The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  I felt her shrug. “No, but had the man really understood my nature, he’d have strangled me at birth. I merely ran away.” The horse trotted on a few paces before she spoke again. “I was almost fifteen. You, Zhurrie, were … partly … the reason.”

  “I was!” I sat up straighter, and the shifting of weight slowed the mare to a walk, from which Arlin pressed her on again.

  “Father always had ignored my existence, until some piece of household garbage hinted I had a lover in the city. His reaction was what one might expect. Luckily the informer did not also give a name.”

  It took a few moments for me to understand that the lover so indicated was myself, at age twelve or thirteen. “It is too bad he didn’t find out my name, for I could have convinced him how innocent—”

  She made a gesture toward looking over her shoulder but didn’t meet my eyes. “You would have had no opportunity. He would merely have sent rowdies to catch you in an alley and geld you. But I never told.”

  “I am very grateful. Did he—beat you?”

  Again her answer came slowly. “That was a long time ago, Nazhuret. I spent six months fuming and six months waiting for my imprisonment to relax, and when that failed, I spent a year and more stealing men’s clothes from visitors—anything that might come in handy. Anything that might fit. These were my first lessons in stealing. After I had escaped I studied theft in earnest.”

  With another person, that phrase might have meant only that she began to steal regularly. With Arlin, I’m sure it meant she studied the matter.

  “You did not think to get word to me? I could have been some help.”

  This time she did turn all the way around. “Nazhuret, you could only have ruined yourself and your career.”

  Her magnanimity astonished me, and the irony of the situation made me chuckle. I held my stinking peasant shirt out from my body. “Yet here I am, old comrade. Ruined anyway.” Arlin didn’t respond to my laughter, and I could not read the expression in her face. I said no more, for she had given me much to think on.

  The afternoon air was warm, and my mistreated body loosened considerably. When we had stopped for luncheon and I went off to excrete, I noticed that my urine had gone the color of varnish. It burned and stank. I have seen this since, accompanying too hard use of the body, but at the time it seemed to reflect the state of my mind, suspended between lust and despair.

  That afternoon I began to talk, and soon I was telling Arlin the whole history of my interaction with the king, including the surveying lens. Her attitude toward my experiment was more realistic than the king’s, and she called it a complicated way to validate the usual legal compromise.

  Concerning my unwitting betrayal of my teacher, she was less cynical. The “redhead,” she said, was thoroughly spoiled and would take all things except obsequiousness as offense.

  I remembered what impudence the king had taken from my mouth, and kept that mouth shut. All kings were spoiled, she added, not just the Velonyan one, and after a hundred percussive hoofbeats, she continued, “You cannot rely on the justice of kings, Nazhuret. Or that of nobles.”

  I admitted that I had heard such sentiments before, and from a trustworthy source.

  “In fact,” she said, as the mare broke into a spontaneous canter, “you cannot rely on the justice of men. There is a strong smell of the stoat in most of them.”

  Still I don’t know whether she meant the sex or the race. I remembered my criminal desire of the morning and I wondered about the courtship behavior of the common stoat. I also slipped my chin off Arlin’s shoulder.

  “Duke of Leoue, you said?” Once again Arlin glanced back at me. “It was he who gave you this … brief history? Then, Nazhuret, you can believe the opposite of what was said, for the man is your wholehearted enemy.”

  I answered that I knew that and that the duke hadn’t pretended otherwise, but that a man might dislike Zhurrie of Sordaling and still not be a hopeless liar.

  The horse clopped on, and Arlin was silent for some time. The air was filled with birdsong, and my mind drifted among illicit ideas. It seemed to me that she must know my mood, and the fact was that she had continued to allow me behind her on the horse, though by now time and sunshine had suppled my limbs and I could run again. Instead I rode locked in this embrace: a forced embrace, but a real one. Of the flesh.

  Arlin must have known; she had been silent so long. It must have been that she was waiting for me to speak, and I was very willing to speak. Though she was daughter of a baron and I only a human accident, still an optician makes steadier wages than a card cheat. We were good enough friends that if she couldn’t return my love, at least she would not throw me off the horse and ride screaming away.

