The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  When you turned back to her, you seemed very guarded. “I don’t think that at all,” you said, and a moment later I could see you were laughing.

  Your horses spontaneously widened the distance between you by two feet. Arlin’s mare flung up her head, white-eyed.

  This was not the first time I witnessed a display of sparks between you and Arlin, always with myself as object of contention. I’m not blind.

  I don’t believe there is a lack of affection between you. It’s not that. But your quarreling never fails to upset my equilibrium, and I fear I gave too strong a signal to Daffodil, who turned on his haunches until I was facing the road we had just traveled.

  A row of dots crested a rise not a mile behind us. “Horsemen,” I called, glad of the distraction. “A company of them. Coming south. Riding like military.”

  I have very good vision, both close and far (ironic, in a spectacles maker), and both of you squinted to verify what I had seen.

  “I have been gone for weeks,” you said. “Could it be things came to blows already?”

  Arlin now turned her squint from the horizon to you. “Did the king know what road you would be taking? If you found us. And if we went?”

  I had not taken my eyes from the apparitions, which were increasing, four abreast. “This is not blue and white,” I announced, and my voice cracked like an adolescent’s.

  “Then what?” It was Arlin who asked, “Is it a livery at all? Who else would ride in formation but soldiers?”

  “Black and yellow, like a bee,” I answered her.

  You cleared the dust from your throat. “I understand you, Nazhuret. But I find it hard to believe, with your connection to the king, that Leoue alone has been responsible for these attempts against you both. That he would move so openly…”

  Now there were six rows of horsemen visible on this side of the last hill. Six rows at four abreast. I didn’t know if more would follow. “Black and yellow,” I said again, and I pressed Daffodil between the others’ horses. “Ride,” I called in what I hoped was a commanding voice and I snagged the reins of your horse under its chin and took it with me. Forgive me that arrogance. I took only your horse, because in respect to these attacks that had come upon us, Arlin and I were of one mind.

  Our three horses were running, and my innards were sloshing with fear. Half of the fear was for the company that pursued us, and half for the liberty I had taken with my teacher’s horse. I expected to be launched from the saddle in some subtle manner and dragged unsubtly behind. Instead you leaned along the horse’s neck and shouted into my ear.

  “Enough, Nazhuret! Release me. I believe you.”

  I let go and let my horse run between the others on loose rein, while I looked again. There were eight lines of four horsemen, all in Leoue’s colors, with one lieutenant before them. Their horses averaged two hands taller than ours and they were coming at a controlled gallop. Our ponies could not outrun them. Your face was unreadable behind the kerchief and dust scarf, but you did not look Velonyan and you did not look afraid. “We have never fought together: the three of us. Have we?”

  “Yes, we have,” I answered, and Arlin added, “What about the cutthroats in Morquenie, my first year? And the Apek police cordon, that I’m not supposed to talk about?”

  Then, to my surprise, I saw you smile. It was not a Velonyan smile. “Those don’t count. Here the odds are ten to one. This will count. As you spoke, you were pulling at your saddlebag, and you had in your hands the gaudy Rezhmian bow, which you bent in the hole of the saddle pommel that is for that very purpose. “Let me relive the battle of Bologhini. This time on the winning side.”

  You prodded me with the end of the weapon. “Go on, you ugly little Red Whip. You go out on that side.”

  In another moment Arlin was pressing her black horse left and off the road, onto a sandy soil not designed for speed. I swung out right, and found that Daffodil’s round hooves and short legs were scarcely inconvenienced by the terrain. I saw that Arlin’s bow was already strung and I locked my own reins around the horn and did the same.

  Now we were drawing back toward the pursuit, back but wider, and through the cloud of dust they were raising, I saw the lieutenant raise his hand in a signal to slow them. The elegant, long-legged animals almost hit the earth in a pile; one did roll on his rider.

  The officer must have thought we had split off the road for escape, and were heading backward merely to confuse them. The officer had never done battle against the Naiish nomads. Along with half his men, he swarmed and floundered off the hard-packed road toward me.

