The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  We pressed through the crowds of Bologhini all that morning, and by noon we were in a section of the city that possessed such amenities as inns and stables. The inns did us no good as far as accommodations went—being filled three to a bed with soldiers and their attendants—and the stables scarcely more. We were at last able to find one establishment that allowed us to turn out our beasts in a paddock filled with goats, and the horses stood there in the gusts of rain with their companions nibbling their manes and tails.

  Though the beds of Bologhini were full, there were plenty of glasses to go around. We squeezed into a tavern surrounded by small trees in buckets (all that grows on this mountain of stone must grow in a bucket), and steamed our wool against the tiles of the stove.

  I chose this establishment, for while I am no great drinker I have a certain appreciation of taverns, that have been my occupation from time to time. It was a dome building, which in Bologhini was to say that it was more than respectable. Its inner bowl also pleased me, being whitewashed and trimmed in colors of salmon and seal brown. Seven feet from the ground hung a circle of small brass bells, too high to be hung for the musical delight of the patrons, but even as I lowered myself to the hearthstones the bells rang all together and the great stove itself made a noise of discomfort and my heart raced and I sweated.

  The tremor left the crowd silent for a moment, and then they broke out into laughter as one man. There was even a scattering of claps and foot-stomping.

  Arlin and the magician had frozen in tableau, with legs bent and arms out for balance, and only after the clapping subsided did they seat themselves. “I suppose,” said Arlin evenly, “that if earthquakes are the specialty of your town, you must take notice of them.”

  “I take the most conscientious notice,” I answered, and the Naiish only grunted.

  About that meal in the tavern filled with soldiers I can remember most clearly the poppy-seed pastries. I have an addiction to pastries, especially poppy-seed pastries, and these had a clear casing of honey and egg whites that raised them above the level of the ordinary. The crumbs scattered in the air as the little bells jangled, responding to every shift of the earth and to the passage of heavy vehicles.

  (I am returned from ten minutes’ journey of the spirit, my old friend. The pastries proved more potent than many another memory of real importance. After reflection, I come to think that my worship of these sweet cakes springs from the fact that they are of ordinary material, like myself, that has had a lot of time invested in it. Pastries presume a kitchen somewhere, with a heavy stove, and a table ghostly with white flour and a woman with a roller leaning over it, rolling the dough still thinner. Perhaps she is singing.

  There is no real reason she ought to be singing. There is nothing in the little, crisp, folded shape of a pastry to imply that it was a woman at all that made it. Inn cooks are as often male as female. But I—who have so often in my life been where there is no roof, no stove, no woman, and certainly no song—I hold the pastry in my hand and fall half asleep in the warmth and the sound of her voice.)

  There must have been people in Bologhini before the military call-up, but one got the feeling that everyone in that tavern and everyone on the street outside was on military business. We sat against the stove like three stones along a riverbed, listening to discussion of troop sizes, bad food, uniform allotments, competition among the career colonels and the land colonels, pay, press-gangs, bad food, the shortage and poor quality of horses, the shame of unqualified officers rising from the ranks, the shame of unqualified officers coming in from outside the ranks, the bribery of noncoms, the shortage of decent blades, the unreliability of any harquebus, and bad food.

  The two things never mentioned in all this tintinnabulation were the purpose of the call-up and the name of the enemy.

  It was this more than the swelling masses of young men and the prevalence of Rezhmian salmon and gold that convinced me this military phenomenon was real, and not merely an artifact of the mountain’s bottleneck and of the season. I spent fifteen years at the school in Sordaling, weathering four separate war scares, and I remember most poignantly that the closer we came to fighting, the stronger became the unwritten prohibition against discussing the enemy, even to the mention of his name. Had any cadet cursed, insulted, or even joked about the Rezhmians, we would have stared at him. He would thereby have declared himself an outsider, a civilian, not a boy in the know at all.

  We wandered from this pleasant tavern to another less appealing, and from there to an open yard with stone benches that was aflutter with brilliant ancestor-flags and pools of water: the Bologhini equivalent of a garden. There Arlin chose a sun-dried bench, glared right and left, and sank down upon it with doglike territoriality. Her sneezes had become coughs according to the normal pattern of a catarrh. After a minute of sitting slumped and weary, she drew her feet out of her black boots and folded them under her, pulled the woolen shawl over her head, and retired from us.

  I saw the magician glancing covertly at her face under the shawl. “What is he doing?” the man whispered to me. This was not (I think) the first time he had observed Arlin or myself in this activity, or this lack of activity. He seemed neither disquieted nor impressed, but merely interested to know.

  I had to reply that I could not tell him. “Not to say I don’t want to tell you, magician, but that I don’t have any way to. He is sitting still, with discipline, and letting the rest go… empty.”

  The magician smiled, tightened his mouth, and then smiled again. “My riders don’t need this. They are empty often enough already.”

  That evening the sky was clear, brilliant, and very cold. As it would be very difficult and expensive to keep a fire going, we delayed making our night camp as long as we could keep awake, and spent hours tavern-hopping, drinking hot ale, and listening to the news. The most interesting piece of information or misinformation was that Minsanaur Reingish himself was going to make a surprise inspection of the Bologhini call-up. He of the dedicated knife, of dangerous repute. My own cousin. I wondered if I should see him.

