The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  My ride through South was an awkward exercise, with an arm swollen as soft as a calf’s-foot jelly, smarting each time my yellow horse broke into a trot. Arlin was gray-weary and concerned for my sake. (Her concern tends to exhibit itself as irritability.) We were not two troopers on extended foray, we were old lovers, each wounded in heart and in body, and we did not know where we were going.

  We had money—rare commodity for either of us—but this far south there was no store in which to spend it. Most of the natives here spoke Rayzhia and lived by driving small flocks of goats or smaller herds of cattle over large stretches of poor grass. I had lived among people like these more than once; they trusted neither Velonya nor Rezhmia, and especially would not trust the yellow Velonyan stubble of beard on my otherwise Rezhmian face. We camped alone, burning dried cattle manure when we dared have a fire at all.

  I have never learned the standard mannerisms of being a husband in fact. I had no way to reassure Arlin, to make her accept the loss of the baby and forget the present risk. I have not the gift of lying bold-faced. I could not speak confidently about our absurd pilgrimage, nor say that I believed war would recede again, like clouds when the wind changes. She would not have believed me, anyway.

  What I could do was to keep us under one blanket, Arlin and me, to pretend to sleep (by way of example), and when that became unendurable, to spend the black hours wrapped in a horse blanket, sitting in the belly of the wolf.

  I am sure she pretended to sleep at least as many hours as I did: tiny, difficult gift to each other.

  There is an official boundary between South Territory and the nation of Rezhmia, and there are numerous markers of the obelisk variety, placed at intervals of a few miles, so in these treeless plains they ought to be visible one from another. They are not visible because though they were once stood up, none of them are still standing. The Naiish tribes rope them, knock them over, and drag them by a dozen saddle horns apiece. It is the largest communal effort in which they commonly engage.

  These nomad tribes mark the real boundary between Velonya and Rezhmia: a boundary as wide as the sea of dry grass that fosters the pony riders. They live off each other, off the less martial herders northeast and southwest of them, and off their own herds of cattle. They are as poor as any starveling in Velonya and prouder than our most impossible nobles.

  It was our intent, insofar as we had an intent, to travel the width of this territory without encountering the herders. Though my arm improved daily, and Arlin gathered her strength—from where I don’t know, from the black night as likely as anything—we were in no shape to survive an encounter with them.

  On a very windy morning we were dived over by a pair of plains eagles, and I recalled what an old woman had told me in the inn called the Yellow Coach, five years before: that the huge birds were the scouts of Naiish magicians, or perhaps their other shapes.

  Eagles, these creatures are called, though by shape and by their naked necks they are certainly more closely related to vultures. They eat aged meat when they can get it, and living meat when that is more convenient. Their wings are oblong and the feathers spread like the fingers of a hand, and the span of them is twice that of my own arms. These creatures glided from behind us; I heard a whisper in the air, and at the same moment I saw an angelic shape descend over Arlin, who was leading. The bird was white and silver and tipped with that elusive blue that is found only on birds’ feathers and fish scales. The red, ropelike head and neck were not visible.

  The shadow of its body darkened over her black mare, and the mare flung herself out of that darkness, plunging three or four steps before Arlin brought her head in. As I was watching, a breath of coolness came over my own head and I reacted without thought, to block and grip the descending claw.

  I heard a ruffle of feathers and my fingers closed upon what seemed a warm bar of metal, sharp-tipped. My yellow horse reacted in his own manner, which was to come to a sudden stop, and I felt myself rising out of the saddle.

  Though I am not a large man, I am not especially light either, I gaped up in astonishment at the bird large enough to carry a man away and saw among the angelic feathers, that red, grotesque, flabby snake-head, seemingly unconnected to the beautiful body and the iron claw, strike down at me. I had grabbed the thumb-claw of the bird with my right hand, which is my hand of instinct, but was not now my strongest. It was my left hand that came up to fend off that beak the size and shape of a cow’s horn, and next I had the thing around its neck. I felt my horse disappear from me and I was rising, first five, then ten feet above the grass, the huge wings beating the dust up on each side of my head.

  Arlin was calling to me to drop the thing, but I could not see how to drop it without being dropped by it, and I trusted that with its head trapped among its toes, it would hesitate to rise far.

  This was clearly one more peculiarity within my peculiar destiny, Powl, or at least my destiny to find peculiarities. Grabbing the attacking arm is what I have been trained to do all my life. In most situations, it is the safest path. I was very fortunate the thing was too flustered at being trapped this way to think about its other claw, which could have taken either of my arms off at the elbow.

  The ground unrolled beneath us. We were rising up a hill, keeping a fairly constant elevation, and at the top of the prominence the creature sank slowly until I was on my feet and supporting its great fanning body. On the other side of the hill at least one hundred and thirty mounted nomads were pulling their ponies to a stop and staring at the sight. In another moment Arlin had ridden up beside me. She regarded the nomads without expression, pulled the bird’s head from my grip, and stuck a tiny dagger into the base of its skull. With Arlin on her black mare and myself holding the dead bird by one foot, we waited.

