The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  There was sense in what she said, albeit oblique sense. I glanced up at the old man in time to find he had been watching us. Without asking what we had been saying or in what language, he began to lecture us.

  “The legends of the riders don’t say much about the earthquake, because the earthquake does not belong to the grassland. It is a monster of the mountains.” He pointed into the darkness. “You are headed now toward the home of all the world’s earthquakes.”

  Arlin chuckled at this bit of drama. “Well, so are you,” she said. “Heading toward…” In the middle of her words the growl came, and the ground shook again. All the horses started and one pulled wildly, but unsuccessfully upon its tether line.

  Two seconds’ pause and then my heart raced, my skin sweated cold. I was very irritated at the earth and at myself.

  The magician laughed. I think it was a laugh of real amusement; I cannot be sure. “You have had quite a trip down to Rezhmia! First two eagles come against you, then a full troop of riders, and now the earth itself. It would seem you are not meant to go to the City.”

  I felt Arlin stiffen under my hands. I straightened, walked around the fire, and sat down beside the magician. “If we are not meant to go to Rezhmia, we will not get to Rezhmia. But nothing has shown that.”

  I made sure I had his attention and added, “Fate can stop a man’s heart with a hiccup, properly timed. There is no need to disarrange the earth.”

  Arlin coughed, groaned, and said, “The earth and sky herald great events, rider. We are only receiving our due.”

  The magician’s eyes grew brighter as he stared over the fire at her. “Earth and sky, you say? I can’t wait to see what the sky will produce!”

  The next day it produced rain, but I do not have such a sense of my own importance to believe it was a gesture directed at me or my fellows. As though for balance, we enjoyed the end of the dry east wind that blows all summer across the grassland. We were now in the Bologhini foothills—no mistake. The ridges ran almost due north and south, and passage through them above Morquenie’s trade road was only by horse or by foot, through the occasional crack in the walls of the peaks. These mountains, however, crack frequently.

  Between insufficient blankets and steady rain, Arlin came down with a head cold. To me it seemed her sneezes were too unmistakably feminine, but I had never paid much attention to the few eunuchs inhabiting Zaquashlon, or at least not to their sneezes. Perhaps it was all my own anxiety; Arlin’s male impersonation is harder on me than upon her.

  The magician claimed to know where we were going, though he did not pass on enough information for us to understand the route. I remember going south along a well-trodden path, between two rows of rock teeth only fifty yards apart. Along either side, the herds of the mountaineers had cropped the herbage to a fine lawn (as the aurochs did the grasslands, according to our magician), but above a certain height, different for each individual stone tooth, the grass gave way to stunted cedar and pine. Sometimes the lower surface of the lowest branches would be shaved to the bark, which was scarred by the teeth of sheep and goats. The manure of sheep and goats dotted the road.

  As we rode down this improbable landscape, I began to catalog in my head the stumbles that fate had thrown in our path since receiving the king’s commission. First we had been attacked by ambiguous cavalry at the borders of Norwess, and then in close sequence by eagles and by the Naiish, from whose hands and hooves very few escape. Building upon this experience we had an explosion of the earth, and now (to finish in whimsy) a leakage of the sky. What was the purpose of all these obstacles? Not having killed us, what had they accomplished?

  The answer came to me like a prompting voice in my ear. They had, each of them, served to keep us from thinking about the job at hand.

  I was going to the Fortress City in order to prevent a war.

  I was not certain the war could be prevented. Or ought to be.

  Arlin and I had been sent because of our training, an education which the king trusted would help us produce alternatives to war that other men might not discover. But alternatives are not always an improvement over things as they are. They do not always (I hate to admit it) exist.

  I personally had been sent because I was the sanaur’s grandnephew. His cross-bred grandnephew, and child of a “snowman.”

  I did not imagine the old man knew of my existence.

  I did not for a moment consider he would be glad to know of it.

  I pondered my mission while the rain soaked my headcloth and liquefied the claypack on my face, and at last I decided that the soldiers, the eagles, the Red Whips, the earth, and the sky had had no reason to bother. I was utterly unable to think about the job at hand.