  I plumbed my feelings. I rehearsed a declaration. I was considering whether it would be appropriate to open the matter with a chaste kiss (or a kiss, at any rate), when Arlin spoke out. “It won’t wash!” she stated. I thought my mind had been read and flushed to the ears.

  “I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about this thing with the king and your Daraln and the duke, and it doesn’t ring true.”

  The sensation was that of having ice water thrown into one’s face. I had to shake my head and blink. “I would be glad to find it I was in error, my friend, but—”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that Rudof isn’t homicidally inclined toward the earl. Rudof is one of those who makes a good commander but a dangerous friend. His father was much worse. But he wouldn’t just hear news of Daraln for the first time in years and decide to do him in. The flames must have been fanned.”

  I said nothing. Arlin’s habit of referring to important people by their first name alone always took me aback. So did her easy analysis of the quirks of those in power. We behaved with more manners in the military school.

  “And all this talk about Eydl, almost thirty years ago. Why?” I thought of what I knew of Eydl, Duke of Norwess, which consisted of a hand-tinted print in the Sordaling library used to illustrate contemporary body armor … and, of course, what the field marshal had said to me. “I know almost nothing of him. Arlin,” I said.

  She snorted and shifted her seat on the mare, but it sparked no response in me; my lubricity had been thoroughly quelled.

  “He went South on the king’s order without a hope in hell of success,” said Arlin. “He was captured by the Rezhmians. Daraln went to the fortress city unarmed and bargained for his return. The Sanaur, in a fit of generosity, released the man without recompense, and he came home, hauling behind him a Rezhmian wife and a Rezhmian warrior-poet.”

  “Concubines,” Leoue said to me. Legal marriage is in the eye of the beholder. Powl never had mentioned this journey of ransom. There was so much he had never mentioned.

  I said, “A warrior-poet? What is that? It is a new category to me. What Velonyan general would latch on to a poet of any sort?”

  Arlin laughed. “A general made like you, my true knight. You would be sure to pick up a poet. Or an orphan. Or a stray wolf. But call the foreigner a philosopher instead of a poet, if you want. In the schemes of the South, there is little difference. Or call him a magician. Whatever he was, he was high-born, and very well regarded by Norwess and Daraln.”

  “How do you know?”

  Now Arlin sighed, and it was such a sorrowful sigh, I found I was giving her a hug of comfort.

  “I know because they came to visit: Norwess and his tame poet. It was in the time before my father became quite the viper he is. I was four, and I was allowed to sit on the foreigner’s knee and babble for him. Now that I reflect on the matter, father probably had been asked to produce a child for entertainment, as he had nothing himself to offer an educated guest. The Rezhmian, in turn, tried out his careful Velonyan on me. Very courtly. Outlandish grammar.

  “My nurse told me he had been a deadly fighter among his own people, but he certainly gave no indications of ferocity at the table. I think my nurse was enamored of him.”

  “Of a Rezhmian courtier?�
�� I had to laugh. “Your old nurse must have been taller than the man by six inches.”

  “As I am taller than you by a few inches, Nazhuret? I can’t deny it.

  “You know, I don’t remember the man’s name. Children forget at random, I think.” She sighed once again. “I do remember that he looked like you, Zhurrie. Much like you, even to the blue eyes, though his hair was black. Perhaps that was why I sought you out so many years ago.”

  At that I sat up. “You sought me out, Arlin? As I remember, I found you running dirty-faced by the swan boats one summer.”

  She stiffened, but not in anger. A crow of laughter almost spooked the gray mare. “And you thought it an accident, you poor sod? It was the work of weeks, to arrange my escapes when you were weren’t changing beds, or drilling, or scraping rust off stupid boys’ ironwear …” Her voice trailed off.

  “I always remembered that man’s kindness. The poet’s.”

  “More important than a name. What became of him, Arlin?”

