The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  He did not take me.

  Baron General Hydeis came the next spring, to take twenty good, reliable men-at-arms of no particular gentility, to be coastal sheriffs in the West. Though this position was all I could hope for, and though I was field-ranked third out of a school of two hundred, still I played the blinking fool in front of the man and was not chosen.

  For this bit of clownishness, Rapiermaster Garot, my longtime patron and personal friend, knocked me backward over the bricks of the dormitory court. I deserved the blow, but at the next recruitment I made no better impression.

  It was not fear of battle that drove me to behave so badly, though I have a strong dislike of battle. It was not dissatisfaction with the status of a knight-contract, for that estate carried with it many times the power and honor I had ever known and could lead to high advancement. Nor did I cherish dreams of personal liberty. I had never considered the possibility of such liberty.

  My panic came from an utter inability to decide—to give myself over to any one person. I had been everyone’s for so long.

  Perhaps I was too much a child, kept so by living among youngsters, and at the place where I had been living since the age of four. Perhaps it was that my own odd face had driven me foolish. Perhaps I was waiting for Powl. But that is all to say the same thing, for who but a fool and a child would have been of any use to Powl?

  To encapsulate years as tightly as I have been doing here is by necessity to lie. To speak of a year’s events in any manner is its own sort of untruth, for a year has no more unity than the broken nib at the left corner of the table; the sound of thunder; and the flight of the bird outside the window, which has just now stolen my eye from the paper. It is a thrasher, I think. (They are all over here in early autumn.) The nib is stained a thin black, which has dribbled onto the porous wood of the tabletop. The thunder is only in my memory. What is the set, pattern, or entirety of these three things that I should speak of them together, or of the events of my early life, for that matter? Perhaps you know, sir, for you have eyes to see me, and mine exist only to look outward from myself.

  I awoke before dawn for the whole week before Baron Howdl’s next winnowing. It had been explained already that my name had been brought up before his sergeant-steward, and that gentleman was interested in a contract. Allegiance and obedience for five years, renewable at the discretion of the noble or his representative. Three years was the standard first graduate’s contract, but at nineteen I was already as old as many who were entering their second contract.

  I have a memory of the stripe of violet that opened the sky that day, broken by the bulk of the square clock tower and the peak of the headmaster’s house, as I saw it from the dormitory window. This memory may well be overpainted by visions come before or since. It may be totally false, for the mind creates with as much talent as the eyes perceive, but still—I have it. (The dewy, young-girl colors of dawn make an ugly picture against the mustard-yellow squareness of Sordaling School, even in the frame of recollection.)

  On the day before Howdl’s descent upon my life I awoke from a very strong dream, which I remember with more assurance than I do the skyline. I was walking in a woods, which was odd enough for one of my background, and had managed to lose the path entirely. It was midday, and I found myself climbing a round, bare-topped hill. Near the top of it was a hole—a cave entrance—and out of this entrance a cool wind was blowing.

  I knew I had to go into this cave. I also knew I would be killed within. I entered darkness, very cold.

  Once I had kicked myself awake, I felt no need to delve for the meaning of the dream. It echoed my waking feelings perfectly. I was left with a chill of dread that the late-summer morning could not overcome.

  I hung from the second-story window, swung sideways onto the sharp-peaked little snow roof of the main entrance, and slid down to stand before the locked dormitory door.

  This was my method for leaving my quarters too early or too late. (It was more difficult to return.) Though my body now is in most ways a more serviceable tool than the frame of that Nazhuret, still I think if I tried such a stunt immediately after springing out of bed in the morning, they would have to carry me back into it. The difference between nineteen years and forty.

  I went barefoot to the practice field: six enclosed acres of coarse grass, chewed earth, and horse droppings, where a few unkempt sheep wandered, badly shorn and painted in unsheeplike colors each year by teams of students. Three of them were indigo-stained, my own victims, for indigo was the team color of my dormitory and I had a pronounced talent for sheep-catching. The more sheep colored after one’s team color, the greater the prestige of the dormitory.

