The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  He paced. “The perceiver first classifies them as undependable and later, useless, and finally, unreal. Most ordinary people are so practiced at this negation that by the time they are in their mid-teens they suffer their sudden understandings as though they were bellyaches and are quickly over them. The sage or the ecstatic, on the other hand …”

  His face tightened. “Do I have it right, Nazhuret, or am I previous, and you were only swooning from insufficiency of food?”

  I told him he had it, and that as Zhurrie the Goblin was certainly dead, and peace-filled Nazhuret the Revisitor seemed to have disappeared also, I had no idea who was talking to him at all. I stared not at the floor but at his gleaming shoes, soiled by September dew and forest mulch only a bit on the sides of the toes, and he patted me on the head, where I would have been bald had I been Powl.

  “That is a very good beginning,” he said to me.

  The clothing in the bundle—that I was to wear and wash out nightly—was a coarse handweave shirt as well as woolen knee breeches, stockings, and wooden clogs. “I am to dress like a peasant and wash like a lord?” I asked him, trying not to make it sound like a protest.

  “Yes,” he replied, with his grin turned away from me. “And eat like a lady and talk like a scholar with a long gray beard. All these things, you see, are perfection in their own variety, and perfection is what we strive for.”

  I was grateful for the lack of mirror in the room, not because I thought I looked so much worse in the poor clothes but because I was very much afraid I would find they looked more appropriate on me than my frock coat. “Peasant shirts are more perfect than … than linen and pearls, Master Powl? Then what about—”

  “No ‘Master,’ Nazhuret. Just ‘Powl.’ And as for my own dress—if it is any of your business—I am in disguise.”

  Powl glanced over me with satisfaction as I stood before him in my rude finery, and I was more and more certain he thought it the right clothing for the sort of person I was. I was tempted to remind him about Sordaling School and its rules for admission, but among the lessons I had learned at that school was that many things were for sale that were not supposed to be salable, and how could I say that admission for a low-born or bastard son was not among these? I held my peace. He fed me more cheese, bread, and beer, until the natural man in me began to climb out of his stupor.

  “Do you remember why you came here and why you stayed, Nazhuret?” Powl ate more slowly than I and far more delicately, so that I had been waiting across the table from him for five minutes.

  “I remember …” I began, and then memories that had seemed perfect and coherent as long as I didn’t look directly at them began to behave alarmingly. “I came because of a dream,” I answered at last, “and I stayed because you …” and here I became unsure of myself, wretchedly so, so that it was almost impossible to continue. Powl prodded me. “Because I what, lad? Speak.”

  “Because you called me back. From death.”

  Powl skinned an apple. Its fragrance filled the air, even overwhelming the cheese, “Called you back from death? Now, how could I do that?”

  I don’t know where my anger came from, but I was shouting, “Don’t make fun of me that way! You were only an hour ago saying that I must believe my own memories, that it required cussedness that was actually faith, that—”

  He waved me down with a light gesture, “No, I’m not making fun of you. It was a legitimate question. By what power could I call a man back from death? I’m not God, I assure you, nor some prescientific notion of a wizard.”

  This outraged me, for although I didn’t confuse the man with the Almighty, yet he was exactly my “prescientific” idea of a wizard. “And yet you did it.”

  “I don’t think so,” answered Powl, so very mildly I was ashamed for my temper. “Examine your memories again. In all honesty.”

  I could not; what had been so coherent the day before had become as cluttered and handleless as the dream that brought it about. “I don’t remember. I don’t even remember why I’m here.”

  “You can leave again.” Ever so coolly, Powl began to eat the skin he had carefully excised from the apple.

  This left me utterly blank. “Leave? But you said you would be my teacher.”

  “So you remember something, then. But what is it I am to teach you?”

  I thought mightily but could remember nothing of the experience relevant. Except how easily he had beaten me at my own skill. “Swordwork, I imagine. Isn’t that it?”

  Powl laughed outright, which I doubt a proper lady would have done with a mouthful of apple. “You are asking me? Like that? You have no idea, yourself, and yet you’ve sat here and chided me …”

  I could only shake my head.

  He put his knife and his tine sticks down and wiped his fingers with a clean handkerchief. “We could certainly begin with that, Nazhuret. If it’s swordwork that interests you, I can teach you to be the most deadly duelist in all of Vestinglon and the Territories.”

  I blushed to think how easily taken in he thought me. “I’m not really so interested in it—”

  “So much the better.”

  “It’s only that since you have reason to know you’re so much better than I am, I naturally thought—”

  “Naturally.”

  “But Master—Powl—I have to be honest. I have ranked third out of two hundred at Sordaling and after all these years I’m as good as I’m going to get. I work the rapier hours each day and I know I have reached my limits.”

  His wide, colorless eyes had no expression as he answered, “That would be too bad if that were true, but I don’t think it is.”

  I sought to excuse myself, for calling myself third of Sordaling had not been my idea of a pitiful confession, and Powl’s “that would be too bad if that were true” really rankled. Still, the man had played cat and mouse with me. “I have been fighting with wooden swords or steel ones since I was four. Though always the smallest in my sessions, I had to stand there and take it and take it until I could figure out how to turn it aside—and I did learn, despite my years and despite my size. That is the school system. Can you think of a better, more realistic one for producing able fighters?”

