During the last Rezhmian incursion, I am told we lost many blonds to the infections of sunburn, and that was in mid-spring, right after the thaw. Skinburn would be a nasty way to die.
The image that stays in my mind of that first trip across the empty spaces is that of a white line of horizon topped by silver-blue and founded on pale tan, broken in the middle by the shape of a single auroch, that ancestor to the broad-horned cattle of the Naiish, and perhaps of our lesser northwestern breeds as well. As the beast sensed us, we had a full view of its spread of horn, eight feet from tip to tip, over a body as tall and lean as that of a racehorse. Its beauty overwhelmed me, and though I am as fond of the soft eyes of a cow as is the next man, I felt man had done a huge disservice to nature in diminishing the creature.
As we watched, it gave out a cry something like a bell and something like a goose. It spun on its haunches and began to flee, swishing its horns alternately over the dry grass. Its manner did not encourage us to chase it, had we been so inclined, and though the beast did not run as gracefully as a horse, it ran very fast.
I cannot recall there was anything visible on the landscape to which the creature’s bellow might have been directed. The land between the auroch and the horizon was as shimmering flat as a tailor’s press. Was it merely giving voice to release its own emotion, or perhaps to dissuade us from pursuit? (This is the sort of question I should have asked our Naiish magician, but I cannot remember that I did.)
It was after this appearance, or perhaps another like it, that the magician said, “It’s in the history of our people that those animals created the grassland.”
Arlin, with her eyebrows, asked for elaboration.
“The plain was once forest, they say. Black, forbidding forest, like those where you live in caves, huddled over your fires against the snow.”
Neither Arlin nor I bothered to correct him. This man did not for a minute believe the Velonyans lived in caves, and one can only suffer one’s tail to be pulled so many times.
“The aurochs lived in the forest, along with every other sort of animal that now lives on the plain. But their horns were too wide; they banged them into the trees everywhere they went. So strong were the fathers of the aurochs that every time they hit a tree, it came down, and at last there were no more trees, and it has been grassland ever since.”
I savored the image of great bulls and cows, scything through the firwoods of my home. I liked it. “And are your people grateful to the aurochs?” I asked him.
When the magician smiled, his dry face creased into fan-folds. “No, they are not. If the aurochs hadn’t been so thorough, wagons would be cheaper to build.”
Arlin must have had her fill of whimsy, for she asked, “Do you believe this, magician of the Plains Eagle People? Did the cattle really knock down all the trees of the forest?”
He laughed. “It is complete superstition. It is for children!” His glance at her was wary, half offended. “What you must think of me!” he said. Then he cleared his throat and pushed his horse to a more energetic trot. “Still, the aurochs did create the grassland…”
Both Arlin and I had to work to catch up in order to hear his next words. The old performer planned it that way. “Or so I think.”
He forced me to ask him how.
“It is simple, Nazhuret. The cattle eat without discrimination, grass, bushes, and young trees. The grass comes back, but the bushes and trees do not. Tell me, what is going to happen to the ground?”
As the magician’s words resolved themselves in my mind, I was struck by a realization, heavy as a blow. It was not merely that his observation was acute and correct, but that this character, who had acted the role of persecutor, pursuer, aide, and comedian to us, and whom I remembered as a drunken geriatric in the tavern and as the manipulator of a mob, had shifted image again, and now was our teacher.
No different from you, Powl; he was dirty, small, and stinking and yet no different at all from the immaculate Earl of Daraln.
And in another moment my perception had focused differently, and I saw in the man something that was not Powl nor Naiish magician, but was of identical nature, shining through both names and faces. I think I made a sound.
My memories rose like birds, and I saw this same identity in the eyes of a wolf I had known (or dog. I never knew which). This thing, which was teacher and not exactly teacher, suddenly seemed to be everywhere in my past: in the slant of a sheeting rain outside the barn where once I slept, in the face of my mother (which may be not memory but an invention from the needs of my heart), and at last in no image and in no disguise at all.
I came awake again and my arms and back were cold with sweat and I had let my horse drift. Arlin was staring at me. She edged the black mare over and took me by the arm. I met her eyes and again I saw this thing—this teacher—before me, bright and real under the light of the sun. I cried out without words.
“What?” Arlin shook my arm, and in her face was a taut, martial concern for me.
I don’t know how much time had passed while my perceptions had knocked one another along in my head. The magician was speaking again, or still. He was pointing his finger at me.
“As a legend, King of the Dead, you should know these things already.”
I did not know then and I do not know now whether he was speaking of the aurochs’ eating habits or of what I had experienced a moment before. The moment was still ringing around me like a struck crystal, and the sweat had stuck my shirt to my back. I felt very calm and light, as though I hadn’t eaten for days. “I don’t have any desire to be a legend, magician,” I said, and I meant it wholeheartedly.
He laughed wholeheartedly in reply. “Of course you don’t,” he said to me. “It works that way.”
By the evening of that day (I think it was that day) the horizon was smudgy. Arlin noted it first and guessed there was weather coming. The magician denied it; though his eyes were cloudy his nose was keen. I stopped my horse, examined the distance, and found the smudge to be mountains.