  Now the rider’s stiffness had a colder quality. “Two years after his visit, he died, with much vomiting and hemorrhage, I am told. My nurse wept openly, so perhaps there had been more there than worship at a distance. The December after that, Norwess’s Rezhmian lady died, too, and similarly. It was spread about that they had not the sturdiness of constitution to bear our six months of snow. I myself have never seen a man die of cold with exactly those symptoms. Ground glass in the food, now—”

  “Glass!” I winced, both because glass had become my teacher and friend and because I knew from experience what glass shavings did to the skin.

  “Yes, glass. For what my conclusions are worth. Don’t repeat them lest I pass on in the same manner, old comrade.”

  We rode in silence for a while, until Arlin cleared her throat and spoke again. “Norwess lasted another few years, and then he was accused of treason, convicted and killed in the very original way our government uses in such cases, and Powl, Earl of Daraln, left public life.”

  Now her cold voice heated. “When Eydl was arrested, he had lived in retirement for five years. What opportunity had he to commit treason?”

  I shrugged, and in our close proximity that gesture was a sort of caress. “What I am more concerned with is that Powl, who had delivered him from the fortress city, allowed his friend to die here. Couldn’t it be that he tried to defend him in court, too?”

  Arlin glanced out of the corner of her large, dark eye. “What court? You have been brought up in a righteous school, Zhurrie. But it could be that he did defend Norwess. How would I know what happens inside the palaces of Vestinglon?”

  To my amazement, Arlin leaned back and gave me a kiss. Lip to lip, unhurried, and filled with sweetness. When it was done, we were both pink and gasping. She gave her attention back to the road.

  “In lieu of heirs of Norwess’s body—for none had the temerity to come forward to declare themselves—Baron Leoue inherited most of Norwess,” said Arlin, and her words were dry. That quickly she could shift, from honey sweet to bitter irony.

  I myself was breathing hard for half an hour.

  This was not the way I had traveled in the autumn, going south. It was hillier, wetter, with a heavier growth of birch and willow. The pounded road itself was more narrow and tended to be lost among the tree boles. We saw no people, though a few crofter cottages stood shuttered not far from the shoulder. The entire landscape reminded me of the low mountains at the southwestern coast of Satt, and of Velonya, for that matter.

  I ventured to say, “I thought we’d have caught up with them by now, Arlin. Slow as the coaches go. In fact, I thought we’d be in Grobebh at noon.” I laughed, almost without pain. “Remember: This whole affair began in Grobebh, with you lauding the progress of the king. If you had not kept quiet about the … dog and I about the red trey …”

  With no expression in her voice she answered, “Then Rudof would have a little red arrow sticking out of his big red head. He forgets these things quickly, doesn’t he?”

  I didn’t know what to say in turn, for my anger at King Rudof was almost unslakable, yet I knew how acutely he did remember his debt to me. “Well, that would have eliminated the threat to my teacher, at any rate,” seemed both accurate and not too treasonous a statement.

  But Arlin shook her head, tickling my nose with glossy black hair and sending odors of woodsmoke and crushed grass through me. “How eliminated the threat, when Leoue is regent of Rudof’s little baby? The death of the king would be the ruination of many others.”

  I had seen no evidence that the field marshal was the malignant force Arlin thought him. Bigoted he was, but so was most of Velonya, and almost all of Sordaling Military School. I knew the trouble such men caused; none better. I also knew their unexpected kindnesses, and their unshakable loyalty.

  “What has the field marshal done to disturb you personally? You’ve the kind of Old Velonyan looks that they worship. The king calls him his ‘bullmastiff.’ How is it that you have become so set against him? Was it cards?”

  Arlin’s glance showed me my place very clearly, and still I could not leave the subject be. “Perhaps he is … a friend of your … of Howdl? I could understand that.”

  She groaned, cracked her back, and straightened again. Her narrow, black eyebrows crawled upward, and I felt my pretensions effectively depressed. “Nazhuret,” she said in that drawling, ironic way of hers (so like Powl’s drawling, ironic way), “I have seen the Duke of Leoue spit upon beauty itself, and I have heard him spread dirty rumors to slander the innocent.”

