The Lens of the World Trilogy

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  The priest tried again. “And how many are the faces of God?” This time I felt more in tune with the discussion. “How many died in the earthquake, Ngaul? How many lived through it? How many of these were your friends?”

  He put down an empty cup. So did I. “Your methods are unorthodox, visitor. This is adversarial, like the courts of law, whose job is to find the truth.”

  I sighed and took up another treat. “I have never seen much truth unearthed by the process of law. Science gives you facts at least, and I am a scientist.”

  I blush that I bragged about that, but the sugar was going to my head in the pleasantest way. Ngaul Eyluzh grinned at me. He was bald under his headdress, as though the weight of it had squeezed off his hair. “I never heard of a barbarian scientist. Rezhmia is the land of science. Although of course I don’t practice science.”

  “Why not?”

  “The arts are more sacred. But let us return to our hoeing. Now you ask me a question.”

  I had not anticipated this, and spoke on impulse. “Tell me, Eyluzh. Who were you yesterday? Who will you be tomorrow?”

  The priest’s gaze sharpened, and he looked sly. “I was the same yesterday, and will be tomorrow. I have always been Eyluzh, and will be for eternity.”

  If the man had not said his own name I might have accepted the answer, for I remember eternity—at least sometimes. But because he claimed to take his name and face and maybe even his dusty robes with him, I was struck with pity, as though he had told me he trusted the pancake of the moon to feed him and the ocean to hold him up. Suddenly the air brightened and I saw a vision: Eyluzh the priest, or at least his robes, and the headdress and the bones that underlay his face, dry and rotten before me, covered with dust and busy spiders, the bony hand outstretched to take his life with him where life does not go. This was not a picture within the head. If it was of the imagination, it was of the eyes, too, and I stood in horror and sorrow at the sight.

  In another moment it had faded and I looked down at the priest’s living face, mottled and pale and gasping. I had not had my vision alone.

  Then I was angry. “This country,” I said, “… or at least this season… attempts to push me where I have no intention of going. Signs and portents. Circular prophesies. I do not accept them. They are… inappropriate. Worse! They are vulgar! Cheap!”

  Eyluzh had gathered himself somewhat, though he still blew like a whale. He raised a chiding finger to me. “Still you cannot escape your destiny,” he said with a shade of his natural complacence.

  I lost my temper, which I rarely do. “Spare me!” I shouted. The young server pushed his head through the door and blinked at me. “Spare me these trite destinies. Meaningless word! What will be, will be: of course. Otherwise it won’t be. You’re chasing your tail when you speak of destiny.”

  I began to take hold of my own reins. I took a deep breath, which smelled delicious. I felt very strong, very ready for anything. “The truth is not hidden, priest of Niaus. It is open to all. Only we tend to look around us with our eyes closed.”

  My red mood lifted, and the pomposity of my statements rang in my ears. I giggled at myself. Eyluzh giggled with me. We stared at one another and my smiling face felt very stiff.

  “I’m glad you set me straight about that,” he said, and I had to laugh harder. So did he. He added, “It’s a very potent drug and I’m surprised you’re still standing.”

  It took me a few seconds to understand what he had said, and then I felt myself falling—or at least my viewpoint getting lower. My body felt nothing. There was a moment’s panic and I remembered that I had left Arlin alone and done this stupid thing. Rise, I told myself: booted myself, whipped myself, and then I did rise again, but my body didn’t.

  To have died twice by the time I am thirty years old, I wondered, as I floated above this scene like a moth fluttering in a basket. This time there would be no Powl to reason me back again, for the priest had had every intention of driving me out of my body: this funny, prim little man, this priest who was not permitted contact with blood.

  Ngaul Eyluzh was peering down over me, and I looked like a heap of linen and straw with small brown hands. The scuttling servant joined him and then my soul’s attention began to waver.

  “You gave him too much,” said the servant, in tones no servant uses to a master, and the priest shook his head in confusion.