  Other stories running through the city that night were that “they,” which I presume meant the Velonyans, had filled Morquenie Harbor with Felonkan mercenary boats, and that these “devil’s darning needles” (as they are called) were about to move south along the Old Sea and attack Rezhmia’s capital through the mountain channel.

  I knew this was so much horseshit, because the king could not have made a productive alliance with the natives of Felonka since I left Norwess. No one had ever succeeded in making a productive alliance with the Felonka tribes, in any amount of time. Furthermore, sending these consummate sailors over a mountain pass to assail the most populous city in the northern world was a threat equivalent to that of sending a school of whales to besiege the city.

  The rumor was idiocy, but it had the power to chill me, for it was the sort of rumor that accompanies imminent war, or the early days of war itself, and we huddled on a bench provided outside the poorest tavern we had struck yet, and I wondered how all this had come to pass without my knowing of it.

  I felt cheated; I should have had months or years of ascending worry and decision before being confronted with such a thing as a major war. Though I have fought often and in deadly earnest all my life, though I have been in two battles and been blown up once, I am of the generation that has never known war with Rezhmia.

  For Velonyans, almost no other war is war. No other enemy has such a power to terrify us, and I, of course, am my own battleground of just this war.

  The night was cold, and I listened to Arlin’s increasing cough, which sounded as dry as ripping paper and seemed to cause her pain. We had spread our blankets under a grainery wall that by the quality of its salmon-pink paint seemed to indicate it was not used too heavily as a urinal. I had strongly considered attempting to buy out some patron’s hotel room, having still almost every penny that you, my teacher, left with us, but it was more likely that space was going by shares of
a bed, and it was too risky to subject Arlin to that. Besides: wasn’t this tumult in the city a military call-up? I knew what happened to friendless poor men during a military call-up. It would be too ironic to be flung back against my home country as a member of an impressed company of Rezhmian infantry.

  What I could do I did; I wrapped my arms and my blankets around Arlin, regardless of the presence of the Naiish magician a few yards away. She was cold in hand and foot, and sweaty-hot in the face. She shivered occasionally, and I could feel the stiffness in arms and thighs that means the body cannot keep its heat.

  After I moved my blanket, I heard the magician laugh: at me, I knew. The impression I received then was not that he laughed at my action, but at the fact it had taken me so long to decide upon it. Arlin also heard the laugh, and I could feel a wave of hostility sweep over her, as though she had turned to stone.

  After some hours of sleep, the discomfort of our situation outweighed my fatigue and I sat up. I heard the magician scrabbling through his baggage, and got up to sit with him. Arlin did not move, and I left her both blankets. There was no moon.

  “I have not seen you shave,” the magician said, much to my surprise.

  What did he think, that we were a pair of assorted castrati, Arlin and I, marching back to the land where our kind were common? Somewhat defensively I told him that it was my usual practice to begin the day (or at least every few days) with a shave. When not pelting across enemy grasslands, enduring flood, earthquake, or altitude, I shaved regularly.

  “But what I am saying is that you do not show it, Nazhuret. Most snowmen are as hairy as ponies, in a very dirty fashion, around the mouth. You have little hair, like a Naiish rider, and that is very valuable, right now. It will make things easier for us.”

  I had thought dyeing my face had been enough to create me a worthy Rezhmian. It was my belief I looked much closer to a native than did Arlin, at any rate, with her height and high-bridged nose. I suggested to the man that if he did not want to endanger himself with us he could return to his grass, his cattle, and his riders.

  I heard the magician shake his head, and I heard a rustling. “No,” he said, “I’m not about to do that. Autumn is coming on. It will be winter soon, and I would rather be somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

  I could not think of anything to say to this statement, coming from a recognized spiritual leader as it did, but the magician heard my silence. “You think that I am abandoning them. Abandoning them in what, I ask you?”

  I shrugged, for dawn was almost upon us and he might be able to see that much. “In the winter. In disease. In the hardest time of the year.”

  He laughed and rustled again. “In the winter the grasslands are death for old people. No one is forced to stay among the tribe all the time. We are not a military, like these poor brutes up here. And as for disease, there are six women who know as much of the medicine as I do. I tell you, Nazhuret, that there are twice the number of Naiish on the grass in summer as in winter, and even more during our beautiful springtime.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “So you live your lives of raid and plunder at your comfort and at your convenience?”

  He leaned away from the wall toward me and replied, “Of course we do. Why not? It is not ourselves we desire to destroy.”

  There was something odd in the shape of the black outline against the salmon-colored wall. The magician’s head was too large. There was also something odd about his voice. For a moment the dissonance between what I saw and heard and what I expected to see and hear was so intense as to cause nausea, and then I was able to make sense of both. I said, “You are wearing a winged headdress. And a skirt. You are masquerading as a woman!”

  “It took you long enough to notice.” The old magician scooted forward into better light. For five seconds I stared, able only to see his male face framed by the stiff cloth folds of the Naiish woman’s coif, and then my mind let go of its habits and let my eyes see what was there: a perfectly acceptable old woman of the nomads. She was not beautiful, but neither was she a travesty.