  I was quite amazed to see Powl lose his temper, even though it was only revealed with a sneer and a slap to the table. “I can think of none worse!” He rose, and his lacquered heels glinted in the light of the high windows as he strode in high energy to and from, striking the hanging buttons from his path so that they swung to and from in the air like reapers’ blades.

  Silently, I began to clear the table. I kept back the bread heels and the scraps of cheese and the rest of the apple skin in case he was about to toss me out, for I had no idea where I would go in that event.

  Not back, certainly.

  Powl returned to me and in his hands he held something in a sheet of flannel. I sat on the stair of the platform beside him as he unwrapped the item.

  It was the size and shape of the bottom of a small bucket and about a thumb’s length in thickness. It was clear, perfect glass, with only a touch of green in its makeup when examined along the diameter. “It’s a lens,” I said, fairly sure of my information.

  He propped it on his knees, and his round face looked like a happy cat’s. “It is a lens. I’m glad we can start with that understanding. Now, do you know exactly what a lens is?”

  His brightness dimmed a little when I could only say it was something made of glass. “To help see things,” I added, and that cheered him again.

  “Yes. This is to help see things. Everything taught is merely to help us see things. Nazhuret, I will teach you the arts of conflict, since that is your background, and as I have heard said, one can only teach a person what he already knows. I will also teach you five languages, two of which are dead and one of which has—for you—what are called magical properties. Together we will study dancing, too, and a sort of history more accurate than that fed you poor brutes at your school. But the only perfect teachi
ng—the only treasure I have—I can give you in a few words, right now.

  “You, Nazhuret, once of Sordaling, are the lens of the world: the lens through which the world may become aware of itself. The world, on the other hand, is the only lens in which you can see yourself. It is both lenses together that make vision.” He paused, terribly still.

  “Do you understand me?”

  I listened, and I looked into the cool clearness of this immense glass, which showed me magnified the fine pink fingers of Powl and the glint of gold and the blue-rose-colored drop of a discreet ruby on one of those rings, and superimposed over all this the ghost of my own face, turned upside down and thus unknowable to me. I had to put both hands over my face and retreat into darkness.

  He asked me again, “Do you understand me, Nazhuret?”

  The words, meaningless to me, were locked in the dark box of my head, and like powder charges, were set to go off. I knew about handling powder charges, and knowing they were locked in with me and the fuse ignited, I began to sweat.

  For a moment I saw myself from above as I had briefly the day before. For a moment I felt the blackness that preceded death. Then I remembered more. I opened my eyes again and let go of Powl’s words. “I don’t understand at all, Powl. Not at all. And I can’t think. My head fills instead with memories of … of before I knew I ought to come back.” “Good.” He nodded forcefully, as though I had said something profound instead of failing the test completely. “Knew you ought to come back. No nonsense about my calling …” He nodded and nodded. To himself.

  “Good, Nazhuret. We have a very strong beginning.”

  Memories only remain connected, so that they make a tale that moves from third hour to fourth hour to noon, in situations so utterly new that our minds cannot otherwise catalog them. Once we have begun to feel comfortable—to understand or to give up understanding all things around us—we group memories in clumps of like experiences. (I am told, however, that it is not the same for idiots, who remember each incident of their unsuccessful lives as sequential, unique, and inexplicable. Though I have been called a simpleton all my life, I am glad my memories have not been so drearily particular as this.) My recollection of my first whole day with Powl switches from the first mode of memory to the second at about the time just described. Sometime later in the afternoon he took a set of keys and led me through various doors into the odd-shaped rooms that made up the rest of the volume of this round building within a square one.

  There was a spare but perfectly comfortable bedroom that boasted a fireplace not set into the wall but pounded out of what seemed to be pieces of old body armor (both of horse and man) and served by a flimsy exhaust pipe, and a storage room where grain was kept very tidily in glass and ceramic with rubber gaskets and where wooden crates rose almost to the low ceiling, along with a far more interesting collection of sabers, rapiers, disassembled pistols, lance cannons, caltrops, and other instruments to eviscerate, maim, and otherwise discourage one’s friends. The room at the third corner smelled of fuller’s earth; it had certain of the flags lifted, and a great displacement of the earth beneath them was scattered over the remaining floor. Atop the hole in the flags was a thigh-high iron box with a matching hole in its top. The entirety was described to me (reluctantly, it seemed) as a “work in progress.”

  The fourth corner was a fairly up-to-date kitchen, complete with an oven of iron similar to but heavier than the affair in the bedroom. It did not appear to be used.

  Why Powl had left me the night before on a hard bench when there were battens and blankets so near at hand puzzled me for a while—he certainly had not used them himself, and it didn’t seem he feared my personal cattle would infect his property, for now he gave me the ring of black keys with no hesitation. I can only suppose he had wanted to give me every opportunity for walking out, if my instincts had run in that direction.

