The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  I was too shocked to remonstrate. I felt the blood drain from my face and hands so completely I could scarcely stand. Some small part of me wondered where it went. Only when dressed as a town buck again, standing in two inches of snow outside the steel-wrapped door, did it occur to me that I was ill used. That the punishment in no way fit the crime.

  I had nowhere to go; I was destitute. I had traded my future away, and if it was a very mediocre future, it was all I had, and had placed myself in that man’s power as completely as a dog. After five minutes I was shivering and I hadn’t moved.

  Enormous disaster. And why? I had trouble remembering. Because I had played marbles when I was supposed to sit still. Had there ever been a dog that did not nose into the trash bin sometime in its life? Did a man throw out his dog just for that?

  No, he beat him. Powl beat me daily, about the head with clubs sometimes, and though it was not meant as a punishment, surely I deserved something out of all that beating.

  Numbness resolved into self-pity, but then a look at that invincible door shook me into horror again. I sank down against a tree and wrapped myself in my arms. I could not think at all. Images of the city and the school (alternatives to squatting here and freezing in the snow) were forced up but faded instantly, like the colors on a prism when clouds cover the sun. Everything was white and black. My hands were the color of dirty snow.

  It got later. Darker.

  From behind the door Powl said to get away or he would throw the dishwater on me. He was very calm, and his voice was so cold I could scarcely breathe. I heard the bolt draw back.

  I rose, fell, and scrambled up again. I withdrew fifty feet, not along the path but into the woods, and as soon as the shadows hid me I squatted down again. I had nowhere to go and no notion of going anywhere.

  I heard Powl leave. His feet went down the path, making dry, ripping noises in the snow. In the last light I went back to the door, hoping he had left it open. Surely he had. I had no coat, and he could not want me to die.

  The door was locked. There was a blanket folded on the step, and pinned to the oak was a note, reading (not in Allec):

  GO BACK TO THE CITY.

  I went back to the woods instead. I peeled some pine branches and lay down on them, wrapped in the blanket. After a few hours the moon rose, just past full. It made everything bright black and white; very clear, like the clarity with which I had been dismissed.

  I did not sleep that night, but I did a little in the sun the next day. Powl did not come to the observatory. I considered following him down the hill and pleading with him at whatever place he spent the rest of his time, but my obedience had been at least this perfect—I had stayed where I was put and never followed him home. I did follow his bootprints in the snow, but as the hill road met the main road, the going got drier and there was nothing to be seen. I saw no one nor any trace of hearth smoke in the sky. I returned up the hill.

  That night was a little warmer, and the slush was harder to bear than the snow had been. I swept the stone step off with branches and curled up on it.

  I had considered the matter endlessly. I had eaten snow and listened to my stomach and decided that Powl was right about me after all. I had failed at everything, even at this unheard-of opportunity to become—what? I didn’t even know, but unheard-of opportunity nonetheless. I was ugly, undersized, and played marbles when I should be long grown up. Worse, I had returned by special dispensation from death—yes, from death, dramatic as that sounded—to do no more than to play marbles. It was now appropriate that I freeze to death. One more night should do it; I felt dizzy enough already.

  All this interior conversation was, of course, in Allec.

  Sometime during the middle of the night it occurred to me that it was poor manners to freeze on Powl’s front stoop like this. It would look like an insult directed toward him, and I felt no desire to insult him worse. I staggered up, but my feet would not work. I crawled on my knees over the thawing ground and dropped myself in the shadow of the trees.

  It was too wet to die there. It was unbearable. I turned back to the building, on my feet this time, and decided Powl would have to put up with finding me.

  I heard him coughing. I heard the key. “I don’t think I can carry you today, Nazhuret,” he said. In Allec. I was spread out on the step of his observatory. An insult to him. How embarrassing. “It was too wet to lie out there,” I said in exculpation and then remembered I was supposed to be dead. This stymied me. When Powl began to drag me in over the threshold, I was too confused and clumsy to help.