  This summer had been a good one. We had three indigo sheep for North House and I still bore as much of the pigment as any woolly creature. I drifted over the field that morning in such early light I could not tell Indigo-North from Madder-East, and I said good-bye to the scene of a life’s play, like a wistful ghost in theater.

  I touched the armory and the better-kept drill field in the same manner, but by the time I reached the refectory, I was little ghostlike enough to strike a conversation with the night scullery and cadge a piece of cheese. He, like everyone in the school except the self-involved freshers, knew that Zhurrie the Goblin’s future had been disposed of, and so sympathetic he was, he probably would have given me a whole beef joint on request.

  I had planned to be back at the dormitory door just before it was unlocked for the day, but time had betrayed me or I it, for the last of the boys were stumbling or swaggering out to breakfast as I returned. Someone whose name and face are lost to me told me that I had been sent for by the headmaster. I remember only that the fellow expected me to be terrified at the news, and even in my lowering mood, I was amused by that.

  What more could the headmaster do to me?

  The headmaster then was no older than I am now, strange to think. A young man for such a position. He came to his office door not to greet me, but to stare at me.

  “They said you had run away,” he told me.

  “They were certainly not correct,” I replied, explaining no more.

  Of his office I remember only that he had on a table a clock that worked with dripping water at almost the accuracy of the usual spring-weight variety, except in exceptionally dry, hot weather. I don’t remember if it made a sound.

  He was very kind to me, once he had overcome his surprise. He told me that I would be missed, and he excused me from all classes and duties that day so I might enjoy myself in the city and get my wardrobe ready.

  My instructional duties had already been relegated to another the week before: not another student, but a minor instructor, who would be paid a living wage for what I did free. My classes—I had not really attended much in the way of classes for years, since I knew the lectures by heart. My wardrobe consisted of the padded suit I was wearing, drill uniform and day uniform, as well as one set of coat and britches handed down to me by a boy in North who had grown four inches during his first year as a student. All these but the hand-me-downs would revert to the school, to be given in turn to the next ten-year-old arrival, or slow-growing adolescent. I had the rapier I had bought the previous year, but no saddle, bridle, or other horsegear. The noble who wanted my services had to do without dowry entirely.

  It is a great deal of fun to do nothing in a place where everyone else is working very hard, but even that amusement paled soon. I went out into the sun. I donned my civilian clothing and buckled on my rapier, just like any underbred burgher gentleman of Vestinglon. I showed my pass at the door (unusual behavior!) and walked out among the cobbles and shops of Sordaling.

  My elegiac mood deepened as I wandered into the flower market by the swanboats, remembering dirty little Lady Charlan, who despite her lack of skill had possessed a very fine though not overdecorated dueling rapier. Dubious ornament to a virgin girl. Dubious virgin girl. That spring the air had been rich with tuberoses and narcissus.

  Now La
dy Charlan was dead or pregnant—or both, perhaps. Now the only flowers for sale were asters, which had no odor. The young man who owned the shop, hauling the bags of bulbs and the heavy earthen pots, was one of those I had taught to leap the bonfire. He was eighteen, I was nineteen, and he probably could have lifted me off the ground on one straight arm.

  I envied that youth: his flowers, his day-long view of the gliding swans, his day’s income, his bulk, and his inches. Most of all, I envied him his simple independence. Only the simple can be so independent.

  Of course, I may have misunderstood him. Perhaps he was crossed in love. Perhaps Howdl was his landlord.