  I swayed in my seat “Three Gods, Arlin! You speak like someone’s nanny,” I had not known she had that streak of prudery in her, behind the marked cards and the spinning knives. I stifled a grin and resolved to be more careful of my language in the future.

  I tried to imagine the bearlike field marshal in back-of-the-hand gossip, and I failed. “Comrade, what in this sorrowing world is so innocent that it can be hurt by an old soldier’s slander?” She didn’t answer, but I wouldn’t let it rest.

  “This side of our field marshal I haven’t seen! Too bad, too, for he sounds more entertaining in your eyes.” Arlin snorted and rubbed her hand under her nose. “You saw. Likely you weren’t paying attention.”

  Being, as she was, the living proof of my failure to act as a clear lens of all around me, she could have said nothing to shut my mouth as well.

  The afternoon shadows spread. The air was damp between the boles of the willows and it carried the flavors of last year’s leaves and this year’s coming fungus. Such soft airs dredge up memories, and when one is weary and unhappy, there is little to defend one.

  I should say there was little to defend me, for the odors of the composting earth and the sweating horse and the Arlin’s sweat and my own had linked themselves with the quarreling of tiny birds, newly returned north from their winter vacations in Falink, and put me back to the year I had spent in heavy dudes in stables. It was during the first time my tuition stopped, and it had been the most miserable time in my life, until it was eclipsed by the day Powl threw me out into the snow.

  I dragged through those days of heavy labor again, feeling the same failure of my life, the same fear of the future. Then my only mirror had been buckets of water, and I had carried enough mirrors from the pump to the stalls, the water distorting my already odd features. Then I often sought to find the source of my inadequacies in my face, and surely I had not changed, except that I now had the sophistication to look to my racial mixture as explanation for my difficulties. It was the same idea.

  But as I stared into this particular bucket (or thought I did), the face that rippled back was not that of Nazhuret. It had my hair, and the eyes blinked back at my own surprise, but it was a regular Old Velonyan I saw, horse-faced, heavy-jawed. He reminded me of someone.

  He reminded me of the man—God the Father—whose baby had disappeared into my shirt, leaving a beautiful, sunburst piss stain that would not come out.

&nb
sp; I laughed in the sudden knowledge that I had been asleep and dreaming, and the image wavered and changed. Because I had been sleeping with my eyes open, my head on Arlin’s shoulder, I saw that my mirror had been the rounded, ornate guard of her rapier, which accounted for all the length and for the sturdy chin.

  I lifted my head. To my chagrin I had actually drooled on Arlin’s velvet shoulder. The weight of my head must have been considerable, with the horse jogging beneath us.

  “Sleep has put you in a better mood,” she said. “What were you laughing about?”

  The confusion of my dream was exacerbated by waking in a place I had never seen before. It was a village set among trees along the slope of a hill. Every house was of timber, and all looked raw-new. There was a palisade of stakes, half built and already broken in places, the rest of the circle made up with rough balls of thorn tied in place. There were a half dozen wagons being loaded at the side of the road; none of them was an ox-wagon, but the smaller, more expensive horse pairs. People of all village types were running from place to place, dirtying their shoes in the mud of new construction, splashing through the streams that undercut the palisade and ran unchecked across the mucky road. The sounds of water and voices were everywhere.

  “This isn’t Grobebh.” I stated the obvious. “This isn’t anywhere near Grobebh.”

  “No,” answered Arlin, and she cracked her neck with the heel of her hand on her chin, first left, then right, “We are far to the west of Grobebh, and a distance north. This is Rudofdaff, though Rudof hasn’t shown much interest in it. A new settlement. It is here where the dragon is.

  “Slide off now,” she said, leaning back to me. “If you can, after all this riding.”

  I could stand, though the immobility of the ride had begun to freeze my muscles again. Arlin came down beside me.

  It took a moment for this all to sink in, and in that moment my anger sparked and glowed and began to burn.