  Their forms and faces looked alike to my eyes—and my eyes are half Rezhmian. They were all short, gaunt, black-headed, with faces like squares stood on one comer. They do not indulge in marks of office, these wild men, though each band has its magician and each has its chief. The chief bides until he is supplanted, but the magician remains through his life.

  It is common knowledge that each of these men wears silk against his skin, a silk finely enough woven to cloak an arrow as it penetrates the skin, so that the arrow might be removed intact and the man survive. The image of silken-clad warriors thus engendered is very misleading, for I have seen the silk undergarments of the Naiish, my king, and they are crusted, malodorous, and largely rotted out at the armpits. What one sees upon the Naiish is homespun, sometimes the hair of goats, woven on portable looms by the men in winter shelter. There is very much hardship and very little color about the Naiish, though I have seen the little girls gather meadow flowers in the spring.

  I was not thinking these things while I waited for the nomads to sort themselves out. I was thinking that the Naiish do not take captives because they consider no one but their own small tribe to be human. I was thinking that our horses were far from fresh, even could I reach mine. I was trying for some argument by which I could convince Arlin to leave me, since she could at least have the satisfaction of trying to escape, and I was finding none worth uttering. I was trying as best I could to face my old colleague, death.

  Out of the milling mob of ponies, brown or dun, came one rider on a dun pony, dressed in brown. His face was dusty, his eyes opaque. He seemed oddly familiar—he reminded me of an old gentleman who had frequented the Yellow Coach when I was peacekeeper, five years ago. That one would visit us on the coldest days of winter, drink himself unconscious, and be dragged before the embers for the night. In the morning he would pay his shot most peacefully, and if the weather had turned, walk away. I had to remind myself forcibly that this was no old dog I was facing, but a red wolf, and a man-eater.

  His horse climbed until he faced me evenly, he on horseback and I on my short legs, and then he stopped. He unfolded his left hand to me, and upon it was a glove, every finger of which was tipped in one of the wing feathers of the eagle, and t
he base of which was sparkling with bird-feather blue.

  I had killed their tribe totem.

  The magician leaned forward from his pony and examined the beautiful body. “You have conquered the male,” he said, and had we not been traveling through South Territory for these few weeks, I would not have understood his accent. “The female is larger and more fierce.”

  Arlin had not descended from her horse. She was much more at home in the saddle than I. She rose three feet above the Naiish magician, only two of those feet being due to the hill, and she pointed to the sky. “Then bring her back to us, magician,” she said, her gravelly public voice speaking perfect, courtly Rezhmian, “and I will allow her to join her mate.”

  I looked up and the magician joined me. Above us, in wide circles and high up, rode the plains eagle that had played with Arlin. It was crying out in its improbable, honking voice.

  The magician snapped his feather glove shut with a sound like the birds’ wings. “I like her where she is,” he said, and his eyes shone with dry intelligence. He put his glance back on me.

  “What can you do, snowman, besides this?” He pointed with his naked hand to the corpse.

  To the Naiish, the term “snowman” is a filthy insult. I cannot take it so, having made many satisfying snowmen in the practice fields of my youth. In actuality it only means yellow-head. I answered that I could do whatever was needed. I did not think humility would endear me to him.

  He rocked back and forth on his pony, which was trained to weight in the Rezhmian fashion and so rocked with him. “Can you die, if that is necessary?” he asked.

  I noticed that the mob of horsemen had edged halfway up the hill and that many of them were missing. I judged that the hill was surrounded by now. The riders beneath me did not have their bows drawn, or even strung. Their swords, axes, or lances were in their hands. They had a catholic armory. I felt the pressure of Arlin’s leg against my shoulder, and that of her mare behind it.

  “All men die,” I answered. “And all things.”

  The magician smiled widely, as a nasty instructor will when a student misses a question. “Ah no, snowman. Most of them are only killed. To die takes strength.”

  I thought the riders were advancing. I made the obvious challenge, the only that held any hope. “I will fight your chief,” I shouted, and since Arlin had ruined our chances of being taken for local—not that it mattered—I also used courtly Rezhmian, which contains some very insulting intonations.

  “I will challenge him for our lives.”

  The nasty instructor smiled more broadly. “Our chief has neither desire nor necessity to fight you. Nor does he want you to live.”

  I thought further. “I will fight any one of you or any number, for his life.” I pointed at my companion. It would do Arlin no good at all for these creatures to discover she is female. No good at all.

  Arlin shouted above me, “I will fight all of you together for his life.” They laughed at that, for all together was how they intended to take us, but she added, “And I prophesy that you will be a very thin band of riders, afterward. There will be too many cows for the number of you. Too many women.”

  At this the laughter stopped, for to wish a tribe “too many women” is a great curse, a great insult. Yet Arlin had not spoken it as insult, but as prophecy, and there was a halo of darkness around her that I could feel through the skin of my face.

  The riders themselves carried another kind of darkness, and with no weapons in my hands, I approached the line of them, and put myself before the pony of the man I guessed to be the hidden chief. “Chief of the Eagles, let me dance over the knives,” I said. “If you want me dead, and think me a snowman, let me do it for you. No snowman can survive the rope.”