  I think it was in the park that day that the townie stopped me. It was either that day or another close to it. He had a red face, brown hair, and three attendant loungers. He accosted, followed, and insulted me, using no originality of expression at all. He was not interesting. I suppose it was my rapier that drew him on—burghers’ sons are frequently excited at the sight of a rapier. It might also have been that the indigo stains on my neck resembled a disfiguring birthmark. With my unusual appearance, however, there is no need to look far for the stimulus to his behavior. In the end he spat at me, forcing me to wipe my shoe. In the end his chatter drove my steps out of Sordaling and onto the sunny road.

  Unhappiness either overwhelms beauty or heightens it. So does joy, now that I reflect on it. It is my fortune that both extremes of emotion tend to increase the quality of all I see, leaving me bright visions of the natural world.

  The suburban air was sharp and the earth was gold and the maples that mark Sordaling’s banner were beginning to brighten with autumn. Even the busy road’s horse manure, preserved by the cool, dry air, seemed perfect and necessary to complete the picture.

  This may be last autumn I am visualizing, my king. How can I know?

  I had never had much business outside the city. If there was in me any instinct for venery or for botany, residence in a closed school had given it no soil in which to grow. So it is not really surprising that by the time I had walked two undirected hours or so, I did not know where I was at all, but only that in my finery I was too hot.

  Examining the flat, well-planted, and sparsely peopled landscape, I spied in the distance a dark line. It looked like trees: a planting of some kind, or a river with willows. I made for the coolness and for the water.

  That is how I came to be stomping through a woods without any sign of path, tangling my rapier in mannerless briars, climbing out of the trees on the domed side of a hill, and recreating every step of my fatal night vision in the bright light of noon.

  I exaggerate for the sake of effect. My dream was not manifest literally, for at the top of the hill there was no cave. Instead there was a building of mundane brick: red, squat, high-windowed, surmounted by a dome like that of the civic house at Sordaling but less impressive, and in that dome was stuck a huge pike or spear … a large tube of metal, at any rate, pointed at the horizon.

  My words make the thing too romantic. It was a dull and commercial-appearing building. I thought at first sight that it was some sort of lumber mill or foundry.

  The irony of this: to have a nightmare made real and then turned into a lumber mill. It only served to dispel the last traces of unease from my mind. The moment after I had seen the hill, I could no longer swear that this hill was the one I had dreamed of, rather than the real sight of a hill replacing an imperfectly painted memory. The mind is like that.

  I walked around the squareness of it. I was thirsty.

  Obviously a mill or foundry would be accessible by road. Easily accessible, moreover, and close to the city. Now, at this remove, it is easy for me to see this. Either my fatigue that day, my ignorance, or some other factor kept me from understanding the anomaly of this undecorative structure at the crown of a pathless hill. Perhaps once I had decided not to be afraid of it, my mind was unwilling to admit anything uncanny concerning it at all.

  There was a door of wood and metal, with a small open grille at the top, out of which poured a welcome cold air. I knocked with open palm, calling halloo, calling mercy for a drink of water.

  I waited in the shadow of the bricks for a long time before I had an answer. I had given up, I think, and would have walked on had I any better place to go, but then I heard a bolt drawn.

  From this point on, sir, I have no doubt of my memory. It was an iron bolt holding the door I leaned against that was shot open. There was no sound of footsteps before or after. No voice answered mine. My weight caused the heavy, reinforced door to swing in.

  There was a hallway, dark and ordinary and smelling of earth, and beyond that a large central room, such as one would, of course, find in a foundry, and this was lit by small windows up at the base of the dome. From the ceiling dangled numerous cords, each of which ended in a brass button.

  This dome base was decorated—I thought at the time it was decorated—with a frieze of crenellated wood in what is called a key pattern. It was massive. In the corner of the room nearest the dark hall stood a tall machine of gears, equally massive. In the middle of the room, where the penetrating shaft reached its end, stood a platform with stairs. There was a glint of brass. Over the newel post of the rail serving those stairs was draped a gentleman’s overcoat of boiled wool.

  This much I perceived in a glance, and as I still stood blinking, a human figure was added to the scene. A man stepped from the concealment of the near wall of the central room into the passage and stood as a black outline.