  The first people we saw since leaving the Naiish were a family of perhaps ten individuals, who had pitched woolen tents on the small width of flat land and were waiting out the rain. The fabric of their tents collected water in droplets all over the surface, each drop serving as a lens for a ray of light. The traditional brass witch-chimes of the Rezhmian peasant echoed that light into sound, that was punctuated by the bleating of their animals from within the ring of hurdles the people had set up.

  I remember most of all the seagulls, that wheeled gray and white like rainclouds above the tents, obviously expecting something of the residents. Their own cries echoed among the stone teeth above us.

  I was riding beside the magician when we first heard the sounds of the camp, and my eagerness to see human dwellings again put me in the lead. I paused long enough to hear a voice from within one of the tents; it was that of a woman speaking Rezhmian, and not the Rezhmian of the Naiish either. I would have ridden in among them, had the old magician not kicked forward and snagged my yellow horse’s bridle in one hand.

  We had a short, whispered argument in the rain: I, feeling justified in greeting these herders or at least riding past them, and the Naiish utterly set against it. Arlin broke the tie against me. She said she was feeling too incompetent to meet anyone, dangerous or not. We were forced to draw back an hour’s ride before we could find a break among the teeth to the east that looked like it might be gotten over.

  It was not a path in any sense, but a channel choked with rocks, and the recent earth movements had sent any number of fresh rocks, pebbles, and boulders to wobble atop the earlier ones. A fall might have been the end of a horse’s leg, and so of a horse. It might have been the end of a rider.

  I gave my Daffodil his head, tying the ends of the reins together over his gnarly blond mane. I considered getting down to spare him my weight, but the magician advised against it. The lurching sensation we felt as the horses hauled themselves from one level to another is not something I can well describe. At the end of another hour, we were scrabbling down the east end of our rock channel, a journey Daffodil completed on two forefeet and his broad behind.

  We were not in another clean-cut valley, but along an uneven, stony ledge that might or might not keep parallel to the way we had been going. It was so narrow that I had to press forward to enable Arlin’s black to skid her way down from the rocks.

  I think it was within five minutes of reaching solid ground that I heard the sound of hooves ahead: a horse trotting. The rock tooth over which I rode opened out into a cuspy molar, and a man came riding toward me from the west.

  I looked at the trail behind him and surmised that the other end of it hit the herders’ valley right past their camp. It looked clear and inviting. I sighed.

  I looked at the horse, a gray, shining like marble in its rain-slick but undoubtedly white when dry. It was beautiful as Arlin’s Sabia had been beautiful. Its trappings were also rain-darkened to a deep purple. They were beautiful, in the Rezhmian manner. The rider’s clothes, too, were black-purple and beautiful in the Rezhmian manner.

  I looked at the rider’s face and he was me.

  His eyebrows were dark, as I remember, and under his broad-brimmed rain hat perhaps his hair was also dark, but the face itself, and the hands
—one of them around the reins and drawn back over the pommel of the saddle and one pointed at me in astonishment or accusation—were my own.

  Was my own hand pointing at him? Was this encounter only with some mirror of distortion, perhaps in my own head? As best I remember, my right hand remained at rest and my left loosely on the reins, for Daffodil did not demand strenuous discipline. I think we looked at him quietly enough, while his horse danced.

  Then the immense growl began again, though which of us the earthquake had as quarry I do not know. My horse skipped sideways, while his horse screamed and plunged ahead along the path he had taken. He was gone before the earth had stopped shaking.

  Arlin’s mare bolted toward us. She halted at my side. “What is it, Zhurrie?” she whispered, as though the old magician were near enough to overhear. “You look dazed by that one. Did a rock fall? Your horse slam you into something?” She put her hand over mine, only for a second.

  My heart was racing, of course, and cold sweat mixed with the rain.