  I said this because they believed it; I had heard it out of the mouths of southerners in my bartending days. No Velonyan can dance the slack rope which is tied to two horses. The knives I mentioned are set into the dirt below the dancer’s feet.

  No Velonyan has ever tried to dance the slack rope, just as no Rezhmian has any feeling for the bonfire dance. In this instance I was entirely the snowman they had named me, for even you never made me dance on a rope tied to horses. Only the Naiish have made that ordeal part of their rites, and most of the Naiish who choose to attempt the ordeal die also.

  I had guessed this man to be the chief by the way his eyes roved over his troop, like those of a herder upon his cattle. I was correct. “What would we get out of that, but wear upon our ropes and bent knives?” he said.

  “Amusement,” I answered him. “Plus knowing, if I fall, you will save the lives of a number of your troop, who otherwise will die trying to kill me.”

  This arrogance raised a chuckle among the riders, and the chief could not entirely ignore that. “And you, tentpole,” he called, turning his attention to Arlin. “What do you say about our dance?”

  I don’t know whether Arlin had any notion what the Naiish chief meant, but she has an unerring grasp of theater. “I am night, I am darkness,” she said, gravel-voiced, sitting black upon her black mare. “I am a plague upon you. But he…”—her long arm pointed down at me—“is King of the Dead.”

  The laughter died, leaving a moment’s utter silence, though my companion had merely named me aloud. The horses, following the instincts rather than the signals of their riders, began to back away from me. I saw in many faces a form of dread: that feeling which hits the bowels instead of the brain.

  I think it was the very triviality of my appearance that did it, with my hair like raw linen, only partially hidden under the three-cornered kerchief, my face, which was neither foreign nor familiar, and the litter of white feathers that stuck to my face and my hands. I tried to turn this moment to profit. “Let me dance above the knives,” I said again, this time loudly and publicly. “I am the only man living or in legend who has ever flown. I deserve it.”

  The old magician had led his pony behind me and I was pressed between hairy noses. I was ready to leap left or right, depending how the blade sang in the air.

  “But you did not fly far,” said the magician.

  “And we don’t want you to live,” said the chief.

  I was beginning to feel dizzy with desperation, which was undoubtedly what they wanted me to feel. I called to my aid both my training in calmness, and my own sense that this game was ridiculous.

  “Well, I don’t know why you don’t like us,” I answered, with obvious hurt in my voice. Again I spoke not to the chief but the whole troop, using the broadest Zaquash accent to my Rayzhia. Everyone knows a Zaquash accent is humorous, even those who speak it. I heard a few more giggles by way of reward.

  “Here are we, two travelers as like out of a puppet show or the spirit world as on a highway, belonging to nowhere and desirous of making you a story to tell your babies, and what else do you have to do but watch us and hear us?” As I spoke, I was looking around as sharply as I knew how, to find out more about these “eagle tribe” people. I peered between the flanks of the ponies.

  Down below the hill were wagons, and around the wagons were spread the cattle that are the wealth of these people. My distance vision is a great gift to me.

  “Nothing but to push the cows from yellow grass to yellow grass, and watch the calves getting thinner.”

  “You have young eyes,” said the chief grudgingly. Unsure of my own wisdom, I answered him, “I am older than you, Chief of the Eagles.”

  He looked at me doubtfully, though I was now more sure I had the right of it. The constant weather of the plains loosens the face around its bones, and I guessed the battle chief to be in his mid-twenties. They usually were. But no Naiish will tell his age out loud. “Who are you, snowman, to claim so much and look like so little?” he asked, speaking publicly as I had done, and I took a grateful breath. Insulting or no, he had showed interest.

  I could not tell him I was the son of a Velonyan earl and a Rezhmian princess. Those attributes would only qualify me as a pincushion amo
ng these people who hate the governments of North and South equally. I also feel every inch a liar when I say it.

  “I was born on the edge of a knife,” I said instead, which was more true to my own perceptions.

  “I grew up confined in stone and under stone, but I burst out under the sky and am free forever, past my own comfort, past the judgment of kings.

  “I was dead and live again.

  “I myself am king: King of the Dead.

  “I am Nazhuret.”

  This time the silence lasted longer, and once again the chief tried to break my effect by turning to Arlin, but Arlin never fails.

  “What is your name?” he asked her, and without expression she answered, “My own.”

  I was glad the chief was as young as he was. He was still trying to find the words that would destroy our impression when the magician spoke. “Let the rope be unwound,” he said, and then I knew who was the real power in the tribe.

  We were not allowed to use our own horses, which the magician did not know was a blessing, as I had no idea whether either animal had ever been saddle-tied before. Neither, however, did he pull crazy young stock or half-broken pack animals out of the line, but instead called for two riding horses from the remount stock, little dun animals with each rib showing (much like the men who rode them).

  The rope itself was neither flax nor hemp, for the Naiish have no agriculture and all their produce is animal. It was a strip of braided cowhide some ten yards long, and even as they unwound it I could see it stretch and bounce in its loops.

  I could feel Arlin’s leg press against my shoulder, giving what support she could without destroying the job of acting that was keeping us alive. She still sat upon her mare; unlike me, Arlin would rather fight on horseback than afoot.