  “What I have done, you must also do, for our protection,” said the magician, and if his face was the same, his voice was that of a stranger. “That is why I was glad you are not hairy.”

  I had no idea how the man thought he could disguise me as female, for my shoulders are wide for my size and my arms not spindling at all. I would not have thought he could do it for himself, though. I asked him if he had carried an entire female equipage over the plains on the chance he might have to escape a military draft, and he answered, “Of course not, Nazhuret. I carry it always, for the times a spirit is in me to be a woman.” I was still trying to encompass that statement when the magician added, “Now you can ask me what it is like, to be a woman of the Naiish, and now I can tell you.”

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t speak at all.

  When Arlin woke, she fixed her gaze on the magician for a good five seconds, closed her eyes again, and seemed to be trying to return to sleep by act of will. I was weeping at that moment, because the magician had me pulling out the straw-colored stubble of my face with steel tweezers. Before this day, I had had no idea how full of feeling was the upper lip.

  Perhaps to give myself a respite, I said to her, “Press-gangs are sweeping the city. Our friend had the idea we are to dress as women and escape their notice.”

  The Naiish magician shook his finger in the air. “No, no, my chicks, I did not say to dress like a woman. That would never fool them. You must be women.”

  Arlin looked from him to me and saw what it was I was doing. My face must have looked as raw as meat. I saw her color rise and her jaw come forward. She began to shake her head. “No. No, I won’t. Forget it. Not me.” Her head still went from side to side, like a beleaguered bull showing his horns to one dog after another.

  “He has strong feelings on the matter,” I said to the magician. He put one finger over his lips and looked regretful. “Then what are we to do? Hang on his coat when they nab him, wailing that he is our sole support and we will starve without him? With those bruisers, it will only cheer them up!”

  I have to admit I had difficulty understanding Arlin’s attitude, too. She could scarcely still be afraid the magician would assault us at the discovery of her sex, especially now he was in a skirt himself. As for the disadvantage women suffer from predacious strangers—well, womanhood had suddenly become the greatest protection available against the present danger.

  Arlin’s “manhood,” however, or to be more accurate, her “rascal-hood,” was a lifetime’s work of art, and she was no more apt to drop this persona in the middle of the business than is a good actor.

  In fact, there are only two human beings before which Arlin moves easily from male to female, and these exceptions were won with labor. She had no intention of showing her female nature in the Fortress City of Rezhmia, and she was not going to dilute her act now.

  My own garb was bought by the Naiish, using our Velonyan money. It was the bright but luckily shapeless dress of the women of the Sekret wasteland, made of strips of pressed animal hair, in more colors than has a good sunrise. I knew an uneducated form of that language, in case my authenticity was challenged. It is a tongue closely allied to old Vesting; a fact unpalatable to those proud Velonyans who call the Sekret people “den-diggers” and “the bear-folk.”

  Another observation I made was that the old Naiish, of a people known as the world’s best murderers and thieves, returned me a penny-by-penny account of the expense. It was less than I had expected, for the old man was a bargainer far beyond my own powers.

  I sought my reflection once more in my dowhee. My felt cap was sky blue. (As the magician said: to match my eyes. If I were a Sekret woman, he assured me, I would care about such things.) The earflaps of the cap had tin dangles with bells at the ends of them, for the women of the Far North wear earrings on their headgear, instead of in their flesh. My dress was enormous; perhaps I was supposed to be increasing. I did not
look pretty, but I did look like a young woman. A young woman who was clearly Nazhuret.

  I felt a cold helplessness, as when I had met my own image, in the rain, on the mountain. It was the sort of feeling one has when some incident recalls a dream that had previously been forgotten, or when a word disappears from the mind as one opens the mouth to say it. This feeling is bad. It contains dread, and also panic, as though the strange face, the missing word, the half-remembered dream were the beginning of one’s final forgetting.

  There we were, two men dressed as women and one woman dressed as a man. We sat on deplorable horses, or at least horses Arlin would once have called deplorable, two of us with our skirts hitched up and our unappealing calves and ankles bare to the world. To the world and his wife, I might have better said, for we did receive a good bit of public attention from the natives of Bologhini, in addition to from the soldiers who swarmed all over the town. Considering the habits of soldiers, it is as well I was an ugly woman, and that the Naiish magician was an old one. Considering the habits of “recruiting parties,” it was much the better we were women.

  Leaving Bologhini was different from entering it; it took longer and was without drama of any kind. The road south and east drew the city out as a string will draw honey from solution, and we spent the best part of the day milling slowly among other travelers on the road, both military and civilian, and pressed between houses. It was time for supper before we could say certainly that Bologhini was behind us, but that observation was followed within a few minutes by the disappearance of the rock walls to our left.

  It was Rezhmia we were looking at: a country half green and half gold. Below the road began orchards, vineyards, grainfields in their end-of-summer stubble, pasture for the large speckled cows of which the Rezhmians are as proud as the Naiish are of their horses, and houses, barns, and enclosures at every crossroad. Nowhere was there any waste, nowhere any wildness.