  Was I within three hundred feet of them? I guessed the distance to the lieutenant as two hundred and fifty. A crankbow bolt split the sky toward me and fell skidding on the dirt some sixty feet away. This was a surprise, for the crankbow is not a usual weapon among the horse-soldiery of Velonya. It is used by siege artillery. Or by assassins. It has a range more than comparable to the Rezhmian reflexed bow, but having no feathering, it is not as accurate.

  I had only eight arrows, and did not dare waste them. Drawing to my chest in southern manner, I took aim for the lieutenant as though at a target and let fly. In the instant the string slipped my fingers, I realized I ought to have shot at his horse instead. I saw the man go down with red feathers sticking out the base of his throat, and I heard a roar, either from the men or in my ears.

  The next shot was more difficult, and while I rode and sweated, with the closest rider locked in the parallax of my eyes and arrow tip, a metal bolt slid over the earth before Daffodil’s hooves, close enough to make that stolid horse shy out. I finally shot the man’s horse in the throat, and felt worse about that than I had about the lieutenant.

  Through all this my pursuers had come closer and now I could see the worker of the crankbow, who had a metal dally on his heavy saddle, and who was presently cranking for another shot. His horse was being led by the rider at his left, and I had a moment’s opening, which I took.

  I hit the man imperfectly, driving the arrow through his bladder and into the saddle, pinning him grotesquely. This so sickened me I turned my horse and ran straight away from the pursuit, vomiting hugely over the side. I am sure the old animal had never been so scandalized by his rider, nor ever run so fast.

  When I could I turned again and shot twice. My first arrow hit a man, though he did not fall, but my second only scraped along a horse and made it rear.

  The pursuit had spread itself out behind me, with less than a dozen men mounted and three of these so bogged in soft sand that their horses were floundering. I could not see what had happened in the other wing of the battle, nor catch a glimpse of Arlin, nor of you.

  I could do harm with these tactics—massive harm—but I could not win, so I turned Daffodil to the middle of the line, where there was most empty air, and as I galloped in I shot at the man directly in front of me. My accuracy was going steadily down, for I hit him a glancing blow on the skull, but he dropped both his short pike and his reins to lift his hands to his blood-soaked face.

  From the left and right, men pressed their horses toward me. I saw blades catch the light and, without dropping my bow, I took my dowhee in my right hand. I made ’eights with it at either side of my horse’s neck, remembering every story I had ever heard about a swordsman cutting off his own horse’s head. Daffodil seemed to have heard the stories, too. He lowered his neck and kept his face immovably forward.

  The soldier at my left had a simple saber, but there was something unconventional about his appearance; I couldn’t say what. He tried to reach me, but the bloody-faced man was in the way. His uncontrolled horse was in my way also, and as Daffodil feinted left and right on his own to find our way through, from the right came a horse white with lather, and a mace descending upon my head.

  My dowhee is not made to take that sort of impact, but neither is my head. I raised my blade obliquely while my horse plunged forward, and the spiked iron weight scraped down the steel of the blade and the bone of the a
rm. I felt a great shock, not seeming to belong to my arm at all, and then I was through the line and galloping.

  Before me was a clutter of cavalry, disorganized, encircled by a white ghost and by a black shadow. At least eight men lay on bloody earth, only a few yards from the road. Someone was screaming in a horrifying manner. By the raucousness, I expect it was you. A sliver of red flew as I watched, and another soldier fell off his horse.

  I realized that I was only leading fresh opponents toward my people, and I swung right and south along the road again, hoping to take my pursuers with me. As I fled, I tried to draw the bow again, but my right arm had no strength in it. Glancing down, I saw a red stain of such size it astonished me, and it was growing momently. I would have to finish this left-handed, and with the dowhee only.

  Daffodil once again took the signal to turn with such alacrity I was almost thrown, and what I saw behind me came close to unseating my mind. The ten soldiers who had marked me for their own were far behind me and heading in the other direction. Toward Arlin and Powl, I thought, and I named various kinds of dung, animal and human, as I set back after them.