  What was too much of a poison, as long as the victim be dead? More to the point, why was I fighting death, once already killed? When I had died before, I had not brawled on like this, striking with no-arms and no-legs against the fabric of my circumstance. This was not dignified.

  But I was not feeling dignified, I was both outraged and afraid together.

  Arlin. I had left Arlin. My no-mouth called her name, but to my fury she did not come and I did not go. I saw the weave of the ceiling, from within. I saw the shrine itself from outside in the free air, high up. I was a powerless phantom, and my notions of how life worked rose in rebellion: against strange and unjust saints and their cohort, against prophecy, omens, dreams, and suchlike superstition. My God was a God of optics, of long waiting, careful notebooks, and conclusions tentative. In this God of omens and destinies and cheap theatrics I did not believe.

  Floating and fading, I began to think again, and even as the blue of the sky surrounded me and beat through my nobody, I became the man of science and I made an experiment.

  “Dowln,” I called, or thought or imagined. “Let your dreams be for something. Dream me down.” I thought these words three times—not because three is a magic number, but in order to give my calling a fair chance.

  The light that swam through me dimmed slightly and then more. I was in the workroom of the jeweler and before me sat My Lady Arlin, tossing an apple into the air and spearing it upon her dagger. She looked through me. Dowln sat behind her, one eye upon the door. I was sitting (in a manner of speaking) on the table.

  “How long,” she said in her hoarse, smoky voice, “is this dithering Yule ornament of a priest going to keep Zhurrie? He has a war to prevent, you know.”

  Her lean face, with its coloring of dusk and of clouds, had never seemed more beautiful to me, nor her skill at juggling more impressive. I was able to approach her very closely, far closer than my body’s eyes could have focused without a lens, and I saw the pulse in her throat.

  She did not seem meaningless to me as my own self had: not meaningless at all. Even the flick of the dagger that sent the raddled apple again into the air was imbued with layered purpose. Likely the difference I saw was that Arlin’s body held life, while Zhurrie’s did not. Or perhaps it was only that I would miss Arlin more.

  She had not received an answer to her question, and her face stretched into a smile. “You don’t believe me, landsman? That Nazhuret was sent here alone but for me, to stop this war? Or that he can do it? Dowln, you are a seer and an artist, but you do not know Nazhuret.”

  Still no response, so she turned to look at Dowln, and I, too, shifted my attention. Dowln’s face was tense and white, and his eyes were not quite upon Arlin’s. He was looking at me.

  I was surprised, because I had not really believed I was there myself. “Get to safety. With Arlin,” I said as clearly as I knew how. “The shrine was a trap. They will come for her next. Get out of here. Flee.” When he merely stared and gaped, I added, “I like this less than you do! I am a man of science, not of apparitions!”

  He knocked his chair backward and staggered toward us, one arm pointing. “Look, Arlin! Nazhuret! He is with us again. Something is very wrong!”

  As though I had been summoned by his naming of me, I felt myself in human form, though I was no more opaque than bottle glass. Having hands, I sought for one of Arlin’s, and took it. She gave a gasp and met my eyes.

  I said, “Go. I am dead. The priest poisoned me. They must mean to kill you, too. Hide. Use all your skill and leave the country.”

  I didn’t know whether she heard me. Arlin held
to my arm-without-substance and I felt a grief I had never felt before. I would sooner have been turned into a cold stone upon her sword hilt, or a mute flea upon her person, as to be dead and silently drifting up away from her as she clasped my hand.

  I could not stay longer; the two were in a rushing river all around me, that covered me over but touched me not at all. I held her hand against the force of it, but that lean hand had the flesh ripped from it and I was gripping a skeleton, and saying my good-byes to a mass of rags and bone. I let go and stared at my own hand, so glassy-clear, and then Dowln scrambled below me, also garbed in his own bones, and the staring teeth shouted, “Nazhuret. It isn’t… I don’t believe you are dead!”

  Now the air was shiny green glass, molten glass, and the specter of my lady and my friend cartwheeled away into the distance. I stared again at my own glassy hand and shouted, “Oh!”