That night we celebrated. Arlin and I each spared an hour to stalk game, which is not easily done in the open land. The magician did not hunt, for though the Naiish are the best archers in the world they waste little time on game, living instead on the herds they follow and saving their arrows for human beings. He stayed at the fire instead, boiling a huge mess of cracked barley and roots to which we were able to add a large desert hare and a little wild chicken. I remember that feast, because it set to rest in my mind all the horror stories one hears about Naiish cooking.
While I sanded the pot and Arlin sharpened our swords—for Arlin gets more satisfaction out of that task than I do—the magician lay his head upon his saddle and instructed us.
“No man over the age of forty likes to see other people’s blood spilled. Not if he has had children, he does not.”
“So that was why… ,” I began, at the same moment in which Arlin said, “Even among the Naiish?”
He glanced at each of us and chose to answer Arlin. Firelight gleamed upon his cataracts. “Even among the riders. Yet you must remember that traders and wealthy parties travel between Rezhmia and Velonya along the strip of wet land south of Morquenie, by the sea. We rarely see strangers cross our property, and when we do, we take it as an insult. You would also, if strangers rode their horse trains over your property.”
This simile was amusing, but I asked, “Can a hundred people call a thousand square empty miles their property?”
The old magician cast me a chiding look. “Of course we can. We do. All the world knows we do. That was not a clever question.” Before I could interrupt further, he continued. “And then you killed our eagle right before our eyes. It is not that we like the old vulture, you understand. But it is our totem.
“Still, I would have been happy to see you fleeing back the way you came, but the young men made that impossible. Our young men are like no other men on earth. They are mad wolves.
“You will say we make them th
at way,” he accused me, and indeed I had been thinking exactly that. “But it isn’t so. Our children are brought up like any other children, but they grow up to carry the red whip!”
His voice rose with emotion and in his face shone a mixture of pride and disgust: very odd. I took the chance of offending him to say a thing I had grown to think over the years of roaming the Zaquash territories. “And yet, magician, by appearance the people of northern Zaquashlon are of the same stock as the Naiish nomads. Certainly you can pass back and forth at will and be unrecognized.”
By the silence I thought I had done it; the man would say nothing more of interest between here and the mountains. But after a minute he replied, “It is a dangerous thing you know, Nazhuret. We avoid letting snowmen know so much about us. But you have taken the information wrongly.
“It is true we are born looking no different than any small child of Warvala. And it is true a rider can get off his horse and labor in a tinware shop for years without anyone suspecting what he is by birth. In fact, many young riders do this.
“I will go further and say that any rider who has it in himself to behave reasonably and mind his own business will get off his horse and do this. And always has done so. The tribe is poor and pleasures are few.”
The magician gazed blandly into the fire and spread his brilliant feather glove in its light. “Old age is an agony among us. It is enough to drive a man into taverns.
“As a result of this winnowing, the young men who are left to us are the ones who cannot moderate themselves. Like certain cattle, certain horses… The plains, however, have the power to do what the rules of man cannot, and under the sky our men learn discipline or they die. Sometimes both.
“If you were stock-raisers, my comrades, you would know that you cannot breed the wildest to the wildest for generations without getting some effect.”
I asked him about the women; were they also the wildest of the wild? He chuckled, snapped his hand closed, and said, “About the women you will have to ask a woman.”
That night I considered all the man had said. I had plenty of time for reflection, because I could not sleep well apart from Arlin, and our blankets are not really warm enough unless shared. The next day, as we fixed our eyes on the smudgy horizon and willed the mountains to grow, I asked the magician if he had been a mad wolf as a boy.
His answer was cheerful. “Oh no, I was clever instead. I ran away to Sekret when I was ten. I was every inch a snowman! Later I went as far west as Grobebh, and I lived in Bologhini until my children were grown.”
My expression of surprise at this revelation won another bout of laughter. “I have no secrets!” he cried loudly, and I gaped again at the inaccuracy of his statement. After another minute he added, “Men like me are necessary among my people, too. Otherwise the poor brutes would die of their own fury.”
The next day was windy and bright, and through our morning’s ride the flattened expanse of earth rose into ridges, just as waves of the ocean rise higher as dawn leads to midday. The peaks along the horizon were clear now to Arlin as well as to myself, and though the old magician could not see them, he knew they were there. What had been grass all of one color, topped with the dried spikes of its husky grain, was becoming a carpet stained with various pigments: gray-green bushes of sage, blue-green plantain, ribs of rock not green at all.
It occurred to me that we were out of the grassland and into the foothills of the mountains. I recalled to mind that I was going to visit the Sanaur of Rezhmia, that most consistent enemy of Velonya, devil incarnate to all Velonyan schoolboys—my granduncle.
Who did not know I lived. Who would not be made happy by the news. I reflected upon this.
I felt a cold wash of fear over me, so strong it seemed to originate outside myself. I heard a beast growling, huge as the earth.