  On the stones, streaming with water, I saw no signs of a horse’s passage. Arlin, who is as much a tracker as I, got up from her soaked knees with no better results. The old magician came up even as she was rising, having lost and found again his pack pony. Without getting down from his saddle he contradicted us both, saying the “silk” of the rain on the rocks proclaimed a horse had passed that way only minutes before, scrabbling wildly over the trail.

  Neither your teaching, Powl, nor my own experience had taught me to read the glint of wet rocks. I could not say the magician was misleading us. I could do nothing but ride on, following out between the teeth of the ridges.

  By evening the ground was rough around us, but easier going than the first ridges of the hills. We passed another herders’ encampment, but this time the surrounding was not so much a trap, and our guide allowed us to ride through. So did the herders.

  Our own camp we pitched upon a height that overlooked the east, and the rain ended in time enough for the rocks to be dry beneath our blankets, though there was nothing for a fire. Arlin was sneezing regularly and her eyes were swollen. She allowed the magician to brew her a tea of herbs that allowed her to sleep. It seemed to my eyes, fingers, and nose, to be made of bark, bones, and opium. When I said as much to him, he denied the bones.

  The sun went down as it does every night. It left a red glow in the western sky, but also a yellow glow in the east. The red glow faded, but not the other, and I was driven to stumble over stones in the dark, to find the cause of the light. Behind me I heard the halting steps of the old magician, and I remember wondering whether a man half-blind was more handicapped in the dark or less so.

  What I had thought to be a murky sky was actually the next rise of the mountains, and little yellow stars and stains decorated the slope. The display was very broad, taking in one hundred degrees of horizon from where I stood, and in two spots the demure glows were clearly dancing in flame. It seemed to be I could smell burning wood, but that might have been suggestion.

  “It is Bologhini,” said the magician, sitting down heavily close to me. “In the times of earthquakes, Bologhini is always on fire.”

  I sat down next to him, astonished. “Bologhini, the city? We’re nowhere near a city, out here. We haven’t seen a permanent building since before we met you.”

  I could barely see him shrug. “Yet that’s Bologhini: the ‘Crescent.’ It runs north and south between the layers of the mountains, that are like onion scales. Travel comes down from Sekret and up from Rezhmia. It comes from every way but the plains. Our way.”

  He stared out over the black decline. I could see yellow lights winking over the milky skin of his cataracts. “It is a grain house burning. That’s a shame, for prices will be high and I’m almost out of barley.”

  He got up again, and reluctantly I followed him. “You will permit us to enter Bologhini?” I asked him, meaning to be flippant and still resenting our clamber over the rocks that day.

  He took the question as earnest. “Bologhini should be safe. All large cities are safe, for who is to call you an enemy among so many strangers?” The magician let me pass before him, so that I might discover our path by hitting my toes against rocks.

  “I really like large cities,” he said, and gave a happy chuckle.

  In the morning the city was before us, and I wondered why I had heard so little about so odd a place. We of Velonya think of Bologhini, when we think of it at all, as second city to Rezhmia itself, lesser in history and culture.

  Whether it is lesser in history I cannot tell, for Bologhini is built out of wood-weavings and wooden boards. Such a building may last a thousand years, except that every piece of it will have been replaced by another. As to its culture, a man without introductions is not likely to discover the culture of a city. He is lucky to discover its taverns.

  No one, not even you, my teacher, thought to tell me that Bologhini was flat as moss on a rock, and largely composed of domes. Nor that the stucco upon the wooden frameworks was dyed delirious colors. Nor that the city spread out over the valley and up the face of Mount Hawtel Azh, covering much more ground than does Vestinglon itself.

  We breakfasted on jerky provided by the magician; I never asked of what animal it was made. Arlin was too fatigued to rip at the stuff, and I remember thinking it a pity I had too much culture and education to chew it for her.

  I had not realized how high we had climbed, not only in these last few days, but over the long rise of the grasslands, until I heard in my ears and tasted in my mouth the same buzzing I had felt in Norwess. The air was thin and odorless.