  “Oh. That makes more sense,” I said, or thought I said. I turned away from the vitreous river and it vanished like a picture on the page of a book, when that page is turned.

  My memories of death are cloudy, like the memories of times before I could speak, but I remember that death was not trivial. It was not frustrating. It did not offend my human reason—if I still possessed human reason. This state was offensive.

  It occurred to me that I had one tool that might serve me when hands and voice and even reason were gone. Powl, you gave me that tool, never naming it, nor telling me its use, and not knowing its use I had tried it out against all the exigencies of my life. It was good against anything: pain, failure, confusion.

  I collected my bodiless self, fighting against the memory of Arlin’s rotting dead hand, against her need of me and mine (so much more painful) of her. I waited with concentration and no set goal in the nothingness that surrounded me. In the belly of the wolf. I had no discomfort to distract me, save that of having no discomfort, and I was bothered by no thoughts. It was an immense contemplation, while around me I heard wailing and the buffet of air against my ears, as though I had fallen into the hell of winds.

  Ngaul Eyluzh was peering at me, blinking. He had no hat. “No, he is not dead after all,” he said.

  “I knew that already,” I answered him, but the force of my words or some other force threw me away into space and it required a lot of effort to maintain myself without panic.

  “A man may be falling off a cliff, with nothing but death below, and yet be in complete control of himself,” you then said to me. You were sitting on the stoop of the observatory. Your head was sunburned. You took note of Arlin’s scowl to say, “I did not intend to diminish your sex, woman. In language, the male embraces the female.”

  “At his convenience, he does. What you say, Daraln, you intended to say. You don’t do things by accident.”

  I remembered this exchange. It was out of the past. Arlin used to sabotage her lessons by being offended, as I used to do the same by distracting my teacher. I turned to tell her I knew what she was doing, but Arlin was not sitting on the grass, nor perched on the root of the oak.

  Arlin had the sword—Dowln’s sword with the woven hilt—in her hand, and she was in alert stance, her gray eyes black with attention. Behind her was a wall of inlay, the pattern lost in the dim light, and following her was Dowln, his flaxen hair shining. There was no Powl, of course. You had been a trick of memory.

  I did not talk to Arlin, lest my words bounce me away again, but merely followed her down this unrecognized hallway to an arch that led to another like it. A woman in the pink-salmon silks of empire swished through, and Arlin flung herself down on the eunuch, flattening his yellow hair and linen beneath her night-colors. Her eyes did not leave the Rezhmian hen, who waddled out one door and in another. Arlin’s sword was unencumbered and ready until the woman disappeared, at which time she allowed Dowln to lift his face from the paving.

  My lady is a dreadful enemy. A magnificent friend. Dowln stared at her in shock.

  He saw me beside them as he followed her through the archway. “Look,” he whispered, plucking at Arlin’s sleeve. “He is still with us. Look.”

  Arlin turned again, and her face was implacable, devoid of softness. I would have apologized, for offering such distraction, but Dowln’s attention had already catapulted me high and away.

  I saw my mother die, vomiting blood. I saw myself a squalling baby.

  I saw the present King of Velonya, pale and taut-jawed, gazing down into the waters of his spring. Behind him was an old woman, holding the hand of a toddler: fat, carrot-headed. The child had a wooden sword, with which he hit the water. The father carried none. His shoes and trew were getting splashed. He has notoriously little concern for his costume.

  I saw a great deal of air, and the earth far below, rounded and dark like a wooden ball. The sensation of falling was overwhelming, and my concentration faltered, making it worse. I reminded myself that I had no body at the moment, and if something as weighty as a mouse can drop from high places unharmed, then surely a man with no weight at all need not fear. I did not cease fearing: not entirely, but neither did I drop. The scene rolled away once again.

  “He will do, he will do,” said the face of Ngaul Eyluzh, from very close. “Though I do not know why he should have proved so susceptible to the drug.”