  I should have spoken again. Perhaps I did, but I doubt it, and I am sure if I spoke it was not coherently. From him also I heard nothing, but there were some yards between us, so it might have been that he bid me enter before turning on his heel and proceeding toward the central platform.

  He had not the back of a foundry worker or the clothes of a miller. He was dressed in a bright brown that went well with his smooth brown hair, over which I could barely espy the glint of his incipient baldness. He was not a large man. Not a small man. The keen eyes of nineteen noticed that his tailcoat was piped at the seams in gold and that thin rims of gold edged his rather tall, square boot heels.

  Trusting that he had spoken me in and that I had only missed hearing the words, I entered, and the cold of that passage was marvelous and the draft hardly to be accounted for, considering the lack of ventilation this block of bricks had seemed to possess. I was intimidated against my will, and the cold upon my sweaty back drove me forward.

  At the end of the passage I stood blinking for the very oddity of the room around me. There were benches with a great shimmer of glass, and mounted on sticks protruding from the coarse brick wall were bits of animals—not heads and skins as a hunter will mount his trophies, but out of a more twisted fancy: a hawk’s leg, with weights on its toes; a dog’s jaw, still hinged; and a suspiciously human-appearing set of hipbones and thighbones.

  Suddenly I recognized the geared apparatus in the corner as nothing other than a torturer’s rack.

  My hand flew to the handle of the rapier, and my dream was alive and flooding again through my senses. The man who was neither foundryman nor miller had faced me, this time full in what light the place afforded.

  I remember his face less well that the rest of the scene, for other, similar encounters have superimposed themselves. I can state truthfully that I thought it a smooth face, a round face, a face of less than average beard and more than average grooming. His eyes were pale for his coloring and set far apart, not unusually deep. The receding hairline gave him a bit of the flat look of an egg. He was not plump, but there was something about the neat, small hands and feet that suggested he could be plump, or that one day he would be.

  His eyes were open wide, but they were ironical. His hand was raised to one of the many hanging strings.

  “I had hoped,” he said in the perfect accent of the court—the accent drubbed into every boy of Sordaling School, with more or less success—“I had hoped for a young girl with porcelain hands.”
He pulled the cord and I heard behind me the slam of the door I had used to enter, followed by the thump of a bolt driven home.

  I started, my ears popped, and my rapier rattled in its scabbard. I put my hand to the hilt—to quiet it, to draw it out; I didn’t know then my intent and don’t know now.

  The problem with carrying a weapon as part of one’s costume is that one is thereby inclined to use it, and when one’s hair is rising and crackling about one’s head and all one’s tooth enamel exposed like that of a frightened dog, that is exactly the time one is most inclined to use it, and that use may well be murderous.

  This man had done nothing to me but to tell me he’d rather had a visit from a pretty girl than from me. That was no affront. Was it his fault his dwelling had found itself in my dream, or that his style of furnishing raised the hair on my head? I let my hand slide, hoping he had not noticed, and explained my situation: I was lost, I was hot and I begged only water.

  He cut my words short. “All in good time,” he said. “Water, work, sleep, study, food, argument, extinction … all in good time.” He loosed the hanging line and let the brass button swing. He turned his tailored back to me and walked to a table, where were laid three flat disks of something that shone, a pot of reddish paste, rags, boxes of sand both white and gray, and what looked like a hedge sickle. It was the last that took my attention.

  “What is your name?” he asked me, and I told him the full of it: not Zhurrie, the boy’s nickname, but all three ungainly syllables, leaving off only the title “the Goblin.” Hearing it, he stopped as still as a fly in amber. I could see the corner of his gray eye as he looked over his shoulder at me.

  Time passed, and the brass buttons swung.

  “Nazhuret,” he repeated, pronouncing it oddly, and then he added, to my mystification, the words “Warrior, poet, king of the dead.”