  No amount of sitting before the fire would warm me; I was lowered into a large tub, which was supposed to become part of the earth closet, and buckets of hot water were splashed over. First I roused and then I shivered and by the time I had ceased shivering, I was so sore in every muscle that I felt I had been tied to a post and beaten. This, I find, is the usual aftereffect of near-freezing, but despite my upbringing in snowy Velonya I had never been so cold before. I was put to bed pink-fleshed and wrinkled with water, feeling bright and curious and without a trace of intelligence.

  So the autumn produced my first death and the winter my second birth. All through this purgatory I thought in the Allec language, as Powl had taught me. I thought very simple, childlike things.

  That day Powl sat by my bed, on the single chair the observatory possessed. He looked gray and old, leaning against the chair’s spindly arm. Occasionally he coughed.

  “I was too sick to make it up the hill yesterday,” he said as I was sitting up, eating the very bad soup he had prepared for me. The stove was sending gouts of smoke out the kitchen door and up through the vent in the roof; Powl was never expert at its use.

  I said that I hoped he was better, and he merely sighed. He did not touch the soup himself. He sat wrapped in a large cloak with capes upon it, of gorgeous subdued coloring. Perhaps he was shivering. “It may be … that I was coming down with the chill the day previous. It is going around in the city, I hear.”

  The soup was greasy and lacking in salt, but I had finished it. I was thoroughly warm by now and got up pink and shining from the bed. My town clothes were dry again from being suspended near the stove, but so smoke-smirched that they would need a thorough fullering to be presentable. I threw both peasant shirts over my head instead, and Powl didn’t stop me.

  I shook out the bedclothes. “Then here. I don’t need it anymore, Powl. I’m very warm.”

  He shook his head, refusing the bed. “I think, Nazhuret, that perhaps my decisions of that day were colored by illness.”

  As I heard my teacher come so close to apologizing—to me—I began to shiver again. Having gone so far in mind to reconcile myself to disaster, failure, and death, I could go no farther. It was too much that the whole experience might have been simply a mistake. Powl’s error. My misery and cold simply my teacher’s feverish blunder.

  I denied it. I told him I deserved every word and worse. That I only wanted the opportunity to prove I had learned from it. I fixed the stove, added salt to the soup, and put on a hot stone to warm Powl’s feet for him. He gave me one sad glance and did not bring up the matter again.

  That evening he was much better. That night, when I was alone, the fever descended on me and Powl found me sweating and babbling in Allec the next morning.

  I was very sick for two weeks, and for two weeks he slept on wool batts beside my bed.

  It was haying season, was it not, when I sent my last missive to you, sir? I remember the envelope was thick enough to chink a good-size hole in a stone wall.

  All these walls are wood, and the wet wind is blowing through them now. I am using two stones, a faultily ground lens, and the hilt of an old throwing dagger to hold the paper down, and what drops I flick from the pen travel westerly before hitting back into the inkwell.

  In the distance I see the shapes of men tilted against the rain and wind, their great hat brims sodden and heavy. This ought to be the oat harvest, and I ought to help. B
ut in fact there is nothing more useful to do than go watch the rain beat the ripe grain flat, and the peasants can do that without my assistance.

  Yesterday evening I was at the local hostelry, bargaining labor against a barrel of summer’s ale, and I was forced to step on three physical quarrels aborning. From my own experience I know that tavern fights in autumn are inauspicious omens, like thick hair growing on the horses. It is only September, too.

  I can ask no better way to fill these sullen days than with this history. Let me clear autumn from my soul and push the inevitable winter to one side, for in my narrative now the nineteen-year-old Nazhuret has survived one autumn and one winter in his peculiar, enforced hermitage.

  I will stare at the glass of the rainy window for a minute and gather memories in place of oats.

  Beginning in early spring the weather cleared, and my daily study of glass and of star maps suddenly proved itself. I spent half my days asleep and half my nights adding to Adlar’s charts of the Northern Hemisphere.