This fear and this growling were not particular to me, for my daffodil-yellow horse reacted to them also, and his heart beat between my knees like a drum. Arlin’s horse, too, had started, and so had Arlin.
In another moment I was flung off the horse and rolling over the stony soil, heels over head. I thought I had been bucked off, but no horse has such power as this had shown, and then I heard the poor creature’s shoulder hit the ground.
I had spun three times around and came out of the roll standing upright, thanks to long and stringent teaching, but it seemed I was still rolling anyway, or at least the earth was. The horrifying growl had grown into a roar, and the ground disappeared from under my feet. This time I came down on my chin.
This was enough, I told myself. It was time for this to be over, but the earth went on bucking and heaving. I raised my eyes, tasting the blood from my own lip, and the air just above the ground was white, nearly opaque. I could see the black shape that was Arlin, flat out like myself with only the position of her head to tell me she was still alive. Beside her the larger black shape of her mare threw her neck about in a vain attempt to ride the bucking earth.
The two Naiish ponies had kept their feet in some miraculous fashion, but they stood with their stubby legs braced out at angle, like furry, fat spiders, and the magician himself lay flat and motionless. I feared the beasts would step on his face, and twice I got to my feet and made a few steps toward him before being knocked down again.
The third time I stood, it was over. The mad beast went quiet and the earth was as still as it had been a few minutes before. I knelt beside the magician, and in a moment Arlin joined me there. We met each other’s staring eyes and neither of us pronounced the word “earthquake” lest we call it back upon us again. I could hear horses floundering, and horses running.
The old magician opened his eyes to the sky and took a deep, laboring breath. Holding his ribs in both hands, he inhaled again, shuddering. He bent his knees and arched his back from the ground in an attempt to pull air into lungs that had been violently emptied. It took him over sixty seconds to reprime the well of his breathing, and just as he sat up, the predatory growl began again, followed by a sensation of something huge stalking the earth all around us.
We held him up by each elbow and did nothing but witness this invisible calamity around us. This time when I heard the “beast” I knew what it was, and I recognized (or perhaps merely trusted) that it was of smaller magnitude than the tremor that had preceded it. I felt calm enough, and indeed felt my consciousness descend into the belly of the wolf, but nonetheless, two long seconds after the growl, when the earth was well into its trembling, I was aware that my heart leaped and started racing. An instant sweat was chilling the skin of my arms.
It seemed the earthquake had pulled these changes out of my body, with my mind having no part in the process.
When this tremor was over, the magician got to his feet. “To think,” he said in a very casual tone of voice, “that an earthquake could throw me and wind me like that. At my age.” In his cloudy eyes I read contempt: for himself, for the event, for us who were holding him when he could stand perfectly well.
Arlin released him first, for his pride called to hers. “Tell me, what animal causes the earthquake? According to your people, of course?”
He didn’t answer her.
Around us I found my own baggage, Arlin’s saddle, and the magician’s eagle-skin kite. Only the last of these seemed to have escaped harm. The old man picked it up, arranged its flight feathers, and proceeded toward the mountains. “The horses will come back to us,” he said portentously. I didn’t ask him how he knew.
For Arlin and me, it was more difficult. I would have liked to carry the saddle for her, since it was more awkward than my own burden, but I did not know how rules of gallantry applied to eunuchs, and I did not want to share her secret with the old man.
Twice in the next hour the beast growled around us again, once so strongly that although it did not knock me to my knees, I found myself sinking down for security’s sake. I had always thought of a large earthquake as something like the hammer of God, which would strike and be done with,
but I learned that it works more the way a burnt house caves in, piece by miserable piece. Each time I heard the tremor announced, my body reacted in the same manner: two seconds of shocked calm followed by a storm of pulse and sweating like a kettle gone from simmer to boil. I resented the calamity’s intimacy with my physical person. I wished to snub the earthquakes, and my body answered their every growl.
The dust in the air made it difficult to know exactly where we were going; the mountains were invisible behind white curtains. I followed Arlin, who followed the magician, who couldn’t see well anyway, and though the journey seemed hopeless and pointless, the tremors were like whips to keep us moving.
Indeed, before that first hour was up, the horses had started to come back to us. First was my bright yellow gelding, still wearing my saddle on his back, and I might preen myself on my ability to attach affection, but I suspect he was always the laziest of the herd. On the other hand, perhaps he was just the most intelligent, and knew what a handicap the saddle would be in the feral life. Arlin’s black mare came over the horizon shortly afterward, leading the Naiish ponies, but while the mare returned to her life of duty, the others shied away and kept clear of us until nightfall.
The magician didn’t care, or pretended not to. He was not carrying anything but a kite.
The summer had been dry, and there was a good deal of dead brush to make a campfire, with which we attempted to keep the earthquakes at bay. Arlin had taken a heavier fall than I, and her neck was stiffening. I massaged it as I could, while in Allec I suggested to her that as times were difficult even without masquerades, we might be better off informing the magician she was female. She responded that such would be a very bad idea, and when I pressed her for a reason, she said, “Tell him nothing. He has not told us his name.”
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 36