  The servant who was not a servant was squatting on the rug behind Eyluzh. “Often the barbarians are like that. Perhaps it is their coarse, simple diet, which does not accustom them to rich liquors and… and herbs of various sorts.”

  The priest was peering at something. Me, I suppose. “Not simple diet, Father. Simple brains.” He seemed content with what he found in my face, for he said very forcefully, “Get up, fellow. Stand!”

  I thought I might oblige him, rude as he was with his remark about my brains, for I had a strong desire to make everyone around me happy. An unusually strong desire. Still, I was being careful of my position in “the belly of the wolf.” Quiet observation had served me well so far, despite the antics of the world around me, so I merely listened to his words as I had listened to the wind in the wickerwork, and perceived light, shadows, and the irritation on his round face.

  The door behind the chamber opened, and through it I stepped, and stared down at myself. I mean, it was Reingish who came through. “Is he tamed yet?” the prince asked.

  I am committing a dishonesty, in describing my observations to you in this manner. I cannot be sure these vignettes were experienced in the order described, or whether they were sequential at all. Interspersed among them were moments of flight, of forgetfulness: moments in which I lost control of the imbecile creature I was riding, named Nazhuret. I cannot fit anywhere in this sequence the image of the hart with the moon caught in his horns, though that feels most important, nor the sudden understanding I came to regarding the retrograde periods of Mercury.

  I lost Nazhuret many times, but I guess that I did not lose my attention, for it was at a moment close-connected with the sight of the prince that I decided I must take more of a control over what had happened to me.

  I had called my method of self-collection a weapon, and the only one that I possessed. I now remembered that I had another, that I had already used without recognizing it. I had used the method of science to discover what my no-body could do. It was very difficult to maintain both science and the clarity of mind I was finding in the belly of the wolf, so upon impulse I decided to essay a test. I would convert my meditation and my science into real weapons, which I would clench in my non-substantial hands for security.

  I did not specify what the weapons would be, although I expected that self-collection would be some sort of shield and science the more active tool, that would therefore be held in the right hand. I was very surprised to find myself—or rather the linen-haired Nazhuret above which I hovered—holding in his left hand a short, thick sword of a style that our great-grandfathers would have considered antique, and in his right a round shield, glimmering in the evening light.

  Science, even when the exp
eriment goes as expected, always brings a little surprise with it. The three Rezhmians who confronted the body of Nazhuret drew away from my experiment smartly, and gasped. It had never occurred to me that other eyes would be able to perceive what was only a mnemonic device to me.

  Nazhuret stood up, with sword and shield.

  The minsanaur had no sword: only the red dagger around his neck that was the symbol of his hatred. He backed away and showed his anger to his own minions instead. “You fools! What good was all this? The bastard is more dangerous than before!”

  The little fellow who had brought the tea was less afraid of his prince than of a sword of magic in the hands of his prince’s double. He disappeared through the wicker doorway into the kitchen. Reingish strode after him, cursing.

  Ngaul Eyluzh was made of stronger metal. He stood before the body I manipulated (my body) and he repeated the words “Do no harm, visitor. Do no harm.”

  He could have chosen no better control over me. I remember clearly the time when the whole world was larger than I, and had more capacity to hurt. Whether Nazhuret is dreaming or awake, he will not hurt anyone who pleads with him. But the priest had done me enough damage that I was not melted altogether by his pleas, and I pushed beyond him, seeking the stairs out of this high trap of wicker.

  It seemed to me then that I might as well be playing twenty-guard, or some similar board game, for I hovered above and worked my clever little game piece with invisible fingers. Remotely. I knew the stairs were behind and to the left of Nazhuret, but it was a job to turn him around. When he did move, uncertainly to the left, the priest interfered again, and I was impressed at how adroitly Nazhuret moved sword and shield (science and contemplation) to ward him off. With no command from me. With no one at home.

  Before my game piece could find the stairs, Reingish had slammed through the wicker door again, this time armed with a kitchen knife, and with this he came at the ensorcelled Nazhuret, with his magic sword and shield. I thought at the time that the prince’s act was very brave.