  I took to stargazing as I had earlier to marbles, with a solitary, intricate passion. I had good eyes, even for my age, and the old astronomer’s equipment was of the best. Coming to the science with no background at all, I did not have the handicaps of the constellation pictures between myself and the twinkles I saw in the lens. Borlad the Red Eye, of mythological fame, was of no more celestial importance through the lens than the pale bluish dot I called the Midnight Candle and that Powl cataloged as 1904D. (I did not know what the “D” stood for.) The various colorations of the stars intrigued me; why some should be distinctly red and others flickering blue while most were so chaste a silver…

  I remembered how when serving in the horse-ménage at school, I was taught to heat the coal forge until the flame, viewed from the side, was blue and the shoes heated to dull cherry. I asked Powl whether the colors of the stars could have anything to do with their heat (I was not so ignorant as not to know the stars were hot), and he had no answer for me.

  I also tracked the four planets through their orbits with the same scrupulous, star fancier’s care. It had been done already by Adlar and years earlier on other, smaller instruments, but I seemed to feel the great bodies needed my own verification before they could be quite predictable.

  Also this spring I studied animal movement, spying on the hunting badgers through the frost. Powl stepped up my program of martial exercise, not so much because he seemed to think it an important study but because it was springtime and the sweat was appropriate. He took to jumping out at me from hidden places both at home and in the neighboring woods. I found this habit of his very irritating and for a while it destroyed my serenity completely as I saw my enemy behind every tree and under each shadow. Once I remember, in a brake of dead ferns, spinning at some intimation of assault and punching a two-point buck deer between the eyes.

  I hurt my hand, but I knocked the creature cold.

  Sometime while I was so occupied, perhaps as the narcissi were blooming on the acid mulch of the forest floor, Velonya declared war against the Falink Islands, in retaliation for their multiplying raids against our coast. Also at this time King Ethelbhel died, some said after hearing of the destruction of the flagship test completely within sight of the city of Vestinglon. Of the passage of both these events I was ignorant for over a year.

  In these years half my study was stillness, but the complementary half was movement. I cannot teach or even describe the art of movement to you, sir, though I have sat here on a hard seat for the better part of an hour, ruining good paper in the effort. At Sordaling I was taught, “The world strikes back against every blow, and strikes exactly as hard as the blow delivered,” but that is not the art of movement but only the science of it; the art I learned from the sly feet and clever elbows of my teacher, Powl. This was also how I learned much about the grass, for sometimes it was more inviting to lie flat and investigate the ragged croppings of the deer than to get up and be knocked down again.

  If I give the impression that Powl taught me personal combat by beating me repeatedly, I do him wrong. He disapproved of such teaching, and knocked me down not out of punishment but by way of illustration. Unfortunately, there was so very much to illustrate. By the second year of my instruction I had been rolled over him, thrown under him, tripped, eluded, and simply lost so many dozens of times that upside down was as natural to me as walking. I began to move like a baby monkey, which was perhaps appropriate to my stature and face.

  I was also as owlish as a baby monkey, from long unsociability, and in certain things as timid as I imagine a baby monkey to be.

  At this time we were speaking in a language the source and name of which I was not told It was highly inflected and long in the vowels, with unpredictable diphthong combinations. Powl said it would someday be an important tongue to me and that its power to influence human thought was almost magical. (Almost magical is as close as that old magician ever admitted.)

  I will always think of this as a lonely language, partly because I was so alone when it made up my days.

  As summer ripened and I graduated from mirrors to prisms and spherical lens grinding and from sword dances to swordplay, Powl spent less time at the observatory: from morning to noon, usually, unless a clear night without moon tempted him to stay over. He also was more cheerful than he had been, that look of appraising worry removed from his oval face. He had lost his incipient plumpness and was more dapper than ever.

  I thought perhaps he had taken a new mistress in that place he went to and came from every day, and I almost followed him to see. Almost. I had no hope of escaping unobserved.