  There were my friends on their ponies, running as wild a circle as before, but there was no dark hub to their wheel. Their pursuers—their prey—had broken out and away, and by the force of their panic they were taking my own personal enemies away with them. Back up the empty road they went, this time without the military organization.

  But the road was not empty. Coming down from the hill was a donkey cart filled with baskets, led by a small human figure. The person was not a woman, for it wore no skirts, but that was all I could tell at this distance. I saw, through rising dust clouds, the mob of horsemen approach the donkey cart and converge upon it, and then I saw winks and flashes of steel. Though I was a thousand feet away, I began to shout against this. Futile noise, for as the horsemen rode away there was no human figure, but a blot upon the dry road and a donkey plunging, dragging a cart behind it onto the dry sand.

  This is all I remember of the battle. I am told I rode up to Arlin and asked her how she did. I am told I handed the reins of Daffodil into your hands. That I said the words “I did everything wrong,” and that I rode another few minutes until we could find a hidden place before I fainted.

  I am told all these things but they are not my memories.

  My next recall is of a crude strip of linen, onion-dyed, being dangled under my nose. I remember that you dropped it beside me, along with a jacket of dark fustian. “Here is your black and yellow, Nazhuret. I think the duke clothes his soldiers better than this.”

  With these words came a shock of burning pain down the outside of my right arm. It took me some while to separate the two stimuli. I looked down to find my arm wrapped in what had been a white undershirt, now torn into bandages and seeping brown and brown-red. It smelled of blood and mint and one of the more disgusting herbs. Powl, your medicine is always as much experiment as altruism. It worried me.

  “How badly—” I began, as you forestalled me. “The spines of the mace sliced along the muscles of your arm, from just above the wrist to halfway up your upper arm. If you are not careful of yourself for the next month, you will lose some use of that arm.”

  “I will see that he is careful,” said Arlin with some heat, but I had heard correctly.

  “You think the muscles will scar and shorten?”

  “Almost certainly,” you answered, and you kept your eyes on your hands, which you were rubbing clean with the rest of your fine linen shirt. “You must stretch it daily. Though… that may not help.”

  The pain was enormous, distracting, and I glanced from yourself to Arlin only to see fear and loss in her large eyes. Arlin always had an exalted idea of the value of my physical prowess; I hoped my own face did not reflect a similar anxiety.

  I tried to stand up, and sat down again, hard. I needed water, to build up the volume of my blood. I asked for it, and, to turn the subject of conversation, added, “So how do you explain the masquerade of our assailants? And, have we surely left them behind?”

  Your bland face grew more bland: a sign you had taken some offense. “Both Arlin and I are satisfied we hid our tracks sufficiently.”

  You taught us that art, and so I had to accept the reassurance.

  “And, as for the masquerade, I can think of a number of explanations.” When you sat down beside me I found I was looking at your rough shoes. A myriad of times I have been nose-to-laces with your footwear, usually because you knocked me down. It was astonishing to see those feet without good leather and gold-plated buckles.

  “They might have been mere brigands using a noble’s colors to confuse and intimidate their victims…”

  Arlin made a sound not quite contemptuous but dubious.

  “… or they might have been Leoue’s men, ordered to travel incognito, but attaching the duke’s colors so we might know who killed us.”

  “The duke his father would do that,” said Arlin, coming to rest at my other shoulder.

  “That would be illegal and dishonorable,” I said to her. I have a tendency to state the obvious. My excuse was exhaustion and loss of blood.

  “Or it might be that they represented the interests of a different party altogether, hoping—if we escaped—that the blame would rest at the obvious door. It could be that Leoue is not your enemy at all.”

  Arlin scratched her shiny black head. “What do you think, My Lord Earl?” she asked. Every once in a while she had to remind you of your bothersome worldly position. She never called me son-of-a-duke, however, or nephew of Rezhmia. Arlin does not tease me often.