  That afternoon he gave me the second of my regular defeats at arms, this time simply saber to saber, but it did not appear that the exercise had his full attention, and before evening he left me again, with food to cook and wood to cut and a very serious charge: I was to discover the central purpose of the building in which I now lived, and I was to be able to operate it competently by daybreak.

  He left me paper and pen for figuring, if I should need it, and beer for solace. Everything but candles for light he left me, and when I pointed out the omission he walked out the door, laughing, saying that the building operated best without candles.

  My king, I know it seems ridiculous to a man of your breadth of experience that I did not know in what sort of place I was, but remember the single-purposedness of my up-bringing, and remember also that it was twenty-one years ago, and many things that are ordinary now were marvelous then, or even unknown.

  First, because it had been so much in my thoughts, I approached the “rack” in the corner. It possessed a great oak wheel on an axle of iron, and protruding from the rim of the wheel was a handle also of oak and iron, parallel in line to the axle itself. I had difficulty turning this wheel, both because of the resistance of the machinery and because the wheel stood so tall that at the handle’s highest point I could scarcely reach it and could put almost no force into the rotation. Below the mechanism I placed a box from the storage room, and by stepping on and off once for each revolution I worked the thing with a will.

  It seemed it did nothing but creak and cause the building to creak. I stopped my efforts and regarded the contrivance again. To the best of my knowledge, nothing had changed. Since I could not lubricate the wooden wheels, I lubricated myself instead, and sat upon the steps of the central platform with a mug of warmish, still beer.

  The buttons were moving on their strings and the sun shone its last light through the fault in the ceiling. Beer is not conducive to mental exercise but rest is, and when I rose again I went to the kitchen stove, took from its belly a damp piece of charcoal, and smeared lines over all the meeting places of the gears within the machine, or at least all that could be reached. I worked the thing again until it was growling all around me, and then I observed what progress I had made.

  None of the lines met anymore. Some had moved only slightly, and some bore traces of having run their circle through more than once. The bigger gears seemed, in general, to have moved least.

  This ought to have been most significant, but my brain refused to lead me any farther. Gears existed to speed movement, to slow it down, or to change the direction of it. These gears were of many sizes and moved up and down, sideways, and in both diagonals, but seemed to be connected to nothing except each other. And the building, of course. It had grown dark during my last flurry of pumping, and I had suddenly in my mind an even darker vision of myself slowly pushing this square shell of bricks and mortar over the crest of the hill it sat upon, until it would overbalance itself and crash into the trees below. It seemed the sort of joke an inexplicable man like Powl would find humorous. In sudden panic I ran out through the hall and out the heavy door, to find the sun was still in the sky, and the path exactly where I’d left it that afternoon.

  I was inspired to leave, to return to Sordaling School with a story of sudden illness, amnesia, attack from townies. Now that I think back, sir, I doubt there was a day in my peculiar education that I was not overcome at least momentarily by an impulse to drop the effort and run. Except for three days, which I shall describe after this is done.

  I went back in and poured another beer. It was very dark inside now, and only the swinging brass buttons of the ceiling caught sunlight through the clerestory windows. I glanced out through the crack in the roof and beheld the first stars, and only then did it become obvious to me that the pole, the slot, the entire roof of the building had moved—that the squat dome, the crowded clerestories, and the clumsy key frieze were no chance ornaments of a builder without artistic taste but instead the inevitable concomitants of a roof designed to spin like a top.

  A very slow, cumbersome top.

  Questions a
re never really answered, but only replaced by larger questions. Why on earth would a man want to move the roof of his house in a circle? That under certain circumstances he might want to move the house itself over the ground I could accept. That he might want to replace the roof to the left or the right according to rain or wind direction also was comprehensible, though practically speaking it was enough that it merely cover the floor well. This pierced, flawed, and ponderously mobile dome seemed beyond reason.

  Yet one thing had led to five or six others in my researches, and I was inclined toward faith in the reasonableness of this ugly brick building. I left off beer and conjecture and mounted the platform.

  The great tube ended in a smaller, polished tube, which in its turn was completed by a round lip of brass like the neck of a bottle. It occurred to me that perhaps Powl’s intent was to capture dew or rain, but when I inserted my finger into the hole I thought I felt it blocked by something hard. It was a tiny opening anyway, and hard to feel with the fingers. The tube itself rang hollow to knuckles; it made a shivery, almost sweet sound.

  On the Zaquashlon southern coast, at Morbin Harbor, there stands a cannon as long as this very tube, and like it, the cannon is made of brass. It can carry a ball of iron for three miles out to sea, and its purpose is to terrify the pirates of Felonk, who harry the shores. Though the Felonkan are a round people, however, their ships are light and wasplike and balanced on wasp-legged pontoons, and never has this fearsome weapon managed to hit a ship clean on or even to swamp one, though I am told men have been washed off the decks and drowned. If ever it did hit a ship, I’m sure the destruction would be total.

  On its way to emplacement on the harbor cliffs, the Morbin Harbor cannon was paraded through Vestinglon and afterward Sordaling, pulled by thirty chestnut brewery horses. We of the school were brought to examine it, and I remember that the barrel of the cannon was very heavy, so that it made little ring when beaten by the fists.