  I wondered if our eccentric, metaphysical undertaking (he had taught me the word “metaphysical,” along with many others equally impressive) had lost savor for him and he was now using me for the sake of his own regular workouts only. I wondered, as I went through my day’s schedule of stove, study, combat, delicate optical equipment, brick-beholding, stove again, dinner, wood-gathering, and laundry, whether I still was the Nazhuret returned from the dead or an unpaid servant of less than average mentality.

  I felt a fool, and I felt totally in the power of Powl.

  Who was he? I had always wondered what history was hidden behind the simple syllable, that very common name. Though in the beginning I had considered him too polite (and too tastefully dressed) to be of higher class than gentry, in this year his natural arrogance had time to shine through the overlay, and I was firmly convinced my teacher was of noble or royal birth. His scorn of anything smacking of birth privilege only gave evidence toward this, for no one can be as contemptuous of the aristocracy as an aristocrat.

  Perhaps I thought this way merely to maintain my own self-respect. If I were to be as thoroughly bested by anyone as I was daily bested by Powl, let him be an opponent of the very highest rank. Let him be a baron, a viscount, an earl …

  (At this time I had no politics and fair manners. I still have no acceptable politics, but my king knows I have no manners either and can be equally abrupt to the gold cloak and the woolly shirt. Now I don’t care who knocks me down.)

  Either Powl had an income enough to support his high dress and moderate appetite as well as my enormous appetite and rough weave, or we were supporting us both on the lenses I made. I had no experience with the standard of lens grinding in the city, but I suspected my wares wouldn’t run to tailored shoulders with gold piping, or three-inch lacquered heels.

  A burgher might easily have supported me as I was, but what burgher would show so little interest in his business as to spend half his waking hours as Powl did? And how would a Sordaling burgher come to be far and away the best man in hand-to-hand combat I had ever encountered, or the smoothest saber fencer, deadly with the Felink tribesman’s dowhee (which resembles a hedge trimmer remarkably), and a rapacious scholar besides?

  And lastly, what man of any rank could spend so long in communion with another as Powl did with me—to give so much in instruction and so little of himself?

/>   I would go, in the afternoons, along the paths of the woods toward where people lived. The observatory was not in a complete wilderness, certainly; it was only a few hours’ walk from the city. There were two households and one cemetery in easy reach. I would prowl the frozen forest mulch in rag-wrapped feet or slog amid the thaw in my clogs until I found myself close enough to a human residence to spy easily, and then I would squat down and peer like an owl.

  One place belonged to a turner, and when the weather was passable he would haul his lathe outside and cut his chair legs in the sunshine. I found this activity very entertaining, much like lens grinding and much different. He tied and piled his product under the steep eaves of the house, like cordwood, and once a week a van of one heavy horse came along the road and hauled it all away.

  The turner made only one style of leg. I know, for in dry times under the full moon I stole in and examined it closely. It was a leg of three large swellings and three small ones, with a knob for the foot and a square area in the middle for the supporting dowels.

  The turner lived alone. He moved oddly on his own legs, like a man in pain.

  The other household was larger and contained a market gardener and his family. There was much more happening here: boys and girls chopping sticks, women hanging linen and wool on the line, the gardener himself bobbing in his fields like a log in fast water. Stiff. All of them stiff. But there was a dog at the house as well, a hairy dog of the loud and incorruptible kind, and so my visits were more covert.

  One wet afternoon I met the wife in the woods. She was leaning against the bole of a tree, with a sack and a handful of acorns. Her cheeks were weather-red and her headscarf was tied under her chin, giving an impression of roundness to her face. From my direction she was hidden by the tree, so we came upon one another without warning.

  The acorns went up in the air and she cried out. “Who are you? How did you get here?” she asked me. I, equally startled, sprang back like a cat with its tail afire. I stuttered an apology, which she could not understand, as it was in a foreign language, tried again and came out with Allec, and then I ran and she ran, in opposite directions. Halfway back to the observatory, it came to me that they might put the dog on my track, so I diverted like a fox, soaking my feet in a stream much deeper than my clogs.