  You pursed your lips and stared at the pale sky. “From that boy I would have expected a different show of resentment. Cruel but not covert. He seems really to be as bluff and honest as his father seemed to be.”

  Arlin sighed, took my injured hand in hers, and sighted down my arm as though it were a doubtful arrow. “It took us many years to discover the other face of the old duke. Some people still cannot believe.”

  Feeling in that arm was growing: not a pleasant thing. “What shall we do about it?” I asked, looking neither at Arlin nor at you, but you answered first. “Do nothing about it,” you said to us. “Stop thinking about it. Go to Rezhmia.”

  Arlin put my arm down on my lap. “Like this? The way he is?”

  I told her I could ride, not knowing whether it was true or not, and you replied heatedly “Yes, like he is, and yes, like you are, My Lady Charlan Bannering, who have had a miscarriage some seven days ago and traveled hard since then.”

  We were both quiet then, as was your intention. “We are breeding insanity in this land: a huge insanity. Neither of you has survived a war, and I cannot expect you to understand, but such as you are, in your present unready state I must send you south.”

  “To what purpose?” asked Arlin. She did not speak insolently.

  In reply you only asked another question. “Do either of you remember what inoculation is?”

  Arlin answered for both of us. “Yes. You described it as the process of exposing a body lightly to a disease so that it does not succumb to that disease more heavily. I have never understood it, though I know that fewer nurses die of the diseases they treat than one would expect. But how we—”

  “You and Nazhuret,” you interrupted her (and I think I have your words right). “I have made you both a little mad, over our years together. With this little madness I have inoculated the nation of Velonya, and I must also inoculate Rezhmia itself, in an attempt to avert the insanity worse than pestilence which man breeds up in himself.”

  These were no new expressions from our teacher: either to call your students madmen, or war insane. But I felt obliged to add, “Powl, if we’re a little mad, Arlin and I, it’s you yourself which are the source of all our madness. I don’t understand why you don’t go in our place.”

  Your smooth oval face went empty. You wove your neat fingers together and blinked several times at the dry turf. “You still
don’t understand me, my old friend. How to say it… ? I am myself a jackdaw of wisdom. I have been many places and carried away with me whatever tools the people used to add to their science, to their understanding. I have used these tools at my whim and inspiration, and what I created was you two. As different as a monkey and a cat, you are, and that must be some proof of the integrity of my work.”

  Arlin and I exchanged glances, with no doubt in our minds which of us was which animal.

  “But I myself remain Powl Inpres, Earl of Daraln, irritable and opinionated, forty-one years old with a career of many highs and lows and gifts primarily for politics and pedagogy. I am not very mad, myself. My own strength lies in argument. And in my sometimes odd acquaintanceship. Old alliances. Now, for Rudof’s sake, I must gather in outstanding debts.

  “And besides…” You slicked your hair back, smooth upon your smooth head, and concluded, “I have taken vows of loyalty in my time. To Velonya. That in itself invalidates me for this act.”

  We left you that midnight, under no moon, and we headed south. In the next large bit of this history you are not present, save in our minds.

  You always encouraged me in the use of Sordaling’s Royal Library, and I took that bit between my teeth, my teacher. I have wasted many hours reading memoirs when I should have been grinding lenses for food money. I know what characterizes a good history: it is a sense that the author had understanding of what passed under his eyes, and honesty in relaying it.

  My own understanding has always been odd-angled to the usual. I have lived through the heart of a cavalry encounter and gone away remembering only that the horses appeared angry and their riders did not. Last year, when a brilliant, idiot crow designed to steal the eyepiece out of my big telescope and left mess and irritation behind, I put out a dozen painted glass buttons around the instrument instead of a crow trap. It worked.

  So much for my understanding. Whether I am honest in my perceptions, you will have to judge. If I were to continue this memoir with the facts that Arlin and I rode through South Territory toward the border, under a dry wind and with no one accosting us, that would sound like the report of a businesslike scouting team. It offends my sense of truth; it is a lie made up of facts.