were other vertical stripes at the edge of my vision.

  Arlin stood with legs braced beside me, somewhat to the front.

  “You said you were not part of this,” I reminded her without looking up. “I’m not a tool to be used against you, Nazhuret,” she said calmly, bitterly. “Not even by a magician.”

  “Then you prove a better friend than I ever did,” I answered in much the same tones.

  The first guardsmen stepped through the gate, walking in the four-abreast formation that meant they were encircling the king, and as I saw them I stood up, and without will in the matter I found myself also in the belly of the black wolf and very calm.

  Arlin’s hand was at her sword hilt, and a lark was singing, very sweetly, high up. “Will you be guided by me, old friend?” I asked, and she answered doubtingly, “In this I will.”

  “Then offer the king no violence. Powl does have a plan.”

  Arlin gave a gasp as though hope had hit her, unexpected and unwelcome. I saw a scattering of black and yellows among the king’s guard and knew that Leoue was with the king.

  Perhaps twenty men entered Daraln, none on horseback. As they strode closer I saw the head of the king, flaming against the green hedge, and then the black smudge that was the duke. Leoue was dressed civilly, but the king had donned the blue and white of a cavalry captain: one of those uniforms he was privileged to, and very simple. It came to me then that a captain’s uniform included a saber, whereas that of a commander, or any court official, would be completed with a rapier. It was better to be a cavalry captain if you wanted to cut someone’s head off.

  Seeing King Rudof approach so dressed, it seemed to me he had wrapped himself up in his own flag to do murder.

  As they came within sixty feet I could see the king’s face, and it was a strange color, dark and cloudy—more gray than red. The duke raised his hand and I saw his dark eyes intent on me. He called one word and pointed, and the half dozen black and yellow bees in the garden came buzzing toward me, drawing their swords. “No,” I said to Arlin, for I had heard the slick of her rapier against leather.

  Out of the comer of my eye I saw very clearly the green calyx snap back from a pink rose blossom.

  The soldiers had not closed half the distance between us when the king bellowed the words, “Desist, you rioting hounds!” and in that short phrase was rage uncontrolled. The men glanced back over their shoulders, not willingly, and they shuffled still, watching the face of their own lord, not that of the king.

  Arlin whined in her throat, like a frightened hound herself.

  For a moment the king turned his face to and his anger on the duke, who replied (for all the world to hear), “Sire. Sir. I have told you what—who—that ruffian is!”

  “You have shared your ideas with me, yes. And I have commanded you to let him be. Now it will be as I first said. I want all the guards out of here.”

  The guards’ captain did not question. In a moment all the men in blue and white were not walking but running back for the gate. Less promptly, the bumblebees followed.

  The captain had taken his king’s instructions literally. The guards left but he remained, a shadow of blue behind blue.

  King Rudof watched them go and squinted to see the gate close. Then he continued walking toward Powl.

  The Duke of Leoue showed his teeth and clenched his fingers in his curling, grizzled beard. He shook his head in frustration, but then that expression faded. He gazed down the length of the drive and then at the entryway, glinting with little panes of glass, and ran to catch up with his king.

  When they were a few yards away Powl stepped down off the stones and bowed to the king. It was not an impertinent bow, but neither was it the sort by which a man donates his head to the ax. King Rudof stood in front of Powl, half a head taller, with his hand on the hilt of his saber and then with his saber in his hand.

  “I can’t… I can’t…” Arlin said this much and then rushed from my side. I knew the unspoken word was “watch.”

  Powl’s shoes shone like dew among the grass.

  He looked into the king’s eyes and was very poised, very alert, whether to dodge or to die I had no idea. He said nothing, and he did not move.

  King Rudof was equally intent, but across his face moved storms of changing expression. He had claimed to be able to read me, but I could not return that skill confidently. All I could perceive, as his saber went up and slowly up for a sideways slash, was that t
he king had no fears this victim would offer violence in return. And yet the king’s face was slick with fear. The saber caught the sunlight and seemed to be shuddering in place.

  The falling of this terrible balance I knew only when Powl’s face went from cold calm to deep concern, and yet I knew I was seeing the king’s expression reflected in Powl’s subtle mirror. Powl Inpres leaned toward the king and lifted his right hand gently as the saber fell out of the king’s hand, to disappear in the grass.

  “Daraln!” cried King Rudof. “How could you do it? How could you reject me so, after all the years? There was no one left of my youth but you. The grief of it!” And in a moment he was sobbing in Powl’s arms, sobbing and slumped, bent far over, like a tall child with a short nanny.

  With the inevitable human reflex, Powl was slapping his hand against the young king’s back, between the shoulder blades, and I was reminded how that hand, using only a slap, had knocked a brigand unconscious—and of how an unknown hand had pounded me in that same silly fashion when I was sick and miserable, though not so desolate as King Rudof was now.

  I watched with complete absorption, untouched as yet by any feeling of relief or gladness, and I noticed that the king’s face was turned toward the flagstones of the entryway and the bloody pile on it (with the impossible foot sticking up, and the horn). He stiffened under Fowl’s rhythm, and then, as though neither threat nor tears had happened, he asked, “What on earth is that?”

  Powl began to release him, and he turned his bland face to follow the king’s glance. “A rat my cat left at the door just now. It will prove interesting, don’t you think?”

  Behind them, where I could not see, I heard the duke cursing in despair.

  Powl took King Rudof’s shoulders in his hands and stood him entirely on his feet again. “I had to deny you, Rudof. For Velonya I had to. Should I be playing experiments on the mind that governs the nation? Do you have time to waste cataloging obscure mammals, like this fellow does? Can you afford to dress in rags?”