  I remembered that Rezhmia’s fortress was even higher in altitude than Bologhini, and it struck me that both of my parents had been raised in an environment I find strenuous. Arlin leaned over to ask me why I was laughing, and all that I could reply was “It seems I cannot live up to my ancestry.” She asked no further explanation. She was not feeling well.

  Ten minutes’ sliding ride left us at the lowest level of the city, close to its south border. The stone below us was rain-scoured and even, but at the flood mark on the other side the camps and houses began, nudging close against the water-made “road.”

  The first, farthest out, and poorest building of Bologhini took me by such surprise that I reined up and stared. It was a suspension building, like certain suspension bridges. It was a tent of boards, stucco, and rope. Outside the square perimeter of its walls stood a rank of timber pegs, and wall and pegs were connected by heavy, tarred ropes that entered holes like dovecot doors at the level of the rafters and, I assumed, held the walls upright. I wondered what damage a good plague of rats could do to such a house.

  The next thing I noted along our way was a cluster of domes all connected, rather like the ice lodges of the Sekret hunters, but of plaster, and in various shades of pink. The cluster was surrounded by a border of colored gravel, in the same way that a house of Sordaling would be surrounded by a border of annual flowers. The very next thing was a troop of Rezhmian soldiery.

  One moment the way was clear save for a few children and a lop-eared black kid. The next we were swirled among dozens of horse militia, each man wearing his little cap with big sun visor, each visor stamped with the sigil of the sanaur. Reduced to this size and replicated in such number, the sign of the book, the sun, and the mountain becomes no more than a froth of gold threads: what we at the Sordaling School were wont to call “yellow birdshit.”

  I felt no desire at that moment to insult the sanaur’s sigil. My Daffodil, gold himself, attempted to meet the random charge broadside, and for a moment it seemed we would go down, bringing a few of the unorganized soldiers with us. As I hauled his head keel-on into the flow, Arlin’s mare came breasting this current to reach my side.

  “Zhurrie. These are not soldiers,” Arlin shouted in Allec. “Not real soldiers. They’re raw recruits. From a press-gang, perhaps.” At this point we were separated by a small horse ridden badly by a large young man who calle
d polite excuses in very good Rezhmian before he was pushed through by the mass behind him.

  In another few minutes it was over, leaving us clattering over an empty roadway, almost back to the place where we had come out of the hills. It took another while to find the magician, who had lost his pack pony in the melee and had to charge into it again to regain his animal. We caught up in time to see him accomplish this; he was Naiish and cut the pony out of the horse troop as he might have cut one cow from his own herd. When he retired with his prize he still held in one hand the eagle kite, taut and undamaged.

  “The city is preparing for war,” he said and he pointed the eagle at me. “Explain.”

  I had to smile. “Me, explain? It’s you who explain everything: the grassland, the earthquake, the rain…”

  He didn’t move and I couldn’t pass. “You summoned the earthquake. And the rain. Did you summon this?”

  Arlin stretched and cracked her back with the show of feline laziness that I know means she is roused about something. “This,” she said (meaning the soldiers, the city, or something else known only to her), “summoned Nazhuret.”

  Under these gray skies I could not continue to wear clay over my face, and I felt that my shining pink cheeks were conspicuous. We withdrew from the flood-road and became one more of the poor camps that filled the yards of South Bologhini. It was necessary, this time, to buy dried dung for a fire. The magician separated from Arlin’s medicinal tea certain of the bark, mashing it in his pestle and brewing a concoction that was vilely black but smelled light and spicy. I asked Arlin to show me her tongue and was thus assured that the Naiish skin dye was permanent. She held my dowhee before me while I painted my face with a fine brush the magician was carrying. I remember it was stamped with the seal of the city of Grobebh. I remember the reflective blade gave back to me a most peculiar image: a doll with a wood-brown face and pale linen hair, with blue eyes as unnatural as diamonds on a cow. When I replaced the concealing headscarf, however, the effect was unreal in a more ominous way. I was glad I did not have to look at myself. I did my left hand and